Bitter Remedy (22 page)

On the evening it happened, Flavia’s father was on a rare home visit, though not for the sake of being with her mother. The uncle, as always, was locked in the dark basement, and never heard a thing. Flavia was old enough not to fall off her rocking horse any more, old enough to toddle about the nursery, old enough to call for Cécile in her own baby version of French. She was used to being alone in the nursery, and unafraid, because it had happened before, and all it took was a few plaintive cries and Cécile, adjusting her dress and stockings, would be there in almost no time.

Flavia’s scream on this evening pierced even her mother’s dulled consciousness. Her father, who was on the telephone to Einaudi at the time, dropped the receiver, the grounds man, weeding the cabbage patch, dropped his hoe, and Cécile disentangled herself within seconds from the son of the greengrocer who ran for the front door of the villa as everyone else ran towards the nursery, passing Flavia’s father on the stairs without stopping. The greengrocer’s son was never to set foot in the premises again. Cécile was there first, of course, and as she ran down the hallway, something bright orange, as if it had its own source of light, flashed past her and vanished, slipping through a crack in one of the crumbling walls. Cécile, too, was shouting as she entered the nursery, and her voice rose to a pitch equal to that of the child when she saw the two foxes. One had its fangs sunk deep into the soft flesh of the child’s thigh, the other had its jaws around the little fingers that had reached out to stroke its nose and was shaking its head to and fro. Cécile threw herself upon the child and the creatures, hissing and snarling to make them let go of their prey.

When the father came in, having mistakenly tried two bedrooms first, so long was it since he had been upstairs in his own home, he saw his daughter white faced and motionless as the governess tried to staunch the flow of blood from the severed finger on the small hand. When her mother arrived, she fainted. The grounds man caught one of the foxes, and kicked it to death on the back stairs.

The princess nudged his calf with her foot, then released him, and picked up his plate.

‘A week later, my father closed down the villa and took us here. I never saw my uncle again, and my mother died six months later from an overdose.’

That night, after his usual dose of statins, it took Blume multiple glasses of water, two Lyrica, three drops of Lorazepam, a dose of Alsuma, and some Doxepin to fight off migraine, insomnia, and the feeling that someone was outside his door. When he finally did get to sleep, he dreamed of foxes and of apples cascading through endless streets.

Chapter 21

When he awoke the following morning, Blume could tell he had a slight fever. It was, he hoped, the sort of flu that he could put off for a day or two before it overwhelmed him. He took three aspirin and, after measuring his sluggishness, four Provigil pills, which he had originally been prescribed to him for what he referred to as ‘obstructive sleep apnoea’ and Caterina called ‘snoring’.

When he got downstairs, he opened several doors to see if he could find his hostess, but she was out. He walked down to the piazza and across to ‘his’ bar again for a breakfast consisting of a cappuccino with scalded milk and a pastry so stale it might have been the one he had abandoned the day before.

At nine, Blume walked into the Carabinieri station, located just outside the walls of Monterozzo. He had a number of thoughts on his mind, one of which was that he should have done this earlier. He presented his credentials to the tall handsome
appuntato scelto
behind the desk, who nodded, like a hotel receptionist registering an expected guest. He motioned Blume to follow him, knocked with a military rat-tat-tat on a door, and opened it when the voice behind told him to.

Maresciallo Panfilo Angelozzi of the Carabinieri was, above all else, a tired man. This was the overwhelming impression that Blume got as he entered the office. Even Angelozzi’s moustache, a large drooping affair more suited to the leisurely years before the Great War, seemed to ache with a drowsy numbness. He was sitting at the desk with one hand pushing up the fat of his cheek so that it folded around his left eye and closed it. He did not get up, but gave a lethargic wave at the chair in front of him. When Blume sat down, the captain, with an enormous sigh, held out a large, warm, and soft hand. They shook, slowly. Angelozzi fell back into his chair, exhausted.

‘I was wondering if you were going to pay a visit.’ He yawned.

Blume yawned in sympathy.

The maresciallo smiled and nodded, satisfied to register that Blume, too, found all this getting up and staying awake business a bit too much. ‘I heard all about you,’ he said, putting an heavy emphasis on ‘all’, as if receiving so much information in one go had been a very taxing experience. ‘But the last thing I heard was that you were going home.’

Blume explained about his accident, and the maresciallo winced sympathetically at the sheer effort of it all. He lifted a leaden arm from the table, held it with his other hand, and contemplated his watch for a while.

‘Look, I just need to know one or two things, if you don’t mind.’

The maresciallo rested his hand on a pile of papers on the desk. The implication seemed to be that if the answers to Blume’s questions were not in the papers, preferably at the top of the pile, it would be very difficult to oblige.

‘I don’t think you need to look anything up,’ Blume assured him.

The maresciallo’s expression became friendlier.

‘Niki Solito,’ said Blume. The babyish face in front of him remained calm, peaceable, and expectant. Clearly, Niki was not a source of much trouble to the maresciallo nor, Blume suspected, was the maresciallo a source of much trouble to Niki or anyone. ‘Solito claims he is worried about a Romanian girl.’

‘Yes,’ agreed the maresciallo. ‘And so is the missing girl’s friend.’ He clasped his hands and stretched his arms luxuriously over his head, cracked his knuckles, and yawned again. ‘In whose company you were seen.’

Blume ignored the comment. ‘So did Niki Solito report her missing to you?’

The maresciallo sighed, and reluctantly pulled the pile of papers towards him. ‘I suppose you want a date?’ he asked in the tone of a man tasked beyond all endurance.

He opened the pile near the top with his thumb and peered in. The piece of paper was not immediately available, and he sat back, defeated.

‘But he did file a missing person report?’

‘No, no. You know he couldn’t do that. He is not family, not gone long enough. Alina . . . Paulescu. This was, let me see, two weeks back, no . . . . today is Sunday, minus seven, minus Friday, Thursday, Wednesday, Tuesday.’

Blume realized he was supposed to do the rest of the arithmetic himself. ‘That’s 20 days ago. But you did not,’ here he paused delicately, ‘pursue any line of inquiry?’

‘I persuaded him not to do a missing person report. Not immediately. Anyhow, he seems to have lost interest now. Maybe he heard from her in Romania.’

‘What about Niki himself?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Niki.’

‘Yes. What about him?’

‘What’s he like?’ demanded Blume.

Sentenced to the labour of explaining, the maresciallo closed his eyes as he selected his words carefully: ‘Complicated.’

Blume slowly learned that Niki predated the maresciallo in the town, and that he had never been in any trouble, apart from the occasional court appearance regarding licensing laws, taxes, and suchlike. ‘White collar minor stuff – the business of the Provincial Police, the Finance Police but not us,’ he told Blume. The maresciallo’s predecessor, however, had singled out Niki and the older man Domenico as potential sources of violence. But he had been quite wrong. The predecessor, an overactive and ambitious zealot, in the maresciallo’s opinion, believed Niki and Mimmo were on some sort of scouting expedition for the Sacra Corona Unita. But the years passed and nothing happened. The older man stuck to his garden, the younger to a nightclub that was not even in the maresciallo’s jurisdiction.

‘It was always unlikely that the Puglia Mafia would invest here.’ He waved desolately at the wall of the office. ‘In Monterozzo,’ he specified, lest Blume had misinterpreted the intended scope of the arm wave.

‘Drugs, gambling, prostitution, trafficking – isn’t that what Niki’s nightclub is all about?’

The maresciallo patted a pillar of air with a pudgy hand to indicate that Blume was running ahead of himself and needed to slow down. ‘Have you been to the nightclub?’

‘Not inside it,’ admitted Blume. ‘I imagine it’s a typical criminal enterprise. It’s also a good place for criminals to meet.’

‘Yes, scoundrels meet there. Most of them local administrators and regional politicians, but Monterozzo is not high on their agenda. We don’t even get visitors, except in the summer to the gardens below. What you are failing to see here, I think, is that Niki’s club is actually far away. Thirty-five kilometres. And from what I hear . . .’

‘You’ve never been to it?’

The maresciallo pondered the question for a while. When he replied it was with the air of a man weighing his words with great care. He had, in fact, been to the club several times. He was, Blume may not have known this, a single man. He was sure that drugs circulated, but he did not feel there was much he could or should do about it.

Blume had a hard time imagining the maresciallo dancing. Or staying up late.

‘I get the feeling the drugs arrive with the VIPs and leave with them, too. As I say, the VIPs are mostly politicians but also the occasional magistrate, a judge or two. They would not appreciate a maresciallo from a small town opening an investigation.’

As for the prostitution thing, the maresciallo felt that while the club might facilitate, it did not seem to be the source, and that, all things considered, it was inadvisable to get bogged down in this very muddy area of the law.

‘Niki has money, I assume. He is engaged, Silvana does not seem as revolted by the prospect as she ought to be. Do you have any idea why they don’t marry?’ asked Blume.

‘Some women like to make men wait and wait. Sometimes until it’s too late.’ This was spoken with some conviction and in the widest-awake tone yet, and Blume understood that some flighty woman had carelessly let drop the catch that was Maresciallo Panfilo Angelozzi.

‘The father, Domenico Greco, may have something to do with it, too,’ added the maresciallo, his outburst about women causing him inadvertently to volunteer information.

‘Yes, what about him?’ asked Blume.

To conserve energy for what now threatened to be a long to-and-fro, the maresciallo tried to keep his replies as economical as possible. ‘Came up here with Niki years ago. Before my time. All in my predecessor’s files. Better source than me, frankly.’

Blume stood up, and shook the maresciallo’s hand, a tactical move that had its intended disarming effect.

‘That’s it? You have no more questions?’

‘I think so,’ said Blume. ‘Thanks very much.’

‘You’re welcome,’ said the maresciallo and, on a generous impulse added some details for free. ‘He’s from Bari. Domenico, the father, I mean. Niki is from Molfetta originally. They already knew each other when they arrived. It took longer for the people in the town to accept Niki, but people liked the father straight away. The child helped.’

‘Silvana.’

‘Yes.’

‘No mother, you know. The father bringing her up alone, never asking anyone for favours. People felt sorry for him.’

‘He lost his wife, obviously.’

A sly look crossed the maresciallo’s countenance. ‘If only. But the truth of the matter is his wife ran away with a younger man. If she had died, people might not have been so embarrassed. For obvious reasons, Domenico never liked to talk about it. The details of the story were never well known to begin with. People have more or less forgotten now and he’s just called the gardener, sometimes “the Botanist”, because he knows so much about the trees and flowers and . . . grass.’ The maresciallo was winding down again. The daylight, attenuated though it was by the grime on the window, showed up all the lines of age and torpor.

‘After I check out Niki’s place, I am coming back to ask Domenico Greco a few questions.’

‘Is that really necessary?’

‘Am I disturbing something?’ asked Blume.

‘I think that is what you want to do.’

‘Perhaps if you just cleared up a few of my curiosities, I could just leave things alone.’

‘What curiosities?’

‘Greco’s wife running away, his origins in the south, how he came to be here, his relationship with Niki. His money.’

‘Money?’

‘Someone financed the refurbishing of part of the house. It might have been Niki, except Silvana tells me he did not approve. So maybe it was the old man. But if he’s just a gardener, where did he get the funds?’

The maresciallo stood up, and Blume was surprised to see he was quite a tall man though he walked with a stoop. He went over to an old filing cabinet, and came back with a folder that included, Blume could see, some printouts of newspaper articles and a fading photocopy of an
avviso di garanzia
.

‘These have nothing to do with me. My predecessor here was one of those overexcitable conspiracy types who see plots and criminals everywhere.’