Cola.”
“I just wanted to get an idea of what they were.”
“And?”
“Two seem to be a sort of diary going right back to the sixties, and one a manual, full of instructions. It’s filled with formulas, ingredients, trade names. I was waiting for you, Commissioner. And I haven’t really had time to read them. I’ve been doing other things, too.”
“Oh? And what would that be?”
Caterina stroked water beads off her glass and said, “Do you know what my father calls ‘Coca-Cola’?” She poked her finger into the glass and spun the remaining shards of ice. “He calls it ‘hoha-hola.’ He can’t pronounce the letter “C,” because he’s a Tuscan. From a town called Signa, know it?”
“Sure. It’s the exit on the A1 that always has a long line, adds thirty minutes to the trip.”
“It’s famous for other things,” said Caterina. “It makes straw hats, for instance.”
“Really?” said Blume.
“You almost make it sound as if that’s not interesting. I only mention it because of that girl, Manuela, in Treacy’s gallery.”
“The one you don’t like, I picked that up,” said Blume.
“No, you’re wrong. She has the arrogance of youth, that’s all,” said Caterina. “I don’t think she’s a bad person at all. Spoilt and unhappy, maybe. But seeing as you were picking things up, did you notice her accent?”
“Her accent? No, not really. It must have been one of the things I didn’t pick up.”
“Me neither,” said Caterina. “Not at first, because she has no accent we might recognize easily. But she’s supposed to be from Pistoia. That’s what she told us, right?”
“I see what you’re getting at,” said Blume. “But young people don’t have such pronounced accents as they used to. All the dialects are dying out in Italy. And now that you mention it, her accent wasn’t entirely Roman, so maybe it was Tuscan.”
“She doesn’t have a trace of a Tuscan accent. Not a trace. I know what it sounds like. Maybe Umbria, north Lazio. Somewhere nearby.”
“That’s more or less Tuscany,” said Blume. “What’s the difference? Why would she say she was from Tuscany if she wasn’t? Only a Tuscan could think that everyone wants to come from Tuscany.”
“I don’t know why she said it. Also there’s no trace of her birth in the records.”
“You checked her out?”
“Sure,” said Caterina. “I can make phone calls from here.” She leaned over to retrieve her bag from in front of Blume, pulled out her notebook, and flicked through it. “According to the APR, three Manuela Ludovisi’s have been born in Italy, but the oldest of them is only eight.”
“So, she was born abroad,” said Blume. “Did you check that out, too?”
“No. I didn’t have time,” said Caterina. “But I did check school enrollments, ID card records, and driving licenses. Or rather, Rosario did. He helped me from the office. He also downloaded
and printed out the photo of her in the Public Records Office. The one in her false ID.”
“Inspector Panebianco thought he should do that? I ordered him to get copies of Treacy’s ID photo, I’m glad to see he found the time to satisfy your requests, too.”
“He obviously thought it was worth pursuing,” said Caterina, annoyance creeping into her tone. “He didn’t comply immediately, but then he found out some things, and phoned me back and told me he had put a copy of her photo on my desk.”
“What sort of things did he find out?”
“Manuela Ludovisi got her first ID card three years ago. Her tax code dates back to the same time. In other words, both her tax code and her ID card date back to a month or two before she got the job at the gallery.”
“She needed the tax code for the job,” said Blume. “That’s OK. Same everywhere in the world. You apply for your social security number, tax code, tax ID, employment book…”
“Right. I can see that. But tax codes are assigned at birth. So I’m interested why she got hers only three years ago.”
“No,” said Blume. “Tax codes are assigned at birth only to people born in Italy. But if you were born abroad, you have to go and get one. I got mine when I was sixteen. Four hours of waiting at Via della Conciliazione, and then I had to go back and have it changed, because they put me down as female.”
“You, a female?”
“It’s the name, Alec. It must have sounded girly to some bureaucrat.”
“Have you got your tax code on you?”
Blume pulled out his wallet and extracted a green-and-white plastic-covered card. “They changed it so I’m not female anymore.”
“May I?” said Caterina. Blume flicked the card onto the table between them. “BLMLCA67B09Z404X,” she read. “So your birthday is February 9. The Z404 shows you were born in the United States, OK?”
“I know that,” said Blume. “I know how to read these things.”
Caterina turned her notebook sideways, so Blume could see what she had written there: MMELDV88M57G713L.
“This corresponds to the name Manuela Ludovisi, born in August 1988,” she said. “This is the tax code that the gallery registered Manuela under. The G713 sequence corresponds to Pistoia, which is precisely what she said. Everything fits-except her accent and the fact this tax code was issued for the first time three years ago.”
Caterina paused to allow Blume to draw the obvious conclusion. But he just sat there looking underwhelmed.
“Either she was born in Pistoia or she was born abroad,” said Caterina. “The code tells us it was Pistoia, but the fact she didn’t have the code until three years ago tells us it was abroad. So, Commissioner, which is it?”
“Italian public offices are not paragons of efficiency,” said Blume. “They probably didn’t assign her a code, then she had to get one when she got her first job. And maybe she’s got rid of her accent in the past few years. I changed language and for the Public Records Office I also changed sex. So she can change accent. As far as I can see, you just don’t like her.”
“I think it was more a case of your liking her too much.”
“I’m not a teenage boy.”
“She is very beautiful. It’s hard to see beyond that.”
“Just what are you accusing her of, exactly?” asked Blume.
“I’m not accusing her of anything. I’m just wondering if she is who she says she is.”
“You mean she’s assumed a false identity? What would she do that for?”
Caterina finished the remains of her drink. “I don’t know, but she worked for two men who sort of specialized in that kind of thing.”
Chapter 11
Caterina left the bar saying she had to pick up her son, Elia. Blume returned to the office, and secured the notebooks in the third drawer of his desk, the only one with a working lock and key. On the table was another memo relating to “concentrated instances of microcriminality prejudicial to the image of Rome in critical zones of cultural heritage.”
“Speaking of which,” said Inspector Panebianco as Blume showed him the memo before balling it up and lobbing it in an ambitious parabola toward the wastepaper basket, “I think Rospo wants to tell you something.”
“You mean he has already told you,” said Blume, going over and retrieving the crumbled ball of paper from behind the leg of a chair and firing it at its target from a more reasonable distance. “Spare me an unnecessary meeting with Rospo and tell me yourself.”
“You’ll be getting a report soon enough. I told him to do a proper one. Last night, several hours before Treacy was found dead, an elderly Asian couple was mugged. They failed to file a proper complaint and it seems that Rospo made an executive decision not to burden us with the disturbing news.”
