The Memory Key: A Commissario Alec Blume Novel

by Conor Fitzgerald

  One door opened with a small gust of air that carried with it the tang of antiseptic, followed by a more complex funk of something familiar yet alien that nagged at his memory. A small head with wispy hair poked out and looked around. The wide mouth, which sat like a gash below a small nose Blume immediately suspected of plastic surgery, emitted a laugh that sounded more like a bark.

  ‘Don’t just stand there knocking, come in.’

  The reptile cage at the zoo. That was it.

  Seeing Blume hesitate, the man, who was sporting an ill-advised stretch-fit black shirt that strained against its buttons, came out of the room and stood with Blume in the no-man’s-land between the sets of double doors. He waved a short dismissive arm at the wall, flashing a glimpse of a fat Rolex and releasing a smell of onion peel. ‘Oh, never mind those signs. They’re just for civilians.’

  ‘I am a civilian,’ said Blume, taking a step back from the door, wondering what sort of deadly bacterial strains had just covered him.

  Ideo frowned, then had a bright idea that split his round face into a smile. ‘I know, let’s go to my office! I’ll get my lab coat first!’

  He pushed the inner doors open, giving Blume a brief glimpse of dozens of cages, and seconds later re-emerged with his lab coat which he started putting on, even though he was now leaving the lab, and all the signs were he was too warm already.

  ‘Lab mice, rats, and, above all, shrews. I am very interested in shrews. Care to look?’

  ‘Another time?’ suggested Blume.

  They walked back into the main corridor.

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘Commissioner Blume.’

  Ideo stuck out his hand but as Blume reached for it, he pulled it away and burst out laughing.

  ‘Sorry! I really need to wash that hand before giving it to you.’ He walked over to a stainless steel sink set into an alcove and rubbed an alcoholic gel all over his hands. He dried off with a paper towel, concentrating most of the wiping effort on his watch. He crumpled and threw the paper towel towards an overflowing bin, and missed by a mile.

  ‘So, you want the tour? My office is down there . . . Oh, here!’ He stuck out his hand to be shaken. He allowed Blume to touch the top half of his fingers, which were still damp, then slipped them out of his grasp. ‘Is this about me not getting round to making my statement?’

  Blume put his hands behind his back and rubbed his fingers clean against his trousers. ‘No, what statement?’

  ‘The magistrate invited me, or should I say, instructed me, to go to make a statement to the Carabinieri. About Sofia, of course,’ he added.

  ‘It’s about her, yes,’ said Blume. ‘But this isn’t about the statement.’

  ‘I haven’t had the time, you know?’

  ‘I understand. Have you been interviewed at all?’

  ‘By phone, yes. Magistrate Principe. A very courteous gentleman.’

  ‘No one came to see you?’

  ‘Not until now.’ Ideo made a comb of his fingers and pushed some hair from behind his ears upwards and over the bald middle part of his head and patted it down gently.

  A door to the left was flung open, and the movement of air undid his hair dressing in a single blow.

  ‘Oh, sorry, Professor!’ A youngish man backed into the room when he saw Ideo and Blume standing there. Inside were two women and two men, all of them between 30 and 40, peering at a large empty cage. Ideo put his hands on his hips and seemed to be counting.

  ‘Where’s Chatterjee?’

  ‘Lunch,’ said one of the lab assistants.

  ‘What?’ Ideo consulted his watch. ‘OK. That’s reasonable. Any luck?’

  There was a collective shaking of heads. Ideo turned on his heel and waddled down the corridor, calling over his shoulder to Blume, ‘That is where Sofia worked when she was not with me in the labs.’ He dropped his voice to a stage whisper. ‘She had twice the personality of any of them.’

  They entered his office. ‘Damn!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘No chairs. They took my chair again. I understand they need a chair and the state gives us no money, but it shows a lack of respect, don’t you think? Just because I am in the lab all day. There’s no chair for you, either. We’ll have to stand.’

  It was more a storeroom than an office. Blume found the spot where he was least likely to knock over lab equipment, books, or papers, and stood there. Where the piles of equipment and paper moved higher was the desk. On the wall was a calendar from 1982 and a poster showing Darwin’s face circled and crossed in red, like a no-entry sign.

  ‘That’s just a bit of fun,’ said Ideo. ‘I am not anti-Darwin. I just think I have moved beyond him. Just like you can believe both in string theory and in Newtonian physics. Do you smoke?’

  He pulled out a pack of Camels and shook it at Blume. ‘Totally forbidden in a public building. Institute of Health, no less. But no one ever uses this room.’ He pulled out a chrome lighter and lit up. ‘Ah. That’s good. I love a good smoke. They are not as bad for you as they say, you know.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Not if you prime your mind first. Power of thought. You can put a little distance between yourself and the holon if you try.’ He blew smoke at Blume. ‘Do you know what a holon is?’

  ‘No. I don’t need to know that now.’

  Ideo inserted the cigarette into the corner of his mouth, and made an unsuccessful attempt to insert his hands into the tight front pockets of his black jeans. They were small hands, but the jeans were tight, and he did not seem to be able to squeeze his thumbs in. He aimed a kick at a ball of grey dust with his short legs, and Blume saw the triple stripe design of Adidas runners.

  ‘We are all going to miss her. She was a wonderful girl. She had a way with animals that was . . . exceptional.’ His eyes took on a shrewd look as he squinted against the rising smoke. ‘I don’t know much about investigations, but is it normal to be questioned by one force and then another?’

  ‘It happens,’ said Blume.

  Ideo pulled the cigarette out, touched it with his tongue, flicked ash at the wall, then put it back on the opposite side of his mouth. ‘Don’t you usually interview in twos, or is that just the films?’

  ‘Films,’ said Blume.

  ‘The Carabinieri must watch more films than the police, then. There were two of them.’

  ‘I thought you said they didn’t interview you.’

  ‘They didn’t. They came here – two of them – to tell us the terrible news, asked a few questions of several people, told me the magistrate would be in touch, and went on their way.’

  ‘Do I call you doctor or professor or just … ?’

  ‘. . . Either is fine,’ said Ideo.

  Blume had mentally filed away Ideo’s first name, which was Matteo. Matteo Ideo – why do parents do that to their kids? ‘And what do you do here, dottore?’

  ‘Do you know what an ethologist is?’

  ‘I know what an etiologist is,’ said Blume. ‘Is it similar?’

  Ideo waved his hands as if trying to stop Blume from uttering some terrible obscenity.

  ‘No! That’s like me saying I know what a travel agent is and asking if it is similar to a policeman!’

  ‘Is it? I wouldn’t be all that upset.’

  ‘Or a travelling salesman.’

  ‘Just tell me what you do.’

  ‘My official title is Professor of Behavioural Neuroscience. I study animal behaviour.’

  ‘That’s what an etiologist does?’ He couldn’t help himself.

  ‘An ethologist. Not an etiologist.’

  ‘I beg your pardon. Can we use animal behaviourist?’

  Ideo shook his head in disbelief and exasperation. ‘No, because an ethologist does it in the wild, a behaviourist works in the lab.’

  ‘But you work in the lab,’ Blume pointed out.

  ‘I do now. But I am an ethologist. I spent an entire year on the island of Lampedusa. You know, we think of Lampedusa as ours, but
if you go there, you’ll see it’s really part of Africa.’

  ‘All the illegal immigrants?’

  ‘No! Are you being deliberately stupid? The flora and fauna.’ He grabbed a sheet of paper covered with equations and dropped his cigarette butt into it. He crumpled it into a tight ball, which he dropped on the floor.

  They watched the paper ball unfold itself a little, and then waited a little longer to see if it would burst into flames.

  ‘It’s so sad,’ said Ideo. ‘Poor Sofia. But, you know, in a way she lives on.’

  Blume suspected a religious gambit in these last words. He parried by pulling out his notebook and flicking it open as if to check something. ‘My notes tell me you studied in La Sapienza?’

  ‘Just across the road. Graduated, travelled the world, wrote some pretty groundbreaking studies and three books, the last of which I wrote directly in English. It was published by Duckworth, and they didn’t even come back to me with any corrections: it was that precise. And then I ended up working more or less where I studied. Story of my life.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Nothing. Just an expression. It’s as if I were born into a circle that I have to stay inside, even if I have travelled widely. I get up in the same house as I did 30 years ago, go to almost the same place as 30 years ago.’

  ‘You live in the same house?’

  ‘I travelled the world for years. I didn’t save for a home, and I, too, served my time as a poorly paid research assistant.’

  ‘The address I have here is the family home, then?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And does anyone else live there?’

  ‘No. Apart from my mother, of course.’

  ‘So, you’re not married?’

  ‘Don’t your notes tell you that?’

  Blume nodded. ‘They do, they do . . . So, now Sofia has gone, what happens her job?’

  Ideo rubbed his small hands together. ‘It’s open. That lot in there will start fighting each other for it. That’s why I set them on a project together. Also, I made sure it’s a particularly pointless project. They have to modify the feeding system in the cages, then design a fish maze. Fish, by the way, have terrific memories. I think if we could hear them scream we wouldn’t be so blasé about angling and trawling. There’s definitely more going on in their heads than we know. But, yes, before you say it, I am doing a little bit of experimental psychology with my researchers. Don’t tell them, though, if you are going to talk to them, will you?’

  Blume promised he would not. ‘Can you confirm that you are 48 years of age?’

  ‘Almost 49,’ said Ideo.

  ‘Yes, you’re right.’

  ‘Of course I’m right. It’s my birthday next week!’

  ‘Have you been following the murder investigation?’

  ‘Absolutely!’ Ideo could not find his cigarettes and whipped off his lab coat in the hunt for them.

  ‘There,’ said Blume. ‘You left the packet next to that . . . that . . .’

  Ideo snatched up the packet as if rescuing it from a thief. ‘Thanks. It’s a centrifuge. Broken, of course.’ He lit another cigarette, smacking his lips.

  ‘We move through life at the speed of light,’ he announced. ‘Death is just a sudden deceleration and a movement into a different and slower dimension.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Blume was keen to avoid this sort of talk. He stayed quiet to let the philosophy blow over, and watched Ideo’s nervous movements as he sucked and tapped at his cigarette. ‘So who will replace her?’

  Ideo shrugged. ‘I’m not sure, but she’ll never be as good as Sofia.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘Well, you saw in that room. They are all women.’

  Blume pictured the room. There had been as many men as women. Plus one on his lunch break.

  Ideo seemed to read his mind. ‘The suitable candidates for the post are women.’

  ‘You prefer to work with women?’

  Ideo opened his wide mouth showing yellow teeth. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘It depends,’ said Blume.

  This time Ideo chose to stub the butt out on the floor. He watched the ashes and sparks scatter, and when he raised his face it had a serious expression. ‘What do you think women want?’

  Blume shrugged. ‘I wish I knew.’

  ‘You, too, huh?’

  Blume did not like the assumption of complicity. ‘No, I’m fine with women.’

  Ideo’s eyes lit up ‘Successful, you mean? Is it your rank? Maybe the weapon you carry? They like power.’

  Blume felt increasingly disinclined to agree with the man in front of him. ‘They like strength.’

  ‘They don’t like a man to have any weaknesses, do they?’

  ‘Not true,’ said Blume ‘They love men with weaknesses. They just don’t like weak men.’

  Ideo went for another cigarette, then thought better of it.

  ‘Well . . . I am working, and this is my time you are wasting. Tell me what you need.’

  ‘Nothing, really,’ said Blume. ‘I just like to meet the people connected to a case, no matter how peripherally. I wanted to make your acquaintance, and now I have.’

  It was a relief to get away from Ideo and his smoke, and from the Institute and its smell of antiseptic and rodents.

  Blume returned to the station and spent most of the early afternoon doing paperwork. The only person in the front office when he arrived was Rospo, a man so disliked by all that he had become as essential as electricity to the smooth running of the department. Whenever two colleagues were bickering over something, whenever a betrayal of trust had taken place, or someone had made a joke that did not go down well, whenever someone was not pulling his or her weight, or was slacking off, Rospo was there to remind them all that human beings could turn out worse in looks, conduct, and intelligence. Even better, some of the higher-ups in the police and judiciary thought he was a useful spy. Thanks to Rospo, sending disinformation up the chain of command was a cinch. Of course, the more intelligent senior officers knew that Rospo was an unwitting conduit of false information, but the more intelligent senior officers were also the ones who did not rely on spies.

  ‘Rospo! Working hard, I see,’ said Blume as he passed by. Rospo had tried to shut down the gambling site he was visiting, but the screen was covered in multiple pop-ups advertising sex sites, free music, poker apps, and video games.

  Towards five, Caterina came in without knocking, leaving the door open behind her, as if they had nothing to hide, which they didn’t, but that did not alter the fact that doors were for closing.

  She collapsed into a chair. ‘Where were you today, Alec?’

  If she had not looked so haggard and exhausted, he might even have reminded her to shut the damned door. They had a deal. He would take his shoes off as soon as he came in and never lie on the bed with his ‘outside clothes’ on. He had adapted, but she couldn’t be bothered.

  He walked over, shut the door to his office, and decided the bad news about Principe could wait.

  ‘Left it open, sorry,’ she said in a totally unsorry voice.

  Blume looked at her face, and realized she, too, was ageing: where her lips ended at what had once been the merest shadow that threw her bright cheeks into relief had become a fold, so that the cheeks were now divided. It was not that they were sagging, it was just that it was now possible to make out where the sag line would be. Her hair was lank and had an unwashed look, and she seemed to have gained weight around the throat so that the tendons were no longer visible. If this was the result of her dieting and jogging three times a week, she might be better off giving it a rest, but he did not want to get into that conversation again. She was wearing no make-up. He appreciated this in her, or had always appreciated it, but now, as he looked at her, he thought she might look a bit better with lipstick and whatever that stuff was women used to give their face colour. Rouge – or was that a word from a different century?

  ‘Meeting Principe.’ Blume wai
ted for her to ask why, but she sat there like a fattening, ageing doll, and asked him nothing, too involved with her own tiredness.

  ‘I just spent the afternoon with a family of fucking troglodytes,’ said Caterina. ‘One’s worse than the other.’

  ‘Valerio’s family?’ asked Blume.

  She nodded. ‘Me and Panebianco. I wish I were more like him. He really detaches, you know? Floats away in a cloud of indifference. I can’t do that. These people. We should have been comforting them, instead we were threatening them that if they took any action against Adelgardo or his family, they’d end up in jail. Not that our threats made any difference.’

  ‘You still think a man like that should end up in the same prison as a hardened criminal?’

  ‘I think it is the natural result of what he did. What do you want, a special prison for the middle class, because that’s basically your problem here, Alec.’

  ‘He’s an old man.’

  ‘Sorry, a special prison for the elderly bourgeoisie,’ said Caterina. ‘And we both know he’s not going to prison, so why argue?’

  ‘No, he’s not,’ agreed Blume. He remembered something. ‘How’s your father?’

  She shrugged. ‘Not good. He’s entering the aggressive stage. Apparently it commonly comes at the end of stage three, before he enters a total vegetative state.’

  ‘Maybe it won’t come to that,’ said Blume.

  ‘Meaning let’s hope he dies before then.’

  A while ago, she had told him that the fact her father had Alzheimer’s greatly increased her chances of the same. ‘I need you to plan what to do if that happens,’ she had told him. Blume had not thought much about her eventual Alzheimer’s; instead, he had obsessed about her assumption that they would reach such an advanced age together. Now as he looked at her slumped in the chair, and thought about Principe, about Stefania Manfellotto propped up on her pillows, he tried to imagine her in hospital, an older version of himself standing there, wisely deciding on throwing the switch, or stopping the feeding, or using his service pistol, fighting with Elia, now a man calling him a murderer.

  ‘You’ve had your hair cut,’ said Caterina.

  ‘No . . . Well, yes, just a trim.’

  ‘It wasn’t long. You had it cut two weeks ago.’