Bitter Remedy: An Alec Blume Case

by Conor Fitzgerald

  He felt a twinge of regret at the way he was treating the mechanic, but he refused to be made a fool of. He cared nothing about the car itself. In fact, he had been meaning to buy himself a new one (so far he had used his inherited wealth only to buy an apartment whose value had then plummeted as the constructors went bankrupt, but there was plenty left), but had not got round to it. What he needed to do was go into a dealership somewhere in the Parioli quarter of Rome and tell a haughty salesman that he was looking for a car that was quiet. That’s what he wanted. A big, fat, smooth, and silent car.

  He spent half an hour walking around the stony narrow streets until he found a newsagent. He tried to browse, but each time he picked up a paper to glance at the headline, the proprietor became agitated as might an archive librarian watching precious manuscripts being handled. All the titles had to do with the ‘spread’ and the crisis of the euro. Blume felt that with his new status as a wealthy man, he should care more about this sort of thing. Responsibly, he bought a copy of Il Sole 24 Ore. He had never tried to read a financial newspaper before.

  Just off the piazza he was pleasantly surprised to find a stationer’s. They were just closing for the afternoon when he slipped in, attracting a look of exasperation from the shopkeeper. He bought himself two hard-backed lined notebooks and five blue and one red pens. He loved pens. He had no nostalgia for fountain pens, and had always disliked biros. The new pens, with their gel ink, were a real pleasure. He especially liked the ones with a thick nib that somehow produced sharp thin lines. Although he might draw imperfect ovals and squares, arrows and messy underlining, he liked his actual script to be neat, almost in block capitals. He hated to misspell, because the correction always looked so messy and spoiled the aesthetics of the page, whereas to leave the misspelling was an assault to the eye and distracted him from everything else. The notebooks in a plastic bag, the pens inside his pocket, he resumed his meandering journey through the narrow alleyways. He could hear the sound of televisions, most of them tuned into the early evening news. Invisible children shouted out names, announcements, and protests. Here I am! Mummy. Paolo? Zia Marina! Noooo! I didn’t. He heard the percussion of plates, glasses, silverware being laid on tables for early family supper. The smell of slow-frying onions and garlic and the soft wetness of boiling pans filled the air, and he realized with a pang that he was hungry.

  Finding nowhere much better than where he had been, he returned to the bar, noting at once two large new arrivals, both of whom were dressed in Adidas tracksuits and sported gold jewellery on their wrists. They were joined by a man in a less blatantly criminal get-up who, he was now certain, had been several steps behind him ever since he had left the stationer’s.

  He ordered a toasted sandwich and beer from the bar boy, and ostentatiously unfolded his pink newspaper. Several minutes later, he remembered why he had avoided Il Sole 24 Ore all his life. It was like trying to understand algebra written in Greek. He rustled the pages for the benefit of the watching men. Four whole pages were dedicated to rows and columns of numbers and abbreviations. How did people read this? He searched for an article containing more words than numbers, and found one; but it was not illuminating. A second article persuaded him he should probably use his wealth to push up food prices, though it did not explain how. After reading it, he felt immoral and hungrier than ever.

  The beer, which was slightly against his own rules, though he had been managing his drinking pretty well over the past few months, was deliciously refreshing. Half an hour later, he ordered a second.

  How had he managed to get stuck in this place? Come to that, how had he managed to get stuck in Italy? He had money now. If he wanted, he could turn his leave of absence into retirement and go back to the United States. It was all a big mistake his being here. All those years ago, he had left junior high school in Seattle, unaware he would never go back. His parents were taking a two-year sabbatical in Italy to study art history. Then they extended it, though his mother lost her teaching post. And then . . .

  The shock of scuola media and liceo in Italy and the need to fit in had made him fluent in the Roman dialect within a year. But he did not become properly Italian until his parents were killed and the people who were kindest to him were the police. Whether casual or traumatic, none of his life-changing decisions had been his decisions. Only by looking back could he see the vast distance he had travelled.

  He finished his second beer and weighed up the pros and cons of challenging the men in tracksuits and their older companion. Niki’s men, he was sure of it. They had spent far too much time not looking at him. They might as well have been holding placards with his name on.

  He was halfway down his third beer, and feeling pretty relaxed and happy, when a shadow fell across his table. He looked up to see a woman standing in front of him. She wore a soft baby-blue cotton tracksuit with white drawstrings hanging over her thighs. She signalled the young waiter, who had come out with the express purpose of gawking at her, and sat down in the chair opposite Blume. Her hair was light brown with auburn highlights. Her eyebrows had been plucked into two inverted commas, and her eyes seemed to have no colour. Her fleshy lips and crooked nose reminded him incongruously of a boxer, but she was slight and feminine.

  ‘Inspector Blume?’

  He was too surprised to hear his name to object to the demotion in rank. His hand reached for his glass and he waved an apologetic arm over the tabletop, which, he now noticed, was covered in bread crumbs and rings of beer. ‘Yes, that’s me. Can I get you something. A drink?’

  She tossed her hair back in what he felt was a contemptuous gesture, and suddenly he felt put out. She was young and though her features were fine, her face was hard, and with her eyes narrowed like that he could imagine her old, ugly. She tossed her hair again.

  ‘Your hair looks like orange marmalade,’ he said. ‘Maybe you were going for a tiger look? It would be nice tied back, I think.’

  ‘Are you drunk, Inspector?’

  ‘Commissioner. Semi-retired. To whom am I speaking?’

  ‘My name is Nadia Antonescu.’

  Chapter 17

  The man who had met Nadia and Alina where the dinghy pilot let them off made it clear by the repetition of the word polizia and a mime show in which he fastened his wrists with invisible handcuffs that unless they wanted to be picked up by the police, they were to follow him. Did they have passports? Did they want the police? Prison? None of these things? Well, he crooked a finger, they had better follow him.

  Nadia made a beckoning motion across the bar table at Blume. ‘He went like that with his finger, and we followed. Like sheep.’

  ‘Because you had no passports?’

  ‘Because we had nowhere else to go, we were frightened, hungry, and tired.’

  ‘Do you have a passport now?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Would you arrest me if I didn’t?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Are you going to keep interrupting?’

  ‘No.’

  She told him how they had followed the man on foot through dirty streets full of vendors and hard faces, getting buzzed by boys on motorini until they reached a pizzeria. The man sent them into the empty kitchen and indicated that they should wait there. He made no attempt to explain for what or whom. The money was gone and with it the last of their bargaining power. They were tired, and neither could speak or understand Italian. Waiting was the only option.

  After half an hour or so, without anyone disturbing them, Nadia began to search through the kitchen for food. She found plastic boxes full of shredded mozzarella in a fridge, and some crusts of bread. Alina shook her head in disgust.

  ‘It’s all there is,’ said Nadia. ‘There are tins of tomatoes, too, but we can’t eat them.’

  She ate the mozzarella, which was cold, wet, and rubbery, and gnawed at the hard bread. As long as they were not sent back to Istanbul. They might be deported to Romania, but would that be so bad? Besides, wasn’t Romania in the EU now, whic
h meant – she was not sure what it meant for someone without a passport. The important thing was not to be sent back to Turkey. She wondered if an international arrest warrant had been issued for Alina. Would they even report the death to the police? She knew the Russians despised the Turkish police. Either way, getting caught by the Russian mafia or Turkish police was not something she wanted to happen. And she had cast her lot in with Alina when they ran together.

  Alina came and sat down beside her again on the dirty kitchen floor. ‘If we get caught, Nadia, I’ll tell them you had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Hey.’ Nadia hugged her. ‘We won’t get caught.’

  ‘At least we made it to Italy,’ said Alina. She looked around the deserted kitchen with its cold ovens. ‘Even if it’s not a hair salon in Milan.’

  ‘We might make it yet,’ said Nadia.

  ‘Sure. And then maybe we’ll go to the Harry Potter University of London.’

  Peeking out from behind the door, they could see the man who had brought them here seated in the empty pizzeria playing with his phone. Once he looked up and caught Nadia looking and shouted at her. Italian was a lot like Romanian, but his meaning would have been clear in any language. She retreated into the kitchen again.

  Over an hour had passed before they heard voices. Two men had joined the first at the table. They were smoking and chatting, spinning cigarette packets and car keys on the table. Nadia had found an angle from which she could spy without being seen. Occasionally she fancied she could understand some of what they were saying. Twice the man pointed in the direction of the kitchen, but no one came to fetch them.

  Another half hour passed and the group was joined by a fourth man. Nadia could see from the way the first three reacted, tensing up and quieting down, that this fourth man was not part of the group. The atmosphere had tightened, as soon as he walked in, even though the first three continued ostentatiously to shout, laugh, smoke, shove each other playfully.

  The new arrival, an unprepossessing short man, had brought a sports bag with him. From the tight fit of his shirt and trousers, he looked like the sort who might exercise fanatically to try and compensate for his unimpressive body. He dropped the bag on the table, and the man who had brought them here, the man she was now thinking of as the owner of the pizzeria, unzipped it. He pulled out a wad of banknotes, said something that made everyone laugh, and then pulled out another and another and another. The fourth man, who did not look nervous but seemed to be sweating quite a lot, retrieved his now empty bag. The owner handed out bundles to his companions, and they started counting.

  It was at this moment that Alina burst out of the kitchen brandishing a curved grey pizza knife with a dull top and edges too broad to be very dangerous. But what it probably lacked in sharpness, it made up for in size. Nadia stood frozen at the doorway in horror as her friend rushed up to the table, screaming that she would cut her own throat rather than be sent back to Istanbul. One of the three men stood up and pulled a gun, but Alina did not notice. She was now holding the flat top of the blade at her own throat, tears streaming down her face, shouting that she could easily take her own life right then, and that they were to let her friend Nadia go.

  All in Romanian.

  The men all looked at her, and then each other, and suddenly the pizzeria owner burst out laughing, and said something that, though Nadia could not understand, must have been obscene, because she recognized the style of guffaw it drew from his underlings. The fourth man, the one who had brought the money, smiled but did not laugh. The owner signalled at the one who had drawn the gun, but Alina spun round suddenly and waved the knife at him. Almost casually, he flipped the gun backwards and pistol-whipped her to the ground, and Nadia rushed out to save her, cursing the man in Turkish, Russian, English, and Romanian.

  There was a lot of blood streaming from Alina’s forehead and a deep gash across the bridge of her beautiful nose, still lightly freckled like the top of her cheeks. Nadia sat down on the floor and cradled her friend’s head, stroking her red hair and getting blood all over herself. She felt Alina, who had closed her eyes against the blood, beginning to relax in her arms. The blow had stunned her. Nadia bent her head down as she whispered to Alina not to sleep. Alina murmured something, and relaxed still more.

  The men began talking again, with a little more animation, and Nadia knew it was about them. But then the conversation calmed down again and she was no longer sure. No one ordered her to leave, and no one gave her a rag with which to wipe the blood from Alina’s face, now quite serene even as a deep bruise appeared on her forehead. Nadia almost envied her friend the peace.

  She might have been sitting there under the table at the feet of the men for 20 minutes or two hours. All she knew was that at one point their meeting was over and they stood up to leave. She simply bent her head down and buried her face in Alina’s hair.

  Someone tapped her on the shoulder. Quite gently. She looked up to see the small man holding out a white towel. She took it and began to wipe Alina’s face, but the blood had dried. The man took back the towel, went into the kitchen, dampened it, and came back. He watched her as she cleaned up Alina’s face. Then they got her sitting up on a chair. They were the only three people left behind. The man lifted Alina’s eyelid with his thumb with an expert gesture, such as a doctor might make. Then he took out a pale green handkerchief and wiped his brow.

  Half an hour later, Nadia was sitting in the back seat of a Range Rover, Alina’s head in her lap while their sweaty saviour, if that’s what he was, drove at excessive speed down the road leading out of Bari. About every 100 metres stood prostitutes, usually in pairs. She expected him to stop at any moment and tell her to stand at the side of the road like all the others, but he kept driving. As he drove, she felt her eyes beginning to close from tiredness. The man would not stop talking, even though she understood nothing he was saying. After a while, he shut up and put on the radio, and she fell asleep.

  ‘The talkative man with the money in the sports bag was Niki?’ asked Blume.

  ‘The man who took us away with him, yes.’

  ‘What was that money for?’ asked Blume. ‘Cocaine? Niki deals, doesn’t he?’

  Nadia shrugged. ‘He has a nightclub that is frequented by rich kids and politicians. They expect things. I told you I saw him give those men money. I never said he took anything from them. Except us.’

  ‘That’s illegal, too.’

  ‘If you ask were we trafficked, we will say no.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we were rescued, not trafficked, by Niki. I have no idea what the money was about. If you force me to testify, I might forget all about it.’

  ‘Why risk telling me all this?’

  ‘For Alina.’

  ‘He rescued you, but you still work for him in his nightclub?’

  ‘I can leave whenever I want.’

  ‘And Alina, she could leave too, whenever?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So maybe that’s what she did,’ said Blume. ‘See, there is a bit missing from your story. Running at a group of armed criminals with a knife, even a blunt one, is an act of desperation. She held it to her own throat, too, and threatened to kill herself. It sounds to me like she was very keen not to go back to Turkey, am I right?’

  Nadia called over the bar boy and ordered a glass of white wine for herself and looked inquisitively at Blume.

  ‘I’ll have another beer,’ he said. ‘What happened in Turkey?’

  Nadia said nothing.

  ‘Is it the sort of thing that if you told me, I, as a public official, might be forced to report it?’

  Nadia closed her eyes, and raised her face towards the sun.

  ‘What I am thinking,’ Blume spoke to her upturned profile, ‘is that whatever happened in Turkey might have finally caught up with her here. Maybe Alina had to run again. Maybe she is destined to spend her life running.’

  ‘It’s an intelligent theory,’ said Nadia. ‘But I don’t think
that’s it.’

  ‘Well, I can’t tell unless I know what happened in Turkey.’

  ‘And I would prefer not to say.’

  ‘Which is why I can do nothing to help.’

  ‘If it had anything to do with Turkey, I would have heard about it.’

  ‘Were you involved in whatever it was?’ asked Blume.

  ‘No, but they – the people in Turkey – don’t know that.’

  ‘Has it ever occurred to you that Niki might have sold you out? Or just Alina?’

  The bar boy came over with their drinks, except instead of a glass of wine, he carried a whole bottle and two glasses, as well as the beer ordered by Blume, on a tray. With a flourish, he placed a steel bowl of salted nuts on the table between them. ‘It’s all been taken care of. The beers, too. The man said to give you a full bottle.’

  ‘Who was this?’

  ‘The ones in the tracksuits,’ said the boy.

  Blume looked up just in time to catch the man who had followed him, the older one, dressed in cheap grey slacks and a shiny fake leather jacket, openly taking pictures of them from the corner. It was as if he had been waiting for Blume to look up.

  Blume made to get up and go over to him, knocking some of his beer over the table. Nadia tugged at his sleeve. ‘Sit down. You can’t arrest him for photographs, and if you’re interested in finding out who he is, that’s Hristjian, he works for Niki. Niki always makes sure he has photographs of everyone. It’s standard practice for him.’

  As she spoke, the group got up and left, the older one directing a wink at Nadia and Blume as he passed their table.

  ‘They paid for my drinks to compromise me; now they’re taking a photo of me with you, presumably for the same reason.’

  ‘Yes, if you had a wife, maybe. The bar boy will remember they paid – but it is not much. I am not part of some plot to discredit you. I am here for Alina. Have you made an enemy of Niki?’

  ‘He sent those men and you. I mean, you’re his whore, right? How did you even know I was here?’