“I know,” roared Blume as an ambulance went whooping by.
“Why have you got all the windows open, then?”
“Because of some rotten kitchen that was in the chicken fridge.”
“What?”
“Other way round. Rotten chicken in the kitchen fridge.” He closed the window. “I opened the fridge to get some milk for my coffee. The smell is pretty foul. Also, there’s no milk.”
“Any other food in there?”
“Not so as you’d recognize it.”
Kristin wrinkled her nose. “How about we go out for breakfast?”
“Good idea,” said Blume. “You get dressed, I’ve got some calls to make.”
Kristin left to shower and dress, and Blume phoned Principe. This time he answered, though he sounded like he was still in bed. Blume said he needed to get a team into Pernazzo’s flat. Circumstances had changed, he said, even though they had not. Before Principe could raise any objections, Blume gave him the address and said he’d meet him there in ninety minutes. That way, Principe would have time to prepare the warrants or his excuses, and Blume would have time to have breakfast with Kristin.
Then, at twenty past eight, they left the house together.
50
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 8:22 A.M.
PERNAZZO WAS ON the point of turning on the engine and driving away when his target, arm in a sling, appeared in front of the apartment building. Pernazzo took Alleva’s Davis P-32 out of Clemente’s backpack and climbed out, but held back to calculate line of sight, distance, and pace. The front door of the building opened again and a woman stepped out. She fell in beside the target and linked her arm through his good arm. The woman was an unforeseen element, but as she was blocking the commissioner’s only means of defense, her presence was almost certainly an advantage.
He would simply walk up behind them and plug the two bullets into the back of his head, and plant the third one in his face if he came down backward—at the top of his spine if he went down forward. The woman would scream. Maybe two-two, one-one would be the best combination.
Clack-clack, then people would look round in mild surprise and hear a soft pop, then another. He’d see the stupid looks of puzzlement on the faces of the passersby, like when he did that idiot outside the pizzeria. There would be disapproving frowns at the two people suddenly lolling on the sidewalk, then a gradual reappraisal and alarm. Some would even smile, as if recognizing something.
Pernazzo stayed on the opposite side and allowed Blume and the woman to remain thirty paces ahead. Outside mobile telephone shops and take-out pizza outlets, entire committees of early-rising Sunday time-wasters loitered on the sidewalk.
He glanced up and down the street and made a rapid count of the people he could see. Apart from the targets, he could see a pair of girls walking toward them and him, five people standing outside or ready to enter their apartment buildings, four or maybe five people behind him.
The bright marble statues of Jesus and John the Baptist poised on the top of the facade of San Giovanni were visible at the end of the street, their arms raised as if in gentle appeal to the traffic below to shut the fuck up just for once.
Pernazzo crossed over to the same side of the street as his two targets and picked up his pace. A small knot of bus and tram drivers in blue stood on the sidewalk, for no visible purpose, and he passed them by rapidly. A fat man with a small dog stared at Pernazzo as he hurried by. Pernazzo stared at the dog, which was crapping right in the middle of the sidewalk. Four people, now five as a man with a plastic case came out of an apartment building, turned, and walked out of the scope of his vision. Twenty paces away now. Four people were between him and them.
Pernazzo skipped slightly as he increased his pace, closing the gap to ten paces, then flapped out his shirt and slipped in his hand beneath. He felt the grainy polymer grip, at body temperature. He was close enough now to hear them and noticed they were speaking English.
The commissioner with the broken arm was on the right, nearest the road. He had placed his good arm lightly against the small of the woman’s back, as if ushering her into a room.
Trying to keep the movements fluid and leisurely, he extracted his firearm, cupped the grip with his left hand, and raised his arms, his finger already tightening around the trigger. It was a headshot from three paces.
Blume would go down, the woman would half-turn around, and he would blow a hole through her temporal lobe.
The moment he felt the blow under his wrist, he knew it was the woman who had hit him. He knew it because it was the lightest of blows, no more than a tap, but she had somehow managed to push his shooting arm up. As he brought it down again, adjusting his aim to shoot her first, her arm flashed out again, and made contact, harder this time, again with his wrist. It hurt no more than the last one, but to his intense surprise and rage, he felt his fingers jerk open and release the pistol. He tried to catch it with his left hand before it hit the ground, but even as he bent down slightly, he heard the blank clink of the Parkerized metal hitting the pavement. In the split second he was standing there with his left arm dangling stupidly between his knees groping for the pistol, she hit him twice. Even now, she was not inflicting any pain. It was as if she had stroked his face with the back of her hand. Pulling himself up again to full height, he found that the lumbering cop had finally maneuvered himself around and was now staring at him, a look of amazement on his face. Then she stuck her fingers into his eyes and the commissioner’s face was replaced with triangles of blinding pain. With a roar, he flung himself at her, ready to bite if need be, but came to a total standstill when she punched him in the throat, then pushed the flat of her hand into his nose.
His pistol was lying on the ground, and she would probably get to it first. It was a lost fight. He stepped back, just in time to avoid taking the full brunt of another white elbow in the throat. Her hair collected the light as she stepped forward after him and delivered a punch to the side of his head, which he managed to parry with his left hand with the result that his hand bitch-slapped the side of his own face.
A flash of red to his left warned him of another attack, and he realized she was preparing to use her leg this time, while the cop was now coming at him straight on, struggling to get his arm out of its sling.
Pernazzo saw his chance. Dropping his right shoulder, he wheeled his left leg around and smashed it into the cop’s right ankle. The impact caused Pernazzo’s cotton espadrille to fly off. As the cop staggered to regain his balance, waving his broken arm in a narrow useless circle, Pernazzo jerked upright out of his crouch and back-smashed his elbow into the side of the cop’s face, sending him lunging sideways into the woman.
Then he ran straight off the sidewalk and diagonally across the road, losing his second espadrille. A car whipped by him at high speed, inches from his feet and stomach. A horn blast sounded in his ears, and behind the horn, he heard a shushing noise and someone’s tires failed to find purchase on the asphalt. As he reached the other side, a scooter horn squawked at him, and the driver seemed to swerve with the intention of running him down.
Kristin stayed Blume’s sideways fall to the ground, but she allowed him to hit the concrete nonetheless. She jumped over him, landed, and hunkered down without losing sight of the pistol, which lay next to a piece of pink bubblegum. She snatched the pistol off the ground, tossed it to her other hand, and drew a bead on the small white head of the assailant before it ducked into the traffic.
Blume made an exclamation and she swiveled around, fearing he might be under attack from some other quarter, but realized he was referring in some way to her handling of the weapon. She snapped her head and shoulders back again to take aim, but she had lost vital seconds. She could not fire into the traffic. She held her aim, watching as the assailant ran almost headlong into a speeding car. Had she fired, the bullet could easily have hit the vehicle. Serve the asshole right for driving like that in a built-up area.
The assailant was now on
the other side of the street and running parallel to the old Roman wall. A missed shot would bury itself into ancient Roman history rather than straying into a passerby, she reflected. She moved the pistol fractionally upward. If the traffic let up, she would have a clear shot, and she would not miss. If the traffic let up. He had put thirty-five meters between them. She saw the breach in the walls to which he was headed. It was maybe seventy-five or eighty meters away and required a leading shot against a moving target. It was beyond the limit of a handgun of this type.
Even so, she realigned. As she did so, a red and gray Number 85 bus heaved into sight and stopped on the far side of the road.
“Kristin!” Blume was standing beside her now. She lowered the weapon, and turned to him. A semicircle of shocked pedestrians had come to a halt several meters away, and was bunched up in a group, afraid to go near the English-speaking couple standing in the middle of the street brandishing a weapon.
Casually, in full view of everyone, Kristin wiped the gray metal against her white blouse. It left a dark stain. She placed the weapon on the ground.
“His fingerprints,” he protested.
“We know who that was,” she replied.
Blume placed his foot on the pistol, and said, “Polizia. Siamo della polizia.” “Polizia!” Kristin yelled out in a clear voice. “Goddamn it, what a nation of rubbernecks,” she said to Blume.
Blume shouted out again, turning as he did so to trace an exclusionary arc around himself and Kristin as more people were drawn toward the commotion.
“Kristin, listen,” he said. “You may want to walk away from this. Just walk away. What ever you want. But decide now, because a patrol car is coming up behind you. Do you want to be a character in the story I am about to tell the patrolmen?”
“No. It would be easier if I wasn’t.”
“I agree. Will you meet me tonight?”
“OK.”
“It’s possible I won’t make it. Depends how this pans out. I’ll let you know. Also, can you avoid going home?”
“I need to change.”
“Pernazzo might know where you live,” said Blume.
“I don’t see why. And too bad for him if he does.”
As she turned to go, one of the patrolmen yelled out: “Signorina! Non si muova!” but he had no real authority in his voice. She heard Blume’s voice ordering the two young policemen away, telling them not to enter the crime scene, to call for backup, to clear the crowd. The gawking file of people on the corner opened ranks to let her through. She was calm. She was smiling.
51
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1:05 P.M.
PRINCIPE LOOKED OVER his half-moon spectacles at Blume. It occurred to Blume that the spectacles were a sort of stage device. Like the piles of folders, barely held closed with ribbons, they formed a necessary but also a theatrical part of the public prosecutor’s paraphernalia.
The two men were seated in Principe’s office in government-issue armchairs, knees up, almost touching. It was already past lunch time, and as far as Blume could see, nothing had been done to catch Pernazzo.
“Alec, I know what you’re thinking,” said Principe, frowning over the steel spectacle frames.
“You’re psychic? Maybe you should book a hall, get out of the business of directing murder investigations, because . . .”
“That will do. You’re thinking you should be out there hunting down the man who tried to kill you and your woman.”
“What woman would that be?”
“We can come back later to the question of the two officers and several witnesses who saw an imaginary woman with you, but just because you’re not out there yourself doesn’t mean all investigative activity has ground to a halt. There is a warrant issued for Pernazzo . . . Also, there have been some developments.”
“What developments?”
“Di Tivoli.”
“What about him?”
“He was found this morning by his cleaning lady. His head smashed in by a heavy object—Wait!” Principe slammed his hand down as Blume cursed. “I only found out about it shortly before you arrived in the back of a police car. A team is already there.”
“I need to get there, too,” said Blume.
“The call was not assigned to us and they have an investigating magistrate already on the scene. Anyhow, you already know who it was.”
“I seem to be the only one.”
“No. It was Pernazzo. At least that’s what Di Tivoli said.”
“Wait, I thought you said Di Tivoli had had his head . . .”
“Di Tivoli is not dead, though I hear he’s in a very bad way. He keeps repeating the name Pernazzo, or did until he fell unconscious again. He might not make it.”
“When was the attack?”
“Seems like it was last night,” Principe replied. “It looks as if Pernazzo tried to kill Di Tivoli and then you. The magistrate on the case is a good guy, used to work as an assistant with me. He’s got a team searching Di Tivoli’s house.”
“Check Di Tivoli’s computer for recordings.”
“What?”
“He records things. He’s a journalist and a Craxi-era socialist. You don’t get trickier than that.”
“OK,” said Principe. “If you say so.”
Blume didn’t like the tone. “I do say so.”
“I’ll pass on that information to the investigating magistrate in charge of the case.”
“And I’ll tell my colleagues,” said Blume.
“And you’ll tell your colleagues. But I will pass on the information, and the magistrate is reliable. He’s already ordered a search of the neighborhood, and they found Pernazzo’s car.”
“Did they look inside it, too?”
“Yes. Nothing important yet. Let me finish, would you?” Principe waited for a signal from Blume. “So the next thing the magistrate did was to start looking for Di Tivoli’s car and—this I just heard—it’s missing from the underground garage where he parks it.”
“So Pernazzo is driving Di Tivoli’s car. Now we have the make and license plate. Maybe we’ll get lucky, though it didn’t do much good when Pernazzo was driving around the city in his own car.”
“We might,” said Principe. “Di Tivoli has a Telepass device on his vehicle. RAI pays all travel expenses, you see. Including motorway tolls.”
“Good to know that my license fee contributes to his free travel through toll gates,” said Blume.
“Maybe you’ll see it as money well spent in a minute,” said Principe.
“Every time the vehicle goes on or comes off a motorway, it is electronically logged. That means once Pernazzo takes a road out of the city, we’ll know, and we’ll also know which one,” said Principe. “The ICT unit in Tuscolana is monitoring the numbers now.”
“Immediately? The vehicle passes a toll point, they see the ID flash up on their screens and call you?”
“No. It takes almost an hour to process the numbers. It’s not us that’s slow, it’s the mainframe to which the electronic toll gates are connected. But I’ve also alerted the highway police.”
“I didn’t know you could get a vehicle ID from a Telepass device,” said Blume.
“You can’t,” said Principe. “But the device has to be associated with a credit card or bank account number. In this case it’s a bank account number held by RAI. We checked with RAI, and they were able to associate the device ID to Di Tivoli’s expense account.”
“We?”
“Me, then. It was my idea.”
“That was good. But suppose he doesn’t take a motorway?”
“Then it won’t work,” said Principe. “But he has to take a motorway sooner or later. It would make it easier if we knew where he was headed. Have you any idea?”
Blume shrugged. “He should be trying to get out of the country. If I were him, I’d be driving towards the sea.”
“We checked to see if he has any other properties he might try to use as a safe house. Nothing in his name, or his mother
’s name. No brothers or sisters. Some cousins in Australia. We’ve been looking through his apartment, but the guy’s best friends seem to be computer avatars, gambling sites, Helen Duval . . .”
“Who?”
“A porn diva. I was certain you’d have heard of her. Also, we’ve already checked Alleva’s place in Rome, and Massoni’s, just in case he thought he could hide out there.”
“You’ve connected Pernazzo to that crime scene already?”
“No,” said Principe.
“But you think it was him?”
Principe hesitated. “Half an hour ago I got a phone call from Innocenzi.”
Blume stayed silent. There was something inevitable about hearing the name again.
“What did he tell you?”
Principe ran the palm of his hand up his face, finally pushing off his spectacles, and said, “He didn’t tell me anything. He asked questions. Asked if the police know the probable whereabouts of the man who had killed Clemente.”
“The concerned citizen,” said Blume. “Do you think someone has tipped him off?”
“That we’re looking for Pernazzo? Maybe. Where Pernazzo is, no. We don’t know that ourselves yet,” said Principe.
“No, we don’t,” said Blume, an idea beginning to form in his mind. “So everyone is coming round to my idea that Pernazzo is the person we want?”
“Sometimes you act as if Alec Blume is the only man in town who knows where the bad guys are,” said Principe. “I can maybe find a good legal argument for coming in the window after being thrown out the front door on the Clemente case, but the finest argument won’t do me or anyone any good if the whole thing collapses into a heap of recriminations.”
“But you think it will collapse? With all this evidence?”
Principe sighed. “It’s messy. But if we don’t step on anyone’s toes, then we’ll get Pernazzo for Brocca’s murder at the pizzeria. We don’t need Pernazzo for the Clemente case.”
THE DOGS of ROME Page 38