“No.”
“Bettino might send the barman round to ask for your order. You’re occupying a place at lunchtime.”
“I meant to get here earlier. It took me some time to find it. Well, it took the idiot taxi driver some time,” she said. “What happened to your nose?”
“You mean my arm?”
“Well, that, too. I’m sorry. It was a stupid question. I know you were injured in that terrible attack.”
“You wanted to talk,” said Blume.
“Yes.”
As Blume had predicted, the barman came up and stood expectantly beside Sveva. She ordered a grapefruit juice, and turned back to Blume.
The barman duly noted down one grapefruit juice, then asked what she would be having for lunch.
Sveva looked at him with revulsion. “I don’t want to eat.”
“Yes, you do,” said Blume.
“No, I do not.”
“Look, I come here three or four times a week. I stay on good terms with them. Choose something.”
“You choose,” said Sveva.
“She’ll have the panino con la coltellata,” said Blume.
“Scusi?” said the barman.
Blume repeated himself. “Panino con la cotoletta. Cotoletta alla Milanese.” The barman nodded, then moved off. Blume noticed that Sveva was looking at him strangely.
“I’m not going to order just for appearances,” he said. “When it comes, I’ll eat it. A nice bit of fried meat will do me nicely.”
“That’s not what-I just thought you said-never mind. Tell me about the investigation.”
“I can’t. I mean, I wouldn’t anyway, even if it was still my case, but seeing as it’s not, I can’t.”
“Why do you think they took the investigating magistrate off the case?” she said.
“I have no idea,” said Blume. “You’re the politician.”
“I don’t consider ‘politician’ as much of an insult as your tone implies, Commissioner.”
“My phrasing was neutral,” said Blume.
Sveva’s grapefruit juice came, and she pushed it as far away from her as she could till it sat balanced on the edge of the table.
“Sometimes everything is wrong,” she began. Blume waited for her to continue, but she seemed to switch her line of thought. “Did you watch that documentary?”
“Yes,” said Blume. “What was that all about?”
“That’s what I want to ask you.”
The cotoletta arrived and Blume motioned the barman to put it in the middle of the table.
Sveva looked horrified as he cut into the meat. Maybe she didn’t eat meat, either, like her dead husband. He realized he was not being polite, but he was hungry.
“Di Tivoli made that documentary out of spite,” she said. “He is attracted to me. He’s attracted to many other things besides me, but he’s always had something special for me. Or so he says. Ever since university. But I am not in the slightest bit interested in him, also because he is, well, sexually ambiguous. He used to court me, then turn up with some boy he’d picked up on the Oppio Hill. That was not bad, back then, because back then Di Tivoli was a boy, too. Now he’s older. He told me about Arturo’s infidelities years ago. In fact, he even told me about them before they could be counted as proper infidelities. Di Tivoli seemed to think ratting on friends attracts women.”
“You didn’t mind your husband having affairs?”
“Yes and no. That’s not really what I want to talk about.”
“Fine,” said Blume. “But tell me this, did you know about Manuela Innocenzi?”
“No.” She was emphatic. “That I did not know. I knew he was seeing a woman, and I knew she was not so young, but I had no idea she was like that.”
“Like what?”
“Well, ugly, to begin with. But the criminal connection. I mean, come on.”
The last sounded like an appeal to her dead husband.
“So, like I said, Di Tivoli’s trying to embarrass me, and he’s doing a good job. First he drags our name into the dirt, then he makes me look like a fool for not knowing, and to end it all, he seems somehow to imply that I want a cover-up, or that I’m not interested in the truth.”
“It’s a good thing you did not try to stop the show from airing,” said Blume. “That would have given him credence.”
“I know.” She paused to allow Blume time to finish his meal. “So what about this Innocenzi woman?”
Blume shook his head. “I know that communications in the force are like a game of Chinese whispers, and the farther a message has to travel down from on high to someone as low as me, the more garbled it becomes. And I know that nobody ever really knows what’s going on.. ” Blume decided to cut short the rest of the diplomatic preface and went straight to his main point, “But I thought you were happy with the idea that your husband was killed by or as a result of Alleva.”
“Happy? You thought I was happy?”
“You know-satisfied. Convinced. Point is, I got a pretty clear message-go get Alleva-because that’s the word that’s come down from on high.”
“Convinced is the right word. They convinced me. Gallone, the people at the Ministry, some of my party colleagues. My uncle, too. He’s the undersecretary for internal affairs. As for me, I never said that or anything of the sort.”
“You never expressed any wish to see the case shut with Alleva as the guilty party?”
“I want whoever did this put away. I don’t care who it was.”
“What about your political career?”
Sveva paused, not to think, but to make sure he was watching her face closely as she spoke.
“That’s important. I won’t say it isn’t. But I don’t want a cover-up of any sort. If this Manuela Innocenzi is behind it, then have her arrested. I can deal with the embarrassment. Sooner or later everyone gets connected to a criminal family in this country. Everyone in Parliament, anyhow.”
“The message I got was clear,” said Blume. “Pick up Alleva. And because we rushed things, a young policeman got killed.”
“So did my husband!”
She raised her voice enough to cause a slight click of silence in the hubbub around them. One of the bank tellers was still looking at them.
“But you sort of led separate lives, didn’t you?”
Sveva pushed herself back from the table, causing the glass of juice to totter. Blume caught it just in time with a quick diagonal jerk of his good arm.
“I can see that I don’t engage your sympathy. Maybe it’s my politics, my background, I don’t know. It’s true Arturo and I led separate lives most of the time. He started it with his dumb betrayals, and I let him. Perhaps you think I should have spent more energy trying to keep hold of him? Made him feel better about himself? Is that my sin, here?”
“I’m not thinking of sin.”
“Yes, you are. You’ve got the same angry, frustrated look as he had. Men like you…”
“What about us?”
“You never find the woman you’re looking for, and you hate the rest of us for not measuring up.”
“This may apply to your husband, but as for me…”
“You live alone, don’t you?”
Blume said, “You looked that up. You’ve got access to files. It’s not hard to find out things like that.”
“ ‘Yes’ was all you needed to say, Commissioner. And I didn’t look it up.”
Blume drank her juice and grimaced. He didn’t like grapefruit.
“The crime scene,” she said, her tone more conciliatory. “It was messed up. Mainly the fault of Gallone and D’Amico, wasn’t it? I called the investigating magistrate, Principe, and he told me the first phase had been
