The Fatal Touch Read online

  “And seeing as you’re that close, can you see any wormholes?”

  “Yes,” said Blume. “Quite a few, now.”

  “Look just inside the rim of one of the wormholes. What do you see?”

  “I see nothing. What am I looking for?”

  “Ink or paint.”

  Blume moved his head back slightly, and realized he could see the canvas better. Was that the first sign of needing old-man reading glasses?

  “I see no ink inside the holes.”

  “Of course not. If the painting is genuine, there could be none, since the wormholes are supposed to come after the composition, so how would color get into them unless it was false—new paint on old canvas, see?”

  “Yes.”

  “And yet, convincing though this may seem, it wasn’t good enough for him to market. He liked it enough to sign it. Maybe he used it to show what he could do. Personally, I think he darkened the tone too far. Treacy ran the most incredible risks. His whole left cheek was wrinkled and scarred from burns he gave himself back in the ’80s from boiling oil. He tried to create black oil to darken a painting, and mixed it with mastic varnish. Knowing him, he probably did it next to cans of turps and benzene, too.”

  “Yes. He had a beard that covered most of the scars.”

  “He grew a beard? My, my,” said the Colonel. “It really has been some time since I saw him. I can’t picture him with a beard. Always so vain. He even thought his scar was romantic.”

  Blume looked at the back of the canvas again. “It’s got faded stamps, mildew, even some old netting or something, like it came from somewhere else. It’s convincing.”

  “Yet this is one of his rejects,” said the Colonel. “I don’t suppose you’d be so kind as to pass me that bowl . . .”

  Blume passed a bowl of fruit to the Colonel, who plucked out an apple and bit it in half. “Floury, old. A still-life apple,” he said. “Disgusting.” He finished it with four more bites and balanced the core on the arm of his chair. “Let me tell you what made Henry Treacy special. He had no artistic personality. I don’t mean in real life. He had too much in real life. But when it came to painting, he had no personality at all.”

  The Colonel picked up and tossed the core of his apple toward the fireplace. It missed and came to rest beside the bookshelf, just below the gap left by the removal of two marbled notebooks. The Colonel did not speak for a moment, and Blume felt sure he must be staring at the same empty spot. Then he heard a grunt and a crunch, as the Colonel helped himself to another apple and bit into it.

  Keeping his movements leisurely, Blume withdrew his gaze from the empty slot on the shelves, and said, “Is no personality a good or a bad thing?”

  “For a forger, it’s good.” The Colonel took another bite, and swallowed without chewing. “To know without being known.” He finished the apple and this time dropped the core back into the bowl, then casually fingered a leopard-skin banana. “To know without being known,” he repeated. “It’s a good philosophy for policemen and for serious artists, as well as for forgers. It’s the opposite for politicians and junk celebrities. They want to be known without knowing.”

  “And Treacy?”

  “I think he began to be attracted by notoriety. So he began to want to be known, which is suicidal if you’re a forger.”

  “Suicidal or the sort of thing that can get you killed?” asked Blume.

  “Good point. What you don’t want is notoriety or personality. You do not want people to be able to point at a work and say: That’s a Treacy.”

  “So he adopted the personality of the painter he was copying?” said Blume.

  “Not the personality. What I mean is he didn’t let his own come through. You’re an American, so you must have been brought up watching Westerns, right?”

  “Westerns are more your generation, Colonel. I was more into Starsky and Hutch.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Kojak, you’ve heard of Kojak?”

  “Yes,” said the Colonel.

  “Well, Starsky and Hutch were . . . Never mind. They were nothing like Kojak. Rockford Files? Harry O?”

  The Colonel was shaking his head impatiently.

  “Hawaii Five-0. Jesus, I loved that,” said Blume. He thought of Jack Lord as Steve McGarrett, turning around to look straight at the camera, those three strands of hair out of place, an effect that he used to try and imitate in front of the mirror. Jack Lord had a scar on his face, too, come to think of it. He brought his attention back to the Colonel. “You were saying something about Westerns.”

  “Westerns are always set in the 1880s or 1890s,” said the Colonel.

  “Well, you’re the expert,” said Blume. “But the American Old West goes back at least to the Gold Rush, which was 1848.”

  “I’m not interested in that now,” said the Colonel.

  “First you start talking about Westerns, now you’re not interested.”

  “You are being obtuse, Commissioner.” The Colonel took the banana, peeled it, and examined the fruit and nodded in approval. He pressed half the banana into his mouth, paused, then spoke.

  “When you watch a Western, you can always tell when it was made. They try to dress like it was the nineteenth century, but you can clearly see the styles of the 1940s or ’50s or ’60s in the clothes, in the makeup, the hairstyles. And that’s not even counting the colors used in the print. It takes, what, about five seconds for you to recognize the decade in which the film was made, even without seeing an actor. The personality of the period comes through.”

  “True,” said Blume.

  “And yet the directors at the time were usually trying to make things look as nineteenth century as possible.” He ate the second half of the banana. “It’s the same thing with forgers. You keep looking at one of their works, and you get a feel for when it was really painted, not when it was supposed to be. Naturally, this makes it easier to spot forgeries from the past, from the 1940s or 1950s, say. Forgeries made now are harder to spot, not because they’re better, but because we are incapable of seeing the style of our own time. We’re too close. We watch a Western made in the last few years, it looks more accurate than the ones made in the 1950s. That’s the beauty of Henry Treacy’s work. It doesn’t have a strong personality. Nothing comes through. He’s timeless.”

  The Colonel put the banana skin on the table, struggled, and rose from his chair and walked over to the davenport desk. He opened a drawer that Blume had completely missed earlier and pulled out a rolled-up piece of paper, and, holding it reverently, showed it to Blume. “Beautiful buff paper, but machine-made, so no attempt at passing it off as authentic, but look at the skill.”

  Blume saw a yellow and gray image of a woman looking down at her foot.

  “This is where he excelled. This is what he sold. Of course he used paper from the period.”

  “Where did he get it?”

  “All sort of places. Fly leaves in old books, old paintings or drawings. Old sketchbooks. You saw that Latin missal in the kitchen? That would have made a good source of paper. What do you think it is?”

  “A woman hitching up her dress, turning out her foot—it looks unfinished,” said Blume. “He didn’t do her other foot.”

  “What we do is we search through the paintings of Raphael, Bronzino, Parmigianino, or Annibale Carracci.”

  “We?”

  “You and I. Let me finish, Commissioner. If we find this woman, or a woman in this pose, or something that reminds us strongly of it, then we would market this work here as a preparatory sketch by the artist. Seventy thousand euros, minus handling expenses and assuming a good outcome after examination by experts. That works out at maybe twenty thousand for you, thirty for me. And that’s just this one. Of course, maybe it won’t work out so well.”

  “You just said it was on modern paper and not salable.”

  “Quite right. This one here is worth almost nothing. But then he did another just like it. On proper paper. My men removed it
earlier. And there are eight more forgeries. I would need to look at them closely to make sure they are marketable, but at first glance I was impressed. More than you, obviously, since you left them here with an aggressive and none-too-bright junior officer guarding the scene.”

  The Colonel pulled a fat aluminum cigar case from his breast pocket. He unsheathed the cigar, sliced the end with a silver cutter, then, with plenty of cheek-puffing and grunts, got it alight. When he had surrounded himself in sweet blue smoke, he said: “Well, are we working together or not?”

  Blume decided to allow the question to hang in the air with the cigar smoke while he worked out a strategy.

  “Well?” insisted the Colonel.

  Blume parried with a question of his own. “What about Treacy’s partner, John Nightingale? He must know about the paintings in here.”

  “A good practical question,” said the Colonel, lowering himself back into the seat. “But Nightingale almost certainly knows nothing about these. They did not get on very well. Clash of personalities or nationalities or something along those lines. One reason they had the gallery was to maintain a neutral space where they could meet. Treacy told me that once. I don’t think Nightingale was ever in this house.”

  “You know a lot, Colonel. So you must also know how they worked together. Logic suggests that Nightingale must have known what Treacy was preparing. To organize things ahead of time.”

  “Logic maybe,” said the Colonel. “But that is not how it worked at all. Like so many Anglo-Saxon fraudsters, they considered themselves essentially upright men forced to compromise with Mediterranean reality. Not only did Treacy not say what he was preparing, I know for a fact that he never even told Nightingale he was making fakes. I had this from both of them, and though I struggled to believe it at first, I think it was true. They liked to pretend that Treacy had somehow come across a valuable painting or, as an alternative, that he had created a pastiche on period canvas and then forgotten to mention this incidental detail to Nightingale. Nightingale always said he could pass a lie-detector test if he had to. It was always possible that Treacy was finding genuine old masters and passing them on.”

  “Really?” said Blume.

  The Colonel smiled behind the swirls of smoke. “Of course not. But good liars tell themselves lies over and over until they believe them. Treacy specialized in ‘finding’ the plausibly overlooked. Nightingale built up provenance stories.”

  “Wouldn’t Treacy have wanted some real works to copy from and study now and again?”

  “I imagine so. It is possible one of these is real. It’s a world of bluff and double-bluff, and almost nobody ever gets caught. It’s also as close to victimless crime as it’s possible to get.”

  “Aren’t the people who buy forgeries victims?” asked Blume.

  The Colonel looked slowly to the left, to the right, and then to the left again. He did this a few more times until Blume finally realized that he was shaking his head in ponderous disagreement.

  “Do you feel . . .” the Colonel hesitated, looking for a term, “sympathy for someone who spends a few million on a painting, which they never even learn is false?”

  He allowed himself a silent pause as he continued smoking his cigar, making the occasional appreciative popping sound with his lips. He let the ash fall on the arm of the chair, and when the cigar was finally down to a glowing stub, he started on the elaborate sequence of grunts and movements that indicated he was preparing to stand up again. When he finally succeeded, he seemed to fill the room with bulk and smoke as he moved around in search of an ashtray.

  “Over there,” said Blume, pointing to a lump of heavy crystal on the mantelpiece, but the Colonel allowed the cigar to drop onto the stone flagging on the floor and trod on it.

  “Too far,” he said.

  The smell of the stubbed cigar was like bad breath. The Colonel picked up an orange from the fruit bowl and began peeling it, dropping the thick skin in slabs on the floor beside the cigar. He divided the orange into four segments and ate three before finally saying, “Let me tell you about a clever trick Treacy and Nightingale liked to work. Treacy would do a damned fine work, usually a small portrait, that looked like it might be a—oh, say a Colberti portrait from his period in Italy, then overpaint it with a poor-quality forgery, usually copied directly from an existing work by someone pretty well known—Van Dyck, say.”

  “I’ve never heard of Colberti,” said Blume.

  “That’s because I just made up the name,” said the Colonel, and popped the quarter orange into his mouth. “Interesting you should spot that.” He winced slightly as if the orange was bitter. “It means you know more about art than you are letting on.”

  “All I said was I had never heard of him,” said Blume.

  “You were puzzled by an invented name, Commissioner.” The Colonel wiped some juice from his lips with the back of his hand. “Now let me finish. Let’s say Dosso Dossi instead of the non-existent Colberti. Better?”

  “Stop testing and get back to telling, Colonel.”

  “Well said, Commissioner. Nightingale would place the easily-spotted Van Dyck fake on the market. When a buyer came forward, he would ask him if he was absolutely sure he wanted the work. Affecting great probity, he would sometimes confidentially reveal to the buyer that he had some suspicions about the authenticity of the work. This served three purposes. The first was to cover himself from liability or any possible setup by us. The second was to insure the buyer examined the painting carefully, including what was under it. Once the buyer looked below the surface and found what he thought was an original by an old master hidden beneath, then he would buy the painting at whatever the asking price was and would usually insist that it had passed all his tests for authenticity. Clever, eh?”

  “You said three purposes,” said Blume. “Coverage from liability, persuading the buyer to look below the surface to get to the ‘real’ fake below, and the third?”

  “Amusement. Delight,” said the Colonel. “The glee of watching people get trapped by their own greed.”

  “And are you immune from the same risk?”

  “No. Are you?”

  Blume was saved from replying by his phone ringing. He answered it without looking at who was calling, and felt a slight lift as he heard Kristin’s voice.

  “Alec, that was an interesting name you gave us. Are you alone?”

  “No. I’m sitting right in front of him now.”

  The Colonel nodded approvingly. “Getting some background on me? Good work.”

  “And now he knows I’m talking about him,” Blume said.

  Kristin hesitated, then said, “I’ll call you back.”

  “No, tell me now. There must be something interesting that made you call back so soon.”

  “He’s ex-secret service. SISDE as it was then. One of the bad apples from the barrels and barrels of bad apples Italy has been producing for years,” said Kristin. “Deviato as the press likes to say. He’s supposed to be retired. Also he was involved in an interesting way in the investigations into the Moro murder. In a way that involved this embassy. But that’s all I’m telling you on the phone.”

  “Is that your romantic way of confirming dinner this evening?”

  Kristin paused before replying. “Yes. We need to talk. You were joking when you said he was sitting in front of you, weren’t you?”

  “Of course I was,” said Blume.

  “Alec, you need to be careful of this guy. He used to be at the center of a lot of stuff.”

  “Used to, but isn’t now?”

  “Not now, but he’ll still have connections. Don’t let him know you’re on to him.”

  Blume hung up, danced his fingers back and forth on the armrest as he considered Kristin’s warning, then said to the Colonel, “So I hear you were in SISDE.”

  “I see you have your sources,” said the Colonel. “Can I ask who they are?”

  “I’m sure you can find out if you’re all that interested,”
said Blume.

  “I am interested. But as you have found out this detail, which I was going to tell you about anyhow, I can get straight to the point. Treacy may have written a diary or some notebooks that contain some compromising details, I won’t call them facts, regarding activities from a long time ago.”

  “How long ago?” asked Blume.

  “Long, long ago. 1978. There used to be a bar on Via Avicenna in the Marconi district. It was a hangout for monarchists, nationalists, patriots, activists. One regular customer was a certain Tony Chichiarelli. He, too, was a forger. He got killed in 1984. Along with his son, who was a few months old. Now Tony Chichiarelli had a good friend called Luciano Dal Bello, and you may come across this name if you decide to start delving into my past, which I really hope you won’t feel the need to do.”

  The Colonel paused to allow Blume the opportunity to make a promise. When he did not, he continued, “Dal Bello was a criminal, but he was also an important informer, and I was his contact. Now, another person who used to hang out in that bar was Henry Treacy, who we all called Harry. He was also Chichiarelli’s friend. I don’t know if they worked together as forgers. It doesn’t seem likely, since Chichiarelli specialized in handwriting, signatures, checks, false share certificates, all that sort of stuff. But they knew each other. Chichiarelli knew Nightingale, too. Now, does the year 1978 mean anything to you?”

  “Argentina won the World Cup. Crystal Gale and the Bee Gees were in the charts. It was the year of Disco Inferno,” said Blume.

  “In its proper place, there is nothing better than bantering good humor,” said the Colonel.

  “That wasn’t just to annoy you, Colonel. Those were the things that were important to me then. You may remember it as the year Prime Minister Moro was kidnapped, then executed by the Red Brigades in March. Me, I was a kid in another country. Come to think of it, I probably didn’t even know about Argentina and the World Cup. I’d have picked that up later. I know the name Chichiarelli. From books and police reports, not experience. He was involved in mysterious ways in the disinformation campaign. Didn’t he produce false messages from the Red Brigades, and from that poor bastard?”