“We could do with more people with that sort of work ethic,” said the commissioner-in-chief.
“Thank you,” said Blume. He hung up.
The tiredness had crept up on him again. There was no point in going to the station now, and Paoloni had gone underground. He did this occasionally, but he always told Blume beforehand. Maybe Paoloni was watching Pernazzo. But he doubted it.
He could not think up an adequate excuse for phoning Kristin, and so he watched a Hitchcock film on television and fell asleep in front of it.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 9 A.M.
This time the call that woke him was from Kristin, which pleased him, though he would have preferred Paoloni.
She wanted to know if he had met Sveva Romagnolo, and whether he felt there might be political repercussions. Blume said he had no idea about political repercussions.
“Not anything big. Ripples in the rockpools, people changing places, networks tightening and loosening. It’s only for a report.”
“If you come over here, maybe we can talk about it,” said Blume, feeling quite sly.
“OK,” she said. “Right now?”
Blume felt like he’d just lost a game of speed poker.
“I don’t really have anything to tell you, Kristin.”
“So maybe later. I’m sure you have something I could make use of.” She hung up before he could work out whether she intended any ambiguity.
The agente at the desk nodded and looked slightly embarrassed as Blume walked stiffly into the station.
“Welcome back, Commissioner.”
“Thanks. I’m going to my office, in case anyone’s looking for me.”
Blume made it all the way to the second floor without encountering anyone else. They really were ridiculously understaffed here.
The door from the corridor led to the windowless antechamber with the desk and computer where Ferrucci had worked, and a second door led into his office. Blume went over to Ferrucci’s desk and stood behind the chair, looking at his own dark reflection in the blank computer screen. Then he went into his own room and sat behind his desk, listened to the sounds of the station and stared out the window across rooftops at the back of the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. He ran his hand over the patina of dust. It felt like years since he had been here last.
He picked up the receiver of his desk phone, placed the handset on the desk as he dialed the Tuscolana center. He had himself patched through to the IT department, and asked for Giacomo Rosati, another of the many people who seemed to be avoiding him.
“Jack, it’s Alec.” He winced at using Rosati’s corny anglicized first name. He hardly knew the man. Small, elfin type with a pointy beard. He waited a beat, then added, “Blume.”
“Commissioner, you don’t catch me at a good time. A lot to do here today. Maybe I can call you back later?”
“It’ll only take a second,” said Blume. “Did Investigating Magistrate Principe ever get in contact with you about tracking an IP address?”
Rosati seemed to be having trouble remembering. Eventually he said, “Yes, yes. I remember. It was an unofficial lead.”
“Right. Thing is, I was expecting you to call me back,” said Blume.
Who did this guy think he was not calling back like he was supposed to, then coming over all self-important? Sort of IT midget it was faster to step over than go around.
“I thought I was to let you know only if we came up with a negative,
Commissioner. That is, if we found that the subscriber’s number had not been assigned an IP at that time in question. But there was an IP assigned, so, yes, the subject was online.”
“I see,” said Blume. “Well thanks anyhow.”
More wasted time. Pernazzo still had an alibi of sorts.
“You’re welcome. Uh-” said Rosati.
Blume caught the monosyllable. “What? Were you going to say something?”
“No. Well, yeah, I suppose I was, but it’s like so obvious I don’t need to say it.”
“Let’s pretend I’m really stupid,” said Blume.
“Everyone knows this, but having an IP number assigned to your line doesn’t prove anything. I mean he could just have left his computer connected. I leave mine on for days, sometimes.”
“Right,” said Blume. “But this guy says he was playing an online game. Did you check that out?”
“No, I wasn’t asked to look into the sites he was visiting, just whether he was connected. I mean, like, you need a magistrate to subpoena the owners of the Web site the subject was visiting to check whether he was really there,” said Rosati. “Or you could just try to persuade the Web site owners to quietly release the IPs of users at the time you’re interested in. You’d still need the backing of a magistrate, though.”
“Which makes it difficult,” said Blume. “But let’s say we checked out someone and he was online and playing at the time, that would make a pretty solid alibi, wouldn’t it?”
“Definitely,” said Rosati. “Of course it could be anyone playing the game at that address, but if the IP matches the subscriber line, then we at least know someone was there at the time playing whatever the game was.”
“Poker,” said Blume. “Thanks, for the help.”
“Poker?”
“Hold ’em Vegas or something,” said Blume. Pernazzo was shaping up to have a good alibi, if it checked out. Now he would need a subpoena on the Web site, which meant going back to Principe, or a different magistrate. It meant a lot of paperwork and the end result would probably be to strengthen Pernazzo’s alibi. There would probably be a financial record of some sort if he was winning or losing.
“If that’s what he was playing, then he could have been using a bot,” said Rosati.
“A bot?”
“A program that plays for you. It’s called a bot, as in robot. Robot-bot. See? It’s like an abbreviation…”
“Yes, I get that bit,” said Blume. “Let’s pretend I’m not stupid anymore.”
“Yeah, well. It simulates a real player. You connect, start the program, and then go and do something else. That way you can play all night without having to stay awake. You can play lots of poker tables, and a decent program will beat beginners and pull in a small amount of profit. The casinos try to crack down on users who have bots, but since they deploy them themselves, it’s impossible to immunize their systems.”
“So you could use a bot to keep playing, and you’re not even there,” said Blume. “Where would you get a program like that?”
“You can buy them ready-made, they’re not illegal or anything. Or you could use C++ programming and build one yourself. But you’d need to know something about computers to do that. Does the subject know anything about computers?”
“Yes,” said Blume. “He does.”
“This is interesting,” said Rosati, who seemed to have forgotten that he was too busy to talk. “Using a bot as an alibi. I’m sure it’s been done before, but I’ve not come across it. It would be hard to prove. I’d be interested in hearing how this works out. Let me know, would you?”
“Sure thing,” said Blume. He felt an adrenaline rush. He was on to something.
Blume hung up and turned on his computer. For the next forty minutes, he queried the public records database, seeing what he could find about Pernazzo. Serena had been his mother’s name, and she had died three months ago.
Pernazzo had a driver’s license on which he had lost two points, an ID card, residence at the address where he lived. His declared income was pathetically low. His tax code corresponded to his given name. He now had a brief entry in the courthouse records as a result of his arrest at the dog fight.
He had no convictions. His birth certificate was dated 1978. His mother was registered as unmarried, the name of the father as “not given” and paternity “not acknowledged.”
Blume thought about the name plaque on the door. Pernazzo and T. Vercetti. He looked up Vercetti in the public records database, and was surprised to get
zero results. He checked again, typing carefully with his one good hand.
No results found. Zero. Vercetti was a nonexistent name.
Blume tried “Vercelli” and found thirty-three entries for the municipality of Rome. But the name he saw had not been Vercelli. He tried Vercetti again, and again got no results.
Blume logged off the police intranet and went to the Google home page. With his middle finger, he slowly tapped in the name “Vercetti” in the search box and hit return. He leaned forward so quickly to look at what came up on the screen that he felt a pain shoot across his neck. Showing 1-10 of 765,000 results, said the page. The very first in the list displayed the name Tommy Vercetti. T. Vercetti. The name Pernazzo had on his door plaque.
Blume clicked on the link, and read:
Thomas “Tommy” Vercetti (voiced by Ray Liotta) is a fictional character in the Grand Theft Auto video game series. He serves as the protagonist, anti-hero and playable character in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, where he emerges as the crime lord of his own syndicate..
Not just elves and sorcerers, then. Pernazzo liked to play other games. Blume read about Grand Theft Auto, or GTA as everyone seemed to call it. By the end of the article, he had the feeling that he might be the only person in the world not to have heard of it before.
The idea was to shoot as many people as possible and rise in the criminal underworld.
He turned off the computer. Even if he could not ask anyone or get an investigating magistrate to give him a warrant, Blume was going back to Pernazzo. But as he stood up, the door to his office opened, and in stepped D’Amico.
30
A week in complete charge of the PR surrounding the stalled Clemente case had left D’Amico looking neater than ever. The whiteness of the French-cuff shirt peeking from under the shimmering gray of a finely cut high-buttoned jacked with peaked lapels was, frankly, a triumph.
Blume suddenly felt everything he owned was dirty and old. He sat down again.
“There you are!” said D’Amico, with the voice of an adult who has been playing hide-and-seek with a child. He stepped across the room to behind where Blume was sitting, and folded his arms on the swivel chair, so that he was looking down on the crown of Blume’s head.
“Maria Grazia is the investigating magistrate in charge of the Clemente-Ferrucci case. We’re treating it as one thing now,” he told the back of Blume’s head.
Blume half-turned backward toward D’Amico, but it hurt his neck.
“Move. You’re making me nervous back there.”
D’Amico came back around the desk, took the chair opposite Blume.
“You’re making people nervous, too, Alec.”
“Am I?”
“You come in here in a parlous state, start reworking the case which you are no longer on. That makes people who lack your commitment look bad. I just tell them that’s your American work ethic. But then you go and give them a real reason to be ner vous by meeting Sveva Romagnolo. It looked like a secret meeting, too.”
“You were watching?”
“Of course not. I am still your ex-partner, Alec. I don’t spy. But she was being watched over.”
“Watched over or just watched?”
D’Amico made a gesture with his hands as if releasing an invisible bird into the air. “It comes down to the same thing. I don’t know. Really, I don’t. I don’t even think they were cops. Trainee domestic spies, probably. SISDE operatives sent in by the uncle. The orange-faced minister in Forza Italia. Looks like a squirrel monkey. Same surname.”
“I know who you mean. But somehow the SISDE guys reported to you.”
“No. This is just stuff I heard. I did have some doubts about the story or your meeting her. Now I don’t. This investigation is doing your career no good, Alec. Leave it alone. You used to know when to leave things alone.”
“I just need to get this one person, then I’ll back out. You can handle it however you want, give the credit to whomever you want,” said Blume.
“Why do you care so much, Alec? You had pretty cynical ideas about justice when we were partners. It’s one of the reasons I quit the flying squad.”
“The suspect I have in mind… I think this guy will kill again,” said Blume. “I should have hauled him in the moment I clapped eyes on him.”
“Why didn’t you? It would have been easier then than now.”
“I don’t know. I didn’t have enough evidence. I was alone. I had been told to go after Alleva instead.” And, he thought to himself, I had my first date with a woman in eighteen months, and I was not thinking straight.
“Ah,” said D’Amico. “That’s not good. Well, I suppose we’ll have to find a way of getting this guy. Have you got good evidence now?”
“Not as such. But fingerprints, DNA, it’ll match.”
D’Amico frowned. “We need to go through the magistrates for that.”
“I know. In the meantime I sent Paoloni after the guy.”
“Paoloni is on leave of absence. That’s what the Holy Ghost told me. When did you send Paoloni in?”
Blume paused as if to think. He had suddenly noticed that D’Amico had not even bothered to ask for Pernazzo’s name. “A short while ago.”
“Has Paoloni reported back to you?”
“Yes,” said Blume. He could play the disinformation game, too.
“Really? That’s good, because Paoloni seemed to have disappeared from sight. The Holy Ghost has been invoking his safe return to the fold. He took leave, then vanished. I’m glad you’re in contact. Where is he?”
“No idea,” said Blume.
“Well, did he find your guy-what’s his name by the way?”
“Vercetti.”
“Did Paoloni find him?”
“Yes,” said Blume. For all he knew, maybe he had.
“Again, no arrest? It seems to me like getting the suspect might be harder than you have allowed for. You need a magistrate to direct inquiries, here, Alec.”
“I know.”
“And you’re not going to get one if it’s connected with the Clemente case. So you had better leave it completely, or leave it with me. I’ll see what I can do. Pass the evidence to me, I’ll make sure it goes to the right people. Get Paoloni to contact me, too, would you? We’ll organize something.”
“Right. I’ll send the evidence over this evening.”
“Great.” D’Amico stood up. “You should rest, Alec. Not come in looking for work.”
“What the hell is the sense in staying at home?” said Blume.
“You need family, Alec. Everyone has some family. You never visited mine when we were partners. Even Paoloni’s got a son.”
The door opened, and Vicequestore Gallone appeared, holding a yellow file folder.
Gallone did not welcome Blume back. He simply closed his eyes and nodded gently as if receiving a confession, and said, “Yes, yes,” in response to a question no one had asked. Then, with the air of a man anxious not to wet his shoes in a dirty puddle, he stepped into the room, reached over and placed the folder on Blume’s desk, and announced: “Road rage incident. A family man by the name of Enrico Brocca, shot dead outside a pizzeria after an argument over a minor car accident. Seeing as you’re so anxious not to let your excellent police skills rust, I can assign the two men I put on the case to other duties, leave it to you. When you require manpower to move the investigation forward, you will come to me, with the paperwork filled out.” He turned to D’Amico. “Good morning, Commissioner.”
D’Amico smoothed an eyebrow with his thumb. “Good morning, Vicequestore,” he said.
Looking at the two of them side by side, Blume was reminded of an old tailor fussing over a model. To Gallone he said, “This road rage case. Who’s the magistrate in charge?”
“Your friend Principe,” said Gallone. “You’ll spend the rest of the day reading the reports. There are no witnesses in this case. We are still looking. Maybe you could find us some witnesses. Contact the magistrate, inform him th
at you are on this case, and await instructions. I expect he’ll want you to go out tomorrow and interview the widow of the murdered man.”
Blume opened the file, not wanting to look at any of them. “Fine,” he said.
Gallone glanced at his watch. “So I’ll phone up the Office of Public Prosecution, tell them the case has been assigned to a detective, shall I?”
He left without waiting for a reply. D’Amico lingered.
“What?” asked Blume. “What do you want?”
“Nothing. I no longer have any reason to be in this commissariato. I’m going back to my office in the Ministry.”
“Goodbye then,” said Blume, opening the folder and beginning to read. He did not glance up when he heard the door shut.
The report was an exercise in minimalism. The bare essentials of time and place, a ballistics conjecture, the name of one witness. There had been a pizzeria full of people, groups of people on the street, and yet just one witness, a young woman. Crowds are made up exclusively of cowards.
There had been no real follow-up. Blume looked at the police sketch of the gunman. It looked like it had been done by an abstract artist. The image was as unhelpful as it could get. It was possible to project almost any face into the almost blank outline. The chin tapered a little, maybe indicating a thin face. The eyes were small, and the nose, too, as if the artist did not want to commit himself to grand statements. The mouth was small and seemed to have been made to look slightly puckered, or else to indicate incipient hair on the upper lip. It was by no means clear. The accompanying notes explained that the children and the widowed wife had not been able to describe the killer in any detail. They had averted their eyes. But the report also said that they had had two occasions to see the killer. Surely a better job could have been made of it than this?
His mobile rang and Paoloni’s name appeared on the display.
“Beppe. Where the hell have you been?” said Blume. He went over to his office door, checked no one was around, then returned as Paoloni gave one of his typically laconic answers.
“Unfinished business. Then I had to fade a bit into the background. I’ll tell you about it when we meet.”
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