here to take on some of your paperwork. She did so, right?”
“Some of it, yes,” said Grattapaglia. “Not all that much.”
“I’m glad she didn’t. Because now it’s your turn. Caterina here is going to be busy with this case. She won’t have time for unrelated paperwork. You’ll do it for her. After-hours, without overtime. I also want you to write up a second report for the incident with the Spaniard. Don’t file it. Don’t talk about it. Give it directly to me. Clear? And stop throwing dagger looks at her.”
Grattapaglia moved his gaze from Caterina and stared with hatred at the sparrows hopping and bobbing among crumbs at the next table.
“Now I need you to organize a decent house-to-house.”
Grattapaglia stood up, not looking at either of them.
“One last thing,” said Blume. “Get the bill. And get me another cappuccino while you’re about it. Inspector?”
“Nothing for me, thanks,” said Caterina.
“He’s paying, remember.” Blume gave her a quick wink and an almost imperceptible jerk of the head in Grattapaglia’s direction, encouraging her.
“No, I don’t want anything,” she said.
“Get me a Danish, too, Salvatore. Get a few take-away pastries and coffees for Picasso-face, Di Ricci, and the others. They’ll appreciate it. Tell them they’re from me.”
“Who’s Picasso-face?” asked Caterina.
“Rospo, of course.”
When Grattapaglia had gone, Blume leaned back and turned his face up to the sun. “I need a job that allows me to drink coffee, eat pastries, and soak up the morning warmth. A job without people like Grattapaglia. I’d keep the dead bodies and crime victims, though. I wouldn’t have any perspective on life without them. So, what’s your impression so far?”
“It’s hard to know. There were a lot of distractions. I didn’t get a chance to examine the scene much,” said Caterina.
“That was my decision, Inspector. You need to know how to handle all the peripheral elements, all the distractions, the mistakes, onlookers, traffic, Spaniards with attitude, people like Grattapaglia. It’s hard. The technicians do most of the detail work, because they don’t have the distractions of all the other stuff. But if you don’t have the distractions, then you don’t have the big picture, which is what you need to solve a case. The big picture, by the way, is that there’s often no picture. All the background stuff you dig up is composed mostly of chaos and irrelevance. You need to look at it all the same. Most of it is a big waste of time. Like most people’s lives, really. All I can tell you is just try not to make any case even more complicated by introducing too many of your own interpretations. Did you sketch the scene like I asked?”
Thankful to have something to show for herself at last, Caterina pulled the notebook out of her bag, handed it to Blume who opened it up to the sketch, which she had developed in pencil and ink over two pages. He looked at it in silence for some time, tilting the notebook left and right every so often, nodding his head.
“Did you go to art school?” he said after a while.
Caterina felt a tingling around her throat and knew she was in danger of blushing. “No. I was good in school, but…”
Blume interrupted, “Let me tell you something, you’ve definitely got natural talent, a good hand…” He snapped the notebook shut. “But it’s useless for our purposes.”
Caterina’s smile weakened.
“As art, it’s excellent,” said Blume. “But that’s not our business. Imagine this sketch has just come to your desk. You think, ah, here’s a helpful thing for the investigation, you open it and you find…”
“No measurements. I forgot to put in the measurements,” said Caterina. “I was going to but I got distracted.”
“The measurements are basically the only things that count. Those and the fact that you were there and made them, which is the purpose of the sketch. The photos and the rulers and measuring tape and the video camera capture all the rest. When I do it, I turn everything into rectangles or, if it’s a car, a triangle with circles. Symbols rather than pictures, see?”
He pulled out his own notebook and showed her an assembly of boxes, lines, and squiggles, made even less intelligible by arrows coming out of the boxes pointing to numbers. “The camera killed representational art,” said Blume. “It’s easy to forget stuff, and it’s easy to forget yourself. That is one reason you need to go easy on someone like Grattapaglia. Another reason is that you mustn’t make enemies in the department. Enemies above you are bad enough, enemies below are worse. You’ll find that out. So you are going to have to make up with Grattapaglia somehow or other. Maybe you could admit you should have told him the Spaniard was a diplomat.”
“I do admit it, Commissioner.”
“No, not to me. To him. Everything with me is hunky-dory.”
“It doesn’t feel that way.”
“Well, it is. Who did you phone on the bridge?”
Caterina hesitated. She was sure Blume had not seen her make the call to Elia. She had kept her eye on his back all the time. She had hit speed dial, spoke for, what, twenty seconds at most, and Blume had not turned around once.
“How do you know I phoned someone?”
“You deliberately fell back by pretending to be interested in a journal of civil service examinations at the newsstand, and so I figured you wanted privacy to make a call. When you caught up, I saw you were a little distracted. And I’ve noticed you hook your hair over the back of your right ear when you’re using a phone. Your hair was still pushed back when you sat down here.”
Caterina brought her hand up to her ear.
“No. It’s fallen back in place now,” said Blume. “Here’s the thing: I like to know who my investigators are talking to while we’re at work.”
“My son.”
“Oh, right. I didn’t know you had a son. Or maybe I did, but I’d forgotten. I didn’t know you were married either. Or are you?”
“I was. My son’s just turned nine. I don’t like people knowing. It’s hard enough being a woman and getting taken seriously, but being a single mother, well, you can imagine.”
“Well, no. I can hardly imagine being a single mother, can I? You should have reminded me the other day when you came in asking for fieldwork.”
“Would knowing that have influenced your decision?”
“I don’t know,” said Blume. “I’d like to think not. But let’s do a test. Tell me what we have so far. Give me a hypothesis. Go on.”
Caterina cleared her throat and said, “Well, not much…”
“Good start,” said Blume. “Never forget the law of parsimony, Inspector. Whichever theory needs fewest assumptions is the best.”
“The tourist mugger, hearing him singing in English, decided to rob him. A struggle ensued, the mugger hit him over the head. Or pushed him down.”
“That’s short enough,” said Blume. “Most reports of the mugger speak of one man acting alone, which is a bit odd since they usually work in twos or threes. That’s not a core issue now, but keep it in mind all the same. More importantly, the reports all mention him having an unusual thin knife, like a stiletto or something. So if he is going to kill, why not use that?”
“He hasn’t used it yet,” said Caterina.
“There’s always a first time,” said Blume.
“Except, this wasn’t it, obviously,” said Caterina, surprising herself as she heard annoyance creeping into her voice. “Seeing as he wasn’t stabbed.”
“So let’s rule out that hypothesis and think of one even likelier and simpler,” said Blume. “Like this: The man had been drinking. He was in his early seventies…”
“Wait…” She double-checked her arithmetic. “He was in his early sixties. Not his seventies.”
