When the train pulled into the small station of Molfetta, Marina got off, a suitcase in either hand, and looked around. It takes no more than half a minute to establish whether someone is waiting for you or not at such a station. Seeing no one, the sense of confusion and alarm perhaps rising in her chest, she walked through the ticketing hall straight onto the small roundabout. The road at twelve o’clock looks down towards the sea. I have not personally reconnoitred the scene of the alleged crime. These last moments of Marina will have to be reconstructed with particular forensic care under the direction of the magistrate.
Blume sat staring at but not really seeing the Carabiniere, trying to imagine Marina arriving to her execution – maybe even suspecting it? Maybe thinking she might talk her husband out of it? Would she have known Niki? He would have been an unprepossessing young man, half a head smaller than she. She might have recognized him as someone who worked with her husband.
I know you are a friend of my husband’s, but I don’t remember your name.
Niki Solito: Allow me. He takes the suitcases.
Does she know now what is happening? She asks about Giuliano at this point.
Giuliano is fine. It’s more than he deserves. He’s waiting for you.
Then she draws a deep breath, and climbs into the car, preferring the back seat. Niki circles the piazza, and takes a road that leads away from the sea, towards the innumerable inland caves.
The appuntato sprang to attention again as the door to the station opened and Maresciallo Panfilo Angelozzi slowly squeezed his way through the gap. Following behind was Domenico Greco.
Chapter 26
‘I should have guessed this might happen,’ said Blume as they took their seats in the office.
Maresciallo Angelozzi bent his head down and rubbed his eyes for a long time with his fists. ‘Can we get this over with, please? It is utterly exhausting for everyone.’
Blume pulled the files out of his bag. ‘I wanted to return these files on Greco.’ He tossed them on to the desk in front of the maresciallo, who seemed reluctant to touch them. The photocopy enlargement of Greco’s driving licence slipped out and a younger Greco stared up at them. The maresciallo looked into the dead space between Blume and Greco.
Blume pulled out his notebook, and opened it. ‘I have taken down the details that matter, and added a few of my own, and nothing in that file is an original document, apart from a gun licence application. So even if it were to disappear, it would not matter.’
‘The gun licence is for shooting foxes and other vermin, Blume,’ said Greco, the first words he had spoken. ‘Just in case you wondered. So, Dottore, or Commissioner, what are you trying to do to me. And why? The maresciallo informs me you were thinking of making an official denunciation.’
The maresciallo made a grunting noise that fell diplomatically between affirmation and denial, but then, energized by a bright idea, sat up almost straight to say, ‘Would either of you gentlemen like a coffee?’
Curtly rejected by both his visitors, he folded his arms and lapsed into a sulk that soon took on the appearance of a nap.
‘Don’t you sometimes think, Signor Greco, that women are more trouble than they’re worth? Your wife all those years ago just upped and left you in the lurch. Isn’t that how it went?’
Greco glanced at the maresciallo, whose head had fallen a bit to the side.
‘Do we have to have this humiliating conversation here?’
‘I prefer it,’ said Blume. ‘Perhaps the maresciallo could prepare a verbale?’
The maresciallo bestirred himself and launched a resentful look at Blume. ‘A verbale? What for?’
‘Maybe we should be minuting this meeting,’ said Blume.
Maresciallo Angelozzi looked at Greco. ‘Is this a meeting? I thought it was a conversation. Do I have to call in the lad Paolo from outside? Then who would look after the desk?’
‘You could take my statement,’ suggested Blume.
‘Me?’ the maresciallo began wheezing. He continued wheezing as he bent down and spent some time with his face below the desk, and Blume eventually realized this was laughter. When the maresciallo finally resurfaced, it was with an old Casio tape recorder. ‘How about this?’ He pressed the button; there was a squeak and some hissing, then the tiny tinny voice of Gianni Morandi singing Fatti mandare dalla mamma could be heard. He popped out a brown cassette and frowned at it. ‘That’s funny . . .’
‘Let’s be reasonable,’ said Greco. ‘The maresciallo can be a witness to an informal conversation. If at the end of our conversation he feels that action needs to be taken, I am sure he will perform his duties. I will, if necessary, repeat everything I tell you here because all I have to say is that, for me, my wife, my ex-wife after the divorce in absentia, was always worth more than a little trouble.’
‘She and her lover took off for Australia?’
‘That’s what I heard,’ said Greco, his eyes unblinking, his jaw straight and unreadable. At least he had the decency not to smirk. ‘Of course, there is no telling if it’s true.’
‘Because Australian immigration has no record of her entering. I found that nugget in the very brief file compiled by the prosecuting magistrate in 1993.’
‘Mistakes are made, things were laxer back then. And before you say it, no record of her or Giuliano. I think they changed their names illegally so they would never be found. It can be done, you know.’
‘Between her disappearance and your reporting it . . .’
‘Ten days elapsed, yes. That seems very suspicious, I agree. I was humiliated. I could not bear it to be known that I was a cuckold. We southerners. . . .’ This time there was a hint of a smirk as he continued, ‘It is interesting though that his family did not report him missing.’
‘He was a young man. Ten days without contacting his family is not exceptional – I am sure they would have filed a missing person form eventually,’ said Blume, annoyed to find himself having to make up explanations. He should have woven that into the story, been prepared for it.
‘But they didn’t,’ said Greco. ‘And I did. The investigators at the time – No, forget it. I don’t even know why I am answering these insinuations.’
The maresciallo snuffled to show he was still there, though the expression on his face suggested that he did not want to be.
‘Humiliating,’ said Blume.
‘Yes. Which is why I left. I wanted to leave everything including the way I had been living. Also, I had this idea of a garden being ideal for bringing up a child. That’s why I chose it.’
‘How did you find it?’
‘I heard a place was open. They didn’t seem too bothered about whether I knew anything about gardening.’
‘Did you?’
‘My parents worked the land. And no one else wanted the job. It pays badly and is hard work. Also, I was lucky I made some friends on the town council.’ Greco rubbed his finger and thumb together.
The maresciallo smiled wistfully as if visited by a pleasant image in a dream.
‘You bribed them?’
‘Yes,’ said Greco. ‘I bribed them to get a low paying job that no one wanted. Are you going to try to do something about that, Blume?’
‘No, I’m not. You got rich from – let’s ignore your earliest past – factoring. It’s one of those terms I’ve heard all my life and never looked up properly.’
‘It’s like lending. That’s all there is to it.’
‘Uh-huh? Maresciallo, are you following this? Do you know about factoring?’
The maresciallo opened a sly eye. ‘Has it something to do with farms?’
‘Well, Maresciallo,’ said Greco, ‘let’s say you are a company, and you sell a whole load of . . . olive oil centrifuges.’
‘See? Farming instruments.’ The maresciallo looked pleased.
‘Centrifuges, washing machines, fresh pasta,’ continued Greco. ‘Then you sell your product to customers. These people then owe you money, right?’
‘Yes, we get that,’ said Blume impatiently.
But the maresciallo was enchanted to be included in so complex a discourse. He even went so far as to say, ‘I can see the logic there.’
‘But sometimes they take their time in paying. Sometimes it’s just the normal 30 days, sometimes three months, sometimes they have genuine problems, often they are cheats. For one reason or another, it takes longer than you can afford. So you go to a factoring company, and you ask them to buy your receivables, and give you the money right away, obviously taking a percentage. So if someone owes you €100, the factoring company may give you €90. Then it is up to the factoring company to get the money from the customer. If the customer never pays, the factoring company loses.’
‘Marvellous,’ said the maresciallo. ‘And you thought of this?’ He looked admiringly at Greco.
‘Yes, but a factoring company has to have a way of making sure the customer pays,’ added Blume. ‘How does it do that? Threats?’
‘Legal threats, yes. Lots of lawyers in the business,’ said Greco. The maresciallo nodded enthusiastically and glared at Blume, defying him to fault the logic.
‘So, obviously, the factoring company needs to have a lot of cash. It’s sort of like a bank in that way, right?’ said Blume.
The maresciallo frowned. Blume had lost him.
‘So you moved out of that profitable line of work and became a gardener. That’s not something you hear every day,’ said Blume.
‘St Francis of Assisi renounced his wealth,’ said Greco.
The maresciallo tapped his thumbs together in minute applause at the comparison.
‘And was Nicola Solito, Niki to his friends, one of the debt collectors?’ pursued Blume.
‘Niki was the accountant. Hardly a debt collector, him. The size of him.’
‘But you worked together and . . .’
In a burst of alertness, the maresciallo suddenly interrupted. ‘Niki as in Niki’s the club. That Niki? Your daughter’s, um, friend? I didn’t know he used to work for you, Mimmo. You should have told me that.’ The maresciallo looked sorely tempted to pick up a pen and write a note, but settled instead for a severe frown of concentration.
Blume opened his notebook and pretended to be looking for something. The maresciallo was listening properly now.
‘Mr Greco,’ said Blume, ‘On the day your wife ran away, you were in Foggia waiting for her there?’
Greco fingered his upper lip, and stayed silent.
‘You waited at the Foggia train station, and she never showed, I believe? And then when they eventually, reluctantly, investigated a bit, they found proof that she had in fact boarded at Bari on the train for Foggia. May I ask what you were doing in Foggia?’
‘Work.’
‘Fair enough. And back then, it was established that your wife got on the train bound for Foggia from Bari Central Station. How did they do that?’
‘Video footage.’
‘Damn, we cops are good. They managed to identify her from CCTV?’
‘They asked me to look at it, and I saw her. Just her.’
‘You saw her get on the train?’
‘Yes. I saw her. I can sue you for defamation. The maresciallo is my witness.’
‘Give me some more rope to hang myself with, then,’ said Blume. ‘And forgive me for saying none of this makes sense. If she was going to run away, why would she have gone to get that train? I mean, if she was planning to run off to Australia, or get away from you – I’m sorry if the memory is painful – why not get a flight out of there, a ferry to Greece, a train in the opposite direction?’
‘Maybe she meant to come to me, but changed her mind at the last moment.’
‘So she got off the train a few stops early? Do you think her lover, Giuliano, was waiting for her between Bari and Foggia?’
‘That’s a possibility, but the Carabinieri think she may have gone on to Rome, staying on the train longer rather than getting off early.’
‘The train went all the way to Rome, then? It was an intercity?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Because if not, she would have changed at Foggia where you say you were waiting. Wouldn’t you have seen her?’
‘One more word out of you, and I am going to denounce you here in this office.’
The maresciallo looked unhappy and made a calming gesture with his hands. ‘I am not following all this.’
‘Blume here is just trying to plant poisonous seeds of doubt in your mind,’ said Greco.
From the maresciallo’s face, Blume knew he had succeeded, though it might take ten slow conversations before the maresciallo actually understood anything. By now, it was a direct battle between him and Greco.
‘You think you have cracked it all wide open. But you haven’t. I loved my wife with all my heart. You can’t understand that because you don’t love your wife nearly enough.’
Blume felt the chill of the previous night seize hold again. Simply by introducing the idea of a wife, Greco was threatening Caterina. Greco knew Blume had received the message, which had sailed far over the maresciallo’s nodding head.
‘She’s not my wife,’ said Blume.
‘Exactly. That says everything about you. And your daughter? I had mine learning to walk in the grass beside me, playing in the warmth of the courtyard in the evening outside the lodge, playing hide and seek and lupo mangia frutta with her friends, while I stood and watched her grow. Where’s your daughter, Blume? What would you do if someone threatened her?’
Fuck. Not even the slumbering maresciallo could have missed that. ‘Maresciallo,’ said Blume. ‘Maresciallo!’
‘What? I’m listening.’
‘You recognize that for what it was?’
‘Mimmo here merely said . . .’
‘Never mind. I should have explained it better to you before this. This man wants to sue me for calumny. So let us be clear, then, about what I am saying. I believe Domenico Greco killed his wife and her lover, or got Niki to do it for him, or they did it together. That’s the hold Niki has over him. That’s why he is allowing his daughter, the one he claims to love so tenderly, to be importuned by that misfit with his discos and his prostitutes, his . . . creams, and tattoos and hairless chest, and plastic surgeon’s nose.’
‘Maresciallo,’ said Greco, ‘you do realize the Commissioner is talking about a case that was already closed in 1994?’
It was all too much for Panfilo Angelozzi. He stood up; he sat down; he spoke: ‘I suggest you two reach a settlement of some sort and present a coherent version of events. If you cannot come to agreement, then we shall take separate statements from you and pass them on to the office of prosecution.’
The phone on his desk rang. Never was a man more pleased to receive a call, but the pleasure did not last long. ‘What? Who? Are they sure? Santo Dio! No question that it might be . . . Because people sometimes throw rubbish down there. I see.’
He put down the phone. ‘Signori, please leave my office.’
They looked at him, both taken aback by the unexpected sound of real authority in his voice. ‘I am afraid something has come up. This –’ he waved his hand dismissively at them both, ‘can wait for another day.’
‘What’s happened?’ asked Blume.
‘I am not at liberty to say.’
‘We’re colleagues of a sort, remember?’ said Blume.
‘I believe you are on leave and,’ he nodded at Greco, ‘a civilian is present.’
‘I’m a commissioner of a murder squad, Maresciallo. I recognize the sort of call that you have just received. Where was the body found?’
‘You could never have heard . . .’ He peered at Blume’s ears suspiciously. ‘Then you will also recognize that I will not respond to such questions, and that you must leave now.’
Chapter 27
‘Give me a lift into town, Greco?’ said Blume, as they left the Carabinieri station.
‘Stramilamurt ca tin, ’mbam,’ snarled Greco. ‘We’re n
ot finished.’ He pushed past Blume and jumped into the old Fiat in which, only days ago, Blume had lain gasping for breath. The memory gave him a momentary pause, since, looked at from a certain angle, Greco might even have saved his life.
‘Who’s dead, Greco?’ he shouted after him.
He asked the same question of the maresciallo, who had assumed a very a dignified mien, and walked with his head up and a look of purpose on his face. Behind him, the appuntato was almost jumping with the excitement of it all.
‘I have not been informed, Commissioner. The investigating magistrate is on his way.’
‘Where?’
‘At the bottom of an escarpment on the far side of town.’
‘Male or female.’
‘First reports speak of a female,’ said the maresciallo, practising his television manner. ‘No doubt further details will become available as . . . we find further details concerning . . .’
Blume had already started walking. He had parked the SUV just inside the walls, no more than a minute or two away. Nadia had not called him yet, and he was worried. On his way to the car, he called her and it went to voicemail.
He called her twice more, still without response, the second time as he was driving past the clinic out the arched town gate. He hit redial several times during the drive to her apartment. He had not foreseen this.
Thirty minutes later, he jumped out of the car and ran into the ghastly green block, fearing the worst and cursing himself for having left her. If they could kill Alina, they could kill Nadia, especially if they knew she was kicking up a fuss. Whatever about poor Alina, for whom he had always been too late, Nadia was his responsibility.
Bitter Remedy: An Alec Blume Case Page 20
