The Memory Key (15 page)

He dialled it and finally got a reply.

‘Yes?’ Principe sounded weary. Everyone seemed so tired and irritable. It had to be the weather.

‘It’s me,’ said Blume. ‘Your mobile is switched off.’

‘I forgot to charge it,’ said Principe, a hint of reproach in his tone, as if to say he had other things on his mind. His voice was muffled as if he had put his hand over the receiver.

‘Can you tell the Carabinieri Captain . . .’

‘Giovanni Zezza.’

‘Tell him I want to talk to him.’

‘Sure . . .’ Principe sounded vague. ‘I tried to set up a meeting. He didn’t call you?’

‘No.’

Principe sighed. ‘Get out of the office and go home to Caterina.’

‘How do you know I am in the office?’

‘Well, are you?’

‘Yes, but that’s just a lucky guess.’

‘Is Caterina in the office?’

‘No, she’s gone home,’ admitted Blume.

‘Go to her.’

‘If we’re handing out free advice, why don’t you phone your daughter and tell her you’re sick?’

‘If you go home to Caterina now, maybe I will. Deal?’

‘Deal,’ said Blume.

Muffled up in a Crombie greatcoat that he hardly ever got a chance to use because it made Caterina laugh, Blume pulled the door to his office closed, greeted the two
agenti
coming in for the night, and went down to the garage for his car.

Before turning on the engine, he called a number he had just looked up in the office. He identified himself to Sofia’s mother and asked if he could come round and ask a few questions.

Sofia’s mother mumbled, her voice clouded and indistinct. Blume recognized the tone. It was the indifference of grief, the indifference to the weather, the passage of time, sleep, food, night and day, the things people said and did, the niceties of communication, the need to separate words when speaking, the expectations of people who didn’t know that you were still supposed to shop, pay bills, wash, acknowledge the checkout person, reply to questions, stop at traffic lights.

Half an hour later, he was walking down the centre of the concrete and grass piazza that ran the length of Via Ventimiglia, looking for the address of Sofia’s mother. Deep in his warn pocket his phone vibrated. He pulled it out, and saw the name ‘Valentino’ on the display.

Valentino was the nickname he had given to the man with the fat tie and huge collar from the estate agency, whose name had gone straight out of Blume’s head as soon as they had met, and whose calling card he had binned.

‘Alec!’

Like they were old friends or something.

When Blume first met him, the man had been wearing a chocolate-coloured Valentino suit. After ‘Valentino’ had called a few times about the apartment, Blume felt obliged to list him in his phone book. The only thing he knew was that Valentino’s name was not Valentino, though he would not have reciprocated the cheery first-name greeting even if he had been able.

‘You still there?’

Blume allowed a reluctant grunt of confirmation.

‘Sorry about the hour, but you know, I never stop working for my customers. You especially. So, are you sitting down?’

Blume continued on his way towards the ground-floor apartment that gave on to a patch of communal grass in the middle of which sat a lethal-looking children’s swing and slide, all sharp metal edges and heavy iron, a rusted relic from the carefree 1970s.

‘Well, are you?’

‘Yes,’ said Blume. He had to go around the garden to get to the door. But now he had to hold back until the clown he was talking to had got to the point.

‘Do you know what IFAD is?’

‘The Something Food and Something Development Something, part of the UN,’ said Blume.

‘Exactly. They pay 90 per cent of the rent for staff on transfer, so people working for IFAD don’t mind paying a bit above the odds.’

‘Are you telling me someone from IFAD is going to rent my apartment?’

‘I am. And wait till you get this . . .’

Blume waited.

‘When I heard the foreign accent, I thought I would throw out a few casual questions before we got down to the question of price. The woman . . .’

‘A woman?’

‘A whole family, Alec,’ he said as if the additional people were a bonus extra. ‘I was able to get her to reveal that she worked for IFAD, and I decided there and then to up the price, try our luck.’

‘It was advertised at €1,200 a month,’ said Blume.

‘I always said you put it too low. I simply told her that the price had been misprinted and was supposed to be €1,800. She hesitated, so I dropped it to €1,750. That hooked her and she made an appointment and I’ve just been through the place with her – maybe you could have cleaned up that study a bit more? I am in the car heading back and, guess what, Alec?’

‘She took it?’

‘Two years!’

‘That’s great,’ said Blume.

‘Two years at €1,750 instead of €1,200. That’s €13,200 extra I just negotiated for you! You could buy a car with the difference. A small car. A Citroen C3, say. You don’t need a new Citroen, do you?’

‘No.’

‘Not necessarily a Citroen, of course . . .’

‘No.’

‘OK. No problem. Hey, €13,200!’

‘Yeah, you said.’

‘I’m doing the paperwork tomorrow. She’s coming in with a three-month deposit. Usually, we keep an extra one-month deposit to cover damages, so that makes a total of €15,000 basically I just got you.’

‘Like I said, great.’

‘You don’t sound so pleased. I do you this favour and you react like your dog died or something.
Oddio
, your dog hasn’t died or anything? Sometimes you say things and then, you know . . .’

‘I don’t have a dog,’ Blume reassured him.

‘Thank God for that. Listen, one thing . . . No two things . . . Three things. The family, two teenage boys and a husband are moving in immediately. Like the day after tomorrow. That’s fine?’

‘Sure.’

It looked like he would have to move in with Caterina after all.

‘And another thing. They asked for the study to be cleared out. Can you deal with that?’

‘I wasn’t expecting that. I have nowhere to put the stuff.’

‘Look, it’s no problem. I can organize everything: removal, a warehouse. I can get you a really good deal. We can talk about it.’

‘Fine.’

‘And another thing?’

‘How many more things do you have lined up to tell me?’

‘Just this one. The woman’s name is Prisca Mutungi.’

‘Is it?’

‘So that’s OK?’

‘Is the name supposed to mean something to me? Has she been in the news recently charged with arson?’

‘Mutungi. She’s from,’ Valentino paused delicately, ‘Tanzania.’

‘Are you trying to tell me she’s black?’

‘She seemed very educated nonetheless. Very respectable. But she is very visibly black. You can’t help but notice that about her. Shiny black, you know that look? Then, damnedest thing, her husband is totally white.’

‘Totally?’ said Blume. ‘That really is something.’

Her phone beeped to tell her the line to Blume was now clear, but it was too late. They had started dinner. It was up to him to call anyhow.

Caterina smiled at Elia, and cut a piece of breaded pork with a steak knife. The meat in the middle was pink, slightly undercooked, and she was about to tell Elia not to eat his and let her fry it a little more, but he had already covered it in ketchup.

‘I wish you wouldn’t put ketchup on everything,’ she told him, getting a scowl in return.

She hated that he was like this. It was normal, she knew. Children became adolescents. But Elia had done it almost overnight. According to Alec, that was what had happened to him, and, he assured her, it was a tough moment in life. A teenager can have 700 times more testosterone than an adult. One minute, he said, you are a child full of trust and innocence, the next you are a twirling mass of testosterone unable to stop thinking about violence and rape and death, and you think you are the worst person in the world. Which you are, Blume continued in that unremitting way of his. If you want to kill a village, baton-charge peaceful protesters, machine-gun intellectuals, shoot dead an honest magistrate or politician, send in a young man to do the job.

Caterina suspected there was some truth in his jaundiced vision, but she resented the implication that Elia was beset by evil. Alec was just using it as an excuse to continue not . . . what was it he did not do for Elia? He was really fond of him. But there was something missing. In the end, blood is thicker than water. Elia, when in a bad mood or when egged on by his grandmother, sometimes regarded Blume as an interloper, and the worst part of it was that Blume himself agreed, and therefore refused even to rent out his own apartment, let alone sell it. She used to argue that they needed the money, but that made no impression on him. She would make that a precondition now. He had better rent his apartment or else.

It was Elia’s favourite dish, which is why she had made it, but the smell of the meat and cooking oil in her nostrils was making her feel nauseous. She cut the piece of meat on her plate, and her hastily prepared breadcrumb-and-egg batter slipped off like a scab revealing a pink piece of undercooked pork beneath. She pushed the batter back on, and dropped it all into her mouth, and as it slipped down her throat, she was overcome with an overwhelming desire not to swallow anything so revolting. She retched, then retched again. She held up a hand, warning Elia away, but also trying to tell him it was OK, and she ran to the bathroom, vomiting just before she reached the toilet bowl. Then, seeing what she had vomited, vomited again.

‘Mamma?’ Elia’s voice had gone back to childhood. ‘Mamma! Where are you?’

‘In the bathroom. Don’t come in! I’m all right, but don’t come in.’

‘Who should I call?’ he said, becoming a little more grown-up now that she had reassured him.

‘No one. I’m OK. Sometimes I really hate meat’ – the very word made her feel ill again.

‘I can call him, if you want.’ Elia found it hard to choose what to call him, ‘Zio’ Blume was stupid, but they had used it, ‘Alec’ was odd, and Alec himself didn’t like it. Recently Elia had taken to calling him Blume, and Alec seemed to like that.

‘No. Don’t. I just have an upset stomach. Go back into the kitchen, throw out your meat. I didn’t cook it properly.’

‘I’ve finished half of it already!’ Panic filled his voice. ‘Will I be all right?’

‘Perhaps it was something else. If you feel sick later, we’ll know. But you’ll be all right. I made a mistake not eating all day . . . Diet.’ It was exhausting having to explain through a closed door to a frightened child trying to be an adult. But at least he had offered to call ‘him’, which was something of a breakthrough. She could do with someone to make her a cup of tea and warm her up. Where the hell was he?

Chapter 16

Blume pressed the intercom button marked ‘Fontana’. No other surname of course. No father. The buzzer sounded without any voice enquiring who he was. He glanced at his watch. Half nine. Who else would it be at this time?

The door to the apartment, a few steps from the main entrance, was opened by two women in their early fifties. One was considerably fatter and more buxom than the other and less elegantly dressed, but they were unmistakably, almost comically alike. Blume identified the larger woman at once as Sofia’s mother. In part, he remembered her outline from the night he had seen Sofia’s body slumped against the university wall, but the look in her eyes was unequivocal. The other woman also wore a look of sorrow, but not the hollow look of a parent who has lost a child.

Blume offered his hand first to Sofia’s mother. Mirella Fontana. ‘I am Commissioner Blume, and I am investigating the murder of your daughter. I am very sorry for your loss, and would like to ask you some questions.’

It didn’t matter that he sounded mechanical and stilted. Everything sounded so to the recently bereaved.

The more elegant woman stood forward. ‘I am the sister.’

‘Silvia, Olivia’s mother?’ asked Blume.

‘Yes.’

They stood back to allow him in, and he followed them through a dark corridor, so short it was almost square, past a red lamp burning under a Sacred Heart and into a room of peeling paint. The room smelled of mould overlaid with a chemically fresh scent of some sort, either floor cleaner or one of those cancerous air fresheners people like to plug into their walls. The horizontals of the room were dominated by a large table topped with imitation wood, the verticals by a black flat-screen television taking up most of the wall on the right. A plastic and glass chandelier with six candle-shaped bulbs was failing to give much light to the room, though one corner, with three mismatching chairs, was better lit by a tasselled lamp. There were two windows looking back into the garden. A roll-down shutter obscured one.

Blume sat on a lumpy armchair and the two women sat down opposite. All of a sudden, he was unsure of his right to be there, intruding. The Carabinieri were dealing with this. They would be doing a good job. He should be at home with Caterina, not probing at the pain of a woman who had lost her only daughter.