The Namesake cab-3

by Conor Fitzgerald

  ‘How did you manage to get these files from him?’

  ‘I took them. He doesn’t know yet, but he will.’

  ‘I suppose that’s good work, then. Anything else?’

  Blume thought about the torn image of the Madonna, and couldn’t bring himself to tell Massimiliani about it until he himself had a clearer idea. He’d talk to Konrad and see what he could find out. He realized he wanted to give Konrad a chance to explain before reporting to Massimiliani.

  ‘No, nothing else at this point,’ he said.

  ‘Keep up the good work,’ said Massimiliani. ‘I think we may be about to learn something this end about Hoffmann and his motivations. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear.’

  Blume dropped the phone by his side, put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes, trying to work out Massimiliani’s tone. The waves broke against sharp rocks at a regular rhythm forty metres below. Far away, seagulls were kicking up a terrible fuss.

  A cooling air swirled around his feet, and he flexed his toes, pulled his trousers up to free his ankles, pulled his polo up, and lay there with his stomach bare. Lovely. It would be nice to have Caterina here now, but it was nice, too, maybe nicer, to be all alone on a large smooth white bed. He could stretch out in an X-shape and catch more of the air coming in, along with the distant noise of people shouting, motorbikes, or maybe outboard motors. The seagulls had stopped their clamour, a plane was passing high overhead, and some insects were clicking and chattering near the window. He flipped the pillow over to the cool side, pressed it against the back of his neck.

  Damned phone. It was still under his hand, he picked it up — no, it was the one beside the bed. He rolled over, realizing the air had darkened considerably and grown cooler and wetter. ‘Pronto?’

  ‘Room 17.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I’ll meet you there,’ said the manager, his voiced hushed with boyish excitement. ‘You’ll see. I’ve sent my daughter down to you. She’ll be there any moment.’

  Someone knocked gently on the door, and Blume jumped out of bed and opened the door.

  ‘My father said to give you this.’ She handed him a neat stack of A4 paper. ‘And to go down to Room 17 immediately. Down those steps.’

  The manager was waiting in the corridor below. ‘The German is not back yet but it’s getting dark. He’ll be here any moment,’ he said. He stopped outside Room 17 and opened the door. Beaming from ear to ear at his own cleverness, he then placed the spiral-bound notes in Blume’s hands. ‘I managed to get them all back into the spine. My fax machine is also a photocopier, so I thought I could copy them for you as I sent them, see? Then you can put this back in his room and the German will be none the wiser.’

  Not bad, thought Blume, though he did not like the idea of the hotel manager being in too much on this, and definitely did not want him to watch as he opened Konrad’s suitcase and slipped the document back in. He nodded, took the file and closed the door in the eager manager’s face.

  The manager knocked immediately.

  ‘No,’ said Blume. ‘You can’t come in here.’

  The manager’s voice, hoarse with panic and excitement, came from behind the door. ‘The German’s walking up the steps. I just caught a glimpse of him. He’ll come in the door at the end of the corridor. It’ll take him only seconds… He’s going to catch us… Wait.’

  Blume heard the manager move away from the door and his footfalls pounding down the corridor. He took his time even so, placing the document carefully in the position he remembered finding it. If Konrad walked in, well, it would be embarrassing, that was all. He closed the suitcase, walked quickly to the door, surveyed the room once more.

  He slipped out of the room as the manager came running up the hall, breathless.

  ‘I pulled hard at the door so he couldn’t open it from the outside. Really hard like it was locked, not like someone was pulling it. He’ll have gone up the cliff path to get in, and then he’ll come down the stairs… that’s him. Quick, we can get out here.’

  He ran down the corridor again. Blume followed reluctantly, and they exited the door the manager had been blocking. They ascended the steps back up to the parking area, past the camper van, and back into the hotel. The daughter and her father exchanging theatrical glances, Blume went back down to his room, dissatisfied.

  Konrad had been willing to leave the documents unattended for hours. It wasn’t unreasonable to conclude that he didn’t care too much if they were discovered, which meant they had no real importance. Or, at the risk of being too Freudian, it meant Konrad unconsciously wanted them discovered. Maybe he wanted someone to stop him. But from doing what?

  31

  Positano

  A few minutes later, Konrad, his raw neck and head sticking out of the white cotton bathrobe, knocked on the door to announce, much to Blume’s surprise, that he had made reservations for dinner. He said he would take a quick shower and meet him in the lobby in fifteen minutes.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘A place called I Partenopei,’ said Konrad, making a good job of the pronunciation. ‘Recommended by the hotel manager who looks at me funny.’ Konrad lowered his voice, ‘ Schwul, definitely. Despite the daughter.’

  Blume went up to the lobby to wait where the manager, full of solicitation and goodwill, immediately informed him he had ordered them a cab, even though it was only ten minutes on foot.

  ‘Far too dangerous that road in the dark,’ the manager said.

  The taxi turned out to have a fixed rate. Fifteen euros there and back. ‘Call here when you want him to come down and pick you up.’

  ‘That’s not a taxi,’ said Blume.

  ‘Not exactly,’ agreed the manager. ‘It’s a sort of courtesy car for some of the hotels on this side of the headland.’

  ‘A courtesy car is free.’

  ‘I’ll pay, of course,’ said the manager quickly. ‘It’s not as if you haven’t already been generous.’

  ‘I’ll get the German to pay. He can pay for dinner, too.’

  Konrad arrived wearing a wide-collar paisley-design shirt, a crumpled linen jacket and drainpipe black jeans. Adidas running shoes and a powerful stench of Denim aftershave or something else that belonged to the 1970s completed his get-up. His hair, still wet, was sleeked back into a ducktail.

  The restaurant was perched on a rocky outcrop overlooking the harbour. Looking down, Blume could see their table reflected in the dark water and the waiter coming towards them like a black shadow moving just beneath the surface. Running the length of the wall was a fish tank with crabs and lobsters, the pincers disabled by plastic cuffs, and red reef mullets, ready to be netted and fried without needing to be gutted.

  They ate well, but mostly in silence. Konrad, who said swimming had made him hungry, announced that from the point of view of toxins, he had more confidence in the produce of the sea than the land. He had swordfish steaks. Blume, being adventurous, went for aubergine with chocolate and peppered mussels, and they both chose acqua pazza as their first course.

  The restaurant was full for a Monday night. Blume glanced at the swarthy bulky men sucking at their fingers and reaching across each other as they stretched to help themselves from central platters of fish. At another table a woman bedecked in gold jewels and wearing a white tracksuit was explaining to the waiter that the roly-poly kid in the blue football strip of Napoli sulking beside her had coeliac disease and would die if any pasta passed his mouth, but he could, and did, eat meat and fried potatoes, though he might possibly be allergic to fish. Five youths at another table, all in tracksuits, drank limoncello and kept a careful eye on Konrad and Blume.

  ‘I’m glad to see you do eat,’ said Blume. ‘You even seem to be enjoying yourself.’

  ‘There is something liberating about this place.’

  ‘This restaurant, the Amalfi coast, or southern Italy?’

  ‘All together. I am not a romantic anarchist. I am, after all, a policeman. But there is
great freedom in the absence of rules. And I feel like we have travelled a great distance, even though it was only a few hours from Rome this morning. That seems so long ago.’

  ‘The south is separate from the north,’ said Blume. ‘The broken roads and railways turn journeys down here into tiring odysseys. Even when southerners speak standard Italian, they use a different grammar. Everything is said in the remote tense. That has to mean something.’

  ‘It means they still use the Latin past tense,’ said Konrad. ‘It is very fascinating to me.’

  ‘If it were up to me,’ said Blume, ‘I’d give this region back to the Spanish, the north back to the French and the Austrians, and Sicily back to the Arabs.’

  ‘And so, logically, you would give Rome and central Italy back to the Pope.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Blume. ‘I couldn’t do that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he’s German.’

  Konrad, recovering his confidence in the purity of the produce, ordered sospiri di limoni for dessert. Blume asked for coffee.

  ‘I am paying for this of course,’ said Konrad. ‘You are my guest.’ He called over the waiter and got the bill, scribbled on a piece of graph paper.

  Blume shrugged. ‘It’s the other way around if anything, but you can still pay.’

  Without quite knowing why he was doing it, especially after he had made such an effort to cover his tracks, Blume now found himself saying, ‘Konrad, listen to me: if you’re thinking of going down to Calabria, don’t. They don’t want visitors. That would definitely include a federal policeman from Germany.’

  ‘Why do you say I am going to Calabria?’

  ‘Because you are.’

  ‘Just because I met Domenico Megale…’

  ‘I saw that torn Madonna with Megale’s signature. Take that look off your face, you left your bags unattended in the camper van, and then your room. Some part of you wants to be stopped. A well-hidden sane part.’

  Konrad’s eyes were shining. Perhaps it was the drink. ‘I have a private matter to attend to. It is not police work. I would be grateful to be left alone,’ he said.

  ‘Is that icon of the Madonna some sort of code? What’s the idea, someone down there has the other half of the torn Madonna, you fit the two halves together, they see Megale’s signature, they know you are good and true?’

  Konrad stared into the middle distance avoiding Blume’s sympathetic gaze and struggling to compose his features into an expression of indifference.

  ‘Are you planning to kill someone, Konrad? Or are you trying to get yourself killed? Or both? All I can say is you are making a bad choice, and I am giving you a chance not to make it…’

  Blume stopped, as the waiter returned.

  ‘If I make a bad choice, there is another universe in which I make a good choice,’ said Konrad. ‘I believe in multiverse theory.’

  ‘That’s handy. Meanwhile, back in this universe, the waiter’s just asked us if you would prefer to pay in cash.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Cash. The credit card machine is mysteriously “broken”.’

  ‘I don’t have enough cash.’

  ‘Fuck it,’ said Blume. He pulled out two fifties from the envelope Massimiliani had given him and paid for the meal.

  32

  Positano

  Blume was lying in bed, his stomach heavy with fish, searching for the willpower to read through Konrad’s notes when his Samsung vibrated.

  ‘Massimiliani, I suppose?’

  ‘Of course it’s me. I hope you’re not using the phone to call other people.’

  ‘No. What do you want?’

  ‘You can forget about Hoffmann.’

  Blume sat up straight, causing some of the papers to slip off his bed. ‘No! I was just getting somewhere with him. He has a torn Madonna. I think it’s a pass of some sort.’

  ‘Sorry, I’m not following. Are you talking about some immediate threat?’

  ‘No,’ said Blume. ‘I was… never mind.’

  ‘Good. We’ll pick you up in the morning, both of you. Hoffmann’s superiors have finally worked out the reason for his trip.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘They won’t tell us yet. They say they need to check up on one or two final details. Personally, I think they are embarrassed at having overlooked something obvious, or maybe they have discovered Hoffmann was working for one internal department, which neglected to tell the other. It’s their problem, not ours.’

  ‘Just like that? We no longer care about Konrad?’

  ‘We never did care about him. We cared about what he might do, but it seems he’s not going to do anything that bothers us. He’s not armed, is he?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘See? It’s not a serious matter, at least that’s what they say.’

  ‘You suddenly trust the Germans?’

  ‘I always trusted my friend and associate Weissmann.’

  ‘But you don’t know what it is they have found out?’

  ‘I am afraid not. I expect them to tell us tomorrow. It’s rather late in the day now. They want to talk to Hoffmann himself beforehand. In fact, they are probably talking to him now.’

  ‘OK,’ said Blume slowly, concentrating on keeping the anger out of the two syllables. It was clear the Hoffmann threat, and hence Blume’s contribution, had never been taken very seriously. He knew all along the mission was not crucial, but this was humiliating.

  ‘What was that you said about a Madonna?’

  ‘I’ll tell you that later, sometime tomorrow. After you’ve heard from the Germans.’

  ‘Tell me now, Blume.’

  ‘It’s late. It’s a complicated thing and you just told me it doesn’t matter anyhow,’ said Blume, hanging up on Massimiliani for the second time that evening.

  Blume picked up the bedside phone and dialled Room 17, and was quite surprised when the inside line did what it was supposed to do and put him in contact with Konrad, who sounded as if he had been asleep.

  ‘Curmaci,’ said Blume. ‘Agazio Curmaci. I don’t quite know why, but that’s who you are interested in. So am I. That’s why they threw us together. If he’s your enemy, maybe I can help. If he’s your friend, then… I don’t know. You don’t want him as a friend.’

  Konrad said nothing.

  ‘Do you know what sort of man he is?’ said Blume.

  ‘Yes,’ said Konrad quietly, his voice muted with sleep. ‘I know what sort of a man he is. I think I was just dreaming about him now. Go to sleep and we can talk in the morning.’

  But Blume no longer felt as tired as before. He retrieved the fallen papers from around his bed and started looking through them. Konrad had copied out songs, dialect words, stories, history and even recipes connected with the Society. Occasionally, a word was underlined here, an exclamation mark added there. Finally, Blume found a page with underlining and translations of dialect words on which Konrad had committed himself to a comment, although it turned out to be no more than a hastily scrawled ‘ sehr interessant? ’.

  It was a description, no doubt out of date, of the protocol for making contact with an ’ndrina that did not know you. Was that Konrad’s plan?

  Q. Are you a wolf, a bee or a goat dropping?

  A. I am a wolf who will devour you, a bee who will sting you, and a goat dropping that follows you.

  Q. Do you walk, sir, above the road or below it?

  A. I walk both above and below the road, for I am an artful scoundrel.

  ‘Oh, no you’re not, Konrad,’ muttered Blume. He flicked through till his eyes landed on more marking by Konrad, this time at the top of the story of Osso, Carcagnosso and Matrosso. Blume knew the legend. It was just the sort of thing an impressionable German like Konrad..

  His phone, his real one, not the one supplied by Massimiliani, was ringing. Wearily, he got off the bed, half hoping it would stop before he got there, knowing full well who it would be. He hesitated; the caller, Caterina of course, was insistent; she was in
a fury with him by the time he answered.

  ‘Apart from everything else,’ said Caterina, following up her long opening sentence in which she had called him a coward, a sneak, an infame, a liar, childish, stubborn and uncaring, ‘you are a fool.’

  Now would be a good time to put down the phone, thought Blume, but then Caterina mentioned she had been to see Magistrate Arconti.

  ‘He’s talking, and he’s talking about you. He’s also talking about a mysterious confession made by Curmaci’s wife.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Blume.

  ‘Captain Massimiliano Massimiliani appreciated the subterfuge. Is that what you want, to earn the approval of people like him?’

  ‘What’s wrong with him? You haven’t even met him.’

  ‘Massimiliani’s father was involved in the Borghese coup attempt.’

  ‘That was his father,’ said Blume with an authority he did not own, since Caterina’s revelation was news to him.

  ‘But you didn’t know that, did you? You were so anxious to get away and play boy soldiers that you did not even question him, look him up or check him out like I did. Since when do you trust some creep from SISDE or AIMI or whatever they call themselves these days?’

  ‘He’s probably listening, you know.’

  ‘Yeah, I can smell him from here,’ said Caterina. ‘Did he give you a Masonic handshake, Alec? What lodge will you be joining, P3, P4, the Circle of the Illuminated Thieves?’

  ‘Now you’re exaggerating. Maybe Italy needs people like him now,’ said Blume.

  ‘No, it doesn’t, but people like him need errant fools like you to follow their directions. Gallivanting about as if anyone would ever take you seriously. A middle-aged homicide cop pretending to be fifteen years younger and playing at secret agent.’