casually at Pernazzo’s heart. It was an elegant model, like Massoni’s.
The kid seemed nice enough. Pernazzo looked slowly to his right. The raw-faced woman had sat down, her big feet pointed in his direction. She was twisting something in her hands and staring at him with her small blue eyes, never taking them off him, all the time working the gum in her jaw. The old man’s phone rang, he pressed it to his mutilated ear, murmured something about five minutes, put it away.
“Move,” commanded the boy. They left by the front door, and the boy suddenly gave him a hard shove, as if the house had kept him polite and he was only now coming into his element. Pernazzo slipped on the grass, went sprawling forward, and considered breaking into a sprint, but the boy was just behind him with his long-barreled pistol. Pernazzo saw two four-by-four vehicles parked in front of the gate. How had he not heard? They circled the house, and he was in the back garden again. There was the broken window, the shining glass shards.
As they approached the thicket at the end of the garden, he tensed, ready to make a break for it, but though the top of his body felt light and ready to burst into flight, the lower part seemed to be wading through water. The youth whispered “Stop,” and his voice was so close that Pernazzo felt the hairs in his ears tingle.
Pernazzo walked on a few paces, wondering whether his mother could see him now.
“I said ‘stop.’ ” There was no annoyance in the soft voice.
Using the energy surging through the upper part of his body, Pernazzo bent down and grabbed a broken elm branch, but it was as light as cork. He spun around, stick in hand, but the kid was five paces behind and out of reach. He didn’t even seem to have noticed Pernazzo’s weapon.
“Wait a minute!” said Pernazzo. He raised the rotten stick above his head. “This is too light. I need…”
“What?”
But Pernazzo could not think of anything to say.
The kid shot him through the right elbow. When he heard the crack, Pernazzo thought the wood had exploded over his head. And, then, suddenly, the pain was so bad he wanted to tear off his right arm with his left.
The next bullet buried itself in his kneecap and did not come out. As he went down, he felt vomit rise from his throat, and when he hit the ground he sucked it all back in again and couldn’t breathe. He wriggled over onto his side and dislodged enough to be able to gasp for air. Something infinitely strong and merciless grabbed his shattered arm and pulled, causing the agony to move from his elbow to his entire body. Far above him stood the darkened face of the young man and above him a blue sky with clouds like faint chalk marks.
Pernazzo had not planned for the pain. It left him no chance of clarity. Most of all, it was not fair. He had no chance, lying there. A distant idea was beginning to form in his mind, somewhere behind the pain. He would need some time to work it through. Time to recover. It had something to do with change. He was sure it was going to be a beautiful idea.
“Wait,” said Pernazzo, “I think I may…”
The young man in the white tracksuit shot Pernazzo twice in the forehead, putting an immediate end to the thrashing movements. He used his foot to push the scrawny corpse over and, never one to take a gamble, delivered two more shots to the back of the head.
55
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 11 A.M.
'What about the dogs?”
The speaker was Sveva Romagnolo, and Blume couldn’t believe her question. He had just finished describing the discovery of Pernazzo’s body at Di Tivoli’s country villa in Amatrice, and this was her idea of a suitable response.
“The dogs?” He took the phone way from his ear and looked at it as if it were responsible for the ludicrous question. His main concern now was what to do about Paoloni. He could not come to a decision.
“I know it may sound like a strange question after all you have been telling me, Commissioner, but you see, I’ve already heard all about what happened to Pernazzo. Your boss Gallone was very pleased to be able to give me every detail, along with assurances that he would handle the media. I don’t want to hear any more. Not for now. And it’s the very first thing Arturo would have asked. So now I’m asking for him.”
“Ferrucci said he would look after that,” said Blume. “But after he got… well… it got forgotten.” What ever he did, he would not report Paoloni to the authorities. Paoloni could do that himself.
“You know where the creatures were kept imprisoned, don’t you? The details were in Arturo’s files.”
“Somewhere near Ponte Galleria, I think,” said Blume. He had been working with Paoloni for seven years. Until now, the differences of style had not mattered.
“And no one has gone to rescue them yet? In all this time, no one thought to rescue the dogs? That’s… It’s unspeakable.”
Blume brought his mind back to the surreal conversation he appeared to be engaged in. “Ferrucci wanted to do something, I remember. The dogs will be dead by now, I suppose. Unless someone was giving them water.
I hadn’t really thought about it.”
“Well, think about it now.”
“If they’re not dead, they’ll have escaped and they’ll be feral,” said Blume. He needed to confront Paoloni now.
“Get a team and go there,” said Sveva.
“It’s the responsibility of the municipal police or the local health board,” said Blume. “Not a matter for the flying squad.”
“So call them. Call someone. Then call me back, let me know.”
Blume had just sent the last of the case files to the Halls of Justice. It would take the best part of the day to get the files back, find Clemente’s notes on the whereabouts of the damned dogs… Unless.
Blume looked up the number of LAV on his computer and called Clemente’s office. The doleful secretary answered. She remembered him, without much fondness, but seemed to soften a little at Blume’s unexpected display of humanity. More to the point, she was able to suggest a place where the dogs might be caged. He could do that, then deal with Paoloni who, wisely enough, had returned to sick leave.
Just under an hour later, Blume stood in the middle of a field, head bowed in an effort to get his nose out of the wind and away from the smell it was bringing with it. About 250 meters in front of him, set amongst collapsing prefab huts and rusting vehicles, were silent metal cages. He could just make out inert lumps and dark shapes in them, and he was not moving a step further. He kept his head down and examined the knotty grass growing out the sand, mud, and crushed seashells.
Blume stayed like that for ten minutes until a four-by-four with the letters ASL and the Lazio coat of arms came rolling over the field and a three-man squad from the Health Service arrived with blue-and- white overalls, orange protective gloves, and an armory that included not only restraining poles and a narcotizing projector but also a shotgun. They all wore masks. They seemed to think it was his task to bring them all the way to the cages.
“Not without a mask,” said Blume. One of them went to the van and came back with a mask. It was impossible to talk with the mask on, so they walked the last stretch in silence.
It was already evident from fifty meters that every dog was dead. Some of them, those at the far end, were already mummifying. The ones nearest the closed off water tap were almost invisible behind the swarms of flies.
One cage seemed to contain one dead dog and the ripped remains of two others. The rest contained one dog each. One of the team handed his companion his dart gun and pointed a fogger machine between the bars.
Blume moved back from the billowing white smoke toward a broken-down shed, avoiding an incongruous refrigerator, also crawling with insects, and leaned against a decaying caravan propped up on three cinder blocks. The ASL team could deal with this foul mess themselves.
The fumigation fog seemed to have gotten into his mask, or maybe it had steamed up inside. Blume pulled it off, got hit by the stench, and put it on again quickly. That was worse. He could see nothing. He leaned down and pulled it off again.
As he did so, he thought he saw a small amber light flicker on beneath the caravan. He hunkered down to
