The Fatal Touch (17 page)

“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.

Chapter 14

Caterina finished stacking dirty plates in the sink. Her kitchen was usually spotless. Well, not spotless, but not like this either.

Blume gave her the details of his talk with John Nightingale.

“So we need to check through the notebooks to find if there is any reference to something both the Colonel and Nightingale would want to keep quiet. But we don’t know if it’s there.”

“Shall we look through them now?”

“Either that, or we systematically read the notebooks from beginning to end, which is probably the best way, because the devil is so often in the details, isn’t it?” said Blume. “If I can, I am going to read them all the way through, but there is a good chance I won’t have time. Also, I have specifically been instructed not to investigate. But before I give up, and it may involve handing over these notes, I want a second pair of eyes. You need to be in the background. Unpaid, unrecognized overtime work, basically.”

As her father liked to say, you wanted a bicycle, now pedal.

Blume opened the first notebook and read in a declamatory tone: “
As William Wordsworth once remarked, the child is the father of the man
.”

The phone rang.

“Are you going to answer that?”

“It’s my mother,” said Caterina.

“You can see the caller ID from all the way over there?”

“No, but I can feel it.”

When it had stopped ringing, she pulled her hands out of the sink, and Blume returned to frowning at the notebook. “Already I don’t like this guy, Treacy,” he said.

“The child’s the father of the man,” said Caterina, repeating the words and then continuing unself-consciously in English. “As in what you do as a child determines how you turn out as an adult. What’s wrong with that?”

Her accent sounded slightly English to Blume’s ear.

“I don’t mind that idea,” said Blume. “Or maybe I do. I haven’t thought about it. It’s that bit about Wordsworth remarking it that annoys me. He didn’t remark it, he wrote it.”

“You know the poem?” asked Caterina. “I studied it once.”

“Of course I don’t know the poem,” said Blume in an exasperated tone. “I just know Wordsworth was a poet. So he wrote that line. He didn’t just once remark it in conversation with Treacy in a bar.”

Caterina sat down on the far side of the table, brushed some Weetabix crumbs onto the floor, pushed her straight brown hair back over her ear, took up a pen, and opened a notebook that she had taken from her son’s room with a blue robo-something on the cover.

“If you’re going to critique each line, Commissioner, this is going to take some time.”

“Well, can you read the handwriting?” asked Blume.

Caterina peered at it, shrugged. “It doesn’t look too . . .”

“Because I think it’s probably easier for me than for you to guess the English words. So if I read a bit and you follow in your copy, you’ll get used to the lettering quickly, then you can go on alone.”

“That seems like a good idea,” said Caterina.

“Great. So we start off like this, then I’ll leave the photocopy here, you read it, I’ll go home and read it. Then we compare notes sometime next week . . . We’ll play it by ear, basically.”

“Let’s try it, then,” said Caterina.

“Good. I appreciate this,” said Blume. He opened the first notebook and began to read, struggling over some of the first sentences, but then finding his flow as he familiarized himself with the handwriting.

“As William Wordsworth once remarked, the child is the father of the man. When I look back down the years, I see a strange nine-year-old boy whom I barely recognize. Yet it was he who decided how my life would be, and all because of his crush on an eight-year-old girl.

“The eight-year-old was called Monica, which was a very exotic name for Ireland in the fifties. I first became aware of my love when I was in ‘high babies’ (which, for the uninitiated, is one year above ‘low babies’). She wore an orange dress with a round lace patterned white collar.