Chapter 3
Chapter 3
Lucia was looking at all the clocks on the wall at the Caffè Duomo di Assisi, a recently modernised café, which was tucked away in a corner of the San Rufino part of town. Most of the clocks were in round, stainless steel frames. Normally this kind of arrangement displayed the real times in major cities all over the world – San Francisco, Sydney, London, Tokyo - and these clocks, too, featured the names of some of the planet’s metropolises. But the time shown on them was the same – twenty-five to eleven. Here, the world ran to only one time. Assisi time. Slow time.
The café was just the right size to afford its patrons the privacy required for conversations of a confidential or intimate nature, the kind Nico and Lucia often engaged in when they met there. The kind of conversation they’d been having that morning.
Nico set down another cup of espresso and pulled up his chair. He tore open a small sachet of brown sugar, emptied it into the cup and stirred silently, watching the liquid swirl.
“A Lira for your thoughts.”
“Euro.” He looked up.
“Lira is more romantic.”
“But not worth as much. My hunch is she would have done it around midnight. You see, today was her birthday. She would have been thirteen.”
“So she ended her life officially still a child. Perhaps she didn’t want to allow a new stage to begin? I agree, the timing might be relevant. And you’re all sure it wasn’t accidental?”
“She wasn’t just mucking around, if that’s what you mean. Girls don’t tend to do that, do they? That’s more boys’ style.” Nico paused. “I’ve never had to handle a suicide.”
“It was bound to happen one day.”
“Why? Why was it bound to happen?”
“Because suicides do happen.”
“Not in peaceful Assisi, they don’t.”
“Even in peaceful Assisi, they do. It’s nothing to do with the place.”
“Why do people do it? Inflict that kind of damage on themselves? They know it’s irreversible. And not just for them. They don’t think about the people they leave behind.”
She nodded. “I know.”
He touched her hand. “I know you know.”
She took a deep breath. “Tocca ferro
,” she was looking for something made of iron she could rub for good luck, “this spoon will have to do. Tocca ferro, I’ve been able to make a difference on a couple of occasions. I think. It’s not been required too often, thankfully. In the sense that I’ve only had to deal with a couple of cliff edge cases. I was lucky. I was able to play a part in guiding them away from the abyss. Desperate souls.”
“I don’t think luck has anything to do with it. Other than that of finding you. How do you do it? What do you tell them? Life is always better than no life? Get a life?”
She looked at him sternly.
“I didn’t mean it flippantly. I mean it: how do you convince someone their life is worth living when they’ve made up their mind it’s not?”
“Empathy. Love. And my Degrees help.”
“Your London training. Your world class Degrees. A BA in Psychology and the MA in Philosophy, wasn’t that it? ”
“You know perfectly well it was the other way around.”
Nico had always had an ambiguous relationship with her academic success. Not so much the academia of it, more the fact that she’d chosen to study abroad. Had she stayed in Italy and gone to the Bocconi in Milan or the Galileo in Pisa, or better still, the University of Perugia, his admiration of her would have been untainted by provincial jealousy. But she’d gone to London. And somehow that needed forgiving.
“Either way, I’m never sure whether I learned more at Uni or from pouring beers in the ‘The Duke of Wellington’.”
“The job you took to fight poverty. Your own; poor student that you were back then.”
“Don’t mock it, Nico. I wouldn’t have been able to finish my studies without it. And I listened to many stories there, many of them sad. Especially from lonely, middle-aged men who came in for a drink just that little bit too early.”
Nico smiled. “And I’m sure those lonely, middle-aged men enjoyed pouring out their hearts to a pretty, young Italian woman. But seriously, Lucia, I want to know. What do you? What’s the bait you throw out?”
“I don’t throw out bait. I’m not a fisherman. And people in real trouble don’t need bait. They already know where to find you. Whether they actually decide to seek help is a different matter altogether. Anyway, it depends. People are different. As are their problems.”
“There must be a common denominator.”
“There is. They see no way out. They’re stuck. In a pitch black space and they can’t get out. And it’s up to me to break open that space. Split it open with a chink of light. Because with light comes perspective. Literally. And hope. And options. That’s what I must show them - that they have a choice. And
that
, actually, Nico, is true. That’s the other common denominator. There’s always a choice.”
Nico’s left eyebrow went up, as it always did when he was about to throw down a gauntlet. “And as a Catholic, your better choice must be not to die by mortal sin and be forever condemned.”
“That’s not exactly fair. Faith can be a great ally in these situations. It’s a source of hope. As are prayers. And you must remember that most people who come to me have their faith. Why seek out a nun, if they didn't? Often they just want their beliefs propped up. If they didn't, they’d confide in a friend or a sibling, or may be a psychologist. But they choose a nun.”
He winked at her. “Not just any old nun. They choose
you
. They choose Lucia. I would! And as you know,
I’m
no believer!”
“You’re biased.” She gave in to his charm, gladly, but persevered, “The fact that someone seeks to share and is able to talk about their predicament is a step towards life. It’s a positive action. And it means they sense hope. Whether they talk to a nun or anyone else. It’s when you stop talking that you’re in real danger.”
“The silence that’s the precursor to the ultimate silence.”
They looked at each other and nodded almost imperceptibly and in unison.
Nico had stirred his espresso into a lukewarm vortex. He knocked it back and sat up straight. The tone of his voice signalled back to business. “In any case, have you got time to make some enquiries at the school?”
“Yes, I can speak to the Head and Tomasina's teachers. I’ll take Sister Francesca with me to talk to classmates and friends, if she’s free. Who’s informing the parents?”
“That task has fallen to Gigi.”
“As always.”
“Gigi has a knack for breaking news of the worst kind. He’s very good at that kind of thing.”
“And you don’t want to be.”
For as long as she’d known him, Nico had been unable to deal with grief. The raw grief of others. He simply didn’t know how to. He didn’t know how to look, where to look, what to do with his hands when he saw despair. He wasn’t able to find the right voice. Years of experience and training had not altered his instinctive resistance to this part of the job and to avoid it, he had no qualms pulling rank. So he called on his subordinate’s undoubted natural gift for combining genuine sympathy with attentive professionalism.
“No, and I don’t have to be. I’ve got Gigi.”
Inspector Giordano had no trouble locating the two pathologists. They were working alongside each other in the laboratory adjoining the mortuary in the basement of the hideous concrete maze that was the Silvestrini Hospital on the outskirts of Perugia. Their focus that morning was the corpse of a female, in her twenties and victim of what was becoming a standard of their work: her arms were peppered with needle holes, most likely a heroine overdose.
He took a deep breath before raising a large left hand to knock on the glass door. Both pathologists looked up and he waved them to the door. Doctor Benvenuti strolled over, her manner matter of fact.
“I need to speak to both of you. I have bad news, I’m afraid.”
And then time slowed right down to Assisi time.
Neither Doctor Mandorli nor his wife said anything as Giordano told them of their daughter’s death. Doctor Benvenuti swayed a little and was forced to sit down, her husband put a hand on her shoulder. All colour had drained from his face. Together, they listened to his account of the discovery of Tomasina’s body, and true to their scientific souls, they focussed on the facts: the ‘who’ was evident, as was the ‘what’, the ‘where’ and the ‘when’. They didn’t want to delve into the ‘why’, notwithstanding his best efforts to gently force the issue. As it became clear that he wasn’t going to get anywhere on this particular front at this particular moment, he changed tack to ask the kind of questions that required a parent’s more generic understanding of their only child.
“So, Tomasina had just started life at her new school, the ‘Liceo Properzio’?”
Mandorli took the reins. “Yes, yes, the classics-based grammar school. It’s the right place for the brightest children. Who else would study Antiquity, Greek and Latin? Only the academically gifted. Her teachers recommended it. With her genes we expected it, but we thought she’d go down the science route in her school career. But the teachers thought it might limit her.”
“They do say the Liceo Classico gives you the broadest base and encourages big picture thinking. But your daughter - was she happy with that path?”
“As happy as she would have been with any other. At that age, how do you know what’s right for you? Her two closest friends, Michela and Chiara, came up with her. That’s what mattered.”
“Did she have many friends?”
“No. Only a few, but they were close ones. Girls, no boys yet. She was quiet, but I’d say well-liked. Not the heart-and-soul of the party, exactly. But not a target for bullies either. She was too normal for that. As far as a teenager can be normal.”
“She would have been thirteen today, Stefano. She was still a child.”
“You’re splitting hairs, Maria-Grazia.”
“Do we have to do this now? I’m not sure I can.” Benvenuti sighed. “She loved drawing. Usually whilst under her headphones with the volume turned to its highest.”
“What did she draw?”
“Oh, people, animals. Leaves. She spent a lot of her time doing it. Whilst her peers were feeding their addiction to social media or watching the TV, Tomasina was drawing.”
“I see. You’re lucky in that respect. I have a son, Luca, he’s only seven and thank God he loves his football, but I’m not looking forward to dealing with
that
minefield. But you had no undue concerns there? Hurtful peer remarks? Might Tomasina have been cyber-bullied?”
“No,” said Mandorli, and “no,” echoed his wife.
Both looked at him empty-eyed. They had just shut the doors. He’d have to dig deeper another time. Once more, he expressed his condolences. Then he left the mortuary.
For a reason that had nothing to do with the difficult situation he was dealing with, Gigi felt uneasy. His occupation allowed him to know better than most that there was no predicting or accounting for how human beings reacted at the moment of receiving distressing news. But there was something about Mandorli's and Benvenuti's behaviour that was outside his experience, something that just didn't fall into the wide spectrum of possible reactions. He tried to reason it out: these were pathologists and they were used to the hundreds of faces of death, they were hardened professionals who had become blind and deaf to the spirits of the people that had once inhabited the corpses sprawled out on their slab. But the sense of scientific detachment emanating from Tomasina's parents was more than just that. He realised that he was unable to tell whether the pathologists masked what must be the most wretched desperation with cool aloofness or whether it was something like the reverse: whether their icy hearts were capable only of weaving a rather threadbare veil of grief.