The detective was talking; then his phone blipped as he broke the connection.
Bad opened his eyes and raised an eyebrow.
The detective said there were many hits on “Martine” and “Dardo” together. He said, “The Blessed Martine Raimondi of Dardo.”
“A saint?”
“So, you are not a Catholic, Mr. Phelan?”
Bad told the detective that while his grandmother was Catholic, the rest of his family were “don’t know and don’t care” and “not at the dinner table, dear.”
The detective explained that “Blessed” meant that Martine Raimondi, a nun, born in the village of Dardo and murdered by the Nazis in 1944, was beatified, but not yet canonized.
“And our floater?”
“Our floater, as you so delicately put it, might have been named for the martyred nun and her village. We will no doubt discover that when we speak to her next of kin.”
Bad said good, he hoped the detective wouldn’t mind if he gave him a call in a few days. He’d like, at least, to know what had happened to her.
Chapter 2
THE POSTULATOR
One morning in May, twenty minutes before the bells rang for Matins, Father Daniel Octave’s phone began to shiver. Daniel was sleeping with the phone curled in his hand and his hand against his sternum, the exact position in which, in childhood, he’d held Donkey, a knit toy, a present from his cherished grandmother. The phone was a prepaid mobile and only two people had its number: Martine Dardo and the old man in Montreal.
Martine had given Daniel the phone nearly a year earlier. She’d said he must keep it charged, topped up, and switched on. “No one need know you have it,” she said. “It vibrates.” She had given him the phone because—Daniel surmised—she felt she might need a priest at the end of it. He had waited to hear her confession. Sometimes the phone would quake and it would be Martine, testing him. Sometimes it would be Father Neske in Montreal, wanting to talk about John Paul II’s “purification.” The old man would say that without Purgatory they might as well all be Protestants. He’d say, “I still pray every day for the souls of the dead. Daniel, you’re the only living soul for whom I say a prayer.”
Daniel sat up, pressed a button on the quaking phone, and put it to his ear.
Martine said she was in a boat.
Daniel reached behind him to pull the cord on the holland blind. The blind snapped up and wound around its cylinder. “Are you alone?” Daniel said.
“It’s a small boat, with an outboard. Or … it had an outboard.”
Daniel scrubbed a hand across the top of his head. His hair stood up. “What happened to the motor?”
“I loosed it,” Martine said, “and I let it go.”
Daniel asked Martine why she’d ditched the outboard.
“I’m waiting for the sun to come up,” she said. “Though if I was truly resolute I’d have thrown the oars away as well.”
Daniel looked over the top of his headboard at sunlight shining on the eaves of the roof across the courtyard. The sun was up in Rome but not yet on the Riviera dei Fiori. He said, “And then what?”
Martine began to talk. She said it had happened—the thing she was unwilling to face. She had finally infected someone. Infected, and killed.
Daniel was surprised. He hadn’t known that Martine was HIV-positive. She’d talked about “health problems” in the past but had given the impression that they were related to allergies.
“I don’t want to infect anyone else,” Martine said. “Or kill again.”
Daniel didn’t know what to say. He was a scholar, not a parish priest. And he was having trouble imagining Martine’s behavior—the behavior that had brought her to her troubles. Still, he suggested that she change it.
“Oh yes,” she said. “I could carry needles, and a cannula, and a plastic tube as a drinking straw.”
Daniel was sitting up now. He was tugging at his hair—which was why he wore it short, so his fingers couldn’t get purchase and pull. His hand slipped and went back. He was patting himself on the head.
Daniel said, “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
Martine said that for years she’d looked east only at evening. She hadn’t seen the dawn in full color. Dawn and dusk were like festive aprons, like the costume of the Arlesiennes. Martine said that her friend Eve Moskelute had met her husband, the artist Jean Ares, at the festival in Arles. Eve was unhappy before she met Jean, so ever since associated certain things with her reprieve, like the smell of fresh horseshit and the costume of the women of Arles. To watch what happened on the horizon opposite a sunrise or sunset was like looking only at the strings of the festive apron. “I’ve looked after myself, you see,” Martine said, “and I’ve starved myself.”
Daniel knew he must make Martine state her intentions. How could he argue with her if she wouldn’t admit what she planned? First he should help her think about her beliefs. Help her remember them. He asked her, “Why is Judas in Hell?”
“Oh, Daniel,” she said, “this isn’t despair. This is a decision.”
Across the city, bells began to ring, high and low, neither happy nor solemn, only summoning bells. Daniel put a finger in one ear and pressed the other to the pierced black plastic behind which this woman waited for him to save her, no matter what she professed. He told her that people only imagine they are making a rational decision to end their lives because they believe that their lives are their own.
Martine said, about the dawn, “It always looks as if it’s about to happen long before it does. I’ve had about an hour of its advance publicity. I have seen this, looking back over my shoulder and running for my life.”
“Martine—” said Daniel.
“I would run for my life now,” she said, “if I could.” Then, conversational, “It’s so clear, and I’m so far out that I almost imagine Corsica is visible. There’s no haze, and no wind.”
“I should end this call,” Daniel said. “I shouldn’t listen to you. This isn’t your transfiguration, Martine; it’s just a miserable, lonely act.” Then, “In a minute!” he said, to whoever was knocking on his door.
Martine said that she would love to know what he went on to do. What he eventually decided. “Because you do have to make some decisions, Daniel. You’ve broken a vow. You’ve been disobedient. You made choices you should have left to the bishop. I read your Life of the Blessed Martine Raimondi. I recognized much of it from the Process. And I read the Process when it was published. You left out your doubts, Daniel. And you left out the evidence that cleared them up. You didn’t want anyone else to ask the questions you’d asked.”
Daniel’s Martine was the Blessed Martine Raimondi’s namesake. At one stage in his investigation of Raimondi’s virtues Daniel had thought that his friend Martine Dardo might be the martyred nun’s daughter. He’d only confided his suspicions to the people whose testimony proved them false.
“I’d love to know what you are going to do,” Martine said again. “I loved your Life. You’re in love with her story. You’re in love with the testimony—Grandfather Raimondi saying that he saw her following ‘a bird’ through the cave. A bird like the Holy Spirit in the old mosaics. ‘A bird like a beckoning hand.’ You know, Daniel, that there’s God—but there are also the glories of nature.”
“Martine—”
“Here it is,” she whispered. “It’s about to boil over.”
Daniel supposed she meant the sun on the horizon.
“I always wanted to show you,” Martine said. “I wanted to show you the Island.”
Was she talking about Corsica? Daniel’s hand was slippery. He swapped hands and put the phone to his other ear.
Martine was speaking again. She hadn’t been talking about Corsica or the sun. “The Island is a glory of nature,” Martine said. “A dust devil who dances forever.”
Daniel heard a sound, like the instantaneous ignition of a patch of spilled gasoline, a short, fierce exhalation. “Martine?” h
e said. But she had dropped him in the sea. He heard himself go under, the splash, and the phone sinking away from its splash. He heard the water by the air rising through it, the air pulled under with him. He heard the phone malfunction, then nothing.
After a total of eleven years of study—punctuated by a two-year stint of teaching high school history—Daniel Octave gained his doctorate at Louvain in France, and after a final year of theology in Rome he was ordained at the age of twenty-eight. Father Daniel Octave, S.J., took up a lectureship in his hometown, Montreal, at Loyola University, in the History of the Modern Church. Then, in 1990, on a warm day after the spring break, Father Octave was summoned into the office of the rector of his house and told that he was to go to the bishopric in Nice. Daniel went without knowing what was expected of him. When Daniel met the bishop the man had on his desk a copy of Daniel’s book based on his doctoral dissertation: Those Things That Are Caesar’s: The Society of Jesus and the Vichy Government. It was Daniel’s own French translation—he’d written it in Italian, his fourth language, if you counted the familiar skeletal conversational Latin he’d had to acquire as a novice. When he saw his book Daniel began to see that the house rector’s “Go there” had some discernible chain of reasoning behind it, not just the vague sense Daniel had had since his undergraduate years of being watched in a kind of relay—by Father Ministers in his Jesuit houses, by professors, by superiors in Quebec, all the way up to the Father General in Rome. It was clear that Daniel had been chosen as the man for a job. He was to help the man who had the job—a Marist brother—in “this matter.” He was given a thick file to read, a protean Process, a collection of testimonies concerning an Italian nun, who had already attained the status of “Venerable.” Daniel took the file and opened it when he was alone in his room in the convent. Daniel read and, for the first time since the Regular Order of the Novitiate had performed on him the change it was designed to perform—a kind of preparation of the ground by its complete defoliation, then sterilization—for the first time since those early years some kind of disorder looked back into Daniel’s mind. Opened its eyes and gazed back at him from the undergrowth of evidence. It was that first miracle—an act of God that looked like the work of another artist. Or like the Great Artist Himself—and great artists are often great mimics—composing a picture in some style He admires but that isn’t His Own.
Daniel had met Martine Dardo in 1990, over some letters she had in her possession. Daniel had been employed for several months as assistant to the postulator appointed by the Holy See to investigate the theological and cardinal virtues of the Venerable Martine Raimondi.
Mother Pauline of the Order of the Daughters of Grace—the Venerable Martine’s order—told Daniel that there was “a woman” who had a collection of the Venerable Martine’s letters. The Process the postulator and Daniel were working on so far lacked writings as proof of Raimondi’s theological virtue. The postulator told Daniel that if the letters were authentic, they must have them for the Process.
Mother Pauline was vague about the woman—Martine Raimondi’s namesake. (Mother Pauline always called the Venerable Martine merely “Martine.” They were near contemporaries and it was Sister Pauline to whom the Germans had released the martyred nun’s body after her execution in September 1944. And it was Sister Pauline who had traveled beside Raimondi’s coffin on the train from Dardo to Turin and who had seen Martine Raimondi interred in a tomb in the gallery of the round votive chapel of Santa Maria della Fiori.) Mother Pauline told Daniel that she had no idea how the letters came to be in Martine Dardo’s hands. Yes, Martine Dardo was Martine Raimondi’s namesake, an orphan, raised by the sisters of the order and named for the martyred nun’s village. But there was no birth certificate for a Martine Dardo—the order had neglected to keep records at that time. “We were hiding children,” Mother Pauline said. “We were deliberately forgetful—because of the racial laws. You must understand, Father.”
Daniel understood, but he didn’t like it. He liked documents behind his documents.
Mother Pauline gave him Martine Dardo’s address. “We only have it because she wrote asking for a copy of a photograph—a group photo of the 1929 Tricentenary of St. Barthelemy’s in Dardo. A photo which shows Martine Raimondi and her family. The fathers at St. Barthelemy’s told me that Martine Dardo let them know she had some letters.”
Daniel wrote to Martine Dardo. He included a number at which he could be contacted.
She spoke Italian, her voice slight and hoarse. She said that the letters were from Martine Raimondi to her grandfather and were fall of inquiries about aunts and cousins and requests for stories about her little goats. “She was only a girl, and homesick. The letters don’t have anything in them remotely resembling theological musing. They’re not what you want—the thoughts of a fine soul in troubled times. They’re not even of any real historical interest. She does once mention the curfew, but only because she has to catch an earlier tram home from the hospital.”
“Nevertheless, I’d like to see them,” Daniel said.
They arranged a meeting. Daniel was to come to her house in Genoa.
It was a summer evening when he visited. She’d said to come late, for she worked late. Daniel found Martine Dardo’s front door along a dingy sotto passagio and under a permanently lit silvery street lamp. There was a folded newspaper over the drain by the door, to dampen down the smell.
When Martine opened her door to him Daniel looked into her face and saw the end of everything he and the postulator had worked toward. He took in Martine Dardo’s dyed hair—brown with a lighter regrowth—and her plain, shapeless clothes. She was thin. Her complexion was dilapidated; her flesh firm, but her face glossy and a mass of fine lines, as though her skin were coated in dried egg white. She asked Daniel in, and as she walked ahead of him down the narrow passage to the living room, he saw that she limped. Limped like Martine Raimondi, who as a child was known by schoolmates as “Martine Malavise”—Martine the clumsy. Martine Dardo appeared to have a clubfoot. She seemed to have inherited everything: her mother’s face and physical impediment as well as her letters.
Martine left Daniel while she made coffee, and he prowled about her small living room inspecting the spines of books—many medical texts—and her ornaments. She owned some intricate old enamelwork, including a crucifix with the entombed Christ on its horizontal and risen Christ on its vertical. At the axis of the cross was a round medal showing a rabbit, its ears back, sniffing a fallen arrow. This artifact hung on the wall under a reproduction of a photo of the Tricentenary at St. Barthelemy’s in Dardo. The old church appeared dwarfed by the cliff behind it. In the foreground stood a group of men and women and children—all in their Sunday best—and two priests in soutanes and hats.
Martine Dardo came back into the room with a tray. She said, “Raimondi is the chubby girl in the front on the right. The one wearing a built-up boot.”
Daniel looked closer and identified Martine Raimondi from other photos he’d seen.
Martine Dardo put the tray down on a low table and came to stand beside Daniel. She leaned in to the picture, her face tender, and said, “This fanny-looking man is her uncle.”
The man had oiled hair and a walleye.
“The photographer had instructed all the men to look to the left, toward the church. The uncle obeyed the photographer with his right eye but swiveled his left back to watch what the photographer was doing. The whole village told him off for spoiling the picture.”
She pointed again. “This is Grandfather Raimondi, to whom she wrote her letters. These villagers are mostly all four families—Truchi, Raimondi, Vail, Villouny.”
Daniel asked if Alberto Vail was in the picture. Alberto Vail was the leader of the partisans with whom Martine Raimondi had spent the final three months of her life. (Daniel had interviewed Vail, who was scornful about the postulator’s project. Vail was a communist and an atheist. Vail had said to Daniel that there was no God, the Virgin and the saints were no
better than Hindu idols, and the Church was a thief. “However,” he said, “I will not misrepresent the character of a comrade. Martine Raimondi was brave. She was pious and chaste, but not proper or precious. She got her hands dirty, but didn’t carry arms. She was a good, brave girl, and true to her faith. You know what that SS man, Giesen, said about her, after he’d had her shot? He said, ‘She went to her death bravely and I honor her as a hero.’ But I’ll tell you, Daniel, Martine didn’t want to be a hero. She didn’t want to be a martyr and remembered. She said to her confessor, ‘I want to live on and fight them.’”)
Martine Dardo told Daniel that Alberto Vail could be seen at the left-hand edge of the group. “He’s the big boy trying to include his bicycle in the picture.”
Next to the photograph was a map of Corsica made with shells. It was a vulgar thing, a kitsch collectible, and Daniel eyed it, faintly offended by its close proximity to the photo. Beyond the map was a print—a reproduction, Daniel assumed, till he saw the numbers penciled in one corner. Seven of twenty—he read—below a famous dashing signature.
“You have an Ares.” Daniel was very surprised.
“His widow, Eve, is my friend. That’s Eve as Persephone.”
Martine told Daniel to come and have some coffee. They sat down, and, as she poured, Daniel saw the skin on her hands, too, was dry, mottled, and damaged. He asked her where she worked.
“I don’t. I only wanted you to come late because I keep irregular hours. I have health problems.”
Daniel said that he had thought that perhaps she was a nurse or doctor. He gestured around him at the books.
“The books are part of a private project,” she said. Then she gave him the letters, a bundle of papers in a folder. She said, “I have these because I stole them. Or perhaps pilfered is a better word. The Order of the Daughters of Grace raised me and named me after Raimondi. And I didn’t have a mother.”