Fatal Touch cab-2

by Conor Fitzgerald

  “Maybe I should wait till I get news of Fabio.”

  “Go get them now, Beppe. I mean it. The sooner you get them…”

  “What? The sooner I get them, the sooner what?”

  “The sooner all this is over. I’ll find Fabio for you. I’ll call you when I’ve found him. I’ve got nothing else to do.”

  Paoloni stood up, pushed the envelope under his arm, and walked out the room. Minutes later he was back. “You don’t have to worry about paying back the difference.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate this. But I’ll get the money back to you.”

  “Another thing.” He handed Blume the three notebooks. “No point in keeping these here. If they come looking for them, this will be the second place they’ll look. If I were you, I’d just burn them.”

  Blume took the notebooks back without any great pleasure. “Thanks, Beppe.”

  “Yeah. Listen, just now you said you would find Fabio… that was a strange way of putting it.”

  “What was strange about it? If I find him, you know, maybe a patrol car will spot him on a corner. If I don’t find him, it means he’s back with his mother.”

  “Just let me know,” said Paoloni.

  They left together. As Paoloni climbed into his car, he said, “I don’t know how long this will take. I’ll call you when I’ve got something.” He paused. “It’s the motorini that scare me most. Death traps. Let me know immediately if there’s been an accident.”

  “He’ll be fine,” said Blume.

  “Yeah. But let me know, eh?”

  Chapter 40

  While caterina was washing the dishes, wondering about Blume’s weird self-invitation and dark warnings about staying in, Elia appeared at the doorway and informed her, with wonderment in his voice, that AS Roma had as good a goal average as Inter Milan, even though Inter was eight points ahead in the Championship. Did that strike her as in any way fair?

  She feigned interest in this, and was rewarded with a series of statistics demonstrating beyond argument that AS Roma, despite frequent losses, seemed to be just as good as any other team in the Championship or, indeed, Europe.

  Warming to his theme, Elia wondered who she thought they should use as the center-forward for the game against Palermo on Wednesday night? She frowned, thinking hard, until he offered a few names and thoughts of his own. She picked a name. Baptista. Elia was amazed. It was exactly the name he had been thinking of. Clearly she was not so completely out of the loop as all that. Now, as regards the defense, was Mexes better than…

  When he had finally finished, she told him to go to bed. She went into her bedroom, took her pistol from its hiding place in the closet, loaded it. By the front door she unhooked a framed poster from the wall to reveal a cavity in the wall that housed the electricity meter. She placed the pistol there, and hung up the poster, looking at it for the first time in years. It was an impressionist’s work, showing a beautiful garden. She checked the name of the artist. Camille Pissarro. Probably Italian in origin. All the best artists were Italian.

  Caterina looked at her watch. It was a quarter to ten already. Elia had to be in bed by nine-thirty and was usually asleep within twenty minutes or less. They had by unspoken mutual consent abandoned her attempts to read him bedtime stories. Instead, she listened to more soccer facts, while she helped him undress, brush his teeth, and climb into bed. She sat there for a while

  stroking his head until he told her to stop. She picked up his trainers and carried them to the shoe cupboard in the hall. They were like two dirty white barges. Size 35. One size smaller than hers.

  At a quarter past ten, she went into her son’s room, kissed him on the forehead, noting again how much he sweated in his sleep. Usually she left his door ajar, in case he called out. They liked to remind each other of their company in the apartment. He called out less often now. Tonight she would close it.

  She undressed and put on a green sweatshirt, gray soft cotton pants, a pair of red woolen socks. It was not the most alluring getup, but it was her house and this is what she wore indoors. Besides, she was far from certain she wanted to allure anyone. Blume was coming round because her child had been threatened. Hardly a reason to put on makeup and high heels.

  While she was in the bathroom removing her makeup, the buzzer to her apartment rang. She stopped in mid movement, a blackened cotton ball pinched between her fingers, staring into the mirror at her tense face staring back. Then she said aloud to herself, “That will be him. Early.”

  She let the cotton fall into the sink and walked toward the front door. The buzzer rasped again, and she unhooked the Pissarro, touched her Beretta, then answered the intercom.

  “Inspector Mattiola?”

  Not Blume. A woman. A girl. “Emma?”

  “Yes, can I come up?”

  “Are you on your own?”

  “Yes.”

  Caterina paused, her finger hovering over the button.

  “I really need to talk,” said Emma. “And I have something I want to show you.”

  “Is there no one down there with you?”

  “No. What do you mean? There’s a police car across the street, two policemen in it, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Police or Carabinieri?”

  “Police.”

  “How did you get my address?”

  “You’re in the book. You are the only Mattiola, C. in Rome.”

  She waited, listening to Emma’s breathing and the background sound of traffic.

  She watched the corridor through the peephole in her door, and just as Emma, who was carrying something, stretched out her hand to knock, she swung the door open, catching the girl by surprise and leaving her with a slightly guilty look.

  Caterina led Emma into the living room, and watched as she cast around looking for a place to sit. She finally chose the armchair, and placed the object she had been carrying flat on the floor, face up. It was a framed picture. Caterina looked down at it. It was filled with dark greens, blues, and a muddy brown. It seemed unfocused, or like someone had smudged it while it was drying. A garden again, maybe before a storm. The garden of a big house, or maybe a public garden. She preferred her Pissarro.

  Caterina sat down on the sofa.

  “Are we alone?” Emma asked quietly.

  “My son is in bed asleep.”

  “I’m sorry about this,” said Emma.

  Caterina nodded. “Tell me what it is before apologizing for it.”

  “As you know, the Colonel and that Maresciallo turned up at my mother’s house today,” said Emma. “I’ve been staying there, in Pistoia. The Colonel said they were looking for paintings that Treacy had sent or she had taken, and my mother, looking him straight in the eye, said Treacy had sent her a painting once and she had sent it back. I never knew she could lie like that. But the Colonel did not believe her, and they just started looking around.”

  “You could have called the police.”

  “The two of them are pretty intimidating, and maybe they had a magistrate’s warrant. It’s easier to imagine all the things you should have done afterwards,” said Emma. “After a bit the Colonel comes back. Behind him is the Maresciallo, seven framed paintings under his arms. Four of them are works by Treacy, ‘in the style of Old Masters,’ as he used to put it in his dishonest way. The fifth-I can’t remember what it was. I think it was an original painting by some seventeenth-century Dutchman. I can’t even think of a name, now. Ter Borch, maybe-probably another Treacy fake. And the last two were nothing to do with Treacy. He left us all the modern-style works, making sure he damaged them and my mother’s feelings first. He says, ‘These modern works here are obviously yours,’ and starts circling the room, unhooking the paintings, breaking open the backing boards as if this was the most natural thing in the world, then checking out the canvas, smelling it. At one stage I think he even licked his finger, smiling all the time and shaking his head to show how pathetic he thought they all were.”

  Emma sat back with a sigh,
and said, “Have you got a drink?”

  “Only bottles of sweet stuff that I take out and put away again at Christmas without opening. Do you want some of that?”

  “No vodka?”

  “No.”

  “All right,” said Emma. She half slipped a stockinged foot from her shoe. Caterina looked down at her own spreading thighs, her cotton running pants.

  “I’m waiting,” said Caterina.

  Emma resumed. “Then he sits down. The Maresciallo comes up, hands him a file folder and a tin. He puts the tin in the middle of the table, opens it, picks out a round brown ball wrapped in crinkled plastic, unwraps it, pops it into his mouth.

  “ ‘Give me your hand,’ he says, plucking another ball from the tin. I refused. ‘From England. Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls. Very hard to find here.’ Then he pulls out pages of numbers with the TIM logo on it and fans them out on the table. He explains it showed the connections my BlackBerry had made with cell masts and the GPS satellites during the day on which Treacy was killed. It showed, he says, that I was with Treacy until late. So I asked him how he knew Treacy was with me all that time, and for a moment he stopped sucking the candies, then he smiles, and says, ‘Good point. I like that. We’ll have to get witnesses, too, won’t we?’ Then he asks if I had accompanied Treacy to the place where he was found dead, and I told him I had accompanied him part of the way.

  “ ‘So you do not deny you were with him moments before his death,’ said the Colonel. And I sort of shrugged at that. I expected more questions, but then he announced, ‘None of that matters, the case is being filed away since we do not suspect foul play.’ ”

  Emma stopped talking and looked down at the picture. “The painting he was looking for is this one here.”

  Caterina looked at it again. It still seemed unremarkable. “Was it hidden somewhere?”

  “No. It was in plain sight,” said Emma. “He held it in his hands, looked it over, smirked, and put it back on the wall. It was one of the works he treated with most contempt, telling my mother she was a deluded incompetent. He didn’t even seem to notice that of all the paintings in the house, it was the one that had the most space to itself. I looked at my mother to see what effect his insults were having. She was keeping a neutral expression, but I could see that inside she was happy.”

  “Happy?”

  “Happy-triumphant. It was in her eyes. But he didn’t see it, because he was squinting at the painting with exaggerated distaste. Now I suddenly remembered the way she looked at it, tilting her head to the side, sometimes frowning, sometimes smiling. She even touched it sometimes. She never did that with any of the others.”

  “What’s special about it?” asked Caterina.

  “I’ve no idea. Except it was the only one he sent. I remember its arrival, even though I was only a little girl.”

  “Your mother allowed you to take it after they had left?”

  “She didn’t try to stop me, if that’s what you mean. But I didn’t ask her permission. She doesn’t deserve it.”

  “A moment ago, it sounded like you were admiring her.”

  “I don’t think she’s a good mother. She’s not responsible enough. I paid for her artistic self-indulgence.”

  “You seem OK.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “She’s the only mother you’re going to get,” said Caterina. “You’re young. Maybe when you’re a bit older you’ll forgive her. She is human and humans are deluded. She probably thinks she was a good mother.”

  “She doesn’t think about it. All she thinks about is herself.”

  In the pause that followed, Caterina listened for Elia’s breathing, but he was too far away.

  “Treacy only ever sent one painting,” said Emma. She touched it with her foot. “And that’s it there. I remember it coming to the house, just before we left for Pistoia. The others, the ones the Colonel took, were always there. As I was leaving, my mother gave me this, as if it would justify things. I balled it up and threw it away. But it has to do with me, too, so I picked it up again.”

  She pulled out a piece of crinkly blue writing paper of the sort Caterina had not seen in years and handed it to her. She recognized Treacy’s handwriting at once. On this occasion, he wrote in Italian.

  Dear Angela,

  I am keeping my promise and my distance. Some time ago, I found myself trying to copy some de Chirico works, and it turned out to be harder than it looked. I had more success in painting originals after de Chirico, and I am sending you the best result of my efforts. It was not until I tried to paint him that I realized what you were trying to achieve in your work. You were seeking expressiveness and therefore a truth that I stopped looking for too many years ago, and this is why I derided you. I never should have done so. And I also know that deriding your work was not even the worst thing I did to you. I am glad you found Nightingale, though I wish you had found someone better than him.

  I should not have written that, but I won’t score it out either, because it’s right that you should hear echoes of the sort of person I used to be. I have always tried to tell you what was best for you, when all I really meant was that I was best for you. And I wasn’t. That’s not news to you, of course. I am glad you realized it long ago. Please destroy the various insulting notes and eliminate from your mind the punches, slaps, and moments of exquisite torture based on neglect and denigration. I don’t know why I did those things. I shall never know why. Not everything has its reason, not everyone has his place in the world.

  I have failed. I am still the best draftsman you will ever know, perhaps the best of my generation, and I have a good eye for color, but I have never found my own voice. I am a mere copyist, a plagiarist, a forger, and a cheat. I still say today’s artists are no good, and the true greats belong to the distant past, but if I were less of a coward, perhaps I might have tried to create my own style.

  This is my bequest to you. If you look at it carefully, you will see a thousand second thoughts, a thousand regrets, and a thousand “pentimenti” in it. Take them as referring to all the harm I ever did to you. If you forgive me, you will keep this painting, and perhaps hang it on a wall where it should sit happily with your own original works.

  Someday, you will understand even better why I have sent this to you. Imagine ourselves in the foreground, sitting on a stone bench. I take a berry from a yew tree, and you tell me that a yew is pure poison from the leaves to the fruit. Your mother had warned you not to touch it. Then I put it in my mouth and eat it, and you panic, and I allow you to panic to see how much I mean to you. It was just one of a thousand cruel gestures, one of a thousand regrets. Yew trees last a thousand years. They will still be there, exactly where we left them. Go back there someday and think of me.

  Your art was wonderful. The yew leaf and its seed are poisonous, but not its fruit.

  Yours with love,

  Henry

  Caterina folded up the letter and handed it back to Emma who took it, making tongs of her fingers and dropping it on the floor at her feet. “I am the fruit, you see? His fruit. It’s so creepy that ‘poetic’ way of talking and thinking. My mother does it, too. Hippies, isn’t that what they were called? But he was wrong about the fruit. The fruit is pure poison, too.”

  “I am not following you, Emma.”

  “I killed him,” said Emma. “I killed Henry Treacy.”

  Chapter 41

  As emma pronounced the words, Caterina sat back, only now realizing that she had been leaning forwards and waiting for this confession. She had essentially known it since Emma’s craven boyfriend withdrew his alibi.

  Emma continued: “It was an accident. I didn’t even mean to hurt him. He was drunk.”

  Caterina believed her at once. She tried to suppress the immediacy of the belief as unbecoming for a police officer, but it simply felt true. The incongruity of Emma killing someone was too great. But it wasn’t just that. Emma’s main concern now did not seem to be to claim innocence for herself, but to co
nfess the reasons for her actions. The girl was telling the truth. She was reliving the moment.

  “Henry tried to hug me, and he tried to kiss me, and then he started weeping like a child. It was revolting. The folds in his skin, the bristles, and the smell of beer, wine, urine, and old man’s breath.”

  “He tried to assault you?”

  “No. Not like that. All evening I had stayed with him waiting for him to reveal this really important thing he said he needed to tell me, but all he did was go on about how beautiful I was. How intelligent, how elegant and perfect until I thought I could take no more. It was so much better when he was sober and ironic, making jokes at my expense. Then we got to that piazza, and he started talking about the self-portrait in his office and asking me what I saw in it. And suddenly he grabbed me and pulled me toward him and he tried to kiss me, not on the mouth, but on the face, on my forehead. I struggled and pushed at him, but he kept begging me to listen to him for a moment, so I told him I would if only he would let me go, which he did.

  “ ‘Nightingale thinks I don’t know about you. He thinks he has me fooled and blinded and that I’m no better than a bewildered wreck, which may be true. But I knew who you were even before Nightingale brought you to the gallery with his false provenance stories, pretending he had just happened to find a treasure like you lying about. And he thought I would not see the way he treated you and looked proudly at you, the way his breast puffed up like a pigeon every time he was watching you. Anyone would have noticed how he behaved toward you. His cover story was pathetic.’

  “ ‘Is that what you needed to tell me?’ I asked him. ‘Why didn’t you confront Nightingale first? I never saw the need for all the deception.’

  “Then Treacy, he gives me a look which… I can’t describe it. Proud and sad at the same time. Partly a leer, partly a look of pity, and he says, ‘John Nightingale is an English cuckold. Three months after he took Angela from me, I went back and took Angela from him, only he never knew it. And I took her back time and time again. Ask her. Ask your mother. John Nightingale is not your father. I am.’