The Namesake

by Conor Fitzgerald

Blume swayed on the threshold, confused. That was surely the question he was supposed to have asked her. And the voice was wrong, too. She sounded like a girl. He could not fit the voice to the wheedling Mafia-accented matriarch he had created in his mind.

  ‘Do you need to sit down?’

  ‘I have a terrible headache,’ said Blume. ‘And I think I’m pretty dirty.’

  ‘Have you been standing in the sun?’

  ‘It’s not the sun. I often get them.’

  Maria Itria stood aside and he walked in. The drop in temperature was immediate and exhilarating, but it made him sneeze and break out in a sweat. He kept his eyes closed, trying to adjust to the shaded hallway.

  ‘Come through to the kitchen,’ she said.

  He followed obediently.

  ‘Sit.’

  He sat at the broad table. Its top was a board of dark oak that was cool against the palm of his hands. He had to resist the temptation to lay his cheek against it.

  ‘My name is Commissioner Alec Blume. Police.’

  ‘Eat this, Alessio.’ She handed him a rock-hard piece of bread.

  ‘Alec, not Alessio. I’m not hungry.’

  ‘If you want your headache to go, eat it. Just a bite or two. You need something in your stomach if you have a headache.’

  Something wet and alive leaped at his face, and he realized she had thrown him a cloth dipped in water. He wiped his face, turning the cloth dark. Then he stood up and went over to the kitchen sink, which is what he should have done to begin with, and washed his hands and arms and drank glass after glass of water. The woman shied away from him as he did this, but when he sat down again, she resumed her position at the sink.

  Back at the table, Blume tried to bite off a small piece of the bread she had given him, but found he had to gnaw his way into it. As he began chewing, it released a fragrance of orange and olive. His teeth cracked a seed, and his mouth filled with the taste of fennel. He realized his lips had numbed slightly and his tongue was tingling.

  ‘There are a few flakes of peperoncino mixed in with the grains. It can help a headache sometimes, but I’ve got something better.’

  She walked across to the cupboard. Blume looked at her properly for the first time. She was barefoot, youthful, dressed simply in faded blue jeans and a beige cotton and linen blouse. It looked comfortable, floppy and elegant all at the same time, and he suddenly felt self-conscious about his abject appearance. Nothing about her fitted his image, and nothing in her actions matched his expectations.

  She placed a full glass of jet-black liquid on the table before him. He looked down at the glass, then up at her, examining her face. Why had he not pulled up a file on her, prepared himself better for this encounter? This was the woman whose life he had decided to put in danger. The woman he said he had no sympathy for. Her eyes were dark and sloped in a way that would have given her an Asian look had they not been so large. She had a small white scar on her left cheek, a mark from childhood chicken pox or measles. Her childhood, Blume realized, could not have been all that long ago.

  ‘What’s in this glass?’

  ‘Your nose must be blocked if you can’t smell it.’ She stood up again, went over to the drawer, pulled out a large knife, and Blume felt his hand reach automatically inwards towards his sweaty waist and the butt of his gun. The knife flashed as she sliced through two thick-skinned lemons. Cautiously, he brought the glass up to his nose.

  ‘It’s a suspension of pure liquorice,’ she said, coming over with the lemons, one of which she had halved, the other quartered.

  ‘Liquorice liquor. Then it’s alcoholic,’ he said. ‘I don’t drink alcohol.’

  She rolled up the dangling sleeve of her shirt, and pushed the lemons towards him. ‘If you want to get rid of your headache, drink that cordial.’

  Blume drank. It was powerful. He could feel it painting his tongue and the roof of his mouth black, and it burned the back of his throat even though it was extremely sweet. The glass contained at least three measures. He put it down half empty. Already he could feel the fumes going to his head.

  ‘All of it, come on. You’re a big man.’

  Blume took a second long draught and snapped the empty glass back on the wooden top. It was like drinking a cough medicine.

  ‘Those lemons are sweet enough to peel and eat like oranges, but they will taste sour after the licorice. Nothing is sweeter than licorice. Bite into the quartered lemons,’ she instructed.

  ‘I don’t think I will. We need to talk.’

  ‘Do it. You can talk at the same time.’

  Blume did as she said. She was right about the lemon being sour, but the effect was invigorating and the taste delicious. He finished two quarters with two quick bites, attacked the third, and said, ‘You know who I am?’

  ‘For now, you are just an unhappy man with a headache.’

  ‘Commissioner Blume. I am a policeman.’

  ‘You just said that a minute ago.’

  ‘So I did. I apologize. The reason I am here, Mrs Curmaci, is . . .’ He stopped. He did not sound credible to himself. He finished the last quarter lemon as he thought of something to say.

  ‘Now take the two half lemons, and press them against your temples.’

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  ‘No. But if you think you’ll look stupid,’ and here she smiled sweetly at him, ‘and you will, just hold half a lemon in your hand and keep smelling it. Your headache will be gone in ten minutes. In fact, it’s already fading.’

  She was right. As soon as he thought about it, he felt another pulse, but at least thirty seconds had passed since the last one. And the sensation of the pain trying to break out was diminishing fast.

  ‘You can use lavender, too. Shall I get you some?’

  ‘No. I’m fine. This,’ he brought the lemon to his nose and inhaled deeply, ‘is working.’

  The nausea was fading fast too, and he had finally stopped sweating. He looked gratefully into the face of the young woman across the table and saw her eyes shift sideways and her face become anxious. He followed her gaze to the kitchen door, where staring at them was a youth on the verge of manhood.

  Blume raised his hand in greeting, but the teenager continued to regard him in grave silence. Blume looked at the mother for guidance. He had never mastered the etiquette of speaking to children. All he knew was that after they reached a certain age, asking them their names and age sounded as strange to them as it would to an ordinary adult. And yet he could not for the life of him imagine what else to say.

  He looked back, and saw the boy was gone. Mostly he felt relieved, but he also found the sudden disappearance and the utter silence that preceded it disturbing.

  ‘That’s my son.’ She smiled. Her eyetooth was slightly crooked. ‘I have another son upstairs, and if he wakes up I’ll have to go to him. His name is Roberto. Robertino we call him. The little one. My son here, the one you saw . . .’

  Blume ran his mind’s eye over files from what seemed like years ago and plucked the name Ruggiero from the air, and said it to her.

  ‘That’s right, Ruggiero.’ Her voice softened as she pronounced the name, and she expressed no surprise that he should know it.

  Blume felt very pleased with his brain and with the lucidity of his thoughts, then realized, almost with a shock, that the pain had simply floated out of his head. Tentatively, he rolled his head backwards to feel the tension in his neck. Nothing. It was gone, and he felt energy returning to his whole body.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  Happy was the right response, but he could not really say that. ‘That liquorice seems to have done the trick,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Don’t mention it. Now what am I going to do about having not just a man, but a policeman visiting my house? I hope you’re going to make a call and a fleet of cars will drive up and you’ll arrest me now. Nothing else would look right.’

  ‘Well . . . I suppose I could . . .’

  ‘And it
needs to be made clear that the time we spent together in here was dedicated to discussing what was to be done about the children. I was refusing to leave the house until arrangements had been made for them. In fact, that’s true. I am going to make a phone call to the Megales across the road, and send Roberto over with Ruggiero. Can you make the call to your colleagues, make sure there are a lot of flashing lights and squealing of tyres?’ She rolled up her shirtsleeve, which had fallen down again, and held out her arms. Blume could see tiny blonde hairs against her smooth brown skin. Her wrists were thin, one encircled by a silver bracelet, and her fingers long, one encircled by a golden ring.

  She shook her lovely hands at him. ‘Maybe you could put handcuffs on me?’

  ‘I can’t just arrest you like that. I need a magistrate to bring charges. And I can’t call in the local police. It doesn’t work like that.’

  She pulled her arms back and folded them across her breast. ‘So what are you doing here?’

  ‘I thought you might need help.’

  ‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘In a moment of weakness, I made a telephone call. But you don’t look like you came either to arrest me or to help me. You’re all alone, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m not here to arrest you.’

  ‘Do you even know what I am talking about?’

  ‘Yes. You made a call to Magistrate Arconti,’ said Blume. ‘But maybe you had no choice?’

  ‘Of course I had a choice.’

  ‘If you have been under pressure or threat from your neighbours, from people around here, I think I can help you understand why. But first I need to ask you this: has your husband returned?’

  She shook her head, not in denial but in refusal to answer.

  ‘I need to ask you this again,’ said Blume. ‘Has your husband returned?’

  This time the shake of her head contained a warning.

  ‘Suppose your husband had returned,’ said Blume. ‘Do you think he could resolve this problem that has arisen? I am referring to your reputation in this community.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘Without bloodshed. Because if he could just make sure, without bloodshed, that everyone understood your phone call was made in good faith, then I would be happy with that.’

  ‘Who knows about it?’

  ‘Only a few people,’ said Blume. ‘It does not have to become known to anyone else.’

  Maria Itria bit her lip as she considered this. ‘What do you want in return?’

  ‘Nothing. But if you decided to follow up on that phone call and talk to a magistrate, I think it would be a good thing.’

  ‘Betray my husband, my family?’

  ‘Talk openly to someone. Even to me. Not to Arconti, he’s leaving the profession. Did you know he has been taken ill?’

  ‘Poor man, it must be the stress of all those lies he tells about honest people.’

  There it was. The flash of cynicism he had been waiting for. But still she sat there, beautiful and seemingly vulnerable, a youthful mother with two children in the house.

  ‘Did you hear about the murder of Matteo Arconti?’

  ‘I thought you said he had been taken ill.’

  ‘Not him. His namesake.’ Blume told her the story, watching her face as he did so. She seemed keen to hear the details, and her eyes shone with interest when he spoke about how they had tracked down the van to the abandoned Falck steelworks in Sesto San Giovanni. She grimaced sympathetically as he described the bullet wounds in Arconti’s body, shook her head sadly as he remembered how Magistrate Arconti had been overcome by apoplexy on the floor of his office.

  ‘And you think my husband planned all this?’

  ‘I certainly think he is capable of it.’

  ‘That is an evasive answer, Commissioner. My husband has so many enemies. Some of them very close. I am still trying to see how my phone call last night to Arconti is supposed to be connected to all this that went before – and to your presence here in my kitchen.’

  ‘Months ago, Arconti phoned you, and you refused to answer his questions. Do you remember that?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Someone altered the transcript of that call to make it sound like you had made a willing confession. The idea was to force your husband to intervene, to get him into the open, and maybe even to force him to break with the Society.’

  ‘What Society? Are you implying organized crime? And what sort of evil person would risk the life of a mother and her two children on the strength of a mere suspicion, a misplaced one at that?’ she said, looking straight at him.

  Blume returned the gaze. ‘What sort of sick community do you live in where the life of a mother and her children would be at risk because she had spoken to a magistrate of the Republic? What sort of evil peasant culture have you chosen? And don’t deny that you chose it.’

  ‘My call yesterday was a moment of weakness. That can be suppressed and forgiven. It can be made to have never happened. What I want to know is what sort of person altered my conversation with the magistrate . . . Hush!’

  Blume listened, and heard nothing. He was about to speak when she held up a warning finger and he heard the sound of an infant making a few practice sounds like little coughs, a clearing of the air passages in preparation for the bawling phase, which began almost immediately.

  ‘He wakes up hungry,’ she said and slipped quickly out of the kitchen, leaving the door ajar, her footsteps thudding quickly up the short flight of stairs.

  The speed with which the infant’s cries filled with desperation was remarkable, as was the immediacy with which his lament turned into contented burbles as he was picked up. Blume could hear the mother softly talking and comforting the child as she made her way downstairs again. She stood outside the door for a moment, muttering something to the baby. He heard another voice, presumably the elder boy.

  She opened the kitchen door slowly, still leaving it open. Framed in the doorway, cradling the baby, she was a lovely sight, and her expression still seemed tender and comforting as she looked up from the child’s face and across the kitchen at him, but there was an expression of alarm there, too.

  ‘I see you haven’t moved, Commissioner,’ she said. Then, instead of taking a step forward, towards him and the table, she stepped aside, and pulled the baby up to her shoulder protectively cupping the back of its head, while she pressed it against herself and squeezed her eyes shut. Blume was still smiling at her when a dark shape he had begun to pick up in the corner of his eye came through the door at speed, seeming to grow in size as it moved. The figure moved across the narrow space that separated them, holding a black pistol at the end of an outstretched arm as if it were a smoking pan he intended to dispose of.

  Agazio Curmaci merely clicked his tongue twice in rapid warning as Blume’s hand reached across his stomach towards his side holster, then he hit Blume’s forehead hard with the barrel of the pistol and even then continued advancing, forcing Blume’s head back and finally toppling him off the chair. Another person appeared, a hefty ageing man in heavy trousers, a filthy shirt and an incongruous red silk handkerchief knitted around his throat. He, too, was holding a weapon, a massive old shotgun, probably legally owned since its ends were not sawn off and he was clearly some sort of peasant hunter. It was characteristic of the Ndrangheta to use buckshot and to aim for the face. Blume was so intent on looking up the barrels of the shotgun and waiting for the flash, the pain and the eternal darkness afterwards that he hardly noticed as Curmaci squatted down and disarmed him. Curmaci patted his hands up and down his body looking for other weapons. He found and confiscated Blume’s mobile phone.

  ‘OK, you can stand. We’re leaving here,’ said Curmaci. He was different in the flesh from the photos Blume had seen in Arconti’s office. For a start, he had aged and gained in girth. In the photos, he had been scowling or tight-lipped, but from up close, despite the circumstances, he seemed to have an open face and a ready smile. He came across as likeable, solid, frank, dependable.


  Blume got to his feet. The shotgun man, who stank of game and meat, grabbed the back of Blume’s filthy jacket, bunching it up, and marched him past the doorway where Maria Itria stood, one child still in her arms, the older wordless child standing beside her, his arm around her waist either seeking or giving comfort.

  ‘Was your husband here all the time?’ said Blume as he passed her. It was the only question that came to mind, or the only question he could ask without feeling completely foolish in the eyes of this woman. He was concerned not to cut too bad a figure in front of her, even though he might be dead within minutes.

  ‘No, I was out on business, Commissioner,’ replied Curmaci, answering on his wife’s behalf. ‘I got a call.’

  ‘Who called? No one knew I was . . .’ Blume saw the bright blue eyes of the boy looking unblinkingly at him.

  ‘Here, Ruggiero,’ said Curmaci, tossing Blume’s mobile phone into the boy’s hand. ‘Get rid of this, and destroy it completely. Not here. It can’t go offline at this address. Can I trust you to do this?’

  ‘Yes, Dad. You can always trust me.’

  ‘I know I can, son.’

  The look on the boy’s face as Blume filed past was of ecstatic pride.

  47

  Ardore, Locride area

  The stinking man with the shotgun tied Blume’s wrists behind his back, but did not show much interest or skill in the task, simply wrapping the cord casually like he was trussing a chicken. Blume felt the knot loosen almost immediately.

  They bundled him into a car, a small Fiat Ritmo from the 1980s that seemed to be made of tin. The stinking giant drove. Blume sat in the back, Curmaci beside him looking pensively out the window, like he was a train passenger keen not to enter into conversation. Blume could almost sympathize given the state of his clothes and skin, and the sour stench of soot he could smell coming from himself. Curmaci was casually but immaculately dressed in a Zenga polo shirt with stripes so narrow they could only be seen close up, an elegant pair of lemon-yellow slacks, slip-on moccasins, a pair of designer sunglasses tucked between the buttons on his shirt. His hair seemed to have been cut an hour ago, so precise was the razor and scissor line above his ear. Where it swept elegantly down towards the back of his head, Blume could see individual strands of white. He wondered if Curmaci was aware of them, and if they bothered him. Blume had been rather pleased with his first white hairs, but disliked the emergent salt-and-pepper look he now had.