police I met helped me out.”
“Maybe the police were better in your day.”
“I’ll try and help,” said Blume. He may have misread Principe, but Principe had read him like a book putting him on this case. Five minutes into the interview and he had pledged his soul to the girl, whose suddenly widowed mother sat dumb, helpless, and closed downstairs.
Their outing to the pizzeria, Giulia told him, had been to celebrate her mother’s fortieth birthday. Her father, who was two years younger, kept teasing her mother about being old. Giulia could tell she didn’t really like him to make jokes, any more than he appreciated being called “Mr. Smooth” in reference to his baldness. Her mother had said something about pizza being all they could afford, and her father had looked hurt.
“She did that quite a lot,” said Giulia.
“They argued a lot?”
“Not really,” said Giulia. “But now she’s hurting so much for all those things she said. She keeps mentioning them.”
“Tell me more about that evening,” said Blume.
They were going to a pizza place. Giulia didn’t know the address, but it was near a hospital. Blume knew it. He had checked the address in the file and driven slowly past the site of the killing before proceeding to the house.
On that evening, Giulia said, they walked out of the house just as a loud clap of thunder burst overhead, and by the time they had reached the car, parked about five minutes’ walk away because there was never space on their street, it was bucketing down, and they were all soaked.
The pizzeria had parking, but it was full. This started another sort of argument about whether he should drop them off outside the pizzeria or not.
Her father didn’t want to give any money to the gang-operated parking attendants, her mother said he was going too far away from the restaurant. She said they would get soaked again, even though the rain was already easing off.
All of a sudden, her father braked and pulled over because he had seen a place, but on the wrong side of the road. The traffic did not let up for ages.
Finally, with a quick shout to Giulia to double-check through the side window, her father lurched into a rapid U-turn. The road was just wide enough to accommodate the turning circle of their small car. Revving the engine a little, Giulia’s father straightened up and set off in the opposite direction.
The herringbone parking rendered the gap invisible from that side of the road, and they were already practically upon it before they spotted it again.
“Hah!” cried her father, swinging the car out a little to get a better angle of approach, and standing on the brake.
The screech, the swish of tires not quite gripping the wet tarmac, the sudden blare of the horn from behind, and the water-filled light of the headlamps coming through the back window and filling the car with a bluish light made her think she was going to die, so that when the actual rear impact came, Giulia couldn’t believe how soft it was. Just a slight bump, that pushed her softly forward in her seat, and a crack and a tinkle of the car’s taillights fragmenting.
Her father stayed outwardly calm. She knew he was faking it, but he continued the maneuver, and edged the car into the gap.
The vehicle behind had wheels that seemed to go as high as the door handles on theirs. As Giulia, her brother, and her mother all got out, Giulia saw the driver of the car behind open his door and jump down onto the road, just like that, without even looking, even though he was practically in the middle of the road. Her father never allowed them to get out on the traffic side. The man was lucky no one was coming behind. Also, he left the driver’s door wide open, blocking the whole lane.
The passenger door opened, and another man, a far smaller one, jumped out on the safe side, covering his head against the rain.
Her father had bent down and was looking, she imagined, at the broken backlights, and shaking his head. Her mother called to him in half-warning and half-pleading tones. She was worried about a fight. Giulia remembered her father saying, “We’re in the right. He rear-ended us.”
Giulia watched the two men. They did not come forward to look at the car, nor did they even bother to look at their own. They simply stood there, in the spotlight of their own headlamps. As her father approached them, the large man leaned over slightly and glanced at the side of his vehicle.
They frightened her. They frightened her mother, too. She could feel this in the way her mother pulled her away onto the sidewalk and propelled her and Giacomo toward the bright windows, crowded tables, and loud happy sounds of the pizzeria. She glanced back and saw her father standing in front of the large one, who opened his hands in what she thought was a conciliatory gesture. And everything seemed to be fine, because ten minutes later, her father, tense but smiling, was sitting beside her, helping her choose a pizza.
She asked for a Coke, not because she wanted one, but because she knew he disapproved of sugary drinks and would give one of his little lectures about the targeting of children by multinationals. And when he had finished, he would allow her to have one, laugh at his own weakness, and not feel so bad.
Her mother had said he was wrong not to call the police. She said they would probably slash the tires. Her father drank four long glasses of beer.
He didn’t usually drink so much beer, but her mother didn’t seem to mind tonight.
“Just remember, I’m driving,” she had said.
They left the pizzeria about an hour later, maybe less. There was a small scene when her father paid for the meal using his Bancomat card. Her mother asked about cash, and he said he had left it at home. As they came out, Giacomo was swinging like a monkey from his mother’s right hand, and, for once, her parents had linked arms. Giulia went to hold her father’s left arm, but realized the sidewalk was not broad enough and she would get bumped into by people coming from the opposite direction.
So she was three steps behind when she saw her father and mother stop and unlink arms and her mother slowly and gently beginning to push Giacomo’s face sideways with the palm of her free hand, as if something had already happened that he should never see. Then her father took a step forward on his own, and Giulia saw the same two men again. The large one had a blue mark on his neck. The smaller one had his arm outstretched. At the end of his outstretched arm, he held a gray-barreled piece of weaponry such as Giulia had only ever seen, or thought she had seen, in her brother’s toy box.
The large man looked surprised. She remembered that. And then the small one shot her father.
“What sort of mark on the neck?” asked Blume, mainly to distract her mind from the images it was now replaying.
“Like three triangles pointing into each other. Blue, same color as veins,” said Giulia.
“A very big man?”
“Bigger than you, even,” said Giulia.
“There was no police sketch of him,” said Blume.
“They never asked for one. It took so long to do one of the man who shot my father… And they didn’t seem too happy with the result.”
“I am not too happy with them,” said Blume.
“They’re right, sort of,” said Giulia. “I couldn’t describe him properly to them. It’s hard to picture him. He was small and horrible and I see him in my sleep, but I can’t see his face. It’s like it was blurred. As if the rain had washed his face off of him.”
“Close your eyes. Listen only to my voice. I know this is an awful place for you to go, but I know you go there anyway, and I know you stay there reliving it. Only this time, I’m accompanying you. Maybe that might help a little? Now what ever you see in your mind’s eye, I can see, too. Like we are there together. Relax your shoulders a little, that’s it. Now don’t worry about the face. Just tell me some other details. Can you see his feet, for instance?”
A minute passed, which Blume used to get her to relax her arms, legs, hands. Finally she said, “No.”
“No problem,” said Blume. “I can see them. Ugly feet. Now think of his arms. Especially the arm that he used to murder your father.”
“I can see it,” she said. “It’s thin. More like my arm than yours. Wait, he was wearing a bracelet, too. Silver, with a chain.”
