Conor Fitzgerald: Fatal Touch

“So I made a mistake,” said Grattapaglia. “But she should have given me a heads-up.”

As Blume’s face darkened, Grattapaglia adopted a less aggressive tone, somewhere between conciliatory and plaintive. “All I’m saying is she doesn’t even lower herself to speak to me.”

“You mean she hasn’t ever come to you looking for advice?”

“No. Never.”

“On what, Salvatore, on how to deal with obstreperous diplomats with direct connections to our administrators?”

Grattapaglia slumped back into his seat, defeated.

The three of them were seated outside a bar on Via Giulia, having crossed the Sisto Bridge. Blume was buying her breakfast because, he insisted, she had won the bet and managed to keep order in the piazza for twenty-five minutes. He was being kind. She had fallen short by ten minutes.

Grattapaglia had ordered peach juice pulp for himself. He now poured the contents of his glass into the cavity behind his bottom teeth, and held the liquid under his tongue as he stared across the table at Caterina.

“Listen, Salvatore,” said Blume. “There is no way we can keep your name out of this, or pretend you were never even there, which might have been one solution. You deserve whatever you get. The thing is, I don’t. You know this is going to be my discipline problem once that diplomat makes his complaint.”

Sovrintendente Grattapaglia swallowed the thick juice and puckered his face as if it had been lemon. “Yes, I see that.”

“We’ll see what we can do to stop this snowballing,” said Blume. “Won’t we, Inspector Mattiola? We’re going to close ranks on this.” He looked at Caterina, who nodded unenthusiastically. She was thinking of Elia. She had called him on the way over the bridge, surreptitiously sliding out her cell phone as Blume and Grattapaglia walked a few paces ahead. Elia reminded her she had promised to watch him play in a five-a-side against San Gaspare del Bufalo that morning, the only team they had a chance of beating in the under-10 tournament.

“Will you be back on time to take me there?” he asked.

“No, darling, I won’t. I’ll be there this afternoon, though. For your swimming.”

“Shall I ask Grandma to drive me, then?”

“Yes, ask her. Score lots of goals.”

“I’m a defender. I don’t score goals.”

“Oh, well, defenders attack sometimes, don’t they?”

“If they’re really good. I’m not.”

“Sure you are. I’ll phone Grandma during the game to see how you’re doing.”

Now Grattapaglia was telling Blume, “I was a bit on edge, you know the way it is. That guy, I don’t know, he got under my skin. The way he looked at me. He had this annoying lisp.”

“He is Spanish, Salvatore. They all lisp.” Blume paused, and closed his eyes like he was suffering from a mild pain. “OK, this is what we’re going to do: anyone comes looking specifically for you, we’re handing you over. Take the discipline, the suspension, or whatever it is. Anyone comes looking for an unidentified aggressive cop, then maybe we play dumb for as long as we can, but only if you give us a good reason. The other day, I told Caterina here to take on some of your paperwork. She did so, right?”

“Some of it, yes,” said Grattapaglia. “Not all that much.”

“I’m glad she didn’t. Because now it’s your turn. Caterina here is going to be busy with this case. She won’t have time for unrelated paperwork. You’ll do it for her. After-hours, without overtime. I also want you to write up a second report for the incident with the Spaniard. Don’t file it. Don’t talk about it. Give it directly to me. Clear? And stop throwing dagger looks at her.”

Grattapaglia moved his gaze from Caterina and stared with hatred at the sparrows hopping and bobbing among crumbs at the next table.

“Now I need you to organize a decent house-to-house.”

Grattapaglia stood up, not looking at either of them.

“One last thing,” said Blume. “Get the bill. And get me another cappuccino while you’re about it. Inspector?”

“Nothing for me, thanks,” said Caterina.

“He’s paying, remember.” Blume gave her a quick wink and an almost imperceptible jerk of the head in Grattapaglia’s direction, encouraging her.

“No, I don’t want anything,” she said.

“Get me a Danish, too, Salvatore. Get a few take-away pastries and coffees for Picasso-face, Di Ricci, and the others. They’ll appreciate it. Tell them they’re from me.”

“Who’s Picasso-face?” asked Caterina.

“Rospo, of course.”

When Grattapaglia had gone, Blume leaned back and turned his face up to the sun. “I need a job that allows me to drink coffee, eat pastries, and soak up the morning warmth. A job without people like Grattapaglia. I’d keep the dead bodies and crime victims, though. I wouldn’t have any perspective on life without them. So, what’s your impression so far?”

“It’s hard to know. There were a lot of distractions. I didn’t get a chance to examine the scene much,” said Caterina.

“That was my decision, Inspector. You need to know how to handle all the peripheral elements, all the distractions, the mistakes, onlookers, traffic, Spaniards with attitude, people like Grattapaglia. It’s hard. The technicians do most of the detail work, because they don’t have the distractions of all the other stuff. But if you don’t have the distractions, then you don’t have the big picture, which is what you need to solve a case. The big picture, by the way, is that there’s often no picture. All the background stuff you dig up is composed mostly of chaos and irrelevance. You need to look at it all the same. Most of it is a big waste of time. Like most people’s lives, really. All I can tell you is just try not to make any case even more complicated by introducing too many of your own interpretations. Did you sketch the scene like I asked?”

Thankful to have something to show for herself at last, Caterina pulled the notebook out of her bag, handed it to Blume who opened it up to the sketch, which she had developed in pencil and ink over two pages. He looked at it in silence for some time, tilting the notebook left and right every so often, nodding his head.

“Did you go to art school?” he said after a while.

Caterina felt a tingling around her throat and knew she was in danger of blushing. “No. I was good in school, but…”

Blume interrupted, “Let me tell you something, you’ve definitely got natural talent, a good hand…” He snapped the notebook shut. “But it’s useless for our purposes.”

Caterina’s smile weakened.

“As art, it’s excellent,” said Blume. “But that’s not our business. Imagine this sketch has just come to your desk. You think, ah, here’s a helpful thing for the investigation, you open it and you find…”

“No measurements. I forgot to put in the measurements,” said Caterina. “I was going to but I got distracted.”

“The measurements are basically the only things that count. Those and the fact that you were there and made them, which is the purpose of the sketch. The photos and the rulers and measuring tape and the video camera capture all the rest. When I do it, I turn everything into rectangles or, if it’s a car, a triangle with circles. Symbols rather than pictures, see?”

He pulled out his own notebook and showed her an assembly of boxes, lines, and squiggles, made even less intelligible by arrows coming out of the boxes pointing to numbers. “The camera killed representational art,” said Blume. “It’s easy to forget stuff, and it’s easy to forget yourself. That is one reason you need to go easy on someone like Grattapaglia. Another reason is that you mustn’t make enemies in the department. Enemies above you are bad enough, enemies below are worse. You’ll find that out. So you are going to have to make up with Grattapaglia somehow or other. Maybe you could admit you should have told him the Spaniard was a diplomat.”