Diego Marani - God's Dog

That evening, when he got back to the Carmelite Convent, it seemed to him that someone had searched his room. Nothing was missing, his pipe was in its place, as was his diary. But somehow it was not quite as he had left it, Salazar was sure of that. He ran his hand over the door posts and the top of the cupboard: strangely, there was not a speck of dust. He inspected the lamp, the backs of the chairs and the bathroom cupboard in search of bugging equipment but found nothing. Still harbouring a lingering suspicion, he sat down at the table and began to write.

Atheist is a catch-all term. If you have grown up among churches, you are not the same sort of atheist as you would be if you’d grown up among mosques. Everyone is an atheist in terms of their own God. Some religions guard against atheism better than others; Protestantism, for example, fairly welcomes it in. Anyone who has been capable of contesting one set of dogma will not accept another; and anyone who starts to think rationally about God will be an atheist. But atheism will not be eliminated by persecuting atheists. It is the sons who have to be targeted, the fathers are already lost. That is why, in Holland, we have forged an alliance with the imams. We are experimenting with mixed services, studying the psalms and the suras together, though unbeknownst to the powers that be, for obvious reasons. For them, everything is a matter of outward form. They would not understand; indeed, I would be in trouble if they found out. For the moment I have to act in secret, but time will prove me right. The old generation of theologians will be swept aside by the new priests of Bible-Koranism. The powers that be cannot conceive of such a phenomenon; they will become aware of it only when it is already rampant. This is the new frontier of globalised faith. The churches which will survive will be those which stand firm against competition in the new market of religions. If they do not want to be swept away by the new forms of evangelism, the new sects, and scientism, our leaders must accept change. Furthermore, this is the only possible future: the three religions of the book must make common cause. No one will have any difficulty acknowledging the Pope of Rome when there is just one faith. But in order to bring about this revolution, we must start now. We must make our presence felt in schools, in the street, through all manner of networks and associations. A westerner who goes into a mosque is a triumph for us too. He has become a believer, he has set reason aside. No religion is better than Islam at cloaking faith in reason. Muslims use reason to reveal the intelligent order which pervades creation, and that is the way to disarm science. We stand around wrangling over the sacraments and women priests; we can’t agree on anything, not even on the emblem of the cross. They simply kneel down beneath the crescent and then all pray in the same way. I observed our atheists during lauds. There they are, dressed up as believers for decency’s sake, possibly even with a rosary in their hand. The Church makes do with appearances. It is far too long since it inspired martyrdom.

That Friday the Vicar’s black shoes were already on the footstool when Salazar went into the church of Sant’Andrea della Valle. He kneeled down before the confessional, which already smelled of mouthwash.

‘Vicar, I need to gain access to the personal files of the doctors in the palliative care unit,’ he said without further preamble.

‘Identify yourself, my son,’ came the cold answer from the other side of the grille. Salazar patiently recited the Credo and then gave his registration number, as procedure required.

‘You cannot afford to skimp on such matters, inspector! You never know who might be seated on this chair! Even today the abortionists threatened the Holy See with new manifestos: posters extolling the secular revolution have been stuck up on the Leonine Walls, no less. Now speak on.’

‘Vicar, I need to consult the files on the doctors in the hospital. I was told to ask you for your permission.’

‘I will give authorisation to the Guarantor of Faith at San Filippo Neri and send you copies of all the files you wish to see. Are there any other developments?’

‘Nothing as yet, Vicar. I have identified several suspects and am making enquiries. The hospital is not as closed a world as I had imagined.’

‘I thought as much. We have been dropping our guard for quite some time. In a way this helps us lay our trap. So, play your cards well and reveal yourself only when the moment to strike has come.’

‘Maybe you’re right. We’ve dropped our guard,’ Salazar concurred. Then he crossed himself, stood up from the prie-dieu and walked off down the nave.

Chiara Bonardi left the flat at seven on the dot to go to eight o’clock mass at the hospital. Those relatives who did not attend mass regularly, and register their entry at the turnstile, lost the subsidy for palliative care and had to pay the hospital out of their own pockets. Salazar had already been sitting in the bar opposite for a good half hour. He waited until she had turned the corner, then paid for his coffee and walked towards the block. The flat was clean and tidy. A crucifix with an olive branch hung on the wall of the hall above the mirror on the coatrack. He went through the pockets of the coat which was hanging there, and found receipts from a hairdresser’s and a beauty salon. He noted the addresses: Via dei Gracchi and Via Silla. Odd, he thought, they’re right in the city centre, a long way away from Monte Spaccato. He folded them up and put them in his pocket. The furniture was old, but well-kept. In the red-tiled kitchen, a smell of coffee lingered. The main bedroom, with its double bed, was clearly never used; the mattress was covered with an embroidered bedspread which was too short for it, and the stitching was fraying here and there. The lamps on the bedside tables were unplugged. The cupboard was empty, apart from a man’s summer jacket and a battered Panama hat. Another little room, leading into the bathroom, contained an ironing-board, a clothes rack, a shoe cupboard and a laundry basket; bottles of water, a few packets of pasta, some jars of jam and two packets of washing powder stood on a nearby shelf. Chiara Bonardi’s room must be the one at the end of the corridor, Salazar thought to himself. That room at least showed signs of being lived in: a pair of pyjamas thrown over a chair, a cup of tisane on the bedside table, the duvet pulled up over the pillow. The main item of furniture in the living room was a large green leather divan; the parquet flooring was worn but well polished, and under the television a few blocks had come loose. On the table there was a vase of dried flowers, yesterday’s paper and a season ticket for the underground, in the name of Chiara Bonardi. The books in the shelves were meticulously arranged by height, forming uniform waves which seemed carved into the wood: adventure stories, history books, travelogues and a row of geology manuals alternated with primitive statuettes and other relics. Some handles on the dresser had been replaced with other, almost identical ones, distinguishable from the originals only by the brightness of the brass. The walls were hung with framed photographs of oilfields, Bedouin on camels, tanned-looking men at the wheels of jeeps. Marco Bonardi had been a mining engineer; he had spent his life travelling the world extracting oil for ENI. Salazar pulled open a few drawers where, among piles of CDs and letters, he found four photograph albums. He took them into the kitchen, laid them on the table and began leafing through them. The images they contained were of two interconnected families; they had been assembled with considerable care, with dates and comments, so as to tell a coherent story. Even without knowing him, Salazar soon identified Marco Bonardi, and was amused to see him aging from one album to the next, while the little girl who was playing around him on the beach in the first album was becoming a young woman. In photos of her with her women friends, Chiara was always the tallest; she seemed to be the leader. She was more obviously recognisable in the fourth album, where Marco Bonardi featured only rarely, alongside a sweet-faced woman who must have been his wife. In the last pages the photos ranged more widely over time. They showed a now adult Chiara Bonardi on a flower-filled terrace, and then on a beach with a woman friend. Here a sun-tanned Marco Bonardi now appeared again, in shirt-sleeves, in front of a monument, or in exotic landscapes, with palms and minarets. There were also several portrait studies, taken in an interior which seemed to be this very flat. Carefully, Salazar detached one and slipped it into his pocket. The smallest album was half empty, with just a few poorly framed shots of landscapes, small figures, the first floors of anonymous houses, a car groaning with luggage, a lit Christmas tree. There were no longer any dates, or commentaries; it was as though the painstaking hand which had organised the earlier albums had suddenly grown weary of the task. Outside, a pale sun was emerging through the smoky sky. Salazar looked gloomily at the shadows of the shutters as they lengthened on the wall. He put everything back in place and was already at the door when he realised that something about those photographs didn’t quite add up. He looked at the one he had removed from the album, running his fingers over the back and edges. He went back into the living room, leafed through the last album and then reopened it, starting at the end. It was then that he noticed that some of the photos were fixed in with adhesive corner-pieces, while others were glued straight on to the page. He detached a couple of them, more brightly coloured than the rest. The paper, too, was different, coated with plastic, and thinner. They all bore the same date on the back, stamped faintly on the margins, a date in December of the previous year.