Bitter Remedy: An Alec Blume Case

by Conor Fitzgerald

  Outside the corridor, stairs, and house were creaking. If he allowed his imagination free rein, it sounded like people were walking up and down outside his door. He heard whispering, then whispered to himself to compare the sounds. He climbed back into his blanket, and dialled the number Caterina had sent him. It was answered on the third ring.

  Chapter 24

  ‘I am looking for Davide Di Cagno.’

  ‘Speaking, who is this?’ The voice of a suspicious man.

  ‘Alec. That is to say, Police. I am a commissioner with the squadra mobile of Rome. My name is Blume.’

  ‘Are you sure you have the right person? I have no connections in Rome. And isn’t it a bit late to be calling?’

  ‘It’s about your brother, Giuliano.’

  ‘Really?’ For a moment the voice seemed hopeful. But the note of caution returned immediately. ‘How do you know it’s him?’

  ‘Do you think he’s alive?’ Blume regretted being so brutal with the question, but hope must have died a long time ago in that family.

  ‘No. I expect you are calling about his remains. Have you found them or not?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Blume.

  ‘Then what the fuck is this about?’

  ‘I was hoping to reopen the case of his disappearance.’

  ‘No point in that, unless something has changed. You have not found the body. What is this, some sort of cold case file you have been assigned?’

  Not assigned, thought Blume. Not quite a cold case either. Alina made it current. The man was saying something else, and Blume realized he had allowed his mind to wander. He remembered he had some Provigil tablets in his suitcase. They were supposed to help with concentration, and stop daytime sleeping. To be on the safe side, he took two. He needed his wits about him.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well?’ demanded the voice.

  Blume found he could not swallow the pills. He ran into the bathroom and gulped down mouthfuls of freezing water directly from the tap. The pills went down and his throat felt better. ‘Sorry, I missed that.’

  ‘So you are not interested. Then I think that’s all we have to say on this. Goodbye.’

  ‘Wait!’ He needed to say something. ‘Domenico Greco is dead.’

  ‘No, he’s not.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Greco’s not dead.’ The voice was certain and accusing. ‘What game are you playing here?’

  ‘It sounds to me that you would not be sorry to hear if he was,’ said Blume.

  ‘Someday it’ll be true, won’t it?’

  ‘How about we get him in prison from now until then?’

  ‘House arrest, you mean. He’s too old for prison. You’re supposed to be the cop. What difference would that make to him? He’s been happy not to leave his garden all these years.’

  Davide had certainly not forgotten.

  ‘Do you mind me asking you how old you were when your brother, Giuliano, allegedly ran away with Signora Greco?’

  ‘I was fourteen.’

  ‘And do you agree with the finding that he left, of his own free will?’

  ‘Look, who did you say you were?’

  ‘I am someone interested in reopening the case.’

  ‘You said you were a policeman? Is that true?’

  ‘Yes, Davide,’ said Blume. ‘That part is true. Can I call you Davide?’

  ‘What part isn’t true then?’

  ‘I am writing out the story.’ He grabbed the pen again. ‘So, Davide, would Giuliano have done that?’

  ‘Why are you talking in that tone?’

  ‘What tone?’ asked Blume.

  ‘I don’t know. Like it is really urgent. It’s twenty years ago now.’

  ‘It is urgent. This is the last chance we are going to get. You are lucky to get this second chance. Almost no one is allowed to correct the past. You can. So, tell me now, would your brother have upped and left for Australia and never contacted anyone again?’

  ‘Of course not. Neither Australia nor anywhere else.’

  ‘So what do you think happened?’

  ‘None of it matters any more. Everyone who mattered is dead. My parents, too. As for Giuliano and Marina, they both died a long time ago, I am sure of it. My brother wouldn’t have left me like that. He wouldn’t have left our parents. He knew Dad was sick. Sure, he had some fights with Mamma, but he would never have done that. Even if he had decided to run away – people can do crazy things – he would not have tortured us by remaining silent. Someone killed him. Greco or, more likely, Greco had someone do it.’

  ‘Why did your family accept the disappearance? Why did you not make more of a fuss?’

  ‘Lots of reasons.’

  ‘Will you tell me some of them?’

  ‘It’s very painful to think back. It’s humiliating.’

  ‘I understand your father tried to get a proper inquiry opened, didn’t he? Then what happened?’

  ‘He was bullied, scorned, and then he died. That’s what happened. Greco had money, we were poor. He had the lawyers, political friends, and other sorts of friends, too. It was made clear to us that he could, if he wanted, get someone to visit and hurt us. The investigating magistrate was in his pocket. Dad was sick and had no energy. Mamma, well, she was so ashamed about the revelation my brother had been fooling around with a married woman that she didn’t even want to speak about him. She disowned him – at least at first, though she had more than forgiven him by the time she died.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I tried again in 1999. But nothing came of it. My parents were dead, the magistrates had all moved on, and the world had changed.’

  ‘What about now, are you doing something about it again?’

  ‘Is that some sort of accusation?’

  ‘No!’ Blume was taken aback.

  ‘It sounded like one. There is still a part of me that imagines him there, happy in Australia or South America or somewhere else in Italy.’

  Blume wrapped the blanket around himself. Davide’s voice did not sound right to him, but he couldn’t say why.

  ‘Silvana,’ said Blume. He had nothing to follow it up with. He just threw out the name to see the reaction, and find out if Davide remembered the daughter. After all, he might even be her uncle.

  The line went dead.

  To keep warm, he dragged himself over to the bed and lay on it without taking off his clothes.

  In his dreams, a healthier and fitter, younger and more alert version of himself was to be found walking up and down the corridors of the empty house, making creaking sounds on the floorboards that scared the feverish version of himself in bed. The healthy Alec Blume was able to vault over the box hedge of the garden, walk unscathed across the marshlands, and even ascend without any effort to the second and third floors of the Romanelli mansion, and fly around it, peering into its windows, watching the people inside, floating upwards to view it from above. Stretching out his arms, he found he could fly, back to Rome, even over the ocean, and all the way back home if he wanted. With exhilarating velocity, he pulled up into a rapid ascent as he reached the black cliff face overlooking the garden, but his angle of ascent was too steep and he could hear the stall alarm beeping at him now, warning of an imminent crash to earth. Three beeps, stall, stall.

  He reached out his hand and grabbed the beeping phone from the floor, and opened one eye. It was, unbelievably, ten minutes to midnight, and a new message had arrived from Caterina. He forced himself awake to read it, and grabbed his pen and notebook.

  Marina Loconsole had only an elder sister called Serena. Their father had died when they were children. Their mother died of cancer on New Year’s Eve 1999. In 2000 just after her mother’s death, Serena filed a suit against Domenico Greco in which she sought custody of her niece. The suit got nowhere. Serena, unmarried, died in 2003 of an overdose of pain relievers. The coroner ruled accidental death. Don’t ask me for more help.

  Another woman silently killed. Blume resolved to wr
ite her back into existence, but the pen dropped from his hand and rolled under the bed.

  Chapter 25

  When he awoke in the morning, he felt light and thin, as if he had been on a diet for a month. He also felt hungry, thirsty, and dirty. He dealt with the thirst first, and by the time he had finished, water was sloshing about in his stomach and his momentary lightness was gone. He had a shower, which was a miserable trickling and cold experience that required considerable courage when it came to washing his back, but when he put on some clean clothes, he felt better.

  He packed his suitcase, carefully separating clean and dirty clothes, took out a small shoulder bag, and put in his notebook, the documents he had got from the maresciallo inside it, along with Silvana’s book of children’s stories. Both these were going back to their owners this morning. He glanced inside at Silvana’s book again. Yes, the chunky handwriting still looked strange. He picked up the key for Niki’s car. That, too, would be returned.

  He shaved, splashed cologne on his face, and brushed his teeth. His phone was fully charged and showing 7:15. The house remained quiet, quieter than it had seemed at night. Houses did that. They liked to come alive at night, settle down in the morning, and allow the streets outside to make the noise. The rectangle of sky framed in the window was pale blue. The air shone, the roofs outside were a clay red and relaxing yellow, and when he opened the window, the air that came in, cooled by the hours of darkness and the stony buildings of the town, was fresh, though he could already detect hints of pollen, perfumes, and cut grass. It was going to be a hot day. One of those early summer days, that gave respite in the early hours and the evening, but rose to August levels of intensity in the middle. He took off his jacket, and folded it into his suitcase.

  At 8 o’clock, he would go down to the Carabinieri and make an official denunciation of Domenico Greco. They would have to take down his statement.

  His efforts to reopen an old case would not go unpunished by various superiors, no matter what the outcome, but that was all right. He had made commissioner, which was an honourable position. He was not going any higher anyhow. He had loads of money. He had a blue passport with a big bald fucking eagle on it. He could go wherever he wanted and take Caterina with him, too. Show her a big country.

  He unlocked the door and went downstairs, checking once again for signs of the princess, of which there were none. The €200 was still there. Locking the front door, he left the house and walked through the town, now familiar, out past the walls, and to the Carabinieri station, his notebook at the ready. He told the appuntato at the desk, a different young man from the other day, that he wanted to file a report.

  ‘Lost something?’ The appuntato handed him a piece of lined paper. Blume explained that he wanted an official record of statement concerning a crime, and the Carabiniere looked pained. ‘I’m the only one here right now . . .’

  ‘When is the maresciallo coming in?’

  ‘In about half an hour?’

  ‘I’ll wait,’ said Blume. ‘I have some work to do anyhow.’ He took a seat on a wooden bench, and pulled out his notebook and the file on Greco.

  So Marina boarded the train thinking she was going to Molfetta, which is what she in fact did. She never had any plans to stay on the train as far as Foggia where her husband told the police he was waiting.

  Greco made a great show of being seen at the Foggia station. He got a taxi to the station and he got a taxi back. Both taxi drivers remembered him and were part of his alibi, and this was one of the reasons given by the preliminary judge for throwing out the case. His car was indeed broken down and at the mechanic’s.

  The mechanic also testified in Greco’s favour, further strengthening his case. While at the station, around the time his wife was supposed to arrive, he made a point of getting into a fight with some stranger.

  He underlined the last part of that. It stood out like a sore thumb. Any decent investigator should know when a suspect was overdoing his alibi. The rule was simple: if a suspect went to a great deal of trouble to get himself noticed in one place rather than another, the investigator should go to an even greater deal of trouble to check the exact times.

  This behaviour ensured that the stationmaster, other passengers, and, best of all, the railway police all confirmed his presence at the time his wife was supposed to be arriving.

  Why was he, Blume, the only person to see this? He felt that this detail merited special note. He took out a red pen, put an asterisk over the word ‘supposed’, and went to the last page and wrote:

  Greco may well have arrived at the station by taxi, but as he himself said in his statement – which needs to be read with greater impartiality – he arrived too early. That is the crucial point. He would have us believe that he stayed at the station patiently waiting for hours until tired and disappointed, not to say humiliated by the non-arrival of his wife, he got into a fracas with a stranger. It is sometimes hard to remember the absence of mobile phones. It used to be that whatever arrangements were made had to be kept until contact could be made again. Can we pull up some records to see whether Greco had one? If so, this fact would help the prosecution case. Public phones were often vandalized or not working, and calling his wife in Bari may have been difficult. Unfortunately for our argument, unless he had a mobile phone, it is quite possible that in 1993, a man might simply choose to wait for the next train and the next and the one after that, until the last one of the evening.

  Here, for the benefit of a geographically illiterate magistrate, he drew a few lines showing the relative positions of the towns.

  Having ensured his presence was registered in the station, perhaps he also asked the stationmaster or ticket clerk to confirm some train times, he walked out and stepped into a car and drove, or was driven, north to Molfetta, the town to which his wife had been called by her lover. Greco, remember, was claiming to be without a car – an unlikely story for a businessman of his calibre. We can assume another car was parked at the Foggia train station or nearby. It is easy to get one’s hands on a car when need be.

  I believe he drove alone because he had only one accomplice, Niki Solito, a young man and a native of Molfetta. (Molfetta, as far as I can see, has two main claims to fame: (1) the conductor Riccardo Muti comes from there; (2) it is surrounded by carsic caves, many of them unexplored – and used for illegal toxic-waste dumping by the Sacra Corona Unita, which is precisely the sort of criminal organization with which a man such as Greco would have connections.)

  He frowned. There was something a bit rambling about his prose style. He was far less incisive than he thought. He crossed out the bit about Riccardo Muti.

  When he called Marina, for the worst betrayal he ever made and the last act of his life, Giuliano will have been a captive, possibly with a gun to his head. His captor, Niki, would need to have been armed, for he is a small man, who is heartless but not tough. It is therefore possible that Niki had help, and the help may even have been Greco’s. It may have been Greco himself who originally waylaid Giuliano at some isolated spot, and forced him at gunpoint or knifepoint into a car, then delivered him trussed and tied, perhaps beaten and cowed, too, to Niki to manage. However the moment of capture took place, we must assume that Giuliano was being held hostage by Niki when he made that treacherous phone call to a woman he was meant to love but betrayed out of cowardice. (It would be good not to emphasize this aspect until we have secured strong evidence from Giuliano’s brother. But it’s impossible to ascribe motives to a dead person. A pistol held against the warm throb of your temple is a terrifying thing. The idea of a bullet ripping though your pulsing brain is unthinkable, and yet it may be about to happen, and when you realize the unthinkable is not only possible but imminent, then you find it is easy to do unthinkable things. I can attest to this from personal experience.)

  And so we should be understanding of Giuliano, despite this last act. I see him as a broad-shouldered young man. There is one photo of him in the news clippings of the day. It
is a blurry enlargement of his ID card. To my eye, it shows the open face and good-natured eyes of a man who genuinely believed he could eventually win the hand as well as the heart of the married woman with whom he had fallen so desperately in love. I believe that he was hoping the trap for Marina would not be fatal.

  That was stupid. You cannot really tell much about people from looking at their faces. Maybe Giuliano was no great shakes after all. But Blume had met Niki, and knew him to be a coward, and glimpsed into the dark mind of Greco, too. He was becoming increasingly convinced now that Silvana was Giuliano’s daughter, because it seemed impossible that one such as Greco could generate such a light-hearted and sweet thing as Silvana, even if she might not be much of a writer. Maybe that was what was behind Greco’s idea of allowing her to be courted by Niki, who was a sort of adopted son. Blume liked his own thinking, but decided he would not write that bit up. He imagined Niki using threats against Giuliano’s family to persuade him to make that call. Niki would have pointed the gun in poor Giuliano’s face, and told him that if he did not call Marina the first bullet would be for him, but the next would be for his little brother, his father, and his mother. Blume wrote that part in. More than half an hour had passed. He looked questioningly at the appuntato, expecting a shrug, but the young man snapped to attention.

  ‘Something must have delayed the maresciallo.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Blume. ‘It’s hardly your fault.’

  An interesting aspect of the case is that the fact of an affair between Giuliano and Marina was never contested. The evidence was overwhelming. Letters were found in Giuliano’s house, phone records showed countless calls from one house to the other, and the call durations were themselves proof. The investigators even found hotel records in which both had signed their own names. The old law by which guests must produce a document of identification had proved its worth once again to the investigators, but would have served no purpose had the information not slipped out in the first place. We can imagine Greco, who had, what, 2 or 3 hours with Giuliano, as they waited for Marina’s arrival, sitting there, pen in hand taking down details, nodding in an understanding manner, chatting back to show he was not really that angry but needed details for his own peace of mind. And Giuliano, as proud of having a woman love him so as he was scared of Greco, will have sat there, giving as many details as he could, increasingly convinced that he was pleasing and mollifying his captor.