Conor Fitzgerald - The Namesake

‘The police in Milan have just confirmed that the burned-out van in Sesto San Giovanni was the same one you were attempting to trace from Rome to Milan. Presumably the two burned bodies they found are the people you were looking for.’

Caterina and her colleagues had spent almost three full days on the reconstruction of the movements of the van, tracking it at the north Rome Tollgate, picking it up again using the traffic speed cameras near Florence, getting decent-quality images of the occupants when they stopped at a service area after Bologna. Their best stroke of fortune had been when the driver paid for fuel by credit card. They were able to get an identification of the driver, a certain Teodor Popescu. The card and the van were registered to an office-cleaning company set up by a building renovations group associated with a real-estate management firm specializing in decommissioned and disused buildings whose holdings included warehouses in Sesto San Giovanni where, as it turned out, the driver and occupant of the van were both killed. Dutifully and promptly, Caterina and her team had handed all the information to this young magistrate, practically in a gift box with a bow on it. The magistrate had somehow botched his effort to steal all the credit for it as he passed it on to Milan, since the head of the investigation there had asked not for the opinion of the magistrate, but had asked for her by name.

Caterina merely nodded as he told her that she should have spent more time investigating the scene of the crime. He conceded it was hardly her fault. Her commander had vanished and left her, a woman with a child and insufficient experience, to run a full investigation.

‘Thank you, Caterina,’ he said as she was leaving. ‘Are you sure you have held nothing back from me?’

‘Nothing. But call me Inspector Mattiola, Signor Giudice, not Caterina.’

She left the door open on her way out, hoping it annoyed the magistrate as much as it annoyed Blume, which, she admitted, was hardly possible.

Unlike Blume, Caterina was a glutton for the summer heat, even in the city. She loved the way it bounced off the pavement back at her face in the early afternoon, then radiated from the buildings in the evening. When the sun heated her hair, it felt like a soft electric current was running through every strand. In the heat everyone walked more slowly and deliberately. She loved the way Roman drivers eschewed air-conditioning, preferring to leave the window open and droop an arm against the side of their car, raising their hand sometimes to direct a refreshing airflow up their arm, sometimes to greet people, more often to insult other drivers with languid gestures. The gleam of the light off the windscreens and metal of the incessant traffic lifted her spirits. The blaring horns, which were full of violence and irritability in the winter, seemed now to be celebratory and bear no ill will. Happy motorbikes and scooters roared through gaps in the traffic and across dangerous intersections, the riders sounding their horns in delight at the way the rushing warm air kept them dry and alert. She passed an old man sitting on a broken bench milking the sun, oblivious to the traffic. She remembered her grandfather sitting on a park bench like that, his face pointed up, as blissful as a lizard.

And yet she wished Blume were here to spoil it all for her. He’d have a jacket on and be sweating underneath it. He’d clump around in his heavy shoes, which he wore off duty and on, contemptuous of men wearing ‘Jesus sandals’ as he called them, appalled at the ugliness of people’s feet. When it became too much even for him to wear heavy clothes, he’d appear wearing the T-shirt he had had on in bed, shiny running shoes and shorts, and pretend day after day that he was going to the park for a run until eventually he did go running, if only to save face (but not his knees, as he would make perfectly plain for the next few weeks). If he were here now, instead of avoiding her and sneaking off on a mission, he’d be complaining of the dust and the grime, and would be seething in rage at the people walking too slow, the drivers driving too fast, the stench of the unemptied skips, the starling droppings and the sticky residue of the lime trees on the bonnet of his car. But he was always funny, intentionally or not, when raging against the heat and his adopted city.

Caterina entered the Gelateria dei Gracchi, to which Blume had introduced her. He said their ice cream was better even than Toni’s on Colli Portuensi, and he was possibly right, but still she preferred Toni’s. He had brought her here on one of those rare days they had been able to spend in each other’s company.

She now ordered herself a rich yellow, cream and walnut cone, and ate it, reflecting on how well she had handled that little shit of a magistrate. The sun had disinfected him out of her mind. Blume absorbed all his rage deep into his body and let it seep out slowly through sarcasm and headaches and intestinal problems he never mentioned and would be mortified to think she knew anything about.

Caterina was considering whether or not to eat the cone. It seemed ridiculous to worry about the few calories left in her hand after she had said yes to the whipped cream on top five minutes earlier. Her minor quandary was resolved by the trilling of an incoming call. She dropped the cone into the overflowing rubbish bin outside the gelateria, and kissed her fingers clean, before fishing the mobile phone from her bag. She glanced at it and saw an unknown number of a few digits. An institution of some sort, she guessed.

‘Inspector Mattiola?’ A woman’s voice.

‘Yes.’

‘I am Doctor Silvia La Verde, Consultant Neurologist at the Gemelli Hospital. I am phoning on behalf of Magistrate Matteo Arconti, who is unable to make the call.’

‘He’s awake?’

‘Absolutely, and he’s sitting here right beside me. He has some difficulty in holding a phone and pressing buttons…’

Like Blume, then, thought Caterina.

‘… but I am confident we can deal with that over the next weeks and months. He has no problems, or only very minor problems relating to muscle control, in speaking. I’m going to put the phone to his ear now.’

Caterina waited a moment.

‘Eeeola?’ said the voice, which sounded like it was coming from the other side of the tomb.

‘Eeola?’ she said.

‘Attrina Eeeola?’

‘Caterina Mattiola, yes, sir, that’s me. How can I help?’

Silence. Then some voices in the background, someone exclaiming something.

‘Chief Inspector Mattiola,’ said the same voice, almost perfectly normal now, apart from a slight slurring. ‘Magistrate Matteo Arconti here. Sorry about that. It turns out I can speak perfectly fine if the phone is at my right ear, but I become almost aphasic if it’s at my left. Half my brain seems to be numb. Dr La Verde here is very interested in this. I think she’s writing a book about people like me.’

Caterina allowed her silence to convey that she had no idea what he was talking about.

‘I was wondering, could you find time to pay me a visit. Just you, mind. I have a few things I’d like to ask you.’

‘Can’t you ask me about them now?’ said Caterina. She had just used up her last stores of tolerance for pompous magistrates.

‘I have a consultant neurologist acting as a phone holder. I really think you should come here, Inspector.’

They always did that, conversationally demoted you by one rank when they sensed a lack of deference.

Perhaps sensing an imminent refusal, Arconti added, ‘If you really want to know, I don’t so much want to ask you questions as to tell you a few things. They concern Commissioner Alec Blume, and a little trouble he has made for himself.’

He could have said that to begin with.