The Memory Key (46 page)

‘250 square metres?’

‘What?’ The disappointment in his voice was comical. ‘That’s the size of an entire floor. Oh, you were joking, weren’t you?’

‘So how big?’

‘80 square metres. Net floor area. Actual walkable area. In Rome but out of the chaos.’

‘No, not interested,’ said Blume, cutting him off.

He walked outside the hotel and was surprised to find that the clouds had, at last, moved higher into the sky and turned white. The reflection of the sun on the wet leaves of the bushes made him put on his sunglasses. He lit a smoke, and wondered about the greenfield site in Borgata Fidene. Out of Rome, away from the chaos every day. Until the city caught up with him, of course. If they developed there, they would develop around it and eventually he’d be back in the city, but that could take years, and he would be dead by then.

He didn’t remember cigarettes being so thin and burning away so quickly in his hand. Had they always been like that? He lit another.

Panebianco phoned him to ask for his car back.

‘I left it at Caterina’s. Sorry about that. I’ll get it later on.’

‘Is everything OK?’

‘It was badly dented already, you know.’

‘I meant Caterina.’

‘Her too,’ said Blume.

His spirits were lifting with the air pressure. Everything would be finished by the end of the day. He took a taxi from the hotel to the Trullo district.

Olivia’s mother was not pleased to see him again, but her mild hostility was nothing to the glare of sheer hatred he received when he walked into the living room and found Olivia seated there.

‘I was really hoping to catch you,’ he said.

Olivia, who was wearing a short purple cotton skirt that may have been some form of night-time wear, slowly uncrossed her legs, flicked her hair back from her forehead, reclosed her legs while sitting up straighter in her chair.

‘Commissioner, why don’t you sit there opposite me?’

Blume shook his head. ‘I’ll remain standing, I think.’

‘You don’t trust yourself not to look up my skirt, is that it?’

There was not too much looking up to be done since the skirt did not travel any distance down.

‘You’re not irresistible, you know,’ said Blume. ‘Some men might not even find you attractive.’

‘Then they are not real men. I’m sorry, Commissioner, but there’s no point in either of us pretending otherwise. Every day, hundreds and hundreds of men of all ages turn as I pass.’

Olivia’s mother had been following the to-and-fro and now thought it time to intervene. As she drew her breath to say something, Blume said, ‘I don’t suppose I could trouble you to make me a coffee, Mrs Visco?’

‘You just want rid of me.’

‘Exactly. So if you can think of something that takes longer to make than a coffee, I would appreciate that even more.’

‘How dare you!’

‘Mother!’

She left.

‘Can Marco resist you?’

‘No.’

‘What is he to you?’

Olivia looked at the back of her hands and found the answer there. ‘You know the way some unmarried women wear a wedding ring, to keep old creeps like you from propositioning them?’

‘I do indeed,’ said Blume good-naturedly.

‘Marco’s my wedding ring.’

‘Where is he now?’

She smiled with exaggerated sweetness at the imbecility of his question.

‘You know he almost got arrested for you?’

‘No, I didn’t know that.’ She grabbed long strands of hair in her fists and with a deft movement he had seen Caterina do, only more slowly, she formed a sort of old-fashioned bun at the back of her head and pushed in a hair slide that she conjured out of thin air. The effect was to outline the angles and shadows around her sharp cheekbones, and expose her pixie ears.

From the kitchen to his left came the sound of her mother reminding everyone that she was there.

‘Is that it?’ said Olivia. ‘You came all the way here just to tell me that Marco has fucked up his life again?’

‘When’s the last time you heard from Marco?’

She slowly shrugged a bare shoulder out of her T-shirt, then covered it up again. ‘A few days.’

‘You know he was seeing Sofia?’

‘I know now. Paolo told me.’

‘And what about you and Paolo. Does Marco know about that?’

‘Who cares – well, you do, apparently. Why?’

‘Because men who get hurt can become evil.’

‘Only if they are evil to begin with.’

‘No one is evil to begin with,’ said Blume. ‘Just release him, Let him find his level, whatever it is. Maybe he just needs a woman who is a bit dumber than him.’

‘Brain damaged, then. I’ll tell him you suggested that might make him happy.’

Blume fingered his eyebrow trying to remember his reason for coming.

‘Are you running out of things to ask me?’

‘No. You know arrests have been made and the investigative phase is over?’

‘Sure.’

‘So you’re safe.’

‘Because I didn’t
do
anything, Inspector.’

‘Exactly. So you can tell me. Were you thinking about it? Did you ever discuss it with Marco?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Getting rid of Sofia.’

She smiled at him. ‘You are so offensive, Inspector. And your mind is full of violence. You hate me, but I think you hate women in general. That’s what this is all about. Now leave.’

‘Tell your mother I’m sorry I couldn’t stay.’

‘I bet you are sorry. You’re like a dog in search of a home, Inspector.’

‘Commissioner.’

‘You think I or anyone else gives a fuck?’

Olivia stood up and came up close to him, and for a panicky moment he thought she was about to stand on tiptoe and kiss him on the lips, until he realized she was showing him the door. She opened it for him. The sharp light of the winter morning was unforgiving on the grubby little place but illuminated her beautiful features.

Chapter 50

The red bedcover and the yellow bulb in the ceiling filled his tiny bedroom with a bloody hue, and he was finding it difficult to read the small print in Pitagora’s book. But Blume could not make head or tail of it:

We might imagine humankind to be formed of a forest of inverted trees that change position, for what is our head but the roots of our being, and what do we do but move?

Humans, walking, trees. Upside-down trees. OK, he could remember that. Blume stuck his finger into the middle of the book and opened another random page.

Though our materialist world is inimical to virtues and misunderstands the Greek concept of goodness, for whereas
agape
is to
amor
as
agathos
is to .
. .

Nope. He turned over another wad of pages.

For the same twelve keys to a good memory are the same twenty-four keys to happiness. And if it is happiness you seek, the thirty-six rules of the golden .
. .

Blume thought about this. All in all, he felt it was pretty safe to say he wasn’t after happiness. The idea seemed as uninviting as heaven threatened to be eternally dull. Misery endured became, after some practice, misery enjoyed. Still, on the off-chance he was missing out on something, he read on:

Then these are the twelve steps you must take: Study, contemplate, debate, discuss, converse, change, seek novelty, hate your rivals, fear criticism, seek praise, strive after excellence .
. .

Now there was something. Hate as a path to happiness. He flicked forward.

Once upon a time .
. .

Good, he liked anything that started this way.

. . . there was a nameless place. Then people came to live there and they needed something to remember it by. So they gave it a name that was a function or a description. Florence is where all the flowers grow, Rome was named after Romulus. The Jews always named a place after the deed that had been done there. When God called on Abraham to kill his son, Abraham called the place Jehovah-jireh, which means the Lord will provide. When the Romans saw tall trees, they called them Abies, which means high-rising. Poplars are poplars because they populate everywhere. The American Indians remembered everything by storing their memories in the vast landscape, on mountaintops, beside rivers, in forests, at the roots of ancient trees, at water springs, and on the shape of the horizon. Their environment was their memory store, and it was so extensive and filled with landmarks they had no need of writing. When they were forced to move, they lost contact with their memory store and began to forget everything about their culture. The only things they are allowed to remember now are the battles they lost .
. .

Blume pulled out his phone and glanced at the time. Time to go. He was looking forward to this.

He had the taxi drop him off at the end of Caterina’s street, where he knew there was an all-night florist manned by a deeply depressed Pakistani who, Blume knew (because he had asked), earned €4 an hour. But the flowers looked as miserable as their seller, and he remembered her saying something about not liking red flowers, or yellow, or red and yellow together. He bought a small cactus with a ribbon round it.

On the way up the road, he popped into the video store and asked for the newest video game they had. He was staggered by the price, but felt sure Elia would appreciate the latest Battlefield, even if Caterina did not fully approve.

He licked his finger and removed a stain of some sort from the lapel of his jacket. He had sprayed on some herbal essence that Caterina had bought him for his birthday. It smelled like fermenting fruit and made him sneeze, but presumably she liked it.

The table was set, red tablecloth and all, the one without the stains, and Elia sat there, looking solemn and bored and angry.

‘Did she keep you waiting for me?’ said Blume, sitting down beside him.

‘Yeah, she did. I’m starving now.’

‘Sorry. I think she wants to be formal. Here, I got you a present.’ He handed over the plastic bag. Elia pulled out the DVD glanced at it, then tossed it straight back in.

‘
Cazzo
,’ said Blume, ‘you have it already.’

‘I wish,’ said Elia.

‘Ah, she won’t let you play it because it’s rated for over-18s.’

‘My machine won’t let me play it. That’s a PlayStation disc. I have an Xbox.’

Caterina came in, cactus still in hand. ‘Where were you thinking I should put this? On top of the piano?’

‘What piano?’

‘No, just testing you for Alzheimer’s.’ The giggle that followed sounded very tense. Her skin was taut and shiny.

‘How is your father?’ asked Blume.

Caterina put the cactus on the floor beside the sofa, then, with her foot, pushed it out of sight.

‘A good dose of lung cancer or something is what he needs. God forgive me. Elia, ignore what I just said. And never smoke.’

She left the room slowly, like she was nursing a sprain, saying, without turning round, ‘By the way, Alec, you reek of alcohol and cigarettes. What’s that about?’

‘Alcohol? As for the smoke, well, you know, people in the hotel.’

‘Your hotel is extraterritorial? Not subject to the laws of the state in which smoking is banned in public places?’

‘Yeah, well, it is sort of out of this world. Owned by the Vatican, I think. And they’re foreign – obviously because they are in a hotel.’

‘Liar.’ She spoke the word from the kitchen and it sounded casual, almost friendly, and she hadn’t returned to the smell of alcohol, though how she could possibly have picked that up was a mystery. It was hours since his last drink.

She had made them lasagna, Blume’s and Elia’s favourite dish, and one at which she excelled. With a stately and cautious gait, she brought it to the living room table, refusing his offers of help. The last time they had eaten at this table had been when they had a dinner party with school friends of hers, a squad of bores none of whose memories coincided with anything to do with his life. They had just made him feel old and lost.

The lasagna was not her best effort. What wasn’t hard was chewy; the meat was dry, crumbly, and tasteless. They ate in almost complete silence, save for the crunch of the overcooked pieces of pasta. At one point, Blume exaggerated the crunching sounds, and Elia had a fit of the giggles, but his mother didn’t notice.

Elia was dismissed, and went without complaint. Caterina sat down on the sofa, but instead of pulling her legs up under her, sat with her hands on her lap, and asked him about the case. Adopting the slightly formal tone that she seemed to be insisting on, he ran through the whole case from beginning to end, clarifying some ideas in his own mind as he spoke them aloud, which, he discovered, was quite therapeutic. By the time he had finished, he felt quite good about how it had gone and optimistic about the next few days.