Bitter Remedy: An Alec Blume Case Page 10

  ‘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.

  Silvana, whose exercise book he had dropped on the ground and dirtied – he would apologize to her for this when he returned it – had no business being with Niki. The K in his name because of an Austrian Formula One pilot, the baptismal name from San Nicola of Bari, who had something to do with the original Santa Claus. A gift-giver. He thought of Alessia, who would know nothing of Santa Claus for three years or so. What would that be like, being too young to understand Santa Claus? So young she had not started to believe in what she would then have to learn to disbelieve. He felt a sudden and unexpected physical longing for his child. His muscles ached slightly at the idea of holding her tightly; his brain came up with a memory of the smell of her head, but kept it tantalizingly undefined.

  Maybe he would just turn up at the door and surprise them – well, Caterina at any rate. Alessia lived in a state of perpetual wonderment anyhow at all the things she saw every day. The appearance of an occasionally present father would have to compete with the thousand other marvels she was taking in from her pushchair, a sort of mobile throne in front of which the world passed and was inspected.

  He swerved hard into a bend he had not quite seen coming. He also took the next curve faster than intended. The road had no hard shoulder, just a sharp drop down a rocky embankment interrupted by a ribbon of asphalt where the road doubled back on itself below and then plunged again even more precipitously. His arms felt stiff and tired, and he wished he was at the bottom of the hill already. He glanced in his rear-view mirror. No one. He could go as slow as he wished. He pressed the brake pedal, which yielded easily, and softly sunk all the way to the floor, as if the brake pads had turned into marshmallows. The engine quietened but the car gained speed.

  His first instinct was to reassert control by slamming his foot against the accelerator, and it was only with an enormous effort he managed not to do so. He pumped the brake to restore some hydraulic pressure to the callipers, but all he got was a shuddering sensation and the sound of the pads scraping against the rotor. He planted his feet on the floor and negotiated a curve by swinging all the way into the other lane. It seemed easy enough but as he was coming out of it, another curve immediately presented itself while the car did its best to keep going straight. He jerked the steering wheel and felt the back wheels slide. To his right was a drop that would kill him. To the left was the opposite lane where he might meet an oncoming vehicle at any time, but it was the only option. He allowed the car to drift sideways, aiming to hit the side of the rock bluff. Too late he realized he was travelling too fast and any impact would simply bounce him across the narrow road and down the sides of the gorge, now deeper than ever to his right.

  He stood on the clutch, momentarily placing the vehicle into a terrifying freewheel descent, then slammed from fourth into third gear. He heard his father’s voice admonishing him, ‘Go down a hill in the same gear you use for going up it.’ Overcautious and fatuous advice, he had always thought, until this moment. He took another corner, with the transmission clamouring in protest. This time he did meet another car which, perhaps alerted by the roar of his engine, had almost stopped. He shot past, millimetres away, leaving the other driver honking his horn in rage at the near miss. The gradient steeper now, and the next corner swept out rightwards. He released the clutch, freewheeled into it, then crunched the gear into second. The lurch of deceleration threw him forward against the steering wheel and the back wheels spun and lost their grip. The edge of the precipice appeared below the nose of the car.

  ‘Porca Madonna!’

  Some cool, dispassionate part of his mind noted with wry amusement what his final oath was likely to be. Meanwhile his hand, seemingly unguided by thought, pulled at the handbrake as if he wanted to rip it from the floor, while his other hand sent the steering wheel into a spin towards the arriving edge, a counterintuitive move that he had learned many years ago at the advanced driving course. He felt the car spin away from the edge, and slide sideways into the opposite lane, and just as he was relishing the idea of stopping, something hit the passenger door, which crumpled inwards.

  The car he had hit bore the words Polizia Provinciale on the side along with the insignia of the province. He had bounced off the car of the local traffic police. Unexpectedly, he found himself wheezing with laughter. After reasserting some control over himself, he got out of his car and started walking up the hill. He touched his face, neck, the back of his head. Nothing, he was perfectly fine. The driver’s door of the car opened, and a vigile in his early forties, quite dashing in his pale blue uniform and very white shirt, got out. He was now performing the ‘I can’t-believe-this-has-happened-to-me-through-no-fault-of-my-own’ mime common to all drivers in Italy, with his dented car as his audience.

  The vigile brought his recital of outrage to an end by crossing his arms and staring at Blume.

  ‘I am a colleague,’ said Blume. He did not like saying this for various reasons, one of which was that he felt superior to this man, whose job was to control the parking in a tiny town and occasionally hassle shopkeepers for permits and health certificates. Another reason was that it sounded ingratiating.

  ‘My brakes failed,’ he paused, noting the three yellow bars on the vigile’s sleeve, and added, ‘Sovrintendente.’

  The vigile acknowledged the recognition of his rank with a curt nod. ‘That’s very rare.’

  ‘Well, it happened.’

  ‘Have you been drinking?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Blume.

  The vigile took out a pen, stuck it in his mouth, and sucked thoughtfully as he regarded Blume. ‘Since it is too early for you to have been drinking, Commissioner Blume, it must be the medication. Didn’t Dr Bernardini tell you not to drive?’

  ‘How do you know about Bernardini? And my name?’

  ‘And why should I not?’

  ‘Could you just check the brake cables?’ said Blume.

  ‘You think they were cut? That would be attempted murder. Who is trying to kill you?’ The vigile took the pen out of his mouth and wrote a note on a pad.

  ‘I misspoke, sorry. It must be the shock.’ Even so, an image of Niki sliding under his car and cutting the brake line had come into his mind.

  ‘If it was brake failure, rare though it is,’ said the vigile, ‘the fluid will have drained out from one of the bolts at the master cylinder. That’s what happens.’

  ‘You think?’ He was not
quite ready to drop his mental charges against Niki.

  The vigile smoked his pen and nodded. ‘Definitely. So, you ignored the warning light?’

  ‘There was no warning light,’ said Blume, trying to remember.

  ‘No warning light? So the vehicle has faulty electronics, too? Or maybe you weren’t paying attention? Let’s have a look.’

  The two of them walked down to Blume’s car. Not one more vehicle had passed them in all this time, Blume reflected bitterly. Just his luck to find the one car and for that one car . . .

  ‘Brakes seem faulty,’ said the vigile who had sat inside the car and pumped the pedal for a while. ‘But I am not excluding reckless driving. Where were you going in such a hurry?’

  ‘Back home to Rome, only I wasn’t in such a hurry.’

  From behind his back the sovrintendente produced Silvana’s exercise book. ‘I found this on the floor of the car.’ He opened up the first page. ‘See there? It’s written Silvana Greco. What were you doing with her exercise book?’

  ‘I was going to drop it off.’

  ‘How did it come into your possession in the first place? It’s hardly proper for a man of your age.’

  ‘I was just going to return it. I was enrolled in that course she was doing.’

  ‘What course?’ asked the vigile.

  ‘A course on Bach Flowers, herbal medicines, relaxation techniques, all that . . .’ His upper arms started itching again, and he took off his jacket to scratch, revealing hoops of sweat beneath his armpits.

  The vigile was looking at him sceptically.

  ‘It’s hot. I have a rash . . .’ He took a tube of pills from his jacket and waved it at the man. ‘This helps with the rash.’ He dropped a pill into his mouth, and chewed. It tasted vile. ‘Any water?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Blume, swallowing the bitter grains in his mouth. ‘Anyhow, as you know, the course had to be cancelled.’

  ‘So I heard. Come on, let’s get back for some form filling. You can have some water there.’