He managed to pass a line of cars and move up about twenty places, but the van he had spotted had disappeared from sight.
‘We think Agazio Curmaci killed Dagmar Schiefer. He was working closely with Domenico Megale at the time of the disappearance. In those days Curmaci was Megale’s driver. It is the closest we can get to associating Curmaci with an act of violence in Germany, but there was never enough to prosecute. A few days after Dagmar vanished, he was questioned and released within hours. Megale was in police custody at the time.’
‘So, you’re saying Curmaci killed this Dagmar back in the early 1990s. Has the investigation been reopened?’
‘We do not close cases such as these, but they do eventually lose priority. Last week, a former colleague in the BKA, Sebastian Eich, a man who has since retired, received a call from Dagmar’s mother. She called the BKA and asked to speak specifically to him, saying it was of the utmost importance. They put her in contact because she was so insistent. Eich and Dagmar’s mother had met many years before, you see. When the BKA finally intervened to explain to Dagmar’s parents — and to her fiance — that their daughter might have been killed by a new Mafia organization, Eich was the person who did it. That was in 1994, more than a year after Dagmar disappeared.’
‘I suppose they heard Megale had been released from jail, and all the old pain resurfaced. Is that what this is?’
‘Yes, they knew he had been released from jail, and that is connected. Before she disappeared, Dagmar Schiefer had been planning to move out of her family home to live with her fiance. He was a student, doing a post-graduate degree in archaeology. After Dagmar’s disappearance, he quit university, promising her parents that he would find out what happened and bring them proof that she was dead, find out who killed her, discover where she died. But he never did. At least not yet.’
‘That boyfriend will have forgotten now. It’s a lifetime ago. Unless he’s unable to let go… Oh, God. Wait — ’
‘I have no time to wait. This boyfriend has not forgotten. He visited Dagmar’s mother the day before she called Eich. He even asked her not to mention his visit to anyone, but she was worried he was about to do something stupid, which is why she called Eich.’
‘And federal agents in Germany are at the beck and call of old women with presentiments?’
‘ Unterbrechen Sie mich bitte nicht, Kommissar.’
‘Then get to the point, because I think I’ve already reached it.’
‘So you will have realized that Megale received a visit from Dagmar’s boyfriend, and that this visit had been observed by us.’
As Weissmann said this, the faded pictures of the young woman in the camper, the sad postcard pictures of journeys past flashed into the front of his mind, the torn Madonna, Konrad’s pale blue eyes, his personal quixotic mission.
‘Konrad Hoffmann,’ said Blume. ‘The boyfriend is Konrad Hoffmann. He wants the man who killed his girlfriend, and he has waited until now.’
‘Yes,’ Weissmann was saying, ‘Konrad Hoffmann. He quit his degree, joined the Deutsche Hochschule der Polizei and then the BKA a few years later. At this time, a few people did notice his career choice, also because for a brief period he was under suspicion as a fiance always will be in these circumstances, but then as the years went by and he carried out his work very well, no one on the force thought about his past, and he never spoke of it.’
Hoffmann distracted everyone with the idea of the Camorra and the Ndrangheta cooperating in toxic dumping, because that is a real phenomenon and part of a real investigation. There was a lot of sides to consider, and that is why no one looked into the deep past. We kept looking at what he does, not at what he used to be.’
Bullshit, thought Blume. The BKA had an agent with a grudge who had decided to set out on a mission against Curmaci; the Italians had the perfect idiot counterweight, him, who had also set out on a personal quest against Curmaci. Two loose cannons, each used to cancel the other out. He could appreciate the elegance of the solution, but felt humiliated at being played in this way. At least Konrad’s quest was noble.
‘Massimiliani, are you still there?’
‘I am, but Weissmann’s gone.’
‘Why now? Why am I learning this only now? Answer me honestly for once.’
‘No one knew. We are all learning this now.’
‘OK, why now for Konrad? Why is he acting now, after all these years?’
‘Honestly? Your guess is as good as mine,’ said Massimiliani. ‘But the most likely answer is Konrad needed confirmation from Megale that Curmaci was the killer, and perhaps permission to act. Maybe he just wanted to know where Dagmar’s body was. But he can’t have approached Megale and demanded any of these things without giving something back. He has something on them. So that is what the BKA want to talk to him about now. Finally, they have a strategy.’
‘He built up his own investigative file on Megale,’ said Blume. ‘He told me. He used it to coax information from the old man.’
‘I hope he planned for his investigation to be made available posthumously, if he thinks he can go down to Calabria, single out Curmaci, and revenge himself.’
‘Maybe he’s looking for information instead of revenge,’ said Blume.
‘He won’t survive. He is completely and voluntarily on his own. Megale sent him down to where he could be killed without the BKA being able to do anything about it, nor even investigate afterwards. Meanwhile, Megale himself stays in Germany with a perfect alibi.’
Blume cleared the crest of a hill. A narrow stripe of road with two-way traffic stretched out below him, visible all the way down to the black oval mouth of a tunnel cut into a hillside of limestone so blindingly white it hurt his eyes to look at it. A red car travelling towards him came shooting out of the tunnel just as a two-tone camper van disappeared into it.
42
On the road in Calabria
Blume had never been able to distinguish between the myths and the realities surrounding the Ndrangheta, the Sacra Corona Unita, Cosa Nostra, the Camorra and the Stidda, but at least he knew he didn’t know. Had Konrad, the German who thought he understood Italians and could speak Neapolitan dialect, failed to see the elaborate hoax? The Ndrangheta loved its symbols but kept them internal. A signed piece of paper from Megale would never turn a German federal policeman into a figure the Ndrangheta could trust even for a moment. Surely he knew that?
The road had narrowed further to the width of a country lane. It was going to be like this more or less until the very end. Hundreds of kilometres down to the tip of the boot at an average speed of what, fifty kilometres an hour? Berlusconi had promised a massive bridge at the end of it, connecting Reggio Calabria to Sicily. Presumably the Ndrangheta would build the first span, from the mainland towards Sicily, Cosa Nostra would build the span from Sicily, and they’d never meet in the middle.
He froze his thoughts as a gap opened in the oncoming traffic, and he moved up nine more places. The road now followed a squiggling line and he could not see far ahead. But half an hour later, he thought he saw the camper van, now only half a mile ahead. The phone beside him started buzzing, but he ignored it: he needed two hands on the wheel now. Dipping the right wheels of the car into a ditch on the verge made shallow by the rubble and rubbish that filled it, he managed to create his own emergency lane and pass an entire line of vehicles on the inside. The wheels rumbled and the side panel and fender on the right were taking a hell of a battering, and then he hit an invisibly low divider, but somehow managed to keep going and, after ten minutes, came right up behind the camper van. He swung back into lane behind it, and it was then he saw the yellow-and-black number plate and the ‘NL’ sticker.
Dutch holidaymakers. Was there any corner of the planet that had not been reached by a Dutch family in a caravan? And now that he was directly behind it, Blume realized the van was twenty years too modern but made to look retro-chic. Finally, he accepted that Konrad had gone.