Conor Fitzgerald - The Namesake

The restaurant was full for a Monday night. Blume glanced at the swarthy bulky men sucking at their fingers and reaching across each other as they stretched to help themselves from central platters of fish. At another table a woman bedecked in gold jewels and wearing a white tracksuit was explaining to the waiter that the roly-poly kid in the blue football strip of Napoli sulking beside her had coeliac disease and would die if any pasta passed his mouth, but he could, and did, eat meat and fried potatoes, though he might possibly be allergic to fish. Five youths at another table, all in tracksuits, drank limoncello and kept a careful eye on Konrad and Blume.

‘I’m glad to see you do eat,’ said Blume. ‘You even seem to be enjoying yourself.’

‘There is something liberating about this place.’

‘This restaurant, the Amalfi coast, or southern Italy?’

‘All together. I am not a romantic anarchist. I am, after all, a policeman. But there is great freedom in the absence of rules. And I feel like we have travelled a great distance, even though it was only a few hours from Rome this morning. That seems so long ago.’

‘The south is separate from the north,’ said Blume. ‘The broken roads and railways turn journeys down here into tiring odysseys. Even when southerners speak standard Italian, they use a different grammar. Everything is said in the remote tense. That has to mean something.’

‘It means they still use the Latin past tense,’ said Konrad. ‘It is very fascinating to me.’

‘If it were up to me,’ said Blume, ‘I’d give this region back to the Spanish, the north back to the French and the Austrians, and Sicily back to the Arabs.’

‘And so, logically, you would give Rome and central Italy back to the Pope.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Blume. ‘I couldn’t do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he’s German.’

Konrad, recovering his confidence in the purity of the produce, ordered sospiri di limoni for dessert. Blume asked for coffee.

‘I am paying for this of course,’ said Konrad. ‘You are my guest.’ He called over the waiter and got the bill, scribbled on a piece of graph paper.

Blume shrugged. ‘It’s the other way around if anything, but you can still pay.’

Without quite knowing why he was doing it, especially after he had made such an effort to cover his tracks, Blume now found himself saying, ‘Konrad, listen to me: if you’re thinking of going down to Calabria, don’t. They don’t want visitors. That would definitely include a federal policeman from Germany.’

‘Why do you say I am going to Calabria?’

‘Because you are.’

‘Just because I met Domenico Megale…’

‘I saw that torn Madonna with Megale’s signature. Take that look off your face, you left your bags unattended in the camper van, and then your room. Some part of you wants to be stopped. A well-hidden sane part.’

Konrad’s eyes were shining. Perhaps it was the drink. ‘I have a private matter to attend to. It is not police work. I would be grateful to be left alone,’ he said.

‘Is that icon of the Madonna some sort of code? What’s the idea, someone down there has the other half of the torn Madonna, you fit the two halves together, they see Megale’s signature, they know you are good and true?’

Konrad stared into the middle distance avoiding Blume’s sympathetic gaze and struggling to compose his features into an expression of indifference.

‘Are you planning to kill someone, Konrad? Or are you trying to get yourself killed? Or both? All I can say is you are making a bad choice, and I am giving you a chance not to make it…’

Blume stopped, as the waiter returned.

‘If I make a bad choice, there is another universe in which I make a good choice,’ said Konrad. ‘I believe in multiverse theory.’

‘That’s handy. Meanwhile, back in this universe, the waiter’s just asked us if you would prefer to pay in cash.’

‘What?’

‘Cash. The credit card machine is mysteriously “broken”.’

‘I don’t have enough cash.’

‘Fuck it,’ said Blume. He pulled out two fifties from the envelope Massimiliani had given him and paid for the meal.

Positano

Blume was lying in bed, his stomach heavy with fish, searching for the willpower to read through Konrad’s notes when his Samsung vibrated.

‘Massimiliani, I suppose?’

‘Of course it’s me. I hope you’re not using the phone to call other people.’

‘No. What do you want?’

‘You can forget about Hoffmann.’

Blume sat up straight, causing some of the papers to slip off his bed. ‘No! I was just getting somewhere with him. He has a torn Madonna. I think it’s a pass of some sort.’

‘Sorry, I’m not following. Are you talking about some immediate threat?’

‘No,’ said Blume. ‘I was… never mind.’

‘Good. We’ll pick you up in the morning, both of you. Hoffmann’s superiors have finally worked out the reason for his trip.’

‘Well?’

‘They won’t tell us yet. They say they need to check up on one or two final details. Personally, I think they are embarrassed at having overlooked something obvious, or maybe they have discovered Hoffmann was working for one internal department, which neglected to tell the other. It’s their problem, not ours.’

‘Just like that? We no longer care about Konrad?’

‘We never did care about him. We cared about what he might do, but it seems he’s not going to do anything that bothers us. He’s not armed, is he?’

‘No.’

‘See? It’s not a serious matter, at least that’s what they say.’

‘You suddenly trust the Germans?’

‘I always trusted my friend and associate Weissmann.’

‘But you don’t know what it is they have found out?’

‘I am afraid not. I expect them to tell us tomorrow. It’s rather late in the day now. They want to talk to Hoffmann himself beforehand. In fact, they are probably talking to him now.’

‘OK,’ said Blume slowly, concentrating on keeping the anger out of the two syllables. It was clear the Hoffmann threat, and hence Blume’s contribution, had never been taken very seriously. He knew all along the mission was not crucial, but this was humiliating.

‘What was that you said about a Madonna?’

‘I’ll tell you that later, sometime tomorrow. After you’ve heard from the Germans.’

‘Tell me now, Blume.’

‘It’s late. It’s a complicated thing and you just told me it doesn’t matter anyhow,’ said Blume, hanging up on Massimiliani for the second time that evening.

Blume picked up the bedside phone and dialled Room 17, and was quite surprised when the inside line did what it was supposed to do and put him in contact with Konrad, who sounded as if he had been asleep.

‘Curmaci,’ said Blume. ‘Agazio Curmaci. I don’t quite know why, but that’s who you are interested in. So am I. That’s why they threw us together. If he’s your enemy, maybe I can help. If he’s your friend, then… I don’t know. You don’t want him as a friend.’

Konrad said nothing.

‘Do you know what sort of man he is?’ said Blume.

‘Yes,’ said Konrad quietly, his voice muted with sleep. ‘I know what sort of a man he is. I think I was just dreaming about him now. Go to sleep and we can talk in the morning.’

But Blume no longer felt as tired as before. He retrieved the fallen papers from around his bed and started looking through them. Konrad had copied out songs, dialect words, stories, history and even recipes connected with the Society. Occasionally, a word was underlined here, an exclamation mark added there. Finally, Blume found a page with underlining and translations of dialect words on which Konrad had committed himself to a comment, although it turned out to be no more than a hastily scrawled ‘ sehr interessant? ’.