‘Shut up,’ said the man. ‘I’m not interested. If I want you to talk, I’ll tell you to talk.’ The voice was plaintive and resentful, as if his captor was the one having the wrong inflicted upon him. The speaker was a terrone, one of those brutal southern peasants whose unwelcome presence in Milan was one of the reasons the Northern League had become so popular. He wasn’t so good with the accents of the Mezzogiorno. He knew his captor was not Neapolitan. Neapolitans always sounded enthusiastic and friendly and on the verge of telling a joke. This was a more lugubrious southern accent, not Apulia. Sicily or Calabria — Calabria, probably. Where his own grandfather had come from.
‘Working in insurance doesn’t mean I can get my hands on money. I don’t have access to funds… I’m only middle management. I’m not very good at my job. I can’t keep up with the latest computer algorithms. I have no knowledge or privileges.’
‘Is that what you do, insurance?’ said the man.
The man had opened his legs a little and bent his head down, like an adult watching a child at play on the floor. Forties, tracksuit, overweight. He smelled of cigarettes, cologne, and something rubbery.
‘You don’t know what I do?’ said Matteo, hope rushing into him like the air had a minute before.
‘The Romanians said you worked in an office. They didn’t go any deeper than that. No need.’
‘Ah, you must have the wrong person, then,’ he tried to sound professional and politely apologetic, like the indemnification guys did when rejecting a claim.
The man held out Matteo’s wallet, pulled out his frayed identity card. ‘You are the person I want. Matteo Arconti, a Calabrian name?’
‘My grandfather came from there,’ said Matteo.
Like a conjurer, his captor produced the book on trees from behind his back. ‘This was in your pocket. You like trees?’
‘No — yes. I don’t know.’
The man opened the book, looked through a few pages in the middle, and neatly pulled one out, then crumpled it up in his hand. He stepped over, and slipped the book back into Matteo’s jacket pocket. As he did so, Matteo caught sight of a black pistol tucked into the man’s elasticized waistband. The absence of a holster caused him despair. It meant his captor did not generally carry a weapon. So, if he had a weapon now, it had to be for a specific and immediate purpose. At the back of his mind, a version of himself was marvelling at the clarity of his thinking, promising to save the memory for later telling once this was over.
But how would it end? Matteo bent his head down, muffling his voice against his chest in the hope that a lack of clarity in the question would elicit a lack of clarity in the response. ‘Are you going to kill me?’
The man pulled up his tracksuit, scratched his stomach, and picked absently at the thick black hairs around his belly button, then pulled down his tracksuit again, slipping the gun into his hand as he did so.
Matteo tucked his thumb deeper into his palm and rebalanced the ring. If he launched it behind him and his captor never noticed, it might serve as a posthumous message for the people who came looking for him when it was too late, and it would tell his wife he was thinking of her. At least he hoped she’d take it that way. But throwing away the ring was also throwing away hope.
‘Why me? I have no connections to anything. I have never harmed anyone, or stolen anything.’
‘We have to bow before the hand of fate.’
Matteo flipped his thumb upwards and sent his wedding ring spinning away into the darkness behind him, for anyone who was looking for him. He began speaking to hide any clinking sound of the gold hitting the floor. ‘I have… I have done nothing all my life. And I’m not ready. I’m still learning things, you saw that. Trees.’
‘I don’t want to explain it. Basically, from your point of view, there’s no explanation,’ said the man, standing up and raising the pistol, which had a short fat barrel. He pointed it at him.
‘I have a family! Two children!’ Matteo’s fear was tinged with outrage. ‘And I am so obviously not the person you want. There must be another person with the same name! No one is making you do this, you understand that, right? Listen, like me, you probably have children, don’t you?’
The man shot him in the heart, then the head.
Minchia che rumore! The noise in the concrete chamber had assaulted his ears and made him angry. He called in the two Romanians. ‘Take this heap of shit down to Rome tomorrow. Do it at night. Dump it at Piazzale Clodio. There are some wide-open spaces there without buildings overlooking. Stay away from restricted traffic zones, cameras, and police, and drive so as not to be noticed. Right, who took his wallet and watch? Come on. Keep the watch, if you want to wear a dead man’s watch… but I need the wallet.’
He held out his hand, not bothering to see which of the Romanians returned it to him. ‘Keep whatever money you found, but leave everything else, especially his ID card. Leave the book in his pocket. It’s a nice touch.’
4
Rome
Chief Inspector Caterina Mattiola walked into Commissioner Alec Blume’s office and dropped an envelope on his desk.
‘The results of the blood test,’ she said.
‘Good,’ said Blume, looking up from the newspaper he was reading. ‘Leave them there.’ He folded over a page. As always, he was reading the local news. The watch she had given him sat beside him on the desk. He glanced up, and made a show of surprise at seeing her still there. ‘I don’t suppose you’d close the door when you come in here?’
Caterina went back and closed the door.
Blume waited till he heard the click, then said, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t make it over last night.’
‘That’s fine.’
Blume returned to his newspaper. ‘So, you’re investigating that robbery on Via Giulia,’ he said as if reading out a mildly interesting headline.
‘Attempted robbery,’ she corrected. ‘They ran off without getting anything.’
‘Sure. No shots were fired. You told me the attempted robbers were probably two middle-class kids out for kicks. So, whose blood are we talking about?’
‘Very funny.’
Blume pushed the paper to one side with a sigh.
‘I picked up your test results on my way in this morning,’ she said.
‘The pointless test you forced me to do.’
‘For your own good, Alec. It’s not normal for a man to wake up in the morning and eat aspirin.’
‘It is if you have a headache.’
‘That’s the not normal part,’ said Caterina.
‘I see you’re having difficulty adjusting to my morning routines,’ said Blume.
‘No, I think it’s working out pretty well. I am adjusting.’
‘Still, I imagine it’s nice to have a break from me now and again. I certainly would like to take a break from myself now and then.’
‘We both need to compromise if we’re going to be living together,’ said Caterina.
‘What about my big American breakfasts at the weekend? They seem to disturb you, too. I need to know they can continue.’
‘That’s a cultural thing. I can accept that. I like the pancakes too. But I don’t know how you can bear to eat all that meat and eggs first thing. It’ll kill you.’
‘Not at all,’ said Blume. ‘Fat and protein are beneficial.’
‘No one will convince me that those fried sausages do you any good. They put all sorts of disgusting stuff in them.’