Bitter Remedy: An Alec Blume Case

by Conor Fitzgerald

  ‘I see,’ said Blume. ‘So we’re reporting this accident in full? Wait a second. You heard the course was cancelled?’

  ‘Heard, yes. Why, am I supposed to be, deaf?’

  Blume tried to recall his conversation with Silvana. The past 24 hours had been confusing. ‘It’s just that she said you or one of your colleagues closed her down. She said the ASL declared the accommodation not fit for purpose, and the Provincial Police arrived to enforce the order. That’s why she had to close the whole thing down.’

  ‘No. We never did that. Maybe you dreamed it, Commissioner. Come back to the office. Maybe you need to rest a little before you leave us? Also, you now have no car.’

  Chapter 14

  Blume spent the next hour filling in forms in the company of the vigile, whose name was Fabio, and a thin woman with jet-black hair, black-framed glasses, and small dark eyes who regarded him severely with schoolmarmish disapproval, though she was probably 10 years his junior, and never spoke a friendly word. He could see that Fabio was embarrassed by her hostility, but not yet ready to share a complicit rolling of the eyes with him.

  It was agreed that Alfredo the mechanic would rescue his car. Fabio, if not his colleague, had turned a bit friendlier now that Blume was, in theory, accepting responsibility. It was felt his insurance should cover everything. Even poor maintenance might be forgiven, Fabio tentatively suggested, which earned him a look of contempt from the woman who, however, held a lower rank.

  Blume glanced at a wall clock behind the desk. It was now past two, as if time were stretching out to make up for the smallness of the place.

  Fabio followed his glance. ‘Yes, these things take time.’

  ‘Is there a taxi service of some sort?’

  ‘Paolo runs a service.’

  His colleague looked up from her paperwork, and said ‘Paolo’s not available today. He is picking people up at Rome airport. The Commissioner will have to make do without a taxi.’

  Fabio slapped his thigh, remembering.

  ‘What about a bus?’ asked Blume.

  ‘There is one at 10:20 every day, goes to Rome. So it’s gone. And one at 11:00 to Naples. And every weekday, but not today, because it’s Saturday, a third one goes to Pescara, though I’ve never seen anyone use it.’

  ‘Hotels in town?’

  Fabio sucked his teeth as if witness to a near miss. ‘There used to be a hotel. But it closed down before I was born.’

  ‘You’ll just have to get someone to collect you, Commissioner,’ said the woman.

  At half past two, Blume put on his orange sunglasses, left the Provincial Police office, and went to explore the town of Monterozzo.

  The town was built on what was essentially a single massive boulder with a flattish top, which looked like it had been cast down from the heavens, splintering and fracturing in its lower regions when it landed. The streets, steps, alleyways, and paths followed the lines of the clefts in the rock. As the upper section of the rock was less fissured, so the number of streets and available land for building decreased. He imagined that as he moved towards the top the various streets and alleys would begin to converge. The most complex maze-like part of the town was in the middle section, where a large slab of the mountain had broken off leaving room for the town to develop a little. He decided to reach the summit to get a clear idea of the layout. On his way up, he passed by a mechanic’s shop, consisting of a garage door set in front of a natural cave. Autoriparazioni Alfredo De Santis. Fiat e Plurimarche. It was closed.

  Blume felt an uncharacteristic longing for people, filth, and life as he passed empty house after empty house, some of them freshly plastered and clean, others in a state of decorous collapse. He continued walking upwards. This street was inhabited, just. He could tell by the potted plants, the occasional piece of furniture, or even shoes left on the porches and steps. It was like walking through people’s private homes.

  The few cars around were sitting on cement platforms built to neutralize the steep gradient. Getting a car up here would be hard. The streets widened a little as the rock formed a ledge, leaving space for a few shops, including a greengrocer whose three-wheeled Ape sat outside. Although it was now 3 o’clock, the shop appeared to be open. On an impulse of pity mixed with sudden hunger, Blume went in and bought himself a bag of apples. The old man inside served him without a word, and Blume left feeling disapproved of. When he bit into his apple, it tasted of wax and flour. He bit into a second one. Same story. There were no litter bins to throw them away, though the idea of tipping the bag and watching them roll them down the street was very appealing. No one was around, no one would see. He imagined the apples bouncing up onto the porches, knocking on doors, thumping against the bodywork of the cars, rolling all the way down to the bottom of the –

  ‘Excuse me?’

  He was so startled, he let go of the bag of apples, all of which rolled into a side gutter and settled there. He followed them with his eyes, then swore at them before remembering he was in company.

  A woman, the height of a child, 90 if she was a day, wearing a crimpy black dress and flesh-coloured gloves was looking up at him, her expression as severe as the tight silver bun into which her hair was gathered. She was so thin that he felt a strong wind might whisk her away.

  ‘Were you looking at the notice?’

  ‘Notice?’

  She pointed. A faded blue cardboard notice encased in a plastic envelope that had turned as orange as his sunglass lens was pinned to the wall. He couldn’t make out a word.

  ‘It says apartment to let,’ she explained. ‘Were those Pino’s apples?’

  He pointed back in the direction he had come, ‘I bought them just round the corner.’

  ‘Pino’s,’ she nodded. ‘They belong in the gutter. So were you looking for somewhere?’

  ‘To let? No, no. I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Pity.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Blume. ‘I’m sorry,’ he added

  ‘No need to be sorry. It’s not your fault. The room is also available on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, just so you know. Maybe you’ll tell someone about it in Rome.’

  ‘I’ll be sure to.’

  ‘Don’t treat me like I am a child who needs to be humoured.’

  ‘OK, I will tell no one about it, then,’ said Blume, ‘even if they ask me.’

  She smiled at him. Her teeth were white, straight, small. He noticed she wore no glasses either, and her expression was intelligent. He doubted he would be in such good shape if he ever made it that far in life.

  ‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘No point in lying to a person you’ll never see again, is there?’

  ‘How did you know I’m from Rome?’

  ‘Your choice of words when you dropped the apples.’

  ‘Oh.’ He felt himself blushing as she continued to stare at him.

  ‘I am not shocked. It’s quite amusing to hear apples being accused of whoring.’

  ‘Yes, well . . . I need to be getting back.’ He pointed at the faint blue smudge on the wall. ‘You might want to change that notice. It’s completely unreadable now.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. No one comes up this way anyhow. Nowadays, if people can’t drive to a place, they don’t bother. Apart from the occasional scooter, I never hear any traffic up here. I have a lovely little terraced garden, and all I hear in it is birdsong. Want to see?’

  ‘As I said, I need to be heading back . . .’

  ‘Not that I like the little bastards. The house martins are fine, they eat insects. Blackbirds can sing all they want, but they still eat my seeds. And as for those vile ravens! And now we have these ringed parakeets from that damned garden below. Parakeets! Here in central Italy!’ Her voice rose to a shriek. ‘Have you heard them?’ She shrieked again, and he stepped back. ‘Well might you step back, when they make that noise,’ she said, then did another imitation. ‘And then they worry about lovely young African men coming over here. It’s the animal invaders we need to watch o
ut for. I can see you are in a hurry. Don’t bother picking up those apples. The crows will fight over them this evening, which will give me something to watch.’

  ‘Well, as I say, I need to go now.’

  ‘Either you want to get away from me or you are in a terrible hurry. Let’s be polite and assume the second. In which case, you should go down that way.’ She pointed to the right. ‘The road ends, but there is a low wall. If you just hop up on that and walk a few metres, you’ll find yourself back at the church. It’s far quicker. Mind your step, though, the wall is low on this side. On the other it’s about 15 metres straight down into an escarpment.’

  ‘I think maybe I’ll just walk back the way I came,’ said Blume.

  Chapter 15

  Alfredo, the town mechanic, studied his irredeemably black fingernails before answering. ‘I am waiting for a part from Germany.’

  ‘It’s an Alfa Romeo.’

  The mechanic shook his head sadly. ‘The parts still come from Germany.’

  ‘What if I said I don’t want it?’

  ‘Too late, I’ve ordered it already. Three days. Five tops.’

  ‘I don’t want it.’

  The mechanic dug his hand into his pocket and produced a handkerchief that might once have been red. Its purpose now seemed to be to apply more black grease to his forehead. When he had finished applying his paratrooper’s camouflage, he said: ‘Hot this afternoon.’

  ‘Did you hear me?’ said Blume. ‘I do not want it.’

  The mechanic took out a crumpled soft-pack of MS cigarettes from the kangaroo pocket in his overalls. The one he extracted looked like a flaccid penis, and he began to stroke it thoughtfully into shape as he considered Blume’s outburst. He placed the cigarette in his mouth and took out a lighter. Blume waited, interested to see if the tobacco paper, now grey and impregnated with oil from the rubbing treatment, would flare when lit.

  ‘Want one?’

  ‘No thanks.’ Blume was disappointed when it ignited normally. The mechanic took a long drag, then pulled the cigarette out of his mouth with a grimace, and squinted suspiciously at the filter.

  ‘So, are you going to leave me a down payment?’

  ‘I do not authorize you to do this. You were supposed to look at the brake lines, talk to the vigili.’

  ‘I did. Then I ordered the spare parts.’ The mechanic seemed thoroughly disgusted with his drooping cigarette. He gave it three of four more pulls before flicking it contemptuously into a puddle of oil and spitting next to his shoe. ‘I’ve already put in a new brake line to your front wheels. What we’re waiting for from Germany is a master cylinder. Yours half-failed. They only ever half-fail, it’s a safety thing, which is why you are alive now.’

  ‘The brake lines were fine then?’

  ‘No. I just told you, I replaced the lines to the front. They were frayed and leaking a bit.’

  ‘But not broken or snapped?’

  The mechanic shook his head. ‘The master cylinder’s your problem.’

  ‘This master cylinder. What’s it like?’

  The mechanic measured a space of air with his hands, revealing incongruously white palms. ‘A thing about this large.’

  ‘Have you got one here?’

  ‘If I had one, would I order it all the way from Germany?’

  ‘Not for my car, an old one. So I can see.’

  ‘Aho, stronzo, dove ti sei cacciato?’

  A head suddenly bobbed up from the floor a few metres to the right. ‘What do you want?’ said the head, which had wild tufts of light hair and an oil-flecked face, and was staring at Blume’s shoes.

  ‘Get your lazy arse into the back and find me an old master cylinder. Any type, any condition. Go on, you useless fucking halfwit.’ The mechanic turned to Blume with a look of considerable pride. ‘That’s my son, Dario. He’s not going back to school next year. He’s going take over the business.’

  Blume looked about him. The Pirelli calendar was 4 years out of date. There were two cars in the place besides his own, and it looked as if they were using one for spare parts to build the other. The kid climbed out of the pit, which might have been where he lived. There was certainly no car over it that he might have been working on.

  A few minutes later he returned, and handed his father a dull metal object that looked like the electric motor of some heavy-duty kitchen mixer. His father made a playful attempt to bash him over the head with it.

  ‘There you go,’ he told Blume. ‘Want it?’

  ‘Just to look at,’ said Blume. It was a welded solid unit. It did not look like the sort of thing a person could easily tamper with, or would tamper with when the hydraulic lines were so simple to find that even he had a rough idea of where they were.

  ‘And this is the part that failed on my car?’

  ‘Yes. Is that all you wanted to see? I’m very busy, you know.’

  ‘So give me my car back,’ said Blume.

  The mechanic shook his head with the mild obstinacy of a mule. ‘I can’t do that. You have no brakes. You would kill someone or yourself as soon as you drove out of here and started down that hill. You’d probably drive into Mrs Servillo’s kitchen at the first corner.’

  ‘If I demand my car back, you must give it to me.’

  ‘If you get into your car with no brakes in this town, I’m calling the vigili and the Carabinieri.’

  Blume felt his shoulder skin prickle. ‘This isn’t finished, you know.’

  The mechanic pushed his oily thumb into his nostril. ‘I know. Five days. Once the piece arrives from Germany.’

  Blume left the shop in a rage, visions of beating the mechanic over the head with one of the outsized spanners hanging on the wall vivid in his head. He popped two of the anti-itch Doxepin pills that he had, in fact, stolen from Caterina’s mother. He walked downhill, choosing a random itinerary, and stopped at the first bar he saw with outside tables. He sat down, still angrier than he knew why, and ordered a pastry and coffee from the bar boy who might have been the brother of the boy in the pit. When they arrived what seemed liked several hours later, he gulped back the coffee washing down two Lyrica tablets for his nerves, but abandoned the stale pastry after one bite. Then he sat back in his chair and realized he was in a suntrap, the town was quiet and sleepy, and his rage subsided.

  He took out his smartphone and, for the first time in several days, turned it on. Tentatively, and feeling foolish, he gave it a vocal command and watched in fascination as a Google results page popped up. He hit the first result and there was the name of a mechanic in a town 60 kilometres away. He did not bother reading the details. The part that interested him was that they advertised emergency pickup services. He went into the bar and asked for a pen and a scrap of paper.

  ‘What for?’ asked the kid who had served him.

  ‘To write with, what the fuck do you think?’

  With the same irritating slowness to take offence evinced by the mechanic – surely they were all related in a place like this? – the kid said, ‘Sure. All I meant was you don’t need it if you need to copy a number from the phone. I’ll get you one.’

  By the time he had come back, Blume felt more charitable. ‘Go on, then, show me how it’s done.’

  ‘If you tap, you can copy and then paste it, and if you put it here . . .’ The boy’s slender fingers danced over the face of the phone as several windows went flashing by, opening and closing. Blume felt like a caveman confronting a spaceship.

  ‘. . . and then if you want to call – do you?’

  Blume nodded helplessly. His pride in knowing how to look up the internet on his phone was shaken.

  ‘Ah! If that’s the number you want to call now, all you have to do is press it on the screen. See how it’s coloured blue?’ The boy handed the phone back to him.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Blume. ‘I’ll have another coffee.’

  The boy made a strange gesture, bringing his hand to his ear, then pointed at Blume’s hand. Blume pointed at his own ha
nd and smiled and nodded pleasantly. A tiny voice was saying something.

  ‘Your phone,’ said the boy. ‘I think they’ve answered.’

  ‘Oh, right . . .’ He brought his hand up too quickly and slapped himself on the ear. He told the irritated person on the other end of the line that he had bad reception. Then he ordered a pickup truck immediately.

  ‘Where are you?’ said the voice.

  ‘Monterozzo.’

  There was an inhaling of air, as if worst fears had been confirmed. ‘That’s pretty far.’

  ‘Emergency breakdown service, that’s what you do?’

  ‘Sure. It’ll cost you is all.’

  ‘Not a problem,’ said Blume.

  ‘So what’s the address in Monterozzo?’

  Blume went back onto the bar, and asked the kid to give the voice directions to the mechanic’s.

  ‘To Alfredo’s?’

  ‘Is there another mechanic in this town?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So, yes: to Alfredo’s.’

  The kid and the voice on the other end of the line seemed to have a lot to say to each other. Eventually he said, ‘He wants to talk to you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ said the voice. ‘Your car is in a repair shop, but you want us to come along with a pickup truck and tow it away, and bring it to our repair shop 60 kilometres away?’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Blume.

  ‘Right, well, I’m going to need your name, the registration of the car, and its make.’

  Blume gave the details.

  ‘And you want an emergency service, as in today?’

  ‘As in as soon as possible.’

  ‘Fine. Someone will be there in a few hours. Don’t go anywhere till we get there.’

  Chapter 16

  Blume decided he might as well get a newspaper to while away the time and, in the back of his mind, he knew he was looking also for a notebook and some pens. It was not quite an investigation he had got himself involved in, but, well, he wanted to get a bit of clarity, and writing things down seemed like a good start.