Read The Girl of his Dreams - Brunetti 17 for Free Online Page A

this Brother Leonardo?'
    'His surname is Mutti, and the mother house - if that's what it's called, and if there really is one - is somewhere in Umbria.'
    'Are they associated with the Church in any way, do you know?'
    'You mean the Catholic Church?' Antonin asked. 'Yes.'
    'No, they're not.' His response was so absolute that Brunetti didn't pursue it.
    After some time, Brunetti asked, 'What is it, precisely, that you'd like me to do?'
    'I'd like to know who this man is and whether he's really a monk or a friar or whatever he says he is.' Brunetti kept to himself his surprise that the priest should want to farm out this research: wouldn't it be easier for a person who was, as it were, in the business to attend to something like this?
    'Do they have a name?'
    'The Children of Jesus Christ.'
    'Exactly where in San Giacomo do they meet?'
    'You know that restaurant to the right of the church?'
    'The one with the tables outside?'
    'Yes. There's a calle by the restaurant, first door on the left. The name on the bell is Sambo.'
    Brunetti jotted this down on the back of an envelope on his desk. The man had sprinkled water on his mother's casket, and he had also gone to visit her in her last days, and so Brunetti felt himself in the priest's debt. 'I'll see what I can do,' he said and got to his feet.
    The priest rose and put out his hand.
    Brunetti took it, but the memory of the priest's fingernails made him glad that the handshake was brief and perfunctory. He took the priest to the door, then stood at the top of the steps and watched him walk down and out of sight.
    5
    Brunetti went back to his office, but instead of returning to his chair, he went and stood by the window. After a few minutes, the priest appeared two floors below, at the foot of the bridge leading over to Campo San Lorenzo, easily recognizable even from this acute angle by his long black skirts. As Brunetti watched, he started slowly up the steps of the bridge, lifting his skirts with both hands, reminding Brunetti of the way his grandmother fussed with the apron she sometimes wore. The priest reached the top of the bridge and let the hem of his tunic drop. He put one hand on the parapet and stood there for some time.
    Moisture had condensed on the bridge that morning, and the dampness would surely cling to his long skirt. As Brunetti watched him walk down the other side and into the Campo, he recalled an observation Paola had once made, after a train trip from Padova to Venice when they had sat opposite a long-gowned mullah, busy with his prayer beads for the entire trip. His robes has been whiter than any businessman's shirt Brunetti had ever seen, and even Signorina Elettra would have envied the perfection of the pleats in his skirt.
    As they walked down the steps of the station, the mullah moving gracefully off to his left, Paola said, 'If he didn't have a woman to take care of his costume for him, he'd probably have to go out and work for a living.' In response to Brunetti's observation that she was displaying a certain lack of multi-cultural sensitivity, she replied that half the trouble and most of the violence of the world would be eliminated if men were forced to do their own ironing, 'which word I use as a metonym for all housework, please understand,' she had hastened to add.
    And who would disagree with her, he wondered? Brunetti, like most Italian men, had been spared the necessity of housework by the tireless labour of his mother, a background panel of his childhood, seen every day but never noticed. It was only when he did his military service that he had confronted the reality that his bed did not make itself each morning, nor did the bathroom clean itself. He had been lucky enough, after that, to marry a woman much given to what she called 'fair play', who conceded that her paltry hours of teaching allowed her sufficient time to see to some things in the house as well as the hiring of a cleaning woman to do the things she did not care for.
    Brunetti