Rome
Matteo Arconti extricated himself awkwardly from his chair as Blume walked in. He stretched out a stiff arm as if he intended to ward off Blume rather than greet him.
‘They have killed me.’
‘Not you. Your namesake, Magistrate.’
The window beside Arconti was open, and a breeze was ruffling the stacks of papers on the desk. He wavered on his feet for a few seconds before collapsing back into his chair, all elbows, knees and anxiety.
Blume moved a heap of books and files to the floor to make room on an armchair.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Arconti. ‘I can’t say anything useful. I feel numb. Not just inside, but outside, too. It’s probably a protective mechanism. I’m not sure this is real. I have even pinched myself but I can’t feel it. That could mean I am in a dream, couldn’t it?’ There was real hope in his voice.
‘This is not a dream,’ said Blume.
‘That’s what the dream version of you would say. Prove it.’
‘Our conversation is too logical.’
‘I suppose,’ said Arconti, unconvinced.
‘Look at your left hand. Can you see it properly?’ said Blume.
The magistrate stared at the back of his hand. ‘I can see it fine. But I can’t feel it properly.’
‘I don’t know anything about not feeling it, but if you can see your hands properly, it’s not a dream.’
Arconti studied his hands, then Blume’s face with the same quizzical expression. ‘How do you know that thing about the hands?’
‘An old trick my father taught me when I was little, so I could tell the difference between nightmares and real life, as if there was one.’
Arconti turned his barn-owl gaze back on Blume. ‘Do you remember a while ago I was saying we were less vulnerable to attacks from the Ndrangheta?’
‘I remember.’
‘That’s why you should have told me about your girlfriend. I thought you were unattached.’
‘I’m still getting used to having someone. I sort of forgot.’
But Arconti was not listening. ‘… remember me saying that no one innocent will suffer as a result of my investigation? Do you? Do you remember that? And then they do this. They make an innocent man die as a result of me.’
Arconti pressed his chest and grimaced. ‘The murder of an innocent man who was unlucky enough to have my name is more than an ironic twist of fate.’ He jerked his elbow into a pile of files and sent them crashing to the floor, startling Blume who leaned forward to pick them up. ‘Leave the files, Commissioner.’
Blume straightened up in his seat, put his hands on the armrests, and waited for Arconti to have his say. The magistrate was now entering into a rhetorical mode as if arguing his case in court.
‘It’s one thing being isolated by colleagues, derided by corrupt politicians, ignored by the public and threatened by criminals,’ Arconti declaimed, his face, so white a minute ago, suddenly flushed with colour, ‘it’s quite another to know that your actions are the immediate cause of the death of an innocent person. Don’t take this wrong, Commissioner, but if they had killed you, I could have accepted that more easily.’
‘I might have found it more difficult,’ said Blume.
‘I can’t do this. It’s like investigating my own death. No one can work alone against that level of organized malice surrounded by colleagues and politicians who are complicit in it. I sometimes feel like quitting, leaving my job, leaving the country, too.’
‘Could you do that?’
‘Of course I could. Pursuant to Article 52 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, Abstention of a Public Minister…’
‘Not what the law says. I meant, could you just walk away from it all?’
‘Yes, I could,’ said Arconti. The idea had a calming effect on him. Speaking in a softer and more confidential tone, he added, ‘And so could you, Commissioner. Maybe someday you will. Do you have somewhere to go when that day comes?’
‘I couldn’t quit.’
‘You could. It’s one of the advantages of being on this side of the law. It’s the criminals who have pledged lifelong allegiance. If I sold my house in Rome, I could live out the rest of my days up north, walking in the mountains, looking after myself. I might even write a book, like that magistrate from Bari, Carofiglio. He’s done well for himself. Somehow managed to eke out his magistrate’s salary by writing books for a country full of people who don’t read. Are you happy, Commissioner?’
‘With what?’
‘Life. You don’t want to answer, I can see that. You probably can’t. I was wrong just now about your partner. Make this woman your wife if she’ll have you. Marriage is important.’
‘Marriage?’
‘Do you know how the Ndrangheta lets it be known you are about to be killed? They don’t invite you to a wedding. So you see, a wedding is life, absence from one is death.’
‘I see,’ said Blume.
‘You lied to me about being alone. I found out by chance about Chief Inspector Mattiola only this morning. Imagine, I thought that that was going to be the biggest shock of the day.’
‘I’m not married to her. I don’t even live with her.’
‘That hardly matters now. Besides, I was wrong. No matter what you do, no matter where you go, no matter how alone you are, they can hurt you and they will come looking. At least you’ll have someone to stand by you. You know at the start of the inquiry I called Curmaci’s wife — did I mention that? The judge in charge of preliminary inquiries wouldn’t grant me a wiretap, so I called her myself, recorded and transcribed the conversation. Do you want to know what I learned, but am only now realizing?’
‘What?’ asked Blume, more to humour Arconti than because he expected anything useful.
‘I learned that not only is Curmaci invulnerable on that front, she makes him stronger. She counterattacked in a way that makes me think we’re talking not just about a wife but a sorella d’omerta. When she replied to me, it was like she was reading from a script. Maybe she wrote it, maybe she learned it as part of the standard rebuff to magistrates who dare go after the wives.’
‘Isn’t that the sort of move that gets these guys really pissed off with you? Children and wives, the family is somehow sacred and off limits? Could that be why they killed your namesake?’
‘You are not making me feel any better, Blume.’
‘I am not blaming you, Giudice. Going after the criminal’s family is perfectly justifiable.’
‘They were Maria Itria’s cousins that we arrested. We had justification, even according to the warped code of the Ndrangheta. Of course, she knew at once that I was interested only in her husband, but the pretext was there. Do you think I was wrong to go after her like that?’
Arconti seemed to be asking for some sort of permission, which Blume was perfectly willing to give. ‘Wrong — morally speaking? No way. The criminals she helps support destroy thousands of children with drugs and guns, kill women and children with impunity. They rip apart families and communities and poison the land. They run hospitals for profit and money laundering, and leave the sick and infirm to die. Nothing is off limits in getting the bastards.’
‘She could also have been acting out of love for her husband. It’s hard to understand the people from my region.’
‘I don’t want to understand them,’ said Blume. ‘To understand is to forgive, and that’s not my line of business. I’ll understand only for investigative purposes.’
‘That makes it harder to detect sincere repentance.’
‘I don’t get to experience much of that.’
‘No, me neither,’ said Arconti. He surveyed the files he had tipped onto the floor. ‘Look, let me show you the transcript of the call. I gave her your contact details, too, by the way, on the off-chance she preferred policemen to magistrates.’
‘What? Why the hell did you do that?’
‘Good question. I had you figured for a more forgiving sort of person, Commissioner. The transcript’s somewhere on the floor now. But it says nothing about her tone. She sounded sad. Aggressive in bursts, but essentially sad. She reminded me of a hostage reading out propaganda. I think there is a slight chance of her talking, if only she had a sympathetic listener.’
‘Not me. You picked up all this from a phone call?’
‘I’m a Calabrian like her. I have an ear for these things. It can’t be nice being trapped for life in a small Calabrian village — well, it isn’t nice. I should know. She’s from Cosenza, you know. That’s on the edge of freedom. The writ of the Ndrangheta is not total there. Almost, but not total. In my town of Gerace and the horrible new town of Gerace-by-the-Sea at the bottom of the hill, Locri as it’s now called, they command everything. No one escapes.’
‘You escaped.’
‘You call this escaping?’
With a grunt of effort followed by what sounded like a sigh of hopelessness, Arconti bent down to retrieve a file from the floor.
‘If I left the police,’ said Blume, addressing Arconti’s curved back, ‘I would not know what to do in life. It’s as simple as that. You get a chance to be good at one thing in life, and most people don’t even get that. If it turns out you don’t like what you’re good at, that’s too bad. The wrong life cannot be lived right.’
Arconti did not reply.
Pity, thought Blume, because he liked the phrase he had just made. The wrong life cannot be lived right. He surveyed the chaotic desk, the bowed-down figure of the white-haired magistrate. ‘Did you write the transcript up yoursel f?’ he asked. ‘If you can’t find it, just give me the gist.’
Arconti still did not reply. Instead, he slid silently out of his chair and fell face first into the scattered files and folders on the floor. Blume leapt up, rushed around, and flicked the magistrate over as if saving him from drowning in a pool of papers. The magistrate’s face was grey, his body stiff and unresponsive.
Dead, just like that. Another dead Matteo Arconti. Two in one morning. A sudden urge to laugh welled up in him, but when it broke his lips, it was as an angry shout.
The magistrate’s gaze was glassy and unseeing, but as Blume looked the right eye suddenly started blinking rapidly, and the right side of his mouth was twitching. In his left hand, he was clutching a piece of paper, which Blume yanked free, as if disarming a wounded criminal. Arconti, so silent in his collapse, was now breathing like a crashed-out drunk, full of snores, gasps, gurgles and murmurs from far down in the throat that sounded like the beginning of violent curses. Blume put his head down to Arconti’s chest and listened. There was a beat there. In fact, there seemed to be several hearts beating at once.
Blume rolled Arconti sideways, stood up, went to the door, opened it, stepped out and found himself looking at a corridor full of seedy lawyers dressed for court and clients dressed, apparently, for running. He ducked back in and, finally, marvelling at the slowness of his own wits, pulled out a phone and called an ambulance.
Then he sat down in the middle of the papers, and did his best to comfort Arconti, whose right eye had stopped moving but whose lip continued to twitch.
‘I don’t know if you can hear me, Magistrate — Matteo? I think you’ve had a stroke or a seizure. The ambulance is coming. You’ll be OK.’ He tried to think of some other comforting thing to say, pulling the piece of paper he had taken from Arconti’s hand out of his pocket in the hope it might inspire him. He saw it was the transcript Arconti had been reaching for. ‘See, you found the transcript,’ said Blume. ‘I’ll read it.’
Blume started rifling through the files on the floor, picking them up, stacking them on the desk.
In the corner of the room sat Arconti’s fat leather briefcase. Blume went over, glanced inside and saw papers from other cases. He dumped them on the desk. Working quickly, he started leafing through the files scattered on the desk and then those on the floor. He spent almost ten minutes going through them, trying to pick up something he could use, even if only as a benchmark to test the integrity of whatever magistrate would now take over. But it was too much. He could never pick out the essential documents in time. Already he heard the commotion and buzz working its way up the corridor. He grabbed handfuls of files at random, choosing the most densely typed ones he could find, and stuffed them into the briefcase. The piece of paper he had taken from the magistrate’s frozen hand he dropped into his inside pocket. Then he stood up, took a deep breath, and calmly opened the door, signalling to the ambulance crew and guards who were coming down the corridor. While the three of them piled into the small office, the fourth remained behind to repulse the horde of curious onlookers and concerned colleagues that had suddenly materialized.
Blume stepped over and looked down at the magistrate whose working eye seemed to have gained some focus. ‘Don’t worry, Dottore. Our case continues until you tell me otherwise.’
Arconti did not reply.