‘No, Blume. We were worried by the magistrate because his health is failing. He is slow to issue orders and has difficulty in following details. Your theory about Sofia is interesting.’
Zezza had put all his effort into controlling the tenor of his voice and trying to come across as sceptical and a little bored, but Blume had seen the look in his eyes as he took in the explanation. He was sorry now he had played his winning hand so badly. He had given the Carabinieri captain the key and got nothing in return. At this point, he may as well do his best to push the captain in the right direction. Maybe he could count on gratitude later.
‘What about the fact that no further moves were made against Manfellotto?’ said Blume. ‘If having her dead was so important, wouldn’t they try again?’
‘She’s practically brain dead, from what I hear, why risk it?’ said Zezza.
‘She’s alive, she could remember and become a risk.’
‘I am going to let you in on a little secret here, Blume,’ said the captain, his moment of doubt beginning to dissipate. ‘We only apparently left that room unguarded. It has been under observation just in case. Or it was. After a few weeks, we ended the surveillance. Too much manpower. No one turned up.’
‘Which is my point!’ said Blume in exasperation. ‘She was not the target. No one is out to get her. If someone had made a second attempt on her, then, yes, I would clearly be wrong, but no one has. Sofia was the target. One miss, one hit.’
Zezza’s eyes darted sideways as if to check that no one was listening. ‘I may look into your theory, Blume.’ He was still modulating his voice to sound bored, Blume could see he had at least managed to plant a seed of doubt. Zezza’s movements were a little hurried now, and though he made a show of favouring Blume with an indulgent smile, he spoiled the effect by striding out too quickly.
Blume looked at the retreating figure and at the umbrella he had left propped against the wall. He did not call out. It was a nice umbrella with a real wood handle.
Chapter 24
With his new umbrella held up against the rain, only a light drizzle now, Blume walked towards the University Hospital, which adjoined the Umberto I Polyclinic. He would make one more round of the people in the case, starting with Stefania Manfellotto, then the professor, just in case the Carabinieri were right and he was wrong. If nothing interesting came from them, then he would finally let it go.
This time he had to use his police badge several times over before he was finally allowed through to the neurology department and into the ward where Stefania lay alone, asleep. It was as if the other day, in the rain, the hospital had decided to suspend its vigilance and suspicion of visitors, perhaps because of some instinctive feeling that a public building in the rain, like a church in war, was a legitimate place of refuge.
The shutters in the room were drawn halfway down, and the dullness of the day meant very little light was filtering in. The room was surprisingly cold, too, which he welcomed, rather than the stifling heat that made hospitals doubly unbearable. He approached the sleeping woman quietly. Although he had come to speak to her, he did not dare to wake her up. It might harm her, and she might scream. He walked over and looked down at her face, which, since he had seen her last, seemed to have grown smoother and younger. The bandaging around her head had been changed, and her hair had already grown back to the length of that mad Irish singer he remembered had ripped up a picture of the pope. What was her name? It had something to do with quietness or shade.
He needed to call someone into the room. A helpless woman in a room like this, a man standing over her. A woman who was the object of great hate, and who was the victim of a murder attempt. This sleeping, ageing, damaged, and vulnerable woman had killed two Carabinieri and 80 civilians.
‘Are you a relative?’
The voice, deep and full of authority, came out of the darkest corner of the room.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Blume, spinning round. ‘Don’t do that! Were you there all the time?’
The man stepped out of the shadows. He was elderly but robust, with a broad chest. He was wearing a white doctor’s coat and had a white beard and wore shining round spectacles. If anything, he should have been particularly visible in the shade, but Blume, who fancied himself as observant, had missed him.
‘I repeat, are you a relative?’
‘No,’ said Blume. ‘I’m not.’
‘If you were, you’d be the first to visit her. But since you’re not, what are you doing here?’
‘I am a policeman.’
‘Oh.’
‘You sound disappointed.’
‘Yes, I am. I don’t like the police. Are you here to make sure she doesn’t say anything awkward, because I can assure you there is no danger of that. You can tell your bosses she may as well be dead for all the danger she poses.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You know exactly what I am talking about.’
‘The train station bombing?’
‘What else?’ The doctor came over and stood disconcertingly close to Blume, then lifted up his glasses and peered into his face. ‘You’re very tall. Generally, tall people are wealthier and stronger and live longer, more profitable lives. They dominate others and get ahead in their careers, all because people don’t realize how primitive instincts guide our decisions. Have you found that?’
‘Have I found that I’m wealthy and at the top of my career? No,’ said Blume. ‘That we are primates, yes.’
The doctor nodded approvingly. ‘Self-irony. That may explain your lack of career success. But it is a good quality: very rare to find in policemen and politicians.’
‘And completely absent in doctors,’ said Blume.
‘Hmm. Would you say?’
‘What was the message you wanted me to report to my superiors?’
‘That she,’ the doctor jerked his thumb at the sleeping head in the bed beside them, ‘is non compos mentis, or non compos memoriae. She poses no threat. She won’t be able to tell anyone about which senior policemen facilitated her and her Fascist fellow-travellers.’
‘I’ll be sure to pass that message on,’ said Blume.
‘I see your irony extends outwards, too, Mr Policeman. You know, in the 1980s I used to have fantasies about having a murderous Fascist like this at my mercy, and my wish has come true.’
‘And is it as good as you hoped?’
‘It’s different. I’m older now, and in my fantasies, the bombers were never women. They were particularly not bewildered old women whose minds have been wiped clean of all guilt. But, even so, I am still pleased that this has happened to her. I am happy that I have been able to use her as opposed to a decent ordinary person, as a case history for my students. We spent all morning exhausting her with tests. That’s why she is sleeping. But when she awakes, she won’t remember the tests, or that she slept, or that we subjected her to almost cruel stress all morning long. She has both anterograde and retrograde amnesia.’
‘So she is literally incapable of holding a grudge,’ said Blume.
‘That is one way of looking at it, I suppose.’
‘Which in the here and now makes her a decent person. More decent than either of us.’
‘I can vouch to the anterograde, but I am still suspicious of the retrograde, since it wipes her conscience so marvellously clean. I am trying to think up a way of forcing recall.’
‘You think she’s faking?’
The doctor went over and placed a finger on the side of Stefania’s temple. ‘The bullet entered here. I don’t know much about ballistics or even head trauma, which is not my field, but it must have been a strange sort of bullet. The impact with the skull changed its trajectory from horizontal to almost vertical. So it came out the top of her forehead.’ He tapped her on the head with his thumb, and she stirred and made a sound as if in pain. ‘Even the exit wound was small, which is why she is still here among the living. All these bandages,’ he gave the top of her head a small slap, aga
in causing her to cry out softly in her dissipating sleep, ‘are the result of an operation to remove half her skull: basically to allow her bruised brain the space to swell up. This,’ he knocked her head with his knuckle, ‘is acrylic, not bone. Amazing advance in medical technology. We are so far ahead compared with, say, 30 years ago. Maybe we’d now be able to save some of those who died in her bomb blast. So the bullet took out a section of the temporal lobe, which is probably the cause of the amnesia, then spun upwards into the frontal lobe.’ He tapped her forehead.
Blume reached out and lifted the doctor’s hand away. ‘That will do,’ he looked at the name badge above the doctor’s breast pocket, ‘Professor Marcelli. What are you a professor of ?’
‘Experimental Psychology.’
‘I am not sure what that means,’ said Blume.
‘It means my students and I come in here to experiment on her, not to cure her. Which is fine by me, Mr . . . Inspector?’
‘Commissioner Blume. What sort of experiments?’
‘Nothing evil. Tests. Mental tests. Like quizzes or puzzles. Checking her orthographic, phonological, and semantic processing. A lot of subjects find them fun. Looking at pictures, learning to draw diagrams, lists of words. That sort of thing.’
‘I don’t suppose you know a professor of animals. Guy called Ideo?’
‘The ethologist?’
‘That’s what it’s called,’ said Blume. ‘Yes, him. So you do know him?’
‘Professionally. I have read his stuff. I can’t really say I know him personally. You know he is utterly insane?’
‘No more than the other academics I have met,’ said Blume. ‘Why insane?’
‘He believes in Lamarckian evolution based on memory,’ said Marcelli, shaking his head in humorous despair at the folly of it all.
‘And that’s a bad thing?’
‘Well, of course it is! The heritability of acquired characteristics?’
Blume shook his head.
‘Soft inheritance, Jean Baptiste de Lamarck?’
‘I am afraid not,’ said Blume sadly. ‘You may as well be speaking Arabic.’
‘The idea that if you learn something, a skill, say, or if you adapt your body to deal with something in your environment, you can pass on this ability to your children.’
‘And you can’t?’ said Blume. ‘Seems a pity.’
‘Lamarck thought giraffes stretched their necks to get to softer leaves in trees, then passed this characteristic on to their offspring, who stretched their necks even further, and so on.’
‘And this theory is insane?’ asked Blume. ‘It sounds pretty good to me.’
‘Forgive me, Inspector.’
‘Commissioner.’
‘Commissioner. That’s simply your ignorance. Not your fault.’
‘I accept that,’ said Blume, doing his best to sound humble. ‘But as mad professor theories go, it doesn’t sound totally insane. That was the word you used.’
Marcelli laughed a big exaggerated Father Christmas laugh. It was the sort of laugh he probably used to put down a student who dared challenge him in public. ‘That is just the beginning of it. Ideo thinks that plants talk to each other. He has this idea of ‘‘morphic zones’’. So a rose grows into a rose not because of its genes or because of evolution, but because other roses around it teach it.’
‘Flowers teach other flowers to grow?’
‘Not just flowers. Everything. People, plants, animals, stones, whatever becomes what they are because they partake in a sort of massive collective memory. Ideo says this solves a mystery of foetal development – how some cells know to become skin, others to become legs, feet, hands, head.’
‘I have sometimes wondered about that,’ said Blume.
‘ “Immanent morphism”, he calls it. Demented stuff. He links it to how dogs know about their owners’ whereabouts and health. You know, the way a dog seems to know its master is on his way home long before he arrives.’
‘Smell?’ said Blume.
‘Exactly. That’s what a normal person would say. Not Ideo. He has done experiments to show that the dog “knows” before smell is possible. Like when the owner is leaving the office in the city and about to take the train. He says it is because the dog has started sharing the morphic space of its owner, the same zone that controls development. They form a “holon”. Lunatic.’
‘Cats never do that, do they?’ said Blume.
‘Of course not. But neither do dogs. Ideo is raving.’
‘Does Ideo have many followers?’
‘Oh no. No one pays any attention to him.’
‘What about students, impressionable young minds? They can be persuaded.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Marcelli. ‘In fact, from what I hear, Ideo has difficulties in hanging on to staff. They quit him and his madness as soon as they get a chance. And while we’ve been talking, someone has woken up.’
Blume glanced uneasily at the woman beside them. Her eyes were moving back and forth, as though she were following every word of the conversation with perfect understanding, though she had not said a word. Her eyes met his and she smiled. Blume smiled back.
‘Hello. I don’t think we’ve met,’ she said. She lifted an unsteady finger and pointed it at Professor Marcelli. ‘I don’t know this gentleman either. Perhaps you might introduce me?’ Then she dropped her voice almost to a whisper, ‘Or maybe don’t bother, eh?’ She smiled and gave Blume a wink.
Marcelli, who had missed Stefania’s aside and wink, grabbed his arm and propelled him across the room hard enough to make Blume consider retaliating with his fist. ‘There is no point in engaging in any conversation with her. I mean, none that will lead you anywhere. Are you trying to find out who shot her?’
‘Are you trying to stop me?’ asked Blume.
‘It was probably a family member of one of the victims, wasn’t it?’
‘No,’ said Blume. ‘It almost certainly was not.’
‘If it wasn’t a revenge attack, then it is likely she was shot by a former camerata,’ said the doctor. ‘Or some neo-Fascist organization. Perhaps it was some organ of the secret state, someone connected with the police or the secret services, am I right?’
The doctor stood back looking pleased with himself, as if he had just proved that for someone like him, investigation was child’s play.
Blume knew he should just ignore it, but the moral contradiction in the doctor’s reasoning annoyed him too much. ‘Let’s admit the possibility that a former right-wing terrorist – no, scratch that – a still active right-wing terrorist, or a person with such sympathies, got wind that Stefania was planning to confess and took action to stop her. But what if Stefania has repented? Perhaps she was finally persuaded by the plight of the families and wanted to tell what she knew. You need to allow for these possibilities, too.’
‘Unlikely though they are.’
‘Unlikely though they are,’ Blume conceded.
‘Look, Commissioner, first of all, remember what she did. Secondly, I am not treating her harshly. At least she serves as a lesson for my students. A lab rat, basically, which is a fitting end for her.’
‘Ammazza, you have got a lot of hate, Professor.’
‘No, she’s the one who hates. Or hated.’
‘What sort of tricks do you get her to perform for your students?’
‘We show her a complicated diagram and ask her to draw it. Every time the diagram seems new to her, and yet her ability to copy it is improving. Her semantic memory is blown, but her procedural memory works just fine.’
‘There is absolutely no point in my trying to jog her memory to find out who shot her?’
‘No.’
‘Will she live?’
‘Hospital will kill you pretty quickly, and seeing as no one even visits her, it’s hard to imagine someone being prepared to take her home. And now, I think I have been helpful enough. I try to avoid talking to policemen.’
As the doctor reached the door, Blu
me said, ‘You must be frightened?’
Marcelli paused. ‘Of what?’
‘Of ending up like that,’ said Blume, pointing to Stefania, who wore a mildly puzzled but friendly expression as she watched them from her bed, ‘and then of meeting someone like you.’
Chapter 25
‘Not a very nice man,’ observed Stefania, as Blume approached her bed.
‘You know him?’
‘Oh no, we’ve never met, but you can tell, even from a distance. And you are?’
‘Commissioner Blume.’
‘Pleased to meet you. I am Stefania Manfellotto.’ The name gave her pause as she said it, but then, having consulted with some functioning part of her mind, she nodded confidently to find herself confirmed in herself.
The hand she proffered seemed whiter, thinner, and softer than only a few days ago. Blume took it and shook it as formally and firmly as he could, then, asking permission first, sat down on the chair at her bedside. The door was open and people passed in the corridor, but no one looked in.
‘I am not a doctor.’
‘Oh, I know that!’
‘How?’
‘You can tell, even from a distance.’
‘Can you guess what I am?’ asked Blume, suddenly interested.
‘You are not a family man. That is obvious. Also, you have no ring. You are taller than most Italians of your age, so I think your parents may have been from northern Europe or America. You have pale skin and eyes that change from blue to green, depending on the sky. Not many professional foreigners settle in Italy, so they may have been artists or scholars, and you may have followed in their footsteps. You dress slightly differently, too. I notice you don’t care for your shoes, which is a sign of a non-Italian, and you speak with a very precise manner, though without an accent, so if you were not born here, you have been here for a long time. I think you have problems in your family. Maybe your mother has died recently? You close your eyelids slowly, which means you are sad, but I don’t know if that is always or just now. When you sat down you were angry with someone, but you are not now. But when you were sitting down I saw a holster, but I don’t think you enjoy . . . you need to . . . What you need to do, before it is too late.’
The Memory Key: A Commissario Alec Blume Novel Page 17