The Memory Key (20 page)

‘Why is it good to see me?’

‘Because we have been talking about you all morning, haven’t we?’

She turned to Caterina, who nodded and smiled both at her new friend and at Blume.

The waiter from the bar across the road arrived wearing an impeccable white uniform with gold braid. He bore a tray full of steaming cappuccinos, coffees, and pastries, which he set down on Caterina’s desk. Everyone gathered around to help themselves.

‘Is it someone’s birthday?’ he asked.

‘No, no,’ said Caterina. ‘We just all felt like some decent coffee. We’re going Dutch.’

Sure enough, everyone was settling up in pairs or separately with the barista, a young kid with a good head for figures. Panebianco came over, nodded at Blume, and paid for his cappuccino and pastries. ‘How was the conference on racism?’

‘Long.’

Even Rospo was invited to the party, though he paid for his coffee alone and took it straight back to his desk.

‘We didn’t order you anything,’ said Caterina apologetically as the waiter left. ‘We didn’t know when, or if, you were coming.’

Olivia, who was sipping her cappuccino, which someone had paid for, waved her hand generously at the two pastries left on the tray. ‘You can share mine. It’s the one with the chocolate.’

‘I’m fine,’ said Blume.

Caterina picked up the other pastry, a hooked cornetto with a bright yellow
crema pasticcera
filling and bit into it, her eyes smiling at him before she had to tilt her chin upwards to catch the falling flakes and powdered sugar.

‘Your diet!’

‘I’ve given it up.’

Blume looked at Olivia, who winked at him. ‘It’ll be better for both of you. Trust me.’

‘Look, I need to talk to you alone,’ said Blume.

‘Sorry, which one of us did you mean?’ said Caterina, gently brushing the front of her blouse to remove sugar and pastry off the curve of her breast. She tore open a sachet of sugar and stirred it into her cappuccino, then lifted the phone on her desk. ‘I’m going to call the bar, get them to bring you something. I can’t bear to see you sitting there so miserable.’

‘I’m fine,’ said Blume. ‘I have had my coffee and pastries today.’

Caterina used her bottom lip and tongue to clean foamed milk from her upper lip, and pointed at the remainder of her pastry. ‘These are delicious. Try a bite.’

By way of reply, Blume turned to Olivia. ‘Can I ask what you are doing here?’

He was alarmed and a bit frightened to see the girl’s eyes suddenly seem to be brimming with tears.

‘Thank you for asking, Commissioner. I am fine. I just suddenly had an image of Sofia.’

Blume looked at Caterina, then back at Olivia. ‘Have you been talking about that?’

‘Of course we have,’ said Olivia. ‘Chief Inspector Mattiola has been absolutely fantastic and so kind to me, and she has not stopped praising you either.’ She quickly flicked a tear sideways from her eye. ‘Sorry.’

‘No, that’s . . . not exactly, but you weren’t to know . . . what made you come here?’

She tilted her head slightly as if appraising him, then reached out and touched him briefly on the arm, before drawing back, as if slightly confused by her own actions. ‘I came to see you. I came to apologize for the unfriendly reception I gave you last night and my poor behaviour the other day. I have discovered that I react to grief with aggression. It sounds strange, but maybe you can understand it?’

‘Understand it? He invented it,’ said Caterina.

‘Well, I guess you two have things to talk about,’ said Olivia, standing up.

‘What things? Where are you going now?’

‘I came by to apologize. I have done that now,’ said Olivia.

‘She waited here all morning for you,’ said Caterina. ‘Now I know where you were last night, by the way.’

Olivia nodded with the air of a sage marriage counsellor. ‘People often refuse to offer the simplest, most innocent explanations. I never understood that. The truth is always best, isn’t it?’

‘Lies have short legs,’ said Caterina.

Blume looked at Olivia’s long legs and nodded.

‘How did Marco behave himself last night?’ Olivia asked Blume. ‘He’s a nervous type, you know. Making him feel better about himself is my project.’

‘Your project?’

‘Yes. He’s my project,’ said Olivia. ‘Nothing wrong with that I hope?’

‘I thought he was your boyfriend.’

‘He’s that, too.’

‘Olivia, can you step into my office?’

She glanced at the white gold watch on her wrist, as if time was suddenly of the essence, then said, ‘Sure!’

His intention had been to demand to know how much she had told Caterina, but as he closed the door, he realized it would make him look weak. He had a feeling that Olivia had already worked out for herself that he was running a sort of one-man show.

She disconcerted him. She was transformed, like she had drunk some magic potion. Sexy, provocative, pouty – and therefore essentially irritating as well as attractive – yesterday evening; now she was beautiful, relaxed, and poised. Her hair, which had been sprayed and lacquered flat yesterday, now unruly and thick and carelessly pushed back, her eyes deep and dark and searching as she waited for him to say something.

‘Is Marco really your boyfriend?’ It was the best he could come up with.

‘Of course! Poor Marco is one of those guys who just can’t manage by themselves.’

‘He’d be lost without you?’

She touched her chest with her hands in a flutter of self-deprecation. ‘It’s not me. I am nothing special. Marco is just one of those men, boys, who can’t manage by himself. It would be so cruel to leave him. He’s not strong like you. Can I leave now?’

He agreed, and watched her as she graciously bade farewell to all the other cops, some of whom had seen all the tricks. Even Panebianco seemed charmed.

He tried contacting Principe again, to no avail. The magistrate had failed to put him in contact with Captain Zezza.

He came out of his office a few minutes later with the intention of asking Caterina about Olivia and perhaps repairing a few broken bridges, but found she was not there.

He called over to Panebianco, who told him Caterina had been asked to pay a visit to Magistrate Martone. ‘Something about that hit-and-run case.’

‘Adelgardo Lambertini? Any progress there?’

‘The opposite of progress, to judge from her face. I think a witness she thought she had secured has withdrawn his testimony. A barber. The magistrate will blame Caterina instead of herself. Good news for old Lambertini, though.’

Chapter 20

With the aid of Google images, Blume identified the car that had followed him that morning as probably a Skoda Octavia saloon. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, trying to bring back the details. He imagined himself coming down the stairs of the research institute, noticing the rain, the man with the curly hair standing in the rain. Why would he do that? Presumably because he was looking to see where Blume had got to. Had he been standing there for long, for all the time he had been inside?

A thought was pushing itself to the front of his mind and frustrating his attempts at relaxed recall: why he had failed to call backup? All it would have taken was a phone call, a patrol car would have been there within minutes, they could have pulled up beside the Skoda, asked the driver to step out, and then he would know who was following him. So why had he not done it? Pride. He thought he could handle it easily himself, outmanoeuvre his follower by coming out of another door. It was a reasonable assumption, seeing as the person was no professional. But he had blown it.

The best way to remember was to think of things around the object, such as that bus that almost knocked him down. Bastard. The car was silver-grey, same as all the other cars, same colour as the rain.

He was going to fall asleep. He could feel it. That was no good. Maybe Aaron Fisher had some advice on recall. Not that recall had much to do with memory.

He pulled the Kindle out of his bag. Part of him was disappointed to discover the search feature. He was hoping the product would be more useless.

Simonides: The man who knew where the bodies are buried

Recalling faces is a funny business. You may not be able to conjure up the face properly, but when you see the person again, you have no problem in recognizing them. You may forget the name, but probably not the face. Even if you cannot call up the features of a face, you often ‘feel’ the identity in your head. For instance, think of the last time you were at a meeting, or sitting in a classroom. Now try to recall the person to your left. Or just try to recall one or two people. Not only will at least one come to mind, you will also remember where they were sitting. And this, folks, is the second big secret of all those memory masters, of those people who can recall lists of emperors, presidents, pi, mathematical formulae, all the bones of the human skeleton, and, a popular one these days, all the cards played in a game of poker or bridge. I am about to tell you this great secret, which, in fact, is not so much a secret as something that was forgotten for many years and is now being recalled. But it is great, and it will help you ace your exams and acquire considerable knowledge with far less effort than you thought possible. Ready? Yes, well, first, I want you to go back, and check you have really learned the Memory Key. Done that? Really? OK, then we have time for a little story.

It concerns a Greek poet called Simonides of Ceos (I like to think of him as Simon), who lived around 550 years before Christ. He was, they say, a bit of a miser, but very good at writing victory poems – boastful ditties for kings and warlords. If he were alive today, he’d be composing songs for Mexican drug lords, or, maybe he’d go it alone as a rapper singing his own praises.

One day, Simonides was at a banquet in the palace of a rich guy called Scopas, who had asked him to write some poems in which the hero was . . . you guessed it: Scopas. But the poet put in too many references to the twin gods Castor and Pollux, sort of squeezing Scopas out of the picture, and, to make matters worse, there was a whole room full of guests to witness this insult. And so Scopas decided that he would not pay Simonides for his poems after all.

At this point, a messenger came in to say there were two young fellows outside who were seeking Simonides. So the poet, suspending his row with Scopas, went out to see who they might be and what they wanted him for. It turns out the two fellows waiting for him looked pretty darned alike. Like two twins. Like the twin gods, Castor and Pollux, whose praises he had just been singing, in fact.

As Simonides stepped out of the doorway, an earthquake struck the city. Down came the palace behind him, crushing Scopas and all the guests. The twins, being magical, vanished, and there was Simonides standing beside a pile of rubble and feeling lucky and – well, we’d have to know him a bit better, but there might have been a part of him that was pretty pleased at what happened to Scopas. Not to the guests, though. In fact, soon the mothers, wives, children came running and there was great lamentation. Not only had all the poor guests been killed, but the collapsing rubble had disfigured them horribly. No one could identify the bodies of their loved ones. Maybe we’d call in the FBI and use dental records nowadays, but this was ancient Greece.

Simonides snapped his fingers and said, ‘Wait a minute! I remember where they were all sitting and who was who.’ And he walked around, pointing to one corpse after another, pronouncing the name of each one.

It was not a great feat, but it got him to thinking. It is easy to remember the position of real things. Just try it now. In your mind’s eye, think of the furniture in your sitting room. Now the furniture in your best friend’s sitting room. Pretty easy, isn’t it?

Simonides developed a system for remembering that has become known by several names. The Memory Theatre, the memory room method, the memory palace, and the ‘loci’ method. Loci is just Latin for location, and the Latin is used because Roman orators, and later medieval monks, used and refined Simonides method.

Anyhow, in the method I want to show you, theatres don’t come into it. We’ll just call it the ‘mental walk’. And instead of saying ‘locus’, we’ll say ‘stop point’.

Now there are two schools of thought about where we should go next with this. One school says that the best mental walk is one that takes you around your own house, school, or neighbourhood. After all these are places you know very well. There is no remembering to be done. The other says that it is better to invent a place in your head, and ‘walk’ your way through it. The effort is a little greater to begin with, but the results are better. Why would this be so? Well, one reason is that a mental walk that brings you into, say, your son’s room, might bring up the image of your son and the smell of his trainers, and much as you love him (that’s why he comes so readily to mind), he might be ‘in the way’ of something you are trying to remember. Sad to say, but the best memory palace is a lonely place.

rule: Whether you use your own house or the place I am about to describe, you must be absolutely consistent in your route. Make sure you know which room leads to which. Do not change direction. Never change the route.