‘Your files can’t be much good. The Camorra and Ndrangheta cooperate all the time.’
‘If there is a connection and it involves German firms, which is very plausible, our man has not been sharing information with his superiors or colleagues. It would be useful to know what he is up to. This is where you come in, Commissioner.’
Massimiliani clapped his hands in a businesslike fashion to indicate that they had said enough. He nodded at Weissmann, said ‘thank you’ in English as if they were at a conference, then switched straight into Italian.
‘Winfried likes me to speak Italian now and then so he can practise,’ he said to Blume. He raised his voice, ‘ Tutt’a posto se faccio cosi, Winfried?’
The BKA commander gave the sort of cheery wave like Blume and Massimiliani were two friends visible from a distance but out of earshot.
‘I don’t think he does understand much,’ said Blume, watching the German’s face for signs of comprehension.
‘You’d be surprised, he’s a wily old bastard. He phoned Hoffmann himself this morning, and told him that the Italians needed a favour, and that he and Hoffmann just happened to be in the right place at the right time to do it. He told Hoffmann to come here, saying we Italians, disorganized as always, suddenly need to send an undercover agent down to Campania. Konrad was asked to provide the cover, and of course he could not say no, holiday or no holiday. I don’t imagine he really believes we need him, a German, to infiltrate an Italian into Italy, but Weissmann put him on the spot.’
‘One of those tricky lies that you can’t challenge without revealing that you, too, are lying,’ said Blume.
‘Right. So everyone is pretending that we need to attach an undercover police officer to him for purposes that we would prefer not to talk about. The pretend undercover agent is you, of course.’
‘What’s my cover story?’ asked Blume.
‘You are going to tell him you are investigating toxic dumping, but obviously you can’t say much. That’s why the material I gave you on Friday night should be enough for you to bluff with. You know a bit about the subject now. You tell him that your mission is secret, and that your bosses thought it would be good to have you join him and pretend to be one of two German tourists travelling into Campania, the Amalfi coast.’
‘He won’t believe that if he’s smart.’
‘He wore a false moustache and missed a stakeout by his own colleague so he could visit a Mafia boss just out of jail. It is possible he is not smart at all.’
‘They’ve had three days already to find out what this Hoffmann is up to. He doesn’t sound as if he’s going to fall for my undercover stuff. If he starts asking me about the Camorra, that file you gave me the other night was pretty thin even for bluffing purposes.’
‘I realize that. If at any point you feel that he should simply be stopped, let us know. Bear in mind also that we or his bosses in the BKA might come to the same decision and intervene. But in the meantime, why not see what we can find out? I see this as a perfect opportunity for you to get a feel for what working undercover might be like.’
Blume looked doubtful.
‘The best way to see what Hoffmann is up to is to let him start doing it without letting on. Covertly track where he goes, who he meets. Not assign someone to him.’
‘That’s exactly what the BKA wanted, but we really can’t let that happen. We can’t have a German agent apparently freelancing in a delicate area, just ahead of the Ndrangheta summit, too. Our first idea was just to stop him. Assigning someone to him was a compromise, and we only agreed to that once we were as sure as we could be this was not some sort of set-up.’
‘Good job you trust them, I’d hate to see what distrust looks like.’
‘Use that phone to report to us and keep it on you at all times so we can see where you are.’
Blume turned to the BKA chief and said in English, ‘Your rogue agent will cancel whatever plans he had as soon as I turn up.’
‘ Ich bitte Sie, das ist doch offenkundig! ’ Weissmann muttered something else that Blume failed to catch, then laughed, stood up and, for some reason, gave Massimiliani a blow on the back, presumably intended as a friendly gesture. ‘Sorry, I must speak English.’
Massimiliani had claimed he liked the German commander, but Blume caught a flash of outrage on his face at being thumped so heartily on the back.
‘I just said it was obvious he would have changed his plans,’ explained Weissmann, ‘if his plans are something he means to keep secret, which they may not be. It is also possible that he has something so urgent that he means to do it anyhow, or it is possible that by putting you in his company we are preventing him from doing something. We will continue to examine his files and movements until we find out something.’
‘Why not just follow him discreetly?’ asked Blume. He could see Massimiliani was annoyed he was repeating the question to Weissmann. ‘I mean before now,’ he specified.
‘That is what we have been doing since Friday evening,’ said Weissmann. ‘But we have been monitoring him only at a distance, using his phone and credit card, without the direct involvement of any Italian police. He has been in the Tyrol, like many Germans, but now he is heading south.’
‘You called him,’ said Blume. ‘So now he knows his movements are being observed. Frankly, this does not seem to have been particularly brilliant.’
Weissmann grinned and gave him a thumbs-up. He had a fat silver ring on the base of his thumb and a tiny cobweb tattoo on his palm. ‘It was so dumb, yeah, so dumb.’
But it was not so dumb. To follow a rogue agent in Italy, the BKA either had to launch a large and expensive surveillance operation using their own people, and risk getting caught and losing trust with the Italians, or they had to rely on a team of Italian police doing the surveillance for them on one of their own men, which he could see was not an attractive prospect either. Add to that the fact that Blume and this Hoffmann character seemed to be tilting more or less in the same direction against the same locale in Germany, and were both prepared to use unorthodox and secretive ways to do it, and they seemed made for one another. Blume also realized, with a flush of shame, that he and the German must also appear as two fools on an errand. Hoffmann’s disguise had been penetrated at once, Blume’s forging of Maria Itria’s transcript was discovered within hours.
Weissmann gave him a friendly nod and, for good measure, another thumbs-up.
‘Babysit him and talk to him,’ continued Massimiliani in Italian. ‘Try to find out whatever you can while we and the BKA try to find out about this new connection between Domenico Megale and the Camorra.’
Weissmann came up and extended his hand, but vertically, like he wanted either to high-five or do one of those hand-grab, shoulder-bump, buddy-buddy moves that young people seemed to favour.
Blume chose to ignore it. Weissmann dropped his hand by his side, smiled understandingly, then aimed a left-handed punch at Blume’s bicep.
‘I appreciate this, Commissioner. You will do good work.’
Blume left the room, rubbing his arm.
20
Rome
A dip in the terrain outside the perimeter fence of the DCSA compound gave the illusion that the area towards which they were headed was contiguous with the car park surrounding the IKEA emporium about half a kilometre away.
They left the air-conditioned building, and Blume thought the heat outside was not as bad as he had feared, but a few paces and the soaking sensation on his back reminded him that Roman heat was cumulative as well as humid. The no-man’s land that separated them from IKEA was filled with yellowing fennel, run to seed, which clogged the air with a scent of hay and aniseed that threatened to make him sneeze. As he kept up with Massimiliani, who walked at a quick pace, he caught flickering glimpses through the railings of broken ancient Roman brickwork and low mounds, beneath which lay tombs emptied of their treasures.