“Half-joking wholly in earnest. No, not even that. I mean, if you had said yes, that would have been cool… no, it wouldn’t have. OK, let me tell you about how I found him,” said Blume.
“I am not interested in that right now.” Kristin was standing glaring down at him, her face too bright in the sunlight for him to see, her hair a fiery red. “You just thought you could dump an unwanted dog on me like that. Like I have nothing better to do? By the way, apart from the fact you already know I’m going to the States in a few days, how often do you think I have to travel there?”
“I don’t know,” said Blume, who had not been there in ten years. “Three times a year? Four?”
“I go back once a month. Just how in the hell did you think I was going to deal with having a dog… I don’t even know where to start with this. You hate dogs. Right?”
“Well… Hate is a bit extreme.”
“You hate them. It was practically the first thing you said to me. So now you are trying to offload something that is hateful to you on me.”
Blume wished he understood his own psychology better.
“A dog is a living being, a responsibility, a thing you give in love, a sign of a long-term commitment. I was not even so sure about inviting you to dinner. I thought maybe it was too… domestic. That it might signal too much. Then you do something like this.”
What he saw as a miscalculation of timing and tone was turning out to be a big mistake, one of those blunders he made that told women things about him that he didn’t even know about himself. Blume had been here before, only with a different girl and no dog.
“Maybe you’d like to hear how I got this dog?” he tried.
No, it turned out she did not. Few things could interest her less. She brought up the subject of his parents’ mummifying study, his immobility, his depressing home and whole attitude. “I think we’re going to have to press the reset button, Alec. Keep it strictly professional.”
Then she walked away, leaving Blume blinking blindly in the sudden sunlight.
59
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 10:30 A.M.
If Kristin thought his apartment was depressing, thought Blume, she should see Paoloni’s. In six or seven years, Paoloni had yet to find time to unpack the boxes he had brought with him when his wife threw him out, and he had rented a place two hundred meters down the street, convinced she’d soon see the error of her ways. Paoloni’s wooden chairs had once been used as weapons during a fight in a pizzeria. The owner donated them as a gesture of deep gratitude for Paoloni’s help in restoring peace. The room also contained a heavy leather armchair of the type to be found in the waiting rooms of certain government ministries.
“That’s a nice TV,” said Blume.
“Yeah, thanks. It’s full HD. You’re supposed to be able to see the sweat on players’ faces, the mud on the football, even the individual blades of grass,” said Paoloni. “Except the screen’s too big or my chair’s too close, so you get a bit seasick watching it. To see it properly you have to stand at the front door, where you are.”
“Right,” said Blume.
“I was thinking,” said Paoloni. “Let’s go out. There’s a sort of park and playing fields behind the church. We could go there.”
“Sure.” Blume had no problem leaving Paoloni’s apartment, but if he had known they were going to a park, he’d have brought the dog. He’d closed it in his bedroom, but the beast could probably break down walls with its forehead.
Paoloni chose to sit on a bench near a chain-link fence behind which two teams of kids were playing football on synthetic grass. A few fathers were shouting instructions from the sidelines.
“Would you have killed them?” asked Blume, getting straight to the worst point first.
“I don’t know. Probably. But I can’t be sure. See, I know Alleva. He’d probably have surrendered immediately when he saw us come in. That would have made it hard to do.”
“But you’d have done it? Put a bullet in him?”
“I’m not talking moral choices here,” said Paoloni. “I only mean it would have been hard for me to get away with it. The other guys with me, they weren’t there to carry out an assassination. If Alleva and Massoni resisted, they would not have asked too many questions about lethal force, but if Alleva surrendered immediately and I killed him, that would have been a problem.”
“Come on, Beppe. You don’t expect me to believe that. The four of you went with one mind and one intention. There’s no point in protecting them. And you’re all on film.”
“Innocenzi gave me a copy,” said Paoloni. “We look like idiots, don’t we? Go there intending to revenge a colleague, leave there looking like the Marx Brothers.”
“I haven’t watched it. I don’t think I will. So, you were with-who-Zambotto and…”
“Two other guys I used to work with in Corviale.”
“Names?”
Paoloni seemed to be distracted by the football game.
“Names, Beppe.” Blume repeated. “You think it’s OK Innocenzi knows and I don’t? Anyhow, it’s all on film.”
“Genovese and Badero. They’re sort of inseparable. Mean bastards both.”
“I was protecting you, and you did this,” said Blume. “What would you do now? Are you even listening?”
Paoloni was watching the game again. “I don’t know what I’d do if I was you,” he said. “Me, I’d look the other way, but that’s the whole problem isn’t it? I’ve looked the other way too many times. I’ve been doing this so long, I’ve gotten sucked in. There’s no longer any real difference between me and them. But I wasn’t on the take. Well, I was, but I used all of it-most of it-to buy information.”
Blume thought of Paoloni’s rented apartment and believed him. More or less.
“What happened to all that guilt about Ferrucci?”
Paoloni spat, lit a cigarette, and said, “That was real. That’s still there. It’s the main reason I wanted to get Massoni and Alleva.”
“I don’t think I can let this go, Beppe. I can’t pretend this didn’t happen.”
“I know,” said Paoloni, staring forward, eyes still fixed on the footballers. “That’s the difference between us. At the beginning, it wasn’t like that. We were basically the same, but you never got streetwise. That’s because you have always been…” Paoloni suddenly stood up, tossed his cigarette aside, and punched the air. “See that?”
“What?”
“That goal!”
A skin-headed youth with black lines tattooed down his arms ran up to the fence, pointed at his chest, plucked at his jersey. Paoloni gave him a thumbs-up, and shouted: “Brilliant header. Fucking brilliant!” His face bright, smiling, Paoloni turned to Blume and said, “That’s my son Fabio. Lives with his mother. He’s the best.”
“You’ve been here watching your son play football all this time?”
“Yeah. Parish legate quarterfinals, under-sixteens. That’s Ottaviano they’re playing against. Hey, I was listening, too,” said Paoloni.
“You could have told me.”
“I didn’t think you’d be interested.”
“You’re not so good at telling me things, Beppe. You can’t even come clean about wanting to watch your son play football.”
“You might have said no. Anyhow, does it make a difference to what you’re going to say?”
Blume looked at the teenagers running around in front of them. They almost looked like professionals, almost looked like men, except they ran around too much. All that energy and enthusiasm.
“I want you to quit the force. If you do that, I’ll look after you from inside, make sure none of this comes out.”
Paoloni said, “I thought that might be what you’d do.”
“It’s a favor, Beppe. A big one. And you will still owe me.”
“I know. Maybe I needed to get out anyhow. Alleva and Massoni, they’d have been my first murders. Others would have followed. Once you start, you know.”
“Yeah,” said Blume. He took out his wallet, extracted the memory card, gave it to Paoloni.
“I don’t need to see this. Destroy it. The fewer copies the better.”