“And before that? The pasta?” asked the waiter.
“I’ll go for the amatriciana,” said Blume.
The waiter noted down their orders, nodded, and went indoors. Before they could strike up a conversation, he was back again bearing a three-quarter-liter carafe of dark red wine, then with two long steps withdrew to the next table, occupied by a German couple.
“Would you like some wine?” Blume offered.
“Sure,” she said. “Half a glass will be plenty.”
Blume poured himself a half glass as well.
The pasta came, and they ate in a bubble of silence, which Blume tried to pierce with an occasional jab at finding out more about Kristin’s past. But she was more interested in her veal intestines.
Kristin started asking about him. Blume overfilled his mouth and chewed hard on the fatty bits of the diced bacon wondering how much he wanted to reveal. He limited himself to saying he had been in Italy for many years.
She asked about his parents. He had been waiting for this question, and decided he wanted to come across as terse and uncomplaining, maybe a bit gruff.
“Both shot dead in a bank raid on Via Cristoforo Colombo.”
Kristin nodded, twisted a glistening strand of pasta on her fork.
“Mmm,” she said. “Now that is good.”
Blume gave her pasta a look of hate, and added some graphic detail. “Some stupid bank guard tried to play hero and pulled out his weapon to defend a bank’s money. Bank guards. Can there be a more pathetic job than that?”
She looked slightly bored as he told her this. She had not even said she was sorry to hear it. The tragic death of his parents had always guaranteed at least sympathy, if not sex.
Kristin had a question: “Did they catch the guys?”
“One was killed there. Not the one who shot my parents. He got away. Obviously, there was a third waiting outside, probably a fourth doing lookout.”
“Did you have to identify the bodies?”
“Yes. My mother had been shot through the breast.”
“They showed you that?” Kristin’s voice rose in disbelief.
“No. They told me. It was supposed to be a comfort. Straight to the heart. Death would have been instant. They showed me her face. My father’s face, too. The first bullet hit him in the mouth. It looked like he was grinning at me. The second and third in the abdomen. It wasn’t instantaneous for him.”
“So you decided to become a cop and hunt them down for the rest of your life?”
“No. It wasn’t like that. And the shooter is dead anyhow.”
“So he did get caught,” said Kristin. “In the end.”
“No, he just died in the end. It was summer 1990, and I had just finished an exam in political economy. It was my first year on the force. I came home, there was a letter waiting for me, postmark was local. I opened it and inside was typed ‘Verano Riq. 57 no. 23-bis.’ Nothing else.
“Verano. As in the cemetery?”
“See? You’d make a good detective, too,” said Blume. “The cemetery is walking distance from where I live.”
Kristin interrupted. “So you still live in the same house?”
“Yes.”
“Are your parents buried in the same cemetery?”
“Yes. Do you want to hear this or not?”
“Go on.”
“So I went straight to the cemetery, to Section fifty-seven, found the tomb number. In our hearts forever, it said. Pietro Scognamiglio 17 October 1961 to 19 May 1990.”
“And who was this Scognamiglio?”
“I didn’t know. I ran the name, found out he had spent more time in Rebbibia than out of it, had a list of violent crimes attributed to him. Kept getting released, though.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“So you don’t actually know this Scognamiglio is the guy who pulled the trigger.”
“No. But someone knew, and that someone sent me a message.”
Kristin soaked up the oil from her plate with a piece of bread, and put it in her mouth, then pushed her plate away. “That was excellent. So did it make you feel better, seeing that tomb?”
“A bit,” said Blume. “Not much. I’d like to be absolutely certain that’s what the message meant, and I would prefer to have put Scognamiglio in his tomb myself.”
“I guess the death of your parents is the reason you’re still here.”
“Yes. I was just seventeen. It was hard to survive on my own in a foreign country.”
“And yet here you are.”
Blume tried to determine her tone. It was not quite mocking, or maybe it was.
“I had already been living here for three years. I thought I was going into freshman class at Franklin High, but they brought me here and put me into the final year of a liceo in Parioli. I was fifteen then.”
“Why did they come here?”
“They were art historians. My father was also an illustrator. I did not take after him.”
“So you lived on your own after seventeen?”
Blume nodded.
“That must have been interesting. How many other kids had a free house every night?”
“It wasn’t my house,” said Blume.
“You were next of kin. There’s no way the house could have gone to anyone else.”
“It was a rented apartment. It never belonged to them. It belonged to a guy called Gargaruti, some fucking character, he turned out to be.”
“Yeah? Tell me about him.”
Blume allowed a look of great sadness to wash over his countenance and said, “Maybe some other time.”
“OK.”
“Unless you want to hear now . . .”
“No. That’s OK. Some other time will do.”
“Yeah, because, he was . . .”
Kristin interrupted him, “So tell me, how did you survive?”
“The police helped me. First of all, they tried to get in contact with my relatives in the States. My mother had a sister in L.A., kind of a failed actress. She didn’t reply to any letters. Nothing. So then they had to send me to an orphanage.”
“That’s very Dickensian. You don’t mind me saying that, do you?”
“I don’t care. Also, I didn’t really live in the orphanage. I continued in school, then the nuns gave me some freedom. I even got lifts back and forth from the police, spent some nights in the apartment, which was paid for until the end of the year. Also, it took the City of Rome three months to complete the paperwork, and so by the time I went in there for my first day, it was only weeks before my eighteenth birthday.”
“How did you survive for money?”
“I taught English, then started giving Latin and French lessons, too.”
“You were good enough at Latin and French to give lessons?”
“Yes. I’m good at languages. Very good. I find them easy to learn.”
“What else do you speak?”
“Spanish—obviously. Basically, it’s Italian with a lisp. My German’s quite good. That’s all. A bit of Albanian. Some Romany. Greek.”
“Ancient Greek?”
“No. Modern. I used to go to the islands in June and July with college friends. I can order food in Greek, read a menu.”
“You pick up languages just by listening to them?”
“No. I need to study them. What I am good at is picking up accents. I can tell accents.”
“Who were these police who helped you?”
“A policewoman, the one who came around to tell me. Marina. She came around the following day, and the day after that, and then her partner arrived, and after him, another, and they all started checking up on me, seeing if I was OK. Five cops on rotation for a year and a bit, all looking out for me. I still know them all.”
“Did your parents leave money?”
“No. They weren’t planning to die. And they were both part-time university teachers, with a lifestyle above their means. No properties, no assets, no savings to speak
of. My father left a debit card in his drawer, and after a long search I found the PIN hidden as a telephone number. So I started drawing money out of his account. But it didn’t last. After six months, the bank found out my father wasn’t alive. I’m not sure how. Not only did they block the account, they also called in the Finance Police and denounced ‘persons unknown’ for theft.”
“So you have a criminal record?”
“No. I get this visit from the Finance Police, and they give me grief for a while. Then I get a lawyer’s letter from the bank, saying they want all the money back plus interest plus legal fees and so on. And then in comes Gargaruti, my landlord, doubles the rent there and then.”
“A landlord can’t just double the rent like that.”
“He can here, if the apartment is let to a non-Italian. Gargaruti had other apartments, and a take-out restaurant, a rosticceria. He worked there all day. He always smelled of roast chicken. Anyway, he tells me to turn up for work in the restaurant on Monday. I did. The pay he gave me didn’t cover my rent, and he said he was charging interest. Then he gets all kindly uncle again, tells me to eat all the roast chicken I want. I told Marina, the policewoman, about him. She spread the word and the police sort of leaned on him. My rent went back down, I left his kitchen. Three years later, I bought the flat from him. He needed persuasion about that, too.”
He lifted his glass to drink some of his wine, and kept the rim of the glass against his mouth and narrowed his eyes until all he saw was the red wine. When he put down the glass, he picked up his napkin, and pressed it against his mouth, leaving a purple stain like a bruise on the linen.
“A few days after I had identified my parents, they asked me to bite on a piece of gauze, and put it with tweezers into a plastic tub. Mitochondrial DNA testing. It wasn’t necessary. This was the early 1990s. The police labs were developing a training program for technicians, and this was a good opportunity.”
“Don’t you resent that? The police using you like that for training their technicians?”
“No.” Blume was emphatic. “The police did everything for me. They took care of me. They kept coming back to check. I’d have ended up on the street if it hadn’t been for them.”
“Or back in America.”
They were interrupted by the arrival of the second course. Kristin tucked in with relish to a red and pale yellow mess of pieces in a bowl.
Blume couldn’t help but wonder at the incongruity between her talc-scented freshness and this voracious appetite for slaughter house leftovers.
He thought of Clemente lying on the floor, the blood congealing around him. Dorfmann dipping a blood-soaked swab on a Hemastix strip and turning it green.
“You’re supposed to eat the marrow,” said Kristin, jabbing a fork in the direction of his plate, where he had hardly touched the osso buco. “That’s the best bit.”
Blume looked without appetite at the cross section of leg-bone with strings of gray flesh attached to it. He reached out for more wine, but discovered the carafe was already empty.
“I did go back to America. A year later, as soon as I was eighteen and could travel alone. There was no one there. I found out where my aunt lived. I watched her house in Los Angeles for a day, and I think I saw her. I have two cousins.”
“You went all the way over to the USA, then just looked at your aunt from a distance?”
“I didn’t see what I could say to her. Anyhow, it was just one day out of my holiday.”
“You considered it a holiday?”
“I was there with Valentina, my girlfriend. We did a coast-to-coast. Two months traveling and working. She got a J-1 visa, so she could work, too. It was fun. My life has not been a total wreck, you know.”
“Did you hang out with students or cops in those days?”
“Both. A lot of people studying law and economics were thinking of joining the police.”
“What about the expat community? Did you have much to do with them? Other Americans?”
Kristin’s voice seemed to echo as she said that, and Blume realized he was slipping into a half-dream state, battling wine and sleepiness with adrenaline. He checked the time on his phone: ten forty-five. The sensible thing would have been to go to bed, get a proper six hours at least before the Alleva operation.
“Not much. I never got on with visiting Americans.” He was tired of talking. “But what about you? Tell me what you do. I haven’t managed to get any information from you.”
“Well, I was a lawyer until recently. I worked for Merck Sharp and Dohme. Pharmaceuticals. What I couldn’t tell you about rizatriptan benzoate ain’t worth knowing.”
“What does that do?”
“Gets rid of headaches.”
“Does it work?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never had a headache,” said Kristin.
“Shit, I get them all the time,” said Blume.
“Well, you could try drinking less,” said Kristin, timing her comment with the arrival of the waiter with another carafe brimming with red wine.
“Why did you quit your job?”
“Ethical stuff. They do too many experiments with dogs. Cats, too—more cats than dogs, actually, but I had some real issues with the dog experiments. I made some ill-advised comments in an in-house magazine.”
“You like dogs?”
“Sure. Don’t most normal people? Apart from the experimenters, and even some of them feel pretty lousy sometimes.”
“I don’t like dogs in the slightest,” said Blume. “Filthy noisy stinking creatures.”
“You’re a cat person, then?”
“Isn’t that code for gay when applied to men? I don’t care—look, I never even think of cats. They live in my courtyard, piss on the motorbikes, that’s all I know about cats. Dogs, on the other hand, are creatures I actively dislike.”
Kristin seemed annoyed to hear this, and to distract her attention he asked the waiter what was on the dessert menu.
“Torta mimosa panna cotta frutta fresca crème caramel torta all’arancio cassata siciliana con ripieno di ricotta fresca—molta buona questa—la prenda,” replied the waiter, not wasting more than six seconds of his life in listing false alternatives before telling him what to order.
“Oh yes, the cassata, I’ll have that,” said Kristin.
Blume ordered the same.
The waiter ambled off toward another table, with the air of having decided not to give them anything, after all.
“Where are you from?”
“Vermont. I already told you that in the courtyard.”
“So that’s what your accent is,” said Blume.
“I lived where there are trees, big gardens. Cold, rich, middle class. Very comfortable. My closet at home is about the size of my apartment here. Dad is an anesthetist, or was. Retired. Now he just bores people to sleep.”
“I don’t get the connection between Merck and whatever and you wandering through the corridors of a police station in Rome,” said Blume.
“I don’t work for a pharmaceuticals company. I used to. But I quit. Now I work as a legat with the embassy on Via Veneto.”
“What’s a legat?”
“A legal attaché.”
“You don’t say more than you have to, do you? Must be part of being a lawyer.”
“Must be.”
“What exactly are you legally attached to?”
“The FBI.”
Blume considered this. “The FBI works from the embassy? I thought they operated through Europol. I’ve heard of cooperation, but it’s always been very specific. I suppose I don’t know much.”
“Your rank doesn’t help there,” she said, and pushed back a strand of hair that had fallen across her forehead. “I am an FBI legat to the Embassy of the United States in Italy. I report here to a regional security officer, and back home to the Office of International Operations.”
“And you draw bad pictures of fountains in courtyards in your spare time.”
“Bad pictures, huh
? You didn’t like the reference to your rank. I’m sorry, Alec.”
“No. I don’t care about that. But seeing that this is more an interview than an evening out, it occurred to me your sketch might have been a prop, to allow you to sit there waiting for me.”
“I couldn’t think of anything better.”
“So you’re here talking to me, finding out things about me because . . . ?”
“I maintain contacts in the Polizia, the Carabinieri, the Finance Police, and even—would you believe it—the traffic police,” said Kristin. “These contacts are official, unofficial, diplomatic, confidential, open, private, public—whatever. They tell me whatever they feel like telling me. I don’t ask them to tell me more. It’s all very above-board and friendly.”
“What’s the point?”
“Helps us get a feel of the place. Keep an ear to the ground.”
Blume gave her his skeptical-cop look.
“I do work a little with people who may have special operational remits. We pool information and work together in what is called a country team.”
“You have contacts up high?”
“I’ve exchanged a few pleasantries with the prefect at embassy dos.”
“What were you doing at my station?”
“Handing out invitations to a conference on terrorism. Before you say it, almost everyone knows the conferences don’t resolve anything, but that’s not what they’re for. Attendance is always total. Know why?”
“Free food? Cops love free food.”
“Yes, they do. But it’s not just that. The top brass is there. That way, lowly commissioners get a chance to have a private word with questors and prefects. We provide a little private court where the vassals get a chance to ask favors of the barons. All played out in front of us. They know we’re watching, but they don’t care. After all, we’re all allies.”
The waiter came out of the tiny doorway with two plates and a winning smile.
“There we go,” he declared, placing desserts in front of them, then standing back as if planning to watch them, like a proud mother feeding her two children. Blume gave him a look that sent him off with a scowl to the next table.
The cassata was something special. Blume had not tasted a cassata so good since he had been posted to Palermo during the period in the early ’90s when the politicians were pretending to care about organized crime. The chef had not skimped on the sweetened ricotta, which was fresh and just the right blend of crumbly creamy and laced with a very generous amount of maraschino liquor. Blume now regretted sending the waiter away like that. Excellence and beauty should always be acknowledged and publicly praised. Italians were good at that, and he was not.
THE DOGS of ROME Page 18
