elegantly down towards the back of his head, Blume could see individual strands of white. He wondered if Curmaci was aware of them, and if they bothered him. Blume had been rather pleased with his first white hairs, but disliked the emergent salt-and-pepper look he now had.
They were headed inland and upwards again, though not on the same road Blume had come from. Either the car had only one gear or the moron driving did not know what the clutch was for, but after half an hour, the constant screaming of the engine being forced to do everything in second was beginning to weigh more heavily upon Blume’s mind than the thought of his own imminent death. And now the driver seemed to forget how to steer. Instead of following the curve of the narrow road, he drove straight at a shiny green bush of buckthorn and myrtle. Blume braced for impact, but they were already through what had been no more than a curtain and, in fact, were still on a road hardly any worse than the one they had left. As they came to a downward slope, the driver finally stopped gunning the overworked engine and allowed the car to freewheel. Blume tried to grip the seat with the back of his tied hands, but was quickly jolted sideways, banging his ear against the window. As the car hit a ditch and bounced out again, he experienced a moment of zero gravity that ended when his forehead hit the back of the driver’s skull. He was almost knocked unconscious, but the driver growled and swatted blindly at the back of his head and neck as if he had been attacked by a mosquito. For the next fifteen minutes, they continued like that, up and down fields, and Blume concentrated on bracing his legs and not biting his tongue. Finally, they stopped at the bottom of a valley next to a clump of oaks.
Curmaci got out first and politely held the door open as Blume, exaggerating the difficulty of movement, extricated himself. Curmaci brushed himself down, looked at the clothes he was wearing, and sighed theatrically.
‘I am not dressed for the part. Zio Pietro here is right never to wear anything but his hunting clothes.’
He started walking ahead, his expensive shoes crunching on the broken acorn shells as he went into what turned out to be a far deeper woodland than had first appeared, leaving Pietro to prod at Blume with the shotgun. Pietro took delight in telling Blume to hurry, then kicking the back of his legs to trip him up. When Blume stumbled, Pietro would jab at him and order him to move faster. By now, the strands of cord binding Blume’s hands were dangling loose, but Pietro did not seem to notice, and Blume decided it was more expedient to keep them clasped behind his back. At one point, Pietro delivered such a hard blow to his kidneys that Blume thought he had finally been shot. It was only as he hit the earth he realized that there had been no corresponding sound and that he was still thinking and feeling.
Blume struggled to his feet, and looked around. Curmaci was just disappearing into the thickets ahead. Pietro raised the two barrels and crooked his finger on the triggers.
‘You’re Pietro Megale?’
He got no reply, but the weapon dipped slightly. No matter what the circumstances, people liked to be recognized and hear about themselves.
‘You’re Tony’s older brother,’ added Blume.
The barrels rose again, this time to eye level. ‘I am Domenico Megale’s first-born son,’ he said.
‘And Tony is the interloper,’ said Blume, but the dirt-caked face in front of him showed no flicker of comprehension. ‘A usurper,’ said Blume. Still nothing. ‘Your brother’s a bastard.’ He braced himself for a blow, which did not come. Instead, Pietro smiled broadly, displaying missing eyeteeth.
‘He’s not my real brother.’
‘Curmaci told you that?’
‘What would I need to tell him that for?’ said Curmaci’s voice from behind him. Blume turned around to see Curmaci standing there, a friendly smile on his face. ‘Pietro clearly remembers the day his father brought the screaming infant Tony into their family home, don’t you, Pietro? And he remembers the anxiety it caused his mother, God rest her soul. Just as he remembers the day that his father left for Germany, leaving him in charge of protecting Tony as his brother, which Pietro did with steadfastness and courage.’
Blume watched in amazement as the dirty thug in front of him blushed modestly and crossed one foot over the other in embarrassment.
‘I know you don’t like to be praised, Pietro,’ said Curmaci, ‘but sometimes praise is so evidently merited that to refuse to listen to it is like asking for it twice.’ Curmaci waved a hand as if presenting Pietro onstage. ‘This man protected Tony until he was seventeen. He lived through scandals brought into the family through his brother. When Domenico Megale invited Tony to Germany instead of Pietro, they said it was because Tony had brought too much attention and trouble to the family. When Tony married, Pietro was his best man. When Tony’s wife died leaving an infant behind in whom Tony showed no interest, it was Pietro and his wife Rosa who stepped in and raised the child. I tell you all this, Commissioner Alec Blume, because you seem to have an unnatural interest in the private affairs of our families. I have been keeping an eye on you ever since Arconti recruited you.’
‘He’s a magistrate with jurisdiction over my ward. He does not need to “recruit” police, all he has to do is order.’
‘Oh, he recruited you, all right. He brought you round to his way of seeing things, kept you on the case well after it left your scope of competence, got you looking into me and my affairs. Then he passed you on to other people, and here you are. Pietro, try not to let Commissioner Blume fall down again or we’ll never get there.’
After twenty minutes’ walking, with the light finally dimming and the air growing colder, they came to a lake, bright blue in the middle but scummy green along its edges where the water was teeming and plopping with thousands of frogs. Newts and salamanders slipped into rather than out of view as they approached, little reptile spectators interested in the show. Where the green scum stopped and the water cleared, fat black fish swam lazily, ignoring the millions of water-skating insects above them. Blume had never seen so much life concentrated in so small an area. They followed the edge of the lake, Blume trying to anticipate where his captor behind him wanted to go, since he had once again lost sight of Curmaci.
He had now also lost sight of the water, which was hidden behind and below banks of reeds, sedge grass and cattails with insects feeding off their sausage-like heads that nodded in the slight wind. He imagined parting the reeds, and peering down into the water, the colour of a dark beer.
It was hard to credit his own feelings, but Blume was still enjoying the absence of his headache, and the idea of a bullet tearing through his skull seemed such a waste. Finally, they caught up with Curmaci, who was standing in a field of asphodels meticulously picking pollen and burrs off his clothes. As they arrived, he started pulling at a translucent piece of corrugated green plastic like a conscientious hiker trying to clean up the mess left by others. He flipped the plastic neatly over to reveal an opening in the ground out of which the two uprights of a wooden ladder barely protruded. Pietro pushed Blume forward towards the pit that looked like a waterless well. The ladder descending into it had a dozen or so rungs. The important thing for Blume at that moment was that the cavity was too deep, too narrow and too carefully constructed to be a grave.
Curmaci nodded amicably at Blume. ‘There are dozens of these in this area alone, thousands in the region, I would say. Some have lighting and running water, sewage, dehumidifiers, all sorts of amenities. This one has none of those things, but it does have a certain history.’
‘Did some teenage kidnapping victim from the north spend his last days starving to death in here back in the ’80s?’ asked Blume.
‘For a kidnap victim, you’d want to go farther back, to the ’70s,’ said Curmaci, displaying no sign of anger at Blume’s provocation. ‘But this dates from the ’20s, no less. It was a refuge for bandits. It’s an entrance to an underground cave, see?’ He pointed, and Blume looked again into the pit at the bottom of which he now saw the narrow opening of a tunnel high enough for a child to walk into.
‘As I say, it’s got no amenities,’ said Curmaci. ‘The access corridor at the bottom is long and dark, and it gets lower in the middle, where you have to get down on your knees and crawl. There’s been some subsidence in there, too. You get to be a police mole.’
‘Very funny.’
‘It opens up again almost immediately afterward. I’ll be in front, Pietro behind. Pietro, unbind his hands.’
Pietro gave a careless pull at the loose strings behind Blume’s back, which fell away. Curmaci plucked at the knee of his expensive slacks. ‘I am definitely not dressed for this. That should tell you how unplanned this is, right, Pietro?’
‘What is all unplanned?’ asked Blume, but Curmaci had stepped onto the ladder and was out of sight. Two shotgun barrels prodded him in the back and Blume, even though he realized he was more afraid of being buried alive than being shot dead, nonetheless found himself clambering down the rungs, feeling his legs shake with
