“Yes. I love that stuff.”
“You do?” Blume had had to learn to cook for himself very quickly, and had remained unadventurous.
“Yeah, come on.” She almost took his arm. If he had moved the right way she might have taken it. But he wasn’t quick enough.
Blume followed Kristin down Vicolo del Moro behind Piazza Trilussa, and from there into a narrow lane with wet black cobblestones that bulged and swelled as if barely holding down a future seismic event.
The lane led to a two-story, ochre-colored medieval house, so small that it looked like a scale model. A wooden veranda had been attached to the front of the building, forming a porch that was fenced off by a palisade of rush mats supporting clematis and jasmine creepers. The porch area had enough room for five tables, four of which were occupied. No signage indicated that this might be a restaurant, and from a distance, the diners looked like an extended family having a private meal outside their front door. No more than thirty meters away, the quays of the Tiber boomed and raged with traffic on wet asphalt, which was here toned down to white noise.
By a series of hand signals and gesticulations, Kristin managed to secure the one remaining table, and she and Blume sat down facing each other.
Only now that he was seated could he see the name of the restaurant, Mattatoio Cinque, inscribed above the narrow doorway, out of which an agile waiter made a curving backward step, and emerged bearing menus, bread, and water on outstretched arms.
Kristin ordered rigatoni alla pajata and, displaying her American impatience, directly ordered the second course as well, choosing frattaglie.
“Frattaglie?” echoed Blume, holding up a hand to stop the efficient waiter from writing down the order in his pad. “You know what they are?”
She shrugged happily. “Sure.”
Blume wasn’t convinced. “It means the insides of animals,” he told her.
“Better than the outsides, I’d say.”
“Stomach lining and livers, kidneys, testicles, windpipes, and.. stuff?”
The waiter smiled and addressed himself to Kristin. “Today the cook has prepared veal heart with artichoke and carrot cooked in lard with white wine and white sauce.”
Blume glanced at the finely shaped woman in front of him. She was going to consume the heart of a calf cooked in the rendered fat of a pig?
The waiter tossed a glance in Blume’s direction. “I’ll just have the osso buco,” he said. “And a bottle of the house red.”
“And before that? The pasta?” asked the waiter.
“I’ll go for the amatriciana,” said Blume.
The waiter noted down their orders, nodded, and went indoors. Before they could strike up a conversation, he was back again bearing a three-quarter-liter carafe of dark red wine, then with two long steps withdrew to the next table, occupied by a German couple.
“Would you like some wine?” Blume offered.
“Sure,” she said. “Half a glass will be plenty.”
Blume poured himself a half glass as well.
The pasta came, and they ate in a bubble of silence, which Blume tried to pierce with an occasional jab at finding out more about Kristin’s past. But she was more interested in her veal intestines.
Kristin started asking about him. Blume overfilled his mouth and chewed hard on the fatty bits of the diced bacon wondering how much he wanted to reveal. He limited himself to saying he had been in Italy for many years.
She asked about his parents. He had been waiting for this question, and decided he wanted to come across as terse and uncomplaining, maybe a bit gruff.
“Both shot dead in a bank raid on Via Cristoforo Colombo.”
Kristin nodded, twisted a glistening strand of pasta on her fork.
“Mmm,” she said. “Now that is good.”
Blume gave her pasta a look of hate, and added some graphic detail. “Some stupid bank guard tried to play hero and pulled out his weapon to defend a bank’s money. Bank guards. Can there be a more pathetic job than that?”
She looked slightly bored as he told her this. She had not even said she was sorry to hear it. The tragic death of his parents had always guaranteed at least sympathy, if not sex.
Kristin had a question: “Did they catch the guys?”
“One was killed there. Not the one who shot my parents. He got away. Obviously, there was a third waiting outside, probably a fourth doing lookout.”
“Did you have to identify the bodies?”
“Yes. My mother had been shot through the breast.”
“They showed you that?” Kristin’s voice rose in disbelief.
“No. They told me. It was supposed to be a comfort. Straight to the heart. Death would have been instant. They showed me her face. My father’s face, too. The first bullet hit him in the mouth. It looked like he was grinning at me. The second and third in the abdomen. It wasn’t instantaneous for him.”
“So you decided to become a cop and hunt them down for the rest of your life?”
“No. It wasn’t like that. And the shooter is dead anyhow.”
“So he did get caught,” said Kristin. “In the end.”
“No, he just died in the end. It was summer 1990, and I had just finished an exam in political economy. It was my first year on the force. I came home, there was a letter waiting for me, postmark was local. I opened it and inside was typed ‘Verano Riq. 57 no. 23-bis.’ Nothing else.
“Verano. As in the cemetery?”
“See? You’d make a good detective, too,” said Blume. “The cemetery is walking distance from where I live.”
Kristin interrupted. “So you still live in the same house?”
“Yes.”
“Are your parents buried in the same cemetery?”
“Yes. Do you want to hear this or not?”
“Go on.”
“So I went straight to the cemetery, to Section fifty-seven, found the tomb number. In our hearts forever, it said. Pietro Scognamiglio 17 October 1961 to 19 May 1990.”
“And who was this Scognamiglio?”
“I didn’t know. I ran the name, found out he had spent more time in Rebbibia than out of it, had a list of violent crimes attributed to him. Kept getting released, though.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“So you don’t actually know this Scognamiglio is the guy who pulled the trigger.”
“No. But someone knew, and that someone sent me a message.”
Kristin soaked up the oil from her plate with a piece of bread, and put it in her mouth, then pushed her plate away. “That was excellent. So did it make you feel better, seeing that tomb?”
“A bit,” said Blume. “Not much. I’d like to be absolutely certain that’s what the message meant, and I would prefer to have put Scognamiglio in his tomb myself.”
“I guess the death of your parents is the reason you’re still here.”
“Yes. I was just seventeen. It was hard to survive on my own in a foreign country.”
“And yet here you are.”
Blume tried to determine her tone. It was not quite mocking, or maybe it was.
“I had already been living here for three years. I thought I was going into freshman class at Franklin High, but they brought me here and put me into the final year of a liceo in Parioli. I was fifteen then.”
“Why did they come here?”
“They were art historians. My father was also an illustrator. I did not take after him.”
“So you lived on your own after seventeen?”
