The Namesake

by Conor Fitzgerald

  ‘What’s this I hear, Alec?’

  Blume gritted his teeth. He had met this man once in the flesh. It did not put them on first-name terms. ‘That depends on who you’ve been listening to.’

  ‘About a magistrate being hospitalized, his office ransacked.’

  ‘I have heard no such thing,’ said Blume.

  ‘A Mafia case, apparently. Ndrangheta to be precise.’

  ‘Nothing you can publish. No story there.’

  ‘Missing papers?’

  ‘No, nothing,’ said Blume. He hung up as satisfied as he knew the reporter was not. If past form was anything to go by, the reporter would get in contact with someone in the police who would get in contact with Agente Rospo who, not being very much in demand, had plenty of opportunity to act alone.

  Blume took some scissors, cut the heading of the original transcript with Arconti’s handwriting on it, and glued it on top of his new version of the transcript. He deleted the file from the computer using the anti-virus program, which promised to overwrite it seven times, folded the original into his pocket, and made three copies on his dinky new multifunction scanner.

  He took one of the copies and placed it in the middle of his desk and gazed critically at the new version of the transcript, and compared it with the old.

  He had left the opening lines intact. Dottore, I appeal to you as the mother of two children. I lay out my truth before your ideals of justice, and I beg you to resist the temptation of making such hurtful, dangerous and damaging charges against my husband . . .

  But where she had spoken of her husband being forced out of his native land, Blume made a few adjustments so that it now read: . . . guilty of nothing other than being a noble father and a shining example to his children who has been placed in an impossible position by the arrogance and power of the judiciary of two countries. That’s how Mafia informers usually justified themselves. He decided to keep the part about Curmaci preferring to cut his own throat, but now it read:

  He would sooner cut his own throat than his ties with his beloved homeland, but nor would he ever betray the love of his wife and children whose very lives are now in danger as a result of the intolerable pressures you have brought to bear on him. My pain at his absence is intensified by the suspicion and evil mistrust of the entire town. Every man must respond to his own conscience for the sins and crimes he has committed, but the man you have described is no infame. He is an honourable man whose conscience is good and strong and whose love for his family too great. I pray that someday the people of this town will be free enough to forgive us for what they, in their ignorance, now regard as a betrayal. Allow his sincere repentance, I beg you, to save the life of two innocent children and a woman of peace . . .

  and so on.

  An affiliated woman who had made a statement like that would not last through the week. He was pleased with his work. The more he read it, the better he liked it. He had turned a statement of defiance into a confession tinged with cowardice. The accusations against the town, the claim that they had no choice, the same dishonest tone, the same refusal to take responsibility for their misdeeds all struck a convincing note. It was still wheedling, still obscurantist, still bitter but, plausibly, the words of an infame, by far the worst insult in the rich Mafia vocabulary of hate and fear. The punishments for an infame were brutal. If Curmaci had any feelings for his wife or his reputation as a husband with honour, he’d have to intervene now.

  Blume hid the confession in the middle of some of his papers. If the copy he was about to plant in Arconti’s office was not found, then there was a good chance this one would be.

  Rospo accepted bribes from the newspapers, lawyers, unknown superiors and even rival magistrates. He was the source of half the leaks from the office and was dumb enough to think no one knew. One of the newspapers would have called him already and even for a modest sum he would hunt through Blume’s files like a truffle dog till he found whatever they had asked him to find, caring nothing for plausibility or truth.

  Blume’s next stop was the courthouse, where he had no problem gaining readmittance to Arconti’s room, though accompanied by the sostituto, a young man with a wispy beard and round glasses, who looked like some early-twentieth-century radical. Gramsci, maybe.

  The papers had been picked up off the floor, but were piled haphazardly on the desk. Blume said, ‘I can hardly search through the papers of an investigating magistrate.’ With a slight push, he sent a few files sliding over the desk. A few of them flopped onto the floor.

  ‘Oops.’ He slipped in the false confession as the sostituto was looking at the floor and swept the fanned-out papers back into an unsteady pile.

  ‘Look, it’s pointless. If you come across my notebook when sorting through the files, let me know, please,’ said Blume.

  The sostituto nodded, uninterested and, it also seemed, unsuspicious.

  Friday, 28 August

  9

  Milan–Sesto San Giovanni

  When he had been a young man, he made the mistake of storing 40 million lire in an abandoned house on the outskirts of the town. Foolish youth that he was, he had secreted the cash in a cavity between one of the outside walls and the rotten floor, thinking the plastic wrapping he had put around the bundles of notes would protect them from decay.

  He was sixteen and had just been inducted as a picciotto and was only then beginning his apprenticeship to become a sgarrista. For a year he had studied the initiation ceremony, overlearning it till it was like the alphabet or the times table.

  – What seek you, young man?

  – Blood and honour.

  – Have you blood, young man?

  – I have blood and I have blood to give.

  – Who was the man that told you of the existence of this organization?

  – My father, Domenico Megale.

  – May the bread become lead in your mouth and the wine you drink turn to blood if ever you betray us . . .

  Once sworn in, he was convinced they would ask him to kill so that his accession from picciotto to sgarrista might be accelerated, as befitted his pedigree. His family had form, history and honour. But they seemed to have no such exalted plans for him. In what was to be the first in a life of insults received, he was entrusted with the mean task of collecting ‘rent’ from shopkeepers. Worse still, they had assigned him to the oldest and weakest, to the most supine, intimidated and accommodating tradesmen, men completely without hope, honour, or courage. He could not understand this failure to put him to the test. Heaping on the indignities, they did not bother to ask him for the pizzo he was collecting from the businesses, yet prohibited him from spending or investing it. And so it was that he stored it in a damp alcove where it sat for three years. He could not bring himself to look at the growing pile of bundles, symbol of his shame, money taken from beings that were less than human. He pushed them deep into the cavity in the wall, and never noticed the mould that bloomed on the banknotes. When he at last pulled out the hidden packets, three-quarters of the banknotes inside had turned into a greasy black sludge. Those that remained were disintegrating.

  He prepared himself for death, and reported his incompetence and loss to the contabile of his locale. But his story of the rotten money was greeted with laughter.

  ‘Burn what’s left, Tony. And find a better hiding place.’

  ‘I shall repay my debt.’

  ‘You made an honest mistake, did you not? 40 million lire. That is not even the salary of a hospital administrator. Let’s write it off as capital invested in experience.’

  But he did not like the easy laughter that had greeted him, nor the way in which his expectation of death and willingness to accept it had been treated so lightly. For months, rumours about the circumstances of his birth, about his blood, had been circulating. Not only had his natural ascent been blocked, but there was, he could feel it, a collective sniggering behind his back when his name was mentioned.

  But he always knew there was one way he co
uld silence all the laughing and sweep away the scorn. When he decided the time had come, he acted without asking his father or his stupid but faithful elder brother Pietro for their opinion or blessing. For who could bless a son who kills his mother? A man who commits an unforgivable sin and shows no fear of certain eternal punishment is a man with no fear. Not only was he prepared for hell fire, he expected it immediately, since his foster father would surely put him to death for what he had done. Instead, they both left the village and transferred to Germany while the story of the boy who murdered his natural mother was quietly absorbed and mythologized by the town.

  It had been harder than he imagined to plunge the knife into the old woman. She was sleeping when he came in, and her face was upturned, displaying so many of the fine lineaments of his own: the sharp chin, the tiny ears like two commas, the way the eyebrows swept upwards. When he saw all this, he hesitated, and as he hesitated, she awoke, and spoke his name in a way that filled him with rage, and allowed him to strike. Once she screamed it was easier, and, as when he was killing a suckling pig, the pity and revulsion merged into pleasure and fascination.

  The sports bag he was now holding in his hand contained 5,000 euros. The bag and the money in it were to attract the attention of the Romanians, and excite their greedy minds.

  He did not despise the two Romanians. He even felt some liking for them. They had carried out his instructions to the letter. It was hard to find reliable people nowadays. If they had not been Romanian, and if the situation had been a little different, he might have eventually put their names forward as potential contrasti onorati, faithful men worthy of being baptized into the organization.

  He stood in the shadow of a tall tree that grew straight out of the cement paving. He was standing on what used to be the storage yard of the Falck steelworks, and yet here was a tree as tall as the factory walls fifty yards behind him. He remembered news reports about the works closing in the 1980s. It did not seem possible that the tree could have grown so tall since then.

  His car was parked behind a pile of twisted rebar and rubble, out of sight. When the Romanians arrived, all they would see was him and the bag. Two of them in a vehicle, just one of him, on foot, in a wide-open space, ready to part with money and perhaps ready to commission a new job. They would wonder whether he was really alone. Well, he was.

  The traffic on the highway made a steady hushing sound like the sea, and, in the tree, two birds of some sort seemed to be squabbling over a single purple berry, pecking at each other, fluttering, hopping on and off the same branch, ignoring the hundreds of other branches and thousands of other berries. The only other sound was the creaking of the steel girders and corrugated roof on the part of the factory that had yet to be torn down.

  He heard the diesel engine before he saw the vehicle. Probably the same vehicle they had used to transport the body. Always a van with the fucking Romanians. You never saw a Russian in a van, never saw a Romanian in anything else. It stopped fifty yards away and flashed its headlights. He raised his hand in greeting, bent down, and picked up the bag, held it aloft, then put it down again. Did they think this was a kidnap exchange of some sort? He waved them over. The van drew closer, slowly, suspiciously. He signalled impatience, but saw no increase in speed. Dirty suspicious animals, the Romanians. Gypsy in all of them.

  Finally, it stopped and out got Teo. Behind the wheel sat the other Romanian. Teo was upon him, his face all bristles and smiles, his thin cheekbones twitching, his eyes moving side to side.

  Tony pointed to the bag on the ground. ‘There you are. You get to keep the bag, too. Pity. It’s Adidas, same as this tracksuit. I bought them as a matching set.’

  ‘Great,’ said Teo, making no move to retrieve it.

  ‘You want me to bend down and open it, show you the money?’

  ‘No, no,’ began Teo, but Tony bent down, unzipped the bag completely, and opened it so Teo could see inside. He could feel the Romanian’s eyes being drawn towards the grip of the pistol protruding from the waistband of his tracksuit bottoms.

  ‘You came armed,’ said Teo.

  ‘I live in a dangerous world.’ Tony picked up a broken piece of rubble from the ground and tossed it in his right hand, then from hand to hand as he straightened up. ‘This,’ he showed the lump of concrete to Teo, ‘is all that remains of Italian industry.’

  Teo glanced quickly at the rock in Tony’s fist, but his gaze was drawn inexorably to the cash-filled bag. He lifted it up, and casually ran his hand inside it.

  Tony slipped the piece of concrete into the kangaroo pocket on the front of his tracksuit top, adjusted his crotch, pulled out the lump of rubble again, and rubbed it with his thumb. ‘You’re not going to count the money?’

  ‘No. You need us again, you know where to come. Always glad to help.’

  He turned around.

  ‘Hey, Teo!’

  The Romanian spun around, his dark eyes widening in alarm.

  ‘Zip up the bag or you’ll lose the money. Two days’ work and nothing to show for it. What would your wife say to that? She’d be suspicious, wouldn’t she?’

  Teo smiled, then nodded, and zipped up the bag. Tony watched him, giving him a friendly wave as he opened the door of the van and got in beside the driver. He allowed them to say a few words, waited till he saw the driver begin to turn the steering wheel, then called out again:

  ‘Hey, Teo!’

  The driver stopped his action. Tony dropped his hand into the kangaroo pocket of his tracksuit, pulled out a black object the size of a computer mouse, and tossed it casually from hand to hand as he approached the van. He got to the window, which was a little higher than he had anticipated.

  ‘There is one thing you could do for me next week, but . . .’

  Teo rolled down the window.

  ‘I didn’t hear that. You said something about next week?’

  ‘Yeah, I was saying there is something you could do. It’s a little harder than this job.’

  ‘What?’ asked Teo.

  Tony stretched his arm out and dropped the black object at Teo’s feet.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Teo.

  ‘A Mecar something or other. I forget the make.’ He fell to the ground and rolled to the rear wheel of the van, hoping the young Slovakian dealer who had explained this trick to him was right about the ‘relatively contained’ explosive force.

  Teo and the driver managed to get a lot of words out between them before an enormous thud caused the entire vehicle to jump from the ground. The sound banged against the wall of the factory and bounced back. The Slovak had told him the fragmentation grenade would not make much noise, but he’d been wrong.

  Megale stood up, a little unsteady. His ears felt as if they were full of water, and he realized he couldn’t hear the traffic on the highway any more. He surveyed the front of the vehicle. The blast had lifted the windscreen out, frame and all, peeled back part of the roof, and knocked out Teo’s door, which was hanging on the buckled remains of a hinge. Teo lay on his seat, his head back. Something blunt and harmless looking, like a piece of soft plastic, was sticking out of the front of his throat. The driver had found time to turn around, because his head was draped over the back of the seat. The blast had blown the shirt right off his back and embedded thousands of red and black fragments across his body, almost as if the cuts had already turned to scabs. The cab was filled with countless droplets of blood, something sticky and black, and a frothy white substance. Many of the banknotes looked unharmed, but he would not be touching them.

  The thing was, the Romanians were alive. Both of them. The Slovak had told him they would never survive. He said it would blow their fucking heads off in an enclosed space like that, and yet here was Teo, not well, but definitely alive, his eyes not only open, but also slowly turning towards Tony as he stood there by the door. The driver, half kneeling in his seat, seemed to be whispering, like he was making a confession. Again, not dead. Megale wrinkled his nose against a stink of sewage a
nd burnt oil that seemed to be coming from the driver.

  Teo seemed to be smiling, but his eyes were becoming glassy. Tony pulled out his pistol, and put it into Teo’s eye, and pulled the trigger. He had to clamber halfway into the van to lift up Teo’s head to shoot him through the second eye. Then he went around to the other side, and pulled the driver off the seat. The man fell back, dead now, his intestines visible, slick and shining. So that’s where the stink was from. Tony shot out his eyes and, for added meaningless symbolism, shot him in the mouth, too. Now they would waste time wondering who this slob had been talking to.

  He went back to his car and drove up to the van. All told, it had been a bit disappointing. He had seen car crashes that produced worse damage than that. The entire back section was intact. He lifted the jerrycan out of the boot of his car, and doused the two bodies, then sprinkled the petrol around the cab, and soaked the seats. He loved the aromatics of petrol. He’d always loved it. Shoe polish, too. He had once set fire to a bowling alley, pouring the petrol down the lanes and setting them alight, watching the river of fire.

  He retreated, pulled out a cigarette, lit it and took a few drags before flicking it into the van. It bounced off the seat, dropped into a shining pool of petrol on the floor, and fizzled out. He moved his car out of the way, then returned and, walking backwards away from the van, poured the remaining petrol on the ground. Then he lit it with his lighter. The flame was slower and feebler than he thought it would be, and there was no explosion as the fire in the cab took hold. As the flames caught, the van rocked, as if being buffeted by wind.