The Memory Key (17 page)

The coming conference was on the theme of racism and the police. It promised to be a pleasant affair. The right-wing government of Rome was not convinced that the police had much to answer for in respect of racism, and, by happy coincidence, all the delegates from the Police and Carabinieri were of the identical opinion. The only irritant was that they all had to turn up at the conference and pretend to be concerned about a problem that they didn’t believe to exist.

There was one point of contention. The City had recently announced that the police would no longer travel free on the metro and buses. The questore was proud of his smooth delivery of hard political truths, and he thoroughly enjoyed having a captive audience. He would have a few telling words to say about bus privileges.

Blume got up quietly, but Caterina was a light sleeper, especially recently, and immediately mumbled, ‘Don’t forget the conference’, before rolling over.

He was tiptoeing out when she sat bolt upright. ‘Where were you last night?’

‘Hmm?’

‘OK, don’t answer then,’ she lay down again.

Blume put his socks on in the hallway, away from Caterina. Did she suspect him of an affair? Where would he find the time? And who? He thought about the meeting last night with Olivia, who was wearing a short kimono robe and a scowl when she opened the door to him and her mother.

Stupidly, he had followed Olivia into her bedroom, a place so full of clothes – piled on chairs, on the bed, hanging over the closet door, strewn on the floor – that sounds were muffled. The remaining surfaces were filled with bijoux jewels and white electronic items. The walls were covered in photos of Olivia at every age from birth and in every pose imaginable. A 6-year-old version of her as a fairy had been blown up to poster size and stood innocently next to a stylized monochrome photo of her face in half shadow.

In the middle of this Bower of Bliss had been a young man with full lips, smooth bronzed skin, and long legs. He had black silky hair, a thin nose, and long delicate hands. He was wearing socks and jeans, but was bare chested. If he had not looked so trapped and uncomfortable sitting in the squalid, overcrowded room, he could have stepped out of a Cinzano or Armani advertisement.

‘Marco,’ Blume had said. Marco nodded, which seemed to be all he had in his repertoire. To any question Blume asked, he received a slow nod in reply. It was either gross insolence or gross stupidity.

Olivia had intervened and steered the conversation wherever she wanted. In the end, Blume had ordered the young man out, telling him it was a ten-minute walk now or a full day in the police station tomorrow. He expected Olivia to make a scene, but she merely crossed her smooth legs and smiled her gracious permission at them.

Marco was handsome as possible, and well-built, but not someone you would want to rely on in a fight. The first few paces as they left the house suggested he wanted to infuse a dash of unconcerned swagger into his walk, but as they turned the corner and the icy
tramontana
wind hit them, he had to stop, zip up, and huddle down defensively. Even his physique was unreliable. By the time they had walked around the block, Marco was stooped over in the attitude of a prayerful penitent, silent, with his chin buried deep in his chest.

In hard facts, he learned nothing new from Marco that he did not already know.

‘My father is a retired Carabinieri captain,’ he told Blume. ‘Parachute regiment. I’ve got an elder brother who’s in the force.’

‘Have they met Olivia?’

‘Sure. First thing my brother did was make a move on her.’

‘At least it wasn’t your father.’

‘No, that came after. But Olivia is a match for them.’

‘Sounds like she earned you a bit of respect, then. Are you sure she doesn’t play you?’ asked Blume.

‘Are you saying she sleeps around or something? She’s free to do what she wants.’

‘And you? Does she give you the same freedom?’

Marco laughed. It was a real laugh, as if Blume had just said something funny. ‘No, she doesn’t. No way. You get a girl like Olivia, though, you do as she says. I’m lucky to have her.’

For one so lucky, he didn’t seem all that happy.

‘What about Sofia?’

‘I knew her, that’s all.’

‘Anything between you?’

Marco hunched down deeper into himself, and it was not the cold wind’s fault.

‘Tell me, Marco.’

‘No, nothing. But I think . . .’

‘Come on.’ Blume was getting impatient with this weak young man.

‘Nothing . . . I didn’t. I think she was worried about something.’

‘Sofia. When?’

‘Nothing. That’s just the impression I got.’

Blume got nothing more out of him, despite walking him round the block once more, listening to him complain about the cold. When they finally came round to Olivia’s again, Blume left him. As he reached his car, he turned round to see Marco still standing there, shivering, and he thought Olivia might have refused to let him back in, but as he watched, Marco raised his hand and pressed the buzzer. Seconds later, the door buzzed and he was in.

Blume left the house at seven when Caterina was still in the shower. He climbed into the car and dropped the bag beside him, and steeled his nerves for the traffic through town. The morning sky was flat and white, as if the sun had been replaced with a fluorescent tube, and everything around him seemed dirty and broken. Dirtiest of all was his own windscreen. He flicked the lever to squirt water on it, and the rubber blades moaned their way with the window three times, evenly distributing a thin patina of sperm-coloured ice that completely blocked his view. This was Rome, not Seattle. Global weirding, they called it. He switched on the demisters.

From his bag, he extracted his new Kindle. He had bought it for himself several months ago, charged it, turned it on, and been very disappointed to find himself looking at what seemed to be a glorified Etch A Sketch pad. But he did not want to start filling Caterina’s apartment with real books. He still did not know what to do with all the books he had left behind in his own place.

He switched it on. It was simple, and he keyed in Pitagora’s name. Amazon had never heard of him. He conjured up Pitagora’s memory test from the other day: OK, there had been Zezza, a group of Roman emperors, Tiberius and Titus the Jew killer, and some others, details he had wiped away, since he didn’t need them. A whole string of names, ‘string’ was one of the words, or ‘wire’? Both? A string of emperors, string, wire, a can of worms, a tin of worms, used as bait on the end of the string . . . someone fishing . . . a Fisherman – Aaron Fisher.

He keyed in the name into his Kindle. There it was:
The Memory Key
by Aaron Fisher, with the inevitable self-help subtitle:
Expand your mental capacity by 27
. He hesitated a second, then pressed ‘buy’, then went back to the main menu, and, sure enough, there, sitting above a line of dots, was the title on his home menu.

Amazing. And he had not even noticed the price. He clicked through the first few pages, then noticed the windscreen had demisted. He checked his wing mirror and, after making it clear to the uninterrupted line of angry drivers on Viale delle Province that he was pulling out no matter what, he edged his way into the traffic flow that would bring him in fits and starts into the centre of town, multiplying twos in his head. Two times 2 is 4, which is 2 squared, cubed is 8, 16, 32 . . . Aaron Fisher promised to improve his mental capacity 128 times over.

While stuck in traffic outside a school, he pressed his Kindle again and, after the irritating business of pressing the side button several times just to get to the start of the book, discovered that it did not handle illustrations well. To make a start on expanding his mind 128 times, Aaron Fisher was suggesting he remembered the number 1 as resembling a magic wand, and had included a Harry Potter lookalike to help him. The 2 was a swan – notice it is black! emphasized Fisher, as if this should excite him. On the Kindle, the black swan was grey. Things improved with the number 3, which he was instructed to remember as a pair of breasts nestling beneath a lacy bra. Here the ink-line drawing seemed to work just fine, with all the laciness in evidence. The 4 was the sails of a sailing boat, or a sailing boat drawn by a 4-year-old. The 5 was a fish hook and the author, with a lot of exclamation marks, drew attention to this and his own name, Fisher. The 6 was a hangman’s noose. He edged forward 10 metres in the line. The car moved when he released the clutch and before he touched the accelerator: something he needed to get seen to . . . Here was a pistol, shaped like a Walther PPQ, in representation of the number 7. Eight was a snowman. The number 9 was a tadpole. Very unsatisfactory, thought Blume. Tadpoles were tiny, and sailing boats were large, and 9 was greater than 4. So far, Aaron Fisher was making his brain feel smaller.

Someone beeped at him and he felt his hand shoot up in the air in an automatic gesture of defiance before he noticed the road ahead was clear and he was holding everyone up. He turned his gesture into an unconvincingly apologetic wave at the last second, and got another blast on the horn for his trouble, so he turned the wave into a
cornuto
gesture. Cars were now pulling out and roaring pointedly past him through the junction. The light turned red again, and looking in his mirror, he watched with interest as the man in the car behind him jerked about in a seated dance of spasmodic rage. Why hadn’t he just pulled out and gone around like the others? Probably so much up his arse he didn’t have space to pull out. Fat bastard, he was, car registration DF 145 LE. Domodossola-Firenze-145-Livorno-Empoli or Delta-Foxtrot-145-Lima-Echo. No need for mnemonics for number plates. He wondered what the book had to say about memorizing letters. The 145 would be a magic wand, a sailing boat, and a fish hook. Wand, boat, fish hook. It would be 128 times easier just to remember 145, he figured. There used to be an Alfa Romeo 145, Article 145 of the Highway Code. That was the one about stopping at stop signs. Speaking of which . . .

DF 145 LE behind him was ready with the horn within nanoseconds of the light changing colour. Blume proceeded at a snail’s pace through the junction. DF 145 LE overtook, shaking his fist as he sped by, then came to a halt 30 metres further on at the next traffic lights. A Skoda saloon behind him allowed two cars to steal into the lane. The Skoda had also sat still at the traffic lights. A patient driver driving a wise car, basically a Volkswagen with a different label, which meant it cost a few thousand less. It, or another Skoda, had been on Viale delle Province when he pulled out.

To the right was the road leading down to the university and the site of the shooting. He was going to be early, far earlier than any of his colleagues, to the Campidoglio. Without quite coming to a decision, he found himself turning down Via del Policlinico. Within a few minutes, he had returned to the site of the shooting, and he pulled up on to the curb beside a group at a bus stop and got out. Casually glancing back, he saw the Skoda saloon arrive, pass him, the driver, a man with curly black hair, almost an Afro, staring straight ahead.

The wall was pockmarked by pollution and rain, but Blume had little difficulty in individuating the small clean chip mark left by the bullet. He placed his thumb in the hollow and stared up at the research institute opposite.

He glanced at his phone, and decided he had time. When he got to the other side of the street in front of the institute, he was more amused than intimidated to see, 50 or so metres distant, the back end of the Skoda sticking out where the driver had unsuccessfully tried to insert it into a small parking place. He pushed open the doors to the CNR building, gave the faintest of nods to a porter who was busy sucking a pencil and studying the
Settimana Enigmistica
, and walked down the hall.

Undisturbed, Blume wandered around the corridors of the building, peering into wards, a lab, several utility cupboards. The only challenge he got was when he tried to enter the radiology department. He showed his badge, received a shrug, and was warned the dangers were mainly to himself.

At the far end of the hall, through a door that gave every appearance of being locked but was not, he found a stairwell that smelled of lift grease and dust. He climbed up to the top floor, pausing at each level as he did so. Every communicating door was open, and the corridors were mostly empty. Finally, as he rounded the last flight of stairs, he was surprised to see a group of six people in white coats, smoking and holding small plastic cups. One of them, a young man with sideburns, stepped forward as if to say something, but Blume stared pointedly at the cigarette in the man’s hand, and shook his head like one disgusted to see smoking in a public building. He half hid the cigarette by cupping his hand, and stepped back. The little crowd then parted to let him through and he saw they were all standing in front of a coffee machine.

‘This is the top floor?’ he asked.

‘The stairs stop here, so what do you think?’ The speaker was a woman, and she had no cigarette in her hand. ‘Who are you looking for?’

‘No one. A place rather than a person.’

‘Which office?’

‘You’re very nosy,’ said Blume.

‘No, that’s you. You’re the one walking about the premises. I work here.’

He imagined asking her out to dinner, and felt the stirrings of being turned on by the contempt that would drip from her voice.