calories left in her hand after she had said yes to the whipped cream on top five minutes earlier. Her minor quandary was resolved by the trilling of an incoming call. She dropped the cone into the overflowing rubbish bin outside the gelateria, and kissed her fingers clean, before fishing the mobile phone from her bag. She glanced at it and saw an unknown number of a few digits. An institution of some sort, she guessed.
‘Inspector Mattiola?’ A woman’s voice.
‘Yes.’
‘I am Doctor Silvia La Verde, Consultant Neurologist at the Gemelli Hospital. I am phoning on behalf of Magistrate Matteo Arconti, who is unable to make the call.’
‘He’s awake?’
‘Absolutely, and he’s sitting here right beside me. He has some difficulty in holding a phone and pressing buttons…’
Like Blume, then, thought Caterina.
‘… but I am confident we can deal with that over the next weeks and months. He has no problems, or only very minor problems relating to muscle control, in speaking. I’m going to put the phone to his ear now.’
Caterina waited a moment.
‘Eeeola?’ said the voice, which sounded like it was coming from the other side of the tomb.
‘Eeola?’ she said.
‘Attrina Eeeola?’
‘Caterina Mattiola, yes, sir, that’s me. How can I help?’
Silence. Then some voices in the background, someone exclaiming something.
‘Chief Inspector Mattiola,’ said the same voice, almost perfectly normal now, apart from a slight slurring. ‘Magistrate Matteo Arconti here. Sorry about that. It turns out I can speak perfectly fine if the phone is at my right ear, but I become almost aphasic if it’s at my left. Half my brain seems to be numb. Dr La Verde here is very interested in this. I think she’s writing a book about people like me.’
Caterina allowed her silence to convey that she had no idea what he was talking about.
‘I was wondering, could you find time to pay me a visit. Just you, mind. I have a few things I’d like to ask you.’
‘Can’t you ask me about them now?’ said Caterina. She had just used up her last stores of tolerance for pompous magistrates.
‘I have a consultant neurologist acting as a phone holder. I really think you should come here, Inspector.’
They always did that, conversationally demoted you by one rank when they sensed a lack of deference.
Perhaps sensing an imminent refusal, Arconti added, ‘If you really want to know, I don’t so much want to ask you questions as to tell you a few things. They concern Commissioner Alec Blume, and a little trouble he has made for himself.’
He could have said that to begin with.
‘I’m on my way,’ she said.
28
Castellammare di Stabia, Naples
Blume waited till Konrad had gone in, then, instead of parking in front, backed up and drove the camper van around to the rear and squeezed behind a semitrailer. Moving quickly, he left the cab and opened the door to the living quarters, and stomped in, lashing out with his feet at anything he thought he saw moving. He flicked on the light, but it only cast a buttery glow on a section of the ceiling, and illuminated nothing. He saw he could let in more light by opening the curtain that closed off the driver’s cab.
The rat, the size of a small cat, was attached to the curtain, perfectly motionless, its pink feet digging into the fabric. It had positioned itself right behind the passenger seat, inches from where Konrad’s head had been. Its nose was pointing up towards the ceiling, its tail swinging almost imperceptibly to and fro to offset the gentle sway of the curtain.
Hickory, dickory dock, sang Blume to himself, his eyes seeking a weapon as the animal continued to gaze upwards, pretending not to have seen him as he pretended not to have seen it.
Blume moved deeper into the camper, quietly unlocked a cupboard, and pulled out the first thing his hand touched, which turned out to be a can of insecticide. Fine. He’d use it as a baton. As he transferred it to his right hand, the rat did a 180-degree rotation, turning his nose from twelve to six. Blume, momentarily experiencing some of the horror he had seen written on Konrad’s features, launched the canister. With a casually insulting backward flip, the rat executed a somersault in the air and landed on its feet on the floor, walking rather than running out the door just as Blume’s useless aerosol hit the curtain. Blume stepped to the door, just in time to see the rat slip under the rear wheel of the camper van, very much with the air of one prepared to bide his time until the human persecutor had left.
He pulled the door to. Without the breeze, the room immediately became airless and hot. He made a very rapid survey of the camper, pausing again to look at the faded picture of the girl. Then he went over to Konrad’s two leather suitcases and lifted the larger onto the misery-inducing Formica table bolted to the floor. It was closed with a small combination padlock of the sort that could be sprung with the help of a mini-screwdriver and the sudden application of force. But he had no such screwdriver to hand. Patiently, he pulled gently on the latch, seeing which of the dials felt tightest. He zeroed it, tested again, found the third dial was now tightest, and worked at that. It took him less than two minutes to get the combination.
Sweating profusely now as the sun outside turned the camper into a Dutch oven, Blume opened the suitcase. As expected, Konrad’s clothes were neatly folded and separated by type. Blume stood back and looked carefully at the contents, studying patterns, memorizing the order. Then he started taking out the clothes item by item and running his hand over each.
He had to open the door for air. He glanced down at the wheel, seeing nothing. ‘Hey, rat?’ he called. ‘Want to climb in here, make a nest in Hoffmann’s underpants?’
Comforted by the breeze, he returned to his task of feeling his way through the contents, stroking the silky lining of the suitcase with the back of his hand. He double-checked to see if he had missed anything in the front pocket, then set about putting everything back. The second suitcase had the same combination as the first.
The contents here proved more interesting. He immediately found a notebook, with an expensive vellum cover. Inside were neat handwritten notes, all in German. It would take him too long to work out the meanings. He could make out some words, Ehrenabzeichen, Geschaftsfreund, Kontaktperson, Rache. Hoffmann also had some headed paper with the lettering BKA and the black eagle symbol, but the sheets were blank. Below some neatly folded shirts, he found a sheaf of papers held together by spiral binding. There had to be eighty sheets at least and, Blume noted, many of them were in Italian. He glanced quickly through, and saw they referred to the Ndrangheta. He caught some names of major families and that of a heroic magistrate Nicola Gratteri, who was one of the leading experts on the organization. Blume hesitated, then decided to transfer the entire document into his own suitcase. It meant Konrad would find out about this in an hour or two when he went to unpack his bags, but that was fine.
He was looking for a weapon. If Konrad had one, it had to be in here, because he was not carrying one on his person. Blume had carefully and surreptitiously checked from the first moment they had met, and had finally been able to rule out the last possibility of a concealed weapon when Konrad had lifted his feet off the floor in fear of rats, revealing that he wore brown-and-white striped socks, but no ankle holster.
He lifted out three books. One was a guidebook to ‘Kalabrien und Basilikata’, one of the more useless guidebooks crammed with glossy photos of places that, presumably, you would be seeing for yourself. He held the book by its spine and made a fan of the pages and shook, but nothing fell out. There was a novel, Selbs Betrug, again with nothing hidden inside. More interesting, but ultimately unrevealing, was a book called Mafialand Deutschland by Jurgen Roth. Konrad also had a neat little halogen penlight that Blume wasted a few seconds playing with. He reached the bottom of the suitcase without finding anything else of interest. He swiped his hand
