Bitter Remedy (21 page)

‘I’d just like to check out something. Have you got a pen?’

‘What do you want?’

Blume gave her Niki’s name, address, approximate age. ‘I think he’s from Molfetta.’ He thought for a moment before supplying her also with Domenico Greco’s name.

‘Are these friends you met among the flowers?’

‘You could say that.’

‘Friends with criminal records, I am guessing. And, tell me, are they there now with you?’

‘No.’

‘And I get these files on what grounds?’

‘I was thinking about that. Go to Magistrate Alice Saraceno, she likes me.’

‘Yes, she does, doesn’t she?’

Blume did not rise to the bait. ‘Ask her from me, please.’

‘She likes you that much?’

‘Saraceno used to work with a magistrate called Della Valle, whom she loathed. I remember her mentioning Della Valle was an investigating magistrate in this district. It’s a long shot, but you could suggest I may have something that might embarrass him.’

‘And this is your idea of relaxation therapy?’

‘Please?’

‘Alec, do you actually know what “extended leave” means? Do you know how dangerous is it to act on your own? And, do I need to say this, a suspended cop acting without the instruction of a magistrate is about the most effective way of rendering everything he touches inadmissible as evidence in court and getting himself into disciplinary trouble. More to the point, what the hell are you doing?’

‘Just passing the time. I got a bit bored with the herbal bliss and stuff.’

‘What is this about?’

‘Well, if you find out some background, maybe you’ll get a good idea and we’ll have some common ground on which to start a conversation about these two. Now there is, in fact, another little favour.’

She greeted this, too, with silence.

‘They found out I was a policeman, and I promised I’d look into something. Just for appearances, you understand.’

‘I don’t understand, no. Who are “they” and what is this other favour?’

Blume remembered he was supposed to have gone down to dinner ages ago, and tried to summarize the situation as quickly as he could, but it still took some time.

‘So,’ said Caterina slowly, when he had finished, ‘there is a missing Romanian girl who is connected to this Niki, who you think is a criminal of some sort. And all this has to with Bach herbal remedies how?’

‘Niki is a criminal. A minor one, maybe, but pimping is the sort of thing that brings you into contact with serious criminals.’

‘You are absolutely sure he is a pimp?’

‘I don’t like him.’

‘Oh, I see. You don’t
like
him. That’s different then. Maybe you feel he’s not nice enough to . . . let me see . . .’ She checked, or made a show of checking back in her notes, ‘Silvana? The young woman who’s teaching you about the birds and the bees or Nadia the dancer? And you want me to do what, exactly, about the disappearance of this Alina Paulescu?’

‘You still have contacts in the Department for International Cooperation from back when you worked in Immigration Affairs, right?’ He left the room and started making his way down the stairs.

‘Call in SCIP for this? It’s an interforce agency, Alec. Special favours get noticed. And unlike you, I have limits. Do you expect me to put out an Interpol yellow notice?’

‘If you don’t want to help me, forget it,’ he said.

‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t. Have you found someone, Alec? Part of me won’t mind if the answer is yes, but please don’t lie.’

‘No, I am going to tell you everything when I get back, promise.’

‘Are you in love?’

‘I don’t even know that what’s supposed to mean.’

‘No, I don’t suppose you do. Are you with someone now? A woman?’

‘Nothing remotely like that. Look, I really need to go down to dinner, now.’

‘Oh god, yes. You mustn’t miss dinner,’ said Caterina.

He entered the kitchen where his hostess sat waiting for him. One plate of no longer steaming pasta sat on the table, and she wore a severe expression on her face.

‘I thought it might be nice to have company for once, but I had my dinner alone again.’

‘Sorry,’ said Blume. ‘People just keep phoning at the most inconvenient time.’

‘Most inconsiderate of them. One should never phone after half past seven in the evening.’

‘Quite,’ said Blume. ‘People just don’t think of others nowadays.’

‘Do you always talk in clichés, or is it for my benefit because I am old?’

Blume liked this direct little woman’s use of sarcasm. ‘Because you’re old,’ he said.

‘I have never heard such insolence. By the way, it takes a lot of effort to cook these red caps. First one side, gills down till all the water is gone, then the other side with some garlic, and finally a splash of white wine. The linguine were perfect too.’ She paused for effect. ‘Fifteen minutes ago.’

‘I’m sorry I was late. Really.’

‘I’m sure you had a good reason. Now I get to watch you eat. I hope you’re embarrassed at least.’

‘I am. Delicious, by the way. And not too cold.’ He peeled a strip of pasta and a mushroom off his shirt front and put it back on his plate.

‘No one ever taught you table manners?’

‘I’ve lived a lot on my own,’ said Blume.

‘So have I, but I can still manage not to slobber my food all over myself, even with only these four and a half fingers you have been staring at since we met.’

‘I wasn’t . . .’

‘Yes, you were. And now you’re blushing. Go on, eat up, I won’t say anything even if you get it in your hair.’

Though ravenous, he did his best not to gobble down the pasta, but it disappeared quickly anyhow. He took a piece of bread from the centre of the table and looked to his dinner companion for permission to use it to mop up the remainders on his plate.

‘A
scarpetta
is always acceptable. It is a form of praise for the cook, who in this case is me,’ she said.

‘Thanks . . . I do not even know your name, Signora.’

‘My name is Flavia.’

‘Flavia. But your full name?’

‘All of it?’

‘If you would.’

‘Princess Donatella Flavia Orsini-Romanelli. But you may call me Flavia.’

He opened his mouth, then remembered his manners, and allowed a piece of wet bread and mushroom to slither down his throat, which evoked a slight emetic response, so that his surprise seemed overdone. ‘Romanelli? As in the Villa?’

‘I had assumed you knew that.’

‘But now you live here.’

‘One hates to say this of one’s own family, but no proper aristocrat would ever build his residence
below
the town. No noble family was ever so stupid as to build its fortress below the peasants, or if they did, they won’t have lasted long. No, we are jumped-up mercantile class, I’m afraid.’

‘But aren’t you a princess?’

‘In Italy that doesn’t mean anything. More princesses here than anywhere. Well, anywhere in Europe. We don’t count Saudi Arabia and such places, of course. The Romanellis were social-climbing industrialists who made crystal, glass, and industrial products. Not my great-grandfather, mind. He was a mason, a republican, a spiritualist, and not my uncle, a botanist, a scientist, and an experimenter. But my parents certainly were. My father married into an offshoot of the Orsini family, and they, to be sure, are aristocracy – even if they started out as peasant bandits, but that is the way of things. All the money is gone now, of course, and so is the family line. That’s my fault, of course.’

‘Your fault?’

‘No children from me.’

‘You never married.’ Blume was about to add something polite about that being a perfectly legitimate lifestyle choice but the princess had not finished.

‘Marriage has nothing to do with it. I fucked a lot of men. Hundreds.’ She winked at him. ‘So after you do that and nothing happens, there is only one conclusion to be made, which is that I am barren and the family dies with me. No great loss.’

Blume concentrated hard on his empty plate, while she poured him some white wine. He would have preferred red. He would also have preferred a slightly less frank princess as a dinner companion.

‘I fucked peasants, too. Shopkeepers, you name it. One might think I was desperate to keep the lineage alive, but that was not it. I just enjoyed what I was doing.’

‘I see,’ said Blume.

‘You’re a bit of a prude, aren’t you, Commissioner? My experience is that prudes prefer them young. Like the girl now inhabiting the gate lodge of my old villa. Taut skin, that’s what it is about, really. Am I making you nervous? I ask only because you are drinking quickly.’

He put down his glass. ‘You lived in the mansion?’

‘I was the last inhabitant of Villa Romanelli. Along with my parents and my uncle, the scientist, of course. I was the last to be born in that ghastly pile. Finally, my father, God rest his black fascist soul, realized it had all been a horrible mistake, and he bought this place. It is not much, but it is the highest building in Monterozzo. No one will ever build above us here. He considered it a defeat; I consider it an elevation.’

‘Was it you who sold the villa?’

‘I basically gave the place away to the state. I received promises that they would look after it, but I never believed them. The Christian Democrat Italian state keep a promise? Hah! But to be fair to them, the place was irreparable from the moment it was built. The only thing worth preserving was the garden.’

‘It is a magnificent garden,’ agreed Blume.

‘
Col cazzo
,’ said the princess. ‘It is a place of evil. But it is special. The garden was invading the house by the time I left. It is why my father took me away.’

She fixed him with her eyes, which were pale blue and, as he had noticed before, showed no sign of myopia or age, but the face around it was a tragedy of collapse. He felt a pressure on his leg beneath the table. She was pressing against his ankle. He was working out a strategy for gently withdrawing, when she held up her mutilated hand and increased the pressure.

‘See this?’

He nodded, helpless.

‘Have some more wine.’

The War had not been good for the Romanelli family. In common with most of the upper bourgeoisie and aristocrats, they had sided with the Fascists. The real problem was not reprisals afterwards, but the economic damage from investing in munitions, chemicals, and other areas of the economy that were nationalized to become Enichem and Agusta, or simply stolen by the Americans. During the War, the house had been neglected, and in 1946, the family’s resources were depleted. It was impossible to make repairs to the villa, and her father, busy making friends with the Christian Democrats and Liberal Party, had little time to attend to upkeep. He started closing rooms. Literally closing them and locking them up. Paraffin heaters and open fires were the main sources of warmth. The courtyard was turned into a vegetable plot, most of the staff were laid off.

Her mother, well, the less said about her and the Orsini clan the better, although there was poetic justice in her fate. Before the War, the Romanellis had joined forces with German chemical companies in experimenting in the uses of coal tar, until then a waste material from mining. The scientists had come up with all sorts of uses. Purple dyes, aspirin, and a more stable form of laudanum called heroin. Her mother used to wear her hair iron-flat with a silken red rose on the side of her head, as in the 1920s, when she was young and beautiful, which was also when heroin, produced by Romanelli under licence from Bayer, became popular. Meanwhile the Germans took all the profits, even after losing the War. The family lost its investment.

Flavia’s governess was a French girl called Cécile. Cécile soon realized that she was on her own with Flavia. Her mother lay most of the day insensible in bed. The servants and cooks were locals who vanished in the evenings. The master of the house was never in. Even if Flavia had become fluent in French, which was the idea, no one would have noticed. Meanwhile the house became damper and colder. Sometimes they forgot to pay the governess.

Cécile, being French, pretty no doubt, and in a backwater such as Monterozzo, soon had
des beaux
, so to speak, young men who would come trespassing looking for her. Inevitably, Cécile began to leave Flavia to her own devices, placing her on the rocking horse in the nursery and vanishing into one of the many empty rooms, except, of course, the room to which she slipped away was not empty, there being some gallant youth lurking in there, waiting for her.

Cécile was what you might call a naughty girl, said the princess, but not a bad person, and so she left the nursery door open, lest Flavia should fall off the rocking horse or cry out. She was fond of the child, and worried about her, and she probably did not manage to get up to all that much, always having one ear open for the baby.

The nursery door was not the only one left open. The churlish hands and sullen servants, the careless groundskeepers and her distracted mother were forever leaving doors open all over the villa, so that all kinds of vermin could get in and build their nests and dens. In fact, her uncle, a botanist and mycologist became so fed up with the situation that he retreated into the cellars of the villa to conduct his experiments. He had his own special entrance built, his own locks, and equipped his own labs in the fond belief the family’s fate could be reversed if only his experiments with the forcing of foods could succeed. Mushroom tunnels, patches of rhubarb, which no one had heard of in Monterozzo, radicchio pits, chicory, asparagus. He also carried out experiments which, he claimed, proved that mushrooms controlled the weather. Mad, of course.