FRIDAY, AUGUST 27, 5:15 P.M.

CHIEF COMMISSIONER ALEC BLUME received the call on his mobile from headquarters at 17.15, while he was having a late lunch in Frontoni’s. Dressed in a T-shirt with paint stains, shorts, and running shoes, Blume was enjoying a white pizza overstuffed with bresaola, rocket, and Parmesan and drinking a beer. His intention was to eat a lot, then run a lot. He was alone in the restaurant, and almost alone in Trastevere. An overheated tourist family stood for a while staring at him through the window, like he was a tropical fish, then moved on, only to be intercepted by a North African hawker selling socks.

Blume picked off a salt crystal from the pizza and crunched it between his teeth. His phone on the table peeped and shook a little, and he pressed at it with an oily thumb. They had texted the address to him.

The street name on the display meant nothing, but the efficient sovrintendente at the desk had very usefully included the postal code. Blume saw it was in a nearby area, so he had time to finish his lunch and knock back a thimbleful of coffee before returning to his car. He called Paoloni, told him they had a case. Paoloni said he knew and was already on site.

Blume drove at a stately speed beneath the plane trees, not wishing to spoil the quietness of the streets. He took just ten minutes to reach the top of the Monteverde hill. He glanced at a Tuttocittà map to find the street. Five minutes later, he swung his Fiat Brava around a corner and parked. Three squad cars blocked the road, their lights flashing. A forensics van had been slotted in at a right angle in the narrow space between two parked cars, its front wheels and nose blocking the sidewalk, the back section creating a bottleneck on the narrow street. As he arrived, Blume saw an ambulance, unable to squeeze behind the forensics van, start executing what would probably be a twelve-point turn. The coroner’s wagon had not arrived yet.

Apartment building C, one of four around a pebbled courtyard, was guarded by a uniformed officer who did not even ask for identification.

Blume gave it anyway, told the officer to note it down, check who was going and coming and generally do his job. Then he went in.

The building had no elevator. When Blume arrived puffing on the third floor the apartment door was shut, and the landing outside crammed with far too many people.

Commissioner Paoloni was wearing a billowy Kejo jacket despite the heat, low-slung jeans, and bling-bling bracelets. His head was shaved bald, his face was gray.

“I went in, but they told me to leave,” he said when he saw Blume.

“Who did?”

“The head of the Violent Crime Analysis Unit. He wants only the most senior officer or the investigating magistrate in there. He’s raging, says the scene has been totally compromised with all the people walking around.”

“What people?”

“D’Amico was here. Then he went, only to be replaced by the Holy Ghost, of all people. Also it appears the wife who found the body touched it, walked all over the place.”

“D’Amico. As in Nando? What’s he doing here?”

Paoloni shrugged. “Beats me. Anyhow, he’s a commissioner now. Same rank as you.”

“I know.” Blume did not like to be reminded of D’Amico’s promotions.

“Thing is, he’s not an investigator anymore. So he has no reason to be here. And the Holy Ghost, was that a joke?”

Paoloni adjusted his crotch, sniffed, scuffed the wall with a yellow trainer, and looked vacantly at his superior. “No, he was here, and says he’ll be back.”

“But Gallone never comes to a crime scene,” said Blume.

“Yeah, well, he did this time.”

Vicequestore Aggiunto Franco Gallone was Blume’s immediate superior.

Everyone referred to him as the Holy Ghost, but nobody could say for sure where the name came from. It stuck, because he was invisible when the hard work was being done, but somehow always present with a pious demeanor whenever the press or his superiors invoked his presence. There was a story that he got the name back in 1981, when, a mere deputy commissioner at the time, he was found weeping in the station, devastated after the attempted murder of Pope John Paul II.

Blume looked around. There were four policemen standing on the landing. There was one other apartment on the floor, he noticed, and its door was firmly shut. “Is the officer who first arrived on the scene here?”

“Yes, sir,” said one of the uniformed policemen, coming out of a comfortable reclining position.

“What are you doing now?”

“I am logging the names of people coming in and out.”

“You get my name?”

“I know who you are, sir.”

Blume looked at the officer. He was in his thirties, and would have seen his fair share of scenes.

“On a scale of one to ten, how bad is it in there?”

“A scale of one to ten? I don’t know—two, three?”

“That low?”

“No children, no rape, just one body, not even that young. Corpse fresh, so not much of a smell, no wailing relatives, no animals, no public, no reporters yet.”

“Who was here when you arrived?”

“A woman. The wife of the victim. She found him like that. She called emergency.”

“Why did you let the witness leave?”

The policeman’s gaze flickered, and he shifted his weight onto the other foot.

“There was a kid, short thing, with long blond hair. It seemed best to let them get out of here. They left when the ambulance men arrived.”

“We have female officers and psychologists for these things.”

“That wasn’t all.”

“What else?”

“I got a direct order, from the vicequestore. He told me the technicians from UACV were on their way, said I was to let the witness leave.”

“The Holy Ghost spoke to you directly?”

“Yes, Commissioner.” He grinned at Blume’s use of the nickname.

“Beppe, did you get the name of this officer?” said Blume.

Paoloni nodded.

“Right,” said Blume. “Let’s go in.”

He bent down and stepped through the barber pole-colored masking tape around the door. His foot caught on a lower strand and snapped it.

The head of the Violent Crime Analysis Unit team came down the corridor

and pointed to Blume. “Come in, come in, join the trample-fest. So now you’re the officer in charge? Not, who was it—D’Amico? And not Gallone? Or are you all in charge? Maybe you’d like to invite a few friends over?”

Blume looked at the technician in his pristine white suit with the yellow and black UACV symbol on his breast pocket. The man was at least fifteen years his junior.

“I picked up the sarcasm from the start. There’s no need to keep going.”

The young UACV investigator shrugged and walked away without offering any walk-through.

Blume wondered again about D’Amico. D’Amico had been his junior partner for five years, and had been pretty good. Two years ago, he had moved to a desk job in the Ministry of the Interior. Blume regretted the wasted training, but D’Amico had other plans for himself. Every few months Blume would hear news of how D’Amico had widened his political base, increased his leverage.

As Blume and Paoloni entered, the medical examiner, Dr. Gerhard Dorfmann, was already packing away his things. Blume nodded amicably at Dorfmann, who stared back with loathing, his default demeanor.

Blume waited until Dorfmann recognized him and finally conceded a curt nod.

Upon first seeing Dorfmann’s name on a report, Blume had felt a slight thrill at finding another foreigner. He had briefly wondered whether Dorfmann might be another American. That was a long time ago. Even then Dorfmann had seemed old. Blume wondered what age he had now achieved. His hair was gleaming white, but there was a lot of it. His eyes were hidden behind thick gold glasses that had gone in and out of style several times since he first bought them. His face contained thousands of wrinkles, but was free of folding or sagging skin. It was finely fissured like old porcelain.

Dorfmann was from the Tyrol and spoke heavily accented Italian. He would not accept being mistaken for a German, though he allowed that people might think he was Austrian. Dorfmann soon revealed a low opinion of Americans. He was not very fond of Italians either.

Blume no longer felt offended. Essentially, Dorfmann disliked people who were still breathing.

“Knife attack,” said Dorfmann, completely ignoring Paoloni.

“Very well, thank you, and you?” said Blume.

Dorfmann continued. “Four wounds. Stomach, lower abdomen, throat, head—behind the orbital lobe. All of them potentially fatal. He was probably dead when the last blow came. The knife hand-guard left a sign in the lower abdomen, so it went in with some force. Probably right-handed. What are you doing here? I don’t see why I should repeat what I just told your dandy colleague. No evident bruising elsewhere, nothing sexual that I can see despite the open robe, though we’ll wait for the autopsy. No mutilations in genital area.”

“My dandy colleague?” The ME had to be referring to D’Amico.

“D’Alema.”

“D’Alema? You mean D’Amico?”

“Yes. That’s the one. Not that fool D’Alema. D’Alema is far from dandy. Or intelligent, or politically literate . . .” Dorfmann was about to express some deeply held Political opinions, which Blume did not want to hear.

“OK, doctor, but here we’re talking about Nando D’Amico, not the political failure that is D’Alema.”

“Yes.” Dorfmann was pleased enough at Blume’s choice of terms to overlook the fact of the interruption. “Your colleague, D’Amico. He was walking about polluting the crime scene, then left, possibly to shine his teeth.”

“So what sort of person did this?” asked Blume, trying to hunker down to examine the body but finding his knees were having none of it.

“I would not describe the stabbing as frenzied. Nonetheless, the person who did this was not serene.”

A small pool of blood had gathered on either side of the neck, and there were impact spatters on the walls to the side and behind the victim, but the blood spillage on the floor was contained. Paoloni was walking up and down, head bent, staring at the floor, then the wall. Blume saw from the way he was moving he was describing a grid pattern around the body. The forensic team ignored him.

“Time of death?” Blume asked Dorfmann.

“This is an unpleasantly hot and dirty city, and the apartment is warm,” began Dorfmann. “When I woke up this morning, I thought we might be in for some refreshing rain, but a hot wind arose and blew the clouds over to Croatia.”

Blume clicked his tongue sympathetically. Damned Croats.

“The liver temperature, however, is warmer even than this place. Loss is just under eight degrees. First signs of rigor around the mouth. The body was almost certainly not here early this morning.”

“Can we say midday?”

“You can say it.”

“Eleven?”

Dorfmann shrugged.

“Nine?”

Dorfmann looked very doubtful. That was as good as he would get.

Dorfmann turned away and pulled off a pair of latex gloves, picked up a clipboard, and made a slight flourish with his hand to emphasize that he was signing off on the case already. “Lividity on back, buttocks. I don’t think anyone moved the body. This seems to be where he died. If you want pinpoint accuracy about the time, it will be up to you or your dandy friend to give me some markers.”

Blume was looking at the towels over by the door.

A photographer in a white jump suit stooped and took a shot of the box of groceries, against which he had propped a photographic scale ruler.

Blume noticed that he was alternating between an ordinary thirty-five mm Canon and a digital Nikon SLR. He removed the ruler and took two more shots of the box, once with the ordinary camera and once with the digital.

Then he turned on Clemente’s halogen lights overhead and repeated the process. He was doing a conscientious job.

“Get those towels over there. Photograph them, I mean,” said Blume.

The photographer looked Blume up and down, assessing his authority, then scowled and continued to photograph the box. Blume went for the friendly angle.

He said, “I’ve got a Coolpix. It’s only a small Coolpix. Wouldn’t be much good here, I suppose.”

The photographer stood up and stared at him, then, without a word, returned to his job.

Blume dismissed a fleeting image of himself plunging his cheap little Coolpix down the photographer’s throat. The technicians were moving through the apartment in white suits, acting under their own orders and initiative. He stopped one, asked for and got a pair of latex gloves, and pulled them on. He had left his own in the car. Everything was going very smoothly.

“My mentor and master,” declared a voice in a Neapolitan accent.

Blume lifted his gaze from the stained body on the floor, which did not have a name yet, and turned around to see Nando D’Amico, resplendent in a golden silk suit, step through the front door, breaking another strand of tape.

“Close your vowels, Nando. You’ll never make it into the political elite till you learn to close those Camorra vowels,” said Blume.

“Elocution lessons from a non-EU immigrant. The shame of it,” said D’Amico. “But of course, you are from the deep north. Superior to every last Leghista in Lombardy.”

“So are you. We’re the same rank now.”

“So we are. We’ll have to do something about that. Now here’s a fact not a lot of people know,” said D’Amico. “Naples is slightly north of New York. Check it out next time you’re near a globe.”

“My people were from Seattle.”

“Where’s that?”

“Far away from here. Listen Nando, what are you here for? Who’s been assigned?”

“You.”

“And you are here because . . . ?”

“The departmental top dog himself sent me. He said the dead guy was important. I reminded him I no longer run a murder team and told him I needed a superior officer.”

Blume said, “I am not your superior anymore.”

“I meant morally.”

“How long have you been here?”

“About half an hour.” He held up a hand as if in admonishment to objections Blume had not yet made. “I am here in an official representative capacity, not as a detective. That needs to be made clear.”

“Gallone is here, too.”

“Yes, all those atheists who doubted his existence look like fools now, don’t they?” He made a show of looking around. “But he seems to have dematerialized again.”

“I see a Violent Crime Analysis Unit doing plenty of good work, policeman outside, a medical examiner finishing up his job. It looks to me like we are already under the direction of an investigating magistrate, am I right?”

“Yes. Public Minister Filippo Principe.”

“That means I was informed late,” said Blume.

“That happens. Happened when we were partners, too.”

“How long were you here before me? Be precise.”

“Forty minutes.”

“The forensic team was here already?”

“About five minutes after that.”

“Did you enter the apartment?”

“What, am I under suspicion?”

“Well, did you?”

“In the company of Gallone and the first reporting officer, yes. The door was open. The wife had opened it.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know. She wasn’t here when I arrived.”

“Weird, isn’t it? You, a representative from the Ministry, and Gallone of all people, being the first to arrive.”

“After the patrol unit, you mean. All I know is I was sent, and I arrived. If there was a delay finding you, it’s hardly my fault.”

“OK,” said Blume.

D’Amico plucked at his tie. “I forgot how aggressive you get.”

“I’m not being aggressive,” said Blume, and patted him on the shoulder. “And I’m happy to hear the investigation is under Principe’s control. I like him. He’ll give us room. He listens, thinks.”

“Except he’s not here,” said D’Amico.

“He’ll get here. He knows it’s best to let the forensic team work the scene first before he sees for himself.”

“If you say so,” said D’Amico.

“I do, Nando. Where were you just now?”

“Getting these keys duplicated.” D’Amico held out and jingled a bunch of keys in front of Blume.

“Those are the keys to this place?”

“Yes. They were on the shelf there, near the door. The technicians gave me permission. Seems like, despite their complaining, they’ve got plenty of other material here.”

“Meaning?”

“Fingerprints, footprints, saliva, hairs. The killer, whoever he was, left traces of himself everywhere. We may even have footprints. That is to say, bare feet.”

Blume looked at the corpse in the hall. Paoloni had put on latex gloves and seemed to be intent on pulling back the lips of a stab wound in the head. “The bare footprints will be his.”

“Not unless he got up and walked about in his own blood, which he could have done, but it doesn’t seem likely. Also, they are small footprints,” said D’Amico.

“A woman’s?”

“Who knows?” D’Amico shrugged. “Here, want a key?” he offered Blume a large H-shaped key for the qua druple deadbolt lock to the front door beside which they were standing. “I didn’t bother getting copies of the key to the front gate. But this one”—he handed Blume a blue aluminium Yale key—“opens the front door to the building. Not that you’ll need it.”

“Why?”

“It’s not secure. Just give it a shove, it opens by itself.”

Blume took the key anyway.

D’Amico reached over and switched off the lights in the hall. His shining suit and white shirt seemed to dim slightly, but his tanned, handsome face continued to glow.

Blume had several questions. He picked an easy one.

“That cardboard box there?”

“It’s full of groceries from the SMA supermarket. Apparently Arturo Clemente here bought them himself yesterday evening, and ordered a delivery for this morning.”

D’Amico pinched the top of his trousers to make sure the crease was still sharp. Blume wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “Arturo Clemente’s the name of the victim?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“So what? You think the grocery boy killed him?”

“Looks like it, doesn’t it?” said D’Amico. He checked a wafer-thin watch, straightened his shirt cuffs. “We get the grocery boy, leave him with Commissioner Zambotto for an hour, we’ll have the case resolved before supper. That would be nice.”

D’Amico snapped open a shell-shaped mobile that he must have been already holding in his hand, found the number he was looking for, and held the phone to his ear. With his free hand, he smoothed his shining black hair and murmured into it. A technician down the hall cursed and dropped a cyanoacrylate fuming wand. One of his colleagues, who was stretching a cat’s cradle of threads from bloodstains on the floor back to the corpse, laughed. Paoloni, who was sketching the scene in a notebook, joined in.

D’Amico was nine years Blume’s junior and for five years had been two ranks below him. In those days, he had been a neat young man in clean shoes and a polo shirt. Every time he went up a level, he upgraded his clothes style. If he ever made questore, he’d have to dress like Louis XIV.

D’Amico clapped his cell phone shut without saying who it was, but announced: “It seems we have a Political murder on our hands.”

Blume looked at the bloodied body in the loose bathrobe. He noted the splatter patterns on the wall and floor, the cardboard box and the packet of Weetabix visible on top. He said, “It doesn’t look very political to me.”

“Well it is—which explains why Gallone was here.”

“Explains why you are here, too,” said Blume. “That’s a politician?”

“No. He was an animal rights activist of some sort. It’s his wife who’s the politician. She’s also the one who found him. She made the call at 16.05.”

“The forensics complained you had been looking through the apartment already,” said Blume.

“I looked in, is all. Gallone was with me. He’s still my superior, so I did what he wanted.”

“What party? The wife I mean.”

“The Greens,” said D’Amico.

“So we’re looking for an environmentally unfriendly errand boy.”

D’Amico smoothed his hair and looked doubtful. “We can’t rule out anything. On my way back from the hardware store with the keys, I had a chat with the porter. I must have been with him when you arrived. The porter says he saw nothing.”

Blume stayed silent.

D’Amico continued, “He doesn’t strike me as being a very reliable witness. Judging from his breath, either he was drinking in his cabin, or he had just spent some time in a bar.”

“The porter is going to be defensive as well as eager to please. He’ll be trying to give the sort of answers he thinks you want to hear,” said Blume, unable to break his teaching habit.

“He has already been doing some finger-pointing at various residents.”

“He could be right. We’re going to have to check up on them, too.”

“Gallone has been appointing uniforms for the house-to-house visits. He’s suspended leave, called in for a few extra recruits from around town.”

“Gallone the coordinator. That’s new, too,” said Blume.

D’Amico slid his hand into his jacket, and from his inside pocket extracted four sheets of paper, neatly folded and stapled together. He thumbed through the sheets, then handed them to Blume.

“This is a list of all the residents in this and the other three buildings in the complex.”

Blume glanced through the pages. “Some of the names are circled.”

“Those are the ones about whom the porter has grave misgivings. He circled them himself.”

Blume turned to the next page. “There are more names circled than not.”

“He is a very suspicious porter.”

Blume said, “How can he sleep at night being surrounded by so many murderous residents? Little wonder the poor man drinks. And you, you’ve been very busy for someone sent to represent the Ministry.”

D’Amico looked offended. “I was just trying to be useful.”

“You entered the crime scene, spoke to the medical examiner, had keys duplicated, and spoke to the porter. Either you’re a judicial investigator or you’re not,” said Blume. “You were once, now you’re not. From now on, you stay here at the doorway.”

“Fine,” said D’Amico.

Blume walked toward the body in the middle of the corridor. The photographer had vanished into the adjoining rooms.

“I got the impression from the medical examiner that this has nothing to do with queers, despite the bathrobe,” said D’Amico from his post by the door.

“Despite the knife, too,” said Blume. “Knives are surrogates, remember?”

“You think it could be sexual?”

“Could be anything. Except I trust Dorfmann. His autopsy will tell for sure.”

A technician walked out of the victim’s study, carrying a plastic-wrapped computer. They would find out more about Arturo Clemente when they pried into his files, followed the trail he had left all over the Internet like an unwitting snail.

Paoloni was examining the shelves along the corridor. The technicians had moved away from the area immediately around the body. Blume waved at one of them and asked for permission to explore. The technician shrugged, nodded.

Paoloni shuffled over and stood beside Blume, looking more like a snitch with privileges than a law enforcer.

“OK, let’s start. Beppe, you finished your sketch?”

Paoloni showed it to Blume. It looked like it had been done by an ungifted five-year-old, but it included measurements, and would do until the technicians supplied their version.

“Slight grazing on the knuckles,” said Blume. “Dorfmann might be able to tell us more, but it looks like he didn’t manage to put up much of a struggle.”

Paoloni asked, “What do you think? The killer was handy with his weapon?”

“Not necessarily. The victim looks as if he wasn’t expecting this.”

“I think that, too. He didn’t know what hit him,” said Paoloni.

“I wonder did he know who hit him,” said Blume.

“No sign of forced entry,” said Paoloni. “Someone delivered the groceries and someone killed him before he had time to put them away. Makes sense to presume it was the same person.”

They stared in silence at the corpse for a while longer. Paoloni said, “I see the assailant being alone.”

“I agree.”

“If there had been a second person, he would have gripped the victim in some way, pinned him down, tied him up. Something that we would be able to see.”

“Yes,” said Blume. “Two people come at you with knives, you run, barricade yourself in a room. Maybe not get very far, but at least some of the wounds would be in your back. This guy looks like he thought he was in with a fighting chance. Stabbed in the front of the body each time. What do you make of those towels over by the front door?”

Paoloni pushed his thumb into his nostril to show he was thinking.

Eventually he said, “No idea. Like the killer wanted to clean up or something, but then didn’t bother. One was streaked, like he cleaned the blade on it. The others are clean.”

Blume said, “It’s as if he wanted to stem the flow of the blood, like he was scared it would run under the door.”

Paoloni made a dismissive click with his tongue, tilted his chin up, and said, “It would never have run that far once the heart had stopped beating.”

“Maybe our killer didn’t know that,” said Blume. “Which would make him a first-timer.”

Blume went over and looked at the towels. They were pure white and fluffy. He thought of his own towels, multicolored strips of sandpaper. Two of the towels were still folded and pristine; one stained as if something had been wiped on it, as Paoloni had said. A third had been unfolded then rolled into a snake shape and left near the door.

“Nice towels,” offered D’Amico, who was standing near to the door. “By the way, I forgot to mention, the wife spoke to the victim at ten thirty this morning. On the phone. From Padua.”

“You forgot to tell me?”

“The Holy Ghost knows this already. He was the one who told me. He got it from the wife.”

“Did you tell Dorfmann?”

“No, I just heard, like I said.”

“Phone Dorfmann now. Tell him you’re the dandy one, and you’ve got a marker for him.”

“The dandy one?”

“Yes.”

Blume went back to Paoloni at the body. “Can we roll him over?”

They rolled Clemente’s body over. There were no wounds behind, but Dorfmann would have said if there were. As Blume had expected, Clemente’s bathrobe had soaked up most of the blood.

“Not much blood,” said Paoloni. “Considering. His heartbeat must have slowed down pretty quick.”

Blume turned around as he felt a presence behind him.

Inspector Cristian Zambotto had arrived, heaving and gasping and cursing after his trip up the stairs. Zambotto was dangerously overweight and had flat black hair that stopped suddenly somewhere high up on the middle of his head, leaving room for a wide rim of pocked skin that eventually merged with his thick neck.

After D’Amico left to pursue a political career, Blume’s team was split up and Zambotto was assigned to him. Blume did not know much about Zambotto except that he almost never contributed anything to anyone’s conversation, as if at some point in his life, Zambotto had decided it was too difficult to turn calories into words.

“Cristian, spend about half an hour here, OK? Get the scene into your head. Then I want you to find out who delivered those groceries, and bring him, or them, in for questioning. I want to be able to leave here, go interview the suspect. Take backup if you need it.”

“Right,” said Zambotto.

“Paoloni, take a few minutes here, then catch up with me in whatever room I’m in, OK?”

Paoloni nodded.

“Then you can go back and requestion the people in the apartment block. I want you to draw up a timeline using the reports from the police officers that Gallone appears to have assigned. We have a ten thirty call from the wife, an estimated time of death not long after, and now we need to find out about when these groceries were delivered. Also, you’ll be doing the paperwork on this.”

Paoloni gave him a dirty look.

“You can get Ferrucci to help you.”

“Oh, great,” said Paoloni.

“Why, you’d prefer to do the paperwork with Zambotto?” Blume looked at Paoloni, who shook his head quickly, more as a warning to Blume not to forget that Zambotto was still standing there. “Yeah, I thought so.”

Paoloni was making life hell for an officer-class graduate called Marco Ferrucci, but Blume saw a lot of raw talent in the young man. He figured Paoloni did, too, which might explain why he was so intent on humiliating him. Ferrucci had the potential to outshine them all.

Blume was about to say more in Ferrucci’s defense when he caught sight of Gallone, who had appeared at the doorway. Blume positioned himself next to the body, like a guard.

Gallone had an agente scelto remove the rest of the crime scene tape from the doorway, then walked in, head bowed. He raised sorrowful eyes and looked at Blume, then held his hands aloft. “Everything in order? Commissioner D’Amico?”

“Yes, sir. All under control,” said D’Amico.

“We shall manage this well,” he told D’Amico. “This is not being announced. No appeals for information, not yet. The rewards for clearing this one up will be high. I have that on good authority.” He turned his attention to Blume. “Commissioner, although you are not suitably dressed—”

“I had some leave, and it’s the weekend.”

“Although, I repeat, it seems almost irreverent for you to be standing in running shorts, you are assigned to the case under my aegis. The investigating magistrate is Filippo Principe. I believe you and he are old friends.”

“I respect him,” said Blume. “So, if Principe has charge of the investigation, and you and I are reporting to him, where do D’Amico and the Ministry fit in?”

D’Amico spoke up. “Stop referring to me in the third person, Alec. You’re hurting my feelings.”

“Sorry, Nando. I’d expect you to do the same in my position.”

Gallone said, “D’Amico has coordinating responsibilities. The investigative work is our responsibility. The investigating magistrate is on his way. We have arranged a meeting of the investigative team tomorrow morning at nine. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

Gallone was gone.

“Nando, I need your cell number, if it’s changed,” said Blume.

“No, same as it always was.”

“So is mine. Then you’ll need to get Paoloni’s and Zambotto’s, give them yours.”

“Will do.”

“And then you should leave so we don’t compromise the scene with too many people.”

Gallone was amongst them again. “I forgot to mention an important detail, Commissioner. It’s about a cell phone. Sveva Romagnolo, the poor widow, left her cell phone behind, and wants it back. It has important government and Political contacts and names on it. I was wondering had you seen it.”

Only Gallone could not know a cell phone at a murder scene was one of the first things to be taken by the technicians.

“The UACV will have removed it.”

Gallone clicked his tongue in irritation. “I know that they would have if they found one, but they say they never found one. It’s not on the list of items removed from the scene.”

“Well if they didn’t find one, why should I?”

Gallone nodded slowly as if accepting a doubtful proposition. “It’s hardly that important. What is important is that I personally shall be interviewing the widow. In this case, I shall report to you. You are not to importune the widow. Understood?”

Gallone was gone. D’Amico stood for a whole minute, sulking but splendid in his golden suit. Then he too left.