“Snatching his diplomat’s card and throwing it to the ground might have been mistaken for pique, but you ground it under your heel,” said Blume. “Classy.”
Sovrintendente Grattapaglia smiled broadly. It took him a long time to realize his cheerfulness was not being reciprocated, and Caterina squirmed in her seat, mortified on his behalf, wondering how he had failed to see the anger in Blume’s face. Eventually and with defiant slowness, the Sovrintendente allowed his smile to fade, then shrugged, and said, “I didn’t know he was a diplomat.”
Blume’s face showed a mixture of contempt and puzzlement, as if he was coming to accept but still struggling to fathom the depths of Grattapaglia’s idiocy. For one who had so casually turned to violence a short while ago, Grattapaglia seemed oddly defenseless now, like a huge child in big trouble. She felt bad for him, and resolved to speak up. “Before the Sovrintendente assaulted… I mean, before the incident, that diplomat-”
Grattapaglia jerked his index finger at her, as if in warning. She stopped speaking, trying to understand why he didn’t want her backing. Keeping his finger pointed at her, Grattapaglia turned to Blume and said, “You know as well as I do, it’s her fucking fault. She shouldn’t even have been there if she can’t do her job.”
Caterina felt her eyes widen and her mouth drop open. She was aware of it, but couldn’t help herself.
“I’d like you to explain that to me,” said Blume.
“Explain what? It’s obvious. She didn’t warn me. She just said troublemaker, like that covered it. If I had known he was an ambassador, you think I’d have done that? I told you she wasn’t ready for fieldwork.”
Blume mock-reprimanded Caterina. “You didn’t think to warn him not to batter a member of the public in front of three dozen hostile witnesses in the middle of a crime scene?”
“So I made a mistake,” said Grattapaglia. “But she should have given me a heads-up.”
As Blume’s face darkened, Grattapaglia adopted a less aggressive tone, somewhere between conciliatory and plaintive. “All I’m saying is she doesn’t even lower herself to speak to me.”
“You mean she hasn’t ever come to you looking for advice?”
“No. Never.”
“On what, Salvatore, on how to deal with obstreperous diplomats with direct connections to our administrators?”
Grattapaglia slumped back into his seat, defeated.
The three of them were seated outside a bar on Via Giulia, having crossed the Sisto Bridge. Blume was buying her breakfast because, he insisted, she had won the bet and managed to keep order in the piazza for twenty-five minutes. He was being kind. She had fallen short by ten minutes.
Grattapaglia had ordered peach juice pulp for himself. He now poured the contents of his glass into the cavity behind his bottom teeth, and held the liquid under his tongue as he stared across the table at Caterina.
“Listen, Salvatore,” said Blume. “There is no way we can keep your name out of this, or pretend you were never even there, which might have been one solution. You deserve whatever you get. The thing is, I don’t. You know this is going to be my discipline problem once that diplomat makes his complaint.”
Sovrintendente Grattapaglia swallowed the thick juice and puckered his face as if it had been lemon. “Yes, I see that.”
“We’ll see what we can do to stop this snowballing,” said Blume. “Won’t we, Inspector Mattiola? We’re going to close ranks on this.” He looked at Caterina, who nodded unenthusiastically. She was thinking of Elia. She had called him on the way over the bridge, surreptitiously sliding out her cell phone as Blume and Grattapaglia walked a few paces ahead. Elia reminded her she had promised to watch him play in a five-a-side against San Gaspare del Bufalo that morning, the only team they had a chance of beating in the under-10 tournament.
“Will you be back on time to take me there?” he asked.
“No, darling, I won’t. I’ll be there this afternoon, though. For your swimming.”
“Shall I ask Grandma to drive me, then?”
“Yes, ask her. Score lots of goals.”
“I’m a defender. I don’t score goals.”
“Oh, well, defenders attack sometimes, don’t they?”
“If they’re really good. I’m not.”
“Sure you are. I’ll phone Grandma during the game to see how you’re doing.”
Now Grattapaglia was telling Blume, “I was a bit on edge, you know the way it is. That guy, I don’t know, he got under my skin. The way he looked at me. He had this annoying lisp.”
“He is Spanish, Salvatore. They all lisp.” Blume paused, and closed his eyes like he was suffering from a mild pain. “OK, this is what we’re going to do: anyone comes looking specifically for you, we’re handing you over. Take the discipline, the suspension, or whatever it is. Anyone comes looking for an unidentified aggressive cop, then maybe we play dumb for as long as we can, but only if you give us a good reason. The other day, I told Caterina here to take on some of your paperwork. She did so, right?”
“Some of it, yes,” said Grattapaglia. “Not all that much.”
“I’m glad she didn’t. Because now it’s your turn. Caterina here is going to be busy with this case. She won’t have time for unrelated paperwork. You’ll do it for her. After-hours, without overtime. I also want you to write up a second report for the incident with the Spaniard. Don’t file it. Don’t talk about it. Give it directly to me. Clear? And stop throwing dagger looks at her.”
Grattapaglia moved his gaze from Caterina and stared with hatred at the sparrows hopping and bobbing among crumbs at the next table.
“Now I need you to organize a decent house-to-house.”
Grattapaglia stood up, not looking at either of them.
“One last thing,” said Blume. “Get the bill. And get me another cappuccino while you’re about it. Inspector?”
“Nothing for me, thanks,” said Caterina.
“He’s paying, remember.” Blume gave her a quick wink and an almost imperceptible jerk of the head in Grattapaglia’s direction, encouraging her.
“No, I don’t want anything,” she said.
“Get me a Danish, too, Salvatore. Get a few take-away pastries and coffees for Picasso-face, Di Ricci, and the others. They’ll appreciate it. Tell them they’re from me.”
“Who’s Picasso-face?” asked Caterina.
“Rospo, of course.”
When Grattapaglia had gone, Blume leaned back and turned his face up to the sun. “I need a job that allows me to drink coffee, eat pastries, and soak up the morning warmth. A job without people like Grattapaglia. I’d keep the dead bodies and crime victims, though. I wouldn’t have any perspective on life without them. So, what’s your impression so far?”
“It’s hard to know. There were a lot of distractions. I didn’t get a chance to examine the scene much,” said Caterina.
“That was my decision, Inspector. You need to know how to handle all the peripheral elements, all the distractions, the mistakes, onlookers, traffic, Spaniards with attitude, people like Grattapaglia. It’s hard. The technicians do most of the detail work, because they don’t have the distractions of all the other stuff. But if you don’t have the distractions, then you don’t have the big picture, which is what you need to solve a case. The big picture, by the way, is that there’s often no picture. All the background stuff you dig up is composed mostly of chaos and irrelevance. You need to look at it all the same. Most of it is a big waste of time. Like most people’s lives, really. All I can tell you is just try not to make any case even more complicated by introducing too many of your own interpretations. Did you sketch the scene like I asked?”
Thankful to have something to show for herself at last, Caterina pulled the notebook out of her bag, handed it to Blume who opened it up to the sketch, which she had developed in pencil and ink over two pages. He looked at it in silence for some time, tilting the notebook left and right every so often, nodding his head.
“Did you go to art school?” he said after a while.
Caterina felt a tingling around her throat and knew she was in danger of blushing. “No. I was good in school, but…”
Blume interrupted, “Let me tell you something, you’ve definitely got natural talent, a good hand…” He snapped the notebook shut. “But it’s useless for our purposes.”
Caterina’s smile weakened.
“As art, it’s excellent,” said Blume. “But that’s not our business. Imagine this sketch has just come to your desk. You think, ah, here’s a helpful thing for the investigation, you open it and you find…”
“No measurements. I forgot to put in the measurements,” said Caterina. “I was going to but I got distracted.”
“The measurements are basically the only things that count. Those and the fact that you were there and made them, which is the purpose of the sketch. The photos and the rulers and measuring tape and the video camera capture all the rest. When I do it, I turn everything into rectangles or, if it’s a car, a triangle with circles. Symbols rather than pictures, see?”
He pulled out his own notebook and showed her an assembly of boxes, lines, and squiggles, made even less intelligible by arrows coming out of the boxes pointing to numbers. “The camera killed representational art,” said Blume. “It’s easy to forget stuff, and it’s easy to forget yourself. That is one reason you need to go easy on someone like Grattapaglia. Another reason is that you mustn’t make enemies in the department. Enemies above you are bad enough, enemies below are worse. You’ll find that out. So you are going to have to make up with Grattapaglia somehow or other. Maybe you could admit you should have told him the Spaniard was a diplomat.”
“I do admit it, Commissioner.”
“No, not to me. To him. Everything with me is hunky-dory.”
“It doesn’t feel that way.”
“Well, it is. Who did you phone on the bridge?”
Caterina hesitated. She was sure Blume had not seen her make the call to Elia. She had kept her eye on his back all the time. She had hit speed dial, spoke for, what, twenty seconds at most, and Blume had not turned around once.
“How do you know I phoned someone?”
“You deliberately fell back by pretending to be interested in a journal of civil service examinations at the newsstand, and so I figured you wanted privacy to make a call. When you caught up, I saw you were a little distracted. And I’ve noticed you hook your hair over the back of your right ear when you’re using a phone. Your hair was still pushed back when you sat down here.”
Caterina brought her hand up to her ear.
“No. It’s fallen back in place now,” said Blume. “Here’s the thing: I like to know who my investigators are talking to while we’re at work.”
“My son.”
“Oh, right. I didn’t know you had a son. Or maybe I did, but I’d forgotten. I didn’t know you were married either. Or are you?”
“I was. My son’s just turned nine. I don’t like people knowing. It’s hard enough being a woman and getting taken seriously, but being a single mother, well, you can imagine.”
“Well, no. I can hardly imagine being a single mother, can I? You should have reminded me the other day when you came in asking for fieldwork.”
“Would knowing that have influenced your decision?”
“I don’t know,” said Blume. “I’d like to think not. But let’s do a test. Tell me what we have so far. Give me a hypothesis. Go on.”
Caterina cleared her throat and said, “Well, not much…”
“Good start,” said Blume. “Never forget the law of parsimony, Inspector. Whichever theory needs fewest assumptions is the best.”
“The tourist mugger, hearing him singing in English, decided to rob him. A struggle ensued, the mugger hit him over the head. Or pushed him down.”
“That’s short enough,” said Blume. “Most reports of the mugger speak of one man acting alone, which is a bit odd since they usually work in twos or threes. That’s not a core issue now, but keep it in mind all the same. More importantly, the reports all mention him having an unusual thin knife, like a stiletto or something. So if he is going to kill, why not use that?”
“He hasn’t used it yet,” said Caterina.
“There’s always a first time,” said Blume.
“Except, this wasn’t it, obviously,” said Caterina, surprising herself as she heard annoyance creeping into her voice. “Seeing as he wasn’t stabbed.”
“So let’s rule out that hypothesis and think of one even likelier and simpler,” said Blume. “Like this: The man had been drinking. He was in his early seventies…”
“Wait…” She double-checked her arithmetic. “He was in his early sixties. Not his seventies.”
“Yeah?” Blume looked skeptical, then spent some time counting on his fingers. “You’re right. Jesus, that’s terrible.”
“What’s terrible?”
“It’s not so long till I’m that age.”
“You’ve still got a fair bit to go,” said Caterina, smiling at him.
“I don’t drink. I suppose that’s a plus,” said Blume. “I gave it up eighteen months ago, don’t even miss it. Alcohol intoxication lessens muscular protective reflexes, and makes the brain more vulnerable to concussive trauma. This is Treacy I’m talking about now, by the way. So, the old fellow falls down, bangs the back of his head, manages to get up, and struggle on for a few meters, perhaps on his knees. He crawls a bit, but his brain is hemorrhaging, so he lays the side of his face on the street, pisses his pants, and dies a drunkard’s death. End of story.”
“Oh,” said Caterina. “This isn’t going to be my first murder investigation, is it?”
“I doubt it. The magistrate has lost interest already. Expect a lot of disappointment in this work,” said Blume.