Conor Fitzgerald - Fatal Touch

“I was mentioning it in front of you, not ‘people,’ ” she said.

He noticed her face was pale, and her eyes so hollow and shadowed from tiredness that it looked like she had bruises. “Are you OK?”

Caterina went across the room and sat down heavily on a broken armchair that Blume had relegated to the corner. “I’m exhausted,” she said. “I was reading the notebooks, and I have been thinking about Manuela and Pistoia. I want to ask you a favor. I was thinking of going to Pistoia tomorrow morning. Early. Just to settle this thing in my mind.”

“No,” said Blume. “We are permanently understaffed, we have the Krishnamachari case, the muggings, and Grattapaglia is going to be suspended. You should know better than to ask for special favors.”

“I have the first half of the day off tomorrow.”

“Lucky you. You don’t want to waste it, then. Spend it with Elia. Look, I’ll make a few calls. We’ll work out this mystery about Manuela’s tax code.”

“If you’re going to make some calls, I’d prefer you got in contact with our colleagues in Pistoia to let them know I’m coming. No overtime claims, of course. I’ll even pay the train ticket.”

“No, keep the receipt. We’ll find a way of reimbursing the cost even if… Well, we would if you were going, but you’re not.”

“I know you didn’t read up on my background thoroughly, but did you at least read about my biggest success in Immigration Affairs three years ago?”

“The bust of the Croatian human-trafficking ring?” said Blume. “That was good police work. Good teamwork. Of course I read about it.”

“Let me tell you how it started,” said Caterina. “A team had been watching an apartment, not far from where I live, as it happened, hoping to establish a link between two Croats who lived there and an Albanian arms smuggler, but no contact was made. After three days, they were winding down the surveillance of the house as yielding no hard evidence. We had resigned ourselves to relying on phone interceptions, but they kept switching numbers and the magistrate was tired of issuing decrees to allow us to tap new SIM cards. I was off duty, a few streets from the apartment block they had been watching, on my way to pick up Elia. My eye was drawn to a silver-gray BMW. I can’t remember the model, but it had that new look to it, the sort of patina that makes some people want to score it with a key.

“As I passed, I noticed, almost without looking, that the license plate at the back was slightly bent and covered in dead insects, and I walked on a few steps, but I had this feeling, like when something has been moved from where you put it. No, that’s not right. It’s more like a tiny shock of recognition, except you don’t know what you’ve recognized.”

“I know the feeling,” said Blume.

“The dirty license plate, slightly bent at the edges, did not belong on a polished BMW. I’m sure you and many others would have spotted it immediately, but for me it was a revelation. A revelation that I might be suited to the job, that I had not fallen victim to the sort of stupidity that comes with hating your work. It was a good feeling. The plate was a DX registration, which corresponded with the age of the car more or less, but I went over and had a look. The edges of the plate were very slightly crumpled inwards, like dog-ears on a book. It’s the sort of damage that small bumps, parking, and so on leave on your front license plate, but not on the back. Also, there was no corresponding damage to the bodywork. It looked like an old front license plate had been put on the back. I called in the number then and there. It turns out the plate was registered to a different vehicle belonging to someone in Turin, and that a replacement request, accompanied by a module reporting the theft of the originals, had just been made to the vehicle licensing authority. The surveillance team was there in half an hour, and, well, it was the Albanian. He was visiting the Croats just after the surveillance had been called off. It was the beginning of the takedown of the gang.”

Blume nodded. “I get it. You’ve got some sort of similar feeling about Manuela and her identity and that tax code.”

“I know it sounds silly…”

“No. You’re dead right. It is what we do. The thing is…” He made a fist of his hand and knocked it slowly and repeatedly against his chin. “Let me think… You’re off duty tomorrow morning, so it’s not like… Look, don’t bother mentioning your trip to people here. Just keep the whole notebook thing quiet for a few days, or until we have a bit more breathing space.”

“Which means never.”

“I don’t want them to think I’m wasting personnel, and I’ve sort of been told not to pursue the Treacy investigation. But you are right to want to follow an instinct. I’ll do as you ask. I’ll call ahead to Pistoia. When shall I say you’ll be there?”

“8:15 tomorrow morning. There’s a train leaves Termini at 5:45.”

“You’ve already checked the timetables, I see.”

“Yes,” said Caterina. She pulled out a printout from her bag. “Actually, I’ve already bought the ticket.”

After phoning pistoia and telling them about Caterina’s imminent arrival and being assured she would receive every courtesy, Blume returned home where he spent the next few hours reading Treacy’s third volume, which evidently formed part of a textbook for artists that he was planning to write. Blume found it technical and rather dull, and was pleased to be able to set it aside as irrelevant. Taking notes, he worked his way through the first volume again until dinner. Then he boiled rice, oversalting the water, added oil and parmesan, and ate directly from the pot, as he began rereading the second volume.

Night stole up on him, and he realized he had been enjoying the work more than he had expected. He particularly enjoyed its potential for discomfiting the Colonel, John Nightingale and, he had to admit it, Kristin, Greg, and the rest of them at the embassy. Not that she or anyone there had any reason to worry about Treacy’s ancient memories, but her job was to anticipate this sort of stuff, to brief and forewarn and minimize the possibility that some journalist might someday ask an official an unexpected question. Fat chance. Investigative journalism had been dead for more than a decade. But giving Kristin the notebooks or even just some details of what was in them was a favor he could do for her, and he liked to be in a position to do her favors.

Before bed, he put Treacy’s memoirs in the study, filling the small space left by the three empty notebooks he had given to Greg.

The Monday morning meeting on the Krishnamachari killing was at 10 o’clock in the conference room with its horseshoe-shaped arrangement of desks. When he arrived, there were already eight people in the room, including the magistrate assigned to the case. Blume chose a place in the midst of the ranks, a demotic touch that unsettled some of his superiors, yet failed to connect him to his men. He knew it wasn’t working, but he had decided that the principle was sound, and so he stayed there, making the people around him uncomfortable. What he needed was someone like Paoloni to tell him to fuck off back to the top of the table where he belonged.

The meeting began. Inspector Rosario Panebianco stood up, touched his lips to indicate he wanted less noise before speaking. “It was not a hit-and-run accident. It was deliberate,” he began. “The victim is.. let me see how you say this name… Krishnamachari, an Indian national, had a store in a district where there is no real Indian community to turn to. An isolated place just off Via Pamphili on a dirty little street called Via Busiri Vici. He was on his own there all day. An easy target. He had two children to support. He came under pressure to pay a pizzo of ten percent of turnover, and reported it. This was last year.”