The Namesake (8 page)
The
sostituto
, whose voice was at once young and tired, said, ‘I hope so.’
‘By the way, in all the confusion, I left my notebook in there. Do you think I could pop round and collect it? It’s got some witness statements from a different case in it.’
‘Do you want me to see if I can find it?’
‘No, it’s all right. I’ll come round. It’s no trouble.’
He hung up before he could receive any more offers of help. The next call he made was to a reporter from
Il Messaggero
, a young woman – no more than a girl, really – who covered some of the
cronaca nera
, the local crime and bad-news section. He told her about Arconti’s collapse and the scattered files that were found in his office, omitting to mention he was there at the time. The reporter was not all that impressed until he mentioned that no one else knew about the mysterious mess in the office, which suggested that someone might have been looking for something. Her voice suddenly became chirpier and harder, her questions more direct, her gratitude for the call more effusive.
Blume sat down at his computer and began rewriting the words that he wanted Curmaci’s wife to have said. He was halfway through his first draft when his phone went. It was a reporter from the Rome section of
La Repubblica
. Blume hated the paper and disliked the reporter, so had some fun in being tight-lipped and uncommunicative, ending the call with an angry outburst about the police having no duty whatsoever to answer questions just because a reporter spoke about the ‘public interest’. He felt confident his comment would intensify suspicion that some sort of attempt was being made to suppress a leaked document. It would take them no more than a day to find the document and a night to construct their own journalistic fantasies around it. He was on his final rewrite of the bogus confession when a reporter from
Il Corriere della Sera
phoned him.
‘What’s this I hear, Alec?’
Blume gritted his teeth. He had met this man once in the flesh. It did not put them on first-name terms. ‘That depends on who you’ve been listening to.’
‘About a magistrate being hospitalized, his office ransacked.’
‘I have heard no such thing,’ said Blume.
‘A Mafia case, apparently. Ndrangheta to be precise.’
‘Nothing you can publish. No story there.’
‘Missing papers?’
‘No, nothing,’ said Blume. He hung up as satisfied as he knew the reporter was not. If past form was anything to go by, the reporter would get in contact with someone in the police who would get in contact with Agente Rospo who, not being very much in demand, had plenty of opportunity to act alone.
Blume took some scissors, cut the heading of the original transcript with Arconti’s handwriting on it, and glued it on top of his new version of the transcript. He deleted the file from the computer using the anti-virus program, which promised to overwrite it seven times, folded the original into his pocket, and made three copies on his dinky new multifunction scanner.
He took one of the copies and placed it in the middle of his desk and gazed critically at the new version of the transcript, and compared it with the old.
He had left the opening lines intact.
Dottore, I appeal to you as the mother of two children. I lay out my truth before your ideals of justice, and I beg you to resist the temptation of making such hurtful, dangerous and damaging charges against my husband
. . .
But where she had spoken of her husband being forced out of his native land, Blume made a few adjustments so that it now read: . . .
guilty of nothing other than being a noble father and a shining example to his children who has been placed in an impossible position by the arrogance and power of the judiciary of two countries
. That’s how Mafia informers usually justified themselves. He decided to keep the part about Curmaci preferring to cut his own throat, but now it read:
He would sooner cut his own throat than his ties with his beloved homeland, but nor would he ever betray the love of his wife and children whose very lives are now in danger as a result of the intolerable pressures you have brought to bear on him. My pain at his absence is intensified by the suspicion and evil mistrust of the entire town. Every man must respond to his own conscience for the sins and crimes he has committed, but the man you have described is no
infame.
He is an honourable man whose conscience is good and strong and whose love for his family too great. I pray that someday the people of this town will be free enough to forgive us for what they, in their ignorance, now regard as a betrayal. Allow his sincere repentance, I beg you, to save the life of two innocent children and a woman of peace . . .
and so on.
An affiliated woman who had made a statement like that would not last through the week. He was pleased with his work. The more he read it, the better he liked it. He had turned a statement of defiance into a confession tinged with cowardice. The accusations against the town, the claim that they had no choice, the same dishonest tone, the same refusal to take responsibility for their misdeeds all struck a convincing note. It was still wheedling, still obscurantist, still bitter but, plausibly, the words of an
infame
, by far the worst insult in the rich Mafia vocabulary of hate and fear. The punishments for an
infame
were brutal. If Curmaci had any feelings for his wife or his reputation as a husband with honour, he’d have to intervene now.
Blume hid the confession in the middle of some of his papers. If the copy he was about to plant in Arconti’s office was not found, then there was a good chance this one would be.
Rospo accepted bribes from the newspapers, lawyers, unknown superiors and even rival magistrates. He was the source of half the leaks from the office and was dumb enough to think no one knew. One of the newspapers would have called him already and even for a modest sum he would hunt through Blume’s files like a truffle dog till he found whatever they had asked him to find, caring nothing for plausibility or truth.
Blume’s next stop was the courthouse, where he had no problem gaining readmittance to Arconti’s room, though accompanied by the
sostituto
, a young man with a wispy beard and round glasses, who looked like some early-twentieth-century radical. Gramsci, maybe.
The papers had been picked up off the floor, but were piled haphazardly on the desk. Blume said, ‘I can hardly search through the papers of an investigating magistrate.’ With a slight push, he sent a few files sliding over the desk. A few of them flopped onto the floor.
‘Oops.’ He slipped in the false confession as the
sostituto
was looking at the floor and swept the fanned-out papers back into an unsteady pile.
‘Look, it’s pointless. If you come across my notebook when sorting through the files, let me know, please,’ said Blume.
The
sostituto
nodded, uninterested and, it also seemed, unsuspicious.
Milan–Sesto San Giovanni
When he had been a young man, he made the mistake of storing 40 million lire in an abandoned house on the outskirts of the town. Foolish youth that he was, he had secreted the cash in a cavity between one of the outside walls and the rotten floor, thinking the plastic wrapping he had put around the bundles of notes would protect them from decay.
He was sixteen and had just been inducted as a
picciotto
and was only then beginning his apprenticeship to become a
sgarrista
. For a year he had studied the initiation ceremony, overlearning it till it was like the alphabet or the times table.
–
What seek you, young man?
–
Blood and honour.
–
Have you blood, young man?
–
I have blood and I have blood to give.
–
Who was the man that told you of the existence of this organization?
–
My father, Domenico Megale.
–
May the bread become lead in your mouth and the wine you drink turn to blood if ever you betray us
. . .
Once sworn in, he was convinced they would ask him to kill so that his accession from
picciotto
to
sgarrista
might be accelerated, as befitted his pedigree. His family had form, history and honour. But they seemed to have no such exalted plans for him. In what was to be the first in a life of insults received, he was entrusted with the mean task of collecting ‘rent’ from shopkeepers. Worse still, they had assigned him to the oldest and weakest, to the most supine, intimidated and accommodating tradesmen, men completely without hope, honour, or courage. He could not understand this failure to put him to the test. Heaping on the indignities, they did not bother to ask him for the
pizzo
he was collecting from the businesses, yet prohibited him from spending or investing it. And so it was that he stored it in a damp alcove where it sat for three years. He could not bring himself to look at the growing pile of bundles, symbol of his shame, money taken from beings that were less than human. He pushed them deep into the cavity in the wall, and never noticed the mould that bloomed on the banknotes. When he at last pulled out the hidden packets, three-quarters of the banknotes inside had turned into a greasy black sludge. Those that remained were disintegrating.
He prepared himself for death, and reported his incompetence and loss to the
contabile
of his
locale
. But his story of the rotten money was greeted with laughter.
‘Burn what’s left, Tony. And find a better hiding place.’
‘I shall repay my debt.’
‘You made an honest mistake, did you not? 40 million lire. That is not even the salary of a hospital administrator. Let’s write it off as capital invested in experience.’
But he did not like the easy laughter that had greeted him, nor the way in which his expectation of death and willingness to accept it had been treated so lightly. For months, rumours about the circumstances of his birth, about his blood, had been circulating. Not only had his natural ascent been blocked, but there was, he could feel it, a collective sniggering behind his back when his name was mentioned.
But he always knew there was one way he could silence all the laughing and sweep away the scorn. When he decided the time had come, he acted without asking his father or his stupid but faithful elder brother Pietro for their opinion or blessing. For who could bless a son who kills his mother? A man who commits an unforgivable sin and shows no fear of certain eternal punishment is a man with no fear. Not only was he prepared for hell fire, he expected it immediately, since his foster father would surely put him to death for what he had done. Instead, they both left the village and transferred to Germany while the story of the boy who murdered his natural mother was quietly absorbed and mythologized by the town.
It had been harder than he imagined to plunge the knife into the old woman. She was sleeping when he came in, and her face was upturned, displaying so many of the fine lineaments of his own: the sharp chin, the tiny ears like two commas, the way the eyebrows swept upwards. When he saw all this, he hesitated, and as he hesitated, she awoke, and spoke his name in a way that filled him with rage, and allowed him to strike. Once she screamed it was easier, and, as when he was killing a suckling pig, the pity and revulsion merged into pleasure and fascination.
The sports bag he was now holding in his hand contained 5,000 euros. The bag and the money in it were to attract the attention of the Romanians, and excite their greedy minds.
He did not despise the two Romanians. He even felt some liking for them. They had carried out his instructions to the letter. It was hard to find reliable people nowadays. If they had not been Romanian, and if the situation had been a little different, he might have eventually put their names forward as potential
contrasti onorati
, faithful men worthy of being baptized into the organization.
He stood in the shadow of a tall tree that grew straight out of the cement paving. He was standing on what used to be the storage yard of the Falck steelworks, and yet here was a tree as tall as the factory walls fifty yards behind him. He remembered news reports about the works closing in the 1980s. It did not seem possible that the tree could have grown so tall since then.
His car was parked behind a pile of twisted rebar and rubble, out of sight. When the Romanians arrived, all they would see was him and the bag. Two of them in a vehicle, just one of him, on foot, in a wide-open space, ready to part with money and perhaps ready to commission a new job. They would wonder whether he was really alone. Well, he was.
The traffic on the highway made a steady hushing sound like the sea, and, in the tree, two birds of some sort seemed to be squabbling over a single purple berry, pecking at each other, fluttering, hopping on and off the same branch, ignoring the hundreds of other branches and thousands of other berries. The only other sound was the creaking of the steel girders and corrugated roof on the part of the factory that had yet to be torn down.