The Fatal Touch

by Conor Fitzgerald

  After the call, Blume wandered around the offices, greeting the few people that were around, then decided he would be more productive at home. He chose three files on personnel management that he was supposed to comment on, and dropped them into his bag, knowing in his heart of hearts that they would stay there until he carried them back the following day. As he was about to leave his office, someone knocked on the door. He opened it himself, and was surprised to see Caterina standing there.

  She came into his office and stood in the middle of the room, a little awkward all over again.

  “Are you on duty today?” he asked.

  “Yes. Half day.”

  “Ah.”

  “I wanted to ask you something about the case.”

  “Right. Actually, Caterina, the Treacy investigation is not a priority now. We have this new hit-and-run killing to handle first. Krishnamachari is the name of the victim. And his son. Attempted murder also of daughter. It shouldn’t take long since there’s no investigative work to speak of. Just liaising with the investigating magistrate, plea-bargaining with lawyers, running a check on phone records, alibis, trying to get others to come forward. We’ll have to run this by the DIA, too, since extortion is automatically Mafia-related. But try not to mention the Treacy thing in front of people for now.”

  “I was mentioning it in front of you, not ‘people,’ ” she said.

  He noticed her face was pale, and her eyes so hollow and shadowed from tiredness that it looked like she had bruises. “Are you OK?”

  Caterina went across the room and sat down heavily on a broken armchair that Blume had relegated to the corner. “I’m exhausted,” she said. “I was reading the notebooks, and I have been thinking about Manuela and Pistoia. I want to ask you a favor. I was thinking of going to Pistoia tomorrow morning. Early. Just to settle this thing in my mind.”

  “No,” said Blume. “We are permanently understaffed, we have the Krishnamachari case, the muggings, and Grattapaglia is going to be suspended. You should know better than to ask for special favors.”

  “I have the first half of the day off tomorrow.”

  “Lucky you. You don’t want to waste it, then. Spend it with Elia. Look, I’ll make a few calls. We’ll work out this mystery about Manuela’s tax code.”

  “If you’re going to make some calls, I’d prefer you got in contact with our colleagues in Pistoia to let them know I’m coming. No overtime claims, of course. I’ll even pay the train ticket.”

  “No, keep the receipt. We’ll find a way of reimbursing the cost even if . . . Well, we would if you were going, but you’re not.”

  “I know you didn’t read up on my background thoroughly, but did you at least read about my biggest success in Immigration Affairs three years ago?”

  “The bust of the Croatian human-trafficking ring?” said Blume. “That was good police work. Good teamwork. Of course I read about it.”

  “Let me tell you how it started,” said Caterina. “A team had been watching an apartment, not far from where I live, as it happened, hoping to establish a link between two Croats who lived there and an Albanian arms smuggler, but no contact was made. After three days, they were winding down the surveillance of the house as yielding no hard evidence. We had resigned ourselves to relying on phone interceptions, but they kept switching numbers and the magistrate was tired of issuing decrees to allow us to tap new SIM cards. I was off duty, a few streets from the apartment block they had been watching, on my way to pick up Elia. My eye was drawn to a silver-gray BMW. I can’t remember the model, but it had that new look to it, the sort of patina that makes some people want to score it with a key.

  “As I passed, I noticed, almost without looking, that the license plate at the back was slightly bent and covered in dead insects, and I walked on a few steps, but I had this feeling, like when something has been moved from where you put it. No, that’s not right. It’s more like a tiny shock of recognition, except you don’t know what you’ve recognized.”

  “I know the feeling,” said Blume.

  “The dirty license plate, slightly bent at the edges, did not belong on a polished BMW. I’m sure you and many others would have spotted it immediately, but for me it was a revelation. A revelation that I might be suited to the job, that I had not fallen victim to the sort of stupidity that comes with hating your work. It was a good feeling. The plate was a DX registration, which corresponded with the age of the car more or less, but I went over and had a look. The edges of the plate were very slightly crumpled inwards, like dog-ears on a book. It’s the sort of damage that small bumps, parking, and so on leave on your front license plate, but not on the back. Also, there was no corresponding damage to the bodywork. It looked like an old front license plate had been put on the back. I called in the number then and there. It turns out the plate was registered to a different vehicle belonging to someone in Turin, and that a replacement request, accompanied by a module reporting the theft of the originals, had just been made to the vehicle licensing authority. The surveillance team was there in half an hour, and, well, it was the Albanian. He was visiting the Croats just after the surveillance had been called off. It was the beginning of the takedown of the gang.”

  Blume nodded. “I get it. You’ve got some sort of similar feeling about Manuela and her identity and that tax code.”

  “I know it sounds silly . . .”

  “No. You’re dead right. It is what we do. The thing is . . .” He made a fist of his hand and knocked it slowly and repeatedly against his chin. “Let me think . . . You’re off duty tomorrow morning, so it’s not like . . . Look, don’t bother mentioning your trip to people here. Just keep the whole notebook thing quiet for a few days, or until we have a bit more breathing space.”

  “Which means never.”

  “I don’t want them to think I’m wasting personnel, and I’ve sort of been told not to pursue the Treacy investigation. But you are right to want to follow an instinct. I’ll do as you ask. I’ll call ahead to Pistoia. When shall I say you’ll be there?”

  “8:15 tomorrow morning. There’s a train leaves Termini at 5:45.”

  “You’ve already checked the timetables, I see.”

  “Yes,” said Caterina. She pulled out a printout from her bag. “Actually, I’ve already bought the ticket.”

  Chapter 18

  After phoning pistoia and telling them about Caterina’s imminent arrival and being assured she would receive every courtesy, Blume returned home where he spent the next few hours reading Treacy’s third volume, which evidently formed part of a textbook for artists that he was planning to write. Blume found it technical and rather dull, and was pleased to be able to set it aside as irrelevant. Taking notes, he worked his way through the first volume again until dinner. Then he boiled rice, oversalting the water, added oil and parmesan, and ate directly from the pot, as he began rereading the second volume.

  Night stole up on him, and he realized he had been enjoying the work more than he had expected. He particularly enjoyed its potential for discomfiting the Colonel, John Nightingale and, he had to admit it, Kristin, Greg, and the rest of them at the embassy. Not that she or anyone there had any reason to worry about Treacy’s ancient memories, but her job was to anticipate this sort of stuff, to brief and forewarn and minimize the possibility that some journalist might someday ask an official an unexpected question. Fat chance. Investigative journalism had been dead for more than a decade. But giving Kristin the notebooks or even just some details of what was in them was a favor he could do for her, and he liked to be in a position to do her favors.

  Before bed, he put Treacy’s memoirs in the study, filling the small space left by the three empty notebooks he had given to Greg.

  The Monday morning meeting on the Krishnamachari killing was at 10 o’clock in the conference room with its horseshoe-shaped arrangement of desks. When he arrived, there were already eight people in the room, including the magistrate assigned to the case. Blume chose a place in the midst of
the ranks, a demotic touch that unsettled some of his superiors, yet failed to connect him to his men. He knew it wasn’t working, but he had decided that the principle was sound, and so he stayed there, making the people around him uncomfortable. What he needed was someone like Paoloni to tell him to fuck off back to the top of the table where he belonged.

  The meeting began. Inspector Rosario Panebianco stood up, touched his lips to indicate he wanted less noise before speaking. “It was not a hit-and-run accident. It was deliberate,” he began. “The victim is . . . let me see how you say this name . . . Krishnamachari, an Indian national, had a store in a district where there is no real Indian community to turn to. An isolated place just off Via Pamphili on a dirty little street called Via Busiri Vici. He was on his own there all day. An easy target. He had two children to support. He came under pressure to pay a pizzo of ten percent of turnover, and reported it. This was last year.”

  Panebianco sat down and nodded at Investigating Magistrate Gestri.

  Gestri wore the tense grimace of a man who was traveling fast on a motorbike toward some important fate. His hair was swept back, his chin pointed forward, his cheekbones high, the tendons on his neck stretched forward. He remained seated, one hand gripping the edge of the table.

  “We have the files here,” he said. He pointed to a short stack of file folders held together by red tape on the table. He clenched a yellow pencil in his teeth, took it out, and examined the bite marks. “Get them. That’s essentially my only instruction here. This is a crystal clear, linear exercise. It requires almost no investigative work. I shall concentrate my energy on shattering the understanding between the culprits and those who allowed them to operate.”

  Gestri released the edge of the table, cracked his knuckles, glared at the papers like he wanted to set them on fire with his eyes, and said, “The extortionists are a repeat offender called Leo Leporelli and his monkey, Giacomo Scariglia. They went back to Krishnamachari, and kept going back, and Krishnamachari kept reporting them to us.”

  Panebianco stood up again. “Here we have the usual stuff,” he said. “They superglued his locks, spray-painted the front, exploded three or four carton bombs at night, smashed the windows, followed Krishnamachari home, followed his wife. This wife has to go to a factory in Pomezia and uses the buses from EUR to get there. So Krishnamachari accompanies his two children on foot to school every morning, picks them up again in the afternoon. Sarjan is eight and Sabina five. This afternoon after school, they’re crossing the road at the traffic lights just outside the school, daughter on one side, son on the other, a Pathfinder doing about 55 runs the light, plows into the three of them, continues on its way without slowing. Hundreds of people about, nobody got its registration. But we know who it was. We know this because one of Leporelli’s friends reported his Pathfinder stolen a few days before.”

  “Like they wanted to taunt us,” said Rospo from behind Blume.

  Blume felt he had been among his men for long enough, and left his seat. He walked over to the table beside Panebianco, and addressed the room. “I don’t think it is because they wanted to taunt us, I think it’s because, like most criminals, they are morons. They probably think reporting a vehicle stolen covers them.”

  Panebianco slipped a report over the desk and Blume glanced at it. “Inspector Panebianco and Deputy Inspector La Magra arrived on the scene around thirty-five minutes after the incident.” He looked at Panebianco. “Anything to add, Rosario?”

  “Well, the son died on the road, twenty meters away from his father. He was still alive on the street when we got there. This is because the ambulance took a long time coming, then the crew spent some time trying to immobilize him, and then, in the end, trying to resuscitate him. He was alive and speaking. Usually the shock stops that, but not this time.”

  “What about the girl?”

  “The daughter’s critical. The hospital says she could suffer brain damage, but it’s too early to say. They operated last night to relieve the pressure on the skull, but I don’t know how it went.”

  Blume asked, “Is that it?”

  “Yes,” said Panebianco. “I can’t think of anything else—regarding the scene.”

  “La Magra?”

  The Deputy Inspector stood up. The year before La Magra had got married, and invited the whole department to the wedding. Blume happily contributed to the gift. Unsure about what the invitation was supposed to mean, he asked around the office. There was a lot of eye-rolling and shrugging, and muttering about not even knowing the guy. It seemed clear that no one was going, so Blume made a weak excuse and opted out. It was not until about a month later that he realized he was the only person in the department who had not been there. Since then, La Magra had started referring everything through others so as not to deal directly with Blume. He was doing it again now, his gaze fixed steadily on the magistrate who was squinting intensely ahead. But as he listened to the young man, Blume felt the words were intended for him.

  “Yeah, well . . . I saw nothing . . . Nothing useful for the investigation. There weren’t even skid marks to measure. The bastards didn’t brake, they accelerated.” He paused, and his gaze flickered toward Blume, who nodded encouragingly. He liked the young man, and kept meaning to congratulate him on getting married.

  “A bit later,” continued La Magra, “when the medics had given up and put sheets over the two bodies, the mortuary men went in with the body bags.” He stopped as if to check that Blume was following the description in his mind’s eye. “So, one of the medics goes over to retrieve the sheets from the bodies. He takes the sheet off the father, whose arms are stretched out so wide, one hand had been visible all the time. He pulls at the sheet, takes two corners, and one of the mortuary men comes over to help. He takes the opposite two corners of the sheet and, together, they fold it up. Then the medic goes over to the child, and he picks up the sheet covering him, gives it a quick shake, and snaps it likes this”: La Magra mimed the action. “Then he folds it, tucks it under his arm.”

  La Magra attended to an itching above his eyebrow and shifted his gaze to a space behind Blume’s right shoulder. “You see? That second sheet covering him, all it needed was one single fold.”

  Blume took out a pen and opened his notebook. He did not need to write anything, but La Magra needed a space in which to recompose himself without Blume scrutinizing his face.

  “We know it was these guys?” said Blume, pen poised over the page. He glanced up to see Panebianco nod. “Right. Then we’ll get the bastards. Like the magistrate said, we don’t need too many detectives. You, me, Grattapaglia until . . . well, when Grattapaglia takes some leave of absence, maybe Inspector Mattiola can take his place.”

  When the meeting was over, Gestri reached over and tapped Blume on the arm.

  “Can I have a word? In private?”

  “Sure,” said Blume. He clapped his hands loudly. “Come on, clear the room. I need to talk to Magistrate Gestri alone in here. Come on, come on!”

  When the room was empty, he nodded to the magistrate. “OK, so what is it?”

  “That wasn’t exactly subtle.”

  “You mean you don’t want anyone to know you’re having a private word with me? You should have said.”

  “No, no. I suppose it’s fine like this. I wanted to talk about tactics and explore the possibility of a shortcut. These two extortionists operated with the express consent of a Camorra gang in Ostia. They paid a fee. The gang won’t be happy with what’s happened, and to make it even less happy, I’m going after their commercial interests, or I’m going to make a big show of it. Can we put out the word that as soon as we have these two the pressure stops? Speed things up a bit. I’ve been asked to deal with this as fast as possible.”

  “Sounds like a good plan,” said Blume. “But they could turn up dead.”

  “I don’t prosecute corpses, so alive is best.”

  “OK. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Do you know someone who can
get a message through to the Ostia gang? Preferably through unofficial channels.”

  “Yes,” said Blume. “I do know somebody who’s rather good at that sort of thing.”

  Blume headed back to his office, telling Panebianco to send Rospo in.

  Ten minutes later, Rospo arrived, a fug of cigarette smoke coming off him.

  “Have you finished your report on the mugging of the Chinese couple?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I need to talk with Agente Di Ricci, who was on duty with me. He’s nowhere to be found right now.”

  “Just do it. With or without Di Ricci. Meanwhile, I want you to find out if the preliminary autopsy report on Henry Treacy is ready, and if so, go get it. They won’t send you a copy. You’ll have to tap your vast reserves of charm.”

  The forehead creased in annoyance. “Which do I do first?”

  Blume’s phone began to buzz in his pocket. “Both,” he said. “Now get out of here. I’ve got a call.”

  “Surely Largo Argentina is a handy lunch venue for you? A four-minute walk, and that’s at my pace.”

  It was the Colonel. Blume drummed his fingers on the desk, and thought.

  “I’ll have Treacy’s autopsy report with me by then,” said the Colonel.

  “I can see that whenever I want.”

  “True. But we have other arrangements to discuss. An autopsy report will make a difference.”

  Blume agreed to meet in two hours’ time. He spent the next hour catching up on paperwork. He read a report on human resource efficiency mapping, and felt pleased to have got that done. A minute later, he realized he had not taken in a single word.

  Shortly after midday, Panebianco knocked, entered, and told him Inspector Mattiola wanted to see him.

  “Tell her to come straight in. She should always come straight in, damn it,” said Blume.

  Panebianco gave him a funny look and left, leaving the door open. Caterina came in and closed it behind her.