The Namesake (5 page)

‘That attitude is what makes you ideal for Mafia work. I’ve seen this happen time and again in investigations, and it has happened to me. You seek a confession from a crime boss, and next thing you know he’s implicated half your colleagues, three dear friends and all your superiors. It takes a special type of person to deal with that. Someone who can survive alone. Once you have a confession, if you get one, you can’t be sure who’s telling the truth any more. Maybe you’re being played by your informer or maybe you have been fooled for years by colleagues you thought you could trust. Capturing a boss is like holding a rabid wolf by the ears as it tries to bite your balls off. You want to release your grip, but really you’d better not.’

He squeezed his eyes shut.

‘Are you feeling all right?’ asked Blume after the magistrate had not spoken for a while.

‘Do you ever get the feeling you are moving in slow motion?’

Blume nodded. ‘In dreams all the time. Running away, legs getting heavier and heavier. Something dragging you back.’ He looked at the magistrate who was sitting very still. ‘But not when I’m awake.’

The magistrate lifted his left hand. ‘Do you ever get the feeling one arm is really light and the other really heavy?’

‘If I am wearing a watch, it makes my arm feel heavy and causes my wrist to itch,’ said Blume. ‘And now you’ve reminded me.’

‘No, not heavy,’ said Arconti absently. ‘More like it was full of water . . .’ His voice trailed off.

‘My speciality is blinding headaches, not heavy limbs,’ said Blume, pulling off his watch and pocketing it. He stared at Arconti, who now seemed to be stroking an imaginary beard, as if he were a doctor diagnosing his own arm trouble.

‘I am stroking an imaginary beard,’ replied Arconti.

‘I see that. You can stop now,’ said Blume.

‘Who is your father, Commissioner?’

‘My father’s dead.’ Arconti knew that, damn it.

‘No,’ said the magistrate, slowly, weighing up Blume’s reply. ‘ “My father’s dead” is one of the initiation responses used by a Russian
vor
. An Ndranghetista at Curmaci’s level would reply, “The sun is my father”, though there are variations.’

‘Is that what the beard-stroking was about? Were you testing to see if I was an Ndranghetista?’

‘Of course not, Commissioner. I wanted to see if you recognized the symbolism. The imaginary beard is Garibaldi’s. Garibaldi, Mazzini and La Marmora are the three secular saints of the
Santa
. Apart from all else, Commissioner, including my trust in you and your work as a policeman, racially and culturally speaking, you could never have been a
santista
in the Ndrangheta. It has to be in your blood.’

Blume shrugged. ‘I just had my blood tested. It’s Mafia-free.’

‘Are you sure you don’t want to talk to this friend of mine about a career change?’

‘The DIA would never have me,’ said Blume.

‘It would not necessarily be the DIA. There are other groups that combat the Mafia from farther behind the scenes.’

‘I would need to think about it.’

‘It’s a solitary life, but you would not mind, I think. Being alone frees the mind; it allows you to explore areas that others neglect, see things that others miss. Don’t you agree?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Blume. ‘In my solitude, I have also seen many things that are not true.’

There was a knock at the door.

‘
Avanti
!?
’ called Blume automatically, before remembering where he was. ‘Sorry, Giudice, this is your office. I had no right . . .’

An elderly man in a blue uniform backed into the office wheeling a trolley filled to overflowing with boxes and binders.

‘It’s no problem,’ Arconti said to Blume and the man shuffled into the narrow space between them. ‘We Calabrians tend to avoid the word
Avanti
. It’s what drovers and goatherds shout at the beasts of the fields.’ He watched the uniformed porter wipe the sweat off his brow, and carefully retreat from the trolley, lifting a clipboard off the top box. ‘When addressing humans, we prefer to be more respectful. We prefer to say, simply enough, “come in.” ’

The porter continued his balancing act with the files, and when it became clear that nothing was going to fall off unless there was a breath of wind, he looked at the form in his hand and addressed the magistrate.

‘These files are for Magistrate Matteo Arconti. I hope that is you, Dottore?’

‘Yes,’ said the magistrate. ‘That’s my name.’

Thursday, 27 August

6

Rome

Chief Inspector Panebianco delicately pinched the dead man’s worn identity card between blue latex-covered fingers. ‘As you can see, this guy was called Matteo Arconti. He was reported missing in Milan yesterday.’

Blume nodded. He was marshalling his thoughts and suppressing his shock. He would speak in a moment.

Panebianco allowed a few beats of silence to pass, then said: ‘The victim has the same name as the magistrate you’ve been working with, Commissioner.’

‘You think you needed to tell me that?’ snapped back Blume.

Panebianco continued, unfazed. ‘Same name as the magistrate but not him, right? Just to be sure.’

‘What sort of dumb question . . .’ He stopped himself. Panebianco was regarding him with the same detached look in his grey-blue eyes that Blume had seen him use for particularly stupid witnesses and suspects. ‘Sorry, Rosario. You were right to ask. No, this is just his namesake.’

‘I agree it was an odd question,’ said Panebianco. ‘I’ve worked with Arconti, and this is not him. But you know the way the dead are always a bit tricky to identify? Best to hear you confirm it, Commissioner. I wonder if he’s related to the magistrate?’

‘I doubt it,’ said Blume.

Panebianco raised his eyebrows. ‘Well, there has to be a direct connection. The body was dumped here outside the court buildings: it’s hardly going to be a coincidence, is it?’

Panebianco seemed to be pushing him for a response.

Blume cleared his throat, and spoke. ‘It’s symbolic . . . it’s . . . They are showing us what they’re made of.’

‘Who? The Calabrian Mafia? That’s the case you were working on with the magistrate. Is this to do with the doctor and the Cuzzocrea brothers?’

‘It’s too early to say,’ said Blume. His rage had subsided almost as suddenly as it had welled up, and was now a simmering and manageable anger, the sort that gave him energy. And deep inside, in a hardly acknowledged part of his soul, there was a feeling of reluctant admiration for the sort of person who could kill for no other reason than that the name of the victim fitted. Murder for a play on words.

‘It’s effective,’ he told Panebianco. ‘This is quite a well-structured act . . .’ He looked at the splayed-out body, one arm pointing up, the other down as if to say,
Here is where I came from, there is where they went
.

As they moved around the body, a forensic technician cocooned in white watched fearfully without daring to intrude, like a possessive child who had made the mistake of lending his favourite toy to the two school bullies.

Blume tapped Panebianco on the elbow. ‘Rosario, don’t start from the Ndrangheta angle. If it’s them, the case will be taken over by the DIA; if it’s not, you’re going to have to build up a different working hypothesis, so you may as well start now. Treat it as an ordinary murder.’

‘You’re talking as if you’re bowing out.’

‘I am,’ said Blume. ‘You deal with whoever is the magistrate in charge. Try to keep Caterina out of it, would you?’

Panebianco stood up from where he was crouched examining the black-caked exit wound in the victim’s head, and waved at the forensic technician who rushed back towards the body with an air of gratitude and relief. His three colleagues followed.

Panebianco and Blume moved several yards away while the technicians continued their work with paper bags, tweezers and swabs.

‘I disagree, Commissioner. This would be a good case for Caterina. Like you said, it’s bound to be taken out of our hands once it’s clear it is organized crime, so it would be a perfect chance for her to get some practice, and then feel the pain of losing a case.’

‘I’d prefer she wasn’t involved. She has a son, you know.’

Panebianco looked at him. ‘She’s the only one on the force with children?’

‘That came out wrong.’

Panebianco did not look pleased. ‘You’ve got no children. Why don’t you handle it?’

‘Magistrate Matteo Arconti won’t be able to investigate this. It’s too clearly a conflict of interest, and I think the same might apply to me. I’m going to retreat into the shadows, so to speak.’

Blume beckoned to Caterina who was still talking to the two street cleaners who had found the body. She flicked her hand at him, with exactly the same gesture she used to shoo away her son when he tried to interrupt her talking on the phone. Blume enjoyed the domestic intimacy of the gesture, but disliked the casual disregard of his authority. Even so, he let her finish her interview.

He took a walk around the area. The place was well chosen, a wide waste ground used as an overflow car park with no buildings overlooking it, and flanked by a road with fast-moving traffic and no footpath. The body had probably been lying there for hours. From what he had seen, it was unlikely that the victim had been killed where he was found. From a distance, the corpse looked like a lump of tar, a heap of clothes or a bag of rubbish.

The road, Via Falcone e Borsellino, was named after two magistrates murdered by Cosa Nostra in 1992.

He checked his phone again. If Arconti knew of the death of his namesake, he would surely call.

Taking his time, he returned to the crime scene, now populated with more vehicles and a mortuary van. He stood at the edge and watched his colleagues go about their business. He observed Caterina whose movements were a little too quick. She changed direction often and twice had to retrace her steps. She spoke to colleagues, then five minutes later had to speak to them again. Lots of micromanagement errors so far, but she was maintaining authority and control, and being taken seriously – that was the main thing. He was pleased for her sake, then remembered he didn’t want her on the case.

When she finally seemed to have a moment, he caught her eye and nodded at her to come over.

‘The most obvious line of . . .’ she began.

Blume put up a restraining hand. ‘No.’

‘No?’

‘I think,’ said Blume, ‘the best way to approach this is to put a Chinese wall between us.’

She closed one eye and examined the side of his face as she often did when trying to assess whether he was being serious or not. ‘A Chinese wall, no less,’ she said eventually. ‘A great one?’

‘A Chinese wall is when you deliberately don’t share knowledge or information so as not to help someone else inadvertently.’

‘Sounds like an ordinary Blume wall to me,’ said Caterina.

‘I think you should maybe opt out of this one. You could tell the investigating magistrate your opinions are contaminated because of what I have already told you. You won’t get sufficient clarity. So Panebianco’s doing this until it’s passed on to the DIA.’

‘Or to Milan,’ said Caterina. ‘That’s where the victim is from. He works in insurance and has no record of any sort. He never arrived at work yesterday morning, and his wife reported him missing. So maybe we should look into the wife.’

‘The wife?’ said Blume, intrigued. ‘You mean an ordinary murder?’

‘I know this is almost certainly to do with the Ndrangheta, but, like you said, I won’t be influenced by you. See, your Chinese wall’s working already.’

‘You don’t want to have anything to do with this,’ said Blume. ‘People who find an innocent namesake, kill him for . . . fun. Because this is a form of fun for them. Like shooting up a shop or firebombing a factory is fun for the young recruits. It is evil joy.’

‘Evil or not, it does not follow that there is a particular risk for investigators. If they strike at us directly, it could spark off a war with the state, like Cosa Nostra was stupid enough to do in the 1990s. I’m in no more danger from this inquiry than any other. And you’re not my protector.’

‘I’m your commissioner.’

Caterina smiled and beckoned him closer, leaned into his ear, and whispered, ‘Commissioner Blume?’

‘What?’ Blume found he was whispering, too, and grinning like a schoolboy.

‘Fuck off.’

Blume stood back and scowled at her. ‘There was no need for that. OK, have it your way. I don’t think Curmaci or the Ndrangheta is involved in this.’

‘Oh for God’s sake, Alec. There is no need to exaggerate. How stupid do you think I am?’

‘No, seriously,’ said Blume. ‘The Ndrangheta is the “quiet” Mafia. This draws a lot of attention to them, and for what? It is not as if Arconti’s investigation was going to the heart of the organization. Maybe Arconti, the magistrate, had other enemies. Maybe this other Arconti from Milan did.’

‘Alec, I’m not listening to this.’