THE DOGS of ROME

by Conor Fitzgerald

  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,” she 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.

  “Is this one of those hopeless cases, Commissioner?”

  Blume looked at her. Young, dowdy, and a bit sad-looking in her uniform. She had been working in immigrant affairs before this. If he remembered right, she had asked for a transfer.

  “All homi cide cases are hopeless,” he said.

  “I meant for resolving.” It surprised him she had the nerve to come back at him with a reply.

  “Inspector . . .”

  “Mattiola,” she supplied.

  “I knew that. Look, we will do our best. You didn’t see what the girl was like. A life force. She’s holding the family together.”

  He was going to make sure the technicians did their job properly. He would demand resources. He might even go to the press. He would show Principe a thing or two about caring for ordinary people. He would devote his entire being to resolving the road rage case. He owed it to the child.

  His phone went, and he waved the inspector away, telling her to write up a report on the non-interview. The call was from Sveva Romagnolo.

  “Hello. Commissioner Blume?” she sounded edgy. “It would not surprise me if someone were listening to this conversation, but we have nothing to hide, have we?”

  “Insofar as we have nothing, yes, I agree,” said Blume.

  “It has been brought to my attention that I am being followed. For my own safety.”

  “So I hear. I have nothing to do with that. I’d love to have the resources to do things like that,” said Blume.

  “I know they’re not your men. I wish they were. I wanted you to know that less than an hour ago I received the nastiest and most abusive phone call you can imagine.”

  Blume, forgetting his arm was in plaster, instinctively tried to bring his finger up to his other ear to close off the sounds of the street.

  “Who?” he said, looking for a silent area in the street.

  “I was called a bitch, whore, slut—lesbian, too. I deserved to die instead of my husband. I was going to die, I needed to watch my back.”

  Blume leaned into a wall to hear better. “This was a woman saying these things, wasn’t it?”

  “So you know who it was. She said she knew who killed Arturo. Said she’d have them castrated. She said she had a cop in her pocket, and she used your name.”

  “Did she ever actually say who she was?”

  “No. I didn’t understand for the first minute or so, then it became obvious. She just went straight at it. Said Di Tivoli was a dead man walking for insulting her like that. Then when I asked her if she was Manuela Innocenzi, she started up again. Don’t use my name, bitch. My name on your cock-sucking lips . . . that sort of thing. So you know what? I’m glad those idiots from SISDE are supposed to be watching me, and I hope they’re recording this, too. Manuela Innocenzi, I’ll repeat the name just in case it gets lost in transmission. Someone’s got to stop her.”

  “I don’t think she’s really going to do anything,” said Blume. “Not to you. That’s not how it works.”

  “Her father is . . .” began Sveva. Blume could hear the fear in her voice.

  “Organized. Her father is organized. Careful, low-key. You’re not in danger. She’s not going to persuade him to do anything like that.”

  “Can you be sure?”

  “Yes,” said Blume. He hoped he was right.

  “Can you maybe go and talk with her?”

  “Well . . .”

  “I mean as soon as you can. Like now. It’s hard e
nough already. You need to get her away from me. That’s all I care about now.”

  “All right,” said Blume, “I’ll deal with it.”

  “Thank you,” said Sveva. “I won’t forget this.”

  When Blume reached the car, an Alfa Romeo, Inspector Mattiola was standing there.

  “I thought I told you to get back—oh, right, we came in the same car.”

  He had even allowed her to drive him. He loosened his sprained arm from the sling.

  “I can manage on my own. You call for a car to come and pick you up.”

  Inspector Mattiola nodded slowly as if finally understanding something.

  She had nice features. And she was quiet, which was good.

  Blume got into the driver’s seat, turned on the engine, winced as he used his damaged arm to turn the wheel, and pulled out, leaving Mattiola standing on the curb.

  32

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 3 P.M.

  MANUELA INNOCENZI LET Blume in as soon as he identified himself. As he entered the apartment, she was pulling up her hair with both hands. She let it go and as it cascaded in ringlets down as far as her shoulders she said, “Hello Alex.”

  “Alec,” corrected Blume.

  “I prefer Alex,” she said.

  “To whom?” asked Blume.

  He walked into her living room, and glanced around to make sure they were alone, before settling among the fat cushions of her favorite Roche Bobois armchair, next to her second favorite dog, a golden retriever called Mischa.

  She invited Blume to say hello to Mischa, but he refused.

  “What happened to your arm and nose? It must have been the crash,” said Manuela.

  “My nose is fine,” said Blume. “What the hell was that call to Sveva Romagnolo about? You think you can get away with threatening people like that?”

  “Yes. And we follow up on threats, too. It’s where our power comes from.”

  “She’s a senator of the republic. They are probably monitoring her calls. Don’t be fooled by the party she belongs to. If push comes to shove, she can and will draw on more muscle than you. Especially since you’re not really anything except your father’s spoiled child. So you can forget this ‘we’ and ‘our power’ shit.”

  “She’s a slut. And she’s a coward. I scared her. She won’t sleep easy for nights.”

  “She already doesn’t sleep so well, what with her son having nightmares about his father.”

  “She never looked after the child. Arturo did that.”

  “Well she’s looking after him now. Let me ask you, do you feel good about what you’ve just done? I mean, leaving aside the fact that you’ve compromised your father’s position and made threats to a member of Parliament and shown yourself for the ugly bullying drab that you are—do you feel good now?”

  “Yeah. I do. Apart from little Tommaso. I wasn’t thinking about him. Anyhow, it got you here, didn’t it?”

  “You and Clemente together,” said Blume. “I just can’t see it. I’ve read up on him. I saw his house, his handsome successful wife, with her exquisite taste in clothes. Clemente was a good guy: educated, polite, cared about people and animals. You, I see you as better suited to petty bosses, shooters, shylocks, building speculators, drug runners, the sort of people whose women also use Botox, peroxide, gym lessons, and purgatives to keep the looks they never had to begin with. People like you. Know what I’m saying?”

  Manuela was intent on stroking her dog, repeating its name soothingly, caressing the creature’s forehead with her thumbs, no longer looking at Blume. Eventually, her eyes still on the dog, she said, “I’m the real widow in this case. And you know it. That bitch will be married within the year to a wealthy politician or something. And you are a cold bastard. I bet you have no one waiting for you at home. And if you do, I wouldn’t want to be her.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to be her either,” said Blume.

  “You know something? You have it all wrong about me.” She finally looked at him, and he noticed her eyes were more green than blue. “The men I’ve had, they’ve been like you.”

  “Cops?”

  “Very funny. I meant English, American, Australian.”

  “It’s not as if we’re all the same,” said Blume. What was that she had just said about getting him here?

  “Something about English makes you all a bit similar,” said Manuela.

  “Clemente was Italian. You must have been slumming it.”

  “Arturo was a good man.”

  “Like I said, not your type. How did you meet him?”

  “Before him, I was with this guy called Valerio.”

  “Another Italian,” said Blume.

  “He was my type of man, according to you. He liked to say his job was ‘damage maximization.’ That’s what he called it. He thought that was really witty. He talked a lot of football, played five-a-side with his mates, and always ended up having a fight with someone on his own team. Anyhow, one evening, he picked me up, said we were going someplace different. Which to me meant we weren’t going for a pizza and a night in a bar in Testaccio. I was not all that curious about his surprise, even when he headed out of Rome with me in the car. I only started asking questions when he drove off the road and across a strip of field, but by then we had practically arrived. It was a dog fight.”

  A mobile phone started shaking on a lacquered table next to her. She picked it up, listened for a moment, said, “Yeah. No. No problem. Fine,” and hung up.

  “Who was that?”

  “Just someone,” said Manuela. “Nothing to do with us.”

  “Where was that dog fight?”

  “Out by the Ponte Galleria, in an abandoned warehouse. So when I realized what sort of a place he had brought me to, I refused to leave the car. He left me there, took the car keys. Then after half an hour, I decided to go in, get him to drive me home, break it off. When I went in, a pair of Fila Brasileiros were savaging each other. There must have been a hundred people there. I couldn’t see him. And I couldn’t stop myself from watching the fight.”

  Manuela paused. She had turned pale. “Anyhow, I ended up vomiting, and someone must have told him to get me, because next thing he was there leading me back to the car. He was talking all the time about a bet he had made on an Argentine Dogo. Then—get this—he asked me what drug I had taken to make me sick like that. He even wanted to bring me to hospital. Well . . . Anyhow, it ended that night.”

  “So you joined LAV as a result of that experience?”

  “Yes. The following day.”

  “You phoned them? How does it work?”

  “I looked up the offices and went straight in and asked to talk to the man in charge.”

  “Who was Clemente.”

  “Yes. They didn’t want to let me talk to him, so I said I had some very important information about a dog-fighting ring.”

  “You told him about the meets?”

  “He knew all about it already. Turns out he had been campaigning all along, and reported the fighting every month to you useless bastards. The best he got was one raid and about three changes of venue.”

  “That was the Carabinieri, not us,” Blume specified. “They probably didn’t have the manpower, what with all the organized crime and stuff. What extra information did you give?”

  “None. I just said that to get in to see Clemente. The idiot asked me if I’d hand out leaflets. Said the campaign was to change people’s attitudes, sometimes to get the law changed, institute a special police division, the polizia veterinaria. I offered him a donation of seven thousand euros.”

  “Is your father in any way involved in the dog-fight business?”

  Manuela paused, as if she were listening for a sound from outside. Eventually she said, “He’s involved, but at a very remote level. When he heard I was frequenting antivivisectionists, he asked me to stop because it was upsetting some of the people he does business with.”

  “And you said?”

  “I said no. He threate
ned to cut my allowance. I still said no. It was a question of principle.” She crossed her arms and stared defiantly back at the memory.

  “The people who were upset, they included the person who ran the business, Alleva?”

  “Sure. Alleva, that’s the guy who ran it, had threatened Clemente in the past—or got one of his henchmen to do it. He definitely wasn’t happy to see me with Clemente. It was a bit awkward for me, too.”

  “How?”

  “You know, being with a man who kept reporting to the police, or the Carabinieri, same difference. And the press. Still, it wasn’t such a big deal.”

  “Did your father warn Clemente off?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Would Clemente have told you if he had been warned off?”

  “He would have.”

  “Could Clemente have told you, and you’re not telling me?”

  “My father had nothing to do with Clemente’s murder.”

  “Could your father have warned Clemente not to open his mouth to you?”

  “My father had nothing to do with Clemente’s murder.”

  “Could your father maybe have helped Alleva arrange the killing?”

  “My father had nothing to do with Clemente’s murder. And that’s something he wanted me to pass on to you. That’s a message from him.”

  “I see. OK, message received. Clemente . . . You liked him.”

  “Yes, I liked him a lot. I really did.”

  “He liked you?”

  “Yes.”

  “He wasn’t ashamed of you?”

  “You don’t have to keep insulting me.”

  “I’m not interested in whether you feel insulted. I want to know: Did Clemente introduce you to all his friends?”

  Manuela bent down to fondle the dog again, allowing some of her orange hair to fall down and obscure her face. “No. He introduced me to no one.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “Get that, will you?” said Manuela, the wistful tone that Blume had detected evaporating as the chime faded. “It’s got to be those real estate people. Flash your badge at them, make them go away. I’ll fix us a drink.”