The Memory Key: A Commissario Alec Blume Novel Page 34

She left.

  ‘Can Marco resist you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What is he to you?’

  Olivia looked at the back of her hands and found the answer there. ‘You know the way some unmarried women wear a wedding ring, to keep old creeps like you from propositioning them?’

  ‘I do indeed,’ said Blume good-naturedly.

  ‘Marco’s my wedding ring.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  She smiled with exaggerated sweetness at the imbecility of his question.

  ‘You know he almost got arrested for you?’

  ‘No, I didn’t know that.’ She grabbed long strands of hair in her fists and with a deft movement he had seen Caterina do, only more slowly, she formed a sort of old-fashioned bun at the back of her head and pushed in a hair slide that she conjured out of thin air. The effect was to outline the angles and shadows around her sharp cheekbones, and expose her pixie ears.

  From the kitchen to his left came the sound of her mother reminding everyone that she was there.

  ‘Is that it?’ said Olivia. ‘You came all the way here just to tell me that Marco has fucked up his life again?’

  ‘When’s the last time you heard from Marco?’

  She slowly shrugged a bare shoulder out of her T-shirt, then covered it up again. ‘A few days.’

  ‘You know he was seeing Sofia?’

  ‘I know now. Paolo told me.’

  ‘And what about you and Paolo. Does Marco know about that?’

  ‘Who cares – well, you do, apparently. Why?’

  ‘Because men who get hurt can become evil.’

  ‘Only if they are evil to begin with.’

  ‘No one is evil to begin with,’ said Blume. ‘Just release him, Let him find his level, whatever it is. Maybe he just needs a woman who is a bit dumber than him.’

  ‘Brain damaged, then. I’ll tell him you suggested that might make him happy.’

  Blume fingered his eyebrow trying to remember his reason for coming.

  ‘Are you running out of things to ask me?’

  ‘No. You know arrests have been made and the investigative phase is over?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘So you’re safe.’

  ‘Because I didn’t do anything, Inspector.’

  ‘Exactly. So you can tell me. Were you thinking about it? Did you ever discuss it with Marco?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Getting rid of Sofia.’

  She smiled at him. ‘You are so offensive, Inspector. And your mind is full of violence. You hate me, but I think you hate women in general. That’s what this is all about. Now leave.’

  ‘Tell your mother I’m sorry I couldn’t stay.’

  ‘I bet you are sorry. You’re like a dog in search of a home, Inspector.’

  ‘Commissioner.’

  ‘You think I or anyone else gives a fuck?’

  Olivia stood up and came up close to him, and for a panicky moment he thought she was about to stand on tiptoe and kiss him on the lips, until he realized she was showing him the door. She opened it for him. The sharp light of the winter morning was unforgiving on the grubby little place but illuminated her beautiful features.

  Chapter 50

  The red bedcover and the yellow bulb in the ceiling filled his tiny bedroom with a bloody hue, and he was finding it difficult to read the small print in Pitagora’s book. But Blume could not make head or tail of it:

  We might imagine humankind to be formed of a forest of inverted trees that change position, for what is our head but the roots of our being, and what do we do but move?

  Humans, walking, trees. Upside-down trees. OK, he could remember that. Blume stuck his finger into the middle of the book and opened another random page.

  Though our materialist world is inimical to virtues and misunderstands the Greek concept of goodness, for whereas agape is to amor as agathos is to . . .

  Nope. He turned over another wad of pages.

  For the same twelve keys to a good memory are the same twenty-four keys to happiness. And if it is happiness you seek, the thirty-six rules of the golden . . .

  Blume thought about this. All in all, he felt it was pretty safe to say he wasn’t after happiness. The idea seemed as uninviting as heaven threatened to be eternally dull. Misery endured became, after some practice, misery enjoyed. Still, on the off-chance he was missing out on something, he read on:

  Then these are the twelve steps you must take: Study, contemplate, debate, discuss, converse, change, seek novelty, hate your rivals, fear criticism, seek praise, strive after excellence . . .

  Now there was something. Hate as a path to happiness. He flicked forward.

  Once upon a time . . .

  Good, he liked anything that started this way.

  . . . there was a nameless place. Then people came to live there and they needed something to remember it by. So they gave it a name that was a function or a description. Florence is where all the flowers grow, Rome was named after Romulus. The Jews always named a place after the deed that had been done there. When God called on Abraham to kill his son, Abraham called the place Jehovah-jireh, which means the Lord will provide. When the Romans saw tall trees, they called them Abies, which means high-rising. Poplars are poplars because they populate everywhere. The American Indians remembered everything by storing their memories in the vast landscape, on mountaintops, beside rivers, in forests, at the roots of ancient trees, at water springs, and on the shape of the horizon. Their environment was their memory store, and it was so extensive and filled with landmarks they had no need of writing. When they were forced to move, they lost contact with their memory store and began to forget everything about their culture. The only things they are allowed to remember now are the battles they lost . . .

  Blume pulled out his phone and glanced at the time. Time to go. He was looking forward to this.

  He had the taxi drop him off at the end of Caterina’s street, where he knew there was an all-night florist manned by a deeply depressed Pakistani who, Blume knew (because he had asked), earned €4 an hour. But the flowers looked as miserable as their seller, and he remembered her saying something about not liking red flowers, or yellow, or red and yellow together. He bought a small cactus with a ribbon round it.

  On the way up the road, he popped into the video store and asked for the newest video game they had. He was staggered by the price, but felt sure Elia would appreciate the latest Battlefield, even if Caterina did not fully approve.

  He licked his finger and removed a stain of some sort from the lapel of his jacket. He had sprayed on some herbal essence that Caterina had bought him for his birthday. It smelled like fermenting fruit and made him sneeze, but presumably she liked it.

  The table was set, red tablecloth and all, the one without the stains, and Elia sat there, looking solemn and bored and angry.

  ‘Did she keep you waiting for me?’ said Blume, sitting down beside him.

  ‘Yeah, she did. I’m starving now.’

  ‘Sorry. I think she wants to be formal. Here, I got you a present.’ He handed over the plastic bag. Elia pulled out the DVD glanced at it, then tossed it straight back in.

  ‘Cazzo,’ said Blume, ‘you have it already.’

  ‘I wish,’ said Elia.

  ‘Ah, she won’t let you play it because it’s rated for over-18s.’

  ‘My machine won’t let me play it. That’s a PlayStation disc. I have an Xbox.’

  Caterina came in, cactus still in hand. ‘Where were you thinking I should put this? On top of the piano?’

  ‘What piano?’

  ‘No, just testing you for Alzheimer’s.’ The giggle that followed sounded very tense. Her skin was taut and shiny.

  ‘How is your father?’ asked Blume.

  Caterina put the cactus on the floor beside the sofa, then, with her foot, pushed it out of sight.

  ‘A good dose of lung cancer or something is what he needs. God forgive me. Elia, ignore wha
t I just said. And never smoke.’

  She left the room slowly, like she was nursing a sprain, saying, without turning round, ‘By the way, Alec, you reek of alcohol and cigarettes. What’s that about?’

  ‘Alcohol? As for the smoke, well, you know, people in the hotel.’

  ‘Your hotel is extraterritorial? Not subject to the laws of the state in which smoking is banned in public places?’

  ‘Yeah, well, it is sort of out of this world. Owned by the Vatican, I think. And they’re foreign – obviously because they are in a hotel.’

  ‘Liar.’ She spoke the word from the kitchen and it sounded casual, almost friendly, and she hadn’t returned to the smell of alcohol, though how she could possibly have picked that up was a mystery. It was hours since his last drink.

  She had made them lasagna, Blume’s and Elia’s favourite dish, and one at which she excelled. With a stately and cautious gait, she brought it to the living room table, refusing his offers of help. The last time they had eaten at this table had been when they had a dinner party with school friends of hers, a squad of bores none of whose memories coincided with anything to do with his life. They had just made him feel old and lost.

  The lasagna was not her best effort. What wasn’t hard was chewy; the meat was dry, crumbly, and tasteless. They ate in almost complete silence, save for the crunch of the overcooked pieces of pasta. At one point, Blume exaggerated the crunching sounds, and Elia had a fit of the giggles, but his mother didn’t notice.

  Elia was dismissed, and went without complaint. Caterina sat down on the sofa, but instead of pulling her legs up under her, sat with her hands on her lap, and asked him about the case. Adopting the slightly formal tone that she seemed to be insisting on, he ran through the whole case from beginning to end, clarifying some ideas in his own mind as he spoke them aloud, which, he discovered, was quite therapeutic. By the time he had finished, he felt quite good about how it had gone and optimistic about the next few days.

  ‘Will he get away with it, do you think?’

  ‘Professor Ideo?’ Blume considered. ‘Maybe. You never can tell.’

  ‘That doesn’t bother you too much, does it?’

  ‘It’s how things work, or don’t work. We have the lousiest court system in the western world. Or the most inconclusive, which may be the same thing.’

  ‘Are you interested in that case you sabotaged?’

  ‘I had almost forgotten about it.’

  ‘The preliminary judge released the daughter and criticized the preventative arrest. Adelgardo Lambertini has been put under house arrest and ordered to sign in once a week. Medical certificates helped there. Are you pleased?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Blume.

  ‘Well, I am glad to get such a direct response from you for once. But you don’t have to look quite so pleased.’

  ‘That’s not it,’ said Blume. ‘I am smiling for a different reason. But I am waiting for you to tell me what it is.’

  She glanced at the door, the way she did in the bedroom when she was nervously checking again that Elia was not home. Then she turned her face towards him, and he was unsure what to make of her expression, at once so bright and so sad.

  ‘What do you think you know, Alec?’

  ‘I think you are still pregnant. You did not have an abortion.’

  He felt a lurch as her eyes filled with tears. Surely, he had not got that wrong.

  She smiled at the teardrops that landed on her blouse.

  ‘You’re right.’

  Quite of its own accord, Blume’s hand made a fist and thumped the armrest.

  ‘So you take this as a victory?’

  ‘Victory, triumph, fantastic news, call it what you will. We are going to have a son.’ He laughed.

  She laughed, too, but with considerably less joy. ‘I am going to have a child.’

  ‘Fine. A girl’s fine. Girls are great. Probably better if it’s a girl. Is it?’

  ‘It’s too early to tell. And I probably won’t get amniocentesis. It’s less used now than – you don’t even know what that is, do you?’

  ‘Is it that thing where they give you a . . . they take a . . . they put you into a . . . no, I don’t know what it is.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t. In most of the ways that count, you’re still basically an adolescent. The reason I called you here tonight is to tell you I do not want you to be the father.’

  Blume felt the same wave of nausea and light-headedness the cigarettes had induced in him a few nights before, and he found his hand reaching for his pocket in search of them. Had he known she was going to say this? His muscles seemed to have seized up as in a dream. He was not sure if they would respond to his commands, so he simply sat there, immobile, considering the idea that he could be asleep and dreaming this moment.

  Caterina had tilted her head and was looking at him the way she did sometimes, with curiosity as well as pity.

  ‘Poor Alec. I am sorry. What were you expecting, though? You abandoned me again in the car park this morning, then you phone me up to ask to come round for dinner. I don’t know where to begin. And you have started drinking and, I think, smoking, but that’s minor. You can give them up. You can’t give up being you.’

  His tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth, and he did not seem to be able to produce saliva. He swallowed dry air, and tried to speak. ‘I think, legally speaking, I am allowed . . . Can I recognize her?’

  Caterina stepped across the space between them and sat on the armrest and stroked the side of his face with the back of her hand. ‘Yes, of course you may.’

  ‘Great.’ The voice that came out of his throat was an alien croak.

  ‘You can contribute, you can visit, and you can watch her grow up. But you can’t bring her – or him – up. You can’t live with me any more.’

  ‘Ah, you say that now.’

  She ignored his effort to assume a bantering tone. ‘Yes, I say it now. I could have said it when I was angrier with you, and it would have been easier. I could have not said it to you, and left you adrift. But I chose this way because it is the hardest way, and the hardest way is always the right one.’

  ‘Well, if that were true, football would be quite a different–’

  ‘Alec!’

  ‘What?’

  She put her finger to her lips. ‘It’s all right. Stop trying to talk your way out of your pain. I know you’re hurt.’ She took her finger off her lips, and touched his forehead.

  ‘Won’t Elia miss me? A bit?’

  ‘Yes, he will. Much more than a bit.’

  ‘I suppose he’s almost grown up now, and I came late on the scene.’

  ‘He’ll survive. He’ll miss you, but he’ll survive.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’ll miss you too. I am transferring out of the department. It will effectively mean a demotion. I am going back to immigration affairs. At least I’ll know what I am doing.’

  ‘I can put in a good word for you.’

  ‘You! A good word.’ She bent down her head and made a sound like a long eeeee, then threw her head back and abandoned herself to laughter. He hadn’t seen her laugh so hard since they had watched a Peter Sellers movie. And it was infectious.

  Elia appeared in the doorway in his pyjamas, a big expectant grin on his face, and demanded to know what was so funny, and his mother tried to explain, contextualize, and yet mitigate the implied insult to Blume. Elia tried to join in the laughter, but it was no longer all that funny.

  Blume ran his hand through the child’s hair. ‘Your mother seems to think that having me on her side won’t necessarily advance her career. You had to be there,’ he added.

  Elia wanted to hang around in case there were more sudden outbursts of merriment, but after a while his mother sent him to bed.

  ‘ ’Night, Alec.’

  ‘ ’Night, Elia.’

  Half an hour later, just as Elia was falling asleep, Blume slipped quietly out the door.

  Chapter 51

&n
bsp; A house of contemplation should be built in open space where the air is pure. It should be as far as possible from the haunts of women, the noise of the market, the rumble of horses, the sight and sound of ships, the baying of dogs, all noises that are offensive to the ear, the groaning of stinking carts. In length and width, it should be of equal measure, and the windows shall be disposed so that neither more nor less light enters than nature herself requires. The roof should not be too low, nor slope too steeply, for that way it will close off your mind and memory. It should be free of dust and blemishes, nor should it contain images or paintings. The walls should be white, there should be but one single entrance and the stairs leading to it should not be tiring. It should afford a view of outdoor areas, trees, gardens, and whatnot, because through the sight of delightful things is our memory strengthened.

  (Boncompagno da Signa, 1215)

  ‘Isn’t that a magnificent view?’

  ‘The IKEA that is set on the hill cannot be hidden.’

  ‘From up here, you can choose what to look at. You don’t have to look at the IKEA.’

  ‘And yet somehow I do,’ said Blume. ‘But eventually they’ll build another high-rise tower in front of me and then I’ll have to look at that instead.’

  ‘The consortium went bankrupt. The building work is finished.’

  ‘Unlike the roads,’ said Blume.

  ‘The City of Rome is legally obliged to pay for them. I am telling you, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Top floor, too. That view of the hills . . .’

  ‘And of the IKEA.’

  ‘From this side you can look back to the city. In a few years this place could be worth two million.’

  ‘Once Italy returns to the lira,’ said Blume.

  ‘I’ll leave you to look around on your own, shall I?’

  Blume walked around the empty apartment. The windows on one side looked out towards the natural park of Veio, home of the Etruscans. The windows on the other looked out at a building development that had taken a huge bite of a hillside. In the distance, the rising heat from Rome made the cold air shimmer. The neighbourhood looked and felt like an airport without any planes, and he was in a watchtower looking out. They had cemented over the past and left it without soul or without memory. No one walked on the half-finished streets below. No one else lived in the high-rise apartment block, no one else had turned up for the showing.