Daniel put his cup down to pick up a folder. “Martine Raimondi is not your mother?” he asked. He asked and sounded calm but found that he felt desolate.
“No, she isn’t.” Martine Dardo didn’t seem at all surprised by his question.
“We do have to delve deep, and dig up any indiscretions. Everything is gone into, and tested.” Daniel said that he had talked to all the living witnesses, the people the Venerable Martine had lived among—the sisters of her order, the people of Dardo, and the surviving partisans. There was nothing to suggest—“But you look like her,” Daniel added, interrupting himself.
Martine Dardo waited.
“It’s a problem,” Daniel said. He had to deliver the letters to the postulator—and with the letters he must deliver his suspicion.
Martine Dardo asked him what he thought of the Venerable Martine’s Cause—he, personally.
“Her first miracle,” he began, then hesitated, remembering his earliest impression of that first miracle—that it was the work of God, the Great Artist, imitating the style He admires but that isn’t His Own.
Daniel continued. “His Holiness is very interested in the Venerable Martine’s Cause. His Holiness is a saint-making pope. He thinks that the Venerable Martine’s first miracle is the most persuasive verified miracle of the modern era.”
“And her second?”
The second—still under investigation—was the cure in 1955 of a sister of the Order of the Daughters of Grace of her tuberculosis of the bone. Daniel knew that the postulator believed this miracle wouldn’t finally pass muster. It was a difficulty for them, and for the Church, because the Venerable Martine already had a steadily growing local cult, a cult the Church couldn’t recognize, for Martine Raimondi must be beatified before the Church could issue a Concession of Public Worship. Bishops in two nations—in Nice and Turin—looked warmly on the cult, which wasn’t, in fact, officially entitled to their warm regard.
Daniel said that about the second miracle he couldn’t say.
“How coy,” she said. She refreshed Daniel’s cup. Daniel watched her face, the fragile, sore-looking lids of her down-turned eyes. Martine Dardo was entitled to personal remarks after his question about her parentage, but Daniel felt uncomfortable. For the first time she seemed considerable in herself, not just as the custodian of the documents he wanted or as the Venerable Martine’s possible daughter—and she must be, somehow; she must. Martine Dardo had considerable nerve, despite her shaded lamps and fastened shutters, her shut-in’s house and hypochondriac’s library. She had nerve, so Daniel told her what he thought. (And he made a friend by doing so, he was later to realize.)
“The second miracle looks like someone else’s work. If I was writing a story, instead of investigating a life, I’d be disappointed by the mismatch. Of course they don’t have to match. If Sister Ursula sent up her prayers to Martine Raimondi, and her prayers were answered, then it was by Martine Raimondi’s intercession. And, naturally, the suffering Sister Ursula was asking for the intercession of a woman she’d known personally. Someone she believed had already performed a miracle. Nevertheless—”
Martine Dardo smiled; she leaned back on her sofa cushions, as relaxed as someone relieved of a worry. Daniel was provoked to ask her what she thought of the Venerable Martine’s Cause.
She said, “I think no. No beatification, no sainthood. Raimondi wanted the soldiers in Castel Abelio to be killed.”
Alberto Vail had talked to Daniel about Castel Abelio, a ruined Savoyard fortress that stood six hundred feet above Dardo and overlooked the pass into Piedmont. During the occupation there were always fifteen men posted in the fortress. Fifteen men, their dogs, and a radio. Only two days after Martine Raimondi’s execution the soldiers at Castel Abelio perished in one night’s fighting.
(Alberto Vail had told Daniel, “It wasn’t my people who killed them. We heard gunfire and made our way up to the Castel. When we came along the ridge we could hear a loud, devilish howling. When we arrived in the fortress we found all the Germans dead. Their attackers had escaped unscathed, or carried their wounded away. The Germans’ dogs were alive. There was a dry well in the courtyard of Abelio, and three dogs were in the well, standing packed in the dust at the bottom and barking. It was the most eerie thing. My people went straight down to Dardo to attack the remainder of the garrison. We had no choice. Because of the reprisals. The soldiers were on their way up. I lost twelve men. The villagers ran away. It was coming on to winter and some of them starved. The whole of Dardo scattered, down to the coast, into the mountains, across into France. You know, Daniel, I think it was the Maquis who attacked Abelio. The French were in touch with the Allied armies—we weren’t; the Allies only dropped things from the sky, like motor scooters. We didn’t have a radio. I think someone ordered the Maquis to take out the watch on the pass. But I don’t understand why. It was weeks before the Allies arrived, and when they did they went around Sospel and the Roya, trapping the Germans, who did more terrible things in their desperation.” Vail had shaken his head and poured Daniel another glass of his sulphurous homemade wine. He’d said, “I still can’t imagine why the dogs were in the well.”)
Daniel told Martine Dardo that if Raimondi had wanted the soldiers dead it had been a thought, not a plan. The Maquis killed the soldiers. Besides, the Old Testament would have praised the Venerable Martine for being able to call down God’s wrath on her enemies.
“And to think your Vichy book was so temperate,” Martine said.
Daniel blushed. He hadn’t imagined she’d read it.
“Did the Maquis ever lay claim to the killing?” Martine asked. Then, “It did no good,” she said, of the soldiers’ deaths. “And it was an evil wish.”
“How do you know what she wished?”
“Ask your witnesses. Ask Alberto Vail.”
Daniel reported to the postulator. He said that he was very sorry to say it, but he believed that Martine Dardo was Martine Raimondi’s daughter. There was no birth certificate for Dardo, though, and no hint of Raimondi having concealed a pregnancy. And Alberto Vail, when asked, had said, “How would she have concealed it? When would she have given birth? She was in a convent school, then a convent. Yes, she attended classes at Turin University. Yes, she worked in the hospital pharmacy. But she lived in a convent. Later she lived in the hills—but only for three months. When did it happen?”
The postulator told Daniel that Rome had to consider all the evidence. Martine Dardo’s name and face and limp were as much evidence as the testimonies of the people who had lived with Raimondi. “Write it up, Daniel,” the postulator said. “It must all go in the Process.”
Several days later the postulator suffered a sudden fatal heart attack.
The Congregation for the Causes of Saints recalled Daniel to Rome. He was told that another postulator would be appointed in due course. He should organize all his material in readiness.
Before Daniel left for Rome he met with Martine. She came all the way to Nice to see him—scotching a suspicion he had entertained, that she was an agoraphobic as well as a hypochondriac.
They met at dusk in a café on the Promenade Anglais. She bought wine and water, then leaned over the seawall to call to a man who was trudging up and down the beach selling bottles of Orangina. Martine bought his remaining stock and then mollified the waiters by giving it to them. “For the bar,” she said. Then, to Daniel, “I just wanted to let the poor man go home.” She looked after him. He was making off toward the glowing headland of the castle, his shoulders straightening, his whole body lifting with relief.
Daniel told her what had happened. That the postulator had died and that he was waiting for another appointment. He gave her back the letters, which he had copied and added to the mass of papers that constituted the Process.
“Stalled,” she said.
Daniel didn’t tell her that he had neglected to add his doubts to the evidence. He left out his questions, to her and to Vail, about her parentage. The
postulator had said, “Write it up,” but the postulator had died.
Daniel didn’t want to be the one to bring it all to an end. His life had been one of thought, research, travel, of taking the testimonies of the faithful, whose faces often seemed to shine with the reflected glory of a revealed God. But Daniel had never before encountered what he felt in the shrine and caverns of Dardo—a sense of absolute certainty that something miraculous had happened there.
“Stalled, for now,” Daniel said. He told Martine that the Bishop of Nice was still pushing for an exhumation. They were waiting for permission from the bishop in Turin. Successive bishops had been reluctant, since the village Dardo claimed Raimondi’s remains and Dardo had been French since 1947. “Negotiations are in progress. We have proposed that certain relics be sent to Dardo—in France—while Turin and Italy retain the body.”
Martine Dardo leaned back in her cane chair and sipped her wine. She was looking healthier that evening—rejuvenated, almost pretty.
Along with the permission for relics to be removed from the body Daniel said he hoped to be allowed to collect a tissue sample. “I’d like to know whether you’re prepared to let a DNA test settle the question of your parentage?” Daniel left his mouth open. He was a little breathless, both embarrassed and excited by his question.
Martine said, “All right. I’ll supply my sample once one is retrieved from Raimondi’s remains.” She smiled at Daniel, blithe and secretive.
A cavalcade of Rollerbladers poured past them along the broad pavement of the promenade. Martine started to say something else, but her voice was overwhelmed by this noise. She leaned forward. Daniel thought for a moment that there was something wrong with her mouth. It looked awkward, as if she had something growing inside it. She said, “You took a good look at my things the other day.”
“I looked at the photograph. And, naturally, I was impressed by your Ares.”
“What did you think of my crucifix?”
“It’s unusual.”
“The rabbit sniffing the arrow represents God’s Grace. God’s best Grace. The best Grace is giddy innocence—a rabbit sniffing a spent arrow, ignorant of the deadly intention behind the bowman’s poor aim.”
Daniel hoped she didn’t think he was a rabbit. He said, “So … ‘As I walk through the valley of the shadow, let me at least not know it’?”
Martine nodded.
“But that isn’t something we can take comfort in. The innocent aren’t always spared, and if they are, and they haven’t apprehended any danger, how can they use comfort?”
“You’re being Jesuitical,” Martine said.
Daniel said it was in his job description.
Martine said that perhaps it wasn’t the rabbit who was to take comfort but whoever had aimed the arrow. Perhaps the dangerous were to take comfort in the assurance that God will sometimes turn their harm harmlessly away. Then she said, “Did you ask Alberto Vail about the soldiers in the Castel?”
Happy to find an excuse to visit the old man, Daniel had seen Alberto, one of the few people for whom Daniel felt affection. Daniel had tried to ask Alberto in a way that wasn’t too leading if Martine Raimondi had ever spoken to him about the soldiers posted in the Castel Abelio.
Alberto had given Daniel a searching look out from under his bird’s nest eyebrows. “Martine was killed two days before them,” Alberto said, guarded.
“Nevertheless,” Daniel said.
Alberto told Daniel that there were things he’d thought about harder and more often than anything else in his life. For longer than the obsessive wondering he’d done when he was in love. Deeper and more constantly than the thinking he’d done about politics—and he’d thought a lot about politics. Alberto told Daniel that the months between June and December 1944 were a lifetime for people all over Europe. He said that in July of that year he’d had a man blinded by gunfire. For three weeks Alberto’s partisans had nowhere to leave the man. They took him around with them, concealing him in hiding places for hours at a time. Alberto said that what he remembered was the way the man looked every time they left him—a look of wrapped-up resignation. And Alberto remembered the look on the man’s face when they’d come back, a look of relief that was somehow frightening and pitiable to see. That had stayed with him. What he and his men found in the Castel Abelio had stayed with him, too.
Alberto would not say more. Daniel asked him why was it different. Different from other actions. And Alberto only shook his head. Then he said that Martine Raimondi had said, of the soldiers posted in the Castel, “They can be killed. We can have them killed.”
A strange way to put it, Daniel thought. For if by “we” Martine meant herself, Alberto, and the partisans, and her “we” was to have someone killed, then who was to do the killing?
Martine had pursued and maintained their friendship. Daniel hadn’t reciprocated, only graciously gone along with it. They’d stayed in touch—though she made all the efforts—even after the exhumation and its unsatisfactory result. Even after Daniel was appointed postulator—much to his surprise—and a third, more persuasive miracle revealed itself and his Process carried Martine Raimondi’s Cause as far as it was able. Martine Raimondi was beatified in 1995, at a ceremony in the Basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome. His goal achieved, Daniel was, thereafter, in Nice and Dardo only for the first two weeks of June each year, to attend the pilgrimage that commemorated the Blessed Martine’s first miracle. Still, each year Martine Dardo had made an effort to see Daniel and two years before she had given him a phone. A phone and instructions.
Daniel had kept the phone charged and waited to hear her confession.
In the days following his friend’s call from the boat, Daniel rang her home number three times, thinking, Perhaps she didn’t do it, after all. Perhaps she was picked up.
Twice he left a message: “Martine, it’s Daniel; are you there?”
Silence, spooling.
“Martine, it’s Daniel again; are you there?”
It was like a séance. “Is there anyone there?” Table rapping.
The third time he called, the phone was answered.
“Martine!” Daniel said in a rush of relief. He felt blood flood the roots of his hair.
“No.” It was a man.
“Is Martine there?” Daniel was hopeful.
“I’m looking for her, too. I have a bone to pick with her.” The man was an American.
Daniel told the man he had fears for her safety.
The man asked Daniel why he hadn’t called the police.
Time had passed, Daniel said, and it had become less and less possible.
“And who am I talking to?” the American asked.
Daniel gave the man his name.
“The Father Octave who wrote A Life of the Blessed Martine Raimondi?” The man seemed amused. “I haven’t read it, but I had a friend who had a very personal attachment to it. To its tales of people lost in caves.”
“You mean our friend? Martine?”
“No.” The man laughed, an idle, ruminative laugh. Then he said, “I hope you like surprises.”
Chapter 3
A CAVE RESCUE
Bad’s girlfriend had happily owned the story of the concert hall bomb, his work-related accident. Gabrielle seemed to see the story as the dramatic culmination of Bad’s colorful career in what she called “the hero business.” To Bad, however, the concert hall bomb was only the most recent, and most manageable, of several traumas. Several stories.
Dart Ridge, as a story, was so good that it had silenced Bad. For it was a story he couldn’t tell without the support of his hearer’s prior knowledge. Gabrielle was an Australian and would need the whole thing explained. He couldn’t just say to her, “I was there, in 1991, when the Dart Ridge viewing platform collapsed. You know me—I’m the one who ran to get help.” Bad wasn’t injured at Dart Ridge, but Dart Ridge was his life’s great singularity, a cairn, a heap of stones like the terminal moraine left by a glacier that has shrunk back u
p its valley and waits—with all its cold power to move—for the climate to change again.
After Dart Ridge there was a commission of inquiry, which paralyzed the survivors by fixing events in everyone’s minds, particularly in the minds of their parents. Bad’s parents had happily sent him to board at Collegiate when he was thirteen, but after the accident they seemed unable to let him out of their sight. He couldn’t walk out of the house without one or the other consulting his or her watch and saying, “Be sure to be home by …” It was as if he were a young child again and straying near the edge of a drop. They wanted to warn him but not to call him back, scare him, trouble his tender confidence. Bad saw his parents’ fear and their self-restraint. But he couldn’t think of any way to help them.
It is in the nature of inquiries to leave no one entirely happy about their results. It was felt by some that the wrong heads had rolled. There was a great deal of talk about accountability. People lost their jobs.
Everyone concerned expressed sympathy for the families of the dead teenagers and their teacher.
Three days after the commission’s report was released, the boy who had saved himself by jumping into the thornbushes turned up at Bad’s place, in an old camper van. He wanted Bad to share driving. They would collect two other survivors, a boy in a wheelchair and the girl who could no longer drive herself because of her headaches and visual difficulties—the two who, as the girl told reporters, had “surfed” the platform down, landing on it, rather than on the glacier. The survivors planned to take the van and go around to all their friends’ families.
Bad went with them. He watched them reach out and touch their dead friends’ mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters, touch because they needed touching back. They slept in the bedrooms of their dead friends—some packed up and some preserved—or in the van in driveways. They filled in the broken palisades of family dinner tables, the boy in the wheelchair always at the head of the table. They made sure the girl got to bed early, before tiredness brought on her headaches—the bright birdstrike, the flocks of color that blinded her and brought her crashing down. They looked out for one another and fine-tuned the channels of their shame.