“What about Pernazzo?”
The one second of silence that followed this question was all it took for Blume to realize that Paoloni had not followed up.
“I got a more important lead. I was following it up. But it came to nothing.”
“I told you to go get this Pernazzo,” said Blume. “You said you would.
Are you still the same person that was beating his breast and blaming himself for the death of a colleague, or are you back to your normal truculent self?”
“I’m definitely the person who cares about his colleague’s death more than anything,” said Paoloni. “Which is why I didn’t make Pernazzo a big priority.”
“You came to me and asked for help, I gave you something to do, and you didn’t do it. And what’s with the leave of absence?”
“I got injured, remember? Same as you.”
“Are you still on leave now?”
“Prognosis was fifteen days. I had my first day yesterday. You want, I can go get your suspect now.”
“You are on leave. I’m not sending an off-duty cop to a suspect’s home.”
“It doesn’t have to be by the book,” said Paoloni.
“It doesn’t have to be absolutely against all the rules in the book either,” said Blume. “What’s with the sick leave, and the switched-off telephone, and now this attitude?”
“I need a break, Ale. I just need to get out of this world of killers and cops and cop-killers for two weeks. I’m sorry if I didn’t do what you asked.”
“What I ordered,” corrected Blume. But it had not been an order, because he did not have the authority to give an order to arrest a suspect like that. Paoloni was right, it had been a request, which made his refusal to comply worse.
“Are we still OK?” asked Paoloni. He sounded more resigned than hopeful.
“I don’t know,” said Blume. “Come back on duty. Waive your sick leave and report straight to me. In an official capacity. Look contrite when I next see you.”
Blume hung up. Paoloni had sounded different. Flatter, less scoffing, less explosive than usual. Something was up there.
Blume glanced at the photo of the murdered man. Killed for a parking place, according to the report. Jesus Christ. He laid the image aside and called the courthouse, got Principe on the line.
“I see we got fobbed off with a road rage incident,” he began.
“What do you mean ‘fobbed off’?” said Principe. “This is one of several important cases I am working on, now that the Clemente affair is in more capable hands.”
“And you want me to follow it up?”
“Not high-profile enough for you, Commissioner?”
“What’s with the tone, Filippo?”
“What tone? It’s just sometimes I get fed up with the way some cases get the red carpet treatment, others get kicked into the long grass. This was a family man, murdered in front of his children on his wife’s birthday. You don’t think that’s worthy of your notice?”
Blume hesitated, unsure what to make of Principe’s attitude. “Of course I do,” he said.
“I want you to stay focused on this case, and on this case alone. Is that understood?”
Blume was perplexed. First Paoloni going quiet, now Principe blustering like this. Principe continued, “Because it’s the only one you’ll get, Commissioner. Leave the Clemente case alone.”
Blume began to suspect Principe was speaking to the gallery. His tone was too rhetorical.
“Have you read the report, Commissioner?”
Calling him Commissioner three times like that was a sort of code. Principe was not on his own in his office. They might even be on speakerphone.
“Yes,” said Blume. “There’s not much to it. An unknown assailant, possibly to do with a fight over a parking place. No witnesses.”
“Get to it, then,” said Principe.
Blume put down the receiver and rubbed his ear as if a small white grub had crawled down the line and into his head, and left the office wondering what the hell had gotten into Principe. Even with an appreciative audience, there had been something too manic in the magistrate’s tone. A road rage case. Pathetic assignment.
31
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 11 A.M.
Giulia sat in the middle of her bed. Blume felt huge in the child’s room.
He had spent the rest of the previous day going over the report and talking to the two policemen who had signed off on it. The involvement of forensics had been minimal. Even Principe, who had sounded so high-toned on the phone, seemed to have lost interest. The previous evening Blume had made the appointment to interview the widow of the victim, and now he found himself talking to the daughter instead.
Downstairs, a policewoman, Inspector Mattiola, newly arrived in the department, was doing her level best to get the woman to say something.
Blume had brought her along to talk to the child, but he soon realized getting any sense out of the mother was impossible. So he left her to the new policewoman. He figured she needed to learn the hard way how unhelpful most interviewees usually are.
Not this child, though.
“Wouldn’t you prefer to go downstairs, Giulia?” he asked her.
She shook her head.
“OK.” The bedroom had one armchair. It was covered in her clothes.
Blume stood there trying to figure out what to do.
“You can put them on the floor,” she said.
Seeing no alternative, he hooked his good arm around a pile of jeans, underpants, small bras, socks, and shirts, and put them carefully on the floor beside the chair, then sat down.
“I’ll be moving into his study soon,” said Giulia. “A few months ago, he promised me that if I started helping around the house a bit, he would surrender his study and turn it into a bedroom for me. He even bought a portable computer, and started working in the kitchen, to get used to the idea. Now I’ll get his room, anyway.”
Blume pretended to examine the room with his eyes. Eventually he had to bring them back to the small grown-up sitting cross- legged on a child’s bed.
“Giacomo could get this room,” continued Giulia. “It’s bigger than his, but he doesn’t want to move. He’s like my mother.”
“I’m sorry,” said Blume.
Giulia cast a skeptical look in his direction. “It’s not as if you people did much. This is, like, the third visit.”
“This one’s different.”
“You mean now you’re going to catch whoever it was?”
Blume wished he had not spoken. “I can’t say that.”
“So it’s not really a different sort of visit, is it?”
“No.”
Giulia pulled a pillow from behind her, and arranged it against her back.
“At least you look sad. The others looked like they didn’t care. If anything, they treated my mother like she had done it.”
“It’s the police way.”
Giulia shrugged. “No wonder nobody likes the police much.”
“What age are you?”
“Twelve. What happened to your arm… and your nose?”
“I crashed a car. It’s only sprained, not broken. There’s nothing wrong with my nose.”
“If you say so.”
Blume steepled his hands, hid his nose behind it, and said, “When I was seventeen, I lost both my parents. They were shot dead in a bank raid.”
“That’s sad. Did you catch the person who did it?”
“I wasn’t a policeman then.”
“Did the other police catch him?”
“No.”
“So he is still out there?”
“No, he died.”
“How do you know he died if you didn’t catch him?”
“Someone told me later.”
“Someone in the police?”
“I’m not sure. I suppose so. But what I want to say is back then, and it’s not really all that long ago, the police I met helped me out.”
“Maybe the police we
re better in your day.”
“I’ll try and help,” said Blume. He may have misread Principe, but Principe had read him like a book putting him on this case. Five minutes into the interview and he had pledged his soul to the girl, whose suddenly widowed mother sat dumb, helpless, and closed downstairs.
Their outing to the pizzeria, Giulia told him, had been to celebrate her mother’s fortieth birthday. Her father, who was two years younger, kept teasing her mother about being old. Giulia could tell she didn’t really like him to make jokes, any more than he appreciated being called “Mr. Smooth” in reference to his baldness. Her mother had said something about pizza being all they could afford, and her father had looked hurt.
“She did that quite a lot,” said Giulia.
“They argued a lot?”
“Not really,” said Giulia. “But now she’s hurting so much for all those things she said. She keeps mentioning them.”
“Tell me more about that evening,” said Blume.
They were going to a pizza place. Giulia didn’t know the address, but it was near a hospital. Blume knew it. He had checked the address in the file and driven slowly past the site of the killing before proceeding to the house.
On that evening, Giulia said, they walked out of the house just as a loud clap of thunder burst overhead, and by the time they had reached the car, parked about five minutes’ walk away because there was never space on their street, it was bucketing down, and they were all soaked.
The pizzeria had parking, but it was full. This started another sort of argument about whether he should drop them off outside the pizzeria or not.
Her father didn’t want to give any money to the gang-operated parking attendants, her mother said he was going too far away from the restaurant. She said they would get soaked again, even though the rain was already easing off.
All of a sudden, her father braked and pulled over because he had seen a place, but on the wrong side of the road. The traffic did not let up for ages.
Finally, with a quick shout to Giulia to double-check through the side window, her father lurched into a rapid U-turn. The road was just wide enough to accommodate the turning circle of their small car. Revving the engine a little, Giulia’s father straightened up and set off in the opposite direction.
The herringbone parking rendered the gap invisible from that side of the road, and they were already practically upon it before they spotted it again.
“Hah!” cried her father, swinging the car out a little to get a better angle of approach, and standing on the brake.
The screech, the swish of tires not quite gripping the wet tarmac, the sudden blare of the horn from behind, and the water-filled light of the headlamps coming through the back window and filling the car with a bluish light made her think she was going to die, so that when the actual rear impact came, Giulia couldn’t believe how soft it was. Just a slight bump, that pushed her softly forward in her seat, and a crack and a tinkle of the car’s taillights fragmenting.
Her father stayed outwardly calm. She knew he was faking it, but he continued the maneuver, and edged the car into the gap.
The vehicle behind had wheels that seemed to go as high as the door handles on theirs. As Giulia, her brother, and her mother all got out, Giulia saw the driver of the car behind open his door and jump down onto the road, just like that, without even looking, even though he was practically in the middle of the road. Her father never allowed them to get out on the traffic side. The man was lucky no one was coming behind. Also, he left the driver’s door wide open, blocking the whole lane.
The passenger door opened, and another man, a far smaller one, jumped out on the safe side, covering his head against the rain.
Her father had bent down and was looking, she imagined, at the broken backlights, and shaking his head. Her mother called to him in half-warning and half-pleading tones. She was worried about a fight. Giulia remembered her father saying, “We’re in the right. He rear-ended us.”
Giulia watched the two men. They did not come forward to look at the car, nor did they even bother to look at their own. They simply stood there, in the spotlight of their own headlamps. As her father approached them, the large man leaned over slightly and glanced at the side of his vehicle.
They frightened her. They frightened her mother, too. She could feel this in the way her mother pulled her away onto the sidewalk and propelled her and Giacomo toward the bright windows, crowded tables, and loud happy sounds of the pizzeria. She glanced back and saw her father standing in front of the large one, who opened his hands in what she thought was a conciliatory gesture. And everything seemed to be fine, because ten minutes later, her father, tense but smiling, was sitting beside her, helping her choose a pizza.
She asked for a Coke, not because she wanted one, but because she knew he disapproved of sugary drinks and would give one of his little lectures about the targeting of children by multinationals. And when he had finished, he would allow her to have one, laugh at his own weakness, and not feel so bad.
Her mother had said he was wrong not to call the police. She said they would probably slash the tires. Her father drank four long glasses of beer.
He didn’t usually drink so much beer, but her mother didn’t seem to mind tonight.
“Just remember, I’m driving,” she had said.
They left the pizzeria about an hour later, maybe less. There was a small scene when her father paid for the meal using his Bancomat card. Her mother asked about cash, and he said he had left it at home. As they came out, Giacomo was swinging like a monkey from his mother’s right hand, and, for once, her parents had linked arms. Giulia went to hold her father’s left arm, but realized the sidewalk was not broad enough and she would get bumped into by people coming from the opposite direction.
So she was three steps behind when she saw her father and mother stop and unlink arms and her mother slowly and gently beginning to push Giacomo’s face sideways with the palm of her free hand, as if something had already happened that he should never see. Then her father took a step forward on his own, and Giulia saw the same two men again. The large one had a blue mark on his neck. The smaller one had his arm outstretched. At the end of his outstretched arm, he held a gray-barreled piece of weaponry such as Giulia had only ever seen, or thought she had seen, in her brother’s toy box.
The large man looked surprised. She remembered that. And then the small one shot her father.
“What sort of mark on the neck?” asked Blume, mainly to distract her mind from the images it was now replaying.
“Like three triangles pointing into each other. Blue, same color as veins,” said Giulia.
“A very big man?”
“Bigger than you, even,” said Giulia.
“There was no police sketch of him,” said Blume.
“They never asked for one. It took so long to do one of the man who shot my father… And they didn’t seem too happy with the result.”
“I am not too happy with them,” said Blume.
“They’re right, sort of,” said Giulia. “I couldn’t describe him properly to them. It’s hard to picture him. He was small and horrible and I see him in my sleep, but I can’t see his face. It’s like it was blurred. As if the rain had washed his face off of him.”
“Close your eyes. Listen only to my voice. I know this is an awful place for you to go, but I know you go there anyway, and I know you stay there reliving it. Only this time, I’m accompanying you. Maybe that might help a little? Now what ever you see in your mind’s eye, I can see, too. Like we are there together. Relax your shoulders a little, that’s it. Now don’t worry about the face. Just tell me some other details. Can you see his feet, for instance?”
A minute passed, which Blume used to get her to relax her arms, legs, hands. Finally she said, “No.”
“No problem,” said Blume. “I can see them. Ugly feet. Now think of his arms. Especially the arm that he used to murder your father.”
“I can see it,” s
he said. “It’s thin. More like my arm than yours. Wait, he was wearing a bracelet, too. Silver, with a chain.”
“The sleeve was what color?”
“White.”
“A shirt?”
“No, tracksuit top, underneath he had a V-neck and nothing under that.”
“Move up a little. What about his chin?”
“Sharp. Small mouth. No, it’s sort of wide, too. He smiled afterwards.”
“Any hair on this face, a goatee, beard, moustache, sideburns?”
“I can’t remember. I can see the mouth with a little moustache, and I can picture it without one. Both sort of fit.”
“What color was his hair?”
“I can’t remember. Not dark, not blond. Mousy. His skin was white. As white as his tracksuit.”
“That blue cross…” said Blume.
“No, that’s on the other man, the large one.”
“Yes I know. It’s just… never mind. Did they touch the car?”
“I don’t think so. Mommy pulled us away quickly. Then afterwards, they were waiting outside the restaurant. The police took the car away. I don’t know where it is, and my mother’s not interested in finding out. But we’re going to need it again next week when school starts.”
Nothing of any use had been found on the car. Blume had read the report. Why had they not given it back? Some bureaucrat who could not give a damn that his lethargy caused suffering.
Blume eased Giulia back out of the memory, and spoke to her a little of a recollection he had of himself, crawling on a long gray beach by the Pacific Ocean. A memory from when he was three, which they said was impossible, but he had it all the same. Giulia seemed to remember a day she had spent at Villa Borghese, and she could have been no more than three at the time. Her father had pushed her all the way from the house in her pushchair.
Hours of walking. He brought pasta in a thermos and they ate that and watched some horses. She was almost asleep as Blume stole out of the room.
He left the house charged with anger for what had happened, and anger at the way his own force had treated the family. The policewoman followed meekly behind. She had got nothing out of the mother. So now they had two follow-up interviews, no reports on progress, even if only to say there had been no progress and never would be.
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