The Memory Key: A Commissario Alec Blume Novel Read online

  Blume leaned in to the bed. ‘What do I need to do before it is too late?’

  Stefania pushed her head back into the pillow, and he pulled back again, apologizing. She blinked, and smiled at him.

  ‘You were saying, what I needed to do?’ prompted Blume.

  ‘What do you need to do?’

  ‘I wanted you to tell me that,’ he said. He looked at her face, which was gazing at him with patient indulgence.

  ‘You have the look of a man who has forgotten what he was going to say,’ said Stefania. ‘That happens to me sometimes.’

  ‘Not all the time?’

  ‘Oh, no. Not all the time. I’m Stefania, by the way.’

  Blume sat back in his chair, and pushed his feet out and realized the room had grown dark.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Stefania. ‘You seem a bit down.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Blume. ‘Look, you know we are in a hospital?’

  She looked around her, a slight look of disapproval clouding her face. ‘Yes. I suppose I knew that.’

  Blume decided to give one more shot at an idea he no longer believed in. ‘Someone put you here. Someone tried to hurt you. They tried to kill you.’

  As soon as he said it, he regretted it. Stefania’s face was contorted in fear and she jerked her arm out of the bed, seeking to grab hold of him. Even as he took her hand and reassured her she was safe now, he could feel the fear beginning to subside.

  ‘It’s OK. That’s not really what happened. It was an accident, probably.’

  Stefania looked relieved. But he had to continue, just to make sure Zezza was not right. It would be hard to take that, Zezza being right and him wrong.

  When he reckoned she was calm enough again, he said, ‘If I ask you the name of a friend or enemy, who comes immediately to mind?’

  A sly expression stole fleetingly across her face. ‘I have friends and enemies in abundance.’

  ‘All right, how about Professor Pitagora?’

  ‘Who is Pitagora? Apart from the triangle guy and music philosopher.’

  ‘You have always known him. You knew him in 1978.’

  ‘No.’

  Blume realized his mistake. ‘He was not known as Pitagora then, was he?’

  ‘Who?’

  Blume recalled the name Principe had told him. ‘Pinto.’

  ‘Pasquale Pinto?’

  ‘Yes. That’s him.’

  Stefania frowned as if trying to conjure up something, but all she came out with was, ‘Pasquale is a sort of friend. Pasqualino. We called him that even though he was older than us. He has quite a high-pitched voice.’ Her voice took on a confiding tone, and she winked at him again. ‘He has a lot of money, you know. All from his father.’

  ‘Pasqualino’s my friend, too,’ said Blume. ‘But can we trust him?’

  Stefania narrowed her eyes as she looked at Blume, then, apparently finding him to her liking, said, ‘Pasqualino is an envoy.’

  ‘An envoy?’

  ‘He passes from one side to the other. He is guaranteed safe passage. It’s how we keep in contact with the authorities. Of course, no one likes him!’ She added this last remark as if Blume had just suggested the preposterous opposite.

  ‘Can we trust him?’ asked Blume

  ‘He believes only in himself.’

  ‘Is he dangerous?’

  ‘Who are we talking about here?’

  ‘Why, Pasqualino, of course,’ said Blume.

  Stefania thought about this for a while, then said, ‘When I talk about him, I want to be scrupulously fair.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ agreed Blume, wondering if what he was doing had any practical value whatsoever.

  He waited.

  And waited.

  ‘You were saying about Pasqualino Pinto?’

  ‘Ah, Pasqualino! You know his father left him a lot of money?’

  When the woman before him murdered a waiting room full of people, her accomplice was Adriano Pazienza. Like her, he was tried three times before receiving a conviction that was surrounded by controversy and obfuscation. Reporters, especially on the left, liked their conspiracy theories. They were less interested in the facts, which were set out quite plainly in the trial papers. Like most investigative work, court proceedings were dull. It was more fun to invent theories.

  ‘What do we think of Adriano?’

  ‘Adriano?’

  ‘Pazienza.’

  ‘I know who you mean, but I don’t understand why you’re asking.’

  ‘You think it’s pretty clear-cut?’ suggested Blume.

  Stefania looked at him so sharply that he was convinced for a moment that she was faking everything. Then she said, ‘I’m afraid I can’t quite place you.’

  ‘My name is Alec Blume.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you. My name is Stefania.’ She offered him her soft hand, this time looking in dismay at her own frail wrist. She looked around in confusion as an electronic trill spiked the air between them. ‘What’s that noise?’

  ‘It’s for me,’ said Blume, and to Stefania’s utter astonishment, he pulled something out of his pocket, opened it, and spoke into it as if this were a perfectly normal thing to do.

  But he was having difficulties with the machine in his hand, or he could not hear properly, because he was asking the person on the other end of the line to repeat what he was saying, and still he seemed to have difficulty following. He folded away the phone and turned his face briefly towards her. The roll-down shutters at the window shuddered in the wind, and suddenly it was raining loudly. The room was too dark to see his features clearly but she could feel the aura of fear and anger around him. She knew it was not directed at her, and she felt sorry for the man who was now turning away from her and rushing out of her presence, his face a mask of anxiety.

  Chapter 26

  Blume headed across town from one hospital to another, and when he reached his destination, he found he had no memory of the trip he had just made. Panebianco was waiting for him in the main lobby. Blume appreciated the gesture. It saved him the necessity of seeking out someone to ask where to go, and someone else to tell him what was happening. In fact, from the second he saw Panebianco’s face, Blume knew he could relax a little. Panebianco looked grave, but not stricken.

  ‘This way.’ He led Blume upstairs and down corridors. The walk had a surreal quality to it. The air in the hospital, passed through the mouths of patients and their visitors, lost most of its oxygen content and grew heavier and warmer as they went deeper into the building. The panic in his soul was becoming swamped with a sense of lethargy.

  After what seemed like an hour, Panebianco stopped and said, ‘There.’

  The door in front of him was definitely closed to casual visitors. It even looked as if it might be locked.

  Blume made to push it open, then stopped. ‘How … ?’

  ‘She is going to be OK. Don’t worry. You can’t talk to her, though. They have administered a general anesthetic, but she’ll wake up soon. Those are the doctor’s words.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘I got here about twenty minutes after she was admitted.’

  ‘I mean how do you know she is going to be all right?’

  ‘The doctors told me.’

  ‘And you believe them?’

  Panebianco nodded firmly. ‘Absolutely. I trust doctors when they are being optimistic. Pessimism is the default mode, you see. If they say things could go wrong and they do, then they were right all along. If they are wrong and everything goes fine, you are so thankful you forgive their miscalculation.’

  Panebianco was still talking and Blume tried to tune in, but found a single large thought sat sideways across the front of his brain blocking his ability to take in information. He had to dislodge it first before he could hope to be of any use.

  ‘Where was she?’

  Panebianco said something unconnected with the question, so Blume repeated it. Finally, Panebianco stopped talking and p
eered at Blume as if only now realizing that he had not been listening. But suddenly the words were devastatingly clear.

  ‘She was talking to a witness who had decided to retract his testimony in the road rage case,’ said Panebianco. ‘The witness who said he saw Adelgardo Lambertini run over the scumbag.’

  Blume gave a tight nod. The back of his neck hurt and his brain felt as if it had shrivelled and hardened inside his skull.

  ‘Magistrate Martone instructed Caterina to go and talk to him. Apply some pressure. I don’t like the magistrate, to be honest, but you can’t really pin this on her.’

  ‘A barber, wasn’t it?’ asked Blume.

  ‘That’s right. The witness was a barber.’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘Kids on a motor scooter. They hit her from behind, but it wasn’t entirely their fault. Apparently, she staggered into their path. One of the kids is in hospital, too. The passenger hit the side of his head against a car.’

  Blume shook his head, shaking off this extraneous information. ‘Rosario, talk to me about Caterina. What happened?’

  ‘I just said. She sort of fell into their path. The kids weren’t even going so fast according to the witness.’

  ‘There was a witness?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Panebianco. ‘The barber again. He was standing at his door and saw it all. He is saying Caterina had already fainted before she got hit. In fact, he says it was almost as if being hit by the scooter woke her up, and it looked like she was going to land quite softly, all things considered, but the kerb is high there and she landed badly. First on her stomach and groin, then her face, and she fell back into the road for a second time. I can’t say exactly, since I wasn’t there. She fell once, then again, is how he put it.’

  ‘You’ve spoken to him?’

  ‘No. I got this from the two vigili who arrived on the scene. So this is his word filtered through them, which puts us at a distance from the events themselves, I realize that.’

  ‘No one from our force?’

  ‘It wasn’t a serious incident, Alec. That’s good news. When she lost consciousness in the ambulance . . .’

  ‘Did you tell me before that she had lost consciousness in the ambulance?’

  ‘I can’t remember. I don’t think so. But if it hadn’t been for that maybe she would have been a code yellow.’

  ‘The doctors told you that? A code yellow for a person knocked down? That’s an automatic code red, Rosario. What sort of fucking doctors are these? Code yellow . . .’

  ‘Calm down, Alec. That was just me saying that. I was just trying to minimize, make you feel better.’

  ‘Yeah, well, where are the doctors? I want to go in there, but I’m afraid I’ll do more harm than good, bringing in germs and the outside cold.’

  As if on cue, the door in front of him opened, and a slow-moving man in white emerged, head down consulting a piece of paper in his hand. Incredibly, he seemed prepared to walk right between them, ignoring their presence. Blume stuck out a restraining arm, though the man was almost small enough to walk right under it. He stopped and, without looking up properly, said, ‘Family only.’

  Blume glanced at Panebianco. ‘Does her family even know?’

  ‘No. I thought . . . We thought maybe you would want to . . . seeing as you’re her . . .’

  ‘Get them in here. Her son Elia. Her mother.’

  Panebianco drew his phone out of his pocket and moved away. The doctor, who had kept his head bent, looked up and revealed himself to have a bent nose, like a witch from a fairy tale.

  ‘You’re family, then? Partner or husband. That’s fine. Do you want to sit down?’

  ‘No,’ said Blume.

  ‘Fine. No need I suppose. Your wife . . .’

  ‘Partner. Why is she like that? Is she paralyzed?’

  ‘Paralyzed? Good God, no.’

  ‘But she can’t wake up?’

  ‘Of course she can. She’s in a pharmacological coma.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘We put her to sleep. She’s having a long nap. It will help make her better.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me like I’m a child.’

  ‘You are the one who didn’t know what a pharmacological coma was. We are monitoring her for internal bleeding, closed head injury, concussion. She also suffered a cracked rib, and a hairline fracture in her wrist. We have scheduled a CAT scan. But she gets 12 on the Glasgow scale.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘The top mark is 15. So 12 is pretty good. Better than some people walking about in the streets right now would probably get.’

  Was this doctor trying to be facetious?

  ‘Some of her speech was incomprehensible and then – excuse me, you are standing too close.’

  Blume stepped back a little.

  ‘As I was saying, her speech was incomprehensible, then inappropriate.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘Incomprehensible is, well, incomprehensible. Not connected with reality. Inappropriate, which is an improvement, of course, means she was saying certain things. Does she usually use a lot of bad language?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Blume.

  The doctor made a quick note on the piece of paper. ‘It’s probably nothing. You’d be surprised at the foul language that comes out of some very demure women when giving birth. That’s because there is nothing demure about giving birth. Were you present at the birth of your children?’

  ‘What’s this got to do with her head?’

  ‘It’s our main worry now.’

  Blume tried to take a deep breath, but his lungs rebelled against the hospital air, and he felt his nostrils flare and his cheeks puff out as he attempted to control his frustration. Doctors did this to him. They talk normally for a bit, then suddenly go all first person plural on you, and you weren’t sure if they were talking about a consultation with other doctors, patronizing you, or using the royal we of themselves.

  ‘Whose main worry? I mean what main worry?’

  ‘Abruption. That’s what we fear. She could lose it, but I’d say it is sixty–forty in favour right now. That’s good. Seventy-thirty,’ he corrected in reaction to Blume’s expression. ‘I am sorry to have to tell you this. It depends on the way she fell. Even a minor knock, if it happens in the right place – that is to say, the wrong place, ha ha! – can cause the placenta to abrupt, and once that happens, the foetus can’t survive but there is grave danger to the mother, too. Even if the abruption turns out to be harmless, and I assure you it often is, the danger comes from the passage of blood from the baby to the mother. If the baby – foetus, I should be saying – if the foetus has a different blood type and some of its blood gets into the mother’s system, this causes the mother’s body to manufacture antibodies, which then start attacking the blood in the foetus, leading to Rh disease. Of course, that only happens if the foetus has a different blood group, which is common enough.’ The doctor scratched the end of his nose and glanced up at Blume. ‘Do you happen to have a different blood group from your partner?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, the baby – sorry, the foetus – does. So we know that father has type O positive blood.’

  ‘Like me. I mean, that is me.’

  ‘Are you sure you don’t need to sit down?’

  Blume allowed the little man to guide him into an armchair, incongruously soft and cushiony, set into a small alcove a few metres away. Vague notions of the diseases lurking in the threads of the material and the dangers these posed for Caterina floated through his mind.

  ‘What sex is the child?’

  The doctor, who was finally a little taller than the seated Blume, looked at him and shook his head in pity at the ignorance of laymen. ‘Indeterminate. The foetus hasn’t decided yet, so to speak. Or won’t tell us. Are you sure you’re the father?’

  Blume stood back up again.

  ‘I am merely explaining why it was decided to give . . .’ he checked his notes
, ‘Caterina an intramuscular injection of Rho(D) immune globulin.’

  ‘Is it possible that she did not know she was pregnant?’

  The doctor pursed his lips, producing an effect that, combined with the nose and his receding hair, made him one of the ugliest people Blume had ever seen. But even as he thought this, he was overwhelmed with a wave of immense gratitude for the little medical troll as he set about explaining how he was trying to save his child, and secure Blume’s place in the world.

  ‘It is possible, yes. But it usually takes a particularly ignorant, young, or underweight sort of woman not to realize what missed periods mean – along with all the other signs, from mood to tenderness.’

  ‘Nausea? I thought morning sickness was after . . .’ Blume stopped. He had no idea what morning sickness was. He had merely heard the term and somehow associated it with babies and therefore with the aftermath rather than the process of pregnancy.

  He hadn’t a clue.

  ‘Oh, yes. Nausea is common.’

  ‘And what about contraceptives?’

  ‘Someone was not using them,’ said the troll with what could have been a leer.

  ‘She was dieting.’

  ‘Dieting while pregnant is very foolish and, if I might add, morally reprehensible. But it would explain a lot, and, from an aetiological perspective, I am very glad you mentioned it. If she was dieting, that would explain her fainting, and we can concentrate on the effects of the accident rather than searching for its cause. Good.’

  The doctor started shuffling away.

  ‘Wait! Can I go in there?’

  The doctor made a victory sign. ‘Two minutes. No more. She is unconscious. You’d do better to go in, say hello, then come back tonight. Except on second thoughts you can’t, because no visitors after seven, so come back tomorrow.’

  Half an hour later Caterina’s mother arrived. She stood behind the glass and gazed in at Caterina with far more calm that Blume was expecting. Still looking at her daughter, she said, ‘I have already spoken with the doctors. They assure me her injuries are not serious, and I believe them.’