The Fatal Touch Read online

  A clacking noise made him turn around as Caterina pushed aside a bamboo bead curtain covering what must have once been the back door to the building. She stepped inside.

  “There’s a kitchen here,” said Caterina’s voice. “And another stove.”

  Blume followed Caterina in. The light was less intense and the whitewashed walls, the gray marble washstand, and the heavy brass taps made the room feel cool. A pastry-board lay half across a large rectangular ivory marble table, on which three boxes of eggs and an earthenware jug of what appeared to be milk sat. An ice-cube tray filled with black liquid shimmered slightly in response to the impact of Blume’s footsteps as he moved around the table, taking it in. A zinc box contained herbs, flakes of charcoal, dried leaves, and a collection of gnarled woody fruits of some sort. In here was another stove, only this was modern, boxy, made from burnished gunmetal steel.

  He opened the refrigerator. “A lot of eggs. Milk, cheese,” he announced.

  The milk smelled old. “Beer. Garlic, feta cheese, some withered greens. A single man’s refrigerator.” The cold green bottles of beer clinked invitingly as he closed the refrigerator. Tuborg and Peroni. He used to drink both. He felt thirsty. There was no real need for him not to drink. It wasn’t as if he had had a problem. Apart from the weight thing, but not drinking hadn’t helped much there. He’d think about it later.

  The next room, the living room, was lit by two dirty-paned windows. Blume immediately noticed three easels. One was folded and propped in the corner. One was gripping a pristine white board holding red-tinted paper with the first gray lines of what looked like a foot.

  Stacked behind the third easel was a collection of paintings and drawings of different sizes, some framed, some mounted on matt boards, some loose. Blume estimated they numbered around thirty, and began to leaf through them. The furniture was old and uncomfortable. The settee was stuffed with horsehair, the chairs hardbacked and spindly, the walls and window frames had the yellow and gray patina of ancient paint. The front door was made of heavy wood and held in place by rusted strap hinges. The grit and cobwebs showed it had not been opened in years. The greenhouse where they had come in was the only functioning entrance. The walls of this room were covered with framed pictures. Some were paintings, but many were sketches, mostly unfinished.

  “No TV,” said Caterina, “and the furniture is decrepit.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “I love it. Who wouldn’t? I’m just trying to make myself feel better that I rent a small apartment and it takes me an hour to get to the station, while an unemployed foreign drunk gets to live in the Botanical Gardens in the center of town. Or does that sound resentful?”

  “Want to buy mine?” said Blume. “It’s near San Giovanni.”

  “You’re selling?”

  “I might have to. The man in the apartment below me is suing for €85,000 in damages.”

  “What happened?”

  “Plumbing problems in my bathroom. Leaked into his apartment. You don’t need the details.”

  “Yeah, but €85,000 in damages. He’s obviously exploiting the situation,” said Caterina.

  “Two things. First, he’s a lawyer. Second, he doesn’t even live there. That’s why the damage got so bad. It looks like the leak had been going on for at least seven months but no one was in there to notice. He didn’t discover it until he opened up the apartment with the idea of renting it. I saw it myself. I don’t think he’s exaggerating, to be honest. The effect was very unpleasant. Getting it fixed cost me just a couple of hundred. But I may have to sell my apartment to pay for the damages below.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Commissioner. What about building insurance?”

  “Ha-ha.”

  “Do you have a good lawyer?”

  “I don’t think I want a lawyer. Just cost more money, and there’s not much to contest when you fill your neighbor’s apartment with . . . Guercino.”

  “Guercino?”

  “There. The artist. Barbieri was his real name. He was cross-eyed, so they called him Guercino.”

  Blume was squinting at a pen-and-wash figure. “That’s definitely Guercino,” he said to himself, surprised at knowing the style of drawing so easily; surprised, too, at hearing his father’s labored pronunciation in his head. He remembered his father’s effort to get his foreign tongue to make the “tsch” sound of the soft Italian “c,” while trying to remain casual and natural about it. To Caterina he said, “And what makes you say he was unemployed?”

  “Who?”

  “Treacy. Concentrate on where we are, Inspector. You called Treacy an unemployed foreign drunkard.”

  “The fact he died drunk and the way he was dressed. But if he had this place and these paintings—I don’t know what to make of him now.”

  “A lot of northern Europeans, even if they have money, don’t dress as well as they might,” said Blume. He remembered his father’s habit of wearing socks with his Birkenstock sandals, white legs, checkered shirts. “Americans, too. And don’t feel resentful. Treacy lives nowhere now.”

  “It came out wrong,” she said. She watched as he resumed leafing through the canvases and sheets on the table again, this time more slowly. “You’re looking at those pictures like they meant something.”

  “My mother specialized in works such as this. This etching by Fontana . . . If any of these are authentic, the only question is why Treacy didn’t live in a grander place than this.”

  They continued their exploration of the house. A cast-iron spiral staircase in the far corner of the room led up to a single bedroom which gave on to a larger bathroom containing a huge enamel tub with lion-claw feet and a large rosewood medicine cabinet with latticework windows. The ceiling was low and sloping.

  Blume opened the cabinet and stood back. “Maybe he ran a pharmacy on the side. No one can be that sick.”

  “That’s not too bad,” said Caterina. “My father takes about that many.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Blume.

  “Prescriptions accumulate, and before you know it, you’re taking ten, twenty pills a day.”

  “Then you need to stop taking them,” said Blume, “before they mount up. That’s what I did. First it was Zantac, then they wanted me to take Zocor. Maybe if they didn’t make them sound like the bad guys in a comic book.”

  “Palonosetron, Venlafaxine, Baclofen,” read Caterina. “The man was in pain. I think he had cancer.”

  “Well, that’s different,” said Blume. “You should probably take pills then.”

  She picked up another bottle. “Nexavar.” She turned it around. “Doesn’t say what it does.”

  “Bag them,” said Blume. “We can look them up, maybe get the labs to check them.”

  When they returned to the living room downstairs, Caterina started looking more closely at the framed works on the walls.

  “He was a collector of some sort as well as an artist?” said Caterina. “He seems to prefer unfinished drawings to paintings.”

  “Art forgery,” said Blume. “The name had been bothering me for a while but I remember now. Treacy. My father mentioned him a few times. Admiringly, if I recall. Not an artist, an art forger.”

  Caterina tapped a thumbnail against her bottom teeth. “That means corrupt dealers, theft, fencing goods, high prices. There is a possibility of some background to the death. At least we have a category of suspect.”

  The pictures and the books in his room reminded Blume of his parents and their apartment, the one he still lived in. Their books, reproductions, and papers, most of which he had preserved after their death, remained in their study, but not gathering dust. He kept it clean, spending hours in there himself, like he did as a child, just looking at the pictures in the art books.

  He went over to a leather-topped writing desk, picked up some papers, and looked through them. They consisted of bank statements, utility bills, discarded receipts, a few stubs from airplane tickets. He looked at the bank state
ments, and saw Treacy had a balance of €243,722 in his Unicredit checking account. Not bad. The plane ticket stubs were all for London and Rome. Treacy had made at least two round trips in the last year. The utility bills were modest. An injunction demanding payment for a TV license lay on top of a brochure for holiday homes in Umbria.

  “It’s legal to copy pictures, you know,” he said, dropping the papers back on the desk. “Only the moment a fake is offered for sale as an original does it become a crime, and even then it’s hard to prove intent. See this?” Blume pointed to a drawing of a nude male in red and black chalk on what looked like old paper.

  “A naked man,” said Caterina. “He drew that?”

  “It looks like a Pontormo, but it’s signed Treacy,” said Blume. “Also, it’s hanging here in his own room.”

  “What does that signify?”

  “Nothing. Just that he was a very good draftsman.”

  Blume wandered over to a mahogany bookshelf. The lower shelves had been removed to make room for large volumes, mostly art books and reproductions, but Blume also saw coverless dictionaries, road maps, atlases, and journals piled up.

  The upper shelves contained mainly novels. Amis, Arpino, Atwood, Banville, Barnes, Beckett, Brontë. An organized man. A man of leisure. A foolscap-size notebook with a marbled cover lay open on the writing desk.

  “No date on this,” said Blume, looking at the spidery script. It was written with black fountain ink.

  “Not great penmanship for an artist,” said Caterina, coming over. “I can’t make out a word.”

  “He was getting on in years and if he was in pain, it would have an effect.”

  Marking the open page with his thumb, he turned to the inside cover of the notebook, and saw Treacy had written his name. Below that he had written “Diary,” then crossed it out and written “Untitled,” which was crossed out and replaced with “Painting my Outward Walls,” also crossed out. The final title seemed to be “An (im)practical handbook for . . .” but he had evidently not decided who it was for. Blume returned to the page he had found lying open.

  “I can see why it was hard for you to make out,” he said. “It’s in English.”

  “I know English,” said Caterina. She sounded very offended. “My father was a NATO liaison officer with the army. I studied in English-language schools in Germany, Turkey, and Canada, till I was fifteen, and later I lived in London for four years. Didn’t you read my file?”

  “Sure I did. I must have forgotten.”

  “You didn’t read it. You didn’t know I had a kid, either.”

  “OK, I didn’t read it, then. I just read the reports about you from the immigration department, two recommendations from magistrates, the details of a few cases. I skipped the rest. What you did in your childhood is not relevant.”

  “How come you know so much about painting?”

  “My parents were art historians, and so I used—ah, well done. Very clever. OK, sometimes the past is relevant. But only incidentally. Still, it’s good to know you speak English, if we’re going to have to read through this guy’s papers.”

  He took the book in his hands and, frowning a little at the poor handwriting and crossings-out, read:

  “Chemically, Cinnabar is also called Vermilion or cinnabarite is red mercury (II) sulfide (HgS), a common ore of mercury and an essential part of our palette. Make sure your cinnabar really comes from China, as Italian dealers have been known to fake the provenance by using Chinese papers to contain the powder. I got the perfect mix from a monk, of all people, whom I met one day on the bridge of San Francesco in Subiaco . . .”

  Blume stopped reading, as he spotted the spines of two more notebooks of the same type among the novels and Giunti art books. Foolscap-size notebooks. Impossible to find in Italy. He had ones just like them at home. They had belonged to his father, one of whose nostrums to his unlistening son had been never to commit anything to loose-leaf paper. Well, maybe he had been listening despite himself if he remembered it now. Always use a hardback expensive lined notebook, his father had said. He had them sent over from New York, and this in the days before the internet made it easy. Then he had got himself killed in a bank raid and left half a shelf of them, unused and new then, unused and yellowing now.

  The notebook on the desk was half full and seemed to be dedicated entirely to technical advice on oils, grinding, canvases. It contained some interesting illustrations in light pencil, including three versions of Dürer’s hare and a page of practice signatures, such as Blume used to do when he needed to sign his own lousy school reports in his father’s name. The other two notebooks were full of entries, some of which seemed to have double dates, others none.

  Every so often, Treacy had whited out the ruled lines and sketched on the page. Most of the sketches were of single body parts. A hand, a foot, the curve of a neck.

  Caterina had picked up one of the first notebooks and was staring at it.

  “It seems to be a manual for painters,” said Blume. “It’s full of recipes . . .” he flicked forward a few pages. “How to age paper . . . convincing spots. Freehand composition . . . We’re getting to the point where we should wait for instructions from the investigating magistrate. Still, I think we should take the notebooks.”

  Blume found three plastic bags for the notebooks, packaged them, and was about to drop them into his bag when he noticed Caterina’s shoulder bag.

  “What’s in your bag?”

  “This?” said Caterina, giving it a pat and blushing slightly. “Nothing. It’s empty. I didn’t know what sort of bag would be best for working at a crime scene.”

  Blume nodded sympathetically. “I’ve never worked it out either. I often use a bag, sometimes an old flat leather one that belonged to my father. But you can also use one of the official reinforced briefcases, they’re bulky, though. So you’ve nothing in that bag?”

  “My wallet, a pen, phone. That’s it.”

  “Here. Drop these notebooks in.”

  Caterina lifted the flap of her bag, and angled in the notebooks. They were just too big to allow her to close the flap over them.

  “Gives you the look of a student,” said Blume. “Suits you.”

  “I’m too old to be a student.”

  “We need to log the items we remove from here,” said Blume.

  “Do we need to take these paintings, too? They must be valuable.”

  “I’m not sure that they are,” said Blume. “I need to take another look at them. I think we might put a guard on this place. Someone to stand outside in the sun for hours making sure no one comes in here. Grattapaglia springs to mind.”

  Blume’s phone rang.

  “I’m taking this. You call Grattapaglia, order him to come here. You had better tell him where to find the door.”

  Caterina shook her head. “I don’t want to be the one.”

  “Do it,” snapped Blume.

  Caterina took out her phone.

  “Sorry,” Blume said into his phone. “What? Oh, I see. Good, thanks, yes . . .” He pulled out his notebook, and jotted a few notes.

  “Treacy part owned a private art gallery called . . .” he checked his notes, “Galleria Orpiment S.n.c. just off Via Giulia. The Rome Chamber of Commerce database has it registered as a limited company. Treacy held fifty percent and a certain John Nightingale the other fifty percent. Apparently the gallery is listed in the Rome business directory as ‘specializing in Old Master paintings and drawings,’ and ‘original reproductions.’ By the way, did you get hold of Sovrintendente Grattapaglia?”

  “He’s on his way,” said Caterina. “Two minutes. He was still going door-to-door.”

  “Good,” said Blume. “Actually, Treacy’s gallery I just mentioned, it’s not on Via Giulia but on a side street named—can you guess?”

  Caterina looked around her in search of clues, then shrugged.

  “Via in Caterina,” said Blume. “Pretty good, huh? Via in Caterina.”

  “Mine’s a commo
n name.”

  “I’m still waiting to see a Via Alec,” said Blume.

  “Well, was there ever a Saint Alec?”

  “Not yet,” said Blume.

  “Isn’t Alec short for Alexander?” said Caterina.

  “Yes. I’m named after a gay mass-murdering Greek. My mother chose it. Your street’s about ten minutes on foot from here, so I suppose it’s quicker just walking there.”

  “You say that like it was a problem.”

  “It’s all a bit claustrophobic. You sort of want an investigation to expand, don’t you? First, we wait for Grattapaglia. After that, we start following the money.”

  “What money?”

  “The gallery has to do with money.” He drummed his fingers against the underside of his chin. “OK, so we’ve got: gallery, maybe a follow-up on any bartenders who saw Treacy, then a coordination meeting. What time is it?”

  Caterina looked at her watch. “It’s just after ten o’clock.”

  “Right,” said Blume. “Let’s make the meeting for 1:00 this afternoon, no, make it 1:30 so people can have lunch.”

  “Why don’t you have a watch, Commissioner?”

  “I hate watches. I never get used to the feel of one. I’m always aware of it being on my wrist.”

  “But don’t you need one?”

  “I can use my cell phone. It has a clock. Or I can just ask an insolent female officer to tell me the time.”

  A raucous rasp sounded from the old Bakelite intercom hanging from the wall next to the bead curtain.

  “That’ll be Grattapaglia,” said Blume. “We’ll go to the gallery, leave him standing outside to guard this place.”

  Grattapaglia was standing in front of the green door, looking up at the wall, when they opened it. He took a step forward as if to enter, but Blume blocked his way with the bag, and said, “Here. Take this. Get someone to bring my car down here, put this in the trunk.” He dropped the bag at Grattapaglia’s feet and handed him the car keys. Then he leaned back and pulled the green door shut, which sagged a little thanks to his earlier efforts.