13
After Delissanti’s phone call, I told Maria Teresa I didn’t want to be disturbed for the next ten minutes. I always felt a bit stupid telling my secretary I didn’t want to be disturbed, for any reason, but sometimes it was necessary. I put my feet up on the desk, crossed my hands behind my head, and closed my eyes.
An old method, when I start to feel panicky and don’t know what to do.
I opened my eyes again about ten minutes later, looked through my papers, found the sheet with the mobile number, and called Sister Claudia. The phone rang about ten times without any answer and in the end I pressed the red button to end the call.
I wondered what to do next. When I call a mobile phone and there’s no answer, I always have the unpleasant sensation that they’ve done it on purpose. I mean, they’ve seen the number, realized it’s me, and are deliberately not answering. Because they don’t want to talk to me. A throwback to my childhood insecurities, I suppose.
My mobile rang. It was Sister Claudia. Clearly, if she was calling me back a few seconds after my call, she hadn’t deliberately avoided answering.
“Hello?”
“I had a call from this number. Who is that?”
“Avvocato Guerrieri.”
A puzzled silence.
I said I needed to talk to her. Without Martina being present. It was quite urgent. Could she come to my office, maybe this afternoon?
No, she couldn’t come this afternoon, she had to stay at the refuge. None of her assistants was there and she couldn’t leave the place unattended. Some of the girls were under house arrest and someone always had to be there, in case the police or carabinieri checked. How about tomorrow morning? Same thing tomorrow morning. But what was the problem? No problem. Or rather, there were a few problems, but I wanted to talk about them in person, not over the phone.
I don’t know what made me think of it, but I told her I could come to the refuge myself, tomorrow morning, as I didn’t have to be in court.
A long silence followed, and I realized I’d put my foot in it. The location of the refuge was a secret, Tancredi had said. With my spontaneous – and quite unprofessional – suggestion, I’d put Sister Claudia in a difficult position. She could either tell me we couldn’t meet at the refuge, because I wasn’t allowed there, and even though the fault was mine she’d be forced to say something unpleasant. Or, reluctantly, in order not to offend me, she could tell me to come.
Or she’d give me a good excuse, which was probably the best solution.
“All right, I’ll see you here.” She said it calmly, like someone who’s weighed up the situation and has decided to be more trusting. Then she told me how to get there. It was outside the city, and her directions were so elaborate as to verge on the paranoid.
I set out at ten o’clock the next morning. What with the city traffic and the wrong turnings I took once I was out in the country, the journey lasted nearly an hour. I’d put The Ghost of Tom Joad in the CD player when I left. By the time I got there, the disc had finished and I’d just started listening to it again. Before my eyes, the dirt road along which I was slowly advancing became confused with nocturnal images of the American highways, populated by desperadoes. Shelter line stretchin’ round the corner
Welcome to the new world order
Families sleepin’ in their cars in the Southwest
No hope no job no peace no rest.
At last, I came to a rusty gate, held closed with a rusty chain and a huge padlock. There was no entry phone, so I gave her a ring on her mobile to come and open up for me. Soon after, I saw her coming round a bend in the avenue, between rows of shabby-looking pines. She opened the gate, and gestured me beyond the bend and the trees, towards where she’d come from, where there was space to park. Then she carefully closed the gate and padlock, while I drove along the avenue of beaten earth, keeping an eye on her in the rear-view mirror.
I had only just parked behind the house – which was actually a farmhouse – and was getting out of the car when I saw Sister Claudia coming back.
We entered the farmhouse. It smelled clean, a mixture of unscented soap and something else, something herbal that I couldn’t put a name to. We were in a large room, with a stone fireplace opposite the entrance, a table in the middle, doors on the sides. Sister Claudia opened one of them and made way for me. We went along a corridor, at the end of which there was a kind of square box room, with three doors on each of its sides. Behind one of these doors was Sister Claudia’s office. It was a spacious room, with an old desk of light-coloured wood, a computer, a telephone, a fax machine. A bulky old stereo unit, with a turntable. Two small black leather armchairs, both quite old, with cracks everywhere. An acoustic guitar, propped up in a corner. A very slight smell of sandalwood incense.
And there were shelves of books and discs. The shelves were full but tidy. I managed to glance at them just enough to read a few titles in English. Why They Kill was one of them. Patterns of Criminal Homicide another. I wondered what that was all about, and why a nun would read that kind of book.
No crucifixes on the walls, or at least I didn’t see any. Certainly there weren’t any behind the desk. There was a poster there, with a sentence printed in joined-up letters, in imitation of a child’s handwriting.
Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not for of such is the Kingdom of God.
Luke 18:16.
In a corner of the poster was a drawing. A child seen from the back, his hands over his head, as if to protect himself against blows from someone you couldn’t see. In the foreground, a teddy bear lay abandoned. It was a very sad drawing, and below it something was written. It looked like a kind of logo, but I couldn’t read it.
Sister Claudia gestured to me to take a seat in one of the small armchairs and she slid into the other, with a sinuous movement.
In the refuge that morning, apart from her, there were only three girls, two of them under house arrest. They were well hidden, I thought: the place seemed completely deserted.
Well? her eyes were asking.
Obviously. But at that moment I didn’t know where to start. It would have been easier in my office. And there was an extra problem: I wasn’t sure I really knew why I’d come all the way here.
“There’s… something more I need to know about Martina. Given that the trial is starting, as you know, in a few days.”
“In what sense: something more?”
In what sense, indeed? In the sense that Martina may be unbalanced, mad, a compulsive liar, and we’re about to get into even more of a mess than we thought at the start?
“I mean… as far as you know, has Martina ever had psychiatric problems?”