Blume nodded.
“That must have been interesting. How many other kids had a free house every night?”
“It wasn’t my house,” said Blume.
“You were next of kin. There’s no way the house could have gone to anyone else.”
“It was a rented apartment. It never belonged to them. It belonged to a guy called Gargaruti, some fucking character, he turned out to be.”
“Yeah? Tell me about him.”
Blume allowed a look of great sadness to wash over his countenance and said, “Maybe some other time.”
“OK.”
“Unless you want to hear now…”
“No. That’s OK. Some other time will do.”
“Yeah, because, he was…”
Kristin interrupted him, “So tell me, how did you survive?”
“The police helped me. First of all, they tried to get in contact with my relatives in the States. My mother had a sister in L.A., kind of a failed actress. She didn’t reply to any letters. Nothing. So then they had to send me to an orphanage.”
“That’s very Dickensian. You don’t mind me saying that, do you?”
“I don’t care. Also, I didn’t really live in the orphanage. I continued in school, then the nuns gave me some freedom. I even got lifts back and forth from the police, spent some nights in the apartment, which was paid for until the end of the year. Also, it took the City of Rome three months to complete the paperwork, and so by the time I went in there for my first day, it was only weeks before my eighteenth birthday.”
“How did you survive for money?”
“I taught English, then started giving Latin and French lessons, too.”
“You were good enough at Latin and French to give lessons?”
“Yes. I’m good at languages. Very good. I find them easy to learn.”
“What else do you speak?”
“Spanish-obviously. Basically, it’s Italian with a lisp. My German’s quite good. That’s all. A bit of Albanian. Some Romany. Greek.”
“Ancient Greek?”
“No. Modern. I used to go to the islands in June and July with college friends. I can order food in Greek, read a menu.”
“You pick up languages just by listening to them?”
“No. I need to study them. What I am good at is picking up accents. I can tell accents.”
“Who were these police who helped you?”
“A policewoman, the one who came around to tell me. Marina. She came around the following day, and the day after that, and then her partner arrived, and after him, another, and they all started checking up on me, seeing if I was OK. Five cops on rotation for a year and a bit, all looking out for me. I still know them all.”
“Did your parents leave money?”
“No. They weren’t planning to die. And they were both part-time university teachers, with a lifestyle above their means. No properties, no assets, no savings to speak of. My father left a debit card in his drawer, and after a long search I found the PIN hidden as a telephone number. So I started drawing money out of his account. But it didn’t last. After six months, the bank found out my father wasn’t alive. I’m not sure how. Not only did they block the account, they also called in the Finance Police and denounced ‘persons unknown’ for theft.”
“So you have a criminal record?”
“No. I get this visit from the Finance Police, and they give me grief for a while. Then I get a lawyer’s letter from the bank, saying they want all the money back plus interest plus legal fees and so on. And then in comes Gargaruti, my landlord, doubles the rent there and then.”
“A landlord can’t just double the rent like that.”
“He can here, if the apartment is let to a non-Italian. Gargaruti had other apartments, and a take-out restaurant, a rosticceria. He worked there all day. He always smelled of roast chicken. Anyway, he tells me to turn up for work in the restaurant on Monday. I did. The pay he gave me didn’t cover my rent, and he said he was charging interest. Then he gets all kindly uncle again, tells me to eat all the roast chicken I want. I told Marina, the policewoman, about him. She spread the word and the police sort of leaned on him. My rent went back down, I left his kitchen. Three years later, I bought the flat from him. He needed persuasion about that, too.”
He lifted his glass to drink some of his wine, and kept the rim of the glass against his mouth and narrowed his eyes until all he saw was the red wine. When he put down the glass, he picked up his napkin, and pressed it against his mouth, leaving a purple stain like a bruise on the linen.
“A few days after I had identified my parents, they asked me to bite on a piece of gauze, and put it with tweezers into a plastic tub. Mitochondrial DNA testing. It wasn’t necessary. This was the early 1990s. The police labs were developing a training program for technicians, and this was a good opportunity.”
“Don’t you resent that? The police using you like that for training their technicians?”
“No.” Blume was emphatic. “The police did everything for me. They took care of me. They kept coming back to check. I’d have ended up on the street if it hadn’t been for them.”
“Or back in America.”
They were interrupted by the arrival of the second course. Kristin tucked in with relish to a red and pale yellow mess of pieces in a bowl.
Blume couldn’t help but wonder at the incongruity between her talc-scented freshness and this voracious appetite for slaughter house leftovers.
He thought of Clemente lying on the floor, the blood congealing around him. Dorfmann dipping a blood-soaked swab on a Hemastix strip and turning it green.
“You’re supposed to eat the marrow,” said Kristin, jabbing a fork in the direction of his plate, where he had hardly touched the osso buco. “That’s the best bit.”
Blume looked without appetite at the cross section of leg-bone with strings of gray flesh attached to it. He reached out for more wine, but discovered the carafe was already empty.
“I did go back to America. A year later, as soon as I was eighteen and could travel alone. There was no one there. I found out where my aunt lived. I watched her house in Los Angeles for a day, and I think I saw her. I have two cousins.”
“You went all the way over to the USA, then just looked at your aunt from a distance?”
“I didn’t see what I could say to her. Anyhow, it was just one day out of my holiday.”
“You considered it a holiday?”
“I was there with Valentina, my girlfriend. We did a coast-to-coast. Two months traveling and working. She got a J-1 visa, so she could work, too. It was fun. My life has not been a total wreck, you know.”
“Did you hang out with students or cops in those days?”
“Both. A lot of people studying law and economics were thinking of joining the police.”
“What about the expat community? Did you have much to do with them? Other Americans?”
Kristin’s voice seemed to echo as she said that, and Blume realized he was slipping into a half-dream state, battling wine and sleepiness with adrenaline. He checked the time on his phone: ten forty-five. The sensible thing would have been to go to bed, get a proper six hours at least before the Alleva operation.
“Not much. I never got on with visiting Americans.” He was tired of talking. “But what about you? Tell me what you do. I haven’t managed to get any information from you.”
“Well, I was a lawyer until recently. I worked for Merck Sharp and Dohme. Pharmaceuticals. What I couldn’t tell you about rizatriptan benzoate ain’t worth knowing.”
“What does that do?”
“Gets rid of headaches.”
“Does it work?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never had a headache,” said Kristin.
“Shit, I get them all the time,” said Blume.
“Well, you could try drinking less,” said Kristin, timing her comment with the arrival of the waiter with
