WHILE PAOLONI WAS gone, Blume shaved, using the sink in his room. The whiplash collar made it difficult, and he couldn’t get rid of some stubble on his chin. He checked his nose, and it seemed fine to him, maybe a little fatter and more off-center than before. Then he sat there in his paper-thin green hospital pajamas waiting for Paoloni. He checked his cell phone and found the battery had died.

When Paoloni eventually arrived, it was with a shirt with a thirty-eight collar. It would have been too small at the best of times, and did not come close to closing around the whiplash collar. Nor had he reckoned on his left arm not working at all. In the end, he had to forego the tie, which was a fat ugly thing anyhow, and get Paoloni to help him. As for Paoloni, he was now wearing a jacket and an open yellow shirt. His jeans were the same as before.

Blume had to get Paoloni to tie his shoelaces, and it was just then that the nurse with flabby cheeks walked in. He expected a hands-on-hips scene of womanly outrage, but she just glanced down at Paoloni and then at Blume.

“What are you doing?”

“My shoelaces, or he is.”

“So you’re leaving us. There’ll be paperwork.”

“Have it sent to me.”

“No. You have to sign yourself out. We don’t want you dying, then suing us.”

Paoloni straightened up. “If he died, then he couldn’t . . .”

“Yeah, OK, Beppe. Thanks.” To the nurse he said, “Can you get me the forms to sign?”

“Of course. The question is whether you’re even capable of pushing a pen.”

“It’s my left arm that hurts. My right’s OK.”

“You need to get that left arm in a sling if you’re planning on discharging yourself—which, it goes without saying, I am opposed to your doing.”

“It’s a funeral. I have to be there.”

The nurse shook her head. “And then I suppose you’ll come straight back here?”

“To be honest,” said Blume, “I hadn’t really been planning . . .”

“I was kidding. What I’ll do is send you down to emergency. They can put your arm in a sling. Then you’ll book yourself into outpatients for some follow-up visits. Won’t you?”

“Um . . .”

“You will. Because the discharge form will be waiting for you at the desk with a note from me. No return appointments, no discharge papers.”

“Thanks, I appreciate this,” said Blume. “It might get you into a bit of trouble, mightn’t it, me disappearing like this?”

“Trouble with who? The doctors here? Hah!”

Blume thought if she had not been a middle-aged woman and a nurse, she might have spat on the floor at this point.

It took Blume, with Paoloni following him around like a silent dog, more than an hour to get his arm put in a sling, make an appointment to return in two days, and sign the discharge papers. Finally, he walked out of the hospital, expecting a sense of liberation and air, but the heat was so great that he forgot about everything else and just concentrated on not swaying or stumbling. Paoloni lit a cigarette and started across the car park, Blume followed.

As Paoloni drove them out of the car park, he lit another cigarette.

“Jesus Christ,” said Blume, who was battling down wave after wave of nausea. “Put that out.” Somewhere far below the nausea and the shooting pains assailing his body, Blume knew he was hungry. “Close the window and turn on the air-conditioning.”

Paoloni flicked his new cigarette out the window, and spun the dial of the AC up to full. He closed his window, blew smoke from his mouth and said, “We’ve still got too much time before it starts,” then slowed down so much Blume thought he was going to pull in.

“No one actually saw Massoni kill Ferrucci,” said Paoloni. “But we know it was him, since Alleva didn’t have time. Ferrucci was getting out of the car, he had opened the door. He got shot three times in the head, close range, one on the side, two in front. The one on the side like that. He hadn’t a chance, poor kid. He probably never knew.”

“The shot in the side of the head,” said Blume. “That wouldn’t be consistent with Alleva pulling a gun and firing as he ran in Ferrucci’s direction.”

“Yeah. Sorry. That was the point I was supposed to be making. So we know it was someone who was there, and that someone was Massoni. We’ll get him for it.”

Blume was pleased to see they were about to enter the Giovanni XIII tunnel and get out of the sun for a bit. “Where are we going, by the way?”

“Borgata Fidene,” said Paoloni.

“Right,” said Blume. “So that’s where Ferrucci lived.”

The area of the city to which they were headed was a densely packed cluster of apartments built on a section of flood plain, hemmed in by a railway line, the ring road, and a bend in the river. The area had never been properly paved, let alone cleaned, and there were no sidewalks, just rows and rows of cars parked against apartment block walls. Traffic sped up and down narrow strips of asphalt in the middle, where some children played.

If two cars ever met in the center strip, one had to reverse all the way back to the beginning of the street. For this reason, the inhabitants tended to respect the one-way traffic signals, but they were less respectful of other laws. For a small area, it accounted for a lot of police work.

On Via Prati Fiscali, they hit a pothole so large Blume banged the side of his head against the window and wrenched his damaged arm.

Paoloni slowed down again. “Sorry.”

“We two should not be in a car together. That’s what it is,” said Blume.

For the first time since he had walked into the hospital that morning, Paoloni smiled a little.

“You know, Beppe, my driving spooked Alleva. I lost my cool, and Alleva panicked. If he hadn’t panicked, maybe Massoni wouldn’t have seen any need to shoot Ferrucci.”

“Massoni wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t tipped Alleva off.”

“All this is going to come out when internal affairs starts its investigation.”

“I won’t be telling them anything about your driving,” said Paoloni.

“I appreciate that, but maybe you should.”

“Shit, I should have turned off there,” said Paoloni. “They put the sign for the Salaria at the exit, not before it . . .”

“Take the next exit, double back,” said Blume. “If Alleva knew we were cops because you tipped him off, his actions don’t make sense.”

“That he fled like that and allowed his thug to kill Ferrucci?” said Paoloni. “I know. Massoni’s thick, but I didn’t think he’d deliberately shoot a cop. I’m sure Alleva didn’t mean him to. That’s why I believed Alleva when he phoned me, saying he was sending Massoni to us like a sacrificial bull.”

“What do you think happened?” asked Blume.

“I think Alleva or Massoni thought we were someone else.”

Blume said, “I think you’re right. All it took was a few minutes, long enough to panic. Alleva gets the nod from you, what does he do? He gets rid of a few things, then maybe calls in Massoni to make arrangements, gets him to hide some stuff, prepare for custody, get some alibis, what ever. But they didn’t meet to make a getaway. Also, if he was planning a getaway, the first thing he’d do is abandon Massoni.”

Paoloni turned left onto a quiet street with trees and less rubbish than usual. “This way might even be quicker. Not as much traffic. We’re almost there.”

He rolled down the window, and within seconds the cool air inside the car was swamped by humid heat. “Mind if I smoke?” he said.

“Same answer as fifteen minutes ago,” said Blume.

“Can I leave the window down, then? The air-conditioning gives me a headache. Also it gives me an acidic taste at the back of my throat. A bit like tomato skins. Ever get that?”

“No.”

Blume had to raise his voice a little above the sound of the car engine echoing back from the building walls through Paoloni’s window, “So Alleva arranges to meet Massoni, sees he’s been followed, and thinks it is someone else, even though you warned him we were going to pick him up.”

“I don’t think he was expecting an operation like that, more of a visit from two cops, told to come quietly, like in the past,” said Paoloni.

“And then my driving freaked him, he ran to Massoni, who had noticed Ferrucci, thought he was someone else . . . They thought it was an assassination attempt.”

“Maybe,” said Paoloni.

“Who are they scared of? Who would have them taken out? Innocenzi comes to mind.”

“I thought about that, too,” said Paoloni. “Suppose Innocenzi thought Alleva had killed Clemente. Clemente was fucking Innocenzi’s daughter, which makes him sort of bastard family. So it’s like Alleva killed Innocenzi’s son-in-law, if you see what I mean. If Innocenzi thought that, then I wouldn’t want to be Alleva. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near him. Getting shot would be good compared to getting disappeared, kept alive for days while Innocenzi used you to set an example to other would-be rebels and hopefuls.”

“Enough to make you panic and start shooting,” said Blume.

They arrived at a brick wall on which someone had painted “Romanians Out” and a backward swastika.

“This is it,” said Paoloni.

“This is a church?” said Blume.