Read Online The Namesake by Conor Fitzgerald - Free Book Online

what he is ) and a threat on Arconti’s life with the references to God’s forgiveness, cut throat, and injuries. Finally, it was a way of letting Arconti know he was not going to get anything from a wiretap except elaborate declarations of innocence.
    Blume phoned the Palaces of Justice, found the assistant who worked with Arconti, and asked if anything had been heard from the hospital. His concern was real, but he also knew it was too early for news and that the person he called would be more interested in hearing what Blume had to say. After confirming that there was no news, the assistant said, ‘You were in the office when it happened, I hear.’
    ‘Yes, yes, I was. He just keeled over. Poor man. But people can come through a stroke.’
    ‘His files are all over his floor. What happened, did he knock them off his desk as he fell?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Blume. ‘He was going to show me something when it happened.’
    ‘It is such a pity. Any idea what he wanted to show you?’
    ‘It was a confession of some sort. No, that’s not quite the word he used: an admission.’
    ‘By who?’
    ‘I never found out,’ said Blume. ‘He collapsed before he could show me. I hope you’ve got those files in a safe place now.’
    ‘Safe?’ the sostituto sounded uncertain. ‘We have to sort through them. There’s a lot there, and some notes from another case have got mixed up. This was the investigation into the hospital consultant who committed suicide?’
    ‘Originally, yes,’ said Blume.
    ‘You’re saying there was a confession involved?’
    ‘I’m not saying that. Did I say confession? Arconti said something about an admission. A telephone call he transcribed. I don’t know any more than that. It’ll be in there somewhere among the mess of papers.’
    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