his sports bag into the backseat and tapped Blume on the shoulder.
“Are you a policeman?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Blume.
“Not a boyfriend, then?”
Caterina climbed into the passenger seat. “Sorry about this,” she said. “Commissioner, this is my son. Elia. Say hello.”
“Hello,” said Blume.
“No, not you, Commissioner. I meant Elia. Elia, say hello.”
“Hello,” said Elia.
“Where’s your car?” asked Blume.
“I take the bus here. It’s quicker than finding parking here and then back home. It’s only ten minutes. Elia, darling, we’re getting a lift. Put on your seatbelt.”
“Seatbelt? In the back?”
“It’s the law.”
“I can’t find any seatbelt,” said the boy.
“Well, look for it. I’m sure it’s there.”
“You never make me put on a seatbelt in the back.”
“I’m doing so now.”
“Are we going to have a crash?”
“You never can tell.”
“Can’t your friend drive properly?”
“Elia, please.”
Blume couldn’t find parking either, so he left them outside the apartment building, and came back ten minutes later carrying his load of paper. He found the intercom button with the name Mattiola on it, and got himself buzzed in. It was only when the door to the apartment was opened that he realized this was not Caterina’s apartment, but her parents’.
“Sorry, I thought I’d mentioned it,” said Caterina. “I live ten minutes away, back toward the swimming baths. I was leaving Elia here because I thought we had work to do.”
“We do,” said Blume. “But it’s voluntary. For you. I just had an idea, since you know English… I didn’t mean to disrupt.”
Ten minutes later, his bulging bag held protectively against his chest, Blume thanked Mrs. Mattiola again for her kindness.
“Don’t be silly, Commissioner. More coffee?”
“No thank you, Mrs. Mattiola.”
“Another cookie, Commissioner?”
“No, really, not another.”
“I can’t think of anything else. A yogurt perhaps?”
“No, really… I…”
“Mother! He said no.”
“I want yogurt!” said Elia.
Caterina’s mother went into the kitchen to fetch her grandson a yogurt, and her husband pounced on the opportunity to struggle out of his chair to reach the coffeepot on the table. But she was back with remarkable speed.
“Are you pouring the coffee, Arnaldo?” She handed the yogurt to Elia. “Here, tesoro, this is for you,” and then returned to her husband. “Careful with that handle. It needs to be tightened. You used to tighten things.”
Her husband, who didn’t look much like a colonel, sank noiselessly back into his chair.
“This yogurt has bits in it,” announced Elia with disgust.
“Just eat the bits, Elia,” said Caterina, then softened her tone. “Listen, do you mind staying here until late? I have some work to do with the Commissioner.”
“Of course you can leave Elia with us,” said her mother.
“Great.” Caterina stood up. “We’d better go.”
Blume stood up, too.
“So you two are going back to your place now?” said Mrs. Mattiola.
“The office, we’re going back to the office,” said Caterina.
“Oh. I was under the impression… Do you need any fruit?”
“I have fruit,” said Caterina.
But her mother had thrown the question into the air as a decoy to cover her retreat, and before Caterina had kissed her son and made it to the front door, she was back bearing two bulging blue plastic bags. “These are apples, from the orchard owner himself, he has apples and cabbages out in Santa Severa, sells them at his stall in the market there on Via Catania. You won’t get apples like that in the shops. I’ve thrown in a few carrots, some fennel, and two lettuces, some artichokes, a few new potatoes, and a handful of onions, and some of those brown pears Elia likes. Kaisers. Also those Kinder chocolate bars. They say each bar contains one and a half glasses of full-fat milk. Do you think that’s true? That’s a lot of milk. He likes to have two at breakfast. That’s three glasses, and he dips them into his milk, which makes four. Milk is good for growing children.”
Blume offered to help carry the bags, though it was going to be a struggle, what with his own paper load.
“No. Just open the front door,” said Caterina. As soon as he did, she shouldered him out into the hallway.
“Lovely meeting you, Commissioner. Drop by again soon.”
“A pleasure, Mrs. Mattiola,” said Blume.
“Call the elevator,” ordered Caterina.
Chapter 14
Caterina finished stacking dirty plates in the sink. Her kitchen was usually spotless. Well, not spotless, but not like this either.
Blume gave her the details of his talk with John Nightingale.
“So we need to check through the notebooks to find if there is any reference to something both the Colonel and Nightingale would want to keep quiet. But we don’t know if it’s there.”
“Shall we look through them now?”
“Either that, or we systematically read the notebooks from beginning to end, which is probably the best way, because the devil is so often in the details, isn’t it?” said Blume. “If I can, I am going to read them all the way through, but there is a good chance I won’t have time. Also, I have specifically been instructed not to investigate. But before I give up, and it may involve handing over these notes, I want a second pair of eyes. You need to be in the background. Unpaid, unrecognized overtime work, basically.”
As her father liked to say, you wanted a bicycle, now pedal.
Blume opened the first notebook and read in a declamatory tone: “ As William Wordsworth once remarked, the child is the father of the man.”
The phone rang.
“Are you going to answer that?”
“It’s my mother,” said Caterina.
“You can see the caller ID from all the way over there?”
“No, but I can feel it.”
When it had stopped ringing, she pulled her hands out of the sink, and Blume returned to frowning at the notebook. “Already I don’t like this guy, Treacy,” he said.
“The child’s the father of the man,” said Caterina, repeating the words and then continuing unself-consciously
