The Memory Key: A Commissario Alec Blume Novel

by Conor Fitzgerald

  ‘So does Rosario.’

  ‘Is that one of your colleagues?’

  Blume nodded, feeling foolish. Had the doctors also mentioned the pregnancy to Mrs Mattiola? If so, she was giving no sign.

  ‘We cannot stay the night. That is also a good sign. If a loved one is likely to die, they allow you to stay.’

  Blume nodded as if all this had occurred to him.

  ‘I have taken Elia off your hands. I am sure you’ll be glad of that.’

  ‘No. I like Elia. We get on great.’

  Finally she turned round and regarded him levelly. ‘I am delighted to hear that. Thing is, you like him, but he needs me.’

  ‘And you need him,’ said Blume before he could stop himself.

  Caterina’s mother did not seem offended. ‘This is my family. This is what it has all been about. My entire life. Will I see you here in the morning?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Blume.

  ‘Well, good night.’

  ‘Good night, Mrs Mattiola.’

  While Blume was driving back to Caterina’s, Pitagora phoned to tell him he had missed his appointment. Blume listened to him without a word, then hung up.

  Chapter 27

  Blume went back to the hospital at eight the following morning. Caterina’s mother was already there, but not Caterina, who, he was frostily informed, was out of the coma and now undergoing a ‘battery’ of tests, which was an excellent sign. Only she didn’t say Caterina, she said ‘my daughter’.

  Blume said he would stay, though he did not relish hanging around in the hospital with Mrs Mattiola.

  ‘You don’t have to stay. I am sure you have work to do.’

  ‘It can wait.’

  ‘No, do it now, because you will be needed later. Do I need to remind you that my husband is in a nursing home?’

  Blume said he did not need reminding.

  ‘Good, because I need to see him, too. And someone needs to be ready for Elia when he comes home from school. That someone has always been me. Unless you want to pick him up, give him lunch. He has karate in the afternoon.’

  Blume started to speak.

  ‘I understand,’ said Mrs Mattiola, shaking her head in automatic disagreement with whatever it was he was planning on saying. ‘It’s hard to predict your schedule, isn’t it?’

  Blume had said nothing about schedules.

  ‘That is why it is better for you to come here this afternoon,’ concluded Mrs Mattiola. ‘Whenever you get a chance. I shall cover the morning shift. Go and get your work done so you can be free later on. Agreed?’

  Blume agreed.

  Fifteen minutes later, he turned off the Via Appia into the recess in front of Professor Pitagora’s villa. The gate before him was shut. The back of Blume’s car jutted out on to the narrow road behind, at risk of being hit and possibly killing anyone travelling too fast, which was everyone, across the slippery cobbles.

  He pressed the intercom button on the gatepost.

  The gate swung open, revealing a lawn that might have once been tended but was now knee-high with soaking crabgrass and wild oats. A swimming pool surrounded by ferns and covered with a sagging tarpaulin gave the appearance of long disuse. Goosefoot, dandelion, and shepherd’s purse had pulled up the tarmac on the drive. He got back in his car and drove up to the house, a sprawling three-storey villa, to which a modern excrescence of cheap concrete and gold-coloured aluminium windows had been added sometime in the 1970s, like an illegal extension to a low-quality pizzeria. The fine old villa had been repainted a delicate rose, but the new part had been left to sag and rot.

  Pitagora, dressed in a pink jacket that matched the outside of the house, with a deep blue shirt and a gold tie, was waiting for him in front of the front door.

  Blume stepped back and made a point of surveying the villa.

  ‘I see what you are doing, Commissioner. You are making me aware that you see how large this villa is. Far too large for a man who earns public sector wages as a university professor, but this is my family pile.’

  ‘I was just stretching my back against the dampness of the day. I am not from the Finance Police, so what do I care? And,’ he waved a hand at the garden, ‘the state of the garden is testament to your integrity. A man with undeclared earnings would hire a gardener. Berlusconi used to have a Mafia boss as his gardener, or was it a stable hand?’

  ‘I prefer the garden like this,’ said Pitagora. ‘Those are my weeds of forgetting. When I use my house and gardens as a memory palace, I never place anything here. And there will be wild flowers in the spring.’

  The professor led the way into the house, and Blume was impressed. It wasn’t just the fine furnishings, the view of the entrance to the Christian catacombs, the overlaid Persian carpets, the long palatial corridor stretching out in front of him with a trompe d’œil wall painting at the end, nor was it just the beeswax and flowery scent that assailed his mouth and nose and made the inside of the villa smell like summer, while outside the sky remained dark and wintry; what really impressed him were the frescos that covered the walls and ceilings.

  After a few steps, he simply stopped and gazed up at them in frank wonderment.

  ‘What you’re looking at there is a Pollaiuolo,’ said Pitagora. ‘Those three figures represent the Goddess Isis, or the Virgin Mary if you prefer, Hermes Trismegistus, and Moses. It’s an original work . . .’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ said Blume. ‘Unless you had the fresco ripped from its original place and brought here. This villa is, what, 200 years old at most?’

  ‘The foundations and the cellars merge with the catacombs, but you’re right, it’s not original in that sense.’

  Blume was still staring at the fresco above him. ‘Obviously, you didn’t have it ripped from its original site. The colours are too bright and the more I look at it, the less impressed I am. But it does have a wow factor on first impact, I’ll give you that. Where is the original work?’

  ‘I thought you’d know that. I hear you’re something of an art expert, Commissioner.’

  ‘You heard wrong.’

  ‘I don’t know if I believe you. The original is in the Vatican, so you can see why it is unlikely I had it ripped from there.’

  ‘I haven’t been to the Vatican in a long time,’ said Blume.

  ‘It’s in the Borgia apartment.’

  ‘And who did this?’

  ‘Me,’ said Pitagora, clasping his hands in front of him in what seemed to be a practised gesture of modesty. ‘With help.’

  Blume squinted at the ceiling again. ‘It’s not a proper fresco, is it? It’s just painted on to dry plaster.’

  ‘Correct. Also, we used modern acrylic paints.’

  ‘You managed to get that soft touch to it, though,’ said Blume. ‘From here it still has that chalk and milk effect. How did you do that?’

  ‘You are the first person in years to notice that. I applied a thick coat of plaster after it was finished, then sanded it down till the painting below was visible again. I deliberately left a few pieces covered, so it looks as if the work has faded with age. There was no need to do that, but I liked the idea.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Blume. ‘The effect is persuasive.’

  ‘You still haven’t seen the centrepiece,’ said Pitagora. ‘Come on!’ And breaking into a trot, he hurried down the corridor and threw open double doors at the end.

  ‘Isn’t this something, Commissioner? I mean, just look at it.’ Pitagora swept his hand in an arc, turning on his heel as he did. They stood in a circular room topped by a dome in the centre of which was a cupola forming a roof lantern, though not much light was coming in from the bleak sky outside. ‘Wait, wait till you see.’ Pitagora flicked up a row of light switches and bathed the room in the bright light from a series of spotlights revealing the work in all its glory.

  ‘It’s the same size as Bramante’s Tempietto di San Pietro on the Janiculum,’ said Pitagora. ‘Exactly the same size. To the millimetre. The floor p
lan, the height, everything in perfect Fibonacci harmony. You know what that is?’

  ‘Remind me.’

  ‘The golden section: A plus B is to A, as A is to B.’

  ‘Oh, that.’

  ‘The golden mean, the basis of all life and harmony, from seashells to the distance from your chin to your navel, the spirals of the galaxy, Florentine architecture. The magic number, 1.6180339887498948482045868343656381177203091798057628621354486227052604 . . .’

  ‘I think that’s precise enough for me, Professor.’

  ‘I know it to 2,800 places. It unfolds as a story before my eyes. It’s an infinite number, like pi.’

  ‘Shouldn’t it be a bit more precise if it’s really so golden?’ asked Blume. ‘A number that just keeps on going – I don’t see that as golden. Pretty annoying, if anything. A beginning without a middle or an end.’

  The professor looked delighted. ‘What a way of thinking you have! I think that you and I, Alec, we have got to . . . We can’t be enemies. We just can’t. There is so much natural sympathy here.’

  ‘Who says we’re enemies?’

  ‘Stop. You’re spoiling it with your tone. You scoff too much, but I can see you are impressed and, yes, envious, at what I have. We can get back to business in a minute. But for now, please.’

  Blume relented, and gave himself over to contemplation of the dome above, which was decorated with the twelve signs of the zodiac in blue, white, and gold. Although the first impact had been considerable, he found his eye skipping over the mannerist depictions of the symbols, and a feeling of rebellious boredom was stealing up on him, as when his parents dragged him round museums.

  ‘Here I have divided the images and set them into the twelve sections, starting with Aries, then Taurus, Gemini, and so on all around. What I want you to look at though are the images at the top of the wall, along the drum of the dome. These are the thirty-six decans. Some of them are a bit clumsy, I admit. I copied from woodcuts, paintings, prints, and one or two I simply made up on the basis of descriptions I found in Marsilio Ficino’s translation of the Pimander. I want you to look and see if you can find yourself. Because you are there, believe me.’

  Blume turned his attention to the figures arranged around the top of the circular wall, where the twelve triangular sections into which Pitagora had divided his zodiac paintings were widest. He kept his eyes on the symbols also because he knew his face was far too readable for a policeman, and that the sudden realization that the professor was insane was now written all over it.

  Under each symbol were three panels containing figures drawn by a clumsier hand than had decorated the rest of the house, or perhaps it was simply a question of being able to see the work up close. The boards, he realized, were treated wood, and the paint was modern, as were the faces of the figures. One showed a black man, an African, with flaming red eyes, another showed a woman in a red dress apparently vaulting a goat. Next in the sequence came a pale man holding a hoop of some sort. The next figure was a fleshy naked man holding a golden key sitting on a bull. Overlapping this was a scene in which a guy wrapped in a bathrobe was holding a snake and a fish while leaning against a white horse. In the following quadrant, a woman saying something to a child with fat thighs. Farther on, someone was playing a clarinet, someone else was praying, people were digging. Next came a massive lobster such as might be seen on a restaurant billboard in New England. Someone strangling an eagle or a dragon, it was hard to say which. A man with a crow’s face (or a crow with a man’s body) sat on a throne grasping a spear in one hand, a sickle in the other, a dragon under his left foot. A woman playing cards sat next to a man playing a trumpet and reading a book at the same time. Someone had speared a fish and someone else was watching a dogfight. A woman was stabbing her husband or lover, and a pigeon fancier was releasing a bird. A young couple, naked, seemed on the point of fucking in what, to Blume’s increasingly jaundiced eye, looked like manga porn. Two young men on a different panel seemed to have similar intentions.

  ‘I am supposed to be one of those?’

  ‘Never mind. It was a stretch to ask you to self-identify, but take my word for it, you are there.’ The professor seemed suddenly deflated. ‘Remind me to show you my theatre afterwards.’

  ‘You have a theatre in the villa?’

  ‘A model. It is a model for the memorizing mind. You need to learn it, Blume. You have a figurative bent. You think in images. Perhaps you are not so Jewish after all. Certainly the Mishnah Torah means nothing to you.’

  ‘You’re right about that bit,’ said Blume.

  ‘You wouldn’t even need to see my memory theatre. It’s really to help people who can’t build one in their own mind. They need the physical analogue.’

  ‘Like the one that guy talks about in his book? You have a scale model version?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘What, you don’t?’

  ‘I mean no, don’t tell me you bought the book by that charlatan and plagiarist from America?’

  ‘You told me you were suing him in an American court.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘So I was interested in finding out.’

  ‘You bought his vile plagiarist book!’

  ‘No, not really. I bought it on my Kindle. It’s not really the same thing.’

  ‘What is a Kindle?’ asked Pitagora.

  ‘An e-book.’

  Pitagora nodded, but Blume could see that the exchange had left him as lost as Blume had been looking at the ‘decans’ in the round room.

  ‘He still gets royalties when he sells an e-book containing my material?’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Blume. ‘Not my area. Maybe he gets less. Maybe he pays for me to download it. I have no idea. It cost me next to nothing.’

  ‘That is because it is worth next to nothing.’

  ‘Is that how publishing works?’

  ‘Of course it is,’ said Pitagora.

  The professor brought him into a smaller room, dark and lined with books. He indicated a bulging horsehair chair for Blume.

  The professor went over to a shelf and took down a large brown book, which he placed in Blume’s lap. ‘That is for you.’

  Blume read the title, instantly forgot it, read it again: Damnatio Memoriae imaginis. La fuga della mente moderna dalle Verità dell’Imagine. He opened the volume, then slammed it shut with a thump to squash the silverfish he had seen scuttling about on the page. A cloud of paper pulp and bookbinding glue rose up into his face and made him sneeze.

  ‘Salute!’

  ‘Tah-huu! Thanks.’ He opened the book. It was so long the publisher had used thin onion-skin paper, such as he had not seen since last looking through the Encyclopaedia Treccani. He slid in his thumb towards the end of the book and glanced inside. Page 875, and there were still more to go.

  ‘It’s got an introduction by Federico Zeri and Mario Praz,’ said Pitagora, the look on his face like that of a father gazing at a child. ‘Mario Praz was a good friend of mine.’

  The guy who wrote The Godfather? Surely not, thought Blume to himself. Surprise seemed to be the reaction called for here, and it came naturally enough.

  ‘And Pietro Boitani has promised to write a foreword to the new revised edition, which I am still working on.’

  ‘A revised edition?’ said Blume. Wait, Puzo was the name of the guy who wrote The Godfather. He had no idea what the professor was talking about.

  ‘Yes, I’m expanding it,’ said Pitagora.

  Blume opened the first page and politely began reading a sentence. He had to bring the book up towards his face to read the small print. After a while, he found his eye was scanning ahead looking for a full stop, but page 1 had only commas and semicolons to offer; he flicked over and saw a lonely dot towards the end of the second page.

  ‘You’re a fast reader, Commissioner.’

  ‘Yes, well. Later. I definitely look forward to it.’

  ‘So maybe you’ll read the original work instead of that populist junk b
y the thieving half-caste Aaron Fisher who stole my work.’

  ‘Half-caste?’

  ‘Jamaican mother,’ said Pitagora with disgust.

  ‘That’s bad?’

  ‘Miscegenation. I am not completely opposed to it, not within a European context, but it is a filthy habit.’

  ‘Why did you meet Stefania Manfellotto on the evening she was shot?’

  ‘Is that really what you want to talk about? There are so many more interesting things I can show you.’

  ‘Maybe later, Professor?’

  ‘All right. Stefania and I met once every three or four months. Once per academic trimester, basically. She always came to me, I never visited her. That was the deal.’

  ‘What deal, Professor?’

  ‘Reciprocal control. A code of self-conduct, mutual betrayal, catching up with old times, the emergence of new tendencies, political developments. Recently we were talking about the emergence of left-wing extremists, the Black Block groups, the anti-TAV protests, the Askatasuna movement. Turkish activists throwing metal objects at Italian police. Surely you can’t accept that. And then what is happening in Greece with the collapse of the euro-project. It’s coming here soon.’

  ‘OK. How about we stop and we go through what you said step by step and you explain in simple terms what you are talking about,’ said Blume.

  ‘I know you are intelligent, Commissioner. You are the embodiment of Saturn, you realize that. There is almost nothing solar or jovial in you at all. Saturn is good, if you want a long life, but an unhappy one, full of pessimism and loneliness and doubt. Your wisdom is dark, you see.’

  ‘And you’re Mr Sunshine?’

  ‘My aim is to incorporate everything, to find the divine in the human, and to forge a unity by the application of the mens to the earthly. I have to embrace and subsume the darker elements, like you and Manfellotto. God is darkness and nameless as well as light and all things.’

  ‘What are you into, some sort of Masonic cult?’