Conor Fitzgerald - The Namesake

Blume watched in amazement as the dirty thug in front of him blushed modestly and crossed one foot over the other in embarrassment.

‘I know you don’t like to be praised, Pietro,’ said Curmaci, ‘but sometimes praise is so evidently merited that to refuse to listen to it is like asking for it twice.’ Curmaci waved a hand as if presenting Pietro onstage. ‘This man protected Tony until he was seventeen. He lived through scandals brought into the family through his brother. When Domenico Megale invited Tony to Germany instead of Pietro, they said it was because Tony had brought too much attention and trouble to the family. When Tony married, Pietro was his best man. When Tony’s wife died leaving an infant behind in whom Tony showed no interest, it was Pietro and his wife Rosa who stepped in and raised the child. I tell you all this, Commissioner Alec Blume, because you seem to have an unnatural interest in the private affairs of our families. I have been keeping an eye on you ever since Arconti recruited you.’

‘He’s a magistrate with jurisdiction over my ward. He does not need to “recruit” police, all he has to do is order.’

‘Oh, he recruited you, all right. He brought you round to his way of seeing things, kept you on the case well after it left your scope of competence, got you looking into me and my affairs. Then he passed you on to other people, and here you are. Pietro, try not to let Commissioner Blume fall down again or we’ll never get there.’

After twenty minutes’ walking, with the light finally dimming and the air growing colder, they came to a lake, bright blue in the middle but scummy green along its edges where the water was teeming and plopping with thousands of frogs. Newts and salamanders slipped into rather than out of view as they approached, little reptile spectators interested in the show. Where the green scum stopped and the water cleared, fat black fish swam lazily, ignoring the millions of water-skating insects above them. Blume had never seen so much life concentrated in so small an area. They followed the edge of the lake, Blume trying to anticipate where his captor behind him wanted to go, since he had once again lost sight of Curmaci.

He had now also lost sight of the water, which was hidden behind and below banks of reeds, sedge grass and cattails with insects feeding off their sausage-like heads that nodded in the slight wind. He imagined parting the reeds, and peering down into the water, the colour of a dark beer.

It was hard to credit his own feelings, but Blume was still enjoying the absence of his headache, and the idea of a bullet tearing through his skull seemed such a waste. Finally, they caught up with Curmaci, who was standing in a field of asphodels meticulously picking pollen and burrs off his clothes. As they arrived, he started pulling at a translucent piece of corrugated green plastic like a conscientious hiker trying to clean up the mess left by others. He flipped the plastic neatly over to reveal an opening in the ground out of which the two uprights of a wooden ladder barely protruded. Pietro pushed Blume forward towards the pit that looked like a waterless well. The ladder descending into it had a dozen or so rungs. The important thing for Blume at that moment was that the cavity was too deep, too narrow and too carefully constructed to be a grave.

Curmaci nodded amicably at Blume. ‘There are dozens of these in this area alone, thousands in the region, I would say. Some have lighting and running water, sewage, dehumidifiers, all sorts of amenities. This one has none of those things, but it does have a certain history.’

‘Did some teenage kidnapping victim from the north spend his last days starving to death in here back in the ’80s?’ asked Blume.

‘For a kidnap victim, you’d want to go farther back, to the ’70s,’ said Curmaci, displaying no sign of anger at Blume’s provocation. ‘But this dates from the ’20s, no less. It was a refuge for bandits. It’s an entrance to an underground cave, see?’ He pointed, and Blume looked again into the pit at the bottom of which he now saw the narrow opening of a tunnel high enough for a child to walk into.

‘As I say, it’s got no amenities,’ said Curmaci. ‘The access corridor at the bottom is long and dark, and it gets lower in the middle, where you have to get down on your knees and crawl. There’s been some subsidence in there, too. You get to be a police mole.’

‘Very funny.’

‘It opens up again almost immediately afterward. I’ll be in front, Pietro behind. Pietro, unbind his hands.’

Pietro gave a careless pull at the loose strings behind Blume’s back, which fell away. Curmaci plucked at the knee of his expensive slacks. ‘I am definitely not dressed for this. That should tell you how unplanned this is, right, Pietro?’

‘What is all unplanned?’ asked Blume, but Curmaci had stepped onto the ladder and was out of sight. Two shotgun barrels prodded him in the back and Blume, even though he realized he was more afraid of being buried alive than being shot dead, nonetheless found himself clambering down the rungs, feeling his legs shake with adrenalin, or just from exhaustion. The air was immediately damp and earthy, and the rocks crumbled at his touch. The floor of the pit was only about three metres below ground, but the walls were too smooth to climb. He looked up at the sky and tilted back his head to allow the sunlight to flood his whole face for a moment before the shadow of Pietro cut it off. He ducked his head and went beneath the ground. The bottom of the pit, which had looked soft and earthy from above, turned out to be formed of a flat rock with only a thin layer of soil, like a dirty flagstone. The floor sloped gently towards the mouth of the tunnel into which Curmaci, dressed in his city clothes, had already gone, and with him the feeble light of the mobile phone, which was all he was using to light his way. Blume considered resisting, but the giant with the shotgun literally had the drop on him and blocked out all light and thoughts of escape as he filled the gap and, to make matters worse, closed the green trapdoor. Blume had no choice but to stoop and enter the tunnel, where it was immediately completely black.

Breathing through his nose to keep calm, resisting the temptation to open his mouth and gulp down extra oxygen because he knew panic would set in if that failed to work, he allowed the sloping roof to push him closer and closer to the floor. There was no light, no sign of anyone before him or behind him, and the only sound was his own breathing and grunts. The rocky roof now came so low that he was forced on to his hands and knees. To calm himself, he started counting backwards, randomly choosing seventeen as the starting point, and subtracting one number for every two shuffles forward of his knees. If he reached zero and the tunnel had not widened — he did not want to think about it. Maybe he should have started at thirty. His forehead hit a wall of stone.

‘Oh Christ.’ Being killed in the open air with the sound of the gunshot racing across the open waters of the lake was what he had wanted, not this. He was at a dead end. Although impossible to do so, he must somehow have taken a wrong turn. He pushed himself backwards, and his knees became wedged against each other, and the walls of the tunnel pushed slowly in, he could feel them moving.

Stuck! Like a rat in a sealed pipe. He could not go backwards!

Without his mind having anything to do with it, his mouth opened in a moan. Then something pushed at him from behind. It was the animal with the shotgun, which meant that he had not taken a wrong turning, but this was worse, for now he would be pushed and crushed against the rock face by the oversized brute to his rear. Blume’s mouth opened again, and this time he tasted the slight movement of air from in front of him. Where had Curmaci gone? He understood his forehead had hit a ledge, not a full wall, and that the air and now also a sheen were coming from directly in front of him, where Curmaci was using his telephone to light his way. He ducked his head below the ledge, and plunged in, resolving to bludgeon himself to death against the sides if he became stuck. He squeezed deeper in, and found he could no longer lift his legs high enough to give his feet purchase. Using his stomach muscles, he wriggled forwards, stretched out his arms, and dug his fingers into the hard ground. Finding a little bit of lateral space, he started using his arms and shoulders in a sort of swimming stroke, and effected an agonizing front crawl.