‘What?’ asked Blume, more to humour Arconti than because he expected anything useful.
‘I learned that not only is Curmaci invulnerable on that front, she makes him stronger. She counterattacked in a way that makes me think we’re talking not just about a wife but a sorella d’omerta. When she replied to me, it was like she was reading from a script. Maybe she wrote it, maybe she learned it as part of the standard rebuff to magistrates who dare go after the wives.’
‘Isn’t that the sort of move that gets these guys really pissed off with you? Children and wives, the family is somehow sacred and off limits? Could that be why they killed your namesake?’
‘You are not making me feel any better, Blume.’
‘I am not blaming you, Giudice. Going after the criminal’s family is perfectly justifiable.’
‘They were Maria Itria’s cousins that we arrested. We had justification, even according to the warped code of the Ndrangheta. Of course, she knew at once that I was interested only in her husband, but the pretext was there. Do you think I was wrong to go after her like that?’
Arconti seemed to be asking for some sort of permission, which Blume was perfectly willing to give. ‘Wrong — morally speaking? No way. The criminals she helps support destroy thousands of children with drugs and guns, kill women and children with impunity. They rip apart families and communities and poison the land. They run hospitals for profit and money laundering, and leave the sick and infirm to die. Nothing is off limits in getting the bastards.’
‘She could also have been acting out of love for her husband. It’s hard to understand the people from my region.’
‘I don’t want to understand them,’ said Blume. ‘To understand is to forgive, and that’s not my line of business. I’ll understand only for investigative purposes.’
‘That makes it harder to detect sincere repentance.’
‘I don’t get to experience much of that.’
‘No, me neither,’ said Arconti. He surveyed the files he had tipped onto the floor. ‘Look, let me show you the transcript of the call. I gave her your contact details, too, by the way, on the off-chance she preferred policemen to magistrates.’
‘What? Why the hell did you do that?’
‘Good question. I had you figured for a more forgiving sort of person, Commissioner. The transcript’s somewhere on the floor now. But it says nothing about her tone. She sounded sad. Aggressive in bursts, but essentially sad. She reminded me of a hostage reading out propaganda. I think there is a slight chance of her talking, if only she had a sympathetic listener.’
‘Not me. You picked up all this from a phone call?’
‘I’m a Calabrian like her. I have an ear for these things. It can’t be nice being trapped for life in a small Calabrian village — well, it isn’t nice. I should know. She’s from Cosenza, you know. That’s on the edge of freedom. The writ of the Ndrangheta is not total there. Almost, but not total. In my town of Gerace and the horrible new town of Gerace-by-the-Sea at the bottom of the hill, Locri as it’s now called, they command everything. No one escapes.’
‘You escaped.’
‘You call this escaping?’
With a grunt of effort followed by what sounded like a sigh of hopelessness, Arconti bent down to retrieve a file from the floor.
‘If I left the police,’ said Blume, addressing Arconti’s curved back, ‘I would not know what to do in life. It’s as simple as that. You get a chance to be good at one thing in life, and most people don’t even get that. If it turns out you don’t like what you’re good at, that’s too bad. The wrong life cannot be lived right.’
Arconti did not reply.
Pity, thought Blume, because he liked the phrase he had just made. The wrong life cannot be lived right. He surveyed the chaotic desk, the bowed-down figure of the white-haired magistrate. ‘Did you write the transcript up yoursel f?’ he asked. ‘If you can’t find it, just give me the gist.’
Arconti still did not reply. Instead, he slid silently out of his chair and fell face first into the scattered files and folders on the floor. Blume leapt up, rushed around, and flicked the magistrate over as if saving him from drowning in a pool of papers. The magistrate’s face was grey, his body stiff and unresponsive.
Dead, just like that. Another dead Matteo Arconti. Two in one morning. A sudden urge to laugh welled up in him, but when it broke his lips, it was as an angry shout.
The magistrate’s gaze was glassy and unseeing, but as Blume looked the right eye suddenly started blinking rapidly, and the right side of his mouth was twitching. In his left hand, he was clutching a piece of paper, which Blume yanked free, as if disarming a wounded criminal. Arconti, so silent in his collapse, was now breathing like a crashed-out drunk, full of snores, gasps, gurgles and murmurs from far down in the throat that sounded like the beginning of violent curses. Blume put his head down to Arconti’s chest and listened. There was a beat there. In fact, there seemed to be several hearts beating at once.
Blume rolled Arconti sideways, stood up, went to the door, opened it, stepped out and found himself looking at a corridor full of seedy lawyers dressed for court and clients dressed, apparently, for running. He ducked back in and, finally, marvelling at the slowness of his own wits, pulled out a phone and called an ambulance.
Then he sat down in the middle of the papers, and did his best to comfort Arconti, whose right eye had stopped moving but whose lip continued to twitch.
‘I don’t know if you can hear me, Magistrate — Matteo? I think you’ve had a stroke or a seizure. The ambulance is coming. You’ll be OK.’ He tried to think of some other comforting thing to say, pulling the piece of paper he had taken from Arconti’s hand out of his pocket in the hope it might inspire him. He saw it was the transcript Arconti had been reaching for. ‘See, you found the transcript,’ said Blume. ‘I’ll read it.’
Blume started rifling through the files on the floor, picking them up, stacking them on the desk.
In the corner of the room sat Arconti’s fat leather briefcase. Blume went over, glanced inside and saw papers from other cases. He dumped them on the desk. Working quickly, he started leafing through the files scattered on the desk and then those on the floor. He spent almost ten minutes going through them, trying to pick up something he could use, even if only as a benchmark to test the integrity of whatever magistrate would now take over. But it was too much. He could never pick out the essential documents in time. Already he heard the commotion and buzz working its way up the corridor. He grabbed handfuls of files at random, choosing the most densely typed ones he could find, and stuffed them into the briefcase. The piece of paper he had taken from the magistrate’s frozen hand he dropped into his inside pocket. Then he stood up, took a deep breath, and calmly opened the door, signalling to the ambulance crew and guards who were coming down the corridor. While the three of them piled into the small office, the fourth remained behind to repulse the horde of curious onlookers and concerned colleagues that had suddenly materialized.
Blume stepped over and looked down at the magistrate whose working eye seemed to have gained some focus. ‘Don’t worry, Dottore. Our case continues until you tell me otherwise.’
Arconti did not reply.
8
Rome
Back at the Collegio Romano station, the only other person from the squadra mobile to be found was the unloved Agente Rospo. When Blume passed him, he was speaking with quiet truculence, his lips almost touching the mouthpiece of the phone, and did not even look up.
Blume shut himself into his office, and slid closed a thin bolt that he had installed himself. He felt at peace here. The room was not pleasant or comfortable, but it had accrued institutional dignity over the years. It seemed as if some long-term policy was in place to renovate it at forty-year intervals. The process must have begun in the 1890s with the installation of the mahogany desk, an impossibly heavy object with dull brass handles on the drawers, topped by an expanse of bulging but still intact gre
en leather. Forty years later, the Fascist authorities had added the heavy grey filing cabinets and a modernist interpretation of a chandelier of gunmetal and glass with sockets for three low-watt bulbs, whose light never reached the ground nor even managed to make the metal shine. The ripped club chair in the corner next to the door was from the same period. The rest of the room, including the ugly orange-and-brown painting in a steel frame on the wall, belonged to the 1970s. Forty years on, and they had supplied him with a multifunction fax-printer-scanner-photocopier and a laptop, and curly energy-saving bulbs for the chandelier.
The window looked into a shadowy void between buildings and never received direct sunlight. The soot on the window filtered out most of the light, and the dark walls of the office absorbed what was left. If he read, it was always in the yellow pool of the light of his desk lamp. While it might invite depression and introspection, the room did not admit panic. It was a good place to plan in.
His mother would not have approved of him being here. She had never dispensed nearly as much advice as his father, but he remembered her warning him about not seeking out too much solitude. It had been a day of a bad school report or something, and she had come into his room where he sat mute, alone, angry at finding himself in a strange country, fed up with having to study his school companions from a distance to see what made them tick rather than just joining in with them and making friends. First, she apologized and promised he would find his way in Rome, Italy and then the world soon enough, and then she comforted him with thoughts of going home to Seattle someday.
‘But loneliness is never a real friend, Alec. Beware of when it creeps up on you disguised as solitude, peace, independence or self-sufficiency. Do not invite it into your life because it will never leave. It will even pretend to be its exact opposite, a companion.’
Even then, she was probably too late with her advice. Besides, sometimes, such as now, solitude was a tactical necessity. He wanted no one, not even his own fully conscious self, to watch as he set about composing a forgery to entrap Agazio Curmaci.
Chief Inspector Panebianco had described the murder of Matteo Arconti as a ‘cowardly’ act. But he was wrong. Cowardice was failing to respond with conviction and power to a challenge, a description that did not fit Agazio Curmaci or whoever was behind this.
Mafia bosses were either traumatized killers or, worse, killers who were not in the slightest bit traumatized by the things they had been made to do when young. The upshot was they were always stronger than politicians and public servants, the police included. The fight against the Mafia, Blume liked to say, would never be won until the politicians did for themselves what they ordered others to do. According to Caterina, his was an argument for a police state. Fine, then. Why would a police state be worse than this Mafia one?
Agazio Curmaci was certainly senior enough to order a killing without compromising his own safety, but he could just as easily have carried it out in person. A man such as that would not take great pains to cover his tracks. With any luck, forensics would be able to get traces of his DNA from the victim, and then place him at the scene of the killing, if they ever worked out where that was.
The challenge, then, was to force the bastard out of his hiding place in Germany and draw him back into the open, back to Italy. As Blume sat in his quiet office reading the transcript of the phone call Magistrate Arconti had made to Curmaci’s wife, he saw with perfect clarity how this might be done.
According to the date stamp, the call had taken place several weeks ago. Blume read the one-sided conversation, a monologue effectively, several times and, as Arconti had already observed, the woman’s words offered absolutely nothing that could be used against her husband. On the contrary, they had been spoken with the opposite intention. It was a typical Mafia call containing the characteristic mixture of veiled threat and whining accusations of victimization. It was practically a template declaration, and there was no doubt but that she had read it out. Evidently, she had been prepared as soon as her cousins were arrested. Arconti’s side of the conversation was missing, but Blume doubted it would have made any difference to what this woman, this sorella d’omerta, said.
Dottore, I appeal to you as the mother of two children. I lay out my truth before your ideals of justice, and I beg you to resist the temptation of making such hurtful, dangerous and damaging charges against my husband, who is guilty of nothing other than being a noble father and a shining example to his children and the hardworking people of this modest town. Unable to make a living in a land too long forgotten and despised by the state, he was compelled to travel abroad, but would sooner cut his own throat than his ties with his beloved homeland. Even in my pain at his absence, I am comforted by the love and respect of the entire town for my husband, for they know him for what he is. Every man must respond to his own conscience and God, but the man you have described, the evildoer to whom you have outrageously attached my husband’s name, is unrecognizable. I pray that God will forgive you for this injury of our name when the time comes, and may the time come slowly.
I am speaking to you as a woman of peace.
It was effectively a declaration of affiliation to the Honoured Society of the Ndrangheta (I am comforted by the love and respect of the entire town for my husband, for they know him for what he is) and a threat on Arconti’s life with the references to God’s forgiveness, cut throat, and injuries. Finally, it was a way of letting Arconti know he was not going to get anything from a wiretap except elaborate declarations of innocence.
Blume phoned the Palaces of Justice, found the assistant who worked with Arconti, and asked if anything had been heard from the hospital. His concern was real, but he also knew it was too early for news and that the person he called would be more interested in hearing what Blume had to say. After confirming that there was no news, the assistant said, ‘You were in the office when it happened, I hear.’
‘Yes, yes, I was. He just keeled over. Poor man. But people can come through a stroke.’
‘His files are all over his floor. What happened, did he knock them off his desk as he fell?’
‘Yes,’ said Blume. ‘He was going to show me something when it happened.’
‘It is such a pity. Any idea what he wanted to show you?’
‘It was a confession of some sort. No, that’s not quite the word he used: an admission.’
‘By who?’
‘I never found out,’ said Blume. ‘He collapsed before he could show me. I hope you’ve got those files in a safe place now.’
‘Safe?’ the sostituto sounded uncertain. ‘We have to sort through them. There’s a lot there, and some notes from another case have got mixed up. This was the investigation into the hospital consultant who committed suicide?’
‘Originally, yes,’ said Blume.
‘You’re saying there was a confession involved?’
‘I’m not saying that. Did I say confession? Arconti said something about an admission. A telephone call he transcribed. I don’t know any more than that. It’ll be in there somewhere among the mess of papers.’
The sostituto, whose voice was at once young and tired, said, ‘I hope so.’
‘By the way, in all the confusion, I left my notebook in there. Do you think I could pop round and collect it? It’s got some witness statements from a different case in it.’
‘Do you want me to see if I can find it?’
‘No, it’s all right. I’ll come round. It’s no trouble.’
He hung up before he could receive any more offers of help. The next call he made was to a reporter from Il Messaggero, a young woman — no more than a girl, really — who covered some of the cronaca nera, the local crime and bad-news section. He told her about Arconti’s collapse and the scattered files that were found in his office, omitting to mention he was there at the time. The reporter was not all that impressed until he mentioned that no one else knew about the mysterious mess in the office, which suggested that someone might have been looking for some
thing. Her voice suddenly became chirpier and harder, her questions more direct, her gratitude for the call more effusive.
Blume sat down at his computer and began rewriting the words that he wanted Curmaci’s wife to have said. He was halfway through his first draft when his phone went. It was a reporter from the Rome section of La Repubblica. Blume hated the paper and disliked the reporter, so had some fun in being tight-lipped and uncommunicative, ending the call with an angry outburst about the police having no duty whatsoever to answer questions just because a reporter spoke about the ‘public interest’. He felt confident his comment would intensify suspicion that some sort of attempt was being made to suppress a leaked document. It would take them no more than a day to find the document and a night to construct their own journalistic fantasies around it. He was on his final rewrite of the bogus confession when a reporter from Il Corriere della Sera phoned him.
‘What’s this I hear, Alec?’
Blume gritted his teeth. He had met this man once in the flesh. It did not put them on first-name terms. ‘That depends on who you’ve been listening to.’
‘About a magistrate being hospitalized, his office ransacked.’
‘I have heard no such thing,’ said Blume.
‘A Mafia case, apparently. Ndrangheta to be precise.’
‘Nothing you can publish. No story there.’
‘Missing papers?’
‘No, nothing,’ said Blume. He hung up as satisfied as he knew the reporter was not. If past form was anything to go by, the reporter would get in contact with someone in the police who would get in contact with Agente Rospo who, not being very much in demand, had plenty of opportunity to act alone.
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