The dogs of Rome cab-1

by Conor Fitzgerald

  Pernazzo then removed every book, magazine, and piece of paper in the house, and placed them in the van; the passports, embosser, mushroom book, and Alleva’s laptop went into the rucksack. He flicked through one or two books before picking them up, but found nothing. He went into the bedroom, closed the floor safe, twirled the dial, wiped it with a bed sheet.

  And now Pernazzo needed a nap. There was one armchair in the room, upholstered in synthetic orange with black ridging. He set his digital watch, leaned back into the slightly damp material, and slept.

  When his beeping watch woke him up twenty minutes later, he went to drink the plastic bottle of water he had given Massoni, but it had turned warm. He stepped into the kitchenette and turned on the faucet and drank.

  Then he left, double-checking he had pulled the front door closed.

  45

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 8:15 P.M.

  What seemed to be bothering Paoloni most were the flies.

  “The flies, maggots, the heat, the smell. You have no idea.” Paoloni paused, then hammered out the syllables as if to a simpleton to get his point across. “You. Have. No. Fucking. Idea.”

  Alleva was dead, Massoni was dead, and Blume could hear exhilaration in Paoloni’s tone. Revenge and reprieve all at once.

  “Have you called the forensic team?”

  “Sure.”

  “How long have the bodies been there?” asked Blume.

  “I don’t know. I’m not a medical examiner, thank Christ. With this heat. Maybe four, five days, a week.”

  “Wait, I’m putting you on hands-free.” Paoloni had no right to feel exonerated, but Blume still felt it fair to warn him: “Prosecutor Principe is here with me.”

  Blume set his telephone on the desk and pressed the loudspeaker. “… appreciate it,” Paoloni was saying.

  “This is Prosecuting Magistrate Filippo Principe. Have you made a positive identification?”

  “Yes, Giudice,” said Paoloni. “Alleva and Massoni. Not so as you’d recognize them, but they had their wallets.”

  “What killed them?”

  “It looks like gunshots. Both have gunshot wounds to the head. I didn’t notice wounds anywhere else on the body.” Paoloni paused. “They may have shot each other. That’s what it’s supposed to look like. Each has a pistol in his hand.”

  “But you don’t think they shot each other?”

  “No, I don’t. The forensic pathologists will say for sure.”

  “What’s wrong with the scene?” asked Principe.

  “Two people killing each other at exactly the same time with head-shots? Two simultaneous lethal shots? They pulled their triggers at exactly the same moment? I don’t think so.”

  Principe nodded at Blume, who nodded back as if to say, yes, Paoloni was a good investigator.

  “What else?” asked Principe.

  “One cadaver-Alleva-has this cute little baby belt holster, but the gun in his hand, a Glock, is too big for it. The place is cleaned out. There’s nothing here, like someone else lifted it all. Also, one of the casings was in the wrong place in the room. I saw two near the table, which is fine, but Zambotto found one near the wall. It could have bounced or something, but it’s a strange place for it to end up. The number of shots fired seems wrong, too. You’d need to be here to see. By the way, there’s a bedroom with a closed floor safe. Maybe there’s something there. But we had to get out so as not to contaminate the scene.”

  Blume asked him what sort of place he was in, whether there were neighbors.

  “The last house we passed on the way was about three kilometers away, though maybe there’s another house on the other side. But the place is isolated. You can’t see it from the road. Also, a car is sitting in the driveway. A big Beamer. Model X5. Nice car. We haven’t looked inside, thought we’d leave that to the technicians.”

  “Good,” said Blume. “Any signs of other cars, other traffic having been there?”

  “You mean tracks on the ground and stuff? The forensics are arriving, along with patrol cars. Looks like it’s about to get very busy. Carabinieri, too, from the looks of it.”

  Principe said, “Inspector Paoloni, if the killer wanted it to look like a suicide or reciprocal killing, let’s make sure we are seen to be thinking along those lines. Make sure no one mentions the possibility of a third person.”

  “Vicequestore Gallone might,” said Paoloni.

  “You’ll have to stop him,” said Principe. “I’ll talk to him myself later.”

  “OK.” Paoloni hesitated, as if waiting to hear from Blume. Then he hung up.

  Principe looked at Blume and said, “Well?”

  “The first thing to say is it does not make sense for Innocenzi to kill them and then tip me off.”

  “Agreed.”

  “And if he sent someone to make it look like a suicide pact or a simultaneous murder, he’d have sent someone who knows how to do it right,” said Blume.

  “Agreed.”

  “And if the setup is amateurish, well, you know where I’m going with this.”

  “You can go there, but I’m not sure I’ll follow,” said Principe. “You want me to believe Pernazzo is responsible for this, too?”

  “Yes,” said Blume. “We know Pernazzo killed Brocca and Clemente. Right?”

  “Know is a strong word,” said Principe, “but let’s assume it.”

  “So we know Pernazzo can kill. Clemente campaigned against Alleva and Massoni, and Pernazzo attended their dog fights. Then we have a sighting of Massoni and Pernazzo together when Brocca got killed.”

  “We do?”

  “We will,” said Blume. “Once I talk to Giulia again. And if we start looking more closely, I’m sure we’ll find more connections.”

  “But you are not accusing Pernazzo of killing Ferrucci?”

  “No.”

  “It doesn’t make sense. Why would Alleva and Massoni reveal their hideout to someone like Pernazzo?”

  “Maybe he did computer work for them. We’ll find out. Pernazzo has no record. That’s all it takes. No record. If everyone was DNA-fingerprinted at birth it would be a different story.”

  Principe looked doubtful. “DNA fingerprinting? That’s a bit-you know. Infringes personal freedom.”

  “No such thing,” said Blume, moving briskly toward the door. “Let’s go catch ourselves a killer.”

  Blume turned around to see Principe still leaning against the desk. “You won’t help?”

  “Remember Article fifty-five of the Code of Criminal Procedure, Alec? As a policeman, you can act preventatively. I don’t have the same scope, especially in this case. At the risk of sounding like a lawyer, I’d prefer not to know exactly in advance what you’re going to do. Do you trust your own judgment?”

  “Not always.”

  Principe clicked his tongue like a teacher who had received a wrong answer. “I mean in this case, do you really trust your own judgment?”

  “Yes. Angelo Pernazzo is our man. I am sure of it. It’s time I brought him in. It’s way past time.”

  Principe straightened up, walked over to Blume, gave him a friendly half slap on the cheek. “Then trust your own judgment on this.”

  He opened the door and, before Blume could reply, was gone.

  46

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 9:15 P.M.

  Blume returned to headquarters. After some haggling, he finally managed to get a squad car and two policemen called back in to take him to the crumbling house on Via di Bravetta.

  The two policemen who arrived in the squad car couldn’t have made up his age between them. One of them couldn’t take his eyes off Blume’s plastered arm, as if he had never seen anything so strange or exotic in his life, which was possible.

  They exchanged glances with each other as Blume clambered into the backseat of the car. Superior officers never did that. The backseat was for junior officers and criminals. But Blume had had enough of front seats for now, and his arm hurt.

  The shops had clo
sed for the night and the traffic on the streets was beginning to flow again as they left. It took only twenty minutes to reach their destination.

  Leaving the driver in the car, Blume and the other young policeman, whose name he never even asked, got themselves buzzed into the shabby apartment block by an old woman to whom they simply declared “police” when she asked who they were. No wonder criminals had such an easy time.

  The elevator mechanism smelled of old oil and grease, and the cab took an age in coming. They stepped into the narrow cabin, and ascended to the third floor in silence, trying not to breathe all over each other, before stepping out into a short hallway with three doors. Angelo Pernazzo’s with its plaque dedicated to a virtual killer was the middle one. Blume walked up to it, raised his fist to thump at the door, then lowered it.

  “Hold it,” he said.

  The young policeman, who had not been on the point of doing anything at all, looked confused.

  An image of Ferrucci sitting at his desk, tapping away at the computer, eyes moving back and forth as he eagerly awaited a command or simply some attention came into his mind. A sense of fatigue overwhelmed Blume, and he felt his confidence drain from him as he realized what he had been about to do. He was right about Pernazzo, a person who had killed at least four people. And here he was on the point of confronting a killer, with a single unprepared rookie cop as backup.

  He was going to have to call in help. Trusting himself did not mean doing it himself. On the contrary: it meant being confident enough to risk what remained of his reputation by ordering a full-blown raid. If Pernazzo turned out to be the wrong person, he might as well apply right now for a job guarding a bank.

  “Ring the door on that side,” he ordered, indicating the apartment to the right of Pernazzo’s. “Show your badge, speak quietly. Ask if they think Pernazzo is in. I’ll do the same here.”

  Blume pressed the button, and heard a sharp buzz from immediately behind the door, but no one answered. On the other side, meanwhile, the young cop was speaking quietly to an old man wearing wide shorts, a yellow shirt, and thin white socks pulled up to his knees. The old man had opened the door fully: another easy victim.

  Blume knocked and waited. Still no one. He tried the buzzer again.

  Nothing. The young cop finished his talk with the old man. Blume motioned him over, made a quick downward bye-bye motion with his hand to warn him to speak quietly.

  “Says he doesn’t know,” said the young cop. “Says the son keeps to himself, was never one to have friends. He used to know the mother, but she died a short while ago. Nobody in that one?”

  Blume slapped the neighbor’s door with the palm of his hand, “Doesn’t look like it.”

  “Are we going to try this middle door?”

  Blume looked at the unwrinkled and uncomplicated face of the young man in front of him and thought of Ferrucci.

  “No. I’ve changed my mind. We’re going to call in backup, and we’re going to get a warrant to get in there.”

  The kid looked annoyed, like he had been told he was too young for a fairground ride. “But we haven’t even tried.”

  “Nor will we. Let’s get back to the car, radio from there,” said Blume.

  But he could not help himself from trying to peer in through the security peephole. The killer could very easily be right there. He might have heard them ringing next door and be looking out, looking directly into Blume’s eye. Blume considered telling the young cop to point his Beretta directly against the peephole, see if that produced a panicked scuttling from behind the door.

  Blume sidestepped out of the radius of vision of the middle door and positioned himself in front of the old man’s door. Then he hunkered down and tested whether he was able to keep his balance with his arm in a sling. He could, but only just. On bended knees he made his way back, below the scope level of the peephole, or so he hoped, and pressed his ear to the door. The elevator behind him clunked and whirred, and moved down. From behind the door, he thought he heard a scuffling sound. He could also hear a Mulino Bianco commercial playing on a TV, advising people to eat healthily. It could have been from another apartment, but he doubted it. The apartment next door was empty, and he did not remember TV noise getting any louder when the old man had opened the door.

  Then he heard it. A sniff. That’s all it was. The sound of someone sniffing from the other side of the door. Still crouching, he took five painful sideways steps out of the range of vision, but the effort was too much and he slowly keeled over onto the floor, on top of his sprained arm, his knees locked in pain. He bit his lip to stop himself from shouting out. Eventually, he struggled back into an upright position. The young policeman, unable to work out a coping strategy for insane superiors, was staring down the stairwell.

  Blume was physically exhausted from his exertions. His ribs felt as if they had pierced his lungs, his arm throbbed. Even his teeth were paining him. He pressed the button for the elevator.

  The elevator took a long time, and seemed even slower going down than it had been on the way up. But as they made their slow descent, Blume’s pain was subsiding and his confidence rising.

  They got out into the courtyard. Blume caught a glimpse of a figure walking fast out the gate, head bowed. There was something slightly strange in the gait. The world was full of people fearful of the police.

  Blume stopped and told the young cop, “I’m staying here outside the main door to make sure our man doesn’t leave the building. You go back to your partner, call in backup, then wait for them to arrive. Just say you’re acting under my orders, and anyone wants to know, they can talk to me. I’ll see about the warrants.” He felt confident.

  47

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 9:35 P.M.

  Angelo Pernazzo slowed to a walk as soon as he came out the apartment building, not so stupid as to draw attention to himself. He managed only a few steps before he had to bend down and adjust his cotton and rope espadrilles, which were threatening to trip him up. He had almost lost them completely in his rush down the stairs to beat the two idiot policemen in the elevator. He pulled up his foot, crooked his thumb, and snapped the fabric back up over his heels. He hefted Clemente’s gray backpack onto his shoulder, and turned sharply as he heard the front door to his apartment block snap shut again. He saw a cop in the car across the street looking straight at him, but not really seeing him.

  He heard footsteps behind. They were after him. He chanced a backward glance. A uniformed policeman was following him. Walking, not running.

  Now the cop cut diagonally across the street to his partner in the car, ignoring Pernazzo. No sign of the commissioner who had tried to look the wrong way through the peephole.

  Pernazzo had prepared the backpack after seeing Di Tivoli’s documentary on Wednesday night. In went his knife, the embosser, the passports, Alleva’s little gun, and Clemente’s wallet, which still had his ID papers and credit cards. Alleva’s mushroom book, bank codes. A perfect compact escape kit. What was in there was enough to take him away from Italy to anywhere he wanted. On Thursday he visited a photo booth, took twenty-four pictures of himself for the passports, and added them to the kit. He spent the afternoon looking at Google Earth images of Argentina, then called Tecno-casa and announced he wanted to put his house on the market. They said they would send someone around the next day.

  No wonder Commissioner Blume had not returned. He had to be busy collecting evidence against Innocenzi. But even as the credits were rolling on the documentary, Pernazzo began to feel frustrated at the continuing failure of recognition. He needed to talk to Di Tivoli about this. Give Di Tivoli the full story, then make good his escape, maybe.

  Or he could kill Di Tivoli. That would be interesting, because then everyone would be convinced it was Innocenzi revenging himself for the expose about his daughter.

  He’d play it by ear.

  Pernazzo did a phone directory search for Taddeo Di Tivoli from the Virgilio Web site, and there he was. Journalists like bein
g contacted.

  On Friday night, for the first time ever, Pernazzo got bored with his online gaming. All of a sudden, it did not seem real. He logged out of World of Warcraft, played a bit of EverQuest, with the same result. Later on, he found he could not sleep when he wanted, and when he did, it was for far more than the twenty minutes that Uberman allowed.

  When the doorbell rang that Saturday, he almost brought up his dinner from shock. Time to run. He crept to the door and peered through the peephole and saw a uniformed policeman leaning on the banisters.

  He stayed still, staring out the peephole, unable to move in case Blume noticed a flicker in the light. Then the cops, who could just as easily have been killers sent by Innocenzi, took the elevator down. Pernazzo seized his one last chance, grabbed the backpack, and ran headlong down the stairs, only realizing he was wearing cotton-and-cord slippers when he slipped on the first landing. As he picked himself up, the slowly descending elevator drew level with him. He hoisted the bag onto his shoulders and took the stairs four at a time, gaining on, overtaking, and leaving the old elevator, Blume, and the policeman behind.

  Pernazzo’s Opel Tigra was parked two streets away. He hoped the traffic would not be against him. He drove as fast as he could, releasing some of the tension. He considered going carefully, stopping when lights were amber, touching the brake pedal every few seconds like his mother used to do-she even signaled to go around double-parked cars-but there was no point. No policeman in Rome ever pulled anyone over for reckless driving. They considered it demeaning.

  It took him thirty-five minutes to reach Di Tivoli’s house. He found a parking place less than five minutes away and walked as quickly as his slippers allowed.

  It was now ten o’clock and quite dark. He had fifteen minutes before he needed to hypersleep. He took Alleva’s Davis P-32 out of the backpack, slipped it into the back pocket of his trousers.

  The front door to Di Tivoli’s apartment block was closed. He pressed the intercom button below Di Tivoli’s. A woman answered.