He had a warm voice and gentle eyes. Pisanelli liked him instantly, and he placed great reliance on first impressions.
“All right, tell me everything.”
Don Salvatore went back around the desk, while Pisanelli took a seat in one of the chairs.
“All right then, Giorgio . . . I would have come straight to see you at the police station, but Don Vito, here, has some concerns that are, shall we say, theological in nature. As you know, we have certain difficulties when it comes to matters of a specific nature, and coming into your office would have given the matter an official standing. We are still in the realm of the hypothetical, even if they are hypotheses that I don’t like one little bit.”
Pisanelli furrowed his brow.
“I don’t follow you, Father.”
The elderly parish priest gently shook his head.
“You know that we hear confession, and it’s pointless for me to waste time explaining that we’re required to keep those confessions secret. If, for example, someone came in and confessed to a murder, I’d do my best to persuade them to turn themselves in, but I couldn’t come to the police and inform you of the confession. You understand that, right?”
Pisanelli nodded. The priest went on.
“And for that matter, confession is always anonymous. Certainly, we know all or nearly all of our parishioners, and it’s rare that anyone comes in here who we can’t identify, but sometimes it happens.”
While he was listening, the deputy captain shot occasional glances at Don Vito; the young man was clearly in a state of some considerable discomfort. His eyes remained downcast and he kept tormenting his hands, twisting them in his lap. His breathing sounded shallow, while his feet, which he kept crossing and uncrossing incessantly, betrayed a bad case of nerves.
Still, Father Salvatore seemed to have no intention of getting to the point.
“And in confession, it sometimes happens that we are given information pointing not to a crime that has been committed, but only the intention of committing one. And then, maybe, sometimes it’s not even a crime, but just a mere fantasy. The strangest ideas pop up in people’s heads.”
Pisanelli decided it was time to weigh in. Father Salvatore was an extraordinary person, but as everyone knew who had ever listened to his interminable sermons, he tended to run off at the mouth sometimes.
“Father, could you be a little more explicit? Have you learned something that might help us to prevent a crime? Because if that’s the case, we don’t have any time to waste, and you know that.”
The parish priest heaved a sigh.
“No, Giorgio. If that was the case, we would either have come straight into the police station or you’d never have heard from us at all; it would have depended on our decision: whether or not to reveal something that we’d learned in the confession booth. Here we’re dealing with a somewhat more complicated matter. Let us try to explain it to you.”
Pisanelli waited in silence. Don Salvatore gestured to his young assistant, who took a deep breath and then started speaking.
“A few days ago, I heard a young woman’s confession. She was a foreigner, but she spoke Italian well. I never saw her face, and by the time I got out of the confessional, she had already gone away. She didn’t stop in church to pray, the way people usually do.”
He fell silent, staring at the parish priest. It was clear that he was struggling to stick to his decision to reveal to someone other than another religious something that he’d learned in the confession booth; Pisanelli mused about just how rigid and conservative young people can be, in every walk of life.
With a gesture, Don Salvatore encouraged him to go on.
“She asked a question. A . . . strange question. A worrisome question. But let me make this very clear, I never saw her, so I can’t even say whether she was asking for herself or for someone else, I just can’t say . . . And maybe it was all just a fantasy, maybe we made a mistake by calling you . . . I don’t . . . I can’t be sure that I understood correctly and, even now, when I repeat the words . . . In and of themselves, they don’t even mean all that much.”
During his career as a policeman, Pisanelli had listened to too many people confiding in him not to know that, in certain cases, you need to just shut up and wait. True, that young man might not have anything important to tell him, but then again, he might. After all, if Don Salvatore had decided to ask Giorgio to come over, there had to be something behind it.
Don Vito went on.
“It was afternoon, there weren’t a lot of people in the church. I’d already heard a couple of confessions when this young woman arrived. First she told me a couple of . . . well, anyway, nothing special, but then, all at once, as if she’d thought it over for a long time, she asked this question. At first, I wasn’t even sure that I’d understood what she was asking. I didn’t know how to answer her; I assumed she was talking about an abortion. They often do, don’t they, Don Salvatore? You must have heard it many times.”
The parish priest nodded. Then, seeing that the young man wasn’t resuming his account, Don Salvatore spoke to Pisanelli.
“We’ve been informed that early this morning you found a newborn baby near a dumpster. You know how it works here at the church, Giorgio: I’d barely got out of bed when Titina came in. She’s the concierge at Vico Egiziaca, number 47, and she’d heard about it from Luisa Russolillo, who had been leaning over the railing of her balcony to hang the laundry out to dry just as your partner was hurrying into the police station. Am I right?”
Pisanelli nodded, fascinated in spite of himself at the ways information had of spreading through the quarter.
“That’s right, Father. It’s true. And theoretically that would be a private matter.”
The priest agreed.
“Of course, of course. But the news gave us, let’s say, the last little shove that we needed to make our minds up to reach out to you, because the convergence of the two different episodes has only made us worry all the more. All right, now, Giorgio, I know you very well, and I have for a great many years. I know that you’re an honest person and that you care about other people. You do your job with care and sensitivity, and you can understand just how delicate a situation this is. What Don Vito heard was in the context of the confessional, and we’re about to reveal part of it to you. That’s a very serious matter, you understand that, right?”
Pisanelli drew a long sigh.
“Father, I thank you for your faith in me, and I’ll do my best to ensure that that faith turns out to have been well placed, but unless you make up your mind to tell me what you know, it’s going to be rather unlikely that I’ll be able to do anything to help you. So, now tell me, what does the newborn baby we found have to do with the foreign woman’s confession that you heard?”
Don Vito looked up and stared Pisanelli in the face. Suddenly he seemed quite calm and self-confident.
“That baby has everything to do with the confession, Dottore. If you ask us, it has everything to do with it. Because the young woman, at the end of her confession, asked me whether a mother would go to hell if she gave up her baby. Even if someone was forcing her to do it, against her will.”
IX
In the past four days there had been thirty-eight births in the city, in various hospitals and clinics. Twelve had taken place in the last twenty-four hours; of the remaining twenty-six births, two had ended, tragically, with the death of the newborn, and ten had been male babies. Eight of the fourteen mothers who had given birth to a baby girl were still in the hospital, as confirmed by the on-site