as he heard Paoloni trying to keep an offhand tone. “Shall we meet back at my place?”
“No,” said Blume. “I need to get home. Remember, Beppe, the front door to my apartment is broken. It closes, but anyone could get in. I’d prefer not to leave it unguarded.”
“I could bring the paintings around to your place. Then tomorrow, you sell them on to the Colonel. You ask five times what I paid for them, we split the difference, and I get a nice quick return on this evening’s investment. Everyone is happy, except maybe the Colonel, but fuck him.”
“I think the Colonel’s men may be watching my place,” said Blume.
“If they are, I’ll spot them.”
“They’re better at surveillance than we thought.”
“Let’s leave it, then. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Chapter 43
The devastation of his apartment looked worse at one o’clock in the morning. For a moment he thought he had been burgled all over again, and his chest trembled with incipient rage, at himself for allowing this to happen. They had polluted his apartment. Nothing felt clean. A strange smell, pungent like fermenting piss, permeated the apartment. Piss and salt. What had they done to his home? Beneath the ammoniac stink of the piss was something worse. Something that smelled of corruption, death.
It was strongest in the kitchen. Moving with a hunter’s careful steps, he searched the cupboards. He opened the refrigerator. On the middle shelf, a gray sea bass lay shimmering in a pool of its own liquefaction.
The trip downstairs with the stinking fish cleared his mind of all thought. Back in the kitchen, he opened a package of bicarbonate of soda and tossed fistfuls of it into his fridge, raising a storm of white which he shut inside by slamming the door closed.
He washed and washed his hands. Now the idea of picking up things from the living-room floor was overwhelming. Even the thought of preparing for bed was exhausting.
Propped against the cracked spine of Volume one of Lotz’s Architecture in Italy, his mother looked out of a silver-framed photograph. She looked like someone else. Unfamiliar, and younger than him. More than twenty years had passed since they died together, leaving him here. Now his memory struggled to retrieve clear images of both together. Was forgetting a sign of things getting better or worse?
There was a fabric conditioner called Chanteclair Marsiglia that brought back his mother. He wished it was something less synthetic-and it was probably poisonous-but nothing worked better. He kept a bottle under the sink and occasionally, but not too often, would add it to his washing.
He undressed. In the bathroom, he eyed his toothbrush with suspicion and decided not to use it. He would get a new one in the morning. He rotated the mattress back into place, pulled up the sheet, and dropped the duvet on top of himself.
The quickest route to remembering his father was a whiff of eucalyptus between the marshlands of Maccarese and the sea, or someone in the office unwrapping a medicinal mint, and there he was, Professor James Blume, standing beneath a balsam-scented tree in Seattle, his face still shining with sweat from the race he had just lost to the fastest ten-year-old in America.
As fast as the wind, Alec, all I could see was the dust behind you, he said, before slapping the white-lined bark with his hand. Black cottonwood makes your mother sneeze. Standing in the shade cast by the trunk, his father fingered the fissures in the bark. The triangular leaves above rotated in the wind and splintered the sunlight into bright shards and dark shadows, so that Blume could hardly make out his face at all.
During the night, Blume’s cell phone died. In the morning, as he stood in the ransacked kitchen, Blume realized the thieves had stolen his recharger, too.
He cleaned up his house a bit, and as he was doing so, the buzzer sounded. Blume allowed a man to come up and measure the door frame. They haggled a bit over the price and vehemently disagreed over the utility of expensive anti-theft features. Blume said he didn’t want them, the man pointed to his apartment and expressed surprise that Blume had not learned from bitter experience.
“They’d have got in anyhow,” said Blume.
“Not with the anti-thrust, kick-stop, reinforced frame with anti-intrusion…”
“No,” said Blume.
“The police recommend that you have a door with these features.”
“The police know nothing,” said Blume.
The man looked offended. Then he had another idea. “They won’t insure you unless you have…”
“No!” said Blume. “Look, I’m sorry. I can’t afford it. How long will it take to get the door replaced?”
“Seeing as you are not interested in extras, and it’s a standard frame, we could do it today. If the warehouse has one in stock. This afternoon?”
“Great. Someone will be here for you.”
He saluted the disgruntled workman, then hunted around for his telephone book. He had not used it in years, but Paoloni’s number had to be in there somewhere. He decided to clear up the scattered books and papers as he looked for it, and for a while forgot the original reason for his cleanup. He hunted with more purpose, but it was nowhere to be found. Using his home phone, he called directory inquiries, but Paoloni was not listed.
Eventually, he decided to go directly to Paoloni’s house. Typical of Paoloni not to bother phoning him at home.
Blume plugged his phone into the recharger in the car and tried to use it immediately, but the battery symbol flashed and the phone would not even switch itself on.
He circled for a while below Paoloni’s apartment building before finding a narrow space three streets away into which he slotted his car. All the buildings in the area were part of the same massive development from the early 1980s. Pale yellow brick facades, square windows with brown roll-down shutters, cement gray cornices. The place looked better at night.
He walked back one hundred and fifty meters to Paoloni’s building. He caught the front door as it swung shut behind a woman with a shopping bag, blocking the door with his hand before it hit his face and sweeping away the woman’s apology with his other hand. Still smiling politely, while absently filing away aspects and curves of the woman’s body in memory for later contemplation and evaluation, he stepped into the elevator, which took him to the third floor. As he stepped out, a door at the far end of the hall clicked softly closed, as if he were not the person they had been waiting for.
The air held a scent of something volatile, pleasant but alarming. It was the smell of someone cleaning brass with pink rubbing alcohol, of a dentist’s waiting room, of a blue flame hovering over brandy. It was pungent and slightly sweet. It was the after-smell of gunfire.
Blume quickened his pace with the idea of smashing into Paoloni’s door at speed and bursting it open, but the apartment was in the middle, not at the end of the corridor, and the best he could do was to check his pace and not overshoot the entrance.
Only as he slid to a sudden stop did he think to ring the doorbell. It rang like a firebell, but nobody answered. He pressed the button till his finger was bent back and whitening. Finally, he let go, stood back, pressed himself against the opposite wall behind, and focused on the point below the keyhole where he wanted his foot to land. He put out of his mind the certain knowledge that he had never seen anyone kick in a door of this type and, for a moment, he was certain it would burst open. He visualized himself crashing into Paoloni’s dark living room. He kicked hard, heel first, and managed to hit the very point he was aiming for. It was enough to make the strike plate shudder. The door seemed to rock on its hinges, but didn’t give. He drew back to deliver another kick, but stopped himself.
He pulled out his badge and marched down the corridor to an apartment door, from behind which he was sure he was being watched. The neighbor opened before he got there.
“Are you the police?”
“Yes.”
“They only sent one?”
