Conor Fitzgerald: The dogs of Rome

Blume looked at the technician in his pristine white suit with the yellow and black UACV symbol on his breast pocket. The man was at least fifteen years his junior.

“I picked up the sarcasm from the start. There’s no need to keep going.”

The young UACV investigator shrugged and walked away without offering any walk-through.

Blume wondered again about D’Amico. D’Amico had been his junior partner for five years, and had been pretty good. Two years ago, he had moved to a desk job in the Ministry of the Interior. Blume regretted the wasted training, but D’Amico had other plans for himself. Every few months Blume would hear news of how D’Amico had widened his political base, increased his leverage.

As Blume and Paoloni entered, the medical examiner, Dr. Gerhard Dorfmann, was already packing away his things. Blume nodded amicably at Dorfmann, who stared back with loathing, his default demeanor.

Blume waited until Dorfmann recognized him and finally conceded a curt nod.

Upon first seeing Dorfmann’s name on a report, Blume had felt a slight thrill at finding another foreigner. He had briefly wondered whether Dorfmann might be another American. That was a long time ago. Even then Dorfmann had seemed old. Blume wondered what age he had now achieved. His hair was gleaming white, but there was a lot of it. His eyes were hidden behind thick gold glasses that had gone in and out of style several times since he first bought them. His face contained thousands of wrinkles, but was free of folding or sagging skin. It was finely fissured like old porcelain.

Dorfmann was from the Tyrol and spoke heavily accented Italian. He would not accept being mistaken for a German, though he allowed that people might think he was Austrian. Dorfmann soon revealed a low opinion of Americans. He was not very fond of Italians either.

Blume no longer felt offended. Essentially, Dorfmann disliked people who were still breathing.

“Knife attack,” said Dorfmann, completely ignoring Paoloni.

“Very well, thank you, and you?” said Blume.

Dorfmann continued. “Four wounds. Stomach, lower abdomen, throat, head-behind the orbital lobe. All of them potentially fatal. He was probably dead when the last blow came. The knife hand-guard left a sign in the lower abdomen, so it went in with some force. Probably right-handed. What are you doing here? I don’t see why I should repeat what I just told your dandy colleague. No evident bruising elsewhere, nothing sexual that I can see despite the open robe, though we’ll wait for the autopsy. No mutilations in genital area.”

“My dandy colleague?” The ME had to be referring to D’Amico.

“D’Alema.”

“D’Alema? You mean D’Amico?”

“Yes. That’s the one. Not that fool D’Alema. D’Alema is far from dandy. Or intelligent, or politically literate…” Dorfmann was about to express some deeply held Political opinions, which Blume did not want to hear.

“OK, doctor, but here we’re talking about Nando D’Amico, not the political failure that is D’Alema.”

“Yes.” Dorfmann was pleased enough at Blume’s choice of terms to overlook the fact of the interruption. “Your colleague, D’Amico. He was walking about polluting the crime scene, then left, possibly to shine his teeth.”

“So what sort of person did this?” asked Blume, trying to hunker down to examine the body but finding his knees were having none of it.

“I would not describe the stabbing as frenzied. Nonetheless, the person who did this was not serene.”

A small pool of blood had gathered on either side of the neck, and there were impact spatters on the walls to the side and behind the victim, but the blood spillage on the floor was contained. Paoloni was walking up and down, head bent, staring at the floor, then the wall. Blume saw from the way he was moving he was describing a grid pattern around the body. The forensic team ignored him.

“Time of death?” Blume asked Dorfmann.

“This is an unpleasantly hot and dirty city, and the apartment is warm,” began Dorfmann. “When I woke up this morning, I thought we might be in for some refreshing rain, but a hot wind arose and blew the clouds over to Croatia.”

Blume clicked his tongue sympathetically. Damned Croats.

“The liver temperature, however, is warmer even than this place. Loss is just under eight degrees. First signs of rigor around the mouth. The body was almost certainly not here early this morning.”

“Can we say midday?”

“You can say it.”

“Eleven?”

Dorfmann shrugged.

“Nine?”

Dorfmann looked very doubtful. That was as good as he would get.

Dorfmann turned away and pulled off a pair of latex gloves, picked up a clipboard, and made a slight flourish with his hand to emphasize that he was signing off on the case already. “Lividity on back, buttocks. I don’t think anyone moved the body. This seems to be where he died. If you want pinpoint accuracy about the time, it will be up to you or your dandy friend to give me some markers.”

Blume was looking at the towels over by the door.

A photographer in a white jump suit stooped and took a shot of the box of groceries, against which he had propped a photographic scale ruler.

Blume noticed that he was alternating between an ordinary thirty-five mm Canon and a digital Nikon SLR. He removed the ruler and took two more shots of the box, once with the ordinary camera and once with the digital.

Then he turned on Clemente’s halogen lights overhead and repeated the process. He was doing a conscientious job.

“Get those towels over there. Photograph them, I mean,” said Blume.

The photographer looked Blume up and down, assessing his authority, then scowled and continued to photograph the box. Blume went for the friendly angle.

He said, “I’ve got a Coolpix. It’s only a small Coolpix. Wouldn’t be much good here, I suppose.”

The photographer stood up and stared at him, then, without a word, returned to his job.

Blume dismissed a fleeting image of himself plunging his cheap little Coolpix down the photographer’s throat. The technicians were moving through the apartment in white suits, acting under their own orders and initiative. He stopped one, asked for and got a pair of latex gloves, and pulled them on. He had left his own in the car. Everything was going very smoothly.

“My mentor and master,” declared a voice in a Neapolitan accent.

Blume lifted his gaze from the stained body on the floor, which did not have a name yet, and turned around to see Nando D’Amico, resplendent in a golden silk suit, step through the front door, breaking another strand of tape.

“Close your vowels, Nando. You’ll never make it into the political elite till you learn to close those Camorra vowels,” said Blume.

“Elocution lessons from a non-EU immigrant. The shame of it,” said D’Amico. “But of course, you are from the deep north. Superior to every last Leghista in Lombardy.”

“So are you. We’re the same rank now.”

“So we are. We’ll have to do something about that. Now here’s a fact not a lot of people know,” said D’Amico. “Naples is slightly north of New York. Check it out next time you’re near a globe.”

“My people were from Seattle.”

“Where’s that?”

“Far away from here. Listen Nando, what are you here for? Who’s been assigned?”

“You.”

“And you are here because…?”

“The departmental top dog himself sent me. He said the dead guy was important. I reminded him I no longer run a murder team and told him I needed a superior officer.”

Blume said, “I am not your superior anymore.”

“I meant morally.”

“How long have you been here?”

“About half an hour.” He held up a hand as if in admonishment to objections Blume had not yet made. “I am here in an official representative capacity, not as a detective. That needs to be made clear.”