The Namesake (9 page)

He heard the diesel engine before he saw the vehicle. Probably the same vehicle they had used to transport the body. Always a van with the fucking Romanians. You never saw a Russian in a van, never saw a Romanian in anything else. It stopped fifty yards away and flashed its headlights. He raised his hand in greeting, bent down, and picked up the bag, held it aloft, then put it down again. Did they think this was a kidnap exchange of some sort? He waved them over. The van drew closer, slowly, suspiciously. He signalled impatience, but saw no increase in speed. Dirty suspicious animals, the Romanians. Gypsy in all of them.

Finally, it stopped and out got Teo. Behind the wheel sat the other Romanian. Teo was upon him, his face all bristles and smiles, his thin cheekbones twitching, his eyes moving side to side.

Tony pointed to the bag on the ground. ‘There you are. You get to keep the bag, too. Pity. It’s Adidas, same as this tracksuit. I bought them as a matching set.’

‘Great,’ said Teo, making no move to retrieve it.

‘You want me to bend down and open it, show you the money?’

‘No, no,’ began Teo, but Tony bent down, unzipped the bag completely, and opened it so Teo could see inside. He could feel the Romanian’s eyes being drawn towards the grip of the pistol protruding from the waistband of his tracksuit bottoms.

‘You came armed,’ said Teo.

‘I live in a dangerous world.’ Tony picked up a broken piece of rubble from the ground and tossed it in his right hand, then from hand to hand as he straightened up. ‘This,’ he showed the lump of concrete to Teo, ‘is all that remains of Italian industry.’

Teo glanced quickly at the rock in Tony’s fist, but his gaze was drawn inexorably to the cash-filled bag. He lifted it up, and casually ran his hand inside it.

Tony slipped the piece of concrete into the kangaroo pocket on the front of his tracksuit top, adjusted his crotch, pulled out the lump of rubble again, and rubbed it with his thumb. ‘You’re not going to count the money?’

‘No. You need us again, you know where to come. Always glad to help.’

He turned around.

‘Hey, Teo!’

The Romanian spun around, his dark eyes widening in alarm.

‘Zip up the bag or you’ll lose the money. Two days’ work and nothing to show for it. What would your wife say to that? She’d be suspicious, wouldn’t she?’

Teo smiled, then nodded, and zipped up the bag. Tony watched him, giving him a friendly wave as he opened the door of the van and got in beside the driver. He allowed them to say a few words, waited till he saw the driver begin to turn the steering wheel, then called out again:

‘Hey, Teo!’

The driver stopped his action. Tony dropped his hand into the kangaroo pocket of his tracksuit, pulled out a black object the size of a computer mouse, and tossed it casually from hand to hand as he approached the van. He got to the window, which was a little higher than he had anticipated.

‘There is one thing you could do for me next week, but . . .’

Teo rolled down the window.

‘I didn’t hear that. You said something about next week?’

‘Yeah, I was saying there is something you could do. It’s a little harder than this job.’

‘What?’ asked Teo.

Tony stretched his arm out and dropped the black object at Teo’s feet.

‘What’s that?’ asked Teo.

‘A Mecar something or other. I forget the make.’ He fell to the ground and rolled to the rear wheel of the van, hoping the young Slovakian dealer who had explained this trick to him was right about the ‘relatively contained’ explosive force.

Teo and the driver managed to get a lot of words out between them before an enormous thud caused the entire vehicle to jump from the ground. The sound banged against the wall of the factory and bounced back. The Slovak had told him the fragmentation grenade would not make much noise, but he’d been wrong.

Megale stood up, a little unsteady. His ears felt as if they were full of water, and he realized he couldn’t hear the traffic on the highway any more. He surveyed the front of the vehicle. The blast had lifted the windscreen out, frame and all, peeled back part of the roof, and knocked out Teo’s door, which was hanging on the buckled remains of a hinge. Teo lay on his seat, his head back. Something blunt and harmless looking, like a piece of soft plastic, was sticking out of the front of his throat. The driver had found time to turn around, because his head was draped over the back of the seat. The blast had blown the shirt right off his back and embedded thousands of red and black fragments across his body, almost as if the cuts had already turned to scabs. The cab was filled with countless droplets of blood, something sticky and black, and a frothy white substance. Many of the banknotes looked unharmed, but he would not be touching them.

The thing was, the Romanians were alive. Both of them. The Slovak had told him they would never survive. He said it would blow their fucking heads off in an enclosed space like that, and yet here was Teo, not well, but definitely alive, his eyes not only open, but also slowly turning towards Tony as he stood there by the door. The driver, half kneeling in his seat, seemed to be whispering, like he was making a confession. Again, not dead. Megale wrinkled his nose against a stink of sewage and burnt oil that seemed to be coming from the driver.

Teo seemed to be smiling, but his eyes were becoming glassy. Tony pulled out his pistol, and put it into Teo’s eye, and pulled the trigger. He had to clamber halfway into the van to lift up Teo’s head to shoot him through the second eye. Then he went around to the other side, and pulled the driver off the seat. The man fell back, dead now, his intestines visible, slick and shining. So that’s where the stink was from. Tony shot out his eyes and, for added meaningless symbolism, shot him in the mouth, too. Now they would waste time wondering who this slob had been talking to.

He went back to his car and drove up to the van. All told, it had been a bit disappointing. He had seen car crashes that produced worse damage than that. The entire back section was intact. He lifted the jerrycan out of the boot of his car, and doused the two bodies, then sprinkled the petrol around the cab, and soaked the seats. He loved the aromatics of petrol. He’d always loved it. Shoe polish, too. He had once set fire to a bowling alley, pouring the petrol down the lanes and setting them alight, watching the river of fire.

He retreated, pulled out a cigarette, lit it and took a few drags before flicking it into the van. It bounced off the seat, dropped into a shining pool of petrol on the floor, and fizzled out. He moved his car out of the way, then returned and, walking backwards away from the van, poured the remaining petrol on the ground. Then he lit it with his lighter. The flame was slower and feebler than he thought it would be, and there was no explosion as the fire in the cab took hold. As the flames caught, the van rocked, as if being buffeted by wind.

Here I am, he thought to himself, twenty years on, burning money again.

10

Rome

The young policeman pointed to the screen with a triumphant air not yet diminished by the grinding repetition of tasks that his career had in store for him. ‘There!’ he said. ‘That vehicle there.’

Blume leaned forward, allowing the side of his face to brush against Caterina’s hair. Businesslike, she moved away from him and pointed to a blurred blob on the screen.

‘Not very clear, is it?’ said Blume.

‘No. It’s an old traffic camera,’ said Caterina. ‘Over here, we have RAI offices, which are definitely going to have a surveillance camera, but we’ve got nothing from them yet. And there is the court of the Giudice di Pace, where most of this footage comes from. Show him, Claudio.’

The young policeman smiled at Caterina. He was probably good-looking, if you were into white smiles and muscles obviously toned through excessive workouts in a gym. As he brought up images on the screen, he strained Blume’s forbearance further by explaining what Blume already knew.

‘This is a bar, which closes at 12:30, and this is a restaurant that closes half an hour later. The cooks and the owner usually leave at around 2:30 in the morning. They all cross the open piazza to where their cars are parked. Inspector Panebianco interviewed them all and none of them reports seeing anything, so we know it was after 2:30 . . .’

‘Look, just show me what you got,’ said Blume.

Claudio pressed a button on his fancy control panel, and another grainy image in washed-out colour appeared on-screen. Blume recognized the crime scene. In the background, practically the only vehicle in sight, was a van, stopped by the kerb.

‘Three-twenty in the morning, we can see the van at the crime scene. This is taken from the offices of the Giudice di Pace. It is too far for us to make out any detail, even with enhancement techniques, also because it is dark. The camera takes frames every thirty seconds. The vehicle is stopped here, see? Afterwards we can just make out the body on the ground, but we miss the moment they put it there.’

‘But maybe we’ll see that from one of the other cameras we have not examined yet. It could be useful for prosecution purposes,’ said Caterina.

‘Uh-huh,’ said Blume, not all that impressed so far.

‘If we go back ten minutes,’ said Claudio, ‘we catch the same vehicle passing a camera on the banks of the Tiber and . . .’ he pressed a button, ‘there it is going past the crime scene, this time without stopping. If we go forward, there it is again, heading away from the scene. So the vehicle, which I think is a Ford Transit, drives by what will be the crime scene, like it was checking, goes down the banks of the Tiber, takes a right, goes down 200 yards where we capture it here, goes back to the crime scene, stops there, then back to the banks of the Tiber for the second time, where the cameras pick it up again.’

He sat back, ran his thumb down his sternum in satisfaction, and beamed at Caterina, who beamed back at him. Agente Carini looked quite dashing in the short-sleeved summer uniform he was wearing, and his hazel eyes were shining and full of enthusiasm for his job and the success they were having. He drew a breath to continue his explanation but was interrupted by Blume.

‘I’m taking it you got the number plate.’

Agente Carini’s face fell as he realized he was not going to get a chance to explain his brilliance.

‘Sorry if I spoil your fun and save my time,’ said Blume. ‘You’ve reported the registration number to Milan, I presume?’

The young policeman pouted, ‘Of course we did. Forty minutes ago. Not just Milan, a general request to all patrols.’ He folded his arms and tried to ignore Blume’s stare.

‘Was the van headed out of north Rome on the A1 back towards Milan?’

Agente Carini nodded reluctantly.

‘OK,’ said Blume. ‘So the vehicle will have arrived in Milan early this morning – but you still don’t have images for it leaving the highway?’

‘Not yet, we have to guess its probable arrival time. Obviously we’re going to see if it gets picked up on the security and speed cameras, in service stations . . .’

Blume held up a hand and cut him off in mid-flow. ‘From about half an hour ago there has been an APB out on it. Who’s the van registered to? Is it stolen?’

‘It’s not reported stolen. It’s in the name of some shopkeeper in Latina,’ said Agente Carini. ‘It looks like he figured he’d save on the vehicle transfer tax. So the van’s still in his name. He’s just now gone into the police to make a sworn statement to the effect that he sold it eight years ago. We’re waiting for news, but he’s probably got nothing to do with it.’

‘People should pay the damned tax to transfer ownership. They don’t realize they can be liable, especially if there is an uninsured accident,’ said Blume.

‘It is a bit steep, that tax,’ said Caterina. ‘My car’s in my aunt’s name.’

‘I don’t think the commissioner meant people like you, Caterina,’ said Agente Carini.

This was too much.

‘
Caterina
?
’

‘I meant to say Inspector Mattiola. Sorry, sir.’

Blume looked at Caterina, and shook his head disbelievingly. ‘Inspector, why are you still here? Shouldn’t you get back downtown?’

‘If we get images of the van on the highway going back to Milan, that will be useful,’ she said.

‘Leave that job to the Boy Wonder here. Anyhow, I don’t understand you. Useful for what?’

‘Useful as evidence,’ said Caterina in her iciest tone.

Blume poked the young policeman. ‘Hey, Calogero . . .’

‘Claudio. My name’s Claudio.’

‘You look like a Calogero to me. Go get me coffee.’

The policeman stood up without looking at Blume, then made a point of going over to a female colleague at the next desk and whispering something and nodding at Blume and Caterina. Eventually he slouched off.

‘How dare you humiliate me . . .’ hissed Caterina, then stopped as she realized a dozen young cops at the data centre were straining to listen in.

‘No, you listen to me, Caterina. You got the number plate, now move on. Evidence for what – the pretrial conference? For the trial, which may never be held? How is it the recipe for hare stew goes? First, catch your hare. This stuff can wait. For God’s sake, Caterina, you’re the one who wanted this. You have twenty-four hours to find out what the victim and the suspects were doing in the twenty-four hours before the murder. Or have you forgotten?’