Bitter Remedy (18 page)

Blume was thinking along other lines. ‘Maybe Niki does not want to ask for them, because to do so would prove that he knows Alina did not have them with her. And the only way he could know that is if he was there when she disappeared.’

Nadia’s eyes dimmed as the truth of this reasoning dawned.

‘In other words,’ said Blume, ‘if she had not run away because of whatever happened in Turkey, I would say Niki is behind your friend’s disappearance. Do you need help, Nadia? I can get you away from here if you want. Before I go after Niki. Right this moment.’

‘You? You don’t even have a car.’

‘I can call in help – how do you know about my car?’

‘I heard Niki. He was laughing on the phone to that mechanic. It was about you and your car. But I don’t need to run away. I need to know what happened to my best friend.’

‘I am not on duty. I don’t even have a weapon. You need to report this.’

‘But you are a specialist, no? You are very good at your job.’

‘Praising me, are you? We men just lap it up.’

Nadia shook her head, impatiently dismissing his attempt to be facetious. ‘They are worried about something. The old man, Domenico, he came round to Niki’s place last night, and they talked and afterwards Niki was tense and shouting at everyone. I have never seen the old man there before. So it must be something new, and you’re the only new thing here. Please say you’ll help.’

Chapter 18

Indistinct sounds of people shouting floated up from somewhere below. Blume glanced enquiringly at Nadia only to catch her looking at him with the same questioning look.

‘That’s the most noise I have heard at one time since I came here,’ he told her.

They abandoned their table and went around the corner to see. A group of around twenty people were standing at the next corner down, many of them shouting what seemed to be instructions.

‘A religious pageant?’ wondered Blume, though as he said it he saw the movement and shape of the crowd was too haphazard for a procession.

‘They are all men,’ observed Nadia. ‘So it won’t be anything important.’

Whatever the focus of attention was, it was out of sight behind a sharp corner at the end of the road. Some old men were to be seen standing at the corner waving their arms, and throwing their hands to heaven. The bar boy came out and looked wistfully at the fun, then returned inside to the till.

Without needing to ask each other, he and Nadia walked down to join the group. Everyone was enjoying himself immensely, none so much as those pretending to be thoroughly disgusted by the scene, which was of a yellow tow-truck that had become trapped on a hairpin curve on the narrow street.

The driver had manoeuvred his vehicle into a perfect snooker, with the front of the cab touching a wall on one house, the back lodged firmly into the wall of another. To complete the totality of the impasse, the front right wheel had slipped into a rainwater channel running down the side of the road. The cab was empty and the driver, visible in his reflective jacket, was in the middle of the crowd, throwing contemptuous open-palm gestures at the narrow street, at the pointless road sign that warned of a hairpin turn, at the unfair rut in which the wheel of his truck was now stuck. A puttering sound was heard as a man with no helmet on his bald head came travelling downhill on his scooter. He stopped, and by means of extensive use of his squawking horn, let it be universally known that the obstacle was so complete that not even a scooter could pass. From behind the truck came a car whose driver confirmed in oaths that the situation from below was just as bad. A car behind that joined in, and now women appeared at windows to shout
Basta! E mamma mia!
and
Ch’è questo baccano?

Blume stepped back against the wall as Alfredo the mechanic and his oil-flecked son came down the road. Alfredo glanced at Blume and Nadia standing in the shadows, and gave a friendly nod. When he arrived on the scene, Alfredo, rolling up his wrinkles into the impressive frown of a true expert, examined the front of the truck, and peered for a while at the fender, then, hands on hips, looked at the back of the truck. He cracked his knuckles and kicked the tyres. The
vigili
arrived, Fabio and the unnamed woman with the unfriendly glasses, and parked their car with the flashing light behind the scooter, whose driver had lifted into its kickstand without turning off the engine. Nadia nudged Blume conspiratorially.

‘Is this something to do with you?’ she asked him.

‘What makes you think that?’

‘The way you are hanging back, trying to stand in the shadow.’

Blume moved closer and stood in the sunlight.

For a minute or two, the
vigili
created a channel through the crowd, waving their arms and giving instructions, but they, too, saw the impossibility of the situation, and were swallowed up in the general hubbub. They reappeared soon after, busy examining the documents of the driver of the tow-truck. They handed back the papers. Everything, apart from the entire situation, seemed to be in order. The
vigilessa
, showing initiative and taking advantage of her thinness, climbed into the tow-truck cab, then slipped out the narrow gap between the other door and wall, and disappeared. Blume assumed she had gone to calm the motorists below, who, to judge from the noise, had gathered in strength and number. Children, which he had thought were completely lacking from the town, now appeared.

Fabio the
vigile
was now examining a new piece of paper that seemed to contain some quite remarkable information. He handed it back to the driver, then asked for it back, and passed it to Alfredo, who read it and handed it into the crowd for general inspection. Heads began turning in Blume’s direction. Straightening his uniform and adopting a stern manner, Fabio, accompanied by the driver and several witnesses, approached him.

Fabio indicated the driver, a deeply tanned man with a crew cut who was staring very hard at Blume, and said, ‘This gentleman alleges . . .’

He got no further, for the truck driver took great exception to the word ‘alleges’, and eventually had to be escorted back into the crowd before he committed an outrage on a public official, or perhaps two, counting Blume. Nadia was openly enjoying herself at his expense now, but Blume felt glad to have her beside him anyhow. Fabio affected not to understand or believe that Blume had really ordered an outside tow-truck to storm his town and make away with a car that was already safe in the shop of his friend Alfredo, an excellent and honest mechanic. Fabio was thin-lipped and regretful of the generous impulse that had prevented him from impounding Blume’s car. As the sheer spitefulness of Blume’s gambit dawned on him, his manner became increasingly frosty. The informal ‘tu’ became ‘Lei’ and he called up Alfredo to witness his chastisement of the arrogant Roman policeman.

‘Everyone from around here knows that a vehicle that size cannot make it to the top of the town,’ said Fabio. ‘Isn’t that right, Alfie?’

Alfredo, who seemed not the least put out, nodded.

‘Not everyone, apparently,’ said Blume nodding at the driver, who now sat in his cab, arms folded, refusing to react to the exhortations of the crowd to make another attempt.

‘That’s because,’ hissed Fabio, ‘he is not from around here. You called in people who don’t know
anything
about Monterozzo.’ He glared at Nadia to make sure she knew she belonged to the group of foreign outcasts.

Alfredo, whom, Blume was coming to realize, was a thoroughly decent chap, as slow to take offence as he was to fix a car, touched Fabio’s elbow. ‘It’s OK. I’ll get it off the corner.’

Fabio shook his head despairingly. ‘This is one of the worst I’ve seen.’

‘It’s all right.’ Alfredo spoke comfortingly, ‘We need to take the air out of the tyres on the left side. Get a wooden ramp, then we use some chains and my car. Same way,’ he looked at Blume with the mildest of reproach, ‘as we tow anything in this town.’

‘I don’t think we are much help here,’ said Blume, still keen to be associated with Nadia.

‘You certainly are not.’

‘So we may as well go.’ He forgot to inflect his voice, so that what he had intended as a request for permission came out as a statement of defiance. He was about to rectify with an ‘if that’s all right with you,’ but Fabio was too quick for him and had already taken grave offence.

‘You can’t just walk away! You’ll have to settle with the driver and his company for a start.’ Fabio reached for his pocketbook. ‘You may well be liable for any damage done to those buildings. And I would ask you, Signorina, to stop smirking like that.’

Nadia covered her mouth, but her smile was wider than her hand.

The crowd was drifting away now, because only so much fun can be had looking at a stuck truck, and the noisy drivers blocked behind had either found alternative routes or been cowed into silence by the
vigilessa
with the black glasses.

‘As I, too, am a public official and a good citizen,’ said Blume, ‘I’ll report to you in the morning, and we can settle all this. If I have to pay something, then I will.’

Fabio seemed mollified, then suspicious. ‘Where are you staying?’ His eyes wandered over to Nadia, and he gave Blume an insinuating, accusing look. ‘I didn’t know you were staying.’

‘I have no choice. The road is blocked and my car is in his shop.’

Alfredo interrupted the blackening of another cigarette to confirm. ‘Next Tuesday at the latest,’ he assured Blume. ‘But no sooner,’ he warned Fabio. He lit his limp cigarette and wandered off in the direction of the tow-truck.

‘There is a place at the very top of the town, an old woman, very thin, black dress, does bird imitations?’

Fabio rubbed his chin. ‘You’re talking about the princess. I didn’t know about the bird imitations.’

‘Princess?’ asked Blume, but Fabio ignored him. He had other objections to make. ‘She doesn’t have any authorization, so if anything happens to you there, you won’t have insurance.’

‘If anything happens?’ Blume was only half listening to the
vigile
. Nadia had stepped back a few metres and had cupped her hand to her ear, taking a phone call she wanted to hide from him.

‘Like a beam falling on your head or something. Not because Flavia would harm anyone. She’s mad but harmless.’ Fabio shook his head sadly, then stamped his foot in irritation at the way his natural friendliness kept breaking out and betraying him. ‘I could stop you from going there, you know,’ he said importantly. ‘But I am prepared to turn a blind eye in view of the fact that I think you should stay here to answer for the damages you have caused, and to pay Alfredo.’

‘Good,’ said Blume. ‘If you need me, that’s where I’ll be. If the driver down there has anything to say, he has my phone number, or someone in his office does. Alfredo has my car and you have my address. Can I go now?’

Fabio looked for faults in the logic and found none. He wanted to say something to or about Nadia, but his attention was being drawn down the road again to where the
vigilessa
had reappeared, and raised voices suggested that the driver did not like Alfredo’s plan for his tyres.

Chapter 19

‘I see no sign of the heavies,’ said Blume. ‘Mission accomplished, I suppose.’

‘I had nothing to do with that,’ said Nadia. ‘They must have followed me.’

‘And got a few photos of us together.’

‘So what? Am I so compromising for your honour, Commissioner?’

‘I can’t work out what’s the deal between you and Niki.’

‘Neither can I,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing,’ she turned away from him. Something in the phone call she had taken a few minutes earlier had changed her attitude, and as she became cooler towards him again, he found himself thinking more lucidly, though he could feel the drinks he had had working against clarity.

Both Niki and Nadia had now asked him for help, and he sensed a trap. He wanted to believe Nadia, wanted to disbelieve Niki, but they were both saying much the same thing: Alina had gone. And thanks to Nadia’s story of her arrival, bowdlerized though it may have been, he felt some attachment to Alina. She was more than just a name.

‘Let me walk you to your car,’ he said. ‘You have a car, right?’

‘Down there, yes. We have to squeeze past your truck to get to it.’

Blume did not want to walk the gauntlet of the remaining spectators gathered around the truck, which Alfredo had, by some miracle of persistence and geometry, managed to manoeuvre into a position from which escape was, if not imminent, at least conceivable. ‘Is there another way?’

‘We could walk up the street a bit, then down a different one, and around. It’s roundabout, but not too far,’ said Nadia, who had already set out with long strides even as she was describing the route.

Blume discovered that his companion was even better than he at blanking people out. She walked through several disapproving stares from the few people they met, moving at an unflagging pace through the streets to the bottom of the town where sensible people parked their cars. He turned round several times to stare back at the people watching them go, but Nadia looked straight ahead and never glanced back. Lot’s wife would have been safe with her.