Conor Fitzgerald: The Namesake

‘I don’t believe in taking medicine preventatively. I think it’s a scam by the drug companies. Scare people to sell them stuff.’

‘I remember you now,’ said the doctor.

‘But I do believe in prescriptions for real pain. I’d like you to write me one for Aulin, please.’

‘So you have headaches?’

‘Migraines, for which I need Aulin or something even stronger.’

‘If I said yes, you’d need repeat prescriptions. You’d have to come back here.’

‘Fine.’

‘But I’m not going to prescribe it anyway.’

Blume pulled a notebook from his jacket and flicked it open. ‘What about Migraless?’

‘Same stuff, same answer,’ said the doctor.

‘Let me see… he also mentioned Minerol and Edemax.’

‘No and no. Still versions of Nimesulide.’

‘Hydrocodone?’

‘Who is this maniac advising you? Take the statins, come back to me in a month, and then we can talk.’

‘I’m not taking statins.’

‘And I’m not prescribing Nimesulide to patients I don’t know. Try over-the-counter paracetamol, less coffee and a more relaxed attitude.’

Blume slammed the door on his way out, startling the little woman in the waiting room. ‘That man,’ Blume told her, ‘is fucking useless.’

Rome

Blume drove fast and aggressively through the streets to his appointment in Piazzale Clodio with Magistrate Matteo Arconti. He did not have a headache yet, but he had the intimations of one. It promised to be brutal, and it would be the fault of Caterina and that idiot doctor.

When they first met, the magistrate, whose unsteady vibrato voice gave all his utterances a plaintive edge, had asked Blume about his personal life. Blume had simply and automatically lied as he did to everyone who asked questions in that area. No partner, woman, girlfriend or emotional attachment to anyone, he had said.

The magistrate seemed so pleased at this information that Blume suddenly had a lurching sensation that this was the prelude to some sort of gay demand. It would fit in with the wavering voice, the ready smile. Jesus, the thought. The guy was white haired and had to be about sixty-five. Not that that was the issue. Even if he had been thirty-five or twenty-five.

‘I was hoping you would say that,’ said the magistrate.

‘You were?’

‘Yes. You see, if the criminals want to get at you, they have to get you, Commissioner. The same applies to me. They would need to kill me in person, since it’s going to be hard to find any family. My parents are dead; I have no idea who my cousins are. My wife divorced me and moved abroad ten years ago, and even under torture, I could not say where she is. We had no children. I can be sure that no one innocent is at risk because I refuse to let go of an investigation. We might die, but no one has to die on our behalf. That is important. It gives us freedom.’

Blume, relieved to discover his magistrate had suicidal rather than homosexual inclinations, agreed, even going so far as to add: ‘I don’t really understand how a policeman can have a wife and family and still be effective.’

Caterina was not a wife, or even a proper partner yet. Propped up at his front door, ready to be taken round to her place, was a suitcase of belongings, mostly mementos of his parents, including their wedding rings. He had carefully buried the objects under a layer of his own clothes so that she could not see quite how sentimental he was. The suitcase had been there for five or six weeks now. Once he carried it into Caterina’s apartment, the die would be cast. Apparently, her coming to his larger and nicer apartment was out of the question, because of her son, Elia, who was not to be traumatized by a change of house and school. Also, her parents lived up the road. His dead parents and lack of children gave him no counterarguments. Saying he did not like her apartment much, which was true, was not an option. She seemed to think they could rent his out, but Blume did not want strangers pawing their way around what had been his parents’ home.

‘I can see we will get on well,’ Arconti had said after that first meeting.

And so they had, but as soon as the case began to get interesting, it had started moving away from them. Now the anti-Mafia magistrates of the DDA and the agents of the DIA were poised to take over.

It had started well enough, a trace on the doctor’s phone leading to a warehouse next to an abandoned cake factory in north Rome. They set up a surveillance detail, and within a few days, two suspects had turned up in a green van. The registration traced back to a car dealer in Calabria with multiple links to the Ndrangheta. A flag went up at the DIA and DDA, and from there on it was hardly their case any more, but Arconti seemed unperturbed.

The actual raid had been carried out at dawn by an eight-man team from NOCS, the Special Forces unit of the police. They were like a rake of eager colts. Trained to stand still as they listened to their commander brief them, each one of them was visibly struggling to suppress his pent-up energy.

Blume, feeling old, had watched them through binoculars as they burst into the warehouse, pretending he didn’t care that the young men in their combat uniforms and boots could all run a hundred metres in fourteen seconds or less, and eight kilometres in twenty minutes. He sometimes went on long runs that felt like they might be eight kilometres; hell, they felt like fifty.

The warehouse haul was 80 kilos of black cocaine and 10 kilos of Nimesulide in five plastic bags. Blume watched as a uniformed policeman wearing surgical gloves lifted one of the fat pill-filled sacks. Blume imagined the sack bursting and the pills bouncing and rolling everywhere as they hit the floor. One quick scoop of his hand and he’d not have another debilitating headache for ten years.

The two suspects, two brothers called Cuzzocrea, were cocooned in sleeping bags when the NOCS team broke in. The elder of the two apparently didn’t even wake up, the other struggled for a moment with the zip, but lay still when a boot was placed on his throat. The police also recovered 300,000 euros in cash — a good haul.

It turned out the Cuzzocrea brothers were first cousins of Maria Itria Landolina, wife of a certain Agazio Curmaci whose name was in one of their phones, though no calls had been placed to or received from him. A trace on both phones revealed a stream of connections in Germany, but the wiretap remit issued by the Italian authorities did not extend across the border.

‘I have been after Curmaci on and off for years,’ explained Arconti. ‘It’s almost a hobby. He is based in Germany now, so there is not much chance of my getting him, but this connection via the cousins of his wife was too good to pass up.’

‘Who’s Curmaci?’

‘Is the name completely new to you?’

‘No. I looked up some records. The capo of the Dusseldorf-Duisburg locale is Domenico Megale, the crimine is his son, Tony Megale, and the mastro di giornata is Agazio Curmaci. The identity of the contabile is unknown, but may be a guy called Murdolo. Or that’s how things stood two years ago, which is the best information I could find. That’s pretty much it. Theoretically, those three are on the same level…’

‘But obviously,’ said Blume, ‘Tony Megale, who’s the boss’s son and is in charge of armed operations, is going to be way stronger than the other two.’

‘You’d think that, wouldn’t you?’ said Arconti. ‘And you may even be right. But I think the most powerful one is Curmaci. There is a persistent rumour that Tony is not really the old man’s son. Then there is the fact that Agazio Curmaci was promoted straight up to the same level as Tony within a year of arriving in Germany. Shortly after, there was some sort of falling out between them, followed by several years that Curmaci spent in London where it seems he took a degree in history. Old Man Megale remains as ignorant as the goats he used to herd, and Tony, natural son or not, has inherited the ignorance. If I had to guess, I’d say Curmaci was the one who came up with the idea of calling the old man the Prefect. Putting his fancy education to use flattering the boss.’