“No, I didn’t notice. How the hell would I notice something like that with Arturo lying in…”
She brought her hand to her throat.
“You didn’t maybe close it yourself, then. You know, sort of protectively.”
“No! Is this normal, for the questions to be so irrelevant?” Romagnolo directed this question at D’Amico, who gave her his most fetching helpless smile.
“Do you eat peanut butter?” asked Blume.
“Are you serious?”
“Well, do you?”
“No. That was my husband. For the protein. He doesn’t eat meat. Didn’t eat meat.”
“Did your husband have a bag?”
“A bag, like a handbag?”
“Any bag.”
“A backpack. He usually went around with a gray backpack. He rode his bicycle a lot.”
“We didn’t find your husband’s wallet. The killer probably took it, but just in case, do you have any idea where it might be?”
“He usually kept it lying around the house, or in his pocket. No, I have no idea where else it might be.”
“His secretary says he didn’t have a cell phone.”
“He thought they were bad for his health.”
Blume allowed a few beats of silence to pass.
Romagnolo said, “Franco was talking about a man called Alleva. He tortures animals. My husband and a friend were making a documentary about this. I would have thought this Alleva would be in custody by now.”
“He will be, soon,” said Blume. “Apart from Alleva, did your husband have enemies?”
“Arturo campaigned really hard against illegal dog fighting. And that earned him a lot of enemies from the criminal underworld. People like this Alleva, I presume. He was responsible for Rome and the Lazio region. I remember he said there were three different gangs in the business, Gypsies-sorry, Roma-Albanians and Italians. He said he was dealing with the Italians, because he felt he had some chance of success, but…” she opened her palms to display her ignorance of the details.
“Can you tell us where these places were?”
“I can probably remember a few of them. But, given that my husband reported every encounter he discovered, the police should have detailed records. Unless, that is, they got trashed as soon as he made them.”
Blume ignored the barb, which applied more to the Carabinieri anyhow, and not the state police. What interested him was how little interest Romagnolo had had in her husband’s activities.
“Did you receive any strange phone calls recently?”
She glanced upward and leftward as she sought to remember.
“No.”
“Anyone new arrive at the house?”
She hesitated. “Not that I know of.”
“Did your husband mention any new friends?”
“My husband would not mention his latest friends to me.”
There. He had hit something. “What do you mean?”
“By what?”
Blume said, “He wouldn’t mention his latest friends. Are you talking about girlfriends?”
To her credit, she did not waste time on pretences. She said: “You can’t say girls. They were older women. They fell for what they thought was his big soft heart. A man who likes animals that much can’t be bad.”
“And was he-bad, I mean?”
“Oh no. Poor Arturo. He was a good man. He was just a bit vain. Vain and lonely, I suppose. Maybe not even vain considering the old babbione he chose.”
“He knew you knew?”
“I guess he must have. We never talked about that side of things. Could one of these… women have anything to do with what happened?”
Seeing no point in pretending otherwise, Blume said: “That’s just what I was wondering.” Then he added, “Did you notice any change in his daily schedules?”
“I told you, Commissioner, he did not have a regular working day like other people. And I’m so busy myself I could hardly notice. I am often in Padua.”
“Your electoral district.”
“Yes.”
“So you are often away from home?”
“I would go so far as to say I am mostly away from home. I spend far more time in Padua than in Rome.”
“I see,” said Blume. But he didn’t see. If you were married to someone, he reckoned, you should live with them. If you weren’t willing to live with them, then it was going nowhere.
Blume was not sure what to make of the woman he was talking to, and he had a feeling he would not have been too keen on Arturo, either. She cared for politics and the environment, he for animals, neither of them for the other. That left the child as their common moral center: the child with the books in alphabetical order and the image of his stabbed father in the middle of his home.
“So you wouldn’t notice if he, say, had been coming in later than usual?”
“Not immediately, but I would probably have heard about it from Angelica or Tommaso.”
“Who’s Angelica?”
“Our babysitter-nanny, I suppose. She’s there most days.” Sveva Romagnolo allowed a note of bitterness to creep into her tone. “Or was. She seems to have been scared off. At any rate, she’s vanished.”
Blume glanced quickly at D’Amico. This could be significant.
“Vanished? The babysitter has vanished?”
“Well, no. Not vanished exactly. She phoned this morning, as a matter of fact,” said Romagnolo. “She said she needed time off to recover from the shock. As if I don’t-oh, never mind.” She brushed invisible dust from her arm, and thus dismissed the useless Nanny Angelica from the conversation.
“And what age is Angelica?” Blume wasn’t so sure he wanted the subject dropped so quickly.
“Oh, let me see… sixty-five, seventy. It’s rather hard to tell with those fat southerners.”
Nando broke his silence. “I am a southerner,” he announced.
“Indeed?” said Romagnolo. Blume had rarely heard a word that conveyed less interest.
D’Amico crossed his arms and relapsed into silence.
Blume continued to ask her about new friends, changes to schedule, strange phone calls, and she continued to tell him that she had nothing to report.
“You were in Padua with your son.”
“Yes.”
“And the idea was to spend the weekend there?”
“Yes, but I got called back for an emergency vote to be held on Monday. Berlusconi is threatening to use a confidence motion- you read the papers.”
Blume did not. He hated politics. “So you came back on Friday afternoon. Why not Saturday?”
“My son was getting bored. He’s still too young.”
“Arturo was not expecting you?”
“I made sure to phone ahead, tell him I was on my way back.”
“At what time did you phone?”
“Half past ten from Padua station.”
“OK,” said Blume. “Now, this nanny person who looks after the house. When does she come?”
“Every other day.”
“And she does all the cooking, cleaning…”
“Sometimes she cooks, but Arturo did his own cooking, too. She cleaned, looked after Tommaso.”
“She did the washing? Made the beds, changed sheets, that sort of thing?”
