“Look at the computer, Inspector.”
Blume looked. The orange light was still winking away.
“You need to hold the button for five seconds before it shuts down.”
“You mean like this?” But before Blume could make a second attempt, his cell phone rang.
“Here we go,” said Di Tivoli.
Blume fished it out of his pocket. “Yes?”
It was Gallone. He had just received a call from the questura informing him that a certain Commissioner Blume, in the company of Commissioner D’Amico, was attempting to intimidate Taddeo Di Tivoli. He hoped for Blume’s sake this was not right.
“We’re not intimidating him, sir,” said Blume.
“You will leave that house now. Both of you. You will then report directly to my office, Blume. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.” Blume looked at Di Tivoli’s smug face, and felt the muscles of his arm tighten. He imagined smashing something heavy into Di Tivoli’s womanly lips, the bright flash of joy, and the gray ashes of his career afterward.
“Nando, we’re leaving,” said Blume.
D’Amico slipped his phone into his jacket, and said, “I think we’ll stay a little longer.”
“I don’t think you realize how high I can reach if I have to,” said Di Tivoli.
“I know you move in exalted circles,” said D’Amico. “It’s fun up there, I imagine.”
“Yes, it is,” said Di Tivoli.
“Lots of swimming pool parties in Sardinia, Ischia, Elba, Portofino, lots of girls, lines of coke. Oh, and boys.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Di Tivoli.
Blume loved hearing that phrase. People who suddenly declared they no longer understood the words being spoken to them were people who had been cornered.
D’Amico had discovered a mirror near the door and groomed himself a little before returning to the living room. “It’s all part of the privileges you enjoy,” he said. “The thing with boys, though. That’s more awkward.”
Di Tivoli whitened and sat down. “No charges have been made against me.”
“I know,” said D’Amico soothingly. “It’s just one of those silly-season stories. So far, you have been interviewed merely as a person informed of the facts. Am I right? Public Prosecutor Bernard Woodruff is conducting the inquiry. Another awkward bastard with a foreign name, like Blume here. Always a bit harder to know exactly where they’re coming from, these half-foreign ones.”
“This is still being recorded,” said Di Tivoli.
“I’d erase it, if I were you,” said D’Amico. “Here, let me give you a sneak preview of something even you might not know about. I hear the villa owned by that Sicilian reporter, Nicotra, is going to be sequestered by the Finance Police acting under the direction of the DIA. Nicotra has the odor of Mafia about him. Now you and Nicotra, apparently…”
“All right, all right, that’s enough,” said Di Tivoli.
D’Amico looked over at Blume and said, “I knew I’d heard this idiot’s name recently for some reason.”
“So you know stuff,” said Di Tivoli. “But it’s not as if you can do anything about it.”
“You’re probably right that I can’t make it go away, nor would I want to; but I think I could make it worse. Look, all we need is a nice, short, friendly interview, then we’re out of here. How about a little bit of mutual understanding? No more filing complaints about my colleague, that sort of thing.”
Di Tivoli nodded.
Blume clapped his hands together. “Excellent. Now, where were we? Sex-boys? Che combinazione. That reminds me, do know who your friend Clemente was sleeping with?”
Di Tivoli tapped the hollow of his cheek with his thumb, still weighing up his options. Finally he said, “I know he had another woman. She came with him to my country villa in Amatrice. Her name was Manuela. She was very plain. Ugly, even. Aging, vulgar- looking, though surprisingly educated in speech. But I don’t know who she was. Why, was she somebody important?”
“Well, yes. She’s daughter of Rome’s second biggest criminal. It’ll be fun mixing this fact up with Woodruff’s investigation.”
“I didn’t know anything about that!”
“We believe you. Don’t we, Nando?” D’Amico nodded solemnly. “It’s the fickle public you need to worry about. The Italians love a good conspiracy theory. Now I want to talk to you about the dog meets you saw.”
Around a month ago, Di Tivoli could not say exactly when, Arturo Clemente and he had gone down to the very end of the Via della Magliana, beyond the warehouses selling building materials and bathroom fittings to where the road, after five kilometers of potholes and crumbling embankments, gives up pretending to be fit for ordinary cars. Out to the place where all the bushes had strips of plastic shopping bags clinging to them, but even further than that, past the gypsy encampments nestled under the bridges carrying the ring road that marked the end of the city boundaries.
“Where out there?”
“To a field, about three kilometers beyond the ring road. Off the Via della Magliana, to the north. There’s a fence with two, no three, strands of barbed wire. Clemente stopped at the corner, pulled up the last post, walked into the field with it, making a gap, drove in, got out, closed it again. At the far end of the field were a few rotting sheds, a row of things that look like chicken coops, except turns out they’re for dogs, and off to the right, a bit uphill, a warehouse or distribution shed with tarmac and parking.”
“Wait, that doesn’t make sense,” said Blume. “You cross an open field to get to a distribution warehouse?”
“Yes, a warehouse with tarmac parking and no connecting roads. Totally invisible to the authorities. Great country we live in, isn’t it?”
“Would you be able to find this place again?” asked Blume.
“Yes, I should think so.”
“The cars in the car park, how many?”
“I’d say about thirty.”
“What sort of cars?”
“Almost all of them SUVs and Jeeps, but I remember seeing one or two really old white Fiat Unos.”
“The vehicles, they were clean or dirty?”
“They were dirty. Everything was dirty,” Di Tivoli shuddered at the memory. “It had been raining a few days before.”
“So what happened there?”
“Clemente parked the car, we went in.”
“You went in, just like that?”
“We were undercover, obviously. What I mean by that is we weren’t there as an activist and a reporter.”
“OK, so these guys have never seen you on TV, or YouTube. I can believe that, but the people there must have known Clemente if he had been busting their balls.”
“He was disguised.”
Blume glanced sharply at Di Tivoli, but the man was apparently being serious.
“Disguised as what?”
“Not as anything in particular. He had on this little blonde moustache; he’d dyed his hair, and was wearing a long leather coat, a Roma AC cap, and hide ankle boots. The outfit almost did his head in.”
“He supports Lazio?”
“Not the football cap-the hide boots and the leather coat. He wouldn’t even wear leather shoes in real life. Never ate an egg. He was deadly earnest.”
“Never ate an egg?”
“No. He had no limits. Or too many, depends how you look at it.”
“Going back to the meet, no one checked you two out?”
“It’s not as if anyone was really that bothered. People would look at you a bit, but no one was checking. People milling about and dogs snarling and… Jesus.” Di Tivoli shook his head.
“What?” Blume leaned forward.
“The smell. The smell of that place is something I’ll never forget.”
“What was the smell?”
“Mud, blood, alcohol, cigarette smoke, but most of all dogs, dog shit and fear.”
“Sounds heavy.”
“You’ve no idea.”
Blume said, “The two of you just walked into this den of horrors?”
“There was a thug of some sort at the door, but I don’t know if he was supposed to be a bouncer. I thought he might try to stop us, but he didn’t.”
“How many fights did you watch?”
“Two, but I wasn’t really watching them, I was looking at the locale, working out the lighting and figuring where to put cameras for when we filmed the raid.”
“Did you take notes about the place, the events?”
“Nothing that will be of any use.”
“Let me decide,” said Blume. “Do you have them here?”
Di Tivoli left the room and came back minutes later with two file folders. He handed them to Blume who glanced inside. Each contained a few typewritten sheets.
“These are typed,” said Blume.
“I can certainly see why you became a detective.”
“Don’t start, lover boy.”
“You typed them up afterwards-from memory?” He laid them aside.
He doubted they, or Di Tivoli himself, were going to be of much value.
As they walked out of the apartment building into the searing heat, Blume gave D’Amico a pat on the back.
“Glad I came with you now, aren’t you?” said D’Amico. “You wouldn’t believe the compromising shit we’ve got on people in the Ministry. Thing is, a lot of the people we got shit on are also the people who run the Ministry.”
“I’ve got to admit it, Nando. Sometimes you have your uses.”
18
SATURDAY, AUGUST 28, 6:30 P.M.
D’Amico left him at headquarters and went on to the Ministry.
On his way to his own office, Blume knocked on Gallone’s door.
“In! Ah, it’s you, Commissioner. I am very disappointed, and very angry too, I don’t mind saying.”
“I think there have been a few misunderstandings, sir,” said Blume. “The investigating magistrate instructed me to go straight to Sveva Romagnolo. I’m going to write up the report now and deliver it to him. I can’t ignore a specific instruction from a prosecutor.”
“You could have informed me,” was all Gallone said. Blume waited for more, but there seemed to be no more talk about defending the privacy of the grieving widow, and Blume got the feeling Gallone was not keen to recall the image of himself being unceremoniously bundled out of Sveva’s apartment.
“And I think if you call Di Tivoli, you’ll find he has no complaints to make of us. I am going to write up the report on that interview, too. Will you sign it off before I forward it to the prosecutor?”
Gallone seemed to have lost interest in the incident, too. Responsibility weighed heavily upon him. Blume doubted he had ever done so much paperwork in his life. And the widow was not even thankful.
“Blume, I am very busy. I have to write up some reports myself. I got the autopsy report, and now I discover that Romagnolo had appointed her own medical examiner to attend the autopsy. She did this without informing me.”
“Anything interesting in the autopsy?”
“What? No. No. Confirmed cause of death was multiple stab wounds. Stomach contents-breakfast. Clemente had eaten high-fiber spelt. Which is basically cardboard, if you ask me. And an apple. Brown rice the night before. You’ll get a copy. Oh, and we’re going after Alleva. Making a move tonight-or maybe tomorrow morning, at this rate. Don’t miss the next meeting, Commissioner.”
“I won’t. What about the house-to-house calls?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. And still I have to write a detailed report on all this nothingness,” said Gallone.
Blume’s tiny office was preceded by a larger room that Paoloni, Zambotto, and Ferrucci shared, though only Ferrucci was ever to be found there. It served as a sort of antechamber to his office and even lent it a slight air of authority. Right now, it contained Ferrucci, who was sitting at his desk, staring at the computer screen.
Blume went into his office and phoned the investigating magistrate.
“I said you told me to visit Sveva Romagnolo. You did, didn’t you?”
“Yes, that’s fine,” said Principe. “Anything?”
“I would say she is sufficiently grief-stricken, but you can’t always judge these things. Who am I to say how sad a person should be?”
“Or show themselves to be,” said Principe. “I’ve issued a detention warrant on Alleva.”
“Yes. So I heard. Gallone’s supposed to be coordinating, so you’ll be lucky if it’s executed this side of Christmas. The poor man has never seen so many forms.”
“Damn. I better make sure he manages to organize an arrest by tomorrow at least,” said Principe. “I’ll phone him now.”
Blume hung up and called in Ferrucci.
“Have you still got that list of names of the people the Carabinieri detained after the dog fight?”
“Yes. Zambotto and Paoloni are checking them out now.”
Blume looked at Ferrucci’s hopelessly frank face. The day would come when even Ferrucci would be tough enough to talk to the bad guys, but not for a long time.
“They are looking into the bad guys?”
“Yes. Working backwards: from the worst offenders to the least.”
“All the way back up to Alleva and his helper, what’s his name?”
“Massoni. Some of these guys have even worse records,” said Ferrucci.
“I’ve been thinking, Marco: maybe we have been doing this the wrong way around.”
“Doing what the wrong way around?”
“The list.”
“You mean going from the most to the least likely is the wrong way to do it?”
“Yes,” said Blume. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
“But…”
Blume waited. He wanted to see if he had been right about the young man’s intelligence. For a moment he doubted it. Ferrucci seemed to stare stupidly at the window, but then his eyes darted sideways as if he had glimpsed a quick-moving animal on the rooftops outside.
“I get it,” he said.
“Let’s hear it, then.”
“OK. Your theory is that the victim was killed in a random or semirandom attack.”
“Let’s say semirandom,” said Blume.
“Now we have a list of names, and the first ones we are looking at are those who have killed before, those who are connected, have previous convictions, and so on. But that would make the killing less random, and more organized.”
Blume nodded encouragement. He was pleased with his protege.
“So,” continued Ferrucci, “when the Carabinieri carried out the raid on the warehouse, they detained only three people with no criminal records. Three people who are not crime professionals.”
“The ones we were planning to question last. Where are they?”
Ferrucci ducked into his office and was back with a sheet. “These three here.” He quickly circled three names with a pen.
“When’s the next meeting of the investigative team?” asked Blume.
“At eight this evening. The Holy Ghost wants to know who’s doing overtime after eight.”
Ferrucci, trying to sound nonchalant as he used Gallone’s nickname for the first time. But he’d just earned himself the right.
“So we’ve got about one hour. How about we check out these three. Right now. You pick one name, I’ll pick another.”
“And the third?”
“We’ve got one hour. Neither of us has time to interview more than one person. I’ll get the third after the meeting, or maybe tomorrow. Go on, pick a name.”
Ferrucci pointed at the first of the three names. “Gianfranco Canghiari. Hairdresser, salon near Parioli, house in Trullo.” He glanced at his watch.
“He should still be at work. Should I go now?”
“Yes.”
“What do I ask him?”
“I don’t know. Ask him why he likes seeing animals tear each other apart, whether he declares all his earnings, whether he has a clear co
nscience about how he uses the computer-anything. Hassle him a bit. Get a feel for what sort of a person he is.”
Blume indicated the next name on the list, Dandini, a car salesman. “I’ll talk to this guy, see who he is. Then one of us will check out the third guy tomorrow morning, or whenever. What’s his name?”
“Angelo Pernazzo. Perl scripting programmer.”
“I don’t even know what that is,” said Blume.
7 P.M.
Dandini turned out to be a man with black curly hair who looked like he was on the verge of bursting into a Puccini solo. Despite himself, Blume liked him almost immediately. He sold fat, ecologically criminal cars from a lot situated off the ring road next to Casale Lumbroso, and was just finishing off a sales pitch to a couple interested in a Volkswagen Touareg when Blume arrived. Blume allowed him to see them off, then he and Dandini went into a prefabricated hut, where Dandini loosened a wide yellow necktie and placed his bulk in front of a roaring air conditioner. He put his hand in his jacket, pulled out what looked like a sheet from a child’s bed, and dabbed his forehead with it.
“I heard thunder earlier. Rain would be nice, but then we have to wash all the cars, especially if it’s got sand in it.”
Dandini seemed genuinely pleased to meet Blume. Even when Blume pulled out his police identification Dandini continued to beam at him, and offered Blume a visiting card, as if completing a fair trade.
According to Dandini, being caught up in a swoop by the Carabinieri was quite the best thing that had ever happened to him.
He paused, a big expectant smile on his face as he waited for Blume to pick up the cue.
Blume obligingly expressed wonderment at the paradox.
Because-here Dandini clenched his fist-it brought it home to him that he had a serious gambling problem. He opened the top drawer, pulled out a white cardboard box, opened it, and offered Blume a puff pastry.
Blume declined. Dandini helped himself to one. The very next day, he and his wife sought help. They found a place on the Via Casaletto.
Some dry flakes of pastry and a cloud of sugar escaped his mouth and he stopped talking for a bit until he had things under control.
The people there were kind to him about his problem, but a bit harsh with his wife, who they said needed to change her superficial attitude. He didn’t get that bit, but they were doing much better. He hadn’t gambled in months. He had totally given up drinking, too, except on weekends and after a sale.
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