THE DOGS of ROME

by Conor Fitzgerald

  “I saw credit cards on the kitchen counter in there. Are they clones or original copies?”

  “Neither. They’re legitimate.”

  “OK. Give me the name and the numbers of your main account in Argentina. Don’t say you don’t have one. Do you have something to write on?”

  “I don’t need to. Banco Galicia e de Janeiro,” he said. “My account name and the codes are on the inside page of that book on mushrooms.” He waved his finger weakly toward the back of the room.

  Pernazzo walked over to the one shelf in the room, pulled out a tall book with damp, powdery pages. He opened to the first page and looked at what he saw written there.

  “If I check these numbers now, find they’re no good . . .”

  “They’re good,” said Alleva.

  “It all ends here, as far as I can see,” said Pernazzo looking through the numbers and nodding in approval, as if he could already see they would work. “I’ve just had one hell of a time these last few days. Maybe I’ll leave the country, go to Argentina instead of you. I see my life as a vast prairie under a rolling sky. I feel good. So what’s it to be?”

  “What’s what to be?”

  “The manner of your death, Renato. How do you want to die?” Pernazzo reached behind and pulled out Massoni’s P220.

  “I don’t want to die,” said Alleva, his voice low.

  Pernazzo transferred the P220 to his right hand, the Glock to his left, then pushed it into his waistband.

  “I’m sure I won’t want to either when my time comes,” said Pernazzo. “But I’m giving you a choice. A head shot like I gave Massoni, or . . . I don’t know . . . a shot through the heart? But if you want, we could fight to the death, just you and me. Single combat.”

  Alleva began to say something.

  “But you have so much more experience than me. Just to make it even fair, I’d have to incapacitate you further. A bullet into each kneecap, ankles, elbows, too. And that would just make it fair. But then I’d have to do more to make sure I win.”

  “What sort of a choice is that?”

  “I’m giving you a chance to fight and be aware of life and its light in the final moments. I think I’d like that myself.”

  “Want to swap places?”

  “Sorry, that’s against the rules,” grinned Pernazzo.

  “You said you’d make sure I couldn’t win,” Alleva’s voice became clearer as it rose in anger.

  Pernazzo said, “That’s right. I’ll give you a chance to fight, not a fighting chance.”

  “That’s no choice at all,” said Alleva.

  “Of course it is. You can’t win against death anyhow. I’m giving you the choice. In some ways you’re luckier than most.”

  “I don’t feel very lucky.”

  “I can appreciate that. But time to decide.”

  “I don’t want to decide.”

  “What have you decided?”

  “I haven’t,” said Alleva. “Don’t do it. Please.”

  “I am going to do it, you know that. You’re not allowed special favors.”

  “Wait,” said Alleva, his eyes fixed on the black hole of the barrel. “I haven’t decided.”

  “Trust me on this.”

  Pernazzo took the P220 in both hands, working his thumbs up and down both sides of the grip trying to find and disengage the safety.

  “No! I do. I would prefer to fight. I’ve made my choice.”

  “It has just occurred to me that a fight would complicate the crime scene I am about to build. I should have thought of that before. My bad.”

  He gave up looking for the safety, and started to pull the trigger, hoping it would turn out to be a two-stage pull like his own Glock. But the trigger seemed specially made for Massoni’s heavy fingers, and he had to squeeze really hard so that when the round exploded with a harsh crack, the whole weapon bounced upward toward the ceiling. He cursed and yanked the weapon down from the air, ready to fire properly, but Alleva had gone. Pernazzo looked in surprise at the empty space, then realized that he had just heard Alleva make a sound like an owl and a gentle thud as he fell backward from his chair.

  Alleva lay on the floor, arms thrown back, which was not what Pernazzo wanted. He had envisaged Alleva and Massoni lolling dead in their chairs on either side of the same table. But this would do.

  Working slowly and methodically, he wiped down the Glock on his T-shirt and fitted it into Alleva’s hands. He took hold of Alleva’s floppy right arm, then, like an instructor with a pupil, held his hand and squeezed off another shot in Massoni’s direction. Good. Then he gave Massoni back his P220, aimed at where Alleva had been sitting and began to pull Massoni’s fat dead finger on the trigger. This time, however, the movement was smooth and fast, and the weapon fired immediately, making him jump. He preferred his Glock, and was sorry to leave it in Alleva’s hand.

  Pernazzo then removed every book, magazine, and piece of paper in the house, and placed them in the van; the passports, embosser, mushroom book, and Alleva’s laptop went into the rucksack. He flicked through one or two books before picking them up, but found nothing. He went into the bedroom, closed the floor safe, twirled the dial, wiped it with a bed sheet.

  And now Pernazzo needed a nap. There was one armchair in the room, upholstered in synthetic orange with black ridging. He set his digital watch, leaned back into the slightly damp material, and slept.

  When his beeping watch woke him up twenty minutes later, he went to drink the plastic bottle of water he had given Massoni, but it had turned warm. He stepped into the kitchenette and turned on the faucet and drank.

  Then he left, double-checking he had pulled the front door closed.

  45

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 8:15 P.M.

  WHAT SEEMED TO be bothering Paoloni most were the flies.

  “The flies, maggots, the heat, the smell. You have no idea.” Paoloni paused, then hammered out the syllables as if to a simpleton to get his point across. “You. Have. No. Fucking. Idea.”

  Alleva was dead, Massoni was dead, and Blume could hear exhilaration in Paoloni’s tone. Revenge and reprieve all at once.

  “Have you called the forensic team?”

  “Sure.”

  “How long have the bodies been there?” asked Blume.

  “I don’t know. I’m not a medical examiner, thank Christ. With this heat. Maybe four, five days, a week.”

  “Wait, I’m putting you on hands-free.” Paoloni had no right to feel exonerated, but Blume still felt it fair to warn him: “Prosecutor Principe is here with me.”

  Blume set his telephone on the desk and pressed the loudspeaker. “. . . appreciate it,” Paoloni was saying.

  “This is Prosecuting Magistrate Filippo Principe. Have you made a positive identification?”

  “Yes, Giudice,” said Paoloni. “Alleva and Massoni. Not so as you’d recognize them, but they had their wallets.”

  “What killed them?”

  “It looks like gunshots. Both have gunshot wounds to the head. I didn’t notice wounds anywhere else on the body.” Paoloni paused. “They may have shot each other. That’s what it’s supposed to look like. Each has a pistol in his hand.”

  “But you don’t think they shot each other?”

  “No, I don’t. The forensic pathologists will say for sure.”

  “What’s wrong with the scene?” asked Principe.

  “Two people killing each other at exactly the same time with head-shots? Two simultaneous lethal shots? They pulled their triggers at exactly the same moment? I don’t think so.”

  Principe nodded at Blume, who nodded back as if to say, yes, Paoloni was a good investigator.

  “What else?” asked Principe.

  “One cadaver—Alleva—has this cute little baby belt holster, but the gun in his hand, a Glock, is too big for it. The place is cleaned out. There’s nothing here, like someone else lifted it all. Also, one of the casings was in the wrong place in the room. I saw two near the table, which is fine
, but Zambotto found one near the wall. It could have bounced or something, but it’s a strange place for it to end up. The number of shots fired seems wrong, too. You’d need to be here to see. By the way, there’s a bedroom with a closed floor safe. Maybe there’s something there. But we had to get out so as not to contaminate the scene.”

  Blume asked him what sort of place he was in, whether there were neighbors.

  “The last house we passed on the way was about three kilometers away, though maybe there’s another house on the other side. But the place is isolated. You can’t see it from the road. Also, a car is sitting in the driveway. A big Beamer. Model X5. Nice car. We haven’t looked inside, thought we’d leave that to the technicians.”

  “Good,” said Blume. “Any signs of other cars, other traffic having been there?”

  “You mean tracks on the ground and stuff? The forensics are arriving, along with patrol cars. Looks like it’s about to get very busy. Carabinieri, too, from the looks of it.”

  Principe said, “Inspector Paoloni, if the killer wanted it to look like a suicide or reciprocal killing, let’s make sure we are seen to be thinking along those lines. Make sure no one mentions the possibility of a third person.”

  “Vicequestore Gallone might,” said Paoloni.

  “You’ll have to stop him,” said Principe. “I’ll talk to him myself later.”

  “OK.” Paoloni hesitated, as if waiting to hear from Blume. Then he hung up.

  Principe looked at Blume and said, “Well?”

  “The first thing to say is it does not make sense for Innocenzi to kill them and then tip me off.”

  “Agreed.”

  “And if he sent someone to make it look like a suicide pact or a simultaneous murder, he’d have sent someone who knows how to do it right,” said Blume.

  “Agreed.”

  “And if the setup is amateurish, well, you know where I’m going with this.”

  “You can go there, but I’m not sure I’ll follow,” said Principe. “You want me to believe Pernazzo is responsible for this, too?”

  “Yes,” said Blume. “We know Pernazzo killed Brocca and Clemente. Right?”

  “Know is a strong word,” said Principe, “but let’s assume it.”

  “So we know Pernazzo can kill. Clemente campaigned against Alleva and Massoni, and Pernazzo attended their dog fights. Then we have a sighting of Massoni and Pernazzo together when Brocca got killed.”

  “We do?”

  “We will,” said Blume. “Once I talk to Giulia again. And if we start looking more closely, I’m sure we’ll find more connections.”

  “But you are not accusing Pernazzo of killing Ferrucci?”

  “No.”

  “It doesn’t make sense. Why would Alleva and Massoni reveal their hideout to someone like Pernazzo?”

  “Maybe he did computer work for them. We’ll find out. Pernazzo has no record. That’s all it takes. No record. If everyone was DNA-fingerprinted at birth it would be a different story.”

  Principe looked doubtful. “DNA fingerprinting? That’s a bit—you know. Infringes personal freedom.”

  “No such thing,” said Blume, moving briskly toward the door. “Let’s go catch ourselves a killer.”

  Blume turned around to see Principe still leaning against the desk. “You won’t help?”

  “Remember Article fifty-five of the Code of Criminal Procedure, Alec? As a policeman, you can act preventatively. I don’t have the same scope, especially in this case. At the risk of sounding like a lawyer, I’d prefer not to know exactly in advance what you’re going to do. Do you trust your own judgment?”

  “Not always.”

  Principe clicked his tongue like a teacher who had received a wrong answer. “I mean in this case, do you really trust your own judgment?”

  “Yes. Angelo Pernazzo is our man. I am sure of it. It’s time I brought him in. It’s way past time.”

  Principe straightened up, walked over to Blume, gave him a friendly half slap on the cheek. “Then trust your own judgment on this.”

  He opened the door and, before Blume could reply, was gone.

  46

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 9:15 P.M.

  BLUME RETURNED TO headquarters. After some haggling, he finally managed to get a squad car and two policemen called back in to take him to the crumbling house on Via di Bravetta.

  The two policemen who arrived in the squad car couldn’t have made up his age between them. One of them couldn’t take his eyes off Blume’s plastered arm, as if he had never seen anything so strange or exotic in his life, which was possible.

  They exchanged glances with each other as Blume clambered into the backseat of the car. Superior officers never did that. The backseat was for junior officers and criminals. But Blume had had enough of front seats for now, and his arm hurt.

  The shops had closed for the night and the traffic on the streets was beginning to flow again as they left. It took only twenty minutes to reach their destination.

  Leaving the driver in the car, Blume and the other young policeman, whose name he never even asked, got themselves buzzed into the shabby apartment block by an old woman to whom they simply declared “police” when she asked who they were. No wonder criminals had such an easy time.

  The elevator mechanism smelled of old oil and grease, and the cab took an age in coming. They stepped into the narrow cabin, and ascended to the third floor in silence, trying not to breathe all over each other, before stepping out into a short hallway with three doors. Angelo Pernazzo’s with its plaque dedicated to a virtual killer was the middle one. Blume walked up to it, raised his fist to thump at the door, then lowered it.

  “Hold it,” he said.

  The young policeman, who had not been on the point of doing anything at all, looked confused.

  An image of Ferrucci sitting at his desk, tapping away at the computer, eyes moving back and forth as he eagerly awaited a command or simply some attention came into his mind. A sense of fatigue overwhelmed Blume, and he felt his confidence drain from him as he realized what he had been about to do. He was right about Pernazzo, a person who had killed at least four people. And here he was on the point of confronting a killer, with a single unprepared rookie cop as backup.

  He was going to have to call in help. Trusting himself did not mean doing it himself. On the contrary: it meant being confident enough to risk what remained of his reputation by ordering a full-blown raid. If Pernazzo turned out to be the wrong person, he might as well apply right now for a job guarding a bank.

  “Ring the door on that side,” he ordered, indicating the apartment to the right of Pernazzo’s. “Show your badge, speak quietly. Ask if they think Pernazzo is in. I’ll do the same here.”

  Blume pressed the button, and heard a sharp buzz from immediately behind the door, but no one answered. On the other side, meanwhile, the young cop was speaking quietly to an old man wearing wide shorts, a yellow shirt, and thin white socks pulled up to his knees. The old man had opened the door fully: another easy victim.

  Blume knocked and waited. Still no one. He tried the buzzer again.

  Nothing. The young cop finished his talk with the old man. Blume motioned him over, made a quick downward bye-bye motion with his hand to warn him to speak quietly.

  “Says he doesn’t know,” said the young cop. “Says the son keeps to himself, was never one to have friends. He used to know the mother, but she died a short while ago. Nobody in that one?”

  Blume slapped the neighbor’s door with the palm of his hand, “Doesn’t look like it.”

  “Are we going to try this middle door?”

  Blume looked at the unwrinkled and uncomplicated face of the young man in front of him and thought of Ferrucci.

  “No. I’ve changed my mind. We’re going to call in backup, and we’re going to get a warrant to get in there.”

  The kid looked annoyed, like he had been told he was too young for a fairground ride. “But we haven’t even tried.”
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  “Nor will we. Let’s get back to the car, radio from there,” said Blume.

  But he could not help himself from trying to peer in through the security peephole. The killer could very easily be right there. He might have heard them ringing next door and be looking out, looking directly into Blume’s eye. Blume considered telling the young cop to point his Beretta directly against the peephole, see if that produced a panicked scuttling from behind the door.

  Blume sidestepped out of the radius of vision of the middle door and positioned himself in front of the old man’s door. Then he hunkered down and tested whether he was able to keep his balance with his arm in a sling. He could, but only just. On bended knees he made his way back, below the scope level of the peephole, or so he hoped, and pressed his ear to the door. The elevator behind him clunked and whirred, and moved down. From behind the door, he thought he heard a scuffling sound. He could also hear a Mulino Bianco commercial playing on a TV, advising people to eat healthily. It could have been from another apartment, but he doubted it. The apartment next door was empty, and he did not remember TV noise getting any louder when the old man had opened the door.

  Then he heard it. A sniff. That’s all it was. The sound of someone sniffing from the other side of the door. Still crouching, he took five painful sideways steps out of the range of vision, but the effort was too much and he slowly keeled over onto the floor, on top of his sprained arm, his knees locked in pain. He bit his lip to stop himself from shouting out. Eventually, he struggled back into an upright position. The young policeman, unable to work out a coping strategy for insane superiors, was staring down the stairwell.

  Blume was physically exhausted from his exertions. His ribs felt as if they had pierced his lungs, his arm throbbed. Even his teeth were paining him. He pressed the button for the elevator.

  The elevator took a long time, and seemed even slower going down than it had been on the way up. But as they made their slow descent, Blume’s pain was subsiding and his confidence rising.

  They got out into the courtyard. Blume caught a glimpse of a figure walking fast out the gate, head bowed. There was something slightly strange in the gait. The world was full of people fearful of the police.