Rome
Back at the Collegio Romano station, the only other person from the squadra mobile to be found was the unloved Agente Rospo. When Blume passed him, he was speaking with quiet truculence, his lips almost touching the mouthpiece of the phone, and did not even look up.
Blume shut himself into his office, and slid closed a thin bolt that he had installed himself. He felt at peace here. The room was not pleasant or comfortable, but it had accrued institutional dignity over the years. It seemed as if some long-term policy was in place to renovate it at forty-year intervals. The process must have begun in the 1890s with the installation of the mahogany desk, an impossibly heavy object with dull brass handles on the drawers, topped by an expanse of bulging but still intact green leather. Forty years later, the Fascist authorities had added the heavy grey filing cabinets and a modernist interpretation of a chandelier of gunmetal and glass with sockets for three low-watt bulbs, whose light never reached the ground nor even managed to make the metal shine. The ripped club chair in the corner next to the door was from the same period. The rest of the room, including the ugly orange-and-brown painting in a steel frame on the wall, belonged to the 1970s. Forty years on, and they had supplied him with a multifunction fax-printer-scanner-photocopier and a laptop, and curly energy-saving bulbs for the chandelier.
The window looked into a shadowy void between buildings and never received direct sunlight. The soot on the window filtered out most of the light, and the dark walls of the office absorbed what was left. If he read, it was always in the yellow pool of the light of his desk lamp. While it might invite depression and introspection, the room did not admit panic. It was a good place to plan in.
His mother would not have approved of him being here. She had never dispensed nearly as much advice as his father, but he remembered her warning him about not seeking out too much solitude. It had been a day of a bad school report or something, and she had come into his room where he sat mute, alone, angry at finding himself in a strange country, fed up with having to study his school companions from a distance to see what made them tick rather than just joining in with them and making friends. First, she apologized and promised he would find his way in Rome, Italy and then the world soon enough, and then she comforted him with thoughts of going home to Seattle someday.
‘But loneliness is never a real friend, Alec. Beware of when it creeps up on you disguised as solitude, peace, independence or self-sufficiency. Do not invite it into your life because it will never leave. It will even pretend to be its exact opposite, a companion.’
Even then, she was probably too late with her advice. Besides, sometimes, such as now, solitude was a tactical necessity. He wanted no one, not even his own fully conscious self, to watch as he set about composing a forgery to entrap Agazio Curmaci.
Chief Inspector Panebianco had described the murder of Matteo Arconti as a ‘cowardly’ act. But he was wrong. Cowardice was failing to respond with conviction and power to a challenge, a description that did not fit Agazio Curmaci or whoever was behind this.
Mafia bosses were either traumatized killers or, worse, killers who were not in the slightest bit traumatized by the things they had been made to do when young. The upshot was they were always stronger than politicians and public servants, the police included. The fight against the Mafia, Blume liked to say, would never be won until the politicians did for themselves what they ordered others to do. According to Caterina, his was an argument for a police state. Fine, then. Why would a police state be worse than this Mafia one?
Agazio Curmaci was certainly senior enough to order a killing without compromising his own safety, but he could just as easily have carried it out in person. A man such as that would not take great pains to cover his tracks. With any luck, forensics would be able to get traces of his DNA from the victim, and then place him at the scene of the killing, if they ever worked out where that was.
The challenge, then, was to force the bastard out of his hiding place in Germany and draw him back into the open, back to Italy. As Blume sat in his quiet office reading the transcript of the phone call Magistrate Arconti had made to Curmaci’s wife, he saw with perfect clarity how this might be done.
According to the date stamp, the call had taken place several weeks ago. Blume read the one-sided conversation, a monologue effectively, several times and, as Arconti had already observed, the woman’s words offered absolutely nothing that could be used against her husband. On the contrary, they had been spoken with the opposite intention. It was a typical Mafia call containing the characteristic mixture of veiled threat and whining accusations of victimization. It was practically a template declaration, and there was no doubt but that she had read it out. Evidently, she had been prepared as soon as her cousins were arrested. Arconti’s side of the conversation was missing, but Blume doubted it would have made any difference to what this woman, this sorella d’omerta, said.
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, who is guilty of nothing other than being a noble father and a shining example to his children and the hardworking people of this modest town. Unable to make a living in a land too long forgotten and despised by the state, he was compelled to travel abroad, but would sooner cut his own throat than his ties with his beloved homeland. Even in my pain at his absence, I am comforted by the love and respect of the entire town for my husband, for they know him for what he is. Every man must respond to his own conscience and God, but the man you have described, the evildoer to whom you have outrageously attached my husband’s name, is unrecognizable. I pray that God will forgive you for this injury of our name when the time comes, and may the time come slowly.
I am speaking to you as a woman of peace.
It was effectively a declaration of affiliation to the Honoured Society of the Ndrangheta (I am comforted by the love and respect of the entire town for my husband, for they know him for what he is) and a threat on Arconti’s life with the references to God’s forgiveness, cut throat, and injuries. Finally, it was a way of letting Arconti know he was not going to get anything from a wiretap except elaborate declarations of innocence.
Blume phoned the Palaces of Justice, found the assistant who worked with Arconti, and asked if anything had been heard from the hospital. His concern was real, but he also knew it was too early for news and that the person he called would be more interested in hearing what Blume had to say. After confirming that there was no news, the assistant said, ‘You were in the office when it happened, I hear.’
‘Yes, yes, I was. He just keeled over. Poor man. But people can come through a stroke.’
‘His files are all over his floor. What happened, did he knock them off his desk as he fell?’
‘Yes,’ said Blume. ‘He was going to show me something when it happened.’
‘It is such a pity. Any idea what he wanted to show you?’
‘It was a confession of some sort. No, that’s not quite the word he used: an admission.’
‘By who?’
‘I never found out,’ said Blume. ‘He collapsed before he could show me. I hope you’ve got those files in a safe place now.’
‘Safe?’ the sostituto sounded uncertain. ‘We have to sort through them. There’s a lot there, and some notes from another case have got mixed up. This was the investigation into the hospital consultant who committed suicide?’
‘Originally, yes,’ said Blume.
‘You’re saying there was a confession involved?’
‘I’m not saying that. Did I say confession? Arconti said something about an admission. A telephone call he transcribed. I don’t know any more than that. It’ll be in there somewhere among the mess of papers.’
The sostituto, whose voice was at once young and tired, said, ‘I hope so.’
‘By the way, in all the confusion, I left my notebook in there. Do you think I could pop round and collect it? It’s got some witness statements from a different case in it.’
‘Do you want me to see if I can find it?’
‘No, it’s all right. I’ll come round. It’s no trouble.’
He hung up before he could receive any more offers of help. The next call he made was to a reporter from Il Messaggero, a young woman — no more than a girl, really — who covered some of the cronaca nera, the local crime and bad-news section. He told her about Arconti’s collapse and the scattered files that were found in his office, omitting to mention he was there at the time. The reporter was not all that impressed until he mentioned that no one else knew about the mysterious mess in the office, which suggested that someone might have been looking for something. Her voice suddenly became chirpier and harder, her questions more direct, her gratitude for the call more effusive.
Blume sat down at his computer and began rewriting the words that he wanted Curmaci’s wife to have said. He was halfway through his first draft when his phone went. It was a reporter from the Rome section of La Repubblica. Blume hated the paper and disliked the reporter, so had some fun in being tight-lipped and uncommunicative, ending the call with an angry outburst about the police having no duty whatsoever to answer questions just because a reporter spoke about the ‘public interest’. He felt confident his comment would intensify suspicion that some sort of attempt was being made to suppress a leaked document. It would take them no more than a day to find the document and a night to construct their own journalistic fantasies around it. He was on his final rewrite of the bogus confession when a reporter from Il Corriere della Sera phoned him.
‘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.