The Fatal Touch

by Conor Fitzgerald

  Five minutes later, Nightingale’s lawyer, a sleek man whose black hair was so shiny it looked wet, slipped into the seat in front of him. Nightingale, dressed in a rumpled linen suit and looking tired, hot, and lordly, sat down next to his lawyer, who turned to him and, speaking mainly for Blume’s benefit, said, “Remember, you are free to stand up and leave the interview at any point. You do not have to answer any questions that you do not want to, and no matter what you say, it cannot be used in evidence against you. A witness may not self-incriminate.”

  The lawyer then turned to face Blume. “Since some of his voluntary statements will now become inadmissible as evidence, you will not want to ask him too much to do with whatever you are investigating. We are happy to cooperate inasmuch as we are assured that you have not been appointed to investigate the case, and I have it on good authority that scientific evidence will point overwhelmingly to accidental causes, a fact that you acknowledge in this statement that I have prepared and I’d like you to sign.”

  Blume ignored the proffered document, picked up his desk phone, and called in Caterina from her desk. A few seconds later, she came in, crossed the room without looking at him, and took a plastic chair to his left, near the wall. She had gone back into sulk mode, evidently.

  “Please explain in what capacity this Inspector is present,” said the lawyer.

  “I need to keep an eye on her,” said Blume.

  “No, we have no time for humor, Commissioner. This is a serious imposition on my client’s goodwill and time.”

  “Inspector Mattiola,” said Blume. “Why do you think I invited you in here?”

  “So I could see Nightingale for myself.”

  “If the policewoman is here to satisfy an idle curiosity . . .” began the lawyer.

  But Caterina, who was indeed looking very closely at Nightingale, continued, “And to tell Mr. Nightingale in person that we know he is Emma Solazzi’s father.”

  In the silence that followed the whirr of a laser printer in the room outside became audible, and the four of them sat still until it, too, stopped. Now they seemed to be listening to broken strands of conversations deeper in the office. A sudden burst of noise from a passing motorino below presented itself as a possible topic of discussion.

  Finally, Nightingale said, “Avvocato, I think you should leave now.”

  The lawyer looked affronted. “On the contrary. You need me more than ever. If I have understood this correctly, this implies errors in public records, alimony issues, inheritance . . .”

  “Yes, there is a lot to it,” said Nightingale. “But I really would prefer if this sort of thing were not known or spoken about, even to my trusted lawyer. We can talk about it later. For now I want to speak with the Commissioner and the Inspector alone.”

  “I advise most strongly against it,” said the lawyer, but he had tightened his lips and was already standing in preparation to leave. The experience of being the one person in the room not to be in the know about something had been a humiliation. Blume almost expected him to announce he was no longer representing his client.

  Another silence ensued as they waited for the lawyer to gather his papers and wounded dignity and leave the room.

  “He didn’t know that,” said Nightingale, switching into English as soon as the door closed. “I should have told him, but he was Henry’s lawyer, too. I’ve never been comfortable with the idea of client privilege. Priests, doctors, lawyers all claim it for themselves, but they’re not particularly likable people, now, are they?”

  Blume said, “How did Treacy not get suspicious? Wasn’t there—I don’t know—some way you and Emma interacted, touched, or didn’t touch? Treacy picked none of that up? Emma is your child. It must have been hard, not to plant a kiss on the crown of her head now and then. Something like that. I’m not a parent, but,” he pointed at Caterina, “she is.”

  Blume looked over at Caterina. Again, he saw only the side of her face, the rigid outline of her body, her legs out straight, like she was a two-dimensional figure in a three-dimensional space.

  She did not answer him or look at him, so he continued alone. “Another thing, you went to great lengths to hide her identity and to keep up the pretence, yet at the same time you didn’t.”

  “I don’t understand you,” said Nightingale.

  “It took Inspector Mattiola less than half a working day to ascertain Emma’s identity as your daughter. She became suspicious immediately, thought about it for a while, then ran a basic background check beginning with the tax code. We’re talking about a few hours’ work to discover your daughter’s identity. It’s the strange mix of thoroughness and carelessness that has me wondering.”

  Nightingale seemed to be studying the swirls on his fingertips. Finally, he said, “Let me address your outrage at my lack of paternal feelings first.” Nightingale turned toward Caterina as he said this, then getting little response, focused on Blume again. “Before Emma came to the gallery to work with us, I had met her exactly five times.”

  He held up a fist and splayed his fingers. “I held her in my arms just once, and it was on the day I first saw her. She was three. She was showing me how she could jump higher than anyone, and she landed on a book she had been reading, slipped, and banged her head hard on the side of a low table. I scooped her up and tried to stop her from crying, but she had this huge bruise and Angela, who hadn’t seen the incident, seemed to think it was my fault, and maybe it was. So, you see, Commissioner, we really were strangers. And if I hid her identity carelessly, it’s because it was well enough hidden already. We did not risk a spontaneous outburst of affection. Emma herself only learned my identity a few weeks before she came to work in the gallery.”

  “You and Emma’s mother had a difficult relationship?”

  “You can’t call my later contacts with Angela a relationship, really. Our story ended before Emma was born. It’s completely my fault. I’m the one who walked away.”

  Finally Caterina spoke up, using English. “She didn’t say anything to you about a daughter until Emma was three?”

  “You’re English?” asked Nightingale, surprised.

  “No. Just answer my question,” said Caterina.

  “Emma’s mother was trying to be sometimes an artist and sometimes a critic, as if they could ever go together, and if they ever could, she was not the person to do it. She became desperate for money, and that was when she swallowed her pride and called me.”

  Blume eliminated a smirk he felt growing at the side of his mouth by the expedient of rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “So she presented you with this little girl and you . . .”

  “Look, Commissioner, I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering what made me so sure she was mine.”

  Blume raised his palms in denial of such a thought.

  “Well, to start with,” said Nightingale, “have you looked at her?”

  “Me, looked at Emma? Well, yes . . . she’s very beautiful.”

  “Thank you. She is. Can’t you see the resemblance?”

  Blume looked at the man in front of him. Nightingale had the pale blue eyes of many northern Europeans. Emma’s eyes were also blue, he remembered, though hers were almond shaped and had green tints. Her eyes soaked in the light and darkened it, his just reflected it straight back. He had high cheekbones and a triangular face. She had high cheekbones, too, but her face was oval. He remembered it well. There was a difference of sex and forty-something years between them.

  Blume decided to be diplomatic. “Yes, I think I do.”

  “That, of course, is the most obvious thing, and I was always afraid Treacy would notice. Treacy had a sharp eye for detail, though he used it in painting, not in the real world. Also, I saw Emma’s birth certificate.”

  “And that was enough? I mean, of all people to trust a piece of paper, surely you . . .”

  Nightingale interrupted, “Emma was born six months after I broke up with Angela. When we were together, Angela and I were utterly inseparabl
e. We had been going together for three years, living together for a year and a half, and we were on our way to being married. When we had sex, we took no precautions. We had sex all the time. We were together all the time. We rolled all our strength and all our sweetness up into one ball, and we traveled around the country, around Europe, and farther abroad. We went to India, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Guatemala, California, and New York. And when we had finished traveling, we bought—I bought—a run-down casale near Anzio, and we spent all day every day fixing it up.”

  “You fit this in with what you did at the gallery?”

  “Not really. I was—I feel embarrassed even saying this now—I was thinking of giving up the art world and becoming a poet. I thought if we fixed up the house we might take in Dutch and English holidaymakers. You know, long-term, cultured guests. Angela thought she might cook for them, though she was even lousier at cooking than painting . . .”

  “Well, if the guests were to be English and Dutch that would hardly be a problem,” said Blume. “What ended the idyll?”

  “We fell out. Silly stuff but, in the end, serious, too. Toxic little asides from me to her, her to me, like when she told me I had made a travesty of a Tasso poem I was translating, which was bloody annoying coming from a woman who couldn’t speak English and, if the truth be told, couldn’t paint for toffee. She couldn’t judge paintings either, or write a decent essay. Long pretentious sentences full of jargon, dismissive judgments of things she didn’t understand, which was most things . . . One day, she gave me a choice: my work or her. So I went back to speculating in the art market. She persisted for three more years, a bit longer, trying to make it as an artist, and then she contacted me, asked me for some money. I’d already left her the house in Anzio, so I told her to get stuffed. That was when she revealed the existence of Emma.”

  “Did she threaten to sue for maintenance?” asked Blume.

  “No. She wasn’t like that. She was not greedy for money, though I wasn’t sure then. After the house, she asked me for money just this once. It was a decent sum, I suppose. Ninety million lire. This when a middle-range car cost around ten million lire, a small apartment in Rome around two hundred million. She gave up her painting and started working in a bank. I waited for her next demand for money, but it never came. The years went past without any more contact or requests, and, when Emma was about to start secondary school, I phoned up and asked her if I could pay for her education. Angela said public schools in Italy were better than private, so she didn’t need it. So I offered to pay for books, holidays, sport clubs—that sort of thing. She said she’d think about it. She phoned me back about a month later and invited me to the house.”

  “The one near Anzio. She still lived there?”

  “Yes. She’s in Pistoia now, but that’s recent. So I went. It was the second time I met Emma. Angela said she’d be happy to accept my money, and I could choose to give her whatever I deemed fit. But she made one condition, which was that the money should be a fixed sum to be paid at regular intervals. She said she did not want to see the sum going up and down reflecting my mood or opinion of her.”

  “Why did you conspire to give Emma a false identity?”

  “I did not. That is to say, we hid her identity; we did not really create a new one.”

  “Manuela Ludovisi, whose real name is Emma Solazzi, false tax code, false background . . .”

  “Yes, but as you said yourself, it was not deeply done. It was to obscure her identity, not set up a new one forever. We just wanted to hide it from Harry.”

  “Why?”

  “To avoid awkwardness. You see, long ago, before she was with me, Angela was Harry’s.”

  Caterina interrupted. “I beg your pardon? She was his—as in she belonged to him?”

  “Yes. Exactly that,” he said with irritation. “He owned her. That’s what Harry was like. It was he who persuaded her to paint, told her she had talent, when she manifestly did not, drew her into a bohemian way of life, molded her to fit his idea of what he thought his woman should be. Then when he tired of her, he walked away, calling her bourgeois. People still used that as an insult back then. People like Harry, anyhow.”

  “I don’t see the need for the subterfuge all those years later,” said Caterina.

  “Angela had told Harry she had had her tubes tied. She told me that. Maybe she did, maybe she had a reverse op, and maybe Emma is a miraculous birth. Angela used to say she never wanted children, made a sort of philosophy of life out of it. Kids kill off sex in the home, they are little Disney-fixated capitalists, and they kill your youth and replace it with their own. The planet can’t take any more, and . . .”

  “And yet . . .” said Caterina.

  “And yet nothing. I’d just started on the good reasons not to have any,” said Nightingale.

  “And yet Angela had a child, is what I meant,” said Caterina.

  “Ah. Yes, quite right. She had a child after all. I think she felt embarrassed about it for a long time, until she finally stopped trying to be an independent, free-floating artist. But there was another reason not to advertise the fact. When Angela and I started going out, Harry, well, he was vile. One day, shortly after we returned from Mexico and I had started working with him again, we invited him down to Anzio for a sort of truce negotiation. He arrived already half pissed, then got viciously, violently, and overwhelmingly drunk like only the bloody Irish can get, and he called her bitch, whore, or ‘hoo-er’ as he mispronounced it, puttana, troia, zoccola, cunt, and threw a full bottle of wine at her. It hit the wall behind and shattered, and a piece of glass pierced her neck, narrowly missing the jugular. There was blood everywhere, and the hospital called you people, and I was questioned since Angela refused to name Harry. The morning after he claimed not to remember anything. But that was it. Angela cut all ties with him. So you can see why she did not want him coming near her child, or knowing of her existence. Harry and I never again mentioned Angela between us. He did not even know when we eventually broke up.”

  “Henry Treacy had a mean streak,” said Blume.

  “A broad stripe of cruelty, more like it.”

  “He was mean when drunk. What was he like sober?”

  “Angry. Confused. Funny. Bad-tempered. Clever. An immensely gifted second-rate artist. Generous. Underhand. It depends what you’re looking for. I knew him for so long, I got to see all sides.”

  Blume said, “Can you explain what you mean by immensely gifted and second-rate.”

  “He copied others,” said Nightingale. “He did it well, but he copied. Also, there were things he couldn’t copy. He could draw anything, and that was his great gift, but there were things he could not paint. He was like a prodigiously gifted child.”

  Blume shook his head. “No. I’m not following you. You’re talking as if his limitations were plain to see, when evidently, given the money you made off him . . .”

  “And he off me,” said Nightingale.

  “. . . which, given the money you both made, was not the case. What was his failing? As a painter or forger, I mean, not as a human.”

  “He could not paint air,” said Nightingale. “Look, as long as we’re dealing with Early and Middle Renaissance painting, it was not a problem, because for most of them, color was something that came after composition. But later on, when northern Italian painters started doing pictures where you could see and feel the air, the sunlight, and the shadows, Harry was lost.”

  “What sort of painters?” asked Blume.

  “You know, Titian, Tintoretto, Giorgione, and basically anyone after them who used light in a certain way, or painted directly, Caravaggio or, for that matter, Turner, but also—”

  “What about Velázquez?” said Blume. “Could he do a Velázquez?”

  “No, I don’t believe he could. Why are you asking that, Commissioner?”

  “No particular reason,” said Blume.

  “I am sure you do have a reason,” said Nightingale. “And it’s probably based on something
you read in Harry’s writings, because you have read them.”

  “I’m not in the mood for sharing,” said Blume. “Did Henry Treacy hate you?”

  “Maybe. But he had mellowed with age. I might have told him about Emma someday.”

  “Do you think he would have betrayed you?”

  “Possibly. I’m not sure. It depends what you mean by betray.”

  “That’s what drove you to Colonel Farinelli, isn’t it?” said Blume. “You knew Treacy was writing his memoirs, and there would be details that compromised you. I don’t know if you were worried about the whole story or just one episode, I can think of at least one that would have got Farinelli interested. I’m talking about your sale of false paintings to the Cosa Nostra boss.”

  Nightingale plucked at his pant legs exposing thin vein-colored socks. “False?”

  “Yes, they were false. He is quite specific about it in his writings. He even gives instructions on how to prove they were false. I believe you when you say you didn’t know, because he’s specific about that, too.”

  “That bastard.”

  “So he betrayed you twice,” said Blume. “Once by swapping real paintings for forged ones, and then once again by writing about it. The stolen paintings went back to their rightful owners. Or so Treacy says. If this were to be published, it could spell a special kind of trouble for you and the Colonel, only I think the Colonel is probably better equipped than you for defending himself from the Mafia,” said Blume.

  “I could leave this damned country. It is probably not worth their while sending someone abroad after me.”

  “You’d be surprised,” said Blume.

  “And you might be surprised to know that the Mafia threat is not my first thought. Only once was I involved in the sale of stolen works, but here you are telling me I was not. In a certain sense, I feel relieved. No doubt I’ll get round to worrying about the implications of selling forgeries to the Mafia later—though the danger was surely greatest at the moment of sale. Perhaps the buyer is dead now.”

  “Don’t pin your hopes on that,” said Blume. “The Mafia has a corporate memory.”