‘What about organized crime or the Sacra Corona Unita?’
‘Maybe, but the SCU was just being formed around then. The divisions between ordinary criminals and the SCU back in the 70s were very porous. He could have been part in and part out, in a way Cosa Nostra would never allow.’
‘Got it,’ said Blume.
‘So Mimmo il Mimo, soon to become known as Domenico, spends the 1980s living happily married and running a factoring company. I suppose the source of the capital behind that company is open to question, but basically he seems to have gone legitimate, insofar as a financial company in southern Italy can be legitimate in any way.’
‘Which is no way at all,’ said Blume.
‘True, but if he was involved in money laundering, he kept a low profile and his contacts to a minimum. So, as I say, he stays clean for years, never back in jail, never charged, until he next pops up in 1999. That was the year in which –’
‘A magistrate re-opened a file against him based on an accusation that he had killed his wife.’
Silence. One. Two. Three. He should have kept quiet.
‘Do you have this information already?’
‘Just that part, Caterina. I heard it this morning, promise.’
‘You promise. Save your promises for things that count. Well, stop me if you’ve heard this one: the person who made the accusation . . .’
‘. . . was the brother of the man with whom Greco’s wife was cheating,’ finished Blume in his own head, managing not to blurt it out and annoy her again.
‘. . . is a certain Davide Di Cagno. Now it turns out he is the younger brother of a man who is said to have run away with Greco’s wife,’ said Caterina. ‘He did not make the accusation till much later, by which time no one was interested. But, reading between the lines . . .’
‘You’re enjoying this, too, just a bit, aren’t you, Caterina?’
‘Reading between the lines,’ she repeated more firmly, ‘it certainly seems possible that Davide Di Cagno knows his brother never ran away anywhere, but was killed for adultery by Greco. Along with the wife. I am not saying that is what happened,’ said Caterina, ‘but I don’t buy the idea that they ran away together, never to be heard of again.’
‘Neither do I!’ said Blume.
‘Yes, but the difference is, I am happy enough to leave it at that. And so should you.’
‘Can you find out where he lives, this brother, what his phone number is, if he’s still alive, and send me the details on my phone?’
‘Did you just hear what I said about leaving it alone?’
‘Come on, Caterina. I can look it up myself if I have to. Save me the effort.’
‘I’ve just sent it to you by email.’
‘You are a sweetheart.’
‘Alec, this is a stupid and dangerous thing. Do you need help? Apart from mentally, I mean.’
‘No. I’m fine.’
‘Why don’t you just come home?’
‘I will, as soon as I finish one last thing here. Thanks, Caterina. I am going to look at that email now.’
He hung up and opened his Gmail. There it was: a message that said, ‘I may be the bigger idiot of the two of us for sending you this’, was followed by the name Davide Di Cagno, date of birth, address, home phone number, no mobile. Born 1979. Surely that was too young?
At the end of the conversation, Caterina had said he should come, not go home. He felt buoyant as he opened the Greco file on his desk. When he saw the disappointingly few pages it contained, his smile faded, but slowly.
Chapter 23
Princess Donatella Flavia Orsini-Romanelli did not come home. Occasionally Blume opened the door of his room and listened, thinking he had heard a noise. He went twice to the head of the stairs and called out her name. He was content, however, to return to his room to read undisturbed the Carabinieri file on Greco, eat biscuits, and wash down aspirins with beer to head off a chill he was beginning to feel as the day wore on into early evening. He kept the nasal spray handy, too, since the last thing he wanted was a migraine to break his concentration as he wrote up his notes. He was coming round to the idea that, whatever his feelings about Niki Solito, Domenico Greco was the more interesting person of the two, and perhaps even made a better suspect.
At eight o’clock, taking his notebook with him, he ventured down the six flights of stairs leading from the second to the ground floor then down the few steps into the kitchen. If she returned and found him there, she might take the hint and cook. At 8:30, with no sign of anyone, he helped himself to some cheese and bread and, after a brief hesitation, cut up two onions with an oversized knife, which slipped and sliced the pulp of his middle finger.
With the help of some kitchen roll and a lot of sucking (and cursing) he stanched the flow, though when he bent the finger, the blood oozed out again. Having dealt with his finger crisis, he salted the onions, pink around the edges now where his blood had stained them, and ate them raw. Caterina wouldn’t kiss him for days when he did that, but she hadn’t kissed him for months anyhow.
Rubbing his stomach and puffing out his cheeks as the onion returned in gaseous form, he wandered out to the hall where the old reception desk was. It occurred to him that unless his host returned, he might leave without paying. He went behind the desk, opened his wallet, and counted out €200, which ought to cover it, and left it on the desk, in a conspicuous position. He also took down his own ID-card details and filled out the register. After all, the law is the law, he thought. She should have done that: the last guest, he saw, had been a German from 1992. Maybe he had been the one with the hiking boots.
He also discovered several sets of keys behind the desk, including one to the front door, which was still open to anyone who might happen to pass. He doubted anyone would come in, but he had just put €200 in cash on the desk, and, since the princess would certainly have keys to her own home, decided to shut the door.
Back in the kitchen, he considered taking a bottle of wine but, at the cost of some willpower, decided against it. As he was lifting up his notebook, the photograph of Alina, which he had put between the pages so as not to bend it, slipped out. Unlike his bedroom, the lights in the kitchen were modern and bright, and he took advantage of them to study the photograph, not because he expected any clues, but because he needed to reignite his sympathy for this girl who was little more than a name to him.
The picture had been taken while Alina was in conversation with someone out of frame. Her face was animated, her mouth slightly open, her chin poised at an angle that suggested she was about to speak. The sea was just visible in the background. He wondered what sea it was, and why she had chosen to print that particular photograph. No one printed photos anymore, so she must have felt she looked particularly beautiful in it, which she did, though like so many young people, she might not have been aware how much of what she considered her particular loveliness was part of the general beauty of youth.
‘I’m sorry, there is nothing I can do,’ he told her. ‘I’m sorry, too, for how you were treated. All that courage and spirit, just to end up dead and no one except Nadia caring enough to look for you. Because you are dead, Alina, aren’t you?’
He placed the picture on the table. ‘Were you getting in the way of Greco’s plans?’ he asked her. ‘Is it really that Niki fell for you? Or did he kill you? Or, did he do both?’
Alina continued to look sideways, away from him, always on the point of speaking and forever mute.
No one in the town was in the slightest bit interested in the disappearance of a Romanian girl. He could not hear their conversations, but he couldn’t picture them whispering about it as if it were something that concerned them. Striking though she may have been, they would not have seen much of her. As Nadia said, they slept most of the morning, kept themselves to themselves, and went to the nightclub in the evening where they had dinner. Monday was their day off. He didn’t imagine the men from the town who had driven 30 or 40 kilometres to Niki’s seedy
nightclub would be willing to acknowledge them if they met them in the street. Would they even recognize them in ordinary clothes, in tracksuits and trainers, instead of tiny skirts, sequined black tops, boots, and white knickers?
The women of the town were unlikely to befriend them either. If Alina’s disappearance had even registered, it might well have been with a mixture of relief and vengeful pleasure.
A face like hers should have brought respect, love, veneration, and tenderness. But she had been used like an animal. He opened the notebook to a fresh page, uncapped a pen, and wrote down ‘Romania, return?’, and then angrily bullet-pointed the reasons for excluding this option. He slipped the photo back into the covers of the notebook and returned upstairs. If he could do nothing about a young woman disappearing in the present, he might be able to do something about one who had disappeared in the past, and maybe there would end up being some connection. He still had work to do.
Back at his desk, he reread his notes, and worried about dates. According to the file, and as confirmed by Caterina, Greco’s wife had gone missing in 1993, a year that in some ways might have been yesterday except that, he reflected, Alina and Nadia would have been no more than newborns.
He looked through the Carabinieri papers. Marina. That was Greco’s wife’s name, and she had been born in 1961. That made her 32 when she disappeared.
He wrote down the date of disappearance: 1993, underlined it, and then started working out some ages, which he entered in a column below: Domenico (Mimmo) Greco 45; his wife Marina Greco, née Loconsole 32, quite a gap, but not too unusual; Giuliano Di Cagno, the young man she was supposed to have run off with, born . . . he checked the papers, 1968, which made him 25 at the time. A 32-year-old woman leaving her 45-year-old husband for a younger man – perfectly plausible, except there was a child in the middle of this, Silvana who, in 1993, would have been about 8. And then there was Niki who was 22 at the time.
That made Niki and him practically contemporaries. Blume stood up and went into the bathroom for a piss, and observed himself in the mirror. He figured he had aged better than Niki. Better angina and migraines than diabetes. Speaking of which, he hunted round for his medicines. He realized he was taking them more or less at random now, eking out those of which he had few, gobbling down those of which he had plenty.
Domenico, born 1949, had been arrested in 1972 for armed robbery. He had been in prison until 1982. That was prehistory. Most of the other people, himself included, were either children or had yet to be born. Blume imagined himself sitting in front of a highly sceptical magistrate, setting out not fact but theories; not evidence but a story, which, somehow, he knew to be true. If he told the story right and got the right sort of magistrate, then the case might be reopened, there being no statute of limitations for premeditated murder – of which he had absolutely no proof. He’d need a youngish ambitious magistrate, and he would need to do all the investigative work for him. He looked at the driving licence photo of the considerably younger Greco. ‘You can’t just disappear women like that, you bastard.’
He had to spell it out, to sell his version of events, and, above all, he needed a witness. This was going to be his final task this evening. Despite what the princess said about manners, supper times, and calling, it was pure common sense to phone people in the evenings after dinner when they were most likely to be in. At least from a policeman’s perspective. It was now 9 o’clock. He’d give it another half hour, then, with the number Caterina had sent him, he would call the brother of the disappeared man. That would be the make or break moment, and, he was not ashamed to admit, he was nervous. Without the corroboration and backing of the younger brother, his investigation into Greco would fail, no matter how convincing his reconstruction of events. He reread what he had written earlier.
On the morning of 19 June 1993, Marina Greco, née Loconsole, received an anguished-sounding call from her lover, Giuliano Di Cagno. In it, he asked her to meet him at the town of Molfetta that afternoon.
He checked on his phone’s diary, and added the fact that it was a Saturday.
She would have been surprised at this request, because Giuliano was not from the town, and the last time they had met, taking advantage of the absence of her husband, who was engaged in some of his usual shady deals in Foggia, he had made no mention of it. Giuliano, however, insisted, saying it was an emergency, and told her to take the train.
We may imagine that she wanted to know why, and Giuliano will have replied, ‘Just do as I say. Don’t use the car. I’ll explain when you get here. There is a train that leaves at 2:15 for Foggia. Take that, I’ll be waiting for you at the station.’
Or words to that effect.
Since we cannot by any means equate unfaithfulness to a husband with lack of maternal instinct, she will have raised the objection that she had to look after her child. It is interesting to speculate, of course, whether this child, Silvana, was her husband’s.
If not, it might explain why poor Silvana’s ‘father’ was so casual about her marrying that freak Niki.
This could be established beyond all doubt, though it might not be germane to the case and would certainly devastate the child, now a woman.
He had had to imagine Marina wondering what to do with the child. Mothers don’t often abandon their children. As Marina was ultimately Greco’s victim, Blume was disposed to think the best of her.
‘Leave her with your sister.’ There would have definitely been something wrong with Giuliano’s voice as he gave her these instructions, but that would only have served to heighten her sense of urgency. She went round to her sister’s with the child. We need to check if she had another car – probably not. Did the magistrate look into this?
Blume had stopped here. He imagined that the unmarried sister and she did not get on very well, but the baby had brought them closer. Marina would perhaps have been surprised at the reserves of tenderness in her elder sister, none of which had been apparent when they were growing up together. This did not stop her sister from asking her sharply enough what was so important that she had to abandon her child for the whole afternoon and evening. But he could not reasonably insert this depth of speculation in his report.
He double-checked the files. Yes, there had been a sister, and even the hint of a custody dispute, which is how he had found the name. He was deeply dissatisfied with his storytelling here. He took out his phone and called Caterina, suddenly appreciative of the power of technology. It seemed wonderful that he could hear her voice in this room. He was on the verge of saying so to her, but she answered with a weary sigh of impatience. Well, if that was her reaction to seeing his name on her phone, then what was the point of telling her he wished she were here with him now in this bare room at the top of an empty house at the top of a hostile town, overlooking a ruined villa and an overripe garden.
‘Hi, Caterina. Can you do me a quick favour?’ was all he said.
‘What else have I been put on earth to do?’
So sarcastic.
‘Marina Greco, née Loconsole, 1961, Bari. I forgot to background her family. What I need to know is did she have any brothers or sisters. Also, can you double-check that she absolutely vanished from sight. If she turns up alive and well in some other part of the world, then I have been wasting my time. I can’t believe how dull-witted I am being. Can you look that up for me?’
‘I am at home, Alec.’
‘Right. Call someone, get them to do it, then send me the details in a text. As soon as possible.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Yeah, no, wait, Alessia’s OK?’
‘Do you want me to text you the answer to that, too?’ She hung up on him.
She’d come through. She always did. He sat back and dreamed up Bari in 1993.
‘Greco has sent for me,’ said Marina. ‘It is urgent. Silvana hates travelling. If you don’t want her, I can take her, but I thought I might be doing everyone a favour, including Silvana. She loves you.’
Here
he left some blank space. He hoped there would not be too many brothers or sisters that might complicate his narrative. You never could tell with southern Italians. Suffice to say the baby was deposited somewhere safe.
He saw Marina. She was crossing the piazza in front of Bari central train station where she was picked up on CCTV – this fact is established in a police report from 1993. The cameras had just been installed owing to a high crime rate in the area. She was reportedly carrying two suitcases, which, like her, vanished from history.
Blume tried to picture Marina, making sure not to confound her in his mind’s eye with Alina. He made her heavier, not as pretty, thicker but perhaps a good deal sexier, standing on a platform waiting for the train to arrive and take her towards what the court decided was irresponsible freedom, but he knew was a bitter death. He put down his pen and left her standing there for a while. He needed to fill in some details about her unfortunate lover, Giuliano, and that brought him closer to making the fateful phone call he was putting off.
A droplet of sweat hit the page and smudged the ink: which was odd, because he was freezing cold. He wiped his brow with his arm, took the blanket from his bed, and wrapped it round himself. The drop of sweat had soaked through two pages, so rather than trying to write around it and risk tearing a hole he skipped two pages, but when confronted with pristine white, he lost track of what he was supposed to be saying. Among other things, this was supposed to be delivered as a persuasive speech. He could not afford to forget himself mid-sentence. Looking back would be cheating. He huddled closer into the blanket. It was almost ten in the evening. Now was the moment to call in his witness.
Bitter Remedy: An Alec Blume Case Page 18