“You never make me put on a seatbelt in the back.”
“I’m doing so now.”
“Are we going to have a crash?”
“You never can tell.”
“Can’t your friend drive properly?”
“Elia, please.”
Blume couldn’t find parking either, so he left them outside the apartment building, and came back ten minutes later carrying his load of paper. He found the intercom button with the name Mattiola on it, and got himself buzzed in. It was only when the door to the apartment was opened that he realized this was not Caterina’s apartment, but her parents’.
“Sorry, I thought I’d mentioned it,” said Caterina. “I live ten minutes away, back toward the swimming baths. I was leaving Elia here because I thought we had work to do.”
“We do,” said Blume. “But it’s voluntary. For you. I just had an idea, since you know English . . . I didn’t mean to disrupt.”
Ten minutes later, his bulging bag held protectively against his chest, Blume thanked Mrs. Mattiola again for her kindness.
“Don’t be silly, Commissioner. More coffee?”
“No thank you, Mrs. Mattiola.”
“Another cookie, Commissioner?”
“No, really, not another.”
“I can’t think of anything else. A yogurt perhaps?”
“No, really . . . I . . .”
“Mother! He said no.”
“I want yogurt!” said Elia.
Caterina’s mother went into the kitchen to fetch her grandson a yogurt, and her husband pounced on the opportunity to struggle out of his chair to reach the coffeepot on the table. But she was back with remarkable speed.
“Are you pouring the coffee, Arnaldo?” She handed the yogurt to Elia. “Here, tesoro, this is for you,” and then returned to her husband. “Careful with that handle. It needs to be tightened. You used to tighten things.”
Her husband, who didn’t look much like a colonel, sank noiselessly back into his chair.
“This yogurt has bits in it,” announced Elia with disgust.
“Just eat the bits, Elia,” said Caterina, then softened her tone. “Listen, do you mind staying here until late? I have some work to do with the Commissioner.”
“Of course you can leave Elia with us,” said her mother.
“Great.” Caterina stood up. “We’d better go.”
Blume stood up, too.
“So you two are going back to your place now?” said Mrs. Mattiola.
“The office, we’re going back to the office,” said Caterina.
“Oh. I was under the impression . . . Do you need any fruit?”
“I have fruit,” said Caterina.
But her mother had thrown the question into the air as a decoy to cover her retreat, and before Caterina had kissed her son and made it to the front door, she was back bearing two bulging blue plastic bags. “These are apples, from the orchard owner himself, he has apples and cabbages out in Santa Severa, sells them at his stall in the market there on Via Catania. You won’t get apples like that in the shops. I’ve thrown in a few carrots, some fennel, and two lettuces, some artichokes, a few new potatoes, and a handful of onions, and some of those brown pears Elia likes. Kaisers. Also those Kinder chocolate bars. They say each bar contains one and a half glasses of full-fat milk. Do you think that’s true? That’s a lot of milk. He likes to have two at breakfast. That’s three glasses, and he dips them into his milk, which makes four. Milk is good for growing children.”
Blume offered to help carry the bags, though it was going to be a struggle, what with his own paper load.
“No. Just open the front door,” said Caterina. As soon as he did, she shouldered him out into the hallway.
“Lovely meeting you, Commissioner. Drop by again soon.”
“A pleasure, Mrs. Mattiola,” said Blume.
“Call the elevator,” ordered Caterina.
Chapter 14
Caterina finished stacking dirty plates in the sink. Her kitchen was usually spotless. Well, not spotless, but not like this either.
Blume gave her the details of his talk with John Nightingale.
“So we need to check through the notebooks to find if there is any reference to something both the Colonel and Nightingale would want to keep quiet. But we don’t know if it’s there.”
“Shall we look through them now?”
“Either that, or we systematically read the notebooks from beginning to end, which is probably the best way, because the devil is so often in the details, isn’t it?” said Blume. “If I can, I am going to read them all the way through, but there is a good chance I won’t have time. Also, I have specifically been instructed not to investigate. But before I give up, and it may involve handing over these notes, I want a second pair of eyes. You need to be in the background. Unpaid, unrecognized overtime work, basically.”
As her father liked to say, you wanted a bicycle, now pedal.
Blume opened the first notebook and read in a declamatory tone: “As William Wordsworth once remarked, the child is the father of the man.”
The phone rang.
“Are you going to answer that?”
“It’s my mother,” said Caterina.
“You can see the caller ID from all the way over there?”
“No, but I can feel it.”
When it had stopped ringing, she pulled her hands out of the sink, and Blume returned to frowning at the notebook. “Already I don’t like this guy, Treacy,” he said.
“The child’s the father of the man,” said Caterina, repeating the words and then continuing unself-consciously in English. “As in what you do as a child determines how you turn out as an adult. What’s wrong with that?”
Her accent sounded slightly English to Blume’s ear.
“I don’t mind that idea,” said Blume. “Or maybe I do. I haven’t thought about it. It’s that bit about Wordsworth remarking it that annoys me. He didn’t remark it, he wrote it.”
“You know the poem?” asked Caterina. “I studied it once.”
“Of course I don’t know the poem,” said Blume in an exasperated tone. “I just know Wordsworth was a poet. So he wrote that line. He didn’t just once remark it in conversation with Treacy in a bar.”
Caterina sat down on the far side of the table, brushed some Weetabix crumbs onto the floor, pushed her straight brown hair back over her ear, took up a pen, and opened a notebook that she had taken from her son’s room with a blue robo-something on the cover.
“If you’re going to critique each line, Commissioner, this is going to take some time.”
“Well, can you read the handwriting?” asked Blume.
Caterina peered at it, shrugged. “It doesn’t look too . . .”
“Because I think it’s probably easier for me than for you to guess the English words. So if I read a bit and you follow in your copy, you’ll get used to the lettering quickly, then you can go on alone.”
“That seems like a good idea,” said Caterina.
“Great. So we start off like this, then I’ll leave the photocopy here, you read it, I’ll go home and read it. Then we compare notes sometime next week . . . We’ll play it by ear, basically.”
“Let’s try it, then,” said Caterina.
“Good. I appreciate this,” said Blume. He opened the first notebook and began to read, struggling over some of the first sentences, but then finding his flow as he familiarized himself with the handwriting.
“As William Wordsworth once remarked, the child is the father of the man. When I look back down the years, I see a strange nine-year-old boy whom I barely recognize. Yet it was he who decided how my life would be, and all because of his crush on an eight-year-old girl.
“The eight-year-old was called Monica, which was a very exotic name for Ireland in the fifties. I first became aware of my love when I was in ‘high babies’ (which, for the uninitiated, is one year above ‘low babies’). She wore an orange dress with a round lace patterned wh
ite collar.
“One day, Miss Woods, our art teacher, set us the task of drawing our favorite objects, as many of them as we saw fit. We had three lessons in which to complete our drawings. If deemed worthy, they would be pinned to the walls for sports day when parents would be allowed to come into the school to watch the children do long jumps that can’t have been all that long, and run egg-and-spoon races.
“Miss Woods allowed us only dark colors to begin with, though we were free to use crayons or pencils. She told us we could do the coloring-in during the next two lessons. I observed Monica carefully, noting the objects she chose to draw; I watched the yellow pencil in her beautiful fingers as she glided her hand over the page leaving careful gray outlines. Most of the other children were still using their fists as they sought to keep their waxy red and blue crayons under control.
“During the second lesson, when it seemed Monica had finished outlining her objects and was preparing for the coloring-in phase, I neatly divided my page into four columns and five rows: 20 boxes in all. In the first box, I drew an exact replica of Monica’s entire page, in miniature, without missing out a single object. In the second box, I did the same, only this time I colored in the objects in the way I thought she was likely to choose. In the third box I chose a different color scheme and so on until I had exhausted almost every permutation. When Monica did finish, her picture and colors corresponded exactly to my miniature in box 17. It is still my lucky number.
“Monica’s favorite objects were: a comb (I had kept it brown or black until version 12, when I thought it might be silver), a golden-brown teddy bear with a green bow, a pair of black dancing shoes, a red-haired Raggedy Ann doll, a giraffe, and a blue windmill with white sails.
“Miss Woods loved my work. Mrs. Walsh, the headmistress, did not, dismissing it in front of the whole class as being rather too ‘. . .’. I did not understand the big word she used that day, and I can’t remember it now.
“But it was clear the bitch did not like it.
“As for Monica, when she realized what I had done, she took her picture down from the wall, ruined it by adding a large and poorly-drawn cat and a purple cabbage tree in the foreground, whereupon she hung it up again.
“I learned three things from that. First, I could draw in another person’s style like it was my own; second, women could be unpredictable and vindictive; third, never imitate a living artist. If I had forgotten the first lesson and remembered the other two, I would have made my own life easier.
“My mother never came to school events and so she never saw the picture. Apart from not having any interest in how I was doing, I think she felt uncomfortable with the ethos of the school. It was Protestant. Church of Ireland, to be precise. My mother was born a Catholic, but no longer practicing. She had not lapsed; rather she had been cast out and thrown over when she became pregnant with me by a man whose name she never revealed to anyone, not even me. After failing to reconcile with her own family and most of her neighbors, she adopted a Bohemian guise, and affected not to care. After a while, assisted by some serious afternoon drinking and several rejection letters from publishers not at all interested in her imagist poetry, she really did not care.
“At the age of eleven, I acquired a reluctant stepfather called Manfred Manning. I call him my stepfather but at the time of his appearance he was married to another woman whom he could not divorce, this being Ireland and then being then. He finally chose to leave his first wife when she was diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas. She lasted almost three years, which may be some sort of record, perhaps hanging on to spite them, perhaps hoping he would come home at least for the final part. When she died, Mother and Manfred were holidaying in Edinburgh, a city I have yet to find a reason for visiting.
“After a Protestant primary education, my mother sent me, aged 12, as a boarder to Clongowes Wood College. It seems strange the Jesuits should take in the child of such an immoral woman shacked up with a bigamous Prod, but the reason is simple enough. Manning made a large contribution toward the building of a new wing and my mother lied about everything. She told them she was married, and though admitting her husband was a Protestant, insisted she was bringing me up Catholic. She might even have produced some false paperwork to prove it.
“The summer before I went, she gave me a crash-course in Catholicism, bringing me to mass, and shuffling me up the aisle to communion. Tongue out, eyes downcast, no chewing, it is supposed to be the flesh of Christ. Yes, Henry, it is a revolting concept, but it helps you not to chew. She explained confession to me, too, and warned me to hold back on some issues, notably religious doubt and my paternity. It was expected, she said.
“She told me in some detail about the first communion party I never had, and the gifts of money I never received from relatives I had never met. After a while, I began to remember all these events that had not happened, and I realized how easy it was to paint a fictional past.
“The most surprising thing I learned during my conversion to temporary Catholicism was that God was a soft blue woman. Cabinteely Catholic Church, to which my headscarfed and unrecognizably pious-looking mother took me to learn the ropes, had a tondo image of Jesus set into the pier to the right of the altar. A red sanctuary lamp hung over the altar and a second tondo image, this one of a gentle-looking person in blue, was set into the left pier. Now, as the Protestants had given me enough instruction about God’s three-in-one-person trick but remained tight-lipped about Mary, Mother of God, my interpretation was: Jesus on the right, the Holy Ghost in the middle, and God was the blue-shrouded woman on the left.
“I was soon disabused of the notion, but images are stronger than words. God was then and is sometimes even now an azure Bellini-esque woman . . .”
Blume turned over the page and looked in dismay at a web of crossings-out and insertion marks.
“I can’t make this out, but I think I’m going to skip ahead. This is no good to us. You’ve hardly taken any notes, I see. Are you following?”
Caterina looked down at what she had written.
Blume flicked forward a few pages. “This section seems to come to an end here.”
“You may as well read it through.”
“The Jesuits may have designed the myth of the Immaculate Conception, but the Irish chapter of the order was keen to make sure we boys understood this was basically a goddess created for peasants. One problem, explained Fr. Ferchware, was this: If Mary was conceived and born without sin, for that is what Immaculate Conception means, is it not, Treacy? (It is, Father), then she had no need of the salvific intervention of her son, Jesus Christ, did she? Don’t try to answer, child, just tell me, the grammatical term for that question.
“A trick question, Father.
“A rhetorical question, you godless reprobate. I shall continue. So if there was already one perfect person in the world, Jesus Christ could not have been the Universal Savior. We might conclude, therefore, that His universality is imperfect and that He is therefore imperfect and He cannot be God. And what does this demonstrate?
“The evident limitations of logic and the frailty of human reasoning in the face of the divine, Father.
“Good man, Treacy.
“The thing about the Jesuits is they started off their history as a sort of special operations force, often poised to stage a military coup within the Church, but ended up teaching geography to schoolchildren. I think that—and chastity—drove most of them mad.
“I was expelled at 16. The immediate or ostensible cause was my poisoning of O’Leary, a gap-toothed red-faced thug who thought he could make my life a misery because I was not so good at rugby. I patiently waited for him one afternoon behind the science wing, opened that very year and contributed to by my stepfather or whatever he was. When O’Leary eventually came by, he was on his own. Looking back with the forgiveness of years, I suppose he was not the worst type of bully. He didn’t have a gang; he didn’t spend his time looking for me. It was casual, off-handed bullying, made possible
by his size. I hit him over the head with a rock as he walked around the corner. He stood there and rubbed his head like a cartoon character doing a double-take, so I hit him again, on the temple, and down he went. I sat on his chest and opened up three paper twists of powder I had taken from the chemistry lab. The first contained tartaric acid, basically sherbet without sugar, and I held his nose and poured it into his gaping mouth. It fizzed, and he choked and I told him it was arsenic. The next packet contained bicarbonate of soda, which I told him was plutonium. While not generally available to Irish schoolchildren, plutonium was such a scary new word back then that I thought its dramatic reach would bridge the credibility gap. The last package contained copper sulphate, which I had taken for the beauty of its color, and this, unfortunately, was toxic, though not deadly.
“I hadn’t figured O’Leary for a snitch but the plutonium and arsenic had him worried. Even then, his babbling report might not have been taken too seriously were it not for the black bruise on his temple, his blue tongue, and terrified eyes. Everyone stood ceremoniously on the pebbled driveway as the ambulance drove away with O’Leary inside accompanied by the headmaster.
“As I was packing my bags, Fr. McCarthy came in holding his black ‘biffer,’ a leather strap weighted with lead. He administered twelve strokes to each hand, aiming also to hit the wrist. He left saying, ‘We’ve all known the truth about you for some time, Treacy.’
“A biffer works on the hands rather like a coronary stroke, managing to impart pain and numbness at once. With my throbbing and fumbling hands, I was unable to complete my packing, still less close my suitcase and bring it downstairs to the front door, and I think it was this more than anything that caused me to become so upset. At any rate, it was Fr. Ferchware who came up and found me, finished packing my suitcase for me and accompanied me to the front door. Before we went out, he told me, ‘There’ll be a lot of people looking at you, Henry. You don’t want to go out with a face like that.’ He took a startlingly white, sharply folded, and perfectly clean handkerchief from his pocket, and handed it to me. ‘Dry your eyes, blow your nose.’ The handkerchief smelled of lavender and sunshine, the smells of France, Italy, and my future. I filled it with gray snot and salt, the color and taste of Ireland and my past.
The Fatal Touch Page 13
