Blume had enough to form three interesting hypotheses. The first, almost a certainty, was that Treacy had written something neither the Colonel nor Nightingale wanted revealed, which logically implied it was something the Colonel and Nightingale had done together. The second, probable but not certain, was that the Colonel learned of the existence of the notebooks only recently, or he would have moved to seize them earlier. The third hypothesis, possible and far from certain, was that the Colonel had had Treacy killed to keep him quiet. If that was the case, Nightingale should not be feeling too safe either.
Blume pulled the first notebook out of his drawer, but before he had a chance to open it, his desk phone rang.
“The Questore wishes to speak to you,” said a secretary at the other end of the line.
This formality, designed to heighten the dignity of office, infuriated Blume beyond what was reasonable. If he wants to speak to me, said Blume’s mind in a well-rehearsed and unspoken rant, then all he has to do is phone and start talking, not instruct his unctuous secretary to inform me about his interest in eventually…
“Commissioner. You have a serious disciplinary problem in your squad, and your detection and closed case statistics are a disaster.”
The bastard could get straight to the point when he wanted. There followed a detailed account of a complaint received from the secundo secretario of the Spanish Embassy to the Holy See. In his reply, Blume tried to insinuate a note of surprise into his voice regarding the unaccountable complaint from the Spanish diplomat. But the Questore was having none of it.
“ Nun ci prova’, Commissa’. If you try to make out like you don’t know what’s happening, it’s going to look like incompetence on your part.”
“OK,” said Blume. “Point taken.”
“Give him up, whoever he is, or you’ll take the full brunt of this.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So, who is it?”
“Can’t we get some time to work this out, see whether my man needs some backup witnesses or is willing to accept full responsibility?”
“I want to be able to talk about the one bad apple in a squad otherwise made up of upstanding heroes, Blume. I don’t want a show of solidarity that implicates the whole fucking force in the thumping of a diplomat. You have until tomorrow morning. You’re not too busy to deal with this, I hope?”
Blume made the beginnings of a response, but the Questore said, “No, listen. I don’t want to hear that you’re busy.”
“OK. You won’t hear that.”
“You are particularly not busy with the dead foreign forger. Leave that to the Carabinieri, please, before you manage to offend another league of nations.”
“Just a few loose ends to clear up, then it’s straight over to them,” promised Blume. “Though it is to be wondered what the basis of the sudden investigation…”
“No, it isn’t. Nothing is to be wondered at. Hand it over now. You know why I want you to do that? Let me tell you why: It’s so you can concentrate your efforts on improving international relations down there. The American visitor your local mugger robbed last month? Turns out his brother-in-law or cousin or someone owns GM Italia and carries clout. Another victim was a NATO negotiator-that makes two assaulted diplomats by the way.”
Now was definitely not the time to mention Rospo’s failure to file a report on the mugging of a Chinese couple.
“It’s not much to ask, is it? I mean, catch a mugger. Skim all the scum off the streets, hold them in five adjacent cells. Eventually they’ll pick out or kill off whoever got them arrested. Come on, Blume. And let me repeat this: Keep away from the dead forger before you offend the British Embassy, too.”
“I think he was Irish,” said Blume.
“Are you trying to be funny?”
“No, sir. It’s just he was Irish.”
“Great. Well, that means your mugger has probably done all the EU by now, including the minor states. So, head on plate of the policeman who beats up diplomats-I am appointing an external investigator today-and catch your mugger. Clear?”
“Very clear.”
Blume had only just hung up and was still making obscene gestures at the phone when Panebianco knocked and, without waiting for an invitation, entered. He always did this: it was part of his efficiency, so Blume had decided not to tell him to stop. Still, it was annoying.
Blume slammed the notebook shut. “What?” He picked up a sheet of paper and dropped it on top of the notebook, thus insuring that Panebianco’s eye was drawn to it.
“We’ve got a hit-and-run,” said Panebianco.
“You mean the Municipal Police have a hit-and-run,” said Blume. “We, on the other hand, have a mugger.”
“Yes, except the vehicle was reported missing a few days ago. The owner is abroad, apparently. He’s also a small-time crook with a previous for assault. There are two victims and a third in critical condition. It looks like they are non-EU immigrants.”
“Oh well, that’s all right then,” said Blume, regretting it as he said it, because Panebianco never detected irony.
Panebianco said, “One victim is a child, the person in critical condition is also a child.”
“Oh,” said Blume. Maybe Panebianco was right to have no sense of humor. “Who did you send?”
“There’s a patrol car now.” I was thinking of going there myself. With Sovrintendente Grattapaglia.”
“No. Choose someone else,” said Blume. “Grattapaglia can’t go. Keep me posted on it.”
When Panebianco left, Blume retrieved the other notebooks from his drawer, and glanced through them. He estimated it would take him eight hours to read through them, perhaps a little less. It was hard to tell with handwritten notes. The following day was a Sunday, and provided the hit-and-run did not balloon into a major case and the mugger did not strike again, he might find the time to go through them. Then he could decide what to do. He wondered if the Colonel knew English well; perhaps he would read them with Nightingale by his side. He pictured them, reading the pages, ripping them out, feeding them into the flames.
He would take them home now, get a start on them. He put them into his father’s old leather bag, large enough to accommodate art books, and thought of how they had peeped out of Caterina’s bag, making her look like a student. A mature student. He wondered what she had studied in college. Probably jurisprudence like him.
Most people who went to British-American schools abroad ended up in highly paid jobs, but not her. She had lived outside Italy, lived in a different language, which gave her a second soul. Who had said that? And then she had ended up a poorly paid servant of the state. Not just a servant of the state but a cop. Part of society’s clean-up crew. She must have come home when her father retired. Possibly another colonel.
He made a sudden decision. He left the office, crossed the road to a bookstore with a photocopying machine. Zalib was the name of the place. It was tucked into the bowels of the huge Pamphili gallery. Paoloni, who had never seen the inside of a bookstore, used to refer to it dismissively as the Arab store, convinced Zalib was some sort of Arab surname. The place smelled of cigarettes, photocopy ozone, and damp paper.
It took Mr. Zalib, who turned out to be a laconic Italian called Marco, half an hour to photocopy all the pages, and another twenty minutes to get spiral binding around them. He charged far too little for his work, apologized for the delay, and sent Blume on his way, bag bulging. Treacy had written on both sides of the sheet, and the single-sided photocopied version was more than twice as thick as the originals.
Blume called Caterina, not sure where she would be. It turned out she was at a swimming pool where Elia was just finishing his lesson. Blume got her to give him directions and asked her to wait.
Twenty minutes later, he was sitting in his car on a road so full of waiting vehicles it had turned into a parking lot. He failed to make out Caterina in the midst of all the other mothers, babysitters, and children milling around the gates of the sports center and swarming across the road, but Caterina and her child found him.
She knocked on the glass at the passenger side, but the kid opened the back door and bundled himself and his sports bag into the backseat and tapped Blume on the shoulder.
“Are you a policeman?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Blume.
“Not a boyfriend, then?”
Caterina climbed into the passenger seat. “Sorry about this,” she said. “Commissioner, this is my son. Elia. Say hello.”
“Hello,” said Blume.
“No, not you, Commissioner. I meant Elia. Elia, say hello.”
“Hello,” said Elia.
“Where’s your car?” asked Blume.
“I take the bus here. It’s quicker than finding parking here and then back home. It’s only ten minutes. Elia, darling, we’re getting a lift. Put on your seatbelt.”
“Seatbelt? In the back?”
“It’s the law.”
“I can’t find any seatbelt,” said the boy.
“Well, look for it. I’m sure it’s there.”
“You never make me put on a seatbelt in the back.”
“I’m doing so now.”
“Are we going to have a crash?”
“You never can tell.”
“Can’t your friend drive properly?”
“Elia, please.”
Blume couldn’t find parking either, so he left them outside the apartment building, and came back ten minutes later carrying his load of paper. He found the intercom button with the name Mattiola on it, and got himself buzzed in. It was only when the door to the apartment was opened that he realized this was not Caterina’s apartment, but her parents’.
“Sorry, I thought I’d mentioned it,” said Caterina. “I live ten minutes away, back toward the swimming baths. I was leaving Elia here because I thought we had work to do.”
“We do,” said Blume. “But it’s voluntary. For you. I just had an idea, since you know English… I didn’t mean to disrupt.”
Ten minutes later, his bulging bag held protectively against his chest, Blume thanked Mrs. Mattiola again for her kindness.
“Don’t be silly, Commissioner. More coffee?”
“No thank you, Mrs. Mattiola.”
“Another cookie, Commissioner?”
“No, really, not another.”
“I can’t think of anything else. A yogurt perhaps?”
“No, really… I…”
“Mother! He said no.”
“I want yogurt!” said Elia.
Caterina’s mother went into the kitchen to fetch her grandson a yogurt, and her husband pounced on the opportunity to struggle out of his chair to reach the coffeepot on the table. But she was back with remarkable speed.
“Are you pouring the coffee, Arnaldo?” She handed the yogurt to Elia. “Here, tesoro, this is for you,” and then returned to her husband. “Careful with that handle. It needs to be tightened. You used to tighten things.”
Her husband, who didn’t look much like a colonel, sank noiselessly back into his chair.
“This yogurt has bits in it,” announced Elia with disgust.
“Just eat the bits, Elia,” said Caterina, then softened her tone. “Listen, do you mind staying here until late? I have some work to do with the Commissioner.”
“Of course you can leave Elia with us,” said her mother.
“Great.” Caterina stood up. “We’d better go.”
Blume stood up, too.
“So you two are going back to your place now?” said Mrs. Mattiola.
“The office, we’re going back to the office,” said Caterina.
“Oh. I was under the impression… Do you need any fruit?”
“I have fruit,” said Caterina.
But her mother had thrown the question into the air as a decoy to cover her retreat, and before Caterina had kissed her son and made it to the front door, she was back bearing two bulging blue plastic bags. “These are apples, from the orchard owner himself, he has apples and cabbages out in Santa Severa, sells them at his stall in the market there on Via Catania. You won’t get apples like that in the shops. I’ve thrown in a few carrots, some fennel, and two lettuces, some artichokes, a few new potatoes, and a handful of onions, and some of those brown pears Elia likes. Kaisers. Also those Kinder chocolate bars. They say each bar contains one and a half glasses of full-fat milk. Do you think that’s true? That’s a lot of milk. He likes to have two at breakfast. That’s three glasses, and he dips them into his milk, which makes four. Milk is good for growing children.”
Blume offered to help carry the bags, though it was going to be a struggle, what with his own paper load.
“No. Just open the front door,” said Caterina. As soon as he did, she shouldered him out into the hallway.
“Lovely meeting you, Commissioner. Drop by again soon.”
“A pleasure, Mrs. Mattiola,” said Blume.
“Call the elevator,” ordered Caterina.