The dogs of Rome cab-1

by Conor Fitzgerald

  Blume showed them pictures of Pernazzo, whom they identified immediately. He showed them pictures of Alleva and Massoni. Giulia remembered Massoni, her mother did not. Then he began by telling them that the man who had killed their father and husband was dead. They nodded. They knew this already.

  He stumbled over a few condolences, not sure where to begin the narrative they were waiting for because it really began the day he walked into Pernazzo’s apartment and failed to arrest him.

  Not only had he not arrested Pernazzo, he had insulted and goaded him, then rushed off to meet Kristin, leaving Pernazzo to reassert his virility by killing Enrico Brocca and ruining this family. He quickly glossed over the details.

  But Giulia was ready for him. She pulled up her legs onto the cushion, turned to face him better, and said, “When you first saw Pernazzo, did you get a bad feeling about him?”

  “Yes.” He would not lie to her.

  “But you couldn’t arrest him then? You can’t arrest people just because you don’t like them. Right?”

  “Right,” said Blume. “I can’t do that.” He noticed the dog was drooling on the carpet.

  Twenty minutes later, Blume concluded his version of events with the news that Pernazzo had been assassinated in a house in the country and that inquiries were continuing, but again Giulia was waiting for him.

  “Who killed Pernazzo?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Liar,” said Giulia. “When you tell the truth you say ‘I’ and when you’re lying, you try to spread the blame and say ‘we.’ ”

  “Giulia, you mustn’t,” said her mother, but her voice lacked all conviction.

  “We have a right to know,” said Giulia, looking straight at Blume.

  “I think it was a woman called Manuela Innocenzi, but it is not likely to be proved.” Blume realized he was going to have to explain who Manuela was, which meant filling in more details.

  When he had finished again, Giulia said, “So my father was Pernazzo’s second victim after Clemente? I think that was important enough for you to tell me right away.”

  “It didn’t seem relevant to your case,” said Blume. “Also, I suspect he might have killed his mother, too. It was probably what set him off, but none of that can be proved now. So your father would have been the third.”

  They sat there in silence for a while. The dog seemed to have fallen asleep.

  Finally, Giulia said, “I don’t feel anything. No, that’s not right. I don’t feel any different now that I know who did it and that he’s dead.”

  “I think I do,” said her mother. They both turned to look at her. Tears were flowing freely from her eyes, but her face seemed strangely composed, as if she was unaware that she was crying.

  “I think I feel better,” she said. “I have something to tell myself. I can say this thing to myself now, and… I can’t explain. It’s like I haven’t been talking to myself. But this is something I can say to myself. You mustn’t mind me, Giulia, when I say this, but I wish I had killed him. I wish I had strangled him with these hands.” She held up her hands, which were small and finely shaped.

  As Blume and his dog took their leave, Giulia followed them to the door and said, “Are you coming back?”

  “Do I need to?”

  “No. I don’t think so.” She held out her hand, but Blume brushed his hand over her hair instead.

  “Bye, Giulia. Look after your mother and brother, but don’t get trapped. You are still a child. Make sure you get looked after, too.”

  On the way back to the car, Blume sent a text message to Paoloni asking to meet. The dog whined and looked at him.

  “You’re hungry? That must be it. Are you planning on being hungry often?”

  Blume went home to feed the dog. Paoloni had yet to reply to the text. The longer he took to reply, thought Blume, the easier it would be to withhold sympathy.

  When he opened a can of meat and cereal and put them in the new bowl, the dog barked, nearly causing Blume to hurl something at it.

  “Your bark is far too large for my apartment,” he told the dog, which barked again, hurting his ears. Blume put the bowl on the floor. He had forgotten to buy a water bowl, so he filled up a shallow saucepan. When he bent down to put the water next to the food, the food was gone. The dog then lapped up the water in twenty seconds. Blume filled it twice more before the dog had enough.

  He left the house at five, far too early for his date with Kristin. It would be his first visit to her place, and she was cooking. Blume had a strong suspicion that she would not be much good, but he was not visiting for the food.

  There was no question of leaving the dog at home. It was just too big and too strange, and it had somehow sensed that he was leaving and placed itself by the door.

  No sooner were they down in the street than the dog squatted and relieved itself, right in the middle of the sidewalk.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” said Blume, revolted. He remembered again how much he hated dogs.

  “Hey!”

  Blume turned around. Another outraged woman, older this time. She pointed to the mess. Blume apologized, but it wasn’t good enough. After a while, he lost patience. “This entire city is covered in dog crap, litter, and graffiti. You Romans are the dirtiest people on the planet. So don’t come on to me like we’re living in Switzerland or something. You live here, deal with it.”

  He walked away, feeling bad. The woman was right, of course. There should be more like her. And what was all that about “you Romans”? It must be the prospect of meeting Kristin that was making him feel like an outsider again.

  “As for you,” he told the dog, “clean up your act.”

  58

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 5 P.M.

  Blume made one more attempt to contact Paoloni, and this time the phone was answered.

  “I’ve been avoiding you,” said Paoloni. “But I’ve been doing some thinking, too. We need to talk.”

  “I know,” said Blume. “But let’s put it off until tomorrow morning. I’ll call, you answer this time.”

  “OK, but call as soon as you can. I want to get this over with.”

  Blume thought he’d give Kristin a surprise and wait outside the embassy on Via Veneto for her. It took all of three minutes of standing outside the gates of the embassy with the dog before a car with three men inside pulled up and he was asked what he thought he was doing. Blume showed some identification, which they passed among them, looking at it carefully. One of them keyed the details into an onboard computer. Blume waited to be validated, and explained he had a girlfriend who worked in the embassy.

  The man in the backseat said something, and the driver looked at Blume. “You’re an American,” he said in English.

  “Yes,” said Blume. “Originally.”

  “But you’re an Italian police commissioner, too. How does that work?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I bet. What’s your girlfriend’s name, by the way?”

  “Kristin Holmquist.”

  “Kristin? I know Kristin.” He gave him a big smile, and suggested he wait for her across the road at the Palace.

  “Too plush for me,” said Blume. “But I’ll get out of your way.”

  “Spoken like a real colleague. Nice dog, by the way.”

  In the end, he called Kristin, told her to meet him at a place he knew on Via Crispi. A small bar five minutes away that didn’t mind his dog and charged the same for sitting as for standing.

  “Alec! What a beautiful dog!” said Kristin as she walked up half an hour later. “That’s a Cane Corso, isn’t it? The Romans used them in battle. Did you know that? Who are you keeping it for? What are we doing here?”

  “Change of plans. You like this dog?”

  “I love him! He’s not mature yet, is he? What’s his name? I hope it’s something totally Roman, like Pertinax, or Pugnax or-I can’t think of any more, Domitian, Nerva, Aureliano.” She sat down and crossed her legs.

  “Th
ose are all good names,” said Blume. “Choose one.”

  “You mean he hasn’t got a name yet?”

  “No, no name. Perhaps you might give him one?”

  “What do you mean?” said Kristin.

  “I mean, you can have him. As a gift. You said you liked dogs.”

  Kristin slowly closed her eyes, then opened them and seemed disappointed to see him still sitting there. “I don’t believe you just said that.”

  “It was a joke,” said Blume. “I was just kidding. Hey, c’mon, really. Would I try to hand a dog off on you like that?”

  “It was a joke?”

  “Sure it was.”

  “So what are you really going to do with the dog?”

  Blume thought, blinked a few times, then said, “I had not really gotten around to-”

  She interrupted him. “You weren’t joking at all, were you? You really thought I’d take the dog just like that.”

  “Half-joking wholly in earnest. No, not even that. I mean, if you had said yes, that would have been cool… no, it wouldn’t have. OK, let me tell you about how I found him,” said Blume.

  “I am not interested in that right now.” Kristin was standing glaring down at him, her face too bright in the sunlight for him to see, her hair a fiery red. “You just thought you could dump an unwanted dog on me like that. Like I have nothing better to do? By the way, apart from the fact you already know I’m going to the States in a few days, how often do you think I have to travel there?”

  “I don’t know,” said Blume, who had not been there in ten years. “Three times a year? Four?”

  “I go back once a month. Just how in the hell did you think I was going to deal with having a dog… I don’t even know where to start with this. You hate dogs. Right?”

  “Well… Hate is a bit extreme.”

  “You hate them. It was practically the first thing you said to me. So now you are trying to offload something that is hateful to you on me.”

  Blume wished he understood his own psychology better.

  “A dog is a living being, a responsibility, a thing you give in love, a sign of a long-term commitment. I was not even so sure about inviting you to dinner. I thought maybe it was too… domestic. That it might signal too much. Then you do something like this.”

  What he saw as a miscalculation of timing and tone was turning out to be a big mistake, one of those blunders he made that told women things about him that he didn’t even know about himself. Blume had been here before, only with a different girl and no dog.

  “Maybe you’d like to hear how I got this dog?” he tried.

  No, it turned out she did not. Few things could interest her less. She brought up the subject of his parents’ mummifying study, his immobility, his depressing home and whole attitude. “I think we’re going to have to press the reset button, Alec. Keep it strictly professional.”

  Then she walked away, leaving Blume blinking blindly in the sudden sunlight.

  59

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 10:30 A.M.

  If Kristin thought his apartment was depressing, thought Blume, she should see Paoloni’s. In six or seven years, Paoloni had yet to find time to unpack the boxes he had brought with him when his wife threw him out, and he had rented a place two hundred meters down the street, convinced she’d soon see the error of her ways. Paoloni’s wooden chairs had once been used as weapons during a fight in a pizzeria. The owner donated them as a gesture of deep gratitude for Paoloni’s help in restoring peace. The room also contained a heavy leather armchair of the type to be found in the waiting rooms of certain government ministries.

  “That’s a nice TV,” said Blume.

  “Yeah, thanks. It’s full HD. You’re supposed to be able to see the sweat on players’ faces, the mud on the football, even the individual blades of grass,” said Paoloni. “Except the screen’s too big or my chair’s too close, so you get a bit seasick watching it. To see it properly you have to stand at the front door, where you are.”

  “Right,” said Blume.

  “I was thinking,” said Paoloni. “Let’s go out. There’s a sort of park and playing fields behind the church. We could go there.”

  “Sure.” Blume had no problem leaving Paoloni’s apartment, but if he had known they were going to a park, he’d have brought the dog. He’d closed it in his bedroom, but the beast could probably break down walls with its forehead.

  Paoloni chose to sit on a bench near a chain-link fence behind which two teams of kids were playing football on synthetic grass. A few fathers were shouting instructions from the sidelines.

  “Would you have killed them?” asked Blume, getting straight to the worst point first.

  “I don’t know. Probably. But I can’t be sure. See, I know Alleva. He’d probably have surrendered immediately when he saw us come in. That would have made it hard to do.”

  “But you’d have done it? Put a bullet in him?”

  “I’m not talking moral choices here,” said Paoloni. “I only mean it would have been hard for me to get away with it. The other guys with me, they weren’t there to carry out an assassination. If Alleva and Massoni resisted, they would not have asked too many questions about lethal force, but if Alleva surrendered immediately and I killed him, that would have been a problem.”

  “Come on, Beppe. You don’t expect me to believe that. The four of you went with one mind and one intention. There’s no point in protecting them. And you’re all on film.”

  “Innocenzi gave me a copy,” said Paoloni. “We look like idiots, don’t we? Go there intending to revenge a colleague, leave there looking like the Marx Brothers.”

  “I haven’t watched it. I don’t think I will. So, you were with-who-Zambotto and…”

  “Two other guys I used to work with in Corviale.”

  “Names?”

  Paoloni seemed to be distracted by the football game.

  “Names, Beppe.” Blume repeated. “You think it’s OK Innocenzi knows and I don’t? Anyhow, it’s all on film.”

  “Genovese and Badero. They’re sort of inseparable. Mean bastards both.”

  “I was protecting you, and you did this,” said Blume. “What would you do now? Are you even listening?”

  Paoloni was watching the game again. “I don’t know what I’d do if I was you,” he said. “Me, I’d look the other way, but that’s the whole problem isn’t it? I’ve looked the other way too many times. I’ve been doing this so long, I’ve gotten sucked in. There’s no longer any real difference between me and them. But I wasn’t on the take. Well, I was, but I used all of it-most of it-to buy information.”

  Blume thought of Paoloni’s rented apartment and believed him. More or less.

  “What happened to all that guilt about Ferrucci?”

  Paoloni spat, lit a cigarette, and said, “That was real. That’s still there. It’s the main reason I wanted to get Massoni and Alleva.”

  “I don’t think I can let this go, Beppe. I can’t pretend this didn’t happen.”

  “I know,” said Paoloni, staring forward, eyes still fixed on the footballers. “That’s the difference between us. At the beginning, it wasn’t like that. We were basically the same, but you never got streetwise. That’s because you have always been…” Paoloni suddenly stood up, tossed his cigarette aside, and punched the air. “See that?”

  “What?”

  “That goal!”

  A skin-headed youth with black lines tattooed down his arms ran up to the fence, pointed at his chest, plucked at his jersey. Paoloni gave him a thumbs-up, and shouted: “Brilliant header. Fucking brilliant!” His face bright, smiling, Paoloni turned to Blume and said, “That’s my son Fabio. Lives with his mother. He’s the best.”

  “You’ve been here watching your son play football all this time?”

  “Yeah. Parish legate quarterfinals, under-sixteens. That’s Ottaviano they’re playing against. Hey, I was listening, too,” said Paoloni.

  “You could have told me.”

>   “I didn’t think you’d be interested.”

  “You’re not so good at telling me things, Beppe. You can’t even come clean about wanting to watch your son play football.”

  “You might have said no. Anyhow, does it make a difference to what you’re going to say?”

  Blume looked at the teenagers running around in front of them. They almost looked like professionals, almost looked like men, except they ran around too much. All that energy and enthusiasm.

  “I want you to quit the force. If you do that, I’ll look after you from inside, make sure none of this comes out.”

  Paoloni said, “I thought that might be what you’d do.”

  “It’s a favor, Beppe. A big one. And you will still owe me.”

  “I know. Maybe I needed to get out anyhow. Alleva and Massoni, they’d have been my first murders. Others would have followed. Once you start, you know.”

  “Yeah,” said Blume. He took out his wallet, extracted the memory card, gave it to Paoloni.

  “I don’t need to see this. Destroy it. The fewer copies the better.”

  “Thanks.” Paoloni slipped it into his jeans. “I destroyed my copy already. But Innocenzi will have distributed it. That’s how he does things.”

  “If you’re off the force, he won’t have much use for it,” said Blume.

  They sat in silence for a few moments, both of them watching the match, Paoloni intently.

  “That winger’s fast,” said Paoloni eventually.

  “Yeah. But he crosses too wide,” said Blume. “Your son’s very good. He plays a lot?”

  “More than he studies. Dumb bastard smokes, though. Cigarettes. Ganja, too. Pops a few pills on Friday night before he goes out dancing. Thinks I don’t know.”

  The other team scored.

  “We’re all attack, no defense,” said Paoloni.

  “What are you going to do?” said Blume. “For money, I mean. It’s going to be hard finding work at your age.”