When he reached the car, he noticed that it seemed lopsided. He soon discovered the cause. Two tyres had been slashed. Not all four, because two was just one more than the available spare, and therefore the more exquisite an act of intimidation. He hardly cared. He opened the door and got a bottle of water that he had seen in the back seat. It was warm and had been half drunk by God knows whom, but took the madness out of his thirst. He wiped his face with his black hands and looked at the results in the mirror. He started the engine and reversed, not bothering to look backwards into the glare of the sun. The Range Rover wobbled and swayed, and the wheels behaved like wooden cubes rather than flat rings. He shoved it into forward gear and headed back towards Via Garibaldi. He found that if he went faster, the car maintained a linear trajectory for longer, and so he pushed down on the accelerator. The sound from underneath the car, echoed and amplified by the walls on the side of the road, was like the rotor blades of a helicopter. He stepped down harder on the gas and the car began sliding unstoppably into the opposite lane where another car, whose driver was either playing chicken with him or texting what might be his last ever message on his phone, continued its head-on approach. Blume pulled at the wheel and aimed at a jagged pothole on his own side. The other car went sailing by and, with a crunch and a pop, his front left tyre disintegrated. The car lurched forwards, showering sparks and making a scraping noise on the asphalt which seemed to electrify every tooth filling in his head and make his balls contract.
Blume gave up. He kicked his way out of the car, even though nothing was wrong with the door, and stepped down into the dingy street, and started walking. Fifty yards ahead of him was a Sidis mini-mart, closed, and after that, on the left, was his inevitable destination, a modest two-storey house with a red gate.
46
Locri
His headache was no longer confined to his head nor was it a mere ache. At some point in the past hour the pain had burrowed its way into the centre of his body, and was operating from there. Each heartbeat seemed to squirt a jet of poison up his spine and into the back of his brain, from where it spread slowly, gripping his entire skull before pulsing in his temples as if trying to burst out. Just as the pulsation ended and the pain began to ebb, another heartbeat injected a renewed dose. He imagined the relief of his heart stopping.
The orange shine of the sun flared off the windows of the house behind the red gate and off the metal of a parked car. When the door opened to his knock, he almost stepped straight in, so inviting was the dark dry air from the house. But there was a woman in front of him, younger-looking and smaller than he had been expecting. He thought he could smell lavender and mint, either from her or from deeper inside. He screwed up his eyes against the brightness and tried to penetrate the dark entrance with his gaze. He could make out her shining hair, and when she smiled her teeth glistened.
‘Are you all right?’
Blume swayed on the threshold, confused. That was surely the question he was supposed to have asked her. And the voice was wrong, too. She sounded like a girl. He could not fit the voice to the wheedling Mafia-accented matriarch he had created in his mind.
‘Do you need to sit down?’
‘I have a terrible headache,’ said Blume. ‘And I think I’m pretty dirty.’
‘Have you been standing in the sun?’
‘It’s not the sun. I often get them.’
Maria Itria stood aside and he walked in. The drop in temperature was immediate and exhilarating, but it made him sneeze and break out in a sweat. He kept his eyes closed, trying to adjust to the shaded hallway.
‘Come through to the kitchen,’ she said.
He followed obediently.
‘Sit.’
He sat at the broad table. Its top was a board of dark oak that was cool against the palm of his hands. He had to resist the temptation to lay his cheek against it.
‘My name is Commissioner Alec Blume. Police.’
‘Eat this, Alessio.’ She handed him a rock-hard piece of bread.
‘Alec, not Alessio. I’m not hungry.’
‘If you want your headache to go, eat it. Just a bite or two. You need something in your stomach if you have a headache.’
Something wet and alive leaped at his face, and he realized she had thrown him a cloth dipped in water. He wiped his face, turning the cloth dark. Then he stood up and went over to the kitchen sink, which is what he should have done to begin with, and washed his hands and arms and drank glass after glass of water. The woman shied away from him as he did this, but when he sat down again, she resumed her position at the sink.
Back at the table, Blume tried to bite off a small piece of the bread she had given him, but found he had to gnaw his way into it. As he began chewing, it released a fragrance of orange and olive. His teeth cracked a seed, and his mouth filled with the taste of fennel. He realized his lips had numbed slightly and his tongue was tingling.
‘There are a few flakes of peperoncino mixed in with the grains. It can help a headache sometimes, but I’ve got something better.’
She walked across to the cupboard. Blume looked at her properly for the first time. She was barefoot, youthful, dressed simply in faded blue jeans and a beige cotton and linen blouse. It looked comfortable, floppy and elegant all at the same time, and he suddenly felt self-conscious about his abject appearance. Nothing about her fitted his image, and nothing in her actions matched his expectations.
She placed a full glass of jet-black liquid on the table before him. He looked down at the glass, then up at her, examining her face. Why had he not pulled up a file on her, prepared himself better for this encounter? This was the woman whose life he had decided to put in danger. The woman he said he had no sympathy for. Her eyes were dark and sloped in a way that would have given her an Asian look had they not been so large. She had a small white scar on her left cheek, a mark from childhood chicken pox or measles. Her childhood, Blume realized, could not have been all that long ago.
‘What’s in this glass?’
‘Your nose must be blocked if you can’t smell it.’ She stood up again, went over to the drawer, pulled out a large knife, and Blume felt his hand reach automatically inwards towards his sweaty waist and the butt of his gun. The knife flashed as she sliced through two thick-skinned lemons. Cautiously, he brought the glass up to his nose.