THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 11 A.M.

ABEEPING SOUND woke him up. By the time he reached the kitchen, he had registered that his phone was recharged and ringing and Kristin was gone. He felt as if he had been drinking cheap grappa for a week. His bandaged arm throbbed, and as he reached out for the phone, he felt that the movement would snap his neck like a dry stick. As he touched the phone, it stopped trembling and beeping.

Blume swayed over to the refrigerator, yanked it open and gazed at the desolation within. He removed a blue lemon and a black onion, and dropped them into the plastic bag below his sink. He carried the half-finished carton of milk with him into the bathroom, poured the yellow and green slop inside into the toilet bowl then pissed on top of the swirling mix. He stood there fascinated for a while, before flushing, washing his one functioning hand and returning to the kitchen for a breakfast of dry Rice Krispies. He had never noticed how salty they were without milk.

Caller ID had been withheld on the last call. Blume looked through the menu, but found no trace of any communication from Paoloni. He put down his cereal spoon and thumbed in Paoloni’s number which he knew by heart, but got a message saying the number was unavailable and offering to send a text message to tell him when it became available again. In Blume’s experience, this service had never worked, but he keyed in the digit 5 as instructed. Telecom Italia thanked him.

Blume phoned the office, asked to be patched through to wherever Paoloni was, but was told Paoloni was on leave. They tried the same number Blume had been using, with the same result.

Although he didn’t like to have to ask, Blume said, “I don’t suppose you heard anything about a guy called Pernazzo getting arrested, did you?”

Blume thanked him, and was about to hang up when the sovrintendente seemed to be struck with a bright thought.

“Do you want to talk to the vicequestore?”

“He’s there in his office?”

“No. But I can connect you to his cell phone if you want.”

“No, it’s OK. Thanks,” said Blume.

“No problem.”

Blume hung up, opened the dishwasher to put away his plate, and found it was full of clean stuff already. Rather than empty the dishwasher, he washed his plate and cereal bowl, using his one hand at the kitchen sink, and soaked himself. Fine. He needed a shower anyhow.

He waited for the water to warm, then stood beneath the dribble seeping out from the lime-encrusted showerhead and lathered shampoo into his scalp. The phone rang again.

As he reached the kitchen, naked and dripping, it stopped. Once more, caller ID had been withheld. Paoloni was probably calling from an unregistered phone. Or maybe it was a call from behind a switchboard. Then it could be Kristin, calling him from her office in the embassy. He sat down at the kitchen table to dry out and wait for the next call.

Ten minutes later, the phone started ringing, slightly freaking him out since he had just then been staring at it and willing it to do exactly that.

It was Sveva Romagnolo. She wanted to see him now.

Blume said, “Your caller ID is hidden.”

“I know. I’m not sure how to change the setting. Why? Is it a problem?”

“I suppose not.”

She asked where they should meet.

“I don’t know,” said Blume, annoyed. “You’re the one wants to meet. I didn’t even say I would meet you today. You decide.”

“I need a place where I won’t be seen.”

Blume said, “So this is to be a secret meeting?”

“Not secret. I just don’t want to bump into anyone I know. I prefer it that way.”

“Do you know anyone on Via Appia Nuova?”

Not that she could think of, so Blume made an arrangement to meet her in an hour at a bar five minutes from his house. If she wanted to go somewhere she wouldn’t be known, she may as well come over to his zone of the city, to where he liked to hang out at breakfast, eating some mighty fine pastries with pistachio filling. He checked his appearance in the mirror and detached the whiplash collar, tossing it on the hall table. It made him look like an idiot.

When Blume arrived the barman was putting out trays of lunchtime sandwiches. The pistachio pastries were long gone. Blume had two ring donuts and a sandwich while he waited. He hoped she would arrive before the lunchtime crowd did.

She came in the door at the same time as a crowd of workers from the Banca di Agricoltura next door, but unmistakably not part of them. Blume found it hard to work out how certain women did this. They stood out from others without seeming to wear clothes that were particularly different, in this case a yellow silk blouse with a Chinese collar, a fawn skirt, strange sandal-shoes of the same color that looked like a child might wear them, a shoulder bag. Not too much makeup. Clean, unfussy, simple, and somehow visibly wealthy. Maybe it was the way she moved.

She sat down on a chair opposite him that he had already had to defend twice as the place filled up. The noise level rose as the bank staff took their seats, joshed with each other.

“Can I get you anything?” offered Blume.

“No.”

“Bettino might send the barman round to ask for your order. You’re occupying a place at lunchtime.”

“I meant to get here earlier. It took me some time to find it. Well, it took the idiot taxi driver some time,” she said. “What happened to your nose?”

“You mean my arm?”

“Well, that, too. I’m sorry. It was a stupid question. I know you were injured in that terrible attack.”

“You wanted to talk,” said Blume.

“Yes.”

As Blume had predicted, the barman came up and stood expectantly beside Sveva. She ordered a grapefruit juice, and turned back to Blume.

The barman duly noted down one grapefruit juice, then asked what she would be having for lunch.

“Yes, you do,” said Blume.

“No, I do not.”

“Look, I come here three or four times a week. I stay on good terms with them. Choose something.”

“You choose,” said Sveva.

“I’m not going to order just for appearances,” he said. “When it comes, I’ll eat it. A nice bit of fried meat will do me nicely.”

“That’s not what—I just thought you said—never mind. Tell me about the investigation.”

“I can’t. I mean, I wouldn’t anyway, even if it was still my case, but seeing as it’s not, I can’t.”

“Why do you think they took the investigating magistrate off the case?” she said.

“I have no idea,” said Blume. “You’re the politician.”

“I don’t consider ‘politician’ as much of an insult as your tone implies, Commissioner.”

“My phrasing was neutral,” said Blume.

Sveva’s grapefruit juice came, and she pushed it as far away from her as she could till it sat balanced on the edge of the table.

“Sometimes everything is wrong,” she began. Blume waited for her to continue, but she seemed to switch her line of thought. “Did you watch that documentary?”

“Yes,” said Blume. “What was that all about?”

“That’s what I want to ask you.”

Sveva looked horrified as he cut into the meat. Maybe she didn’t eat meat, either, like her dead husband. He realized he was not being polite, but he was hungry.

“Di Tivoli made that documentary out of spite,” she said. “He is attracted to me. He’s attracted to many other things besides me, but he’s always had something special for me. Or so he says. Ever since university. But I am not in the slightest bit interested in him, also because he is, well, sexually ambiguous. He used to court me, then turn up with some boy he’d picked up on the Oppio Hill. That was not bad, back then, because back then Di Tivoli was a boy, too. Now he’s older. He told me about Arturo’s infidelities years ago. In fact, he even told me about them before they could be counted as proper infidelities. Di Tivoli seemed to think ratting on friends attracts women.”

“You didn’t mind your husband having affairs?”

“Yes and no. That’s not really what I want to talk about.”

“Fine,” said Blume. “But tell me this, did you know about Manuela Innocenzi?”

“No.” She was emphatic. “That I did not know. I knew he was seeing a woman, and I knew she was not so young, but I had no idea she was like that.”

“Like what?”

“Well, ugly, to begin with. But the criminal connection. I mean, come on.”

The last sounded like an appeal to her dead husband.

“So, like I said, Di Tivoli’s trying to embarrass me, and he’s doing a good job. First he drags our name into the dirt, then he makes me look like a fool for not knowing, and to end it all, he seems somehow to imply that I want a cover-up, or that I’m not interested in the truth.”

“It’s a good thing you did not try to stop the show from airing,” said Blume. “That would have given him credence.”

“I know.” She paused to allow Blume time to finish his meal. “So what about this Innocenzi woman?”

Blume shook his head. “I know that communications in the force are like a game of Chinese whispers, and the farther a message has to travel down from on high to someone as low as me, the more garbled it becomes. And I know that nobody ever really knows what’s going on . . .” Blume decided to cut short the rest of the diplomatic preface and went straight to his main point, “But I thought you were happy with the idea that your husband was killed by or as a result of Alleva.”

“Happy? You thought I was happy?”

“You know—satisfied. Convinced. Point is, I got a pretty clear message—go get Alleva—because that’s the word that’s come down from on high.”

“Convinced is the right word. They convinced me. Gallone, the people at the Ministry, some of my party colleagues. My uncle, too. He’s the undersecretary for internal affairs. As for me, I never said that or anything of the sort.”

“You never expressed any wish to see the case shut with Alleva as the guilty party?”

“I want whoever did this put away. I don’t care who it was.”

“What about your political career?”

Sveva paused, not to think, but to make sure he was watching her face closely as she spoke.

“That’s important. I won’t say it isn’t. But I don’t want a cover-up of any sort. If this Manuela Innocenzi is behind it, then have her arrested. I can deal with the embarrassment. Sooner or later everyone gets connected to a criminal family in this country. Everyone in Parliament, anyhow.”

“The message I got was clear,” said Blume. “Pick up Alleva. And because we rushed things, a young policeman got killed.”

“So did my husband!”

She raised her voice enough to cause a slight click of silence in the hubbub around them. One of the bank tellers was still looking at them.

“But you sort of led separate lives, didn’t you?”

Sveva pushed herself back from the table, causing the glass of juice to totter. Blume caught it just in time with a quick diagonal jerk of his good arm.

“I can see that I don’t engage your sympathy. Maybe it’s my politics, my background, I don’t know. It’s true Arturo and I led separate lives most of the time. He started it with his dumb betrayals, and I let him. Perhaps you think I should have spent more energy trying to keep hold of him? Made him feel better about himself? Is that my sin, here?”

“I’m not thinking of sin.”

“Yes, you are. You’ve got the same angry, frustrated look as he had. Men like you . . .”

“What about us?”

“You never find the woman you’re looking for, and you hate the rest of us for not measuring up.”

“This may apply to your husband, but as for me . . .”

“You live alone, don’t you?”

Blume said, “You looked that up. You’ve got access to files. It’s not hard to find out things like that.”

“ ‘Yes’ was all you needed to say, Commissioner. And I didn’t look it up.”

Blume drank her juice and grimaced. He didn’t like grapefruit.

“The crime scene,” she said, her tone more conciliatory. “It was messed up. Mainly the fault of Gallone and D’Amico, wasn’t it? I called the investigating magistrate, Principe, and he told me the first phase had been mishandled. Too many chiefs and not enough Indians, was how he put it.”

“Good way of putting it.”

“I admit it’s mainly my fault for calling Gallone instead of making a normal emergency call. I hardly even know Gallone. I mistook length for depth. Just because we used to hang out a bit at university a long time ago. Even then he was always a bit removed, always calm, priestly.”

“We call him the Holy Ghost.”

“I heard that. It suits him. He and the people in the Ministry—they never cared about forensic evidence. They just wanted to show their masters they were in direct control, and could steer the investigations. And you think I’m one of those puppeteers, but I’m not. My uncle may be, but I am not. My party does not want a scandal, the so-called Center-Left does not want a scandal, the government does not want a scandal. So they sent in D’Amico and Gallone to micro-manage. I’m just caught in the middle.”

“So now you want the truth,” said Blume.

“You still don’t believe me.”

“You phoned Gallone straight away. You wanted the micromanagers in first, experts in second. You got your wish. Including a half-ruined crime scene.”

“I made a mistake. I was in a panic. You think if I was really panicked I would have called in the police on the emergency number, but I did what a politician does: I tried to regain control. I called Gallone, a friend on the Justice Commission, my party leader, my uncle. I wanted to be back in command. But not at the cost of the truth.”

Blume shook his head, then suddenly stopped as a searing pain shot through his neck and upper spine. He exhaled heavily.

“You still don’t believe me? My son was with me. You remember that? You remember it was he who found his father’s body?”

“Yes,” said Blume. “I remember. I am sorry he had to see that.”

“Are you? Have you any idea how he must feel?”

“Perhaps a little,” said Blume, fingering the back of his neck.

“You know how he feels?”

Blume tried to find some purchase for his aching arm on the table.

“Well, he must miss his father terribly . . .”

“No. That’s not really how it is with him. Not yet. You know what form his trauma is taking? Do you know how he’s living this?”

“No,” said Blume. “I don’t.”

“He thinks his father is still hurting. He can’t stop seeing the slashes and the cuts. He keeps telling me that the wounds are hurting his father. I tell him bluntly and brutally that his father is dead, and can’t feel anything anymore, but Tommaso is convinced Arturo is somehow still feeling the cuts of the knife. He’s so insistent and certain that I sometimes begin to think he may be right. He’s woken up every night and he says to me, ‘Daddy’s still bleeding,’ like he was a reporter coming back from somewhere with the undeniable facts. I tell him it’s just a dream. Then the other day—when was it? Monday. On Monday afternoon, Tommaso went into my mother’s kitchen—that’s where we are staying now, in the house in EUR that you saw—and he took a steak knife from the drawer and ran it across the inside of his palm. He pushed it in deep, too. I was out, and my parents had to bring him to Bambin Gesù. They say he narrowly missed a tendon. Tommaso said he wanted to know what just one cut would feel like. He told the doctors that his father had lots of cuts like that, almost as if he was boasting. But he wants to know the precise number. He keeps asking how many times they cut his father.”

Seventeen, thought Blume.

Her lower lip trembled. She stopped to regain control of her facial muscles.

“The best thing I can tell my child is that his father is turning to dust and no longer bleeds. My mother’s religious, but she’s no fucking help with her dripping sacred hearts and bleeding Jesuses. I can’t think of anything else to tell Tommaso. Where’s the comfort? Where is it to be found?”

“There is no comfort,” said Blume.

“Well, where’s the justice, then?”

“It’s in our minds,” said Blume. “That’s the only place you’ll find it.”

She nodded. “All I want you to know is that if that woman Innocenzi is behind this, I want her punished. Maybe I will end up doing some politics to keep my name out of it as much as I can, but I want her to be got. Is that clear? If it was Alleva, fine. Better, at least for my image, but don’t let her get away with it.”

“I doubt she had anything to do with it,” said Blume.

“So it was Alleva or his henchman after all?”

Blume stayed silent.

“Well, tell me. I need some sort of closure. I have to be able to tell my child something definitive someday, stop his father from bleeding.”

“I will tell you this,” said Blume. “There is no such thing as closure. In the end, it doesn’t matter if the person is caught. I have yet to meet anyone who really felt better for seeing so-called justice done. Not even revenge works.”

“That is palpably untrue,” said Sveva.

“Don’t talk to me like we were on a televised debate,” said Blume. “I know what I’m talking about. I know you’ve seen them and heard them on TV, in books, on the news, all these people who rejoice that the person who murdered their child has been caught or even killed, but after a few months, it all comes back again, every bit as bad as at the beginning. They are no better off. What’s lost forever is lost forever, no matter what you do afterwards. If the perpetrator is dead, it’s often worse. The survivors have no one left to hate, so they turn to hating themselves.”

“You’re a policeman, and you say it makes no difference who’s caught. Great.”

“Nobody likes hearing it,” said Blume. “A lot of cops know it, but they can’t say it out loud, because it means almost all we do is too little too late. Unless we catch a perpetrator beforehand. That feels good. It only makes a difference if it prevents another victim.”

Blume glanced at his phone on the table. Still no call from Paoloni.

“Are you expecting a call?” asked Sveva.

“I was. Now I’m beginning to wonder.”

“Has it to do with my case?”

Blume hesitated.

“It has, hasn’t it? Even though you’ve been taken off the investigation, there’s still something you’re waiting for. What is it?”

“I can’t say,” said Blume.

“Why not?”

“Do you know how many levels of hierarchy I am skipping by talking to you like this? Suppose I had an idea, and gave it to you, then you tried to impose it from above—have you any idea what sort of a mess that would make of my already static career? You’re sort of outside the hierarchy, but you’re above it, too.”

“Do you have an idea who killed Arturo?”

“Yes,” said Blume. “I do, but I could be wrong.”

“And you can’t give me a name?”

“No.”

“And you’ve been taken off the case.”

“Right.”

“And there is no way I can get you put back on the case without everyone thinking you went behind their backs, which would screw your good reputation and career.”

“Good reputation and career are inversely related. Let’s just say my reputation.”

“And you maintain it won’t make any difference to me who killed my husband.”

“Not in the long-term, no. The pain will be the same.”

“I’m still not sure about that last part. Maybe you’re talking about someone specific. Someone who doesn’t feel any better for knowing.”

Blume shrugged, and discovered that that hurt, too.

“And yet, despite all you have said and all that you profess to believe, you’re still going to try to get the real culprit, aren’t you?”

“Yes. And there’s nothing I need you to do to help me,” he said. “Except maybe stay clear of me, just so there are no misunderstandings.”

Sveva Romagnolo stood up, and held out her hand. Blume half stood up, too, and took it.

“Thank you, Commissioner,” she said. “Good luck with your unofficial investigation.”

“Thank you, Senatrice,” said Blume.

She left him sitting at the table, wondering if he had just made a promise. Ten minutes later he went to settle the bill, and Bettino handed him fifty-four euros.

“What’s this?” asked Blume.

“Your change. The lady you were with left a hundred-euro bill to pay for lunch. Have I seen her on TV?” When Blume didn’t answer, he said, “You don’t want the change? I’ll put it in the book as credit, if you want.”

“I don’t have a tab, Bettino.”

“I can make you one now, Commissioner. Let’s make it fifty-five euros credit, a better number. OK, now you’re in credit with me, and in debt to her.”