Daylight

  Eve Moskelute said to Bad that in the early nineties her friend Martine had been in touch with Father Octave, who was hunting up the last of Raimondi’s small body of writings. “Martine turned over what she had,” Eve said. “Twenty letters to Grandfather Raimondi. The letters were lively and sweet-natured—my friend said—but not exactly heroically virtuous.” Eve Moskelute shrugged. “I didn’t know that Martine had remained in touch with Father Octave after giving him the letters. But then I didn’t always know who Martine knew, or who she was seeing.”

  Bad said that he guessed the detective would get on to Father Octave. Then he said that, despite being “into alternative medicine,” Eve’s friend was writing to a microbiologist in the States.

  “Not a hematologist?”

  Bad cocked an eyebrow at her. “Did I say a hematologist?”

  Eve didn’t answer him.

  “They were swapping pictures of slides,” Bad said. “Microscope slides.”

  “Coffee?” Eve inquired, getting up.

  He nodded, said, “Please.” He had the impression she’d turned her back on him to hide her expression. He said, “I looked over the computer guy’s shoulder. Your friend had e-mailed the microbiologist the image of a slide, the microbiologist returned it with a question, and she answered his question.”

  Eve Moskelute loaded her already steaming machine. She said, “I suppose you’d like this diluted?”

  “I come from Sydney, not Salt Lake City,” Bad said.

  She laughed.

  “There was the slide, right?” he went on. “A picture of pink-stained cells. The microbiologist sent back, asking: ‘What is this?’ And your friend answered him: ‘This is a single-cell parasitic organism mimicking a human stem cell.’”

  Eve shut off the valve when the cups were half-full. She brought the mere mouthfuls of coffee to the table. She said, “It doesn’t mean a thing to me. I’m not a biologist.”

  Bad watched her face, looking for daylight. The clouds had come down the valley and the room was twilit, its colors under dusk’s dark filter. Bad asked, “Was your friend sick?”

  “She had health problems,” Eve said. “Tell me, Mr. Phelan, are you going to communicate with the detective again?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So … you came to tell me what the detective is up to?”

  Bad told Eve why he’d come. He said that, ten months back, he’d been injured by a bomb. “I cracked a couple of vertebrae and broke a leg. I had a near miss with a concrete pillar in a collapsed underground garage. On the pillar there was a poster for an exhibition of European Modern Masters. Jean Ares’s painting Eve in a Gaucho Hat. Your face,” he said. Then, “Did you have a daughter? Do you? By the way, that’s only my second real question after, ‘Did you ever lose someone in a cave?’”

  Bad watched Eve Moskelute’s face lose all expression. She got up from the table again. She opened a drawer and came back with paper and pen. She sat down and began to write. She told Bad that this was a note of introduction to the caretaker at Jean Ares’s house on Cap de Nice. The house was right beside the sea. There was a short escalade down to a summer-house, and a small apron of pebbles on the water. “The clear turquoise water,” she said. “It’s a beautiful place—open to the public in the high season, from the second week of July to the end of August—but you can have four weeks there before it opens. There’s a market nearby. The caretaker will show you,” she said. “Go; enjoy yourself. It’ll soon be swimming weather.” She slipped the thick textured white sheet into an equally crisp envelope. “You’ll never get another offer like this. This is for fetching my friend’s body out of the sea. Thank you. Take it, Mr. Phelan, and go.”

  Bad took the envelope, then her thin-skinned hand, and retained it. “You didn’t answer me,” he said. “I don’t mean to cause you any pain.”

  Eve stood. The table was between them. She edged away so that Bad was obliged to release her.

  But Bad persisted. He apologized and explained. “I’m sorry that it was me there both times. In Le Lien Vert and at Riomaggiore. That’s why I’m here. Because it’s the strangest chance. I know I wouldn’t have muscled in on the recovery at Riomaggiore if it wasn’t for the way your friend wore her hair. I took one look at her hair and said to the detective, ‘I can do it, I can get her out of the water.’ Because the only other person I’d seen with hair like that was your daughter—the girl who died in the cave near Dardo in 1992. I never did hear whether they found her body. I wondered why no one called to hear my story. I’d given my name and address to the rescuers from Gino’s zona. I expected to hear from her family. But no one wrote. I never knew if she was found, or who she was. But she wore her hair the same way as your friend Martine.” He shook his head, dazed. “Not that I understand why she would have done that. But, at Riomaggiore, I had a crazy feeling—I thought it was her in the sea cave. And it turned out there was a connection, between her and Martine Dardo. You. I remembered the face in the exhibition poster—it looked like her, but it was you.”

  “I had no daughter,” Eve said. “It was my sister.”

  Bad frowned at Eve. He made calculations, counted the years back to ’92. The woman in the cave would be in her mid-thirties now. That still left a twenty-five-year age gap between the sisters. What he was hearing didn’t make sense. He said, “What was your sister’s name?”

  “Dawn Moskelute.” Eve pointed at the envelope. “You know, Mr. Phelan, that’s a dream offer.”

  Bad folded the envelope and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket. He waited for Eve to ask him questions. He waited for permission to ask his own. But Eve Moskelute remained silent. She held his gaze, friendly and calm. She wouldn’t allow any mutually satisfying confidences.

  “I wish you’d explain it to me,” Bad said.

  Eve Moskelute shook her head.

  After a long, discouraging silence Bad gave up. He said that he’d go brave the austrostrada on Gino’s Vespa. He was sorry for bothering her.

  Eve Moskelute saw him to the door. “Thank you,” she said. She put her hand in the small of his back, gentle and managing, and propelled him into her atrium, then out into her courtyard. She pushed the button on the gate. She said, “I’m grateful for your efforts.”

  Bad thanked her for the meal.

  “Have a lovely time, Mr. Phelan,” she said. “Send me a postcard.”

  Chapter 6

  AN EXHUMATION

  A week after Martine Dardo’s call from the boat and several days after Daniel’s phone conversation with the American in Martine’s apartment, one of Daniel’s brother Jesuits appeared at the open door of his room, where Daniel was busy packing a bag. He was on his way to Dardo to attend the pilgrimage commemorating the Blessed Martine’s first miracle. Daniel’s brother Jesuit said that there was a call for him, from a detective in Genoa. “I said I’d see if you were in. If you take this call you’ll miss your train.”

  Daniel put Father Roderigo’s Manual for Preparing the Processes of Canonization in the top of his bag and closed its zipper. He went into the library to take the call.

  The detective told Daniel that Martine Dardo had been found drowned. Until then Daniel had entertained a faint hope that, although Martine had followed her phone into the water, she’d thought better of it, had climbed back and used the oars she’d not had the resolution to abandon.

  Daniel told the detective that he had last heard from Martine Dardo only a few days ago.

  “How did she seem to you?”

  “Troubled. She was in poor health.”

  “Father, do you think it’s possible she was troubled enough to have done something desperate?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “Have you tried to call her again since you last spoke?”

  “Yes. I got her answering machine.”

  The detective was silent for a moment, and Daniel waited to continue parrying questions with politeness. He was aware that he hadn’t yet lied, only made
omissions. He didn’t want to lie, but he knew he would.

  “Isn’t there anything you would like to ask me, Father?”

  Daniel said that he’d appreciate it if the detective could give him the address and phone number of Martine’s friend Eve Moskelute. He would ask her about Martine’s funeral.

  The detective said, “I think we have to conclude that Martine Dardo took her own life.”

  Daniel shook his head, at the phone, the book-lined walls, the time on the library clock.

  “We’ve been distracted by the presence of a severe contact rash on Signora Dardo’s upper body. We’ve speculated more than we need have, apparently.”

  Daniel said, “Did she have a clubfoot?” He was surprised by his own question.

  “Yes, she did, but it didn’t kill her, Father.”

  “I wish I could offer you more help,” said Daniel. “But I’m in the dark.”

  Each year, on the anniversary of the day that the ten villagers were locked in the Church of St. Barthelemy, then led by a young nun to safety through an absolute and unmapped dark, a group of people made the same journey. Every year more pilgrims participated, and the two-kilometer underground route was now illuminated for its fall distance by electric light. The pilgrimage was, in fact, more a commemorative journey with rituals. For five years Father Octave and the three priests of St. Barthelemy’s had performed those rituals, with the attendance each year of a group of sisters of the Order of the Daughters of Grace, including their current Reverend Mother, who had known the Blessed Martine. Other contemporaries of the Blessed Martine were also in regular attendance. Three of the people who made that first journey were still alive, men from Dardo, all in their teens in 1944. Then there were the partisans—war veterans—among whom every year Father Octave would hope to see Alberto Vail. Vail made the pilgrimage but kept his hat on. All the pilgrims wore helmets, but Vail made a point—a show—of fastening his helmet over his cloth cap. He’d make sure to do it in Daniel’s sight, his eyes gleaming at the priest from under the shadows of his prodigious eyebrows.

  Alberto Vail would not remove his hat in church. He was a communist and atheist. He was also responsible, in a way, for Martine Raimondi’s beatification. Sometimes Daniel would entertain the thought that God had sent him this atheist in order to make up his mind. Vail’s testimony did not appear in Father Octave’s Process of Canonization, but it was what Vail told Daniel that led him to leave certain things out of the Process, things concerning the Cardinal Virtues of the Blessed Martine. Alberto Vail’s vital testimony was this: “She had no child.”

  In 1991 the bishop in Turin gave permission for an exhumation. Father Daniel Octave was present. Along with the permission for the removal of relics, he had permission to collect a sample of hair or tissue for analysis. He had persuaded Martine Dardo to let a DNA test settle the matter. She said she’d supply her sample once one was retrieved from Martine Raimondi’s remains.

  Martine Raimondi had been captured by the Germans at the beginning of September 1944. “She was ill and wasn’t able to stay on the move,” Alberto Vail had told Daniel. “She was in bed, and in the care of an old woman, the only occupant of an all-but-ruined farm on the path to St. Sauveur above Tende.” (“And you needn’t arch your brows at me, Daniel,” Vail said. “She wasn’t lying in, about to deliver. I thought we’d done with all that!”) Martine was exhausted, depleted, not sufficiently robust for life in the hills. Vail visited her only two days before she was caught. “She was running a fever, covered in a rash, and she couldn’t keep anything down. She wouldn’t have been able to escape the soldiers, even if she had a warning,” Vail said. “And she was troubled.”

  “Troubled?” said Daniel.

  “About St. Barthelemy’s, and the men she’d saved.”

  “About their future?”

  Alberto shook his head. Then he shrugged and said, “She told me that their lives had come at a price.”

  Martine was captured and executed in September 1944. Her grandfather and a sister of the Daughters of Grace (who later became Reverend Mother) received Martine’s body from Giesen’s men (with his remark about honoring her as a hero). A carpenter in Dardo made her coffin, placed her in it, and sealed its seams with lead. The sister accompanied the body on its journey by train to Turin. The order was then without its own church, St. Marguerita’s having been bombed, so the young nun—already seen as a martyr—was interred in the great round votive chapel of Santa Maria della Fiori, in a marble sarcophagus in the gallery high above the octagonal nave and under the dome.

  The exhumation took place in March 1991. Cold radiated from the frescoed plaster of the dome and from the tessellated mosaic on the floor of the gallery. Daniel couldn’t seem to keep his feet warm, no matter how he shuffled and stamped.

  In the gallery with the churchmen and -women were a pathologist and stonemasons and laborers. Some stood out of the way above the trestle where they would lay the lid of the sarcophagus once it had been raised from its place. Others worked to tighten elasticized straps around the lid. Far below in the nave a service was under way. Mass was being said, a booming murmur in which words were indistinguishable.

  The workmen didn’t prize at the lid and risk chipping it. Instead they got a good grip on the stone with the straps, which were coated in latex. They took hold of the handles attached to the straps and hauled. The heavy lid came up a little. The men were panting, and the air filled with their breath. It billowed, a visible cloud for a few feet above their heads, solidifying further in the glancing light from one of the small windows at the apex of the dome, then vanished in the gloomy space beyond.

  Daniel thrust his hands into his armpits to warm them. He watched the workmen maneuver planks beneath the rocking lid. Once the planks were secure and their hands were free the workmen crossed themselves. The planks protruded from either end of the lid. Between the planks and the edge of the sarcophagus was a black crack. Daniel wanted to step up and apply his eye to the crack. Lifting the lid seemed too swift a transition. They were all nervous. Daniel’s arms were sore, though he’d done no lifting. His chest was tight and his eyes were watering.

  The workmen rested for a minute, then went back to their places around the lid and, in a concerted effort, lifted it off the sarcophagus. They shuffled over to the trestle and set the lid down. They watched what they were doing, where they were putting their feet, didn’t risk even a sidelong glance. Daniel respected this practical pause; he followed the lid with his eyes till it was securely on the trestle. Then he looked back at the tomb.

  The Reverend Mother’s hands were lifted to her head. She looked horrified but at the same time began to blush deeply.

  Lying curled among shards of smashed wood was a mummified corpse, its flesh a dark leather torn in places or worn down to bone. The mummy was wearing black, the deflated uniform of an officer of the SS.

  “It’s Giesen,” Daniel said. But, of course, it needn’t be Giesen. It was six hours by train from Dardo to Turin, and who would take the kind of trouble needed to get the man here—dead or alive—even to arrange this dramatic, symmetrical revenge? The partisans may have killed Giesen—who had disappeared when the Allied armies bypassed Sospel and the Roya, trapping all the occupying Germans—but who would exchange Giesen’s body for his victim’s? It didn’t make any sense.

  For half an hour Daniel stood listening to a stunned circular discussion by the clergy while the coroner and his assistant removed the mummy from the tomb. As they worked, it was revealed that, at the back of the sarcophagus, where it stood hard up against the wall of the dome, there was a hole. A hole smashed through the marble tomb and the brick wall behind the tomb. Where the bricks had been removed was a gap-toothed darkness.

  Daniel told the others he was going in. He borrowed a flashlight and climbed into the sarcophagus. One of the workmen asked if he wanted company.

  “If you like,” Daniel said. He didn’t care—his curiosity felt like a fit on him.

&nb
sp; He switched on the flashlight and shone it into the gap. He couldn’t get onto his knees to look—the litter of smashed coffin and most of the broken bricks were on the bottom of the sarcophagus. Just inside the hole Daniel could see a pile of stacked bricks. The tomb had been broken into from inside the hole, the bricks wedged out of chipped mortar and piled up in the dark, then the marble attacked and chipped and eventually penetrated.

  Daniel said that it appeared there was a space between the inner and outer walls of the dome.

  “The inner one is mortared brick and braced with iron hoops; it goes up in steps from the bottom, only its interior is smooth,” the bishop explained. “The architect’s plans are in the library here. The cupola is marble slabs laid over support beams. Can you see the timber bracing?”

  Daniel said he could. He had climbed into the hole.

  The dark space curved away from him, broken by a nest of timbers criss-crossed between the inner and outer walls to make a kind of rigid maze. It confused the beam of Daniel’s flashlight. The space was all gaps and blockages, some solid, some shadow.

  The workman followed Daniel. Their breath hung in the air around their heads.

  The man tapped Daniel on the ankle and held up a rusted chisel. “I didn’t find the hammer,” the workman said. “But this was what was used.” Daniel nodded and went on, stepping over some beams, ducking under others. The air was musty, the timber cold under his hands, so cold it stung, as though the wood were live and conducting the cold of the marble.

  Daniel saw a smudge on the outer wall and held his flashlight to it. It was a handprint—someone had put out a hand. Daniel suspected the smudge was blood. He went on. The workman moved delicately behind him. Both were mindful of the age of the timbers and the weight of the masonry they supported.