Conor Fitzgerald - The Namesake

He looked back, and saw the boy was gone. Mostly he felt relieved, but he also found the sudden disappearance and the utter silence that preceded it disturbing.

‘That’s my son.’ She smiled. Her eyetooth was slightly crooked. ‘I have another son upstairs, and if he wakes up I’ll have to go to him. His name is Roberto. Robertino we call him. The little one. My son here, the one you saw…’

Blume ran his mind’s eye over files from what seemed like years ago and plucked the name Ruggiero from the air, and said it to her.

‘That’s right, Ruggiero.’ Her voice softened as she pronounced the name, and she expressed no surprise that he should know it.

Blume felt very pleased with his brain and with the lucidity of his thoughts, then realized, almost with a shock, that the pain had simply floated out of his head. Tentatively, he rolled his head backwards to feel the tension in his neck. Nothing. It was gone, and he felt energy returning to his whole body.

‘How are you feeling?’

Happy was the right response, but he could not really say that. ‘That liquorice seems to have done the trick,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t mention it. Now what am I going to do about having not just a man, but a policeman visiting my house? I hope you’re going to make a call and a fleet of cars will drive up and you’ll arrest me now. Nothing else would look right.’

‘Well… I suppose I could…’

‘And it needs to be made clear that the time we spent together in here was dedicated to discussing what was to be done about the children. I was refusing to leave the house until arrangements had been made for them. In fact, that’s true. I am going to make a phone call to the Megales across the road, and send Roberto over with Ruggiero. Can you make the call to your colleagues, make sure there are a lot of flashing lights and squealing of tyres?’ She rolled up her shirtsleeve, which had fallen down again, and held out her arms. Blume could see tiny blonde hairs against her smooth brown skin. Her wrists were thin, one encircled by a silver bracelet, and her fingers long, one encircled by a golden ring.

She shook her lovely hands at him. ‘Maybe you could put handcuffs on me?’

‘I can’t just arrest you like that. I need a magistrate to bring charges. And I can’t call in the local police. It doesn’t work like that.’

She pulled her arms back and folded them across her breast. ‘So what are you doing here?’

‘I thought you might need help.’

‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘In a moment of weakness, I made a telephone call. But you don’t look like you came either to arrest me or to help me. You’re all alone, aren’t you?’

‘I’m not here to arrest you.’

‘Do you even know what I am talking about?’

‘Yes. You made a call to Magistrate Arconti,’ said Blume. ‘But maybe you had no choice?’

‘Of course I had a choice.’

‘If you have been under pressure or threat from your neighbours, from people around here, I think I can help you understand why. But first I need to ask you this: has your husband returned?’

She shook her head, not in denial but in refusal to answer.

‘I need to ask you this again,’ said Blume. ‘Has your husband returned?’

This time the shake of her head contained a warning.

‘Suppose your husband had returned,’ said Blume. ‘Do you think he could resolve this problem that has arisen? I am referring to your reputation in this community.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Without bloodshed. Because if he could just make sure, without bloodshed, that everyone understood your phone call was made in good faith, then I would be happy with that.’

‘Who knows about it?’

‘Only a few people,’ said Blume. ‘It does not have to become known to anyone else.’

Maria Itria bit her lip as she considered this. ‘What do you want in return?’

‘Nothing. But if you decided to follow up on that phone call and talk to a magistrate, I think it would be a good thing.’

‘Betray my husband, my family?’

‘Talk openly to someone. Even to me. Not to Arconti, he’s leaving the profession. Did you know he has been taken ill?’

‘Poor man, it must be the stress of all those lies he tells about honest people.’

There it was. The flash of cynicism he had been waiting for. But still she sat there, beautiful and seemingly vulnerable, a youthful mother with two children in the house.

‘Did you hear about the murder of Matteo Arconti?’

‘I thought you said he had been taken ill.’

‘Not him. His namesake.’ Blume told her the story, watching her face as he did so. She seemed keen to hear the details, and her eyes shone with interest when he spoke about how they had tracked down the van to the abandoned Falck steelworks in Sesto San Giovanni. She grimaced sympathetically as he described the bullet wounds in Arconti’s body, shook her head sadly as he remembered how Magistrate Arconti had been overcome by apoplexy on the floor of his office.

‘And you think my husband planned all this?’

‘I certainly think he is capable of it.’

‘That is an evasive answer, Commissioner. My husband has so many enemies. Some of them very close. I am still trying to see how my phone call last night to Arconti is supposed to be connected to all this that went before — and to your presence here in my kitchen.’

‘Months ago, Arconti phoned you, and you refused to answer his questions. Do you remember that?’

She nodded.

‘Someone altered the transcript of that call to make it sound like you had made a willing confession. The idea was to force your husband to intervene, to get him into the open, and maybe even to force him to break with the Society.’

‘What Society? Are you implying organized crime? And what sort of evil person would risk the life of a mother and her two children on the strength of a mere suspicion, a misplaced one at that?’ she said, looking straight at him.

Blume returned the gaze. ‘What sort of sick community do you live in where the life of a mother and her children would be at risk because she had spoken to a magistrate of the Republic? What sort of evil peasant culture have you chosen? And don’t deny that you chose it.’

‘My call yesterday was a moment of weakness. That can be suppressed and forgiven. It can be made to have never happened. What I want to know is what sort of person altered my conversation with the magistrate… Hush!’

Blume listened, and heard nothing. He was about to speak when she held up a warning finger and he heard the sound of an infant making a few practice sounds like little coughs, a clearing of the air passages in preparation for the bawling phase, which began almost immediately.

‘He wakes up hungry,’ she said and slipped quickly out of the kitchen, leaving the door ajar, her footsteps thudding quickly up the short flight of stairs.

The speed with which the infant’s cries filled with desperation was remarkable, as was the immediacy with which his lament turned into contented burbles as he was picked up. Blume could hear the mother softly talking and comforting the child as she made her way downstairs again. She stood outside the door for a moment, muttering something to the baby. He heard another voice, presumably the elder boy.

She opened the kitchen door slowly, still leaving it open. Framed in the doorway, cradling the baby, she was a lovely sight, and her expression still seemed tender and comforting as she looked up from the child’s face and across the kitchen at him, but there was an expression of alarm there, too.

‘I see you haven’t moved, Commissioner,’ she said. Then, instead of taking a step forward, towards him and the table, she stepped aside, and pulled the baby up to her shoulder protectively cupping the back of its head, while she pressed it against herself and squeezed her eyes shut. Blume was still smiling at her when a dark shape he had begun to pick up in the corner of his eye came through the door at speed, seeming to grow in size as it moved. The figure moved across the narrow space that separated them, holding a black pistol at the end of an outstretched arm as if it were a smoking pan he intended to dispose of.