Bitter Remedy: An Alec Blume Case Page 16

  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. />
  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.