The Namesake cab-3

by Conor Fitzgerald

  He started walking ahead, his expensive shoes crunching on the broken acorn shells as he went into what turned out to be a far deeper woodland than had first appeared, leaving Pietro to prod at Blume with the shotgun. Pietro took delight in telling Blume to hurry, then kicking the back of his legs to trip him up. When Blume stumbled, Pietro would jab at him and order him to move faster. By now, the strands of cord binding Blume’s hands were dangling loose, but Pietro did not seem to notice, and Blume decided it was more expedient to keep them clasped behind his back. At one point, Pietro delivered such a hard blow to his kidneys that Blume thought he had finally been shot. It was only as he hit the earth he realized that there had been no corresponding sound and that he was still thinking and feeling.

  Blume struggled to his feet, and looked around. Curmaci was just disappearing into the thickets ahead. Pietro raised the two barrels and crooked his finger on the triggers.

  ‘You’re Pietro Megale?’

  He got no reply, but the weapon dipped slightly. No matter what the circumstances, people liked to be recognized and hear about themselves.

  ‘You’re Tony’s older brother,’ added Blume.

  The barrels rose again, this time to eye level. ‘I am Domenico Megale’s first-born son,’ he said.

  ‘And Tony is the interloper,’ said Blume, but the dirt-caked face in front of him showed no flicker of comprehension. ‘A usurper,’ said Blume. Still nothing. ‘Your brother’s a bastard.’ He braced himself for a blow, which did not come. Instead, Pietro smiled broadly, displaying missing eyeteeth.

  ‘He’s not my real brother.’

  ‘Curmaci told you that?’

  ‘What would I need to tell him that for?’ said Curmaci’s voice from behind him. Blume turned around to see Curmaci standing there, a friendly smile on his face. ‘Pietro clearly remembers the day his father brought the screaming infant Tony into their family home, don’t you, Pietro? And he remembers the anxiety it caused his mother, God rest her soul. Just as he remembers the day that his father left for Germany, leaving him in charge of protecting Tony as his brother, which Pietro did with steadfastness and courage.’

  Blume watched in amazement as the dirty thug in front of him blushed modestly and crossed one foot over the other in embarrassment.

  ‘I know you don’t like to be praised, Pietro,’ said Curmaci, ‘but sometimes praise is so evidently merited that to refuse to listen to it is like asking for it twice.’ Curmaci waved a hand as if presenting Pietro onstage. ‘This man protected Tony until he was seventeen. He lived through scandals brought into the family through his brother. When Domenico Megale invited Tony to Germany instead of Pietro, they said it was because Tony had brought too much attention and trouble to the family. When Tony married, Pietro was his best man. When Tony’s wife died leaving an infant behind in whom Tony showed no interest, it was Pietro and his wife Rosa who stepped in and raised the child. I tell you all this, Commissioner Alec Blume, because you seem to have an unnatural interest in the private affairs of our families. I have been keeping an eye on you ever since Arconti recruited you.’

  ‘He’s a magistrate with jurisdiction over my ward. He does not need to “recruit” police, all he has to do is order.’

  ‘Oh, he recruited you, all right. He brought you round to his way of seeing things, kept you on the case well after it left your scope of competence, got you looking into me and my affairs. Then he passed you on to other people, and here you are. Pietro, try not to let Commissioner Blume fall down again or we’ll never get there.’

  After twenty minutes’ walking, with the light finally dimming and the air growing colder, they came to a lake, bright blue in the middle but scummy green along its edges where the water was teeming and plopping with thousands of frogs. Newts and salamanders slipped into rather than out of view as they approached, little reptile spectators interested in the show. Where the green scum stopped and the water cleared, fat black fish swam lazily, ignoring the millions of water-skating insects above them. Blume had never seen so much life concentrated in so small an area. They followed the edge of the lake, Blume trying to anticipate where his captor behind him wanted to go, since he had once again lost sight of Curmaci.

  He had now also lost sight of the water, which was hidden behind and below banks of reeds, sedge grass and cattails with insects feeding off their sausage-like heads that nodded in the slight wind. He imagined parting the reeds, and peering down into the water, the colour of a dark beer.

  It was hard to credit his own feelings, but Blume was still enjoying the absence of his headache, and the idea of a bullet tearing through his skull seemed such a waste. Finally, they caught up with Curmaci, who was standing in a field of asphodels meticulously picking pollen and burrs off his clothes. As they arrived, he started pulling at a translucent piece of corrugated green plastic like a conscientious hiker trying to clean up the mess left by others. He flipped the plastic neatly over to reveal an opening in the ground out of which the two uprights of a wooden ladder barely protruded. Pietro pushed Blume forward towards the pit that looked like a waterless well. The ladder descending into it had a dozen or so rungs. The important thing for Blume at that moment was that the cavity was too deep, too narrow and too carefully constructed to be a grave.

  Curmaci nodded amicably at Blume. ‘There are dozens of these in this area alone, thousands in the region, I would say. Some have lighting and running water, sewage, dehumidifiers, all sorts of amenities. This one has none of those things, but it does have a certain history.’

  ‘Did some teenage kidnapping victim from the north spend his last days starving to death in here back in the ’80s?’ asked Blume.

  ‘For a kidnap victim, you’d want to go farther back, to the ’70s,’ said Curmaci, displaying no sign of anger at Blume’s provocation. ‘But this dates from the ’20s, no less. It was a refuge for bandits. It’s an entrance to an underground cave, see?’ He pointed, and Blume looked again into the pit at the bottom of which he now saw the narrow opening of a tunnel high enough for a child to walk into.

  ‘As I say, it’s got no amenities,’ said Curmaci. ‘The access corridor at the bottom is long and dark, and it gets lower in the middle, where you have to get down on your knees and crawl. There’s been some subsidence in there, too. You get to be a police mole.’

  ‘Very funny.’

  ‘It opens up again almost immediately afterward. I’ll be in front, Pietro behind. Pietro, unbind his hands.’

  Pietro gave a careless pull at the loose strings behind Blume’s back, which fell away. Curmaci plucked at the knee of his expensive slacks. ‘I am definitely not dressed for this. That should tell you how unplanned this is, right, Pietro?’

  ‘What is all unplanned?’ asked Blume, but Curmaci had stepped onto the ladder and was out of sight. Two shotgun barrels prodded him in the back and Blume, even though he realized he was more afraid of being buried alive than being shot dead, nonetheless found himself clambering down the rungs, feeling his legs shake with adrenalin, or just from exhaustion. The air was immediately damp and earthy, and the rocks crumbled at his touch. The floor of the pit was only about three metres below ground, but the walls were too smooth to climb. He looked up at the sky and tilted back his head to allow the sunlight to flood his whole face for a moment before the shadow of Pietro cut it off. He ducked his head and went beneath the ground. The bottom of the pit, which had looked soft and earthy from above, turned out to be formed of a flat rock with only a thin layer of soil, like a dirty flagstone. The floor sloped gently towards the mouth of the tunnel into which Curmaci, dressed in his city clothes, had already gone, and with him the feeble light of the mobile phone, which was all he was using to light his way. Blume considered resisting, but the giant with the shotgun literally had the drop on him and blocked out all light and thoughts of escape as he filled the gap and, to make matters worse, closed the green trapdoor. Blume had no choice but to stoop and enter the tunnel, where it was immediately completely black
.

  Breathing through his nose to keep calm, resisting the temptation to open his mouth and gulp down extra oxygen because he knew panic would set in if that failed to work, he allowed the sloping roof to push him closer and closer to the floor. There was no light, no sign of anyone before him or behind him, and the only sound was his own breathing and grunts. The rocky roof now came so low that he was forced on to his hands and knees. To calm himself, he started counting backwards, randomly choosing seventeen as the starting point, and subtracting one number for every two shuffles forward of his knees. If he reached zero and the tunnel had not widened — he did not want to think about it. Maybe he should have started at thirty. His forehead hit a wall of stone.

  ‘Oh Christ.’ Being killed in the open air with the sound of the gunshot racing across the open waters of the lake was what he had wanted, not this. He was at a dead end. Although impossible to do so, he must somehow have taken a wrong turn. He pushed himself backwards, and his knees became wedged against each other, and the walls of the tunnel pushed slowly in, he could feel them moving.

  Stuck! Like a rat in a sealed pipe. He could not go backwards!

  Without his mind having anything to do with it, his mouth opened in a moan. Then something pushed at him from behind. It was the animal with the shotgun, which meant that he had not taken a wrong turning, but this was worse, for now he would be pushed and crushed against the rock face by the oversized brute to his rear. Blume’s mouth opened again, and this time he tasted the slight movement of air from in front of him. Where had Curmaci gone? He understood his forehead had hit a ledge, not a full wall, and that the air and now also a sheen were coming from directly in front of him, where Curmaci was using his telephone to light his way. He ducked his head below the ledge, and plunged in, resolving to bludgeon himself to death against the sides if he became stuck. He squeezed deeper in, and found he could no longer lift his legs high enough to give his feet purchase. Using his stomach muscles, he wriggled forwards, stretched out his arms, and dug his fingers into the hard ground. Finding a little bit of lateral space, he started using his arms and shoulders in a sort of swimming stroke, and effected an agonizing front crawl.

  He’d dragged himself a body’s length along the ground when his hand touched something hard, metallic, and familiar. It was his Beretta. He knew it at once, like a neglected old friend. The nicks and imperfections on the grip, the tiny chip out of the hammer, the stickiness of the release catch, now on. It must have dropped out of Curmaci’s pocket. Almost without thinking, he scooped it into his hand, even though it impeded his movements. Curmaci would no doubt have noticed and would be waiting at the end of the tunnel, but even so it felt like a providential gift. Even better, the collapsed section of the tunnel was over. The cavern opened upwards and outwards, suddenly becoming a spacious chamber in which he could stand up. In front of him was a metal door with a sliding bolt like the one to the communal roof of his apartment in Rome, and behind that a larger room where white LED-bulb lanterns were hanging. He saw all this with absolute clarity after the darkness of the tunnel.

  He walked into the cavernous space, tucking his Beretta into the back of his waistband under his shirt.

  Curmaci was waiting for him, but at a distance, and half hidden behind a rock. Already he could hear Curmaci’s henchman wheezing and cursing as he emerged from the tunnel. It must have been even tighter for him.

  ‘It’s a limestone cave, ten or twelve metres high at the centre, shaped like a big tent. Most of the tunnel into it was already there,’ said Curmaci, switching on another lamp and lifting it up to reveal the last corner of the room with a camp bed and neatly folded blankets. The room contained piles of old newspapers, what seemed like a complete collection of Dylan Dog comics, chipped mugs, plates, a few food cans with faded labels. A bench-chair was fashioned from fruit crates, and was placed in front of a truncated section of a single log of heavy wood that served as a table.

  ‘The door and that log are far too big. How did they get down the tunnel?’

  Curmaci shrugged. ‘Why do you care, Commissioner?’

  ‘Everything needs a logical explanation.’

  ‘I don’t agree,’ said Curmaci.

  ‘But the metal door…’

  ‘Shh!’ said Curmaci. ‘Listen, this place has running water. You can hear it.’

  A creaking sound of reluctant water came from the back of the cavern.

  ‘It takes a while to fill a cup, but you just leave one there. Basile stayed here for eight months once, during the Second Mafia War, venturing out only at night. But maybe you don’t even know who Basile is?’

  Blume shook his head. How had Curmaci failed to noticed the missing pistol? Behind him, smelling even worse than before, stood Pietro, shotgun pointed straight at him. All that bulk and a shotgun through the narrow tunnel. It was an unwelcome marvel to see him here.

  Curmaci inclined his head in the direction of the corner of the cavern, and Pietro waved the gun in Blume’s face and, finally, verbalized the death sentence. ‘Over there, into the corner.’

  ‘This also doesn’t make sense,’ Blume said over his shoulder to Curmaci, pleased to hear that the cavern deepened and echoed his voice, removing the tremor of fear he could feel in his chest. ‘All the way down here just to shoot me.’

  ‘That’s what Pietro said, too, but it does make sense. You’ll see in a minute, won’t he, Pietro?’

  ‘If you say so,’ said Pietro.

  ‘I do say so, and that should be good enough for both of you.’

  ‘What happened to Konrad Hoffmann?’ said Blume.

  ‘My idea for Hoffmann,’ said Curmaci, ‘though I need to check the logistics of this, is to ship what’s left of him back to Germany, throw the pieces into the same sewage pipes into which they poured his girlfriend all those years ago. What do you think, Blume? Will I make all that effort and run the risk of detection just so as to lay the grounds for an ironic story that I could tell to myself and two, three other people at most?’

  ‘I think you might.’

  ‘Is that how you see me? OK, Pietro, do your stuff.’

  Blume moved back into the depths of the cavern in the direction of the water, drawn there by thirst as much as anything. Pietro came up behind him. Just as it was becoming too dark to see, Blume stopped dead, causing Pietro to lumber into him. Pietro stood back and aimed a vicious kick at the small of his back.

  The kick was hard and sent him lurching forwards, but he exaggerated his fall. The floor was irregular and jagged, and he took his full weight on his left hand as he went down, but in his right he had the Beretta, and as the shotgun appeared over him, Blume fired directly into the space where Pietro’s stupid face should be, realizing as he did so that this was the first time he had ever killed a man, and surprised at how quick it was, and how easy. His would-be assassin did manage to utter a half-shout half a second after the gunshot. The acoustics of the cave seemed to combine the two sounds into a single angry roar that ricocheted off the walls, and returned with renewed vigour just as Pietro’s body hit the floor. Even his going down worked out nicely. He fell neither forwards nor backwards but crumpled in on himself, like a smokestack being demolished by expert engineers. After the gunshot and shout, the flop of his body on the stone was like a whisper.

  Blume stood up, Beretta in hand, but Curmaci was there, a pistol inches away from Blume’s forehead.

  Ah well, thought Blume.

  Curmaci stepped back, and beckoned with the pistol. ‘Come over here and sit down.’

  ‘I think I’d prefer to be shot standing up,’ said Blume.

  ‘Who’s talking about shooting? Come over here, away from that shotgun. Go over there and sit down.’

  Blume stayed where he was, his own pistol still in his hand.

  ‘Please?’ said Curmaci.

  Blume started walking towards the makeshift seat, and Curmaci picked up the shotgun by its barrel and tucked it under his left arm.

  Blume was shi
vering, because it was damp and ghastly in the cave and because he had just killed a man. He recognized the plastic LED lanterns now: from the home and garden section of IKEA. They were one of the last objects displayed for impulse buys before the warehouse section. Caterina had wanted one, even though neither she nor he had so much as a balcony, let alone a garden. There were four of them in the cavern. They shone pure white unto themselves, but bathed everything around them in shades of yellow and grey and did not nearly penetrate the darkness behind.

  He was sitting underground with Curmaci. He was still holding his weapon, and Curmaci did not seem to mind. Their voices boomed and echoed as they spoke. He was pretty sure it was not a dream, but it didn’t feel very real either.

  Curmaci popped the shells out of the shotgun. He pocketed them and tossed the weapon carelessly in the direction of the incongruous door at the entrance. He propped a foot on the log table, and contemplated Blume.

  ‘Was that your first time to kill a man?’

  Blume nodded.

  ‘It’s not as hard as you’d think, is it? The first thing to do is to persuade yourself it is not a man, which will have been easy with that stinking goat Pietro. Easy for you, I mean. For me, it would have been a bit harder. He and his wife virtually brought up my boy along with their fat spoiled nephew, Enrico. Pietro, for all his faults, was like a father to his nephew Enrico, and like an uncle to my son. And you have just shot him dead. A single shot, that’s all you had, and that’s all it took. You didn’t pull the trigger again, which is not just a sign of your self-confidence, but also of your humanity.’

  ‘Obviously you left me just one round in the pistol.’

  ‘Yes. I took out the others. Then left it for you to find. You were hardly going to use it on me while Pietro was behind you, and you could not use it on him while you were in the tunnel.’

  ‘What if I had not found the gun or missed my shot?’

  ‘Then you would be dead and I would have had the sad task of killing Pietro myself,’ said Curmaci. ‘Now he has a bullet from a police-issue weapon in his head, which is good for me, and possibly good for you, since it gives us a bit of wriggle room. For example, you could take the blame for killing Megale’s only son, as indeed you should, and I would make sure the revenge attack on you never happens, especially since the Megales are about to lose all power.’