Positano
Konrad Hoffmann was swimming deeper and deeper into the unplumbed depths of a restaurant fish tank and his voice streamed upwards in an angry buzz of bubbles to pop loudly but meaninglessly as they reached the surface, and Blume, observing that this was all far-fetched, especially the bit about the fish tank being bottomless, deep and dark, decided to wake up and grab at his mobile phone. He opened his eyes as he brought it to his ear, shocked to see daylight. If he had been asked to guess, he would have said he had been asleep for an hour at most.
‘Maria Itria has called for help. For real this time. She called Magistrate Arconti at around 4:30 this morning, but did not answer a call that he made later. After thinking about it for a bit he called me,’ said Caterina on the other end of the line.
It gave him such an unexpected lift to hear her voice first thing after a stupid dream about… red fish or something, that he was not sure he had understood the content of her message.
‘Caterina? Wait… go through that again.’
‘Curmaci’s wife. She called for help last night.’
‘She called you?’ Blume shook his head. ‘Sorry, dumb question, I was asleep just now.’
‘She called Arconti and said if something happened to her husband, she would be willing to turn state witness. Then she said she wanted police protection and an escort the hell out of there. Since then, her phone has been off. Arconti told me and I’m telling you. It’s six in the morning, you’re usually awake at this time, not that that was a consideration. The woman and her children are in trouble. Your trick has become self-fulfilling, and now she really is willing to reach out to the authorities.’
‘She called Arconti on her own initiative, in the early hours of the morning?’
‘Yes, he said he definitely got the impression she was either unaware of or indifferent to the fact of his hospitalization.’
‘Why didn’t Arconti call me?’ asked Blume.
‘I can’t second-guess Arconti, but I can think of several reasons he might not trust you after that stunt you pulled with the false confession.’
He felt a throb in the back of his head. If only it would remain there, but it would not. Within half an hour it would have worked its way to his frontal lobes and would sit pulsing like a toad all day long.
‘He’s very fucking busy for a man in a hospital bed. Why didn’t he call the local police, get them to pick up the Mafia wife and her progeny?’
‘Are you really asking that?’ said Caterina. ‘An order imparted from a magistrate in Rome to the local police would be intercepted pretty quickly, and the police themselves will be under surveillance, especially with the Polsi summit meeting coming up. They can’t move without being followed.’
‘Fine, but they’d still go and get her. Probably.’
‘He didn’t make that call.’
‘More strange behaviour on his part,’ said Blume.
‘You write false confessions but he’s the one who’s acting strange because he does not issue orders from his bed for the police at the far end of the country to go rescue a woman who is now not responding to calls? Apart from the fact he is not assigned to any case, on what grounds could he order a patrol around? For all he knows, it could be a trap or a diversion. She may have called to test his reaction.’
‘So what did he say?’
‘That he would pass on her message to a different magistrate who would contact her later in the morning. He said she could call the police herself if her need was immediate. At that point she hung up.’
What seemed like a bubble of methane rose from the back of his throat into the back of his head and popped with a thud. He counted six heartbeats, before the next thud arrived.
‘Alec?’
‘Yes, yes. Still here.’ But he wasn’t. His mind had darted back to the idea of Curmaci’s wife fleeing, Konrad as a fast-moving fish, a fragment from his dream.
‘Maria Itria said she would co-operate with the authorities if something happened to her husband, but as far as we know, nothing has,’ said Caterina. ‘But something is up. Curmaci’s acting strangely and his wife and children are in trouble, just like you wanted.’
‘What’s Curmaci doing that’s strange?’
‘He was booked under a false name on a flight from Frankfurt to Lamezia Terme, but he never took the flight, and he disappeared yesterday evening,’ she said.
‘Those geniuses at the BKA lost him?’
‘No, we did. The BKA saw him board a flight for Bari instead of Lamezia Terme and alerted us. That is to say, they alerted the Finance Police at Bari airport. The Finance Police registered Curmaci’s arrival and reported it to the Carabinieri at the airport, who reported it to the police in the city. Problem is, the police in Bari were in Bari while Curmaci was at the airport, and no one had told the Carabinieri… Well, you’ve seen how it happens. By the time it had been cleared up, and authorization given for the Carabinieri to follow him, he was gone. It appears he rented a car, and they’re looking into it.’
‘He changed his route at the last minute,’ said Blume. ‘Three or four hours will take him to Calabria and Locri. Looks to me like he’s just trying to shake off anyone who might be following. We can try to pick him up after the Polsi summit, though it’s not so easy to find those bastards. They seem to vanish into the Aspromonte wilderness only to turn up a few days later in New York, London, Malaga or Amsterdam.’
‘Or he does not want to meet his welcoming committee in Lamezia Terme,’ said Caterina.
‘You mean because he fears for his life? No. That’s not it. If he feared assassination at the hands of his own people, he’d steer clear of Calabria altogether.’
‘Typically, Alec, you keep forgetting his family. He has the strongest and most urgent reason in the world to get there. They are vulnerable. Funny how you seem to block that out of your mind since, I presume, that was the original idea behind the forged confession. Or didn’t you think about the consequences for the woman and her children?’
Blume paused to think. This was one of those questions Caterina liked to ask in which, whether he replied yes or no, he still came out of it looking like the bad guy. He chose the best response he could come up with: ‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know,’ she echoed, scathing. ‘You realize Arconti may be trying to do you a favour by not calling in the local police? A woman from the Ndrangheta, a s orella d’omerta confessing to a magistrate, especially one who has become notorious because of the namesake killing, is going to be big news. And if her story is big news, your efforts to force her husband back into Italy via a false confession is going to be just as big, maybe bigger given the poisonous atmosphere in the country against investigators and magistrates.’
‘I’m not a magistrate.’
‘Arconti is. If the story breaks in the press, every magistrate in Italy will distance themselves as fast and as far as they can from you and all your dubious tactics before Berlusconi’s hacks turn this into another weapon to use against the judiciary. They’ll throw you to the lions.’
‘Those reporters aren’t lions. More like trained monkeys.’
‘Trained to tear people apart, Alec. You know better than to hope for solidarity…’
‘All right. Point taken. My thanks to Arconti for allowing me to fix this thing myself.’
‘Good. What are you going to do now? What about the German you are with?’
Blume felt a small tingling in his stomach and arms, like a tiny version of the body’s aftershock to a near-miss traffic accident. Her question bothered him. ‘I think I need to talk with him,’ he said. ‘Right now, as a matter of fact. I’ll call you back.’
‘Sure you will,’ she said.
Blume ran up to the hotel lobby in his boxer shorts, his mind’s eye already anticipating what he would see out the window of the lobby, the silver leaves of the olive trees, the mass of dark green and pale white of jasmine bushes in the background, and, off to the side, nodding in and out of view, a scarlet hibiscus bush he had noticed the day before. His eye immediately latched on to the revolting plant as soon as he arrived in the lobby. Blume stared across the room out at the fat red flowers already opening in the morning sun, their protruding stamens licking at the air. Yesterday, when he had glanced out the window, the plant had been obscured by the rear section of an old orange-and-white camper van. Slowly now, since he knew the answer and because each footfall travelled up his body and thumped on the side of his aching head, he walked out the front door of the hotel and stood there bare-chested, looking at the empty space where the camper van had been.