Positano
A few minutes later, Konrad, his raw neck and head sticking out of the white cotton bathrobe, knocked on the door to announce, much to Blume’s surprise, that he had made reservations for dinner. He said he would take a quick shower and meet him in the lobby in fifteen minutes.
‘Where are we going?’
‘A place called I Partenopei,’ said Konrad, making a good job of the pronunciation. ‘Recommended by the hotel manager who looks at me funny.’ Konrad lowered his voice, ‘ Schwul, definitely. Despite the daughter.’
Blume went up to the lobby to wait where the manager, full of solicitation and goodwill, immediately informed him he had ordered them a cab, even though it was only ten minutes on foot.
‘Far too dangerous that road in the dark,’ the manager said.
The taxi turned out to have a fixed rate. Fifteen euros there and back. ‘Call here when you want him to come down and pick you up.’
‘That’s not a taxi,’ said Blume.
‘Not exactly,’ agreed the manager. ‘It’s a sort of courtesy car for some of the hotels on this side of the headland.’
‘A courtesy car is free.’
‘I’ll pay, of course,’ said the manager quickly. ‘It’s not as if you haven’t already been generous.’
‘I’ll get the German to pay. He can pay for dinner, too.’
Konrad arrived wearing a wide-collar paisley-design shirt, a crumpled linen jacket and drainpipe black jeans. Adidas running shoes and a powerful stench of Denim aftershave or something else that belonged to the 1970s completed his get-up. His hair, still wet, was sleeked back into a ducktail.
The restaurant was perched on a rocky outcrop overlooking the harbour. Looking down, Blume could see their table reflected in the dark water and the waiter coming towards them like a black shadow moving just beneath the surface. Running the length of the wall was a fish tank with crabs and lobsters, the pincers disabled by plastic cuffs, and red reef mullets, ready to be netted and fried without needing to be gutted.
They ate well, but mostly in silence. Konrad, who said swimming had made him hungry, announced that from the point of view of toxins, he had more confidence in the produce of the sea than the land. He had swordfish steaks. Blume, being adventurous, went for aubergine with chocolate and peppered mussels, and they both chose acqua pazza as their first course.
The restaurant was full for a Monday night. Blume glanced at the swarthy bulky men sucking at their fingers and reaching across each other as they stretched to help themselves from central platters of fish. At another table a woman bedecked in gold jewels and wearing a white tracksuit was explaining to the waiter that the roly-poly kid in the blue football strip of Napoli sulking beside her had coeliac disease and would die if any pasta passed his mouth, but he could, and did, eat meat and fried potatoes, though he might possibly be allergic to fish. Five youths at another table, all in tracksuits, drank limoncello and kept a careful eye on Konrad and Blume.
‘I’m glad to see you do eat,’ said Blume. ‘You even seem to be enjoying yourself.’
‘There is something liberating about this place.’
‘This restaurant, the Amalfi coast, or southern Italy?’
‘All together. I am not a romantic anarchist. I am, after all, a policeman. But there is great freedom in the absence of rules. And I feel like we have travelled a great distance, even though it was only a few hours from Rome this morning. That seems so long ago.’
‘The south is separate from the north,’ said Blume. ‘The broken roads and railways turn journeys down here into tiring odysseys. Even when southerners speak standard Italian, they use a different grammar. Everything is said in the remote tense. That has to mean something.’
‘It means they still use the Latin past tense,’ said Konrad. ‘It is very fascinating to me.’
‘If it were up to me,’ said Blume, ‘I’d give this region back to the Spanish, the north back to the French and the Austrians, and Sicily back to the Arabs.’
‘And so, logically, you would give Rome and central Italy back to the Pope.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Blume. ‘I couldn’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because he’s German.’
Konrad, recovering his confidence in the purity of the produce, ordered sospiri di limoni for dessert. Blume asked for coffee.
‘I am paying for this of course,’ said Konrad. ‘You are my guest.’ He called over the waiter and got the bill, scribbled on a piece of graph paper.
Blume shrugged. ‘It’s the other way around if anything, but you can still pay.’
Without quite knowing why he was doing it, especially after he had made such an effort to cover his tracks, Blume now found himself saying, ‘Konrad, listen to me: if you’re thinking of going down to Calabria, don’t. They don’t want visitors. That would definitely include a federal policeman from Germany.’
‘Why do you say I am going to Calabria?’
‘Because you are.’
‘Just because I met Domenico Megale…’
‘I saw that torn Madonna with Megale’s signature. Take that look off your face, you left your bags unattended in the camper van, and then your room. Some part of you wants to be stopped. A well-hidden sane part.’
Konrad’s eyes were shining. Perhaps it was the drink. ‘I have a private matter to attend to. It is not police work. I would be grateful to be left alone,’ he said.
‘Is that icon of the Madonna some sort of code? What’s the idea, someone down there has the other half of the torn Madonna, you fit the two halves together, they see Megale’s signature, they know you are good and true?’
Konrad stared into the middle distance avoiding Blume’s sympathetic gaze and struggling to compose his features into an expression of indifference.
‘Are you planning to kill someone, Konrad? Or are you trying to get yourself killed? Or both? All I can say is you are making a bad choice, and I am giving you a chance not to make it…’
Blume stopped, as the waiter returned.
‘If I make a bad choice, there is another universe in which I make a good choice,’ said Konrad. ‘I believe in multiverse theory.’
‘That’s handy. Meanwhile, back in this universe, the waiter’s just asked us if you would prefer to pay in cash.’
‘What?’
‘Cash. The credit card machine is mysteriously “broken”.’
‘I don’t have enough cash.’
‘Fuck it,’ said Blume. He pulled out two fifties from the envelope Massimiliani had given him and paid for the meal.
32
Positano
Blume was lying in bed, his stomach heavy with fish, searching for the willpower to read through Konrad’s notes when his Samsung vibrated.
‘Massimiliani, I suppose?’
‘Of course it’s me. I hope you’re not using the phone to call other people.’
‘No. What do you want?’
‘You can forget about Hoffmann.’
Blume sat up straight, causing some of the papers to slip off his bed. ‘No! I was just getting somewhere with
