The Fatal Touch Read online

  “A lot of eggs,” said Blume.

  “Ah, you noticed them, did you?” said the Colonel, clumping his hands together. He wore a large ruby ring on his middle finger.

  “Yes,” said Blume. “And I thought maybe he was using the eggs for tempera painting, instead of just eating them.”

  The Colonel tapped the side of his nose. “What made you think of that?”

  “I’m investigating the suspicious death of a man who forged paintings for a living. Eggs are used for tempera painting, it’s an obvious connection.”

  “It’s not obvious to everyone,” said the Colonel, pulling out a green folding wooden chair from below the marble table on which the two boxes now sat beside a honey pot, a bag of sugar, an open carton of milk, a pepper canister, and a bottle of Worcester sauce. “But I suppose you have the right background.”

  The Colonel lifted the flimsy chair in one hand, looked at it scornfully, then put it down, and dragged a heavy oak stool with paint spots all over it. He brushed the surface with the back of his hand, sat down, stretched out his arm, and pulled the two white boxes across the table. “Your parents were art historians, Commissioner. I was hoping some of their knowledge had rubbed off on you, and it seems it has.”

  “Did you delve deep, Colonel?”

  “A cursory glance, just to see who I would be dealing with. I am very impressed, Commissioner. Really. That was a terrible thing that befell your parents. What made you decide to stay in this awful country afterwards?”

  Blume wagged his index finger at the Colonel, warning him off the subject.

  “I don’t mean to intrude on your private grief,” said the Colonel. “Though it can’t have been easy. All these years on a police salary? We public servants, risking our lives, grossly underpaid, unrewarded, unrecognized. Policemen fall into arrears on a mortgage, take stupid risks, some even kill themselves out of despair. Some have killed their families. It doesn’t take much to get into a hole, especially if the first place you go to is the criminal underworld instead of your colleagues in law enforcement. A house sale falls through, your kid needs braces, some bastard sues you for some trivial mishap. And there we stand, vulnerable, outbid, underpaid, in debt.”

  He opened a box with a sigh and a sad shake of his head that caused his cheeks to wobble. “Get those two glasses over there, the ones by the sink, would you?”

  Blume stayed where he was.

  “Go on,” said the Colonel. “I had them washed earlier. The corkscrew, too, if you’d be so kind. And some knives, forks, spoons from that drawer.”

  Blume spread his hands out in an apologetic way, and said: “Sorry, Colonel. You want a valet, call your Maresciallo in.”

  The Colonel sighed theatrically. “Look, Commissioner, I am a fat man. What is simple for you is difficult for me. I suffer from diabetes. I have gout in my left toe.”

  “Gout? Nobody gets gout anymore.”

  “Nowadays they call it metabolic arthritis. It’s been getting worse. It comes in the spring, stays for the summer, and is gone by the winter. Like some sort of evil migrating bird.”

  Blume went over and retrieved the glasses, corkscrew, and silverware, brought them back to the table.

  “To the side of the refrigerator there, in the rack, the bottle third from the top—no, the other. That’s it,” said the Colonel.

  Blume brought the bottle of wine over, set it in front of the Colonel who was now lifting things out of one white box.

  “The thing is,” said the Colonel, “our man was not known for forging tempera paintings, and I found only two in the house. His real specialty was pen, ink, wash, sketches, preparations for prints. He was a great draftsman, but maybe his eye for color was not so good. Maybe you need to be Italian to appreciate the full palette of color.”

  “Do you?” said Blume. “Well, then maybe he just liked eggs a lot.”

  “There was a lot of milk in that refrigerator, too,” said the Colonel. “Both fresh and sour. Anglo-Saxons always have so much milk.”

  “The fresh milk tells us Treacy was here recently,” said Blume. “Not that it’s likely to make much difference.”

  “Why would he keep sour milk, Commissioner?”

  “Milk is used as a fixative for pencil and chalk, which is what you say he mainly used. Sour is as good as fresh for that. Or maybe he made his own soda bread.”

  “Soda bread? Good stuff that. You use sour milk? You must tell me about that another time,” said the Colonel. “Speaking of bread, did you notice the basket with the stale bread in it?”

  Blume went over to a wicker basket sitting on the counter, pushed off the top, and produced two pieces of broken dirty bread which he rapped against the counter.

  “Rub breadcrumbs over a chalk drawing, and you get an old look,” said the Colonel. “Treacy was a bit of a pig, but I don’t think he kept dirty bread to eat.”

  “It’s hardly the only way to get a drawing to look old,” said Blume.

  “You’re right again,” said the Colonel. “Just one of many techniques.”

  “So maybe it was just stale bread,” said Blume.

  “What else did you notice?” asked the Colonel.

  “There was gelatin in the fridge, which maybe he used for glues or for preparing paper, something like that.”

  “I see garlic, potatoes, vinegar. They can all be used, too, can’t they?”

  The Colonel had dipped his spoon into the pot on the table. He twirled it niftily between his fingers as he pulled it out, opened his mouth, and dropped in a glob of honey.

  “Honey is used for pastels,” said the Colonel, his voice slow and thick.

  “Vinegar, wine, oatmeal,” said Blume. “There is an ice-cube tray full of ink over there, and it looks like he used the pastry-board as a drawing board. Under the sink in the greenhouse, I found denatured alcohol, white spirit, benzene, turps. You can smell the turps in here. Also, he was doing something with oils in that double boiler.”

  “You haven’t missed a trick,” said the Colonel.

  “Yes, I have,” said Blume. He walked over to the zinc fruit bowls and scooped up a handful of small acorns, shook them in the hollow of his hand, then let them drop. “Why did he collect dry acorns?” He went to the other bowl and picked up the woody fruits he had examined earlier. “And I don’t even know what these are.”

  “Oak apples,” said the Colonel. “Or galls.”

  “Galls?”

  “Houses for insect larvae.”

  “Sorry. I still don’t get it,” said Blume.

  “I don’t know much about the nature side of it,” said the Colonel. “These things grow on oaks, maybe on other trees, too. They contain wasp larvae. What you do is pluck them, dry them out in the oven or the sun, then crush them with a pestle; you mix in acorns, too. But I don’t know what the proportion is. You mix it with water, maybe other things, and you get iron ink for drawing.”

  “And that’s the end result in the ice-cube tray?” said Blume.

  “You don’t use your nose enough, Commissioner. Bring your face down to that ink, breathe in, slowly, use your mouth as well as your nose. Open the back of your throat, too. Get the taste.”

  Blume put his face over the tray and sniffed. “Nothing,” he said. “Maybe a bit like a sweaty cheese rind.”

  “You need to learn to use all your five senses, Commissioner, and never despise smell which is our most basic, our most reptile sense. That is not gall ink. That’s cuttlefish ink. You can smell the salt. Damn, I can taste it in the back of my throat from here. Wonderful stuff. It looks black, draws brown. But gall—it burns through paper, but that’s good if all the paper you have available is half ruined. Gives you an excuse for all the wear.”

  The Colonel pointed to the raised brick fireplace where a half-burned log lay in ash. “It’s too warm to be lighting fires for comfort,” he said. “So we can assume that had another purpose. Mix the soot with rainwater and you’ve got bistre which, in the end, is going to be the in
k he used most.”

  “Does it have to be rainwater?” asked Blume.

  “Definitely. Especially here in Rome. Too much limescale in the tap water, too many salts in the bottled stuff. Besides, it’s free. You know who used bistre a lot?”

  “Who?”

  “Nicolas Poussin,” said the Colonel. “And you know when I first met Henry Treacy?”

  “Tell me.”

  “In 1973, when he was accused of trying to sell a fake Poussin landscape. An oil painting. He wasn’t so good with oils. Good, but not that good.”

  Blume did some mental arithmetic.

  “I turn sixty-three on November 13, Commissioner. That’s what you’re trying to work out. Two years ago I moved out of the Carabiniere Art Forgery and Heritage Division in Trastevere and was posted to Madonna del Riposo.”

  The Colonel picked up a flat painting knife from the table, stabbed it into the top of the second box, and slit it open. He pulled out several flat and several bulky packages and a half loaf of Genzano bread, then set about unfolding and unwrapping each package. The flat ones contained salamis and cured hams, the bulky ones cheese.

  The Colonel broke off a triangle of cheese and popped it into his mouth. He shoved the corkscrew into the black bottle before handing it to Blume. “If you’d be so kind, I’m a little breathless?”

  Blume pulled out the cork, handed the bottle to the Colonel, who filled up Blume’s glass. Blume pushed his glass back to the Colonel, and said, “No thanks.”

  “But it’s a Sassicaia. Not the famous 1985 vintage, more’s the pity, but even so.”

  “I do not drink,” said Blume.

  The Colonel held the glass by the stem and lifted it up so that the ruby highlights in the dark wine became apparent. “I see,” he said. “And this is because you are an alcoholic?”

  “No. I just thought I should give it up, that’s all,” said Blume. “I prefer to keep in shape.”

  The Colonel placed his nostrils over the rim and inhaled, sipped the wine, paused, pursed his lips, then drained half the glass. “You must be an alcoholic. There is no other reason for not drinking Tuscan wine. I’m disappointed, but I am sure we can still manage to work together. Informally.”

  He unwrapped a bundle of waxed paper to reveal a pile of sliced ham. He peeled off the top slice with his thick fingers. “This culatello is particularly sweet. Try it.”

  Blume hesitated, before finally helping himself to a thin slice of meat. It was good.

  The Colonel cut a wedge of yellow cheese with a black rind, handed it to Blume, and said, “Gran Bastardo.”

  “Who?”

  “The cheese. That’s what it’s called. Comes from the Veneto,” said the Colonel. “By the way, if you insist on treating this as murder, just remember that Treacy’s business partner John Nightingale is the one with the most to gain and the most to lose. Most to gain because maybe he knows where Treacy has hidden his wealth and is now about to help himself, but most to lose because he may have just killed the goose that lays the golden eggs. You know, I can’t bear to see you sitting there drinking nothing. There’s some mineral water in the fridge, help yourself.”

  “I don’t drink mineral water. Tap water is fine.”

  The Colonel tore at a hunk of bread. “You’re not eating. Here.” He pushed over a plastic carton with soft white cheese. “Testa del Morto. Lovely on the bread. Slide a slice of ham over the top, fold, and . . .”

  “No thanks.”

  “Fine. More for me, then.” The Colonel chewed for a while, then started fingering around in his mouth. “Always get these strands of flesh . . . stuck between my teeth. I don’t suppose you have any toothpicks on you?”

  Colonel Farinelli eventually decided the solution to the annoyance in his mouth was to down another glass of wine.

  “As I said, I knew Treacy very well, once. I also knew his business partner John Nightingale, though less well. The two of them came to my attention in the 1970s.”

  The Colonel pushed away his plate, and continued, “Henry Treacy and John Nightingale were a very effective pair. Treacy specialized in sixteenth-century forgeries. He used to say no artist after 1620 was worth imitating.”

  “In America, we’re taught that’s when history starts,” said Blume.

  “Sounds to me like Treacy was right,” said the Colonel. “No, I mustn’t do that.”

  “What?”

  “Scoff at other cultures. Especially the Americans. They are the new Romans. Practical, murderous, and efficient. Now I know you insist on being taken for an Italian, but you must admit, it’s a strange thing for us Italians to have foreign names in law enforcement, though for some reason we have had a number of half-foreign magistrates, hundreds of half-breed journalists.”

  “I met three Filipino recruits, recently,” said Blume. “Plenty of Croats and Serbs in the force, too. And some German names. It’s not as rare as all that.”

  “I am not happy with these developments, as I’m sure you can imagine.”

  “Maybe you can tell from my face how fascinated I am by your views on race, Colonel?”

  “You need to learn how to give conversations time to mature and expand, Commissioner. Let people have their say, allow them their little foibles and foolish beliefs. Don’t always be so direct. No one will want to talk to you or confess to you. All this directness, which, if you don’t mind my revisiting the idea, is terribly American, is not conducive to trust. You’re an isolated man, Commissioner. Learn how to tune into others’ wavelength. We need to be talking, getting to know one another. So I don’t like niggers on TV reading me the local news about my ancient city of Rome, what do you care? You listen, silently disagree, we talk. That’s how it’s done.”

  Blume shoved himself and his chair back from the table. “If you have something important to say, then do me a favor and start at the end with whatever the important thing is.”

  “And talk backwards thereafter? Absolutely not. Anyhow, you’re still investigating. I can tell from the way your eyes keep roaming around this room, looking for things. So I know you’ll be interested in what I already know about Nightingale and Treacy. But before I go any further, did you happen to find any manuscripts, typescripts, memoirs, notebooks, diaries, papers, when you were here earlier?”

  “No,” said Blume.

  “Written in English, possibly? Probably in longhand: I don’t think Treacy would have even recognized a computer.”

  “No.”

  “That’s unfortunate. Have you spoken to Nightingale yet?”

  “No,” said Blume. “I’m here with you, waiting for you to tell me something.”

  “Replicating a picture or doing it in the style of an old master is not a crime, but, of course, you know that. The crime comes when it is offered for sale as if authentic, but Treacy never sold the paintings. That was Nightingale.”

  “Did Nightingale do time?”

  “No,” said the Colonel. “And I’m glad we’re talking like civilized men now. Treacy was caught with faked provenance documents a few times, but he could pretend he was an innocent victim. As for the sale price, Nightingale always feigned a total lack of artistic sensibility. He would ask the buyer to name a price, sometimes even warning about the possibility of forgeries. He allowed buyers to call in experts, if they wanted. If they came back to him and told him it was a fake, which usually they didn’t, you know what he would do?”

  “Withdraw it from sale?”

  “No. He’d apologize, and ask them if they were interested in buying it as a copy or a pastiche instead. Often they said yes, and the painting would go out with just the surname but not the Christian name of the artist, which is the convention used for imitations. The important thing is, it remains legal. Art forgery, dealing, even theft and ownership—all categories that are hard to pin down. Legally speaking, art is a very gray subject.”

  Without warning, Colonel Orazio Farinelli’s face turned the color of a damson plum. It was not until beads of sweat ap
peared on his forehead that Blume realized what he had taken for an expression of inexplicable rage was the result of the Colonel’s efforts to stand up. When the Colonel had made it off his stool, he placed his hands on the table, lowered his head like a penitent until his face and head returned to white. Then he spoke.

  “You are absolutely sure you didn’t find a manuscript, a diary, anything like that? Or, if you prefer, I could shorten the conversation and ask you where you put the one you found.”

  Blume opened his hands like a priest blessing the broken bread on the table, then he, too, stood up. “I found nothing of the kind. But I am interested in your insistence on these papers. Perhaps we should look for them together?”

  The Colonel said nothing, but walked back into Treacy’s living room, where he eased himself into a leather armchair.

  Blume cleared some art books off the bulging settee, and settled himself on it, and looked over to where the paintings and sketches had been.

  “I see you have been removing things from here.”

  “True,” said the Colonel. “As you can see, I’ve left that painting with the seaport, classical ruins, ships on the wall. Take it down, pop it out of its frame, have a close look at it.”

  Blume was interested enough in where this was leading to do the Colonel’s bidding. He unhooked the painting, and immediately checked the back where he saw a monogram made up of the letters “HRTR,” with the “T” done like a tower.

  “I like the way you checked immediately for a signature on the back,” said the Colonel. “There’s one on the painting itself if you look closely. Anyhow, HRTR stands for Henry Treacy. That’s his mark, so he was not going to sell that as an original. Now tell me, does it look like it could have been painted three hundred and thirty years ago?”

  “I don’t know. The colors are dark. The paint is cracked everywhere. Thousands of tiny squares.”

  “How does it smell?”

  Blume made a skeptical face, but brought his nose down to the canvas. “Dusty, woody, a little sweet. It smells old,” he said. “It’s very glossy and hard to see this close.”