The Namesake cab-3

by Conor Fitzgerald

  The Namesake

  ( Commissario Alec Blume - 3 )

  Conor Fitzgerald

  Conor Fitzgerald

  The Namesake

  1

  Milan

  ‘ Before we begin,’ said the magistrate, ‘I want you all to know that there is no chance of a happy ending to this story.’

  A policeman stepped forward. He was a young man with an accent full of the unclosed vowels of southern Italy. He said, ‘Sometimes these cases work out for the best.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-eight, Giudice.’

  ‘I am almost twice your age, Agente. I have had experience of cases like this before. Just one is enough to change your outlook on life and stop you from hoping.’

  The other four police officers filling the small room nodded, which had the effect of isolating their outspoken colleague. The magistrate regarded them with a hint of disdain, and pressed the tips of his fingers against the polished wood of his organized desk, then shook his head in sadness at the open laptop in front of him as he set forth the essentials of the troubling case before them.

  ‘At four o’clock yesterday, after spending two hours in the “Aqua Felix” swimming pool, Teresa Resca, fourteen years of age, was waiting for a bus that would take her back home to San Donato. A car drew up, and for some reason she climbed into it. The whole scene was captured by a CCTV camera located on the outside wall of an office block here.’

  The magistrate spun his laptop around on his desk so they all could see, and hit the space bar to start the video.

  ‘There she is, holding her pink sports bag. The camera has a narrow field of vision. She seems to be talking to someone, who moves out of frame. Now you can see the car pull up and, before you ask, yes, the camera is too high up to capture the number plate. The car is probably a grey Yaris, which might or might not be relevant at a trial held some day in the far future, but is not enough for us now. An unidentified older-looking woman goes over to the car, and you can see her talking to the driver, but we get no picture of who he or she is. She might be the same person Teresa was talking to a moment before. My instinct says it is, but let’s wait for the technicians to analyse the images more carefully, see what they say. This woman starts getting in and, at the last moment, beckons to Teresa. The girl, who, her parents and friends tell me, is not rebellious or unhappy or stupid enough to do something like this, climbs willingly into the car. The car drives off. Imagine being her parents seeing this video. Imagine being her as she realizes her mistake, which happens within half a mile, because it is then that her phone goes dead and vanishes from the network. Imagine the worst, because that is what will happen.’

  They watched the girl get into the car, and the car driving away. He hit replay, and they watched the scene again.

  ‘It makes you want to reach into the screen and pull her back,’ said the southern policeman who had spoken up before.

  ‘It’s like being an all-seeing but powerless god,’ said the magistrate. ‘We need to get through a lot of detestable business first. We need to check the father. We need to look deeper into the family and its friends. That is the most promising hypothesis of all. Why would Teresa climb into a car like that? Our first idea must be that she knew the driver. Father, all family friends, relatives, all the girl’s friends, and then the mother. We rip into the lives of those who are suffering most. Let’s do it immediately and quickly. We strike when the nerves are raw and the pain is greatest, and we try not to drag it out for longer than we must. Next, we look into the father’s activities. He appears to be a failed journalist, but perhaps he is wealthier than he seems, and a ransom demand is in the offing, though twenty-four hours have now passed. Perhaps he owes someone something. Find out everything about his colleagues, past jobs, employment records. Go through the girl’s diaries, if she had any. Her phone records have already been checked, and every contact she had needs to be questioned. Check out boyfriends, if she had any. Check out fights with teachers, with classmates and any disputes involving her or her family, no matter how trivial: a fight over an apartment-block boiler bill, an unpaid dentist bill, a broken fence. Then, when we have done all that, we pass on to the worst scenario, worse for us because it leads to a dead-end: a random attack. Remember, though, this is a story that will not end well.’

  Magistrate Francesco Fossati of the Fifth Section of the Criminal Court of Milan dismissed the police officers, and replayed the video, willing the girl not to get into the car and watching helplessly as she ignored the thought waves he was sending back in time.

  2

  Milan

  Standing on a white pebble path at a quarter to eight in the morning towards the end of what had been another uneventful working week in an almost empty office, Matteo Arconti, now deputy head of the actuarial division of the insurance company, pulled out a pair of folding glasses to consult his new book. He pushed the glasses down his nose and raised his eyes to focus again on the tree in front of him. He had a lot of things to take in. Pale grey bark with deep fissures, a wide crown with sinuous low branches, entire leaves in alternate pinnate pairs. He was not sure about how deep a deep fissure was supposed to be, nor what ‘pinnate’ meant, but surely there could be no mistaking the round green fruit which, the book told him, ripens slowly over long hot summers. This was almost definitely a walnut tree, a Juglans regia. He had been walking past it, under it, for fifteen years and had never thought to examine it, or any of the other trees in the Indro Montanelli Gardens. He lowered his eyes to read the botanical name again: Juglans regia.

  He skimmed through the pages to see if he could spot an illustration of the taller and thinner tree on the other side of the path, but he was already running late. He gave himself a certainty score of 85 per cent with regard to this probable walnut. In need of more data, he reached up and plucked one of the bright lime-coloured fruits. He split the outer skin of the globular casing with his thumbnail, causing it to release a scent that cut through the air like the aromatic volatiles of a synthetic detergent. He tried to prise it open to get to the walnut inside.

  Unexpectedly, fluid squirted out, hitting his white shirt cuff, which poked neatly out from beneath his business suit. Damn. Watery as it ran into the webbing between his thumb and index finger, the fluid quickly became sticky. He stopped off at a drinking fountain to wash his hands, and tossed away the unsplittable case. Through the railings, he could see his dark-blue BMW 5 Series. A dirty white van drove slowly past.

  He rubbed his hands under the flowing water and then stared at them in puzzlement. The juices from the smooth green fruit had tanned his skin with shades of yellow and brown. His fingers seemed nicotine stained, and the purple and black streak across his thumbnail was so similar to a bruise that he fancied he felt it throb as he looked at it. The more he washed his hands, the darker the stain became.

  His wife had set him a challenge as she handed him the book: identify every tree in the park by the end of September, before the leaves fall. He liked the idea, and had even figured out how to set up a spreadsheet on his laptop to keep track. He had decided to locate the trees he identified on Google Maps, and mark the date too. Walnut tree, August 26. It would be the first thing he did when he got to the office. In these dog days of late summer, he had plenty of dead time.

  ‘You need to change your priorities a little,’ Letizia had told him that morning as he stood frowning at the unexpected gift. ‘We’ve plenty of money. You said yourself there was no need to continue with the pretence of being a dynamic young manager. So take it easy. Spend time with your children, who love you. Sofia is fifteen already. She’s going through a bad patch now, coming to terms with not being as good-looking as she once thought she was.’


  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, she’s hardly perfect. She seems to have inherited your legs, for a start, which, well, and her chin is pointy sharp and her nose — I think that must come from your side of the family, too.’

  ‘She’s absolutely beautiful. She always has been, always will be.’

  Now he glanced at his vintage Breitling watch, a gift from Letizia six years ago to celebrate his fortieth birthday. The watch lost twelve to fifteen minutes a day, but he had never had the heart to tell her and continued to wear it, surreptitiously righting it every morning against the clock on his mobile phone. One minute to eight, lied the watch. That meant it was already at least one minute past. He slipped the book into his pocket, exited the gate on the side of Via Daniele Manin. He opened the back door of his BMW and tossed his briefcase in. Shutting it, he noticed a van, the same one he had glimpsed earlier, reversing down the road at speed. Idiot driver. He was going to have to get out of the way quickly if he didn’t want to get knocked down.

  The van braked just in time, and its back doors burst open, to reveal a man with short straw-coloured hair, who half nodded at him, then leaped out and smiled as he landed nimbly on the road. Matteo stood absently fingering his car key, wondering if he was supposed to know the man standing next to him. Now the driver was coming around from the side, and for a split second, Matteo was worried that he had made a gesture of some sort to protest at the reckless driving. But of course, he hadn’t. He was proud of his ability to resist road rage. Even so, it almost seemed as if they were coming for…

  Someone, it must have been the driver, pulled a thin plastic cord around his neck and jerked it tight, strangling his cry. The other man, or perhaps the driver again, grabbed his hands, and twisted them behind his back with speed and violence, then jerked upwards, causing extreme pain in his shoulders, and propelling him towards the van. He went straight into the side of one of the doors, hitting it with his mouth, and felt a crack, a shooting pain, and a sudden rush of salt and slime in his mouth. He felt the van tilt down slightly as someone jumped into it. The man who had nodded in that friendly way seconds before was now grabbing a fistful of Matteo’s thinning hair at the back of his neck and dragging him in. He could not breathe. The floor of the van felt strangely yielding, as if his face was metal and the floor was soft flesh. Now thousands of tiny ball bearings seemed to be rolling beneath his hands. He clutched at them desperately with his fists as if they were pearls of oxygen. A tingling sensation passed through his chest and he felt his body beginning to float upwards. Just before he lost consciousness, the cord was released from around his neck. He could hear gasping and coughing, and it took him a while before he realized he was making the sounds himself. He became aware of the man beside him and the movement of the vehicle. He was bringing his eyes into focus and getting ready to speak, when a bag was pulled over his head. Silently, the man bound his wrists with duct tape. He could hear the squeak of the sticky plastic being pulled from the roll as it was wrapped over and over his wrists and hands, stretchable at first, then tighter and tighter.

  3

  Milan-Sesto San Giovanni

  The journey took somewhere between half an hour and an hour. Or maybe more. He had lost track of time but sensed the distance was not great. It was a short transfer from the vehicle to a damp room via a short few steps that he managed to negotiate without falling. He was thrown nose first against a crumbling wall. Still they left the bag over his head. He asked for it to be taken off, then scrunched up his face waiting for the blow that would inevitably follow. But no one answered and he realized he was alone. He could hear the muffled voices of the men speaking some Balkan or East European language. Probably Romanian, he thought. It sounded like it made sense. Romanian was full of Latin and Italian-sounding words; Albanian was unlike anything else.

  Thought fragments and oddly irrelevant questions were forming a disorderly pile in the back of his mind, but they had to wait. He needed to concentrate on not dying from suffocation, on expelling the blood that kept welling up from inside his mouth and making him nauseous. To vomit would be to die. Finally, as an overwhelming question of dignity, he had to concentrate on his bowels. He began to get a rhythm going. Breathe slowly, gently, until someday someone would take this stifling hood off his head. Spit softly into the fabric to keep the blood and saliva from sliding down his throat and making him sick. Tighten the sphincter and clench the stomach muscles when the cold rush of liquid fear hit the base of his gut. The thing to remember was that they had the wrong person. As soon as they discovered their mistake, they would let him go. He had to be careful not to look at them and not to hear any names. He was able to move his fingers a little behind his back. He could use his right hand to feel the wedding ring on his left. Inside the ring were his wife’s name and the date of their marriage twenty-two years ago. He closed a finger and thumb over it and started easing it off.

  He was not ready to die, even though that very morning he had given a thoughtful little speech on the question of ageing and death in front of his wife and his children, sleepy-eyed and outraged at being dragged out of their summer-morning beds. They already felt underprivileged to be in Milan at the end of August when everyone else was still on holiday. The trips to France in June, the holiday camps in July, and the two weeks on the Argentario counted for nothing, evidently.

  ‘Happy belated birthday,’ Letizia had said, giving him the book on trees. He had kissed her on the cheek. She moved her lips up to meet his, but he’d gone for the cheek, because, well, the children. But now he regretted it. He should have kissed her on the lips. He felt his wedding band slip over his knuckle. Then he had kissed Sofia on the head, run his fingers through his son’s hair, and said, ‘Get a haircut, Lorenzo. You look like a girl.’

  Lorenzo was showing signs of wanting to follow in his father’s footsteps. Statistics, mathematics, probability puzzles. He and Lorenzo always had football, number tricks and puzzles to keep them in contact with each other. But his daughter Sofia had floated to a planet so far away that communications between them had become infrequent and asynchronous.

  His right hand was cramping, and his wrist hurt from the effort, but he had managed to free the wedding ring from the fat of his finger. He crooked his fingertip to stop the ring from falling off immediately.

  Someone entered the room. Something scraped, thin metal against cement, the hollow tube of a chair leg, followed by a fizz of static as synthetic fibres brushed plastic as the person sat down inches from him. Fingers touched his throat without violence. Then another hand, moved in under his chin, as Letizia sometimes did when she was adjusting his tie before he left in the morning. Behind his back, he straightened his finger and allowed the ring to slip into his right hand, where he nestled it protectively in the hollow made by his thumb and the edge of his palm.

  The hands left his neck and the hood was lifted. Fresh cool air rushed across his face, down his mouth, up his nostrils, through his hair. It was like riding the waves in a speedboat. He looked up into the face of the man who had freed him from the constriction and darkness, unable to keep the gratitude out of his eyes. His thoughts began to clear as the oxygen returned to his brain and his eyes focused. He was in an abandoned place that smelled of urine and wet cement. He started talking.

  ‘We don’t have much money. I have a ski chalet in Aprica, just one bedroom, not worth all that much. My Generali stock options are worth 172,000 euros. I have 90,000 in the bank plus two online accounts that transfer to that account only, so I would have to be the one to do that. They have about 20,000 each in them. I lost money on the stock market. My parents rent their house and live on a state pension. Even if Letizia — that’s my wife, as you probably know — even if she sells the house to get me back, which she could hardly do without the authorities finding out and freezing my assets, you’re not going to get much more than a million, and… seeing as there are several of you…’ He thought of the Romanian words he had heard them speak. �
��Do you understand what I am saying?’

  ‘Shut up,’ said the man. ‘I’m not interested. If I want you to talk, I’ll tell you to talk.’ The voice was plaintive and resentful, as if his captor was the one having the wrong inflicted upon him. The speaker was a terrone, one of those brutal southern peasants whose unwelcome presence in Milan was one of the reasons the Northern League had become so popular. He wasn’t so good with the accents of the Mezzogiorno. He knew his captor was not Neapolitan. Neapolitans always sounded enthusiastic and friendly and on the verge of telling a joke. This was a more lugubrious southern accent, not Apulia. Sicily or Calabria — Calabria, probably. Where his own grandfather had come from.

  ‘Working in insurance doesn’t mean I can get my hands on money. I don’t have access to funds… I’m only middle management. I’m not very good at my job. I can’t keep up with the latest computer algorithms. I have no knowledge or privileges.’

  ‘Is that what you do, insurance?’ said the man.

  The man had opened his legs a little and bent his head down, like an adult watching a child at play on the floor. Forties, tracksuit, overweight. He smelled of cigarettes, cologne, and something rubbery.

  ‘You don’t know what I do?’ said Matteo, hope rushing into him like the air had a minute before.

  ‘The Romanians said you worked in an office. They didn’t go any deeper than that. No need.’

  ‘Ah, you must have the wrong person, then,’ he tried to sound professional and politely apologetic, like the indemnification guys did when rejecting a claim.

  The man held out Matteo’s wallet, pulled out his frayed identity card. ‘You are the person I want. Matteo Arconti, a Calabrian name?’