Bitter Remedy (20 page)

‘Maybe she learned things about Niki and his business life that he did not want known? Maybe it was some sort of erotic game gone wrong. Maybe she tried to blackmail him. He likes them young, does Niki.’

He had had too much of hypothesizing, he was overtired with thinking. ‘What about Silvana’s father?’ he added, more for the sake of completeness of argument than because he believed it. ‘That quiet gardener has quite a bit of history.’

Nadia continued to watch the wall, but the tears were subsiding.

‘One more thing, Nadia,’ said Blume, beginning to regret the ascendancy of his logic over her hopes, ‘That was Niki who phoned you when I was talking to the
vigile
, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, it was.’

‘Thanks for telling the truth. Now tell me what he said.’

‘He wanted to make sure you don’t get involved in looking for Alina.’

‘
Not
involved,’ said Blume. ‘Until now you – and he – have been saying the opposite.’

He led her gently back to her apartment, asked her again if she intended to stay. She moved in a trance and barely nodded in response to his questions. She began to shiver and he guided her to the sofa, stepped into the bedroom, whipped the duvet off the bed, and covered her with it.

‘I think you should leave,’ he told her.

‘No. Not yet. Don’t you leave either, please? Find out the truth. I’ll act with Niki like nothing has happened.’

‘Can you manage that?’

‘Yes. I’m tough.’

‘OK, then.’ He knew it was wrong to leave her like this, but the hunt was on. Suddenly his being here made sense. Destiny had put him here. He had been dreading the empty hours in Monterozzo, now he feared he might not have long enough.

He took Nadia’s phone number and gave her his. Solicitously, he bent down to pull the duvet over her shoulders, but she pushed it off. ‘I’m not cold any more,’ she said.

He straightened up and found himself looking at a shelf of photographs of Nadia and a young redhead with a slightly upturned nose, high cheekbones, fleshy lips, and a smile that seemed to be at once shy and knowing. Hello, Alina, he thought to himself. He scanned the shelf for a close-up, and found one next to some Orthodox icon of Mary. In this picture, he could make out the freckles on her cheeks and nose, which definitely had a slight bump along its ridge, presumably from the pistol-whipping but plausibly from any one of the many beatings this child had received at the hands of men throughout her brief life. Without saying anything, he took the photograph and left.

Chapter 20

Blume parked the SUV back where they had taken it from, and continued on foot through the steep streets of the town, thankful to see no crowd and no blocked tow-truck when he reached the fateful corner. Indeed, he met no one at all outside, though it was only a little after nine.

He varied his route a little, entering twice into cul-de-sacs, but it was hard to get completely lost in a place so small when his destination was simply its highest point. He was breathless by the time he arrived. Like the rest of the town’s inhabitants, the old woman had gone indoors, and her house, the size of which was hard to determine from outside owing to the narrowness of the street and the general absence of clear divisions in the stone-faced line of buildings, did not even look inhabited, but the warm scent of slow-frying garlic from somewhere inside it told him it was.

Seeing no intercom or bell, he knocked, softly at first, then harder when no one came. He placed his palm on the heavy wood door, pushed gently, and stepped in as the door swung open, his nose appreciating the delicious smell of cooking food before his eyes adjusted to the darkness.

‘
Permesso
?’

He was in a small vestibule filled with the ancient relics of someone who had once led an active life. Cracked leather boots, musty umbrellas, sweaters and coats on hooks. He went through the next door, which led him into a far larger room with unadorned walls, once whitewashed, now greying. To his right was a fusty counter, possibly intended as a reception desk. It was so high that if the old woman had been behind it, she would have been quite invisible. ‘Anyone here?’ he asked of the desk, relieved when no one stepped out from behind it. To his left a staircase went up to a landing before turning back on itself, to the right a door, and from behind the door the smell of cooking. He called out again. Nothing, but he heard a clink of metal on metal, the sound of a saucepan being placed on the stove. He was ravenous.

How could he open the door without terrifying the elderly woman? He knocked on it.

‘Come in.’

He pulled the door open and walked into an unexpectedly large kitchen, with a ceiling as high as three of his apartments stacked on top of each other. The walls were lined with enough copper pans to feed an army, all of them perfectly polished. The lighting was modern, and the work surfaces a mixture of old wood and modern steel. The large kitchen was redolent of unexpected wealth as well as food.

‘What’s cooking?’ he asked hopefully.

‘Your dinner. I expect you down in fifteen minutes. We don’t usually eat too late in this house,’ she said, without taking her eye from the frying pan and steaming pot. The stove was too high for her, and she was standing on a plastic step stool such as children use to reach the toilet. She had put on a white apron over her black dress and had perched glasses, which were hopelessly steamed up, on the end of her nose.

‘We?’

‘Yes, you and I.’ She stood down, took off her glasses, and peered in his direction, as if checking to see if she was talking to the right person. ‘Go back through that door, up the steps all the way to the last room. It’s open. The sheets are fresh and the blanket is clean, but the bed is not made. You’ll have to do that yourself. I don’t make beds, and I dismissed the girl.’

‘What girl?’

‘The one who made the beds and cleaned. That was several years ago. I have been managing perfectly well on my own since then. Now you don’t believe me that the linen is fresh, but I brought it up myself an hour ago and placed it on the bed. I hope you like the smell of lavender. The front door key is on top of the sheets. I may not always be in or awake when you come in.’

‘You knew I was coming back?’

She showed her pearly teeth. ‘Telepathy.’

‘Oh. I see.’

‘God, don’t be so stupid, man. The young
vigile
came up here with your suitcase, which you left in some car, which he wanted to tell me all about for some reason. I had him take it up to your room. Telepathy, really, what do you take me for? I have no truck with superstition. Despite my age, I am not even a religious bigot – or a witch. I do believe in ghosts, mind. That’s inevitable when you live in this house. I notice you did not ask the price, which is €45 per night, by the way.’

‘They told me you are a princess.’

She mockingly knighted herself with the wooden spatula. ‘Princess. Well, it’s nice to be appreciated.’ She softened the R, as they did up in Piedmont, as in France. It sounded forced to his ear. ‘Even if I know they use it to insult me. What else would you expect in miserable Monterozzo?’

Montechwozzo
. If not a princess, her accent certainly had aristocratic notes to it.

‘Cruel peasant mentality,’ she continued. ‘If you put crabs in a bucket, none ever escapes because the others pull him down. That is what they are like here. The information I have received is that you are a policeman who has been thrown out of the force as a result of some terrible scandal, and are now wandering about the town, sticking your nose into everyone’s business, hanging out with go-go dancers, and trying to seduce the little girl with that ridiculous name . . .’

‘Silvana?’

‘Exactly!’

‘You hear a lot from up here.’

‘News travels up, socially and geographically.’

The princess, if that’s what she was, giggled like a little girl, and covered her mouth with her left hand, still in a flesh-toned glove, which must have been custom-made because she was missing her ring finger. She saw him notice and waggled her remaining fingers at him reprovingly. ‘Hurry up. Just wash your hands and come straight down again. I will not dine on cold pasta for your sake.’

The top floor was six flights up, but Blume, looking forward to dinner and thinking of how he would manage his investigation of Niki, found his energy seemed to be increasing the more he climbed. He could feel his heart thumping away. It was noisy but seemed to be fluttering happily rather than hammering. His chest felt light, his head, too, but crystalline, as if his brain fluid had been replaced by carbonated water.

He was therefore disappointed when he finally reached the top floor to see the long corridor tilt slightly on its axis, like some sort of fairground attraction, and even more surprised to find his knees felt weak, and that the blood pounding in his ears was deafening and painful. A great sense of fatigue shoved away the energy of a few seconds ago. He bent down until the dizziness passed, and, since he often felt he was under some sort of numinous observation and did not want even an imaginary being to see him suddenly so weak, pretended to be interested in the granite and marble composite of the floor, which was dull and old, though he could see how it would shine with a bit of treatment. All the pinks and reds and speckles of green would sparkle.

He took a shot of the migraine nasal spray he kept in his jacket pocket, but even before the medicine had time to work, the pain passed and the elation returned. He walked down the corridor, his legs more cautious than his freedom-loving mind. He searched for a song he might sing, just to check if he was breathless. Something told him he was. He could not think of a song. The corridors tilted back again. It was like walking down a ship’s galley in a storm, but without the seasickness.

Blume entered the small room, monastic in its sparseness. The bed, which took up about half the space, was heaped with multicoloured blankets. A religious icon on the whitewashed wall above the bed was the only decoration. A dresser with an oval mirror sat to the left of the window. A tiny bathroom was off to the right. The floor was white tiled and spotless. The clean sheets and blankets on the unmade bed seemed excessive for the time of year, but none of the heat from outside seemed to penetrate, and the rectangle of blue sky visible through the narrow window at the end of the room looked cold. He went over to the window and pressed his forehead against the glass, and was rewarded with a riot of descending rooftops with red and yellow tiles. The walls of the houses were orange in the setting sun, and seemed far warmer than top room in which he now stood.

From his suitcase he retrieved his phone charger and found a socket behind the bed. He washed his hands in the basin, splashed some water on his face, less to wash himself than to prepare for the call he now made.

‘Caterina?’

‘You! How’s your flower-power course going?’

How the hell had she worked that out?

‘Great. They make us turn off our phones. It’s sort of a detox spiritual thing.’

‘You must be the star pupil then, since you never turn it on.’

‘You know how it is. Being on call all the time is so much part of the job, it’s important to switch off when I’m on leave.’

‘When are you coming back?’

‘I took indefinite leave, so maybe a few months?’

‘I meant when are you coming back to Rome?’

‘Oh. I don’t know: a day or two. Three? Do you want me to visit when I do?’

‘You should know the answer to that.’

Caterina was forever saying things like that to him. Things that were self-evident to her were mysterious to him. Maybe, as she said, he should know, but he didn’t; whereas to her it was so obvious as not to merit a response. He wondered whether the right answer was yes or no. Whatever it was, he was not going to walk into the trap of committing himself to either.

‘I was just checking in.’

‘After three weeks’ silence.’

‘Is it that long? I think I might have tried to call last week.’

‘I think it might have shown up on my phone if you had.’

He peered out over the rooftops. Beyond the last of them the mountain fell away, and below that stretched the garden, part of which would now be completely dark in the shadow of the cliff.

‘Alec. Are you OK there? You sound far away. You haven’t left the country or something? You’d be capable of that.’

‘I’m fine. How’s Alessia?’

‘There you go changing the subject,’ said Caterina, but he heard her voice soften. She was like one of those teachers who knew when their students were trying to distract them from the lesson, but couldn’t help themselves all the same. ‘Little Miss is behaving very strangely this evening.’

‘What’s wrong with her?’ said Blume.

‘Nothing’s wrong, she’s actually sleeping. That’s what’s strange.’

‘I hope I didn’t wake her with my call.’

‘Of course not. I am glad you called at last,’ she said.

‘I am glad I called, too. Actually, now that I think about it, I was wondering if you could do me a favour.’

She had a special way with her silent pauses, which seemed to involve some mysterious slowing down of time. Caterina could create a universe that had a life-cycle of two seconds yet the capacity to hold an infinity of recrimination. When she spoke again, her voice was flat. ‘A favour.’