Brother Leonardo Calisi started up the steep hill, his short legs pounding furiously. Puffs of steam issued from his mouth into the cold air. With his hands plunged into the pockets of his habit, resting atop his belly, his diminutive stature and his ruddy cheeks conferred upon him an unmistakable and comical appearance that might easily have prompted a smile. But on that chilly November afternoon, a smile was fairly rare currency among the few shivering passersby.
Truth be told, he wasn’t smiling either. Truth be told, Brother Leonardo was worried.
It wasn’t the cold that was giving him pause, even though like so many other parish priests in the city, he was working as hard as he could to offer shelter and protection to the homeless, to whom he had even opened the doors of the convent’s refectory, to the immense horror of Brother Teodoro, the cook. Nor was he preoccupied by the countless concerns of his office, since he possessed the energy and strength to deal with every conceivable difficulty: deep down, he said, everything that happens is God’s will, and as such we men are obliged to accept and tolerate it.
While the sunshine was making an effort to raise the temperature at least to freezing, Leonardo had very different matters on his mind. He was thinking about his secret mission.
At night, after saying his prayers and before falling asleep, in his deeply personal dialogue with Our Lord, he compared his work with that of an agent of the intelligence services. One of those operatives capable of jumping off a speeding train onto the back of a motorcycle, like in those movies that, from time to time, in the recreation hall, his confreres insisted on watching. Only Brother Leonardo was “on a mission from God.”
In spite of himself, he had to smile when he was reminded of that line from the famous comedy starring Dan Akroyd and John Belushi. There wasn’t a human being on the planet more different than he from John Belushi, the beloved actor who had fallen victim to his own excessive appetites. Leonardo didn’t even know what excess was, quite the opposite. He was an exceedingly moderate and sober individual: never an outburst of anger, no messy desires, never the call of the flesh. He didn’t even feel the need to replace sandals with proper shoes, even though the weather had forced many other monks to make the switch.
And he never hesitated in his service to the faithful, in spite of the fact that responsibility for the parish weighed chiefly on his shoulders, with a series of heavy obligations. In particular, he was the first to volunteer for shifts hearing confession.
He turned the corner and came face-to-face with an elderly couple, assiduous worshippers at the church, who greeted him and gave every sign of stopping. But he didn’t slacken his pace, doing no more than to impart a hasty benediction: if he had stopped to speak with them, and especially with Signora Caterina, who possessed an unstoppable gift of gab, the north wind would have transformed the three of them into ice statues. And after all, Brother Leonardo was in a hurry. He was in a tremendous hurry.
It was in fact the confessions that helped him in his secret mission, though that was something he certainly couldn’t explain to his fellow monks, who were so dear to his heart. Their fragile consciences couldn’t bear the burden of that information.
He shot a glance at a scrap of paper he had in his pocket and checked the street numbers.
Certainly, his many responsibilities filled his days, took most of his time, and the task he had assigned himself required great care and dedication. He couldn’t allow himself to slip into a slipshod carelessness. One time, under great pressure as he hurried to celebrate Christmas Mass, he’d come terrifyingly close to committing a grave error that would have led to catastrophic consequences. No, he needed to remain on the alert.
He was grateful to God for having chosen him. For having shown him how lovely the world was, how wonderful life was, and for having taught him to defy sin, to protect his fellow man from the devil. In a homily that he had delivered the week before, he had cautioned his parishioners against the temptations of the Great Adversary, which so often present themselves in forms that are difficult to recognize. The devil, he had reminded them forcefully, is cunning by definition.
The malaise of this century, as Leonardo could see, as clear as daylight, was loneliness. Because of it, men and women were cast adrift and were no longer capable of stirring pity in others, because they shut themselves up in an impregnable tower of their own construction, built around their own despair. Science, in its myopic cluelessness, had even attempted to treat this scourge. As if depression, the abandonment of love, could be cured with a pill, like a migraine.
In Leonardo’s view, loneliness was the product of a progressive turning of one’s back upon God.
It was self-evident, wasn’t it? As one turned one’s back on God, one inevitably found oneself increasingly alone. Free will, originally a gift, had been polluted by the Evil One, until it turned into the most terrible of damnations, since it allowed men to choose to remain alone, in prey to anguish, and therefore falling easy victims to the cunning Horned One, who tricked them into committing the gravest of all sins, thus casting them down into eternal hellfire.
The gravest sin was suicide.
How many times, in the coolth of the confessional, amidst the odor of incense and the candles flickering under the painting of the Holy Annunciation, had he heard those words: I want to die, Father, all I lack is the courage to kill myself.
As a young monk, when the curly locks crowning his head weren’t white like they were today, he had spent hours beseeching those wretched souls not to throw away the greatest of all gifts. He had tried to persuade them to listen to reason, he had even wept. And more than once, brokenhearted and eyes puffy with tears, he had been summoned to identify the remains of those who, in the end, had finally worked up the courage.
Then he had realized that his mandate, his mission, in fact, was to prevent those fragile souls from falling into the clutches of Lucifer: the tug of war between God and the devil must no longer end with a victory of the Father of Lies.
But what could he do to help, he, a poor little monk just five feet tall, armed with nothing more than a placid smile and a pair of clear blue eyes? What could he do if he relied only on the aid of the Gospel, which fewer people seemed willing to listen to with each passing day?
Leonardo found the street number that matched the address written on the scrap of paper. He went and inquired with the doorman, who was cooped up in his overheated little booth. He obtained the information he needed.
The illumination had come to him at dawn one day, ten years earlier, while he was praying and reflecting on the suicide of a young man who had hanged himself, driven by his terror at the thought of having to confess his homosexuality to his family. His face wet with tears and his heart pierced by a sense of helplessness, he had received a message from God, wrapped up in the first beam of sunlight that day.
So he’d have to do it.
He’d have to kill them before they could kill themselves.
That was the only way to rescue them from the devil’s clutches: to keep them from sinning by taking their own lives.
But by doing so, would he be sinning? He had asked God that question, his heart palpitating at the thought, terrified at the prospect of languishing in hell. The Lord hadn’t answered him, not directly anyway; and yet, by the light of the doctrine he had studied for so many years to such good effect, Leonardo had nevertheless come to a conclusion. He would not be punished. That which is done in the name of God, and according to His will, to help Him triumph in the daily battle against evil, is no sin. And in heaven, when the time came, many angels would flank him, clustering around him on judgment day, and they would tell the Almighty Father that this small humble soul had saved them from committing an act that would have been irredeemable for them.
It was no simple matter. The slightest error in his evaluation and he would kill someone who, deep in their heart, might still find a reason to go on living, sooner or later, even if that day were far in the future. The candidates suited to benefit from Leonardo’s extreme and desperate act of mercy were only those who walked through the dolorous vale of absolute affliction, with no hope of ever escaping. Men and women who no longer had any bond to life, who sooner or later, one rainy weekday morning, while the television screen blathered away with some inane infomercial, after even their last remaining friend had failed to pick up the phone, would tug open the window or turn on the gas and put an end to an existence that no longer offered any peace.
He couldn’t gain the certainty that he was right during a simple confession or with a conversation in the sacristy. He had to talk to the candidate several times, clearly understand the reasons at play, delve deep into the emotions and the memories. He had to take his time and make sure that the person really had nothing left to live for. His own salvation was at stake. The Lord would never forgive him for the superficiality of an overhasty act, and he would find himself peering down into the abyss of the Great Adversary.
As he was climbing the stairs, his mind turned to his friend Giorgio Pisanelli, one of God’s children who was dearest to his heart.
More than once, in the aftermath of the death of Giorgio’s wife Carmen, whom he had assisted in the final, atrocious period of her too-short life, he had thought that Giorgio might be a serious candidate for his services: the man had been dead-eyed, flat-voiced, the same features that Leonardo had identified all too often in others. Leonardo had been alone in knowing about the disease that the policeman refused to treat. How often he had begged his friend to see a doctor, to battle against his cancer. But his friend had stubbornly refused: Giorgio was afraid he would be put into early retirement.
Because only Giorgio Pisanelli—and that reason kept the monk from helping his friend to commit the one act that would have brought him peace—had been capable of glimpsing a consistent plan, a single hand behind the apparent suicides that were taking place in the quarter. And Giorgio had got it into his head to discover just who was behind that plan. And so he was obsessively tracking down a murderer whose existence nobody else believed in.
Giorgio Pisanelli was hunting for him.
Little did he suspect that his best friend, the one who ate lunch with him once a week at the restaurant known as the Trattoria del Gobbo, the one he confided in and who supported him in the grief and sorrow of his memories of his wife, might actually be the man he was trying to track down. And for that matter, there was absolutely nothing Leonardo could or would have done to defend himself, if his friend ever happened upon the truth. Leonardo was no murderer. Aside from the affection he felt for Giorgio, he was incapable of killing any man who had a strong reason to go on living—even if the strong reason in question was Leonardo’s own capture.
But that wasn’t the source of his unease, as he placed his half-moon reading glasses on the bridge of his nose to read the name on the doorbell next to the door. Pisanelli was miles from having picked up his trail, and in any case he was keeping Leonardo briefed on the developments of his investigation, so he’d have no trouble parrying his blows. No, his sense of disquiet was due to the spiritual exercises he was scheduled to undergo in just a few days’ time.
These exercises were a recurring obligation, a beneficent and soul-preserving week of silence, reading, and meditation led by an aged and learned father at a Roman monastery. Usually Leonardo looked forward to these sessions with joy, because they gave his soul, worn and weary from absorbing the sufferings of so many worshippers and religious brothers whose confessions he received, a chance to cleanse itself in the presence of holy doctrine. This time, however, the exercises were landing square in the middle of the final conversations with a candidate, just as Leonardo was on the verge of attaining solid certainty that said candidate no longer had any desire to live.
He rang the doorbell. What was he to do? Accelerating the pace of events would be dangerous, because he could never, for so much as a second, allow a worm of doubt to wriggle into his heart. The doubt that he might be putting an end to a life not yet meant to be cut short.
But to delay, on the other hand—to put it all off till such a time as he might return—exposed the person in question to the perilous risk of being unable to wait, the danger that that person might go ahead and cut her own life short, thus binding herself over to the tender mercies of Satan for the rest of eternity. Who would be able to assuage his conscience, if such a thing were to occur?
The atrocious dilemma tore at him, and that was the reason he’d set aside an hour or so for that chat. He’d pretend to have happened by, purely by chance, and he’d talk to the person about this and that, seeking a word, an expression, or a sigh that might sway him definitively in one or the other direction.
He heard a dragging, shuffling step, then the door swung open.
Leonardo’s face beamed in a mild smile.
“Peace and goodness, my dear Agnese.”