THE DOGS of ROME

by Conor Fitzgerald

  “We could do both,” said Gallone. “Just to be sure.”

  Gallone, getting back into his old habits, assigned Paoloni the task of setting up the stake out for the following morning. This was not what Paoloni did best, but Blume wasn’t going to waste his breath.

  As the meeting was breaking up, Ferrucci suddenly announced, “I’ve got a DVD of Di Tivoli’s documentary for RAI. I forgot to say. I picked it up at Viale Mazzini on my way back.”

  Blume looked over. Ferrucci held a DVD in his hand. The RAI butterfly–talking heads symbol was printed on the cover.

  “What time is it?”

  “Just gone eight,” said Ferrucci.

  “OK, let’s watch it,” he said.

  “Not everyone, Commissioner. That’s hardly necessary or efficient,” said Gallone. “I suggest you pick one of your men to watch it with you.”

  Blume massaged his temples. “I wasn’t going to—never mind.”

  “I’ll watch it with you,” said Ferrucci.

  “I’ll get the popcorn,” said Zambotto.

  Paoloni left the room and returned wheeling the wire rack with the DVD player and TV on it. Ferrucci put in the disc, turned on the TV, and sat down next to Blume. Zambotto and Paoloni had gone.

  The documentary was pretty much as Ferrucci had said. Plenty of mid range shots of Di Tivoli himself in profile, his chin pointed slightly upward as if he were gazing ahead into an uncertain future.

  The dog fights were filmed with a hidden camera, and there was a lot of wobble and confusion and sometimes too much darkness for it to be clear what was going on. The sound editors had overdubbed some of the fights with a frantic dance track.

  Go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go! went the track, and Blume leaned forward with enthusiasm. Two pitbulls circled, then tore into each other, head to head, and the track burst into a manically repetitive refrain.

  Blume found himself marking out the beat with his feet. He felt like punching the air and saying, “Fuck yeah!” Now that’s what dogs are for.

  Later, to make up for it, the sound editors spliced in a few shots of bloodied, staggering, and dying dogs, and played Fauré’s Requiem.

  Clemente was interviewed. He appeared sitting in the office Blume had been in early that morning. He used a lot of statistics, possibly to keep calm, because when he started talking about the way dogs were trained, he seemed to be struggling to stay in his seat. He seemed like an earnest type, dressed too young for his age. He did not resemble the corpse Blume had seen, but live people never looked like their dead selves.

  The Carabinieri raid was well filmed. The reporters had set up a long-range camera at the end of the field that could pan across the whole scene as the Jeeps came roaring up to the warehouse. A large skinhead bouncer seemed about to put up some resistance as the Carabinieri stormed the door he was standing beside, but knelt down with his hands behind his head when a shotgun was pointed at him.

  “Stop the tape,” said Blume.

  “It’s a DVD,” said Ferrucci, but stopped it.

  “Can you go back a bit to that guy kneeling?”

  It took Ferrucci a few attempts to get a picture frame that had some readable detail in it, and even then it was hard to make out faces.

  “That there must be Massoni, Alleva’s enforcer,” said Blume, pulling out a file folder from his bag. “You leave these folders on my desk?”

  Ferrucci nodded.

  Blume opened the profile of Massoni. There were two sets of police pictures. One, in color, from five years before, the other in black-and-white from eight years ago. He chose the black-and-white one.

  “They should never have started using color,” he said, holding the photo in front of him, then comparing it to the picture on the screen. “It overwhelms all the essential details.” He handed the photo to Ferrucci, “What do you think, is it him?”

  Ferrucci looked hard at the photo, then at the screen, and said, “I have no idea.”

  “Yeah, it’s impossible, isn’t it? And this is with real cameras, not your usual CCTV.” Blume studied the screen image carefully. “Let’s just say that this could be the same person. Right, let’s get back to the film.”

  They had sent in two cameramen with the Carabinieri, as well as an extremely righteous Di Tivoli, who came running up to the people as they were manhandled by the Carabinieri, and hurled questions at them. They hurled back abuse that was bleeped out. Worst of all, their faces were pixelated.

  “I didn’t think to ask for the master tape or whatever it is,” said Ferrucci apologetically.

  “Doesn’t matter. We’ve got the names of the people, anyhow. We can gaze at their faces anytime we want.”

  More Carabinieri in white overalls were shown bending over mutilated animals, trying to gain control of an enraged taupe beast using two control poles with restraining loops.

  “That’s a Tosa Inu,” said Ferrucci.

  “Ugly beast,” said Blume, watching the slavering black mouth trying to snap the restraining pole.

  “No, they’re nice dogs, really,” said Ferrucci. “We need to go and rescue them. Or send someone there. I’ll deal with it, if you want.”

  Blume glanced over to see if Ferrucci was trying to be funny, but he seemed to be intent on the scene in front of them.

  A sudden whoosh of wet air slammed open a window, and Ferrucci paused the documentary again as Blume went over to close it. As he arrived at the window, a flash of white lightning seemed to envelop the whole building, and left him with a taste of aluminum in his throat. The thunderclap that followed shook the building, and then the rain came crashing down. Ferrucci joined him at the window. There was no point in trying to watch the DVD as long as the storm was directly overhead.

  Looking ahead to his date, Blume began to worry that Kristin wouldn’t turn up in this weather. But after a few minutes, the storm moved away, toward the Castelli Romani. The lightning flashes now had a yellowish tinge, and the thunder rolled as well as crashed. After eight minutes, the rain began to ease, and they returned to their chairs in front of the TV.

  Now the screen showed Di Tivoli back in the studio. He talked a bit about the organizer being known to the authorities, but did not mention Alleva by name or show any picture.

  The reporters were waiting for some of the detainees as they came out of the Carabinieri station to which they had been brought. More obscenities, but three did agree to be interviewed. Again, their features were obscured, though not their voices. One, who sounded drunk, defended dog fighting as the same as greyhound racing. Another was defiant and spoke of the free market and the right to free speech. A younger voice that seemed to come from a throat filled with mucus drew historical parallels with bear-baiting, then laughed and said sure, when the reporter asked him if he thought bear-baiting could be defended. Cut to Di Tivoli, trembling with barely suppressed rage, pretending he had just heard the interviews at the same time as the viewer. Di Tivoli then summed it up with hints of political complicity and the need for further acts of courage by the media. Clemente had got about thirty seconds.

  Blume wondered if he had time to interview the third name on the list,

  Pernazzo, before his meeting with Kristin. Probably not. He should not have tried to get a date in the middle of an investigation.

  “Someone had to watch it, I suppose,” he told Ferrucci. “I’m going to interview that third person on the list, Angelo Pernazzo.”

  Ferrucci ejected the disc without replying. His jaw seemed to be quivering, but whether it was a trick of the thunderstorm light, Blume could not tell.

  20

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 28, 8:50 P.M.

  AT THIS TIME of the evening on a Saturday, Via di Bravetta was clogged with cars full of people from Corviale determined to celebrate Saturday night anywhere that was not Corviale. The house in front of him was done in yellow stucco that looked like dried vomit, but behind him a stretch of undeveloped fields still glittering from the rain an hour before rolled down t
o the Portuense area and gave the illusion of grassy slopes stretching all the way to the mountains behind. Blume pressed the intercom button next to the name Pernazzo.

  “Pernazzo?”

  “Yes?”

  “Angelo Pernazzo?”

  “Yes. What do you want?”

  “Police.”

  The pause that followed was long enough to make Blume press the intercom button again.

  “I’m still here, fuck it,” said the voice.

  “Did you hear me? I said police.”

  “OK.”

  The buzzer sounded, and the lock to the front door clicked open. Blume held it open with his foot and pressed the buzzer for a third time.

  “What!”

  “Which floor?”

  “Third.”

  “OK. On my way.”

  Blume took the elevator and stepped out onto a narrow landing with three chocolate-brown doors, each of which had a brass plaque showing two different surnames. The plaque on the middle door looked new. The first name was T. Vercetti and the second F. Pernazzo. Below the doorbell was a paper tag covered in adhesive tape. This displayed only the name A. Pernazzo. Blume hooked his fingernail under the tag and eased it back to see what name had been there originally. S. Pernazzo. He flattened the new tag back into place and rang the bell.

  Blume thought he must look tired, but the person who opened the door was evidently in a worse state. He looked as if he had been dipped in nicotine, then rolled in clay. His small nose twitched slightly. It was slightly upturned, a bit pink, the sort that plastic surgeons put on so many women.

  He jerked the door open, then retreated into his apartment, leaving the door ajar.

  “Permesso?” said Blume, and taking the sullen silence as permission, walked over the threshold. Angelo Pernazzo was waiting for him in the middle of the hallway, in a slightly crouched position as if ready to leap.

  Blume tensed for a brief moment, ready to parry, but Pernazzo turned around and entered the last door on the left.

  Blume followed Pernazzo down a short corridor, past a kitchen in which he glimpsed a table covered with a plastic cloth, on which sat an open tin of butter beans, a glistening fork, a torn piece of bread smeared with something brown. He walked into a small living room. The marble composite floor was so sticky that it snatched at the soles of his shoes so that each step was accompanied by a short clack of release as his feet broke free.

  The shutters were down, closing off the remaining few minutes of evening light. The main source of illumination in the room was a large computer screen in the corner. The picture on the screen showed a detailed fantasy landscape as seen from above. Blume was fascinated by the level of detail. There seemed to be hundreds of characters doing battle below.

  Pernazzo pointed at the screen, revealing a woman’s silver bracelet on his arm. He indicated the level he had reached and asked, “You into World of Warcraft?”

  “Me? No,” said Blume. “I’m an adult.”

  He moved away from the computer and sat on a chesterfield sofa that smelled of yeast and dust. A Mars Bar wrapper lay on the floor at his feet.

  Pernazzo picked up a pair of balled-up mauve socks from the floor.

  Blume could smell them from where he sat. Pernazzo bent down and put them on, then straightened up and asked, “What’s this about?”

  “You were detained at an illegal dog fight. Remember?” said Blume.

  “That? Is that what this is about?”

  “Why? Is there something else it should be about?”

  “No. It’s just it was a while ago, you know. And it was the Carabinieri, not the police.” Pernazzo licked chapped lips.

  Blume settled into the brown velvet chesterfield. He thought he could smell fish from his left. He brought his hand up to his nose to block the smell, then turned his gesture into a yawn, which became real.

  “You are tired,” said Pernazzo settling into a plastic-covered club chair opposite Blume. “I never am.”

  “No?”

  “If you sleep, you lose,” said Pernazzo. “I follow the Uberman sleep schedule. It maximizes my REM sleep and minimizes non-REM sleep, which is just a waste of time.”

  “I see,” said Blume, and yawned again.

  “What you have to do is take six twenty-minute hyper-sleeps, every four hours. When you close your eyes, you go straight into REM, skipping four unnecessary phases. It’s called polyphasic sleeping.”

  “And you do this?”

  “Yeah, it’s raised my productivity.”

  Foul air seemed to be seeping up from inside the brown cushions. Blume leaned forward. A gray Champion backpack sat beside Pernazzo’s computer desk.

  “You work in computers,” said Blume.

  “I write scripts for Web sites. Some of the companies I work for are big names, but I am paid fuck all, and the work’s never regular. No stable income. You think that’s fair?”

  Blume had no opinions on the matter.

  “Nobody pays for quality, either. I do quality work. High intelligence doesn’t pay.”

  “Depends on your unit of measurement,” said Blume.

  “Euros,” said Pernazzo. “I did day trading for a while. Naturally, I was good at it, but you can’t do much with the Italian stock market. The MIBTEL gained, what, five percent over the year? In the same period, the Dow Jones Industrial was up twenty-three percent.”

  “You lost money?”

  “Of course I did. You can’t make money in this fucked-up country.”

  “So you started gambling.”

  “I have always gambled, as you put it. Usually I win.”

  Pernazzo seemed to have sunk down into the chair so that its arms were higher than his.

  “So you’re a winner. Tell me, is this house yours?”

  “Of course it is.”

  “Did you buy it?”

  “No. It used to be my mother’s. She died a few months ago.”

  Blume ignored the opportunity to express his condolences. “And your father?”

  “He abandoned my mother before I was born. Makes me a bastard.”

  “I see. Your mother’s name was?”

  “What? You don’t believe I had a mother? Her name was Serena.”

  “Serena Pernazzo. You took her surname,” said Blume.

  “Yes. This was her house. Now it’s mine because she’s dead.”

  “What did she die of?”

  “Old age.”

  “Is that what is says on the death certificate?”

  “The death certificate says she died of heart failure.”

  “Where did she die?”

  “In her room.”

  “In this house? Mind if I take a look?”

  Pernazzo sprang out of his chair. “Of course I mind. What’s this got to do with dog fighting? Have you got a search warrant?”

  “No. Do you think I need one?”

  Pernazzo went over to his computer, moved the gray backpack toward the wall, and started shutting down programs, turning his back on Blume.

  “If you’re not going to ask me any more questions about the dog fight, then I have no reason to speak to you.”

  “You’re very nervous.”

  “That’s your fault.”

  “So, have you given up on illegal dog fighting?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re only saying that because I used the word illegal. Have you thought about looking for help for your gambling problem?”

  “I don’t have a gambling problem. I usually win.”

  “So you have plenty of money?”

  “Enough.”

  “But not enough to afford you own house until your mother died.”

  “That’s because I only play small amounts.” Pernazzo’s voice went up. “I am not a dupe. I read systems. I studied form for horses, but there are many other factors, which I couldn’t know about. Dog races have better odds. Ask anyone. Anyhow, it’s all fixed.”

  “So why play if it’s fixed?”

/>   Pernazzo looked at Blume as if he were an idiot. “Because if you learn how they’re fixing it, then you bet the same way.”

  “That’s what you did?”

  “For a while, but then they notice, and you have to stop. Those Neapolitans that run the greyhound races in Valle Aurelia, they don’t like people winning.”

  “So you moved from greyhounds to illegal dog fights,” said Blume. “Doesn’t look to me like you’re much good at any of this.”

  “That’s because you know nothing about it!” Pernazzo writhed with frustration in his chair at Blume’s stupidity. “I study tactics. I was learning Alleva’s system. It was just a question of time.”

  “Ah, so you know Alleva. What about his helper and enforcer, Massoni? Ever heard of him?”

  “I might know the name,” Pernazzo said to the screen.

  “Angelo, turn around. It’s rude to talk to people like that. Did your mother teach you nothing?”

  Pernazzo twisted around in his seat.

  “It looks to me like you could do with more REM sleep,” said Blume.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Your eyes are moving rapidly now,” said Blume. “Did you owe Alleva money?”

  “I did once,” said Pernazzo. “But I paid him.”

  “Just once. Where did you pay him?”

  “Not him. That guy you mentioned. I can’t remember his name.”

  Blume looked at Pernazzo’s feet. They were both pointed directly toward the door. A fat yellow toenail protruded through a hole in one of his socks.

  “Massoni.”

  “Yes, him,” said Pernazzo “Did Massoni come here?”

  “I think so. Yes.”

  “When?”

  “A year ago. I can’t remember.”

  “Was your mother alive then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wasn’t she alarmed?”

  “She never even saw him. I deal with my own shit.”

  “Earlier on I was talking to a man called Dandini. Do you know him?”

  “No.” Pernazzo shook his head.

  “He is troubled by his gambling. I think you should be, too.”

  “Well I’m not.”

  “OK. What’s in that bag?”

  “What bag?”