THE DOGS of ROME

by Conor Fitzgerald

  “You going to call him now?” asked Principe.

  “Why? Think we should wait?” Blume dialed the number, identified himself to the man who answered and apologized for calling so late, paused for a second, then made a weak joke about bad television. Two minutes later he hung up and shrugged.

  “Well?” said Principe.

  “OK. This supermarket manager—Truffa—just told me customers almost never try to pull a fast one or complain about missing items,” said Blume.

  “Is that a breakthrough of some sort?” Principe wanted to know.

  “Not at all,” said Blume. “Hardly makes any difference. But it means stuff doesn’t go missing. Customers would complain if it did. It doesn’t make sense to lose a job, even a lousy one, for the sake of a tin of beans.”

  The door to the interrogation room burst open, and Zambotto appeared, breathing heavily, his enormous head hanging down as if he had just completed a round in the ring. “Had to get out of there, stop myself from strangling the fucker.”

  “Why, what did he do?” said Principe.

  “He denies everything. So maybe he didn’t do it, but he’s using this tone of voice, you know, like he was calling me stupid.”

  Blume said, “You know what, Cristian? I think we can leave it there.”

  “What?”

  “He’s not who we’re after. Also, I want a break. Maybe you want one, too?”

  Zambotto nodded.

  “Fine,” said Blume. “Let’s send him back to his mother in time for supper. In one piece.”

  Blume left the basement and went up to the serious crimes section on the second floor of the station in search of Paoloni, who was supposed to be setting out the investigative chronology. But instead of Paoloni in the office, he found the young deputy inspector, Marco Ferrucci, tongue out in concentration as he tapped something into his police computer on the desk. Blume had not intended to use Ferrucci until the following day.

  “When did you get in?”

  “About an hour ago, sir.”

  “There was a reason I didn’t call you. I wanted at least one wide-awake officer on the job tomorrow. Who told you to come in?”

  “No one.”

  “So what, you just dreamed there was a case, woke up, and came in?”

  “I wasn’t asleep. It’s not late.”

  Blume cut him off. “So where’s Paoloni?”

  “He said the computer hurt his eyes, sir.”

  “He went home?”

  “I don’t think he went home. Anyhow, he’s been working very hard until now.”

  The phone on Blume’s desk in the next room began to ring. Almost all the calls to his desk now came from within the building, and the only person he could think it might be was Gallone.

  “Are you going to answer that, sir?” asked Ferrucci.

  The phone stopped ringing.

  Blume said, “Answer what?”

  But then it started up again. Blume banged his way into his poky office, grabbed the receiver, brought it up to his ear, but, just to provoke Gallone, said nothing.

  “Alec?”

  It was D’Amico, not Gallone.

  “Nando.”

  “Yeah, it’s me. So you’re in the office. I called this number because I know it by heart. I was about to call you on your mobile.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In my office in the Viminale,” said D’Amico.

  “Aren’t we supposed to coordinate or something?”

  “That’s what this is: coordination.”

  “Have you got something for me, Nando?”

  “Yes. The widow, Sveva Romagnolo, did not make an emergency call when she found the body. Not at first.”

  “No?” said Blume.

  “OK, picture this,” said D’Amico. “Romagnolo finds her husband’s bloody corpse on the floor, her kid is presumably suffering psychological trauma so she whips out her mobile like any normal person would do and she calls—get this—not 112, 113, or 118 but 1240—directory inquiries. She made that call at three fifty-five. That’s nine minutes before we logged the emergency call.”

  “Wait. Go back a bit. She whips out her mobile phone?”

  “Sure.”

  “The one that went missing from the crime scene?”

  There was silence from on the other end of the line.

  “Nando? Did you lift Romagnolo’s phone from the crime scene?”

  “It wasn’t part of the crime scene. She left it there after the fact. It’s irrelevant to the murder. Unless she did it, which is out of the question.”

  “Is it?” asked Blume.

  “Pretty much, yes. She was traveling with her son. She was in her constituency in Padua. Hundreds of people saw her. She’s a senator, for God’s sake.”

  “When the Holy Ghost started talking about the cell phone, you didn’t think to explain? Maybe even give it to him?”

  “He didn’t ask nicely. And he’d just have given it back to her, without checking the calls and the numbers on the contacts list. And I want to know why the Holy Ghost is suddenly so visible.”

  “You ever hear of a chain of evidence, Nando?”

  “You could ask the same of Gallone. He was happy to hand over an important piece of evidence. Do you want to hear what I phoned to say or not, Alec?”

  Blume realized he was pressing the receiver too hard against his ear. He put his free hand on his solar plexus and tried to measure his feelings. He was tense, but not angry. D’Amico was presuming complicity, but he was also sharing information. Blume knew D’Amico’s interest in the case was political, that’s why they had sent him down from the Viminale. For some, including D’Amico, evidently, it was more urgent to find out who the widow knew and who she had called than who killed her husband.

  “Romagnolo calls directory inquiries, you say?”

  “Yes,” said D’Amico. “If we get a warrant, we can maybe find out who she was looking for, but I don’t think we need to. She was looking for the Collegio Romano commissariato, where you are.”

  “Here? This station?”

  “Yes,” said D’Amico. “A few minutes later, she phoned the desk downstairs there and asked to speak to the vicequestore aggiunto. So it looks to me like she got directory inquiries to give her the number for your offices, or tried to get Gallone’s number, which is not listed. They wouldn’t connect her, so then she said it was an emergency, and they asked what sort and she told them. When I say ‘they,’ I mean the officer who took the call.”

  “She called directly?”

  “Yes. I just spoke to the desk sergeant who took the call. He remembers she then told him she was a personal friend of the vicequestore aggiunto, and demanded to be put through. He patched her through to Gallone’s mobile number.”

  “So she wanted the Holy Ghost in particular, not just any old police.”

  “Funny, that. Someone wanting Gallone,” said D’Amico.

  “She can’t know him all that well,” said Blume, “or she’d have had his number already.”

  “Gallone’s the sort of person whose number you cancel from your phone first chance you get. I did. Anyhow, after talking to Gallone, she called the central switchboard here at the Viminale. I don’t know where that call went to, if anywhere. Probably to someone more important than Gallone.”

  “And after that?”

  “After, maybe because no one had come yet and she was beginning to freak at what was in front of her in the apartment, she called 113, where she spoke to the dispatchers. They routed the call to Via Cavalotti, but they had no one available, so it was rerouted back to you. The same desk sergeant took the call, got the address, dispatched a unit, then called the Holy Ghost to inform him. But Gallone said a team had already been sent to that address, and called the poor bastard on the desk an incompetent.”

  “So, first Gallone, then you people at the Ministry, then an ordinary emergency call, in that order?”

  “Yes,” said D’Amico. “Which is why I heard abou
t it first, and you last.”

  “So where is she now? The wife, or the widow as she now is.”

  “She told the first unit—the one sent by Gallone—that she was removing herself and her child to her mother’s house. She gave an address. But didn’t Gallone say he was dealing with that?”

  “He did say that, yes,” agreed Blume. “You can tell he’s handling it by the way he let the wife walk away like that. OK, Nando. You coming round here to coordinate with me anytime soon?”

  “I was thinking of getting home. I’ll stay on call if there’s anything you need me to do,” said D’Amico.

  Blume thought about it. For now, he didn’t want D’Amico to do anything.

  “Just be here tomorrow morning. Before the meeting with Gallone,” said Blume, and hung up.

  Blume walked out of his office. “Ferrucci, what have you got for me?”

  Ferrucci, who had been bobbing up and down in his seat from enthusiasm, and showed no signs of tiredness, said, “I got a list of addresses, sir.”

  “Whose?”

  “Romagnolo’s mother’s place. Clemente’s office and . . . I got two so far. You need any more?”

  Blume wondered if he had been overestimating Ferrucci. “That’s all you got?”

  “Yes, sir.” Ferrucci went bright red.

  “You could have used a phone book for that. What’s with the computer?”

  “I was looking up Clemente, sir. I hadn’t finished.”

  “Tell me what you know.”

  “He worked for LAV—that’s the League Against Vivisection. He is the chairman of the Lazio section. Was the chairman. He sort of specialized in protecting dogs.”

  “Meaning?”

  “He campaigned against illegal dog fights. He’s been at it for a while. There are newspaper articles dating back at least as far as 1998. He was doing a documentary on it. Remember the operation last year against a dog fighting ring in Tor di Valle?”

  Blume did, though it had involved the Carabinieri, not the police.

  “He was behind that. Kicked up a big media fuss. His name’s all over the papers in that period.”

  “Good. So we have a motive. Who was he doing the documentary with?”

  “Taddeo Di Tivoli. He’s the host of a TV show.”

  “I know the name,” said Blume. “But I don’t really watch TV. What else did you find out about Clemente?”

  “He was thinking of going into politics, joining the Greens. That’s his wife’s party.”

  “Right. Anything else?” Blume was beginning to believe in his young colleague again.

  “No. But I heard the vicequestore was . . .”

  At that moment, Paoloni came in and belched.

  “Broad beans don’t agree with me,” he said and rubbed his stomach. “It could be the beginning of Favism. Go on, Ferrucci, you were saying: Gallone was what?”

  Ferrucci, his voice rising a little from tension, continued: “I heard he had taken charge of questioning Romagnolo.”

  “Or so he thinks,” said Blume. “Go on.”

  “Well, I know Vicequestore Gallone doesn’t like becoming entangled . . .”

  “You can’t entangle the Holy Ghost, Ferrucci. Knotty problems just pass right through him,” said Paoloni.

  “Well . . .” Ferrucci looked unhappy. “I realized it was unusual for him to, you know, work a case personally, and so I looked for a point of convergence between him and Romagnolo, see if there was some special connection that would explain his interest.”

  “You ran a check on Gallone?” Blume thought his voice conveyed warmth and admiration, but Ferrucci flinched.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well?”

  “I found one. They were at university together studying jurisprudence. She was a year ahead of him.”

  “You looked up university records,” said Blume. “What made you think of that?”

  “First I looked up police files, sir. Clemente, Romagnolo, and the vice-questore were tagged because they were members of a revolutionary group called Prima Linea at La Sapienza University.”

  Blume and Paoloni both burst out laughing. Ferrucci looked worried, thinking it might be him they were laughing at.

  “Comrade Gallone,” said Paoloni. “Who’d have thought it? I always figured him for a spoilt priest. Maybe he was one of those Catho-communists you used to hear about.”

  Prima Linea was an echo from a distant past when the Communists really thought they might just make it. Blume was a child in another country when they were active, and Ferrucci had not even been born.

  Blume tried to imagine Gallone in a combat jacket hurling Molotovs at the police he was later to join. Plenty of right-wing politicians and administrators had been in far-left movements in their youth. Even so, if he had kept it quiet, Gallone obviously felt vulnerable. What Blume found funniest of all was the idea that the vicequestore might ever have had an ideal. Or been young.

  “Right. I’m filing that in my head for next time I need to compromise the bastard,” said Paoloni.

  “Good work, Ferrucci,” said Blume.

  “Alè?” said Paoloni.

  “What?”

  “I need to go for a drink in Trastevere, see who I can meet. You coming?”

  Blume looked at his watch. It had just gone eleven. “You think?”

  “You decide,” said Paoloni.

  Blume had never had much street credibility. D’Amico had told him once it was because he would not compromise, but he knew it was his voice. His accent, acquired in the schoolyard, was perfect Roman, but a hint of something else lay behind it, a watchfulness, a lack of spontaneity or a slight reticence in his movements. Whatever it was, he put people on their guard.

  “I think I’ll pass,” he said.

  “Are you staying here?”

  “I don’t know. I might try to steal some sleep, a few hours. Here or at home, I haven’t decided. But I’m on call if you need me.”

  Ferrucci’s relief at Paoloni’s departure reached Blume like a softening in the air.

  Blume said, “I want you to get in contact with Zambotto, give him the address to Clemente’s office, tell him to get over there, find a way of getting in. I’ll meet him there later. Tell him to wait for as long as it takes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Blume scribbled down the address of Clemente’s office, shoved it in his pocket.

  “Then finish retrieving the essentials—car registration, relatives, friends, telephone numbers, Internet providers, name of bank, credit card transactions, all that sort of stuff. Also, see if you can get a copy of the Carabinieri report on that dog-fighting raid, first thing tomorrow. Go straight to the Court Records Office tomorrow morning. Let’s not waste time. Get the investigating magistrate to help you with it. It’s Principe. He’s good. He’ll help you if the Carabinieri decide to be unhelpful. And then go back home and go to bed. You get all that?”

  “Bed?”

  “Yes. Tiredness leads to oversights. People who don’t sleep make stupid mistakes.”

  7

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 27, 11:40 P.M.

  BLUME SAT IN his car in the underground garage and couldn’t sleep.

  He had climbed into it with the intention of driving home, napping ninety minutes, and changing into proper clothes before going to Clemente’s office to join Zambotto. But he didn’t feel comfortable going home while Paoloni was still working his contacts.

  He decided to put his phone on the dashboard and try to fall into a doze while he waited for it to ring. The oily smell of the dark garage and the soft seat of the police Lancia, which he had pushed back into maximum recline, seemed to invite sleep. But Blume stayed awake.

  Again he checked the signal strength bars on his cell phone, even though he had received and made calls from the basement countless times in the past. The phone was showing a signal at full strength, but he could not rid himself of the idea that the tufa walls and concrete pillars were somehow blocking his communications with
the outside world.

  After half an hour, Blume drove the car up the ramp, out through the electric gates and into the piazza. He got out, breathed in the warm night air and phoned Paoloni, but got no reply. He was not surprised. Paoloni often went offline when he was doing his thing. Incoming calls made confidential informers and potential witnesses nervous. Fine. Time to join Zambotto.

  He pictured the bulky policeman with his drooping eyelids waiting without acting.

  Clemente’s office was located near the zoo, or the Biopark, as it liked to call itself now that almost all the large animals in it had died or been poisoned by disgruntled keepers. Blume double-checked the address in his pocket and turned on the engine.

  The traffic on the northbound quays was still heavy. Small cars with young people weaved in and out, cutting him off over and over. Blume did his best to keep calm and drive carefully, but he still found himself doing more than a hundred as he came out of the tunnel leading to Ponte Risorgimento. As he slowed down to turn right, his phone rang. He was surprised to see Zambotto’s name on the screen. Zambotto did not usually take the initiative of placing a call.

  “The office was being searched already,” said Zambotto without even checking to make sure the right person had answered.

  “Clemente’s?”

  “Yeah, that one. Your colleague D’Amico was here with two uniforms. They’ve just left.”

  “Stay there. I’ll be there in three minutes.”

  Blume ran the traffic light and headed down Viale delle Belle Arti at high speed. He raced up Via delle Tre Madonne, and almost lost control as the wheels lost their grip on tram tracks, before turning onto Via Mercandante. A police car was coming up in the opposite direction and Blume bore down on it. The police car whooped its siren, and swerved across the road to block Blume. An officer jumped out of the passenger side, pistol already in his hand. Blume got out, his police ID held high.

  Nando D’Amico, wearing a white shirt, stepped carefully out of the backseat of the car and unfurled a dark jacket.

  He put on the jacket and became less visible. “Alec! What’s going on?”

  Slowly, the policeman lowered his weapon.