Bitter Remedy (13 page)

If the stool could be propped up against the wall and she could raise her head towards the patch of light, then she could, what, shout for help? Her throat was parched and closing, and she no longer had strength enough to climb. The chute, or air duct or whatever it was, would be too small. But if someone happened to be walking in the garden above just at the right moment and she made noise, she would be saved.

Nadia would surely be looking for her. Just as she had gone looking for Nadia, so Nadia would come looking for her. Nadia was good at finding good people. That was her speciality. Out of the thousands of bad people, Nadia could spot the good ones, and they were not the likeliest. She had found the taxi driver. Called him on her mobile phone, and he had not been on duty that night, yet he had left the warmth of his family and travelled across the city to help them. Two foreign prostitutes.

Five minutes into the taxi ride, Nadia opened the window, and said to Alina, ‘If you have a phone, get rid of it now.’

Alina took out Fyodor’s phone. ‘Like this?’ She held it out the window.

‘Just drop it. If it doesn’t break, it might even be better. Keep them looking hereabouts for you.’

‘What about yours?’

‘This is a never-used phone I have been keeping for this moment,’ said Nadia.

The taxi driver, who knew he was helping them escape, had not even wanted any money. Nadia had left some anyhow, stuffed down the back seat. She called him soon after he had gone, telling him the money was not intended for his passengers, so he had better take it. Alina could hear his protests. He almost sounded angry to be so cunningly rewarded.

‘Why?’ was all Alina could ask about the taxi driver.

Nadia opened her arms in a helpless gesture. ‘Some people are put together so well that they stay good no matter what. Maybe they have to be very stupid to stay so good. The taxi driver? He is a very devout Muslim. Now he can tell his God he saved two women.’

They were standing outside a freight area of the port. The sun was coming up over the Asian side of the city. Alina felt far from saved yet.

‘You need to find a bad man trying to become good,’ Nadia explained. ‘That is where you can find some hope. Someone who has done a very bad thing, but wants to become good. Because someone like that knows what direction he is moving in.’

‘Last night I became a killer . . .’

Nadia raised her hands to her ears. ‘Don’t tell me, Alina. Not now.’

‘I killed a man who wasn’t always . . .’

‘No, Alina!’

She stopped. What had she killed? What had Fyodor been? Soft brown eyes; his almost empty contact list on the phone; the picture on his phone of the tall ships cutting the open seas; the jokes he tried to tell; and, then, the things he did. They would be finding his body soon. They might have found it already.

Nadia had resumed her senior role and taken charge of the money. Now she was showing breast and cash to two men at the heavy-duty dock security-gate, which rolled open. They stepped through and the gate rolled closed. Nadia giggled as she allowed herself to be touched by the older of the two men, and the men giggled as they received their money. Alina stood there, sick with fear and loathing. If they wanted, these two men could simply take all the money from them, and with it their freedom and their lives. They looked like weak men, but physically they were stronger. Nadia seemed to be exchanging telephone numbers with them. She pulled out another wad of notes, smiling. After a few minutes of whispering and pointing, they walked away, the elder one slapping the younger on the shoulder.

Nadia came over, slightly breathless, her eyes, which had seemed so dead the other day, now alert and shining.

‘How much did you give them?’ Alina felt resentment building up. That was her money. Tree money and blood money.

Nadia took off at a brisk pace towards the quayside, ignoring Alina’s question. When Alina caught up, Nadia said, ‘Have you ever heard of Bari?’

‘No, who is he?’

‘It’s not a he, it’s a place. A port in Italy.’ She pointed towards the waterside. ‘There is a ship down there carrying engine parts or chemicals or something.
Corona Apulia
. And we’re going on it.’ She looked at Alina critically, as if assessing the suitability of her attire, then unexpectedly said, ‘A pen? I bet you don’t have a pen. Neither have I. You must repeat and remember any names or numbers I say out loud.’

Nadia pulled her behind the crumbling wall of an outhouse and they stood there in silence as Nadia stared at her phone. To Alina, it felt as if they had been there for hours: long enough to grow cold, long enough to become numb, and long enough to lose hope.

The winter sun was high in the sky and they had been spotted and pointed at by several shipyard workers, though no one had come over to them yet, and still Nadia held the phone, her face screwed up with the determination not to look sick with grief at what was happening. Neither of them had spoken in 40 minutes, but it was clear everything depended on the phone ringing.

And then it did. Nadia had it at her ear before the first trill had ended. She held up a finger to Alina, reminding her to listen.

‘François . . . Taymur. Taymur. OK.’ She nodded at Alina, who started repeating the name to herself. ‘Nitti, Salvatore. Nitti. Thank you. Yes.’

It turned out Taymur, a Lebanese, was the name of the captain of the ship. Nadia tried to boss and shove her way on board just with the name alone, but it was not enough. Two men, one in uniform, the other not, stood with their arms folded and pretended not to hear. Alina wondered why Nadia would not bribe them, and tugged on her arm. In a flash of Romanian, whispered with urgent speed and rage, Nadia told her not to let these two see any money.

‘No good at all in either of them. Just say the captain’s name: Taymur.’

By dint of sullen repetition and no attempt at explanation, Nadia managed to get the one in uniform bored or worried enough to call the captain, who turned out to be younger, taller, and more handsome than seemed possible for a man in charge of such an old ship manned by such dirty brutes as these two. The captain also turned out to be something of a polyglot. Maybe that and his easy-going manner had got him his job.

Now the money did its magic. Speaking in a mixture or Romanian, Turkish, and English, Nadia explained that the captain now had two extra passengers, and that they were expected by Nitti in Bari. The captain managed to look both impressed and unbelieving at the same time, but he allowed them on board, and Nadia handed over what seemed to be almost all the rest of the cash and then, with the captain watching, threw her mobile phone over the side of the ship. They had travelled but 4 kilometres and spent four-fifths of the money. It seemed unlikely they would ever make it.

And so began another sea voyage, the two of them taking turns to lie down on the bunk in a room where no one disturbed them. What Alina saw of the Adriatic and bits of Greece was through a porthole, and when she saw Italy at last, the ship was already slowing and shuddering in the water, and people were shouting and chains were clanking. The city of Bari bobbed gently up and down outside.

The ship had been docked and motionless for several hours before the captain came in. He accompanied them to the gangway and shook their hands, formally, politely, and wished them luck.

‘What about customs? Immigration control?’

The captain pointed down at the water.

‘
Yüzmek . . . nager . . .
swim?’ asked Alina in alarm, and mimed the action with her hands close to her chin. Nadia and the captain laughed. Alina leaned over the bar. Up against the ship, risking getting squeezed between it and the wharf, a man stood in a rubber dinghy looking up at them.

‘Bad turning good,’ Nadia said of the captain as they climbed down a slick, stinking ladder to the dinghy. The trip to the shore cost €400. A bargain. The journey continued.

Alina awoke clutching the wooden stool as if it were a piece of wreckage keeping her afloat. A splinter had inserted itself into her cheek, too. She stood up. There was the grey rectangle again, gliding rightwards as she looked at it but more or less in the same position. With the last of her strength, she dragged the stool until she hit the wall. From here she could not see the patch of relative light. She leaned it against the wall and climbed up. She fell twice. On the third attempt, she managed to keep her balance, and now, at last, she could feel the air again. It smelled of mud, grass, and something very pungent, like leather, sweat, and piss. She stretched up her hand. It was a chute of some sort that receded into the wall, then turned upwards. He fingers touched something. Metal. She hooked a finger around it, then another, then a third, and pulled. The stool fell from below her feet, but now her feet found an indentation in the wall, allowing her to take most of the strain off her arms. She thrust her hand into the space and hung onto what were definitely iron bars of some sort. Even without her full body weight, her arms were tiring, and she did not have the strength to pull the rest of her body up and even if she could, it would not fit through the gap. She thought she could hear movement of some sort and shouted. Nothing replied. Tightening her grip with her left hand, she thrust her right through the gaps in the bars to find out what was behind. She splayed her fingers, feeling around. The smell was unmistakable now, and yet she could not identify it. A savage smell such as came out of her grandmother’s kitchen when she was preparing hare stew.

A scuffling, then a cold, wet, familiar thing touched her outstretched hand, then something snarled and a razor-like pain pierced her fingers, the pain bringing a burst of orange behind her eyes, the brightest colour she had seen since she became locked in. With a scream she pulled away and fell backwards, her head hitting the stone floor with a sharp, final crack. Her eyes rolled back, and for a second it was like she was floating on the sea again.

Theotokos, mother of Christ, looked down, still demurely smiling, still indifferent, as Alina drew her last three breaths.

Chapter 13

The clinic nestled in the lowest part of the town, at the edge of a lozenge-shaped piazza called Largo Minerva, enclosed by buildings on one side and the high Roman walls with diamond-shaped brickwork in
opus reticulatum
on the other. Outside the walls, the land was too steep for any building, and the road travelled down by a series of hairpin turns till it reached Villa Romanelli. Even here, inside the walls, the gradient was so sheer that shallow steps had been cut into the pavement. Outside the walls, there was only road.

Largo Minerva was no more than a car park for the few people who did not have special permits to drive into the historical centre, which, the signs told him, started ten metres up. Everything in the town was built on a slope. A row of houses, white and clean but also crumbly and empty, repaired by European funds after one of the many earth tremors, ran up a street so steep that three doors was all it took to level the attic of the lower house with the basement of the higher.

Blume knew nothing of the history of the town. The defensive wall suggested it had once been keen to repel all comers. In that respect Monterozzo had been ultimately successful, he reflected, since he could not imagine anyone wanting to live here.

Even Dr Bernardini, who spoke fondly of the town during the half-hour conversation that followed his interruption of Blume’s attack on Niki, admitted that it lacked many facilities, including a well-stocked chemist, and that many people who worked in the town, himself included, lived outside it. ‘If you need some prescription drugs, you often need to wait several days,’ he explained. ‘So in your case it makes better sense to go back to Rome directly. I have written up a short description of what happened and the symptoms you displayed,’ he said, handing Blume a piece of paper. ‘Show that to your doctors, and let them decide.’

‘Do I get the idea you want me to leave?’

‘I certainly don’t want you to come to harm while under my care,’ said the doctor. ‘That would be
catastrophique
for my reputation. But you need to mind yourself, too. Attacking Niki was not a good idea. Niki may not look it, but he has powerful connections and some unsavoury friends. What made you hit him anyhow?’

‘Oh, nothing.
Pour encourager les autres
, maybe,’ said Blume.

‘
Dingue! Vous parlez français!
Wait, what “others” are you talking about?’

‘Anyone else who thinks they can act – look, I don’t speak French, doctor. It just sounded like a good phrase in the circumstances.’

‘Will you go to Rome now?’

‘I will,’ promised Blume. ‘I’ll collect my things and be gone.’

He edged his car out of the car park and through the narrow arch that pierced the wall at the end of the piazza. A road sign opposite with red and white arrows on it warned him that if someone had found a good reason to travel up the hill into the town, that person would have right of way.

He drove down to a T-junction that resembled a calligraphic Y for the way the road curved away from him on either side. Anyone arriving from the left would probably be travelling slowly up the hill. The danger therefore came from the blind right, where vehicles would be travelling in fast descent. Steep curving roads had once been a source of enormous enjoyment for him as a young man, and he did not want to meet a younger version of himself now. He pulled on his orange Gucci sunglasses, a strange present from Caterina, and got ready for a drive back to Rome.