The Memory Key: A Commissario Alec Blume Novel Read online

  ‘Understand it? He invented it,’ said Caterina.

  ‘Well, I guess you two have things to talk about,’ said Olivia, standing up.

  ‘What things? Where are you going now?’

  ‘I came by to apologize. I have done that now,’ said Olivia.

  ‘She waited here all morning for you,’ said Caterina. ‘Now I know where you were last night, by the way.’

  Olivia nodded with the air of a sage marriage counsellor. ‘People often refuse to offer the simplest, most innocent explanations. I never understood that. The truth is always best, isn’t it?’

  ‘Lies have short legs,’ said Caterina.

  Blume looked at Olivia’s long legs and nodded.

  ‘How did Marco behave himself last night?’ Olivia asked Blume. ‘He’s a nervous type, you know. Making him feel better about himself is my project.’

  ‘Your project?’

  ‘Yes. He’s my project,’ said Olivia. ‘Nothing wrong with that I hope?’

  ‘I thought he was your boyfriend.’

  ‘He’s that, too.’

  ‘Olivia, can you step into my office?’

  She glanced at the white gold watch on her wrist, as if time was suddenly of the essence, then said, ‘Sure!’

  His intention had been to demand to know how much she had told Caterina, but as he closed the door, he realized it would make him look weak. He had a feeling that Olivia had already worked out for herself that he was running a sort of one-man show.

  She disconcerted him. She was transformed, like she had drunk some magic potion. Sexy, provocative, pouty – and therefore essentially irritating as well as attractive – yesterday evening; now she was beautiful, relaxed, and poised. Her hair, which had been sprayed and lacquered flat yesterday, now unruly and thick and carelessly pushed back, her eyes deep and dark and searching as she waited for him to say something.

  ‘Is Marco really your boyfriend?’ It was the best he could come up with.

  ‘Of course! Poor Marco is one of those guys who just can’t manage by themselves.’

  ‘He’d be lost without you?’

  She touched her chest with her hands in a flutter of self-deprecation. ‘It’s not me. I am nothing special. Marco is just one of those men, boys, who can’t manage by himself. It would be so cruel to leave him. He’s not strong like you. Can I leave now?’

  He agreed, and watched her as she graciously bade farewell to all the other cops, some of whom had seen all the tricks. Even Panebianco seemed charmed.

  He tried contacting Principe again, to no avail. The magistrate had failed to put him in contact with Captain Zezza.

  He came out of his office a few minutes later with the intention of asking Caterina about Olivia and perhaps repairing a few broken bridges, but found she was not there.

  He called over to Panebianco, who told him Caterina had been asked to pay a visit to Magistrate Martone. ‘Something about that hit-and-run case.’

  ‘Adelgardo Lambertini? Any progress there?’

  ‘The opposite of progress, to judge from her face. I think a witness she thought she had secured has withdrawn his testimony. A barber. The magistrate will blame Caterina instead of herself. Good news for old Lambertini, though.’

  Chapter 20

  With the aid of Google images, Blume identified the car that had followed him that morning as probably a Skoda Octavia saloon. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, trying to bring back the details. He imagined himself coming down the stairs of the research institute, noticing the rain, the man with the curly hair standing in the rain. Why would he do that? Presumably because he was looking to see where Blume had got to. Had he been standing there for long, for all the time he had been inside?

  A thought was pushing itself to the front of his mind and frustrating his attempts at relaxed recall: why he had failed to call backup? All it would have taken was a phone call, a patrol car would have been there within minutes, they could have pulled up beside the Skoda, asked the driver to step out, and then he would know who was following him. So why had he not done it? Pride. He thought he could handle it easily himself, outmanoeuvre his follower by coming out of another door. It was a reasonable assumption, seeing as the person was no professional. But he had blown it.

  The best way to remember was to think of things around the object, such as that bus that almost knocked him down. Bastard. The car was silver-grey, same as all the other cars, same colour as the rain.

  He was going to fall asleep. He could feel it. That was no good. Maybe Aaron Fisher had some advice on recall. Not that recall had much to do with memory.

  He pulled the Kindle out of his bag. Part of him was disappointed to discover the search feature. He was hoping the product would be more useless.

  Simonides: The man who knew where the bodies are buried

  Recalling faces is a funny business. You may not be able to conjure up the face properly, but when you see the person again, you have no problem in recognizing them. You may forget the name, but probably not the face. Even if you cannot call up the features of a face, you often ‘feel’ the identity in your head. For instance, think of the last time you were at a meeting, or sitting in a classroom. Now try to recall the person to your left. Or just try to recall one or two people. Not only will at least one come to mind, you will also remember where they were sitting. And this, folks, is the second big secret of all those memory masters, of those people who can recall lists of emperors, presidents, pi, mathematical formulae, all the bones of the human skeleton, and, a popular one these days, all the cards played in a game of poker or bridge. I am about to tell you this great secret, which, in fact, is not so much a secret as something that was forgotten for many years and is now being recalled. But it is great, and it will help you ace your exams and acquire considerable knowledge with far less effort than you thought possible. Ready? Yes, well, first, I want you to go back, and check you have really learned the Memory Key. Done that? Really? OK, then we have time for a little story.

  It concerns a Greek poet called Simonides of Ceos (I like to think of him as Simon), who lived around 550 years before Christ. He was, they say, a bit of a miser, but very good at writing victory poems – boastful ditties for kings and warlords. If he were alive today, he’d be composing songs for Mexican drug lords, or, maybe he’d go it alone as a rapper singing his own praises.

  One day, Simonides was at a banquet in the palace of a rich guy called Scopas, who had asked him to write some poems in which the hero was . . . you guessed it: Scopas. But the poet put in too many references to the twin gods Castor and Pollux, sort of squeezing Scopas out of the picture, and, to make matters worse, there was a whole room full of guests to witness this insult. And so Scopas decided that he would not pay Simonides for his poems after all.

  At this point, a messenger came in to say there were two young fellows outside who were seeking Simonides. So the poet, suspending his row with Scopas, went out to see who they might be and what they wanted him for. It turns out the two fellows waiting for him looked pretty darned alike. Like two twins. Like the twin gods, Castor and Pollux, whose praises he had just been singing, in fact.

  As Simonides stepped out of the doorway, an earthquake struck the city. Down came the palace behind him, crushing Scopas and all the guests. The twins, being magical, vanished, and there was Simonides standing beside a pile of rubble and feeling lucky and – well, we’d have to know him a bit better, but there might have been a part of him that was pretty pleased at what happened to Scopas. Not to the guests, though. In fact, soon the mothers, wives, children came running and there was great lamentation. Not only had all the poor guests been killed, but the collapsing rubble had disfigured them horribly. No one could identify the bodies of their loved ones. Maybe we’d call in the FBI and use dental records nowadays, but this was ancient Greece.

  Simonides snapped his fingers and said, ‘Wait a minute! I remember where they were all sitting and who was who.’ And he walked around, poi
nting to one corpse after another, pronouncing the name of each one.

  It was not a great feat, but it got him to thinking. It is easy to remember the position of real things. Just try it now. In your mind’s eye, think of the furniture in your sitting room. Now the furniture in your best friend’s sitting room. Pretty easy, isn’t it?

  Simonides developed a system for remembering that has become known by several names. The Memory Theatre, the memory room method, the memory palace, and the ‘loci’ method. Loci is just Latin for location, and the Latin is used because Roman orators, and later medieval monks, used and refined Simonides method.

  Anyhow, in the method I want to show you, theatres don’t come into it. We’ll just call it the ‘mental walk’. And instead of saying ‘locus’, we’ll say ‘stop point’.

  Now there are two schools of thought about where we should go next with this. One school says that the best mental walk is one that takes you around your own house, school, or neighbourhood. After all these are places you know very well. There is no remembering to be done. The other says that it is better to invent a place in your head, and ‘walk’ your way through it. The effort is a little greater to begin with, but the results are better. Why would this be so? Well, one reason is that a mental walk that brings you into, say, your son’s room, might bring up the image of your son and the smell of his trainers, and much as you love him (that’s why he comes so readily to mind), he might be ‘in the way’ of something you are trying to remember. Sad to say, but the best memory palace is a lonely place.

  rule: Whether you use your own house or the place I am about to describe, you must be absolutely consistent in your route. Make sure you know which room leads to which. Do not change direction. Never change the route.

  The other reason I want to create an imaginary place is that I am here and you are there. I don’t know what your house is like! And the people reading this book will have all sorts of houses, so we need a common virtual ground.

  This place may sound lonely, but remember, there are thousands of us who are familiar with it, or with a version of it, since each will be very slightly different from the next, like parallel universes.

  But, you’ve guessed it, I have relegated the palace to the back of the book. Appendix II . . .

  For fuck’s sake. Blume went online and ordered a proper version of the book. There.

  Chapter 21

  Dinner with Caterina that evening was conducted in the sort of stilted silence that used to make him hate his parents when they did it. He could see Elia stealing furtive glances at them both. Poor kid was dying to say something, find out what was going on and stop it, or just break the evil mood. The looks he was directing at Blume were no more hostile than those at his mother, which made Blume feel grateful and suddenly tender.

  It only took him three minutes to wolf down his pasta. Caterina took her fourth or fifth forkful and eyed him levelly. He had complained in the past about her pushing food around her plate, but he was not going to bring that subject up tonight. She seemed to be considering making one of her remarks about him eating like a savage, but whoever made the first criticism would become the guilty party in Elia’s eyes, so they both held their peace.

  Elia, closer to Blume than his mother in eating speed, fidgeted.

  ‘I was followed today,’ said Blume suddenly, addressing himself more to Elia than to Caterina.

  Elia’s eyes widened. ‘Who by?’

  ‘Some amateur,’ he said. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘This is the first I am hearing about it,’ said Caterina.

  ‘I didn’t give it much thought.’

  ‘Is it in connection with the university thing?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Did you get a look at the person, the vehicle?’

  Blume relented. He had not wanted to discuss the case with Caterina, but he couldn’t think of anything else to talk about. Besides, Elia seemed to be enjoying the break in the tension.

  When he had finished telling an abbreviated version of his morning, Caterina said, ‘So did you look up the reports of stolen vehicles afterwards?’

  ‘No,’ said Blume.

  ‘How do you know the car was stolen?’ Elia asked his mother.

  ‘She doesn’t,’ said Blume, ‘but it is an intelligent suggestion. It shows she is cleverer than me.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said Elia.

  ‘If what Alec has been telling us is the truth, love, and the person following him was really an amateur, and he is not just saying that to put my mind at ease, then we have three options: the person was driving his own car, he was driving a friend’s, or he was driving a stolen one.’

  ‘That applies to anyone in a car,’ said Elia.

  ‘You’re right, of course. But let us suppose that this person now fears that Alec has the details, then he may well be tempted to report the car stolen. That’s what some people do in a hit-and-run. They report their own car stolen. It never works, but they do it. It makes our task easier, because they give a full description of the car, make, model, registration, none of which was known before. Then we find the car and we find the owner, and usually the owner is the guilty party, or his best friend is. It’s depressingly easy.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Blume, ‘they report the car stolen before using it for a criminal act.’

  ‘So they are driving around with intent in a car that is on a watch list?’ asked Elia. ‘Nobody can be that dumb.’

  The two of them turned and spoke almost in unison.

  ‘Oh, yes they can,’ said his mother.

  ‘Dumber than that, even,’ said Blume. He surreptitiously swiped his thumb across his empty plate and sucked it. ‘That was delicious pasta, Caterina.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘All that effort, you could have made a little more?’

  The following morning, they drove in to work together. The sun had made a glorious comeback and every surface was glistening. Even his car looked bright and new.

  ‘I can look for reports of a stolen Skoda Octavia when I get in, keep my eye open during the day,’ said Caterina.

  Blume patted her knee, ‘I appreciate that.’

  She swung her legs towards the door. ‘Don’t do that. It’s patronizing, and the fact you mean it humorously makes it worse. And you never really explained who you think might be following you.’

  Blume put both hands on the steering wheel and looked straight ahead.

  ‘There is something important I need to tell you,’ she said.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I think . . .’ A rippling roar and a figure flashed in front of them, but Blume continued driving without interruption, as if nothing had happened. If anything, he had accelerated a little. ‘Dio mio! Alec, did you not see that motorcyclist?’

  ‘I saw him,’ said Blume. ‘And he saw me, the fucker. If he wants to drive like that, it’s his funeral.’

  ‘You can’t just. . .’

  ‘I didn’t do anything. I kept going straight at the same speed. If he wants to cut in at speed inches from a vehicle on a wet road, that’s his problem. Sooner or later he’ll slide under someone’s car.’

  ‘Let’s try not to make it ours, OK?’

  ‘You’re talking as if I aimed at him.’

  ‘You didn’t try to avoid him.’

  ‘Not the same thing.’

  ‘Sometimes I don’t understand you,’ said Caterina.

  ‘I am easy to understand. I’ll tell you what’s hard to understand is motorcyclists who think they’re immortal. They try to bully you on the road as if they were in a Sherman tank or something, but it’s the other way round. Just the tiniest tap with your car and they go skittering across the road like rag dolls.’

  Caterina stared out the side window. Her husband, Elia’s father, had been killed while on a motorcycle. Maybe by a driver like Blume. No doubt Blume had forgotten this detail of her husband’s death, which in some respects made it worse. He had been a better man than t
he one beside her now.

  It was not until they were heading across Piazza Venezia that Blume said, ‘You were going to say something?’

  ‘Was I?’ said Caterina. ‘Maybe I was going to say I’ll drive myself in tomorrow.’

  Blume spent the entire morning writing up a report for a magistrate on his minor role in what turned out to be an interesting enough case of a jeweller’s wife organizing to have herself robbed by a gang that was supposed to return some of the proceeds, but then did not. The police had still been chasing up the identity of the gang members and examining some video evidence when the wife walked in and named them all.

  He made a special effort to be succinct. He rather prided himself on it, even though he knew it was regarded as a failing by certain magistrates, whose love of formal language and meandering, inconclusive sentences knew no bounds. Once, paraphrasing someone, he had added a note, ‘I am sorry this report is so long, I did not have time enough to write a shorter one’, and the magistrate called him in and reprimanded him for facetiousness.

  At mid morning, he phoned Principe, who turned out to be at home.

  ‘Not feeling well?’ asked Blume.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I could call round.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I am coming around anyhow.’

  Chapter 22

  Blume was shocked into a sudden sympathy when Principe opened the door. The magistrate’s fine suits had hidden a lot. Now that he was dressed in a round-necked sweatshirt and loose-fitting tracksuit bottoms, he seemed three times thinner and 30 years older.

  ‘I seemed thin, but not emaciated, right? I know. I didn’t quite realize it myself until I looked in the mirror this morning. I almost never look in the mirror.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said Blume irrelevantly.

  ‘The Gemcitabine they were giving me made me vomit, the cancer kills my appetite. Weight Watchers have got a lot to learn from me. I think I’ll write a book. Any ideas for a title?’