The devastation of his apartment looked worse at one o’clock in the morning. For a moment he thought he had been burgled all over again, and his chest trembled with incipient rage, at himself for allowing this to happen. They had polluted his apartment. Nothing felt clean. A strange smell, pungent like fermenting piss, permeated the apartment. Piss and salt. What had they done to his home? Beneath the ammoniac stink of the piss was something worse. Something that smelled of corruption, death.
It was strongest in the kitchen. Moving with a hunter’s careful steps, he searched the cupboards. He opened the refrigerator. On the middle shelf, a gray sea bass lay shimmering in a pool of its own liquefaction.
The trip downstairs with the stinking fish cleared his mind of all thought. Back in the kitchen, he opened a package of bicarbonate of soda and tossed fistfuls of it into his fridge, raising a storm of white which he shut inside by slamming the door closed.
He washed and washed his hands. Now the idea of picking up things from the living-room floor was overwhelming. Even the thought of preparing for bed was exhausting.
Propped against the cracked spine of Volume one of Lotz’s Architecture in Italy, his mother looked out of a silver-framed photograph. She looked like someone else. Unfamiliar, and younger than him. More than twenty years had passed since they died together, leaving him here. Now his memory struggled to retrieve clear images of both together. Was forgetting a sign of things getting better or worse?
There was a fabric conditioner called Chanteclair Marsiglia that brought back his mother. He wished it was something less synthetic-and it was probably poisonous-but nothing worked better. He kept a bottle under the sink and occasionally, but not too often, would add it to his washing.
He undressed. In the bathroom, he eyed his toothbrush with suspicion and decided not to use it. He would get a new one in the morning. He rotated the mattress back into place, pulled up the sheet, and dropped the duvet on top of himself.
The quickest route to remembering his father was a whiff of eucalyptus between the marshlands of Maccarese and the sea, or someone in the office unwrapping a medicinal mint, and there he was, Professor James Blume, standing beneath a balsam-scented tree in Seattle, his face still shining with sweat from the race he had just lost to the fastest ten-year-old in America.
As fast as the wind, Alec, all I could see was the dust behind you, he said, before slapping the white-lined bark with his hand. Black cottonwood makes your mother sneeze. Standing in the shade cast by the trunk, his father fingered the fissures in the bark. The triangular leaves above rotated in the wind and splintered the sunlight into bright shards and dark shadows, so that Blume could hardly make out his face at all.
During the night, Blume’s cell phone died. In the morning, as he stood in the ransacked kitchen, Blume realized the thieves had stolen his recharger, too.
He cleaned up his house a bit, and as he was doing so, the buzzer sounded. Blume allowed a man to come up and measure the door frame. They haggled a bit over the price and vehemently disagreed over the utility of expensive anti-theft features. Blume said he didn’t want them, the man pointed to his apartment and expressed surprise that Blume had not learned from bitter experience.
“They’d have got in anyhow,” said Blume.
“Not with the anti-thrust, kick-stop, reinforced frame with anti-intrusion…”
“No,” said Blume.
“The police recommend that you have a door with these features.”
“The police know nothing,” said Blume.
The man looked offended. Then he had another idea. “They won’t insure you unless you have…”
“No!” said Blume. “Look, I’m sorry. I can’t afford it. How long will it take to get the door replaced?”
“Seeing as you are not interested in extras, and it’s a standard frame, we could do it today. If the warehouse has one in stock. This afternoon?”
“Great. Someone will be here for you.”
He saluted the disgruntled workman, then hunted around for his telephone book. He had not used it in years, but Paoloni’s number had to be in there somewhere. He decided to clear up the scattered books and papers as he looked for it, and for a while forgot the original reason for his cleanup. He hunted with more purpose, but it was nowhere to be found. Using his home phone, he called directory inquiries, but Paoloni was not listed.
Eventually, he decided to go directly to Paoloni’s house. Typical of Paoloni not to bother phoning him at home.
Blume plugged his phone into the recharger in the car and tried to use it immediately, but the battery symbol flashed and the phone would not even switch itself on.
He circled for a while below Paoloni’s apartment building before finding a narrow space three streets away into which he slotted his car. All the buildings in the area were part of the same massive development from the early 1980s. Pale yellow brick facades, square windows with brown roll-down shutters, cement gray cornices. The place looked better at night.
He walked back one hundred and fifty meters to Paoloni’s building. He caught the front door as it swung shut behind a woman with a shopping bag, blocking the door with his hand before it hit his face and sweeping away the woman’s apology with his other hand. Still smiling politely, while absently filing away aspects and curves of the woman’s body in memory for later contemplation and evaluation, he stepped into the elevator, which took him to the third floor. As he stepped out, a door at the far end of the hall clicked softly closed, as if he were not the person they had been waiting for.
The air held a scent of something volatile, pleasant but alarming. It was the smell of someone cleaning brass with pink rubbing alcohol, of a dentist’s waiting room, of a blue flame hovering over brandy. It was pungent and slightly sweet. It was the after-smell of gunfire.
Blume quickened his pace with the idea of smashing into Paoloni’s door at speed and bursting it open, but the apartment was in the middle, not at the end of the corridor, and the best he could do was to check his pace and not overshoot the entrance.
Only as he slid to a sudden stop did he think to ring the doorbell. It rang like a firebell, but nobody answered. He pressed the button till his finger was bent back and whitening. Finally, he let go, stood back, pressed himself against the opposite wall behind, and focused on the point below the keyhole where he wanted his foot to land. He put out of his mind the certain knowledge that he had never seen anyone kick in a door of this type and, for a moment, he was certain it would burst open. He visualized himself crashing into Paoloni’s dark living room. He kicked hard, heel first, and managed to hit the very point he was aiming for. It was enough to make the strike plate shudder. The door seemed to rock on its hinges, but didn’t give. He drew back to deliver another kick, but stopped himself.
He pulled out his badge and marched down the corridor to an apartment door, from behind which he was sure he was being watched. The neighbor opened before he got there.
“Are you the police?”
“Yes.”
“They only sent one?”
“What?”
“I called when I heard gunshots. I knew they were gunshots. There was shouting too. Then the door slammed.”
“Stay there,” ordered Blume, pulling out his phone.
“I was not planning on going anywhere,” said the neighbor. He was a balding man in his sixties, and he seemed calm. Calmer than Blume.
The wailing sound inside his head resolved itself into real-life sirens, and he heard the police arrive. Four of them, from the sound of it. The elevator whirred and disappeared down the shaft, heavy footsteps came banging up the stairs.
Both policemen had their Berettas drawn, down by their sides. Blume held his badge up, pointed at the door. The elevator stopped and two more, a Sovrintendente in charge, emerged, one holding a long cloth bag, which they unzipped immediately to reveal a two-handled blue battering ram. On the second blow the deadlatch burst out of the strikehole and the door swung open and hit something on the floor. Blume was the third man in.
Everything and more than he needed to see lay there in front of him, but for some reason, his eye was drawn first to the bullet hole in Paoloni’s flat-screen TV. It was a neat puncture in the upper left. It looked like the TV might work even now, if he turned it on. Lying before the screen, face up, arms thrown forward like he was doing the back crawl, was Paoloni. The mess of gunshots to the head seemed nowhere in evidence, which did not make sense for a moment, until he lowered his eyes and saw the splashed table legs, the glistening skirting boards, and darkening sofa cushions. The final shot had been delivered to his upturned face. Paoloni’s weapon was on the floor, just out of his reach.
The heavy black object that had been blocking the door was as lifeless a lump of anything as Blume had ever seen. The Sovrintendente was kneeling down looking at it.
“Poor thing,” he said. “Looks to me like it took three bullets in its haunch before it let go. It’s a Cane Corso. Or was.”
“I know,” said Blume.
The policeman snapped on latex gloves, then he bent down and pulled the dog’s mouth back. “Some pressure in those jaws.” He peeled back the black lips some more. “I was right. Look there. That’s cloth and blood. It looks to me like this dog attacked the killer before he got shot. He may even have done some real harm to him. We’ll certainly get a good DNA sample from this.”
The Sovrintendente stroked the dog’s face. “Good boy,” he said.
One of the young officers came over, his face first-timer white.
“I know who that is. That’s Chief Inspector Paoloni. And I know who you are, sir. You’re Commissioner Alec Blume. I worked in Collegio Romano three years ago.”
The policeman’s face was familiar.
Blume said, “He’s dead, right?”
The young policeman looked at him in astonishment, the older one with pity.
No matter how bad the crime scene, even one that included a child, Blume knew that if he waited, something would click in his mind and his thoughts could detach themselves from his emotions and float into a state of forensic serenity. But for now the feeling would not come. He could not bear to look at Paoloni, nor even at the dead black beast by the door. He checked an impulse to run, battled down a rebellion in his gut and stomach and a heaving in his chest.
After ten minutes, he began to reassert control. He still could not look at Paoloni, but he was able to start checking the apartment, making plans for his next moves, deciding on how he would deal with colleagues as they arrived.
He conducted a search of the kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, followed by the Sovrintendente, who was trying to be casual about making sure the Commissioner did not compromise the scene.
“What are we looking for, sir?”
“Anything,” said Blume.
Paintings, which would not be here, he thought to himself. Paintings that, if he had left them alone in the wardrobe of his own house, would not have led to this. Paintings that were cursed.
“Sovrintendente, start calling all the hospitals in the city now, find out if anyone is being treated for dog bites. But this is not my crime scene. Seal it. Call in the forensics, the PM, medical examiner-the usual.” He walked toward the door.
“Are you leaving?”
“Yes. I arrived outside the door approximately five minutes before you, I’ll write up a report and respond to questions later. OK?”
The Sovrintendente deftly interposed himself between Blume and the front door, saying, “Don’t you think it would be better to stay here, Commissioner?”
“No,” said Blume and barged past.