Bitter Remedy: An Alec Blume Case

by Conor Fitzgerald

  ‘I think you should leave,’ he told her.

  ‘No. Not yet. Don’t you leave either, please? Find out the truth. I’ll act with Niki like nothing has happened.’

  ‘Can you manage that?’

  ‘Yes. I’m tough.’

  ‘OK, then.’ He knew it was wrong to leave her like this, but the hunt was on. Suddenly his being here made sense. Destiny had put him here. He had been dreading the empty hours in Monterozzo, now he feared he might not have long enough.

  He took Nadia’s phone number and gave her his. Solicitously, he bent down to pull the duvet over her shoulders, but she pushed it off. ‘I’m not cold any more,’ she said.

  He straightened up and found himself looking at a shelf of photographs of Nadia and a young redhead with a slightly upturned nose, high cheekbones, fleshy lips, and a smile that seemed to be at once shy and knowing. Hello, Alina, he thought to himself. He scanned the shelf for a close-up, and found one next to some Orthodox icon of Mary. In this picture, he could make out the freckles on her cheeks and nose, which definitely had a slight bump along its ridge, presumably from the pistol-whipping but plausibly from any one of the many beatings this child had received at the hands of men throughout her brief life. Without saying anything, he took the photograph and left.

  Chapter 20

  Blume parked the SUV back where they had taken it from, and continued on foot through the steep streets of the town, thankful to see no crowd and no blocked tow-truck when he reached the fateful corner. Indeed, he met no one at all outside, though it was only a little after nine.

  He varied his route a little, entering twice into cul-de-sacs, but it was hard to get completely lost in a place so small when his destination was simply its highest point. He was breathless by the time he arrived. Like the rest of the town’s inhabitants, the old woman had gone indoors, and her house, the size of which was hard to determine from outside owing to the narrowness of the street and the general absence of clear divisions in the stone-faced line of buildings, did not even look inhabited, but the warm scent of slow-frying garlic from somewhere inside it told him it was.

  Seeing no intercom or bell, he knocked, softly at first, then harder when no one came. He placed his palm on the heavy wood door, pushed gently, and stepped in as the door swung open, his nose appreciating the delicious smell of cooking food before his eyes adjusted to the darkness.

  ‘Permesso?’

  He was in a small vestibule filled with the ancient relics of someone who had once led an active life. Cracked leather boots, musty umbrellas, sweaters and coats on hooks. He went through the next door, which led him into a far larger room with unadorned walls, once whitewashed, now greying. To his right was a fusty counter, possibly intended as a reception desk. It was so high that if the old woman had been behind it, she would have been quite invisible. ‘Anyone here?’ he asked of the desk, relieved when no one stepped out from behind it. To his left a staircase went up to a landing before turning back on itself, to the right a door, and from behind the door the smell of cooking. He called out again. Nothing, but he heard a clink of metal on metal, the sound of a saucepan being placed on the stove. He was ravenous.

  How could he open the door without terrifying the elderly woman? He knocked on it.

  ‘Come in.’

  He pulled the door open and walked into an unexpectedly large kitchen, with a ceiling as high as three of his apartments stacked on top of each other. The walls were lined with enough copper pans to feed an army, all of them perfectly polished. The lighting was modern, and the work surfaces a mixture of old wood and modern steel. The large kitchen was redolent of unexpected wealth as well as food.

  ‘What’s cooking?’ he asked hopefully.

  ‘Your dinner. I expect you down in fifteen minutes. We don’t usually eat too late in this house,’ she said, without taking her eye from the frying pan and steaming pot. The stove was too high for her, and she was standing on a plastic step stool such as children use to reach the toilet. She had put on a white apron over her black dress and had perched glasses, which were hopelessly steamed up, on the end of her nose.

  ‘We?’

  ‘Yes, you and I.’ She stood down, took off her glasses, and peered in his direction, as if checking to see if she was talking to the right person. ‘Go back through that door, up the steps all the way to the last room. It’s open. The sheets are fresh and the blanket is clean, but the bed is not made. You’ll have to do that yourself. I don’t make beds, and I dismissed the girl.’

  ‘What girl?’

  ‘The one who made the beds and cleaned. That was several years ago. I have been managing perfectly well on my own since then. Now you don’t believe me that the linen is fresh, but I brought it up myself an hour ago and placed it on the bed. I hope you like the smell of lavender. The front door key is on top of the sheets. I may not always be in or awake when you come in.’

  ‘You knew I was coming back?’

  She showed her pearly teeth. ‘Telepathy.’

  ‘Oh. I see.’

  ‘God, don’t be so stupid, man. The young vigile came up here with your suitcase, which you left in some car, which he wanted to tell me all about for some reason. I had him take it up to your room. Telepathy, really, what do you take me for? I have no truck with superstition. Despite my age, I am not even a religious bigot – or a witch. I do believe in ghosts, mind. That’s inevitable when you live in this house. I notice you did not ask the price, which is €45 per night, by the way.’

  ‘They told me you are a princess.’

  She mockingly knighted herself with the wooden spatula. ‘Princess. Well, it’s nice to be appreciated.’ She softened the R, as they did up in Piedmont, as in France. It sounded forced to his ear. ‘Even if I know they use it to insult me. What else would you expect in miserable Monterozzo?’

  Montechwozzo. If not a princess, her accent certainly had aristocratic notes to it.

  ‘Cruel peasant mentality,’ she continued. ‘If you put crabs in a bucket, none ever escapes because the others pull him down. That is what they are like here. The information I have received is that you are a policeman who has been thrown out of the force as a result of some terrible scandal, and are now wandering about the town, sticking your nose into everyone’s business, hanging out with go-go dancers, and trying to seduce the little girl with that ridiculous name . . .’

  ‘Silvana?’

  ‘Exactly!’

  ‘You hear a lot from up here.’

  ‘News travels up, socially and geographically.’

  The princess, if that’s what she was, giggled like a little girl, and covered her mouth with her left hand, still in a flesh-toned glove, which must have been custom-made because she was missing her ring finger. She saw him notice and waggled her remaining fingers at him reprovingly. ‘Hurry up. Just wash your hands and come straight down again. I will not dine on cold pasta for your sake.’

  The top floor was six flights up, but Blume, looking forward to dinner and thinking of how he would manage his investigation of Niki, found his energy seemed to be increasing the more he climbed. He could feel his heart thumping away. It was noisy but seemed to be fluttering happily rather than hammering. His chest felt light, his head, too, but crystalline, as if his brain fluid had been replaced by carbonated water.

  He was therefore disappointed when he finally reached the top floor to see the long corridor tilt slightly on its axis, like some sort of fairground attraction, and even more surprised to find his knees felt weak, and that the blood pounding in his ears was deafening and painful. A great sense of fatigue shoved away the energy of a few seconds ago. He bent down until the dizziness passed, and, since he often felt he was under some sort of numinous observation and did not want even an imaginary being to see him suddenly so weak, pretended to be interested in the granite and marble composite of the floor, which was dull and old, though he could see how it would shine with a bit of treatment. All the pinks and reds and speckles of green would s
parkle.

  He took a shot of the migraine nasal spray he kept in his jacket pocket, but even before the medicine had time to work, the pain passed and the elation returned. He walked down the corridor, his legs more cautious than his freedom-loving mind. He searched for a song he might sing, just to check if he was breathless. Something told him he was. He could not think of a song. The corridors tilted back again. It was like walking down a ship’s galley in a storm, but without the seasickness.

  Blume entered the small room, monastic in its sparseness. The bed, which took up about half the space, was heaped with multicoloured blankets. A religious icon on the whitewashed wall above the bed was the only decoration. A dresser with an oval mirror sat to the left of the window. A tiny bathroom was off to the right. The floor was white tiled and spotless. The clean sheets and blankets on the unmade bed seemed excessive for the time of year, but none of the heat from outside seemed to penetrate, and the rectangle of blue sky visible through the narrow window at the end of the room looked cold. He went over to the window and pressed his forehead against the glass, and was rewarded with a riot of descending rooftops with red and yellow tiles. The walls of the houses were orange in the setting sun, and seemed far warmer than top room in which he now stood.

  From his suitcase he retrieved his phone charger and found a socket behind the bed. He washed his hands in the basin, splashed some water on his face, less to wash himself than to prepare for the call he now made.

  ‘Caterina?’

  ‘You! How’s your flower-power course going?’

  How the hell had she worked that out?

  ‘Great. They make us turn off our phones. It’s sort of a detox spiritual thing.’

  ‘You must be the star pupil then, since you never turn it on.’

  ‘You know how it is. Being on call all the time is so much part of the job, it’s important to switch off when I’m on leave.’

  ‘When are you coming back?’

  ‘I took indefinite leave, so maybe a few months?’

  ‘I meant when are you coming back to Rome?’

  ‘Oh. I don’t know: a day or two. Three? Do you want me to visit when I do?’

  ‘You should know the answer to that.’

  Caterina was forever saying things like that to him. Things that were self-evident to her were mysterious to him. Maybe, as she said, he should know, but he didn’t; whereas to her it was so obvious as not to merit a response. He wondered whether the right answer was yes or no. Whatever it was, he was not going to walk into the trap of committing himself to either.

  ‘I was just checking in.’

  ‘After three weeks’ silence.’

  ‘Is it that long? I think I might have tried to call last week.’

  ‘I think it might have shown up on my phone if you had.’

  He peered out over the rooftops. Beyond the last of them the mountain fell away, and below that stretched the garden, part of which would now be completely dark in the shadow of the cliff.

  ‘Alec. Are you OK there? You sound far away. You haven’t left the country or something? You’d be capable of that.’

  ‘I’m fine. How’s Alessia?’

  ‘There you go changing the subject,’ said Caterina, but he heard her voice soften. She was like one of those teachers who knew when their students were trying to distract them from the lesson, but couldn’t help themselves all the same. ‘Little Miss is behaving very strangely this evening.’

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ said Blume.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong, she’s actually sleeping. That’s what’s strange.’

  ‘I hope I didn’t wake her with my call.’

  ‘Of course not. I am glad you called at last,’ she said.

  ‘I am glad I called, too. Actually, now that I think about it, I was wondering if you could do me a favour.’

  She had a special way with her silent pauses, which seemed to involve some mysterious slowing down of time. Caterina could create a universe that had a life-cycle of two seconds yet the capacity to hold an infinity of recrimination. When she spoke again, her voice was flat. ‘A favour.’

  ‘I’d just like to check out something. Have you got a pen?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  Blume gave her Niki’s name, address, approximate age. ‘I think he’s from Molfetta.’ He thought for a moment before supplying her also with Domenico Greco’s name.

  ‘Are these friends you met among the flowers?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘Friends with criminal records, I am guessing. And, tell me, are they there now with you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And I get these files on what grounds?’

  ‘I was thinking about that. Go to Magistrate Alice Saraceno, she likes me.’

  ‘Yes, she does, doesn’t she?’

  Blume did not rise to the bait. ‘Ask her from me, please.’

  ‘She likes you that much?’

  ‘Saraceno used to work with a magistrate called Della Valle, whom she loathed. I remember her mentioning Della Valle was an investigating magistrate in this district. It’s a long shot, but you could suggest I may have something that might embarrass him.’

  ‘And this is your idea of relaxation therapy?’

  ‘Please?’

  ‘Alec, do you actually know what “extended leave” means? Do you know how dangerous is it to act on your own? And, do I need to say this, a suspended cop acting without the instruction of a magistrate is about the most effective way of rendering everything he touches inadmissible as evidence in court and getting himself into disciplinary trouble. More to the point, what the hell are you doing?’

  ‘Just passing the time. I got a bit bored with the herbal bliss and stuff.’

  ‘What is this about?’

  ‘Well, if you find out some background, maybe you’ll get a good idea and we’ll have some common ground on which to start a conversation about these two. Now there is, in fact, another little favour.’

  She greeted this, too, with silence.

  ‘They found out I was a policeman, and I promised I’d look into something. Just for appearances, you understand.’

  ‘I don’t understand, no. Who are “they” and what is this other favour?’

  Blume remembered he was supposed to have gone down to dinner ages ago, and tried to summarize the situation as quickly as he could, but it still took some time.

  ‘So,’ said Caterina slowly, when he had finished, ‘there is a missing Romanian girl who is connected to this Niki, who you think is a criminal of some sort. And all this has to with Bach herbal remedies how?’

  ‘Niki is a criminal. A minor one, maybe, but pimping is the sort of thing that brings you into contact with serious criminals.’

  ‘You are absolutely sure he is a pimp?’

  ‘I don’t like him.’

  ‘Oh, I see. You don’t like him. That’s different then. Maybe you feel he’s not nice enough to . . . let me see . . .’ She checked, or made a show of checking back in her notes, ‘Silvana? The young woman who’s teaching you about the birds and the bees or Nadia the dancer? And you want me to do what, exactly, about the disappearance of this Alina Paulescu?’

  ‘You still have contacts in the Department for International Cooperation from back when you worked in Immigration Affairs, right?’ He left the room and started making his way down the stairs.

  ‘Call in SCIP for this? It’s an interforce agency, Alec. Special favours get noticed. And unlike you, I have limits. Do you expect me to put out an Interpol yellow notice?’

  ‘If you don’t want to help me, forget it,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t. Have you found someone, Alec? Part of me won’t mind if the answer is yes, but please don’t lie.’

  ‘No, I am going to tell you everything when I get back, promise.’

  ‘Are you in love?’

  ‘I don’t even know that what’s supposed to mean.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose you
do. Are you with someone now? A woman?’

  ‘Nothing remotely like that. Look, I really need to go down to dinner, now.’

  ‘Oh god, yes. You mustn’t miss dinner,’ said Caterina.

  He entered the kitchen where his hostess sat waiting for him. One plate of no longer steaming pasta sat on the table, and she wore a severe expression on her face.

  ‘I thought it might be nice to have company for once, but I had my dinner alone again.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Blume. ‘People just keep phoning at the most inconvenient time.’

  ‘Most inconsiderate of them. One should never phone after half past seven in the evening.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Blume. ‘People just don’t think of others nowadays.’

  ‘Do you always talk in clichés, or is it for my benefit because I am old?’

  Blume liked this direct little woman’s use of sarcasm. ‘Because you’re old,’ he said.

  ‘I have never heard such insolence. By the way, it takes a lot of effort to cook these red caps. First one side, gills down till all the water is gone, then the other side with some garlic, and finally a splash of white wine. The linguine were perfect too.’ She paused for effect. ‘Fifteen minutes ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry I was late. Really.’

  ‘I’m sure you had a good reason. Now I get to watch you eat. I hope you’re embarrassed at least.’

  ‘I am. Delicious, by the way. And not too cold.’ He peeled a strip of pasta and a mushroom off his shirt front and put it back on his plate.

  ‘No one ever taught you table manners?’

  ‘I’ve lived a lot on my own,’ said Blume.

  ‘So have I, but I can still manage not to slobber my food all over myself, even with only these four and a half fingers you have been staring at since we met.’

  ‘I wasn’t . . .’

  ‘Yes, you were. And now you’re blushing. Go on, eat up, I won’t say anything even if you get it in your hair.’