The Memory Key: A Commissario Alec Blume Novel Page 35
He walked out of the apartment. Then back in.
The estate agent, who was looking with admiration at his own reflection in the gleam of the brand-new metal lift doors, caught the movement, and rolled his eyes. For the past half hour, he had had to scrape and bow and smile as the tall, sarcastic bastard in the suit who had arrived an hour late with the improbable excuse that he had been at a friend’s funeral, walked around the apartment, a look of loathing on his face, criticizing every aspect of it and the landscape below.
He had not had a commission in 40 weeks. The estate agency paid him a paltry €550 a month, yet were still considering letting him go. No one was buying in this climate, and the criminals who had built this block were asking a stupid amount for such a lonely godforsaken place. His boss said he might as well learn the trade, practise his spiel, and test his patience on awkward customers like this. Nothing to lose. Except an evening he would prefer to be spending warm in the company of his girl, even just sitting together on a sofa, snuggling, and watching something stupid on TV.
‘Excuse me?’
He set his face to smile and turned round.
‘I’ll take it,’ said Blume.
Appendix
Memory Key 1 – The Major/Phonetic System (from The Memory Key: Expand your mental capacity by 27, Profile Books, Los Angeles, 2009)
William James (The Principles of Psychology, vol. I, p. 668) calls it a ‘figure-alphabet’ and one of the ‘ingenious’ methods of ‘technical memory’. As he explains, ‘whatever is to be remembered is deliberately associated by some fanciful analogy … Each numerical digit is represented by one or more letters. The number is then translated into such letters as will best make a word.’
Other writers have used many other names for this memory key which, remember, is for learning off numbers, playing cards and dates, but not facts or poetry or faces (see Appendices B and C for these).
Key words can be constructed by placing vowels before or after the consonants listed above. Thus, to remember the digit 1, you might think of a tie, tea, oat or tee and so on. It must contain only the consonant t or d (die, aid, doe – or ‘dough’ since the gh is silent). Remember also that ‘h’, ‘w’ and ‘y’ may also be treated as vowels. So the number 7 might be coo, key, cow, quay, wake, yak or ache.
Here is a list of key words for the numbers 0–20.
I trust to your inventiveness to continue up to 100 (which might be daisies, thesis, disease) and then to 999. When you get there (it will take about three months of studying), my advice is to re-use the same images but recontextualise them with a strong enveloping theme. For 1,000–2,000, encase the same images in ice, for 2,000–3,000, surround them with fire, and so on until 10,000. So that if 14 is a door, 1,014 is a door in a block of ice, 2,014 is a door on fire. Choose your own. Personally, I use ice, fire, amber, hair, grass and flowers, honey, plastic bubble-wrap, dirt, tar and molasses, coloured glass and blood.
I explain this and the room-method in more detail on my website, which I urge you to visit.
A Note on the Author
Conor Fitzgerald has lived in Ireland, the UK, the United States, and Italy. He has worked as an arts editor, produced a current affairs journal for foreign embassies and founded a successful translation company. He is married with two children and lives in Rome. He is the author of The Dogs of Rome, The Fatal Touch and The Namesake. The Memory Key is his fourth book.
By the same author
The Dogs of Rome
The Fatal Touch
The Namesake
Also available by Conor Fitzgerald
The Namesake
When it comes to murder it’s all in a name.
When Magistrate Matteo Arconti’s namesake, an insurance man from Milan, is found dead outside the court buildings in Piazzale Clodio, it’s a coded warning to the authorities – a clear message of defiance and intimidation.
Commissioner Alec Blume, all too familiar with Rome’s criminal underclass, knows little of the Calabrian mafia currently under investigation by the magistrate. Handing control of the investigation to now live-in and not-so-secret partner Caterina Mattiola, Blume takes a back seat. But while Caterina questions the Milanese widow, Blume has an underhand idea of his own to lure the arrogant mafioso out of his hiding place...
‘Conor Fitzgerald is a class act. A real find’ William Boyd
‘Alec Blume is an inspired creation’ Guardian
The Namesake
The Fatal Touch
In the early hours of a Saturday morning, a body is discovered in Piazza de’ Renzi. If it was just a simple fall that killed him, why is a senior Carabiniere officer so interested?
Commissioner Alec Blume is immediately curious and the discovery of the dead man’s notebooks reveals that there is a great deal more at stake than the unfortunate death of a down-and-out... What secrets did he know that might have made him a target? What is the significance of the Galleria Orpiment? And why are the authorities so intent on blocking Blume’s investigations?
‘Set in Rome in the murky world of art forgery, it’s beautifully written and has a deliciously laconic sense of humour’
Irish Times
The Fatal Touch
The Dogs of Rome
Rome. A city where rules are compromised and compromise rules.
It’s one of the hottest days of the year. Chief Inspector Blume is enjoying a rare solitary lunch in a tranquil corner of Trastevere when an unwelcome phone call intrudes with news of a brutal killing a few streets away.
Arturo Clemente is no ordinary victim. His widow is an elected member of the Senate, and Blume arrives at the scene to find enquiries well underway, the case itself apparently clear-cut, a prime suspect quickly identified. Blume must fight to regain control of the investigation, but well-acquainted with the city’s underworld, he knows from bitter experience that in Rome even a murder enquiry must bow to the rules of politics …
‘Fills the gap left by Michael Dibdin’ Sunday Times
The Dogs of Rome
Copyright © 2013 by Conor Fitzgerald
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