“Is this one of those hopeless cases, Commissioner?”
Blume looked at her. Young, dowdy, and a bit sad-looking in her uniform. She had been working in immigrant affairs before this. If he remembered right, she had asked for a transfer.
“All homi cide cases are hopeless,” he said.
“I meant for resolving.” It surprised him she had the nerve to come back at him with a reply.
“Inspector…”
“Mattiola,” she supplied.
“I knew that. Look, we will do our best. You didn’t see what the girl was like. A life force. She’s holding the family together.”
He was going to make sure the technicians did their job properly. He would demand resources. He might even go to the press. He would show Principe a thing or two about caring for ordinary people. He would devote his entire being to resolving the road rage case. He owed it to the child.
His phone went, and he waved the inspector away, telling her to write up a report on the non-interview. The call was from Sveva Romagnolo.
“Hello. Commissioner Blume?” she sounded edgy. “It would not surprise me if someone were listening to this conversation, but we have nothing to hide, have we?”
“Insofar as we have nothing, yes, I agree,” said Blume.
“It has been brought to my attention that I am being followed. For my own safety.”
“So I hear. I have nothing to do with that. I’d love to have the resources to do things like that,” said Blume.
“I know they’re not your men. I wish they were. I wanted you to know that less than an hour ago I received the nastiest and most abusive phone call you can imagine.”
Blume, forgetting his arm was in plaster, instinctively tried to bring his finger up to his other ear to close off the sounds of the street.
“Who?” he said, looking for a silent area in the street.
“I was called a bitch, whore, slut-lesbian, too. I deserved to die instead of my husband. I was going to die, I needed to watch my back.”
Blume leaned into a wall to hear better. “This was a woman saying these things, wasn’t it?”
“So you know who it was. She said she knew who killed Arturo. Said she’d have them castrated. She said she had a cop in her pocket, and she used your name.”
“Did she ever actually say who she was?”
“No. I didn’t understand for the first minute or so, then it became obvious. She just went straight at it. Said Di Tivoli was a dead man walking for insulting her like that. Then when I asked her if she was Manuela Innocenzi, she started up again. Don’t use my name, bitch. My name on your cock-sucking lips… that sort of thing. So you know what? I’m glad those idiots from SISDE are supposed to be watching me, and I hope they’re recording this, too. Manuela Innocenzi, I’ll repeat the name just in case it gets lost in transmission. Someone’s got to stop her.”
“I don’t think she’s really going to do anything,” said Blume. “Not to you. That’s not how it works.”
“Her father is…” began Sveva. Blume could hear the fear in her voice.
“Organized. Her father is organized. Careful, low-key. You’re not in danger. She’s not going to persuade him to do anything like that.”
“Can you be sure?”
“Yes,” said Blume. He hoped he was right.
“Can you maybe go and talk with her?”
“Well…”
“I mean as soon as you can. Like now. It’s hard enough already. You need to get her away from me. That’s all I care about now.”
“All right,” said Blume, “I’ll deal with it.”
“Thank you,” said Sveva. “I won’t forget this.”
When Blume reached the car, an Alfa Romeo, Inspector Mattiola was standing there.
“I thought I told you to get back-oh, right, we came in the same car.”
He had even allowed her to drive him. He loosened his sprained arm from the sling.
“I can manage on my own. You call for a car to come and pick you up.”
Inspector Mattiola nodded slowly as if finally understanding something.
She had nice features. And she was quiet, which was good.
Blume got into the driver’s seat, turned on the engine, winced as he used his damaged arm to turn the wheel, and pulled out, leaving Mattiola standing on the curb.
32
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 3 P.M.
Manuela Innocenzi let Blume in as soon as he identified himself. As he entered the apartment, she was pulling up her hair with both hands. She let it go and as it cascaded in ringlets down as far as her shoulders she said, “Hello Alex.”
“Alec,” corrected Blume.
“I prefer Alex,” she said.
“To whom?” asked Blume.
He walked into her living room, and glanced around to make sure they were alone, before settling among the fat cushions of her favorite Roche Bobois armchair, next to her second favorite dog, a golden retriever called Mischa.
She invited Blume to say hello to Mischa, but he refused.
“What happened to your arm and nose? It must have been the crash,” said Manuela.
“My nose is fine,” said Blume. “What the hell was that call to Sveva Romagnolo about? You think you can get away with threatening people like that?”
“Yes. And we follow up on threats, too. It’s where our power comes from.”
“She’s a senator of the republic. They are probably monitoring her calls. Don’t be fooled by the party she belongs to. If push comes to shove, she can and will draw on more muscle than you. Especially since you’re not really anything except your father’s spoiled child. So you can forget this ‘we’ and ‘our power’ shit.”
“She’s a slut. And she’s a coward. I scared her. She won’t sleep easy for nights.”
“She already doesn’t sleep so well, what with her son having nightmares about his father.”
“She never looked after the child. Arturo did that.”
“Well she’s looking after him now. Let me ask you, do you feel good about what you’ve just done? I mean, leaving aside the fact that you’ve compromised your father’s position and made threats to a member of Parliament and shown yourself for the ugly bullying drab that you are-do you feel good now?”
“Yeah. I do. Apart from little Tommaso. I wasn’t thinking about him. Anyhow, it got you here, didn’t it?”
“You and Clemente together,” said Blume. “I just can’t see it. I’ve read up on him. I saw his house, his handsome successful wife, with her exquisite taste in clothes. Clemente was a good guy: educated, polite, cared about people and animals. You, I see you as better suited to petty bosses, shooters, shylocks, building speculators, drug runners, the sort of people whose women also use Botox, peroxide, gym lessons, and purgatives to keep the looks they never had to begin with. People like you. Know what I’m saying?”
Manuela was intent on stroking her dog, repeating its name soothingly, caressing the creature’s forehead with her thumbs, no longer looking at Blume. Eventually, her eyes still on the dog, she said, “I’m the real widow in this case. And you know it. That bitch will be married within the year to a wealthy politician or something. And you are a cold bastard. I bet you have no one waiting for you at home. And if you do, I wouldn’t want to be her.”
“I wouldn’t want you to be her either,” said Blume.
“You know something? You have it all wrong about me.” She finally looked at him, and he noticed her eyes were more green than blue. “The men I’ve had, they’ve been like you.”
“Cops?”
“Very funny. I meant English, American, Australian.”
“It’s not as if we’re all the same,” said Blume. What was that she had just said about getting him here?
“Something about English makes you all a bit similar,” said Manuela.
“Clemente was Italian. You must have been slumming it.”
“Arturo was a good man.”
“Like I said, not your
type. How did you meet him?”
“Before him, I was with this guy called Valerio.”
“Another Italian,” said Blume.
“He was my type of man, according to you. He liked to say his job was ‘damage maximization.’ That’s what he called it. He thought that was really witty. He talked a lot of football, played five-a-side with his mates, and always ended up having a fight with someone on his own team. Anyhow, one evening, he picked me up, said we were going someplace different. Which to me meant we weren’t going for a pizza and a night in a bar in Testaccio. I was not all that curious about his surprise, even when he headed out of Rome with me in the car. I only started asking questions when he drove off the road and across a strip of field, but by then we had practically arrived. It was a dog fight.”
A mobile phone started shaking on a lacquered table next to her. She picked it up, listened for a moment, said, “Yeah. No. No problem. Fine,” and hung up.
“Who was that?”
“Just someone,” said Manuela. “Nothing to do with us.”
“Where was that dog fight?”
“Out by the Ponte Galleria, in an abandoned warehouse. So when I realized what sort of a place he had brought me to, I refused to leave the car. He left me there, took the car keys. Then after half an hour, I decided to go in, get him to drive me home, break it off. When I went in, a pair of Fila Brasileiros were savaging each other. There must have been a hundred people there. I couldn’t see him. And I couldn’t stop myself from watching the fight.”
Manuela paused. She had turned pale. “Anyhow, I ended up vomiting, and someone must have told him to get me, because next thing he was there leading me back to the car. He was talking all the time about a bet he had made on an Argentine Dogo. Then-get this-he asked me what drug I had taken to make me sick like that. He even wanted to bring me to hospital. Well… Anyhow, it ended that night.”
“So you joined LAV as a result of that experience?”
“Yes. The following day.”
“You phoned them? How does it work?”
“I looked up the offices and went straight in and asked to talk to the man in charge.”
“Who was Clemente.”
“Yes. They didn’t want to let me talk to him, so I said I had some very important information about a dog-fighting ring.”
“You told him about the meets?”
“He knew all about it already. Turns out he had been campaigning all along, and reported the fighting every month to you useless bastards. The best he got was one raid and about three changes of venue.”
“That was the Carabinieri, not us,” Blume specified. “They probably didn’t have the manpower, what with all the organized crime and stuff. What extra information did you give?”
“None. I just said that to get in to see Clemente. The idiot asked me if I’d hand out leaflets. Said the campaign was to change people’s attitudes, sometimes to get the law changed, institute a special police division, the polizia veterinaria. I offered him a donation of seven thousand euros.”
“Is your father in any way involved in the dog-fight business?”
Manuela paused, as if she were listening for a sound from outside. Eventually she said, “He’s involved, but at a very remote level. When he heard I was frequenting antivivisectionists, he asked me to stop because it was upsetting some of the people he does business with.”
“And you said?”
“I said no. He threatened to cut my allowance. I still said no. It was a question of principle.” She crossed her arms and stared defiantly back at the memory.
“The people who were upset, they included the person who ran the business, Alleva?”
“Sure. Alleva, that’s the guy who ran it, had threatened Clemente in the past-or got one of his henchmen to do it. He definitely wasn’t happy to see me with Clemente. It was a bit awkward for me, too.”
“How?”
“You know, being with a man who kept reporting to the police, or the Carabinieri, same difference. And the press. Still, it wasn’t such a big deal.”
“Did your father warn Clemente off?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Would Clemente have told you if he had been warned off?”
“He would have.”
“Could Clemente have told you, and you’re not telling me?”
“My father had nothing to do with Clemente’s murder.”
“Could your father have warned Clemente not to open his mouth to you?”
“My father had nothing to do with Clemente’s murder.”
“Could your father maybe have helped Alleva arrange the killing?”
“My father had nothing to do with Clemente’s murder. And that’s something he wanted me to pass on to you. That’s a message from him.”
“I see. OK, message received. Clemente… You liked him.”
“Yes, I liked him a lot. I really did.”
“He liked you?”
“Yes.”
“He wasn’t ashamed of you?”
“You don’t have to keep insulting me.”
“I’m not interested in whether you feel insulted. I want to know: Did Clemente introduce you to all his friends?”
Manuela bent down to fondle the dog again, allowing some of her orange hair to fall down and obscure her face. “No. He introduced me to no one.”
The doorbell rang.
“Get that, will you?” said Manuela, the wistful tone that Blume had detected evaporating as the chime faded. “It’s got to be those real estate people. Flash your badge at them, make them go away. I’ll fix us a drink.”
Manuela sprang up and disappeared out of the far door leading, he imagined, into the kitchen. With his arm in a sling, it took Blume so long to extricate himself from the yielding cushions of the soft armchair that the doorbell rang again before he got to it. Annoyed, he yanked it open.
An old man with no ears wearing a white linen jacket over a pink T-shirt was standing beside a young man in a half-unzipped tracksuit. He had just begun to register something funny about the old man’s face, when the young man stepped in and shoved the barrel of a small-frame pistol hard against the underside of Blume’s chin.
33
The gunman kept Blume’s head tilted awkwardly back, preventing him from getting a look at him. The older man, who smelled of after-shave, ran his hands expertly across Blume’s stomach and waist, up and down his side, back, and front, then patted him gently as if he was a big baby with wind. Then he hunkered down on a single knee around Blume’s calves, before standing up again, to extract Blume’s wallet and cell phone from his front trouser packet with considerably more ease and speed than Blume himself had ever managed, even when two-handed. Then he gently raised the sling holding Blume’s plastered arm, and slid his hand across the sweaty patch below on Blume’s polo shirt. Blume was fascinated by the man’s earless head.
“Clean,” he said at last.
“I don’t like that,” said his younger partner, releasing some of the pressure on Blume’s chin.
“What?”
“Clean. Don’t say clean. That’s what cops say.”
“Yeah? What do we say, then?”
The young man withdrew his tiny pistol entirely from Blume’s face to gather his thoughts and think about this.
Free to move, Blume turned his eyes to the older man. Where his ears should have been were two crumpled pieces of pink flesh that resembled the @ of an email address. They looked infantile and out of place perched behind his aged face. He wore two thin pendants around his neck, one of which, a golden horn amulet, had slipped out from below his T-shirt. Tufts of hair rose from below the neck.
“The fuck you looking at?” said the young man.
Blume ignored the question.
“I said…”
“Shut up, Fa,” said the older man. His overtanned face fissured into countless lines and wrinkles as he concentrated on a plasticized card in his hand.
“This is your badge?”
/>
“Can’t you read?”
“I can read just fine.”
Blume said, “Because I thought maybe at your age, you’d need reading glasses, though I can see how wearing them might prove difficult.” Blume broke off as the young man, smelling mockery in the air, shoved his pistol back into his face.
The earless one remained calm. He was old. He must have heard them all by now, and if he was still alive in this business at this age, then he must have some self-control. At least Blume hoped so.
“Fa. Get rid of it,” he told his partner.
The young man lowered the weapon again.
“Commissioner Alexsei Blum-eh?”
“More or less.”
He slipped the card back into the wallet.
The young man made the pistol vanish into his velour top. The other handed Blume his wallet and phone back.
Blume took them wordlessly, and glanced behind him. No sign of Manuela. The dog slept on.
“Step out?”
It was phrased as a request, but the young man moved slightly behind Blume. Blume chose to step out the door, and the two followed. Neither of them had a weapon in evidence. Blume thought about making a break for it, and felt the muscles in his legs throb. He imagined hurtling down the stairs, lurching into the banisters with his sprained arm.
The young man pressed the elevator button. All three stepped in.
“I suppose ‘clean’ is all right,” he said as the doors slid shut. “I can’t think of another way of saying it.”
The older man poked Blume in the back.
“You’re really Commissioner Blume?”
“My fame precedes me.”
“You’re not a journalist?”
“No.”
“Good. There’s something I want you to know.”
“Tell me.”
“This isn’t abduction.”
Blume turned around and said, “No?”
The elevator stopped and the doors opened. A woman with a small boy and some shopping bags was waiting to get in. Blume went to help her, then remembered his arm. The youth pushed past them, then stood outside the elevator. He reminded Blume of a pouting footballer who played for Juventus. Almost good-looking, except for the mouth.
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