Conor Fitzgerald - The Namesake

Rome

Blume answered the phone, taking his time. He knew without looking it was Caterina, the only person who ever called him on his landline.

‘Hi.’

‘I’m back in the office,’ said Caterina. ‘I took your advice and got to work on other things.’

‘Maybe you should call it a night,’ said Blume, staring at Massimiliani who raised his hands in a gesture of mild exasperation, but whose face did not betray much.

‘Are you calling it a night?’ she asked.

‘Yes, you should go home, Caterina.’

‘You know Elia’s on holiday at the sea with my parents?’

‘Even if you don’t need to get back to him, it’s good to get some sleep,’ said Blume. ‘You can get back to the investigation in the morning.’

‘I see,’ she said coldly. ‘I was phoning for another reason.’

‘What?’

‘That book Arconti’s wife gave him for his birthday. It had a page missing.’

Blume was surprised. He had been expecting some personal stuff from her. This was more welcome.

‘The wife bought the book at Feltrinelli at Piazza del Duomo a few days ago,’ continued Caterina. ‘I called her to check. It was brand-new, yet damaged when we found it. The pages skipped from 156 to 159. One sheet — pages 157 and 158 — had been torn out. You could see the ragged edges where it was ripped. I had one of the uniformed guys, Bonanni, pop round to the Feltrinelli store on Largo Argentina and get a copy while I was examining the CCTV, and it was here on my desk when I got back. The torn page corresponds to a description and drawings of oak trees: the Quercus petrea and the Quercus robur, the Sessile oak and the Pedunculate oak. I looked them up in combination with various search terms, including Ndrangheta, and this brought me to a series of webpages on the “Tree of Wisdom”, which is also called the “Mother Tree”, the tree of the Ndrangheta. Depending on the webpage, sometimes it seems as if the tree is mythological, sometimes as if it is an actual oak that has been growing for hundreds of years near the sanctuary of the Madonna di Polsi, above the “Infernal Valley”. The trunk is five metres in circumference.’

‘That’s very interesting.’

‘You don’t have to be sarcastic.’

‘I wasn’t being sarcastic. That’s interesting: the Tree of Wisdom.’

‘I think the missing page is a buried reference. Ripped out by the killer in a symbolic gesture. The Ndrangheta sees itself as a tree. The main trunk, the capo bastone, is the boss, the leaves are the latest recruits, the least important, the branches are their commanders, and so on. The roots feed on the blood of traitors and the soil of the land. I’m still reading up on it. If you want, we…’

The captain slapped out a fast rhythm on his knee, and stood up briskly and started touring the room.

‘Another time, Caterina. I need to go.’

‘Wait. He did have a wedding ring. His wife told me. For some reason he threw his ring away or they stole it from him.’

‘Probably the latter,’ said Blume.

‘No, I don’t think that fits the…’

‘Later. Tell me later.’ He hung up. Massimiliani was now strolling around the room, picking out books at random, looking at them, putting them back.

‘A lot of art books. History, too.’

‘My parents’.’

‘They were art historians. I read your file. But three of the books I just looked at were published after their death, so you must have bought them.’

‘It’s a hobby.’

‘No novels.’

‘Stories are a waste of time unless they’re true,’ said Blume.

‘Or unless they serve a purpose. We all tell stories to ourselves that we know aren’t true. The Ndrangheta, for example, has a lot of stories that are useful. That Tree of Wisdom you were just talking about with…?’

‘They make stories up as it serves their purpose,’ said Blume, ignoring Massimiliani’s cue.

‘That’s just what you did with that confession, isn’t it?’

Blume tried to keep his gaze steady, but he felt disoriented. He had reckoned it might take two or three days for his falsified transcript to leak through the system. Instead, it had been a few hours. Even by the lousy standards of secrecy in the force and among the magistrates, that was far too fast.

‘Look, Blume, I admire your enterprise here. It tilted the scales in your favour. But let’s not waste time in denials. If there had been a confession from Curmaci’s wife, I’d have heard about it from Arconti. He mentioned that he had called her, fishing for information, but there was no talk of a confession. It had to be you. I think it was a good idea, and I like the way you both buried it in your office and in the Palaces of Justice. You made us look for it so that when we found it the thrill of discovery would make us reluctant to consider that we were led to it. I think you might be a natural.’

‘You keep saying “we”. Who else was with you?’

‘Your direct superior, the Vice-questore. Well, he accompanied one of my men. So he sort of knows, but he is not aware it was a forged document. Let’s hope he never finds out.’

‘Great. So my office was searched. Was Arconti relaying everything back to you? I trusted him.’

‘And you were right to, and you should continue. Casual chats. Of course, he’s not in a fit state to talk at length, but if we were to phone him now and ask whether he had received a confessional phone call from Curmaci’s wife, what would he say?’

Blume stayed silent.

‘We soon found out you were planting the story in the press, too, along with hints of a break-in and a cover-up. If we try to deny or kill the story, it will only gain more credibility. So it’s out there, now, with a life of its own doing whatever you wanted it to do. So, tell me, what did you want it to do?’

‘Disorient Curmaci, maybe force him back into Italy to defend his family before he’s ready. Get him in trouble with his associates. Just get back at him some way. Drag him into the open, discomfit the bastard.’

‘I like that. We can let it run its course,’ said Massimiliani. ‘Curmaci was probably planning to attend the Polsi summit anyhow. But for all your cleverness, Blume, you made a mistake that, to my mind at least, makes it incontrovertibly a forged confession.’

The nagging doubt Blume had had from the start in the back of his mind seemed to step forward and take an ironic bow. ‘I got the tone wrong,’ he said.

‘I was really hoping you’d recognize your own mistake — another good sign. You kept to the same tone of the original denial. But that was a prepared statement full of insinuation and warning. If she really had been confessing and seeking help, the tone would have been less coherent.’

‘Ah, well,’ said Blume. ‘She’s still in the shit, though, isn’t she, once this gets known?’

‘Probably,’ agreed Massimiliani. ‘Her name’s Maria Itria.’

‘I know.’

‘She’s got two children.’

‘So had the unfortunate insurance salesman, Arconti.’

‘He was an actuary.’

‘Whatever.’

‘You seem convinced it was Curmaci. Any particular reason?’

‘Well, Magistrate Arconti is the main reason. He told me a bit about Curmaci, and this seems like the sort of thing he might do. But I am not assuming it is Curmaci.’

‘So why did you go to all that trouble of falsifying his wife’s statement?’

‘If it wasn’t Curmaci, it was one of them. Getting Curmaci will do fine, since they’re all the same.’

‘Interesting attitude. You don’t care whether this really was Curmaci or not?’

‘Like I said, it may as well have been him,’ said Blume. ‘Curmaci or someone else in the organization. All the same. Only the name changes.’