The Namesake cab-3

by Conor Fitzgerald

  Caterina entered the Gelateria dei Gracchi, to which Blume had introduced her. He said their ice cream was better even than Toni’s on Colli Portuensi, and he was possibly right, but still she preferred Toni’s. He had brought her here on one of those rare days they had been able to spend in each other’s company.

  She now ordered herself a rich yellow, cream and walnut cone, and ate it, reflecting on how well she had handled that little shit of a magistrate. The sun had disinfected him out of her mind. Blume absorbed all his rage deep into his body and let it seep out slowly through sarcasm and headaches and intestinal problems he never mentioned and would be mortified to think she knew anything about.

  Caterina was considering whether or not to eat the cone. It seemed ridiculous to worry about the few calories left in her hand after she had said yes to the whipped cream on top five minutes earlier. Her minor quandary was resolved by the trilling of an incoming call. She dropped the cone into the overflowing rubbish bin outside the gelateria, and kissed her fingers clean, before fishing the mobile phone from her bag. She glanced at it and saw an unknown number of a few digits. An institution of some sort, she guessed.

  ‘Inspector Mattiola?’ A woman’s voice.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I am Doctor Silvia La Verde, Consultant Neurologist at the Gemelli Hospital. I am phoning on behalf of Magistrate Matteo Arconti, who is unable to make the call.’

  ‘He’s awake?’

  ‘Absolutely, and he’s sitting here right beside me. He has some difficulty in holding a phone and pressing buttons…’

  Like Blume, then, thought Caterina.

  ‘… but I am confident we can deal with that over the next weeks and months. He has no problems, or only very minor problems relating to muscle control, in speaking. I’m going to put the phone to his ear now.’

  Caterina waited a moment.

  ‘Eeeola?’ said the voice, which sounded like it was coming from the other side of the tomb.

  ‘Eeola?’ she said.

  ‘Attrina Eeeola?’

  ‘Caterina Mattiola, yes, sir, that’s me. How can I help?’

  Silence. Then some voices in the background, someone exclaiming something.

  ‘Chief Inspector Mattiola,’ said the same voice, almost perfectly normal now, apart from a slight slurring. ‘Magistrate Matteo Arconti here. Sorry about that. It turns out I can speak perfectly fine if the phone is at my right ear, but I become almost aphasic if it’s at my left. Half my brain seems to be numb. Dr La Verde here is very interested in this. I think she’s writing a book about people like me.’

  Caterina allowed her silence to convey that she had no idea what he was talking about.

  ‘I was wondering, could you find time to pay me a visit. Just you, mind. I have a few things I’d like to ask you.’

  ‘Can’t you ask me about them now?’ said Caterina. She had just used up her last stores of tolerance for pompous magistrates.

  ‘I have a consultant neurologist acting as a phone holder. I really think you should come here, Inspector.’

  They always did that, conversationally demoted you by one rank when they sensed a lack of deference.

  Perhaps sensing an imminent refusal, Arconti added, ‘If you really want to know, I don’t so much want to ask you questions as to tell you a few things. They concern Commissioner Alec Blume, and a little trouble he has made for himself.’

  He could have said that to begin with.

  ‘I’m on my way,’ she said.

  28

  Castellammare di Stabia, Naples

  Blume waited till Konrad had gone in, then, instead of parking in front, backed up and drove the camper van around to the rear and squeezed behind a semitrailer. Moving quickly, he left the cab and opened the door to the living quarters, and stomped in, lashing out with his feet at anything he thought he saw moving. He flicked on the light, but it only cast a buttery glow on a section of the ceiling, and illuminated nothing. He saw he could let in more light by opening the curtain that closed off the driver’s cab.

  The rat, the size of a small cat, was attached to the curtain, perfectly motionless, its pink feet digging into the fabric. It had positioned itself right behind the passenger seat, inches from where Konrad’s head had been. Its nose was pointing up towards the ceiling, its tail swinging almost imperceptibly to and fro to offset the gentle sway of the curtain.

  Hickory, dickory dock, sang Blume to himself, his eyes seeking a weapon as the animal continued to gaze upwards, pretending not to have seen him as he pretended not to have seen it.

  Blume moved deeper into the camper, quietly unlocked a cupboard, and pulled out the first thing his hand touched, which turned out to be a can of insecticide. Fine. He’d use it as a baton. As he transferred it to his right hand, the rat did a 180-degree rotation, turning his nose from twelve to six. Blume, momentarily experiencing some of the horror he had seen written on Konrad’s features, launched the canister. With a casually insulting backward flip, the rat executed a somersault in the air and landed on its feet on the floor, walking rather than running out the door just as Blume’s useless aerosol hit the curtain. Blume stepped to the door, just in time to see the rat slip under the rear wheel of the camper van, very much with the air of one prepared to bide his time until the human persecutor had left.

  He pulled the door to. Without the breeze, the room immediately became airless and hot. He made a very rapid survey of the camper, pausing again to look at the faded picture of the girl. Then he went over to Konrad’s two leather suitcases and lifted the larger onto the misery-inducing Formica table bolted to the floor. It was closed with a small combination padlock of the sort that could be sprung with the help of a mini-screwdriver and the sudden application of force. But he had no such screwdriver to hand. Patiently, he pulled gently on the latch, seeing which of the dials felt tightest. He zeroed it, tested again, found the third dial was now tightest, and worked at that. It took him less than two minutes to get the combination.

  Sweating profusely now as the sun outside turned the camper into a Dutch oven, Blume opened the suitcase. As expected, Konrad’s clothes were neatly folded and separated by type. Blume stood back and looked carefully at the contents, studying patterns, memorizing the order. Then he started taking out the clothes item by item and running his hand over each.

  He had to open the door for air. He glanced down at the wheel, seeing nothing. ‘Hey, rat?’ he called. ‘Want to climb in here, make a nest in Hoffmann’s underpants?’

  Comforted by the breeze, he returned to his task of feeling his way through the contents, stroking the silky lining of the suitcase with the back of his hand. He double-checked to see if he had missed anything in the front pocket, then set about putting everything back. The second suitcase had the same combination as the first.

  The contents here proved more interesting. He immediately found a notebook, with an expensive vellum cover. Inside were neat handwritten notes, all in German. It would take him too long to work out the meanings. He could make out some words, Ehrenabzeichen, Geschaftsfreund, Kontaktperson, Rache. Hoffmann also had some headed paper with the lettering BKA and the black eagle symbol, but the sheets were blank. Below some neatly folded shirts, he found a sheaf of papers held together by spiral binding. There had to be eighty sheets at least and, Blume noted, many of them were in Italian. He glanced quickly through, and saw they referred to the Ndrangheta. He caught some names of major families and that of a heroic magistrate Nicola Gratteri, who was one of the leading experts on the organization. Blume hesitated, then decided to transfer the entire document into his own suitcase. It meant Konrad would find out about this in an hour or two when he went to unpack his bags, but that was fine.

  He was looking for a weapon. If Konrad had one, it had to be in here, because he was not carrying one on his person. Blume had carefully and surreptitiously checked from the first moment they had met, and had finally been able to rule out the last possibility of a concealed weapon when Konrad had lift
ed his feet off the floor in fear of rats, revealing that he wore brown-and-white striped socks, but no ankle holster.

  He lifted out three books. One was a guidebook to ‘Kalabrien und Basilikata’, one of the more useless guidebooks crammed with glossy photos of places that, presumably, you would be seeing for yourself. He held the book by its spine and made a fan of the pages and shook, but nothing fell out. There was a novel, Selbs Betrug, again with nothing hidden inside. More interesting, but ultimately unrevealing, was a book called Mafialand Deutschland by Jurgen Roth. Konrad also had a neat little halogen penlight that Blume wasted a few seconds playing with. He reached the bottom of the suitcase without finding anything else of interest. He swiped his hand through the inside pocket, finding nothing more than what seemed to be the torn and crumpled remains of some old-fashioned postcards. One showed the ‘doors of Malta’, another was an image of an English seaside town called Brixham. Judging from the faded turquoise colour of the sea and the single brown car parked in the port, the photo dated from the 1970s. There was a ripped postcard of a caravan site in County Cork in Ireland framed by bright red fuchsia, and a close-up of the Glockenspiel at Marienplatz in Munich and another of the nearby Frauenkirche. There was nothing written on any of them. The postcards were so old that the paper formed tiny fibrous pills as he rubbed his thumb along the edges. They did not fit in with the neatly stacked clothes, the high technology, the cleanliness and order of the bags. He had an idea, which immediately crystallized into a conviction, that the camper van in which he now stood had been to those places in the distant past. These were fragments of Konrad’s memory, pieces he wanted to keep for personal reasons. Something here explained his presence in Italy.

  He pulled out the last postcard, which turned out to be ripped vertically in half. He felt around for the other half, but the pocket had given up the last of its treasures. The postcard, more of a holy keepsake, was of the type religious people bought in churches. It showed a vaulted ceiling, a side chapel, a Madonna with a massive crown on her head and the beginnings of a second crown, presumably on the head of the Christ child in her arms. The vertical tear obliterated the rest. But Blume recognized it at once. It was an image of the Madonna of Polsi, also known as the Madonna of the Mountains, the goddess of the Ndrangheta. This was the very Madonna that the bosses lifted on their shoulders and paraded through the steep streets of the village clinging to the sides of Aspromonte. He turned the card over and saw it was signed in a careful childish hand with rounded large characters: Domenico Megale.

  Old Megale wrote like a five-year-old. If that was his signature. Blume looked closely at it, bringing it over to the door to get more light. The glistening of the ink, its fresh darkness on the old paper convinced him that Domenico Megale, or someone purporting to be him, had signed the back of this torn Madonna recently. Either Konrad was such a fan of the Mafia boss that he carried around his autograph, or this had some specific purpose. It had to be Konrad’s passport to somewhere, he reasoned. It certified that Konrad was to be allowed to enter somewhere, or was a man to trust. Someone else held the other half of the image, so they could check this was authentic.

  And yet, even as he looked at the signature and the torn image, Blume could not believe that Konrad was really an envoy from Domenico Megale. He could not say why he was so certain except that Konrad had little of the perpetrator and much of the victim about him.

  He closed the van door again and started putting everything back into the suitcase, including the torn Madonna. When the lanky German came knocking on the hotel door a few hours from now, angrily demanding an explanation for his missing notes, Blume would ask him about it.

  Someone hammered on the door he had just closed. Blume snapped shut the case, put it back on the floor, opened the door.

  Konrad stood holding two plastic bags. ‘I thought you’d be out front.’

  ‘No parking space. I tried to use the shade of the trucks to keep the camper van cool.’

  Konrad peered in. ‘Are they still there?’

  ‘No,’ said Blume. ‘There was just the one. It might be near your feet.’

  Konrad gave a satisfying leap, like a colt learning to show-jump. Then he got in the driver’s side, slamming the door behind him. ‘Close the door, please.’

  ‘Did you get that coffee?’ said Blume from behind him. ‘Wait, I’m coming around.’

  Blume sat down in the passenger seat and Konrad gingerly handed him the bag. Blume peered inside and pulled out a packet of fruit pastilles and popped one in his mouth. ‘You remembered, well done. I love these sweets. But where’s the coffee?’

  ‘When I asked for what you said, no one understood me,’ said Konrad.

  ‘It’s sold with the sweets, in a blue container… never mind.’ He popped another in his mouth, adding synthetic strawberry to the chewy lemon he was already enjoying. ‘What?’ he said to Konrad’s outraged and incredulous expression. ‘I like sweets. I never grew out of it. It’s my only vice. You want one?’ he pulled back the wrapper and held the tube towards Konrad, who recoiled.

  ‘Did you wash your hands?’

  ‘You mean the rat? I was kicking at the rat, not tickling its stomach.’

  ‘European rats carry a flea which carries a bacterium called Bartonella. It causes serious coronary damage.’

  Blume popped a green sweet into his mouth, then mimicked a man having a heart attack, clutching at his left bicep, then throat.

  ‘You’re not funny, Commissioner.’

  29

  Rome

  Arconti was sitting up waiting for her and managed to lift his arm as she entered the room. A box of Kleenex sat by his side.

  ‘I have a private room, which is good,’ he said, plucking one out and dabbing the side of his mouth. ‘Excuse me if I drool a little.’

  Caterina, who did not know the magistrate, was unsure what sort of tone to use. Sensing this, Arconti said, ‘I am going to use tu and call you Caterina. I want you to do the same. Call me Matteo.’

  ‘Signor Giudice, you are asking too much. I can’t possibly use tu

  …’ she trailed off as the magistrate fixed her with a haughty and unblinking stare.

  ‘I am not that old, despite present appearances,’ said Arconti, his lip curved into a sneering expression of command.

  Caterina bristled. ‘I am not using the familiar form with a magistrate I don’t know. You had something to tell me, now tell me.’

  The magistrate continued to regard her balefully, but his voice sounded incongruously cheerful. ‘That’s fine by me. Sorry if I embarrassed you. May I call you Caterina?’

  ‘Yes,’ she conceded.

  ‘OK, Caterina, now will you please look at this side of my face, the side that doesn’t look like it’s had the mother of all Botox injections? I’m sure the frozen half is fascinatingly creepy, but I have feelings, too.’

  She looked at Arconti’s face full on, and saw half his mouth smiling. His right eye was moving up and down and there was a humorous glint in it.

  ‘They are hopeful that other side will start thawing out within a few days,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Caterina. ‘I was staring, wasn’t I?’ She glanced surreptitiously at the left eye which glared murderously back at her, while Arconti laughed good-naturedly.

  ‘Never mind. And as for the honorifics due to a magistrate, you can forget that. I’m quitting. I know it was probably cholesterol or cigarettes or something, but I blame my work for this. That and my parents of course, they gave me the genes.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Caterina. She hooked some strands of hair over her ear and turned her head so as to look only at the magistrate’s good side.

  ‘You’re lovely,’ he said. ‘And now you’re blushingly lovely. I found in the past few days it’s become easier for me to speak my mind. I find you lovely, and the fact that that big brooding bastard of a commissioner didn’t see fit even to mention you in all those hours we were together is…’ />
  ‘Hurtful,’ said Caterina.

  ‘Yes. Blume isn’t always upfront, is he?’

  ‘Not always,’ she agreed.

  ‘I think he probably communicates more with you than with me, which is as it should be and as I hope it will be,’ said Arconti. ‘Do you know where he is now?’

  Caterina hesitated.

  ‘I’m not fishing for information. I know where he is,’ said Arconti. ‘I’m just wondering if you do.’

  ‘Yes, I do. I think so. Tell me anyhow.’

  ‘He’s been recruited by Captain Massimiliani from the DCSA to accompany a German who may or may not have something to do with the Ndrangheta and may or may not be acting as a go-between for the Ndrangheta and the Camorra. He left you here investigating the murder of Matteo Arconti, which, I have to say, still makes a certain impression on me when I say the name. You were briefly under the direction of a magistrate from my office, right?’

  ‘Magistrate Nardone.’

  ‘Can’t quite bring him to mind,’ said Arconti.

  ‘Natty little beard, young…’

  ‘Nope. Can’t picture him, but it’s all irrelevant now because the case has floated up to Milan and into the all-devouring embrace of the anti-Mafia magistrates.’

  ‘You are very well informed, Giudice.’

  ‘Call me Matteo, and, really, use the familiar form,’ he attempted a smile, and Caterina’s eye was drawn back to the sneer stamped on the left side of his face. ‘I’m informed because I’ve been talking to this Massimiliani I mentioned. He wanted to know a few things about Blume.’