The Memory Key (42 page)

He had moved from bourbon to gin and tonics, which were his natural drink, now that he remembered. The mixture of fizz, steel, and juniper berry seemed to freshen the mouth and mind at once. After a while, he moved closer to a pair of women talking in whispers, but they continued whispering for ten more minutes, then vanished. He did not even see them go. He went sadly to the toilet but returned giggling at a joke that had re-entered his head from years ago about a guy who punished his foul-mouthed parrot by locking it in the fridge for half an hour, and now the bar was empty, apart from him and the barman, bar boy, really, he was educating. But the night was over already. Disappointed, he saluted the barman and returned to his room and fell on to the horrible bed. ‘Pharmaceutical coma,’ he said to himself, and sank into a catatonic sleep.

Kissing you is like licking an ashtray
, a girlfriend had told him once, possibly quoting from some anti-smoking advertisement. In any event, he had not been very sympathetic to her complaint but now, as he awoke, and tasted his own stale mouth and ran the tip of his tongue against the back of his teeth, he realized she might have had a point. There was definitely something ashy as well as cloying about the taste in his mouth.

His head felt remarkably clear, though his hands had been infused with a strange reluctance to do what he wanted, as if the commands from his brain were moving slowly. He ordered his hand to stretch down and pick up the sock from the end of his bed, which it did, eventually. His foot, leg, and fingers cooperated reasonably well in getting the sock on, but when the idea arrived that he might need to take them off again if he was going to have a shower, his limbs gave up in exhaustion, and he lay down again and stared at the warped ceiling. His hair itched. It was five in the morning.
Freezing, agreed the contrite parrot. Terrible experience. But what the fuck did that chicken do?

He slipped back into sleep but a strange vibrating sensation in his chest woke him. It turned out not to be cardiac arrhythmia but his telephone alarm, which he now remembered setting for half past five.

He showered.

Caterina would neither like his appearance nor the fact of his appearing, but it could not be helped.

Chapter 45

She left the building at 6 in the morning, just as the traffic lights stopped flashing yellow and cars started coming in twos and threes rather than singly. It was bitterly cold and damp, which afforded her grim satisfaction. That is how it should be. She had borrowed her mother’s shapeless coat for the occasion, ostensibly to protect against the cold, but mainly as a form of disguise. And it had worked, she hardly knew herself.

The morning sickness had left her a few days ago, but as she woke up at 5 this morning, she had been unable to eat for the nerves. The combination of the cold, the early morning air, the empty stomach, and the sense of dread reminded her inappropriately of going on a foreign holiday. She even felt a perverted version of the excitement that she remembered from those holidays, taken on her own, later with her husband, but never with Alec. The cold was like that she had felt in London all those years ago. She remembered her dear husband’s heartfelt envy at the ability of the English to park their cars in front of their house. How would he have aged?

But in the Bible of Blume, having to remember where you parked your car every morning was good mental exercise: the equivalent of a five-minute run for the brain cells, he had told her. The bullshit he came out with.

Her car was parked at the end of the street, next to a bar frequented by
Vigili Urbani
and shift workers. Someone was leaning against its side, and she pushed her head down and advanced, hoping the person would understand her intention and remove himself without her having to speak. It was a miserable enough morning.

But the figure stayed there, leaning in a posture that was far too casual for the cold, too slouching for that hour of the morning. People up and about at 6 do not slouch. She kept her head down, and looked at the familiar scuffed brown shoes.

‘I’d like to accompany you, if I may,’ said Blume. ‘And apologize while we are on our way.’

She had not mentioned anything to anyone. Nobody knew of her appointment.

‘Do you want me to drive?’ he asked. He had that smell about him again. Soap and alcohol oozing from his pores. It reminded her of formaldehyde, but she was not prepared to deal with it now.

‘The hell I want you to drive. Do you know where I am going?’

‘Yes. That’s why I am here. Accompanying you is the least I can do.’

‘You stupid bastard.’

He nodded, accepting, but there was something in the way he did it, like an old master nodding wisely as his protégé finally formulated and delivered an insight, that made her even angrier.

‘Did you hack into a computer, no, you can’t even turn on a mobile phone. Did you spy on me?’

‘I know you, Caterina. I know that if you make a decision, you take the earliest possible opportunity to put it into effect. I was not sure it was going to be today, and I don’t know if I was going to hang around all day, but I guessed right. The first available day at the earliest possible hour. That’s you. No room for doubt on some things.’

Another insult. Was it deliberate? But he had guessed right.

‘How did you find out I was still pregnant?’

‘I replayed the scene of our last meeting in my head, over and over. And I kept seeing the cushion in front of you, and the way you held it, and the look on your face. What I don’t understand is how I failed to understand it at the time. I could see you were pregnant yesterday as we sat there talking. But you told me the child was lost, and you don’t lie, not really, not like I do. That meant you had decided you were going to end your pregnancy. This became clear to me last night as I was going over stuff in my head. Ruling out your mother, I guessed you would go by yourself.’

‘I could have called a friend to drive me, and what then?’

‘You don’t have any friends, not like that. But I did think you might get a taxi. So I kept my eyes open for that, since you can’t drive home by yourself after an operation like that.’

‘Are you here to hand out medical advice?’

‘Let me drive. I have something to confess, and I want to have an excuse to be looking forward, away from your face as I say it.’

She handed him the key, and sat in the passenger seat.

‘You know the accident you had. You went to talk to the barber who had withdrawn his statement?’

At last. It was as if she had grown used to a small sharp something, like a jagged sliver of ice, being lodged somewhere around her ribcage. She turned on the CD player. Einaudi’s repetitive melodic music filled the car and Blume, typically, incorrigibly, even as he was confessing and apologizing, lifted his hand and turned the volume almost all the way down.

She turned the volume up again, but not as loud as before. ‘That music makes me feel more relaxed. It’s therapeutic.’

‘It always makes you cry,’ corrected Blume.

‘Sometimes the key changes can make me cry.’

‘Good job he doesn’t seem to know how to do them, then,’ said Blume.

He finished telling her what he had done, and how sorry he was, and how miserable, too, and the last track, ‘Bella Notte’, came on.

‘I don’t expect you to think much of me for confessing to this only now,’ he said, ‘also because I know you knew I knew you knew.’

‘It’s too early for me to follow you. Yes, I knew.’

‘I know. I figured it out. The barber has been questioned three times now by Panebianco. He’ll have found out about my visit and he will have told you, and I am glad he did.’

‘You figured it all out using memory and logic. You replayed the scene of me on the sofa, you worked out the probable dynamics of the visits to and conversations with the witness, you worked out what I would do, when I would do it, and waited for me, then appeared in a triumph of rightness, and you expect me to accept it as some sort of apology? Do you even get where we are going, what you are making me do to myself, to you . . . and to . . .’

Einaudi chose that moment to change key.

She did not manage to say anything more until they had reached the hospital. He parked the car in the lot, already half full, and gave her the key.

‘I don’t want you coming in with me,’ she told him, ‘and I don’t want you here waiting for me, and I don’t think I want to hear from you afterwards either.’

He nodded. ‘I know why you are doing this.’

‘Really, why?’

‘You want to hurt me. You want to repay me some of the damage I have done. I accept your choice, but I wish you would not make it.’

She swallowed her tears and found her throat suddenly hoarse and dry with anger.

‘Repay you? You think this is about revenge?’

‘Partly. And partly, I’ll grant you, my incapacity to behave like a responsible adult.’

‘You cannot be allowed to think that your behaviour, your flaws are so important that they determine what I do with my body. Because you’ll never grow up I must submit my body to this violence?’

‘Then I don’t know what to think,’ said Blume.

‘Good. Because if you are left in a state of total loss as to why all this is happening, then you’ll at least have some idea of how I feel.’

She climbed out of the car and wrapped herself up against the cold wind. He got out, too, but kept the car between them. Typically, he was not dressed warmly enough, and she could see him wince as the cold wind bore into his chest and his eyes, and he brought his hand up to protect them.

He waited until she was almost out of earshot, then used the wind and distance as an excuse to scream her name at the top of his lungs.

She turned round. He had his arms out, like a character in an
opera buffa
. ‘Everything is unravelling.’

She willed herself forward, but her feet refused to comply; she was not moving back, and he showed no sign of moving forward. They stood still 50 metres apart, the wind howling between them.

Chapter 46

‘We have had an interesting development, Commissioner, and I feel you really should be part of this,’ said Captain Zezza.

Blume, sheltering from the rain beneath the awning of a bar on the Circonvallazione Gianicolense in front of the clinic, took a deep drag on his cigarette and pressed his phone to his ear.

‘I heard.’

‘The murder weapon has been found at Pitagora’s villa. It was confirmed this morning. It is the weapon that fired both shots. It has been stripped down and cleaned. The lab hopes some DNA traces can be found, but it would be useful to know if the person who cleaned the weapon is also the person who fired it.’

‘That would be the logical thought.’ Blume flicked his cigarette against a billboard sign advertising one of the many funeral parlours that fronted the hospital complex.
Why cry twice? Funerals from as little as €100!

‘Pitagora was charged, and is currently at liberty on his own recognizance. Circumstantial evidence, circumspect magistrate, that Alice Saraceno. She does not want to make any mistakes.’

‘And neither do you,’ said Blume. ‘But you know you already have, which is why you are calling me. Remind me who filed a complaint that got me suspended? Who wanted me out of his investigation?’

‘Where are you?’ asked Zezza.

‘What do you care?’

‘Let me hazard a guess that you are not at the Courthouse, for a meeting with Saraceno that begins – right now, as a matter of fact.’

‘It must have slipped my mind,’ said Blume. ‘So you know I was supposed to have a meeting with her. Oh, OK, I get it, she told you to phone me.’

‘She is minded to close the Principe case immediately, and is looking forward to resolving the Manfellotto–Fontana cases in which she will commend you and me for our excellent work.’

‘I don’t know about you guys, but magistrates don’t have that much clout in the police. She can praise me all she wants, but who the hell is going to spend their free time reading a case report except for other magistrates and lawyers? Superiors on my force only look up past cases when they are trying to screw you.’

‘Well, the Principe affair, your inheritance. It would be nice for that not to be investigated too closely.’

‘Tell her, nice try.’

‘You are not going to help? You’ll allow Pitagora to go through all this?’

‘I don’t see why not. A Fascist agitator getting his comeuppance from a leftist magistrate?’ Blume lit another cigarette. Like cherries, you could never have just one. ‘Tell you what, I’ll meet you at Pitagora’s place. You show me where the weapon was found, I’ll have a chat with the professor himself. I have one or two things to ask him anyhow.’

‘I am very grateful,’ said Zezza.

‘Don’t be. If I can screw you in any way, I will. Also, I need a lift. Send a car round.’

While waiting Blume made a call to the Courthouse and was put through to Magistrate Saraceno.

‘I forgot,’ he said as soon as she answered. ‘I am sorry.’ He almost felt like telling her all about Caterina.

‘Aren’t you already in enough trouble, or do you no longer care because money is coming your way?’