The Fatal Touch

by Conor Fitzgerald

  “And here is where the irony begins. In recent years I have become more and more open about what I have done, the artists I have emulated, the paintings and drawings I have invented—and I invent, I do not copy. No more than I steal. But because I have become known, and because I am so good, and because I have been honest enough to talk about these things, I am the last person in the world who can announce the discovery of a long-lost Velázquez and be believed. If experts really were experts, they would know immediately that it is genuine, but they are not, and it is going to take them some time. To be sure, Nightingale could get it on to the market, but at a fraction of its price, and he’d steal the money from you, Angela. There are less than 120 Velázquez works surviving. Adding one to the repertory is big news. I had a painting worth tens of millions sitting in my kitchen, and I couldn’t think of how to sell it.

  “Knowing I could not rely on Nightingale, I began to look into the provenance myself, and found it was excellent. The painting had been in the possession of Adam Brookes, a private collector who ran a Chicago commodities brokerage that was doing pretty well until World War II, but went bust. He in turn seemed to have bought the painting from Joseph Duveen in 1918, which, I am afraid, like 1946, is one of those years that raises suspicions. After the European wars, an awful lot of plundered art changed hands, and it is a known favorite trick of people like John to pull up dubious records from just that time, when all was confusion. In any case, it appears that the painting was owned by Count Johann Ludwig von Wallmoden-Gimborn, the illegitimate son of George II of Britain. It stayed in royal hands until George V, that ignorant bollocks who was on the throne when Ireland struck for independence in 1916.

  “In finding all this out, I enlisted John’s help without letting him know what I was doing. I simply said I wanted to see how he set about his business and I learned what books to look up, how to consult catalogs, how to make deceptive phone calls and send innocent-sounding letters purporting to be from students, travelers, guidebook authors, heritage groups, art appreciation societies, and the like.

  “I would have told John, I would have enlisted his help, and together we would have shared the vast proceeds had he not treated me in the most ignoble fashion. I was still reeling from what I had discovered, certain yet hesitant to utter it aloud, when I learned that John and Angela had betrayed me. If John is reading this someday, he will be surprised to learn that I found out so soon, but I did.

  “A few days later, I revisited our gallery, and John asked me about the painting.

  “ ‘Oh that,’ I said. ‘Nothing. It was a good frame. I washed the entire thing clean with solvent. I’ll make good use of the empty canvas.’

  “ ‘Wasn’t that a bit expensive for a worn canvas and frame?’

  “Oh no, not at all, John.”

  “Fuck you, John. John Bull.”

  “What does that mean: bull?” asked Caterina.

  “Bull?” said Blume. “It’s short for bullshit. Frottole, panzane, cazzate.”

  “They didn’t like each other much,” she said.

  “No,” said Blume.

  She pushed her feet farther under the cushions, and wished she could follow with her whole body. Tiredness rang in her ears, and for a moment a mistimed inhalation of air through her nose caused the back of her throat to make a snore, and she jerked her head up. Blume still sat there in the armchair. What was the etiquette for telling her commanding officer to go home, to let her sleep? It wasn’t just a question of etiquette. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings, either. But still he sat there, like a big dog. Maybe if she threw a stick out the window, he’d go bounding enthusiastically down the stairs. But she wanted him there, too, protecting her and Elia as they slept. If only he’d send her to bed, tell her he would be keeping vigil.

  “I’ll be going in a minute,” said Blume. “I am meeting someone, but I don’t know where until he phones me.”

  Caterina swung her feet onto the floor and shivered and yawned. She was too tired to be disappointed or even worried.

  “Who?”

  “Paoloni. You said you remembered him. He’s surprised everyone, himself included, by becoming a successful ‘security consultant.’ I’m going to give him the notebooks for safekeeping, and then maybe we’ll throw out your photocopies, too, put this behind us.”

  “Paoloni’s the person to trust?”

  “Yes,” said Blume. “He is. Also, I think he can help me make sure the Colonel doesn’t bother you again.”

  Caterina forgot to be tired for a moment. “How will he do that?”

  “I don’t know. We shall see,” said Blume. “Also, I think he might be able to speed up the resolution of the murder of Krishnamachari and his son.”

  Blume’s phone went, and she shivered again. Blume spoke a few words and stood up to go. She forced herself to stand up too.

  After he had left, she gathered up the pile of Treacy’s notes, her eye falling on the scrawled “Fuck you, John.” And yet they must have been friends once. She flipped back to the beginning, past the days in Ireland, which she had read. There was the arrival in London with Monica. John’s name appeared for the first time in the next pages. She took them to bed, undressed, got into red cotton pajamas that were the most comfortable things in the world, switched on her bedside lamp. The dictionary was in the next room, where it could stay. She could look up any unknown words tomorrow.

  Monica and I arrived in London and I managed to sell my poor forgery to a failing dealer ready to try anything. He gave me twelve pounds for it, which got us into a squalid bedsit on Queensway. I had brought some but not enough of my painting tools with me, but could not afford to buy any more. The dole kept us going, just. After a month, Monica found a job at the cosmetics department of Selfridges. After one week in the job, she had been asked out eight times. She accepted the eighth invitation. I found out and raged at her, and told her she had a choice: Forget about going out with customers, or forget about me. She interpreted this quite literally, so that six months later, when our paths happened to cross on Hampstead Heath, she was unable to remember me at all, and therefore saw no reason to stop and introduce me to the buck-toothed haw-haw Englishman in the chalk-stripe business suit, who was recounting what must have been one of the most amusing stories ever told for the way it made her laugh.

  After Monica had left me, I was lonelier but freer, and without her pressure to find a job, I was able to wander as much as I liked through the city streets. This is how I discovered Ramsauer’s art shop in Cecil Court. Nowadays, London is all spruced up and stressfully tidy (a risk that Rome does not run), but back then, streets were dirtier and rents affordable. The shop now is an ordinary rectangular place with minimalist furnishings and pointless books of utter bollocks (mostly “art photography” as if such a thing existed) for the perennially bored. Then the rectangular plan was divided into a grid of tight corridors whose walls were made of antiques, easels, army surplus stocks, paintings, vases ready to topple over. I wandered through the place, free to steal any of the tiny silver, china, and polished wood ornaments that I chose, or perhaps an eighteenth-century letter-writing set. But I am not a thief. Only when I had explored every corridor, though not every object, did the owner appear from a basement area. He nodded to me, asked me if I needed any help and, when I said I was just looking, disappeared again.

  On my third visit, I spotted an interesting painting that looked to me like a work by Coello. Of course it was not, but it almost might have been. The subject was a Spanish nobleman. Mold had eaten away at the painting so much that the face seemed to have decayed and exploded outwards in a burst of gray and green, like something from the Night of the Living Dead.

  Interested also in the monogram on the back of the canvas, which seemed to suggest the painting had belonged to Lord Mountbatten, I brought it up to the end of the shop, waited patiently for Ramsauer to appear, and asked him how much he wanted for it. Two guineas, he said. “But see this chalk mark? That means it has alread
y been sold.”

  “Who to?” It seems like an impertinent question, but so far I was the only person I had ever seen enter the shop, and I wondered why the buyer had left a chalk mark on it rather than take it home, since it was not a very large painting. Ramsauer explained that the buyer had not had the money on him at the time, but was coming back.

  “When?” I asked defiantly. I was conceiving a dislike for this buyer already.

  “Later today, sometime tomorrow, or by next Thursday at the latest.” The old bastard didn’t have a clue, of course, but he didn’t really care. The only thing that mattered was honoring his own chalk mark. I wanted to offer more for the painting, but Ramsauer would not have accepted and I did not have it anyhow. Besides, it was not all that great a bargain considering the state of the work.

  As it turned out, the buyer was a young man of about my own age, who did not look as if he had that much to spend either. I saw him the following Wednesday (not Thursday, then) pick up the painting and bring it to old Ramsauer and pay for it.

  I went over and demanded to know what he intended to do with it. He looked at me in astonishment, and clutched his painting tighter.

  “Are you an artist?” I wanted to know.

  “No.”

  “What do you want with that, then? It’s ruined.”

  “It’s my business what I want with it, Paddy.”

  I could have given him a clout there and then, but if he fell over he would have broken about a thousand objects.

  “Take that back.”

  “What?”

  “You called me Paddy. Call me that again and you’ll need to put a toothbrush up your arse to clean your teeth.”

  He put the painting on the counter and said, “Paddy.”

  His eye tooth cut my knuckle when I hit him. He staggered backwards.

  “Jesus. Mind the vase behind you,” I said. “It’s a bell krater.”

  He obediently moved away from it, and I hit him on the nose.

  He cupped his nose between his hands and shouted, “Fucking hell! That hurt! I am calling the police!” He was outraged, as if I had just made a terrible mistake. Then he added, his voice nasal and his eyes watering, “It’s not an original krater, is it?”

  “Course not,” I said. I picked up the painting.

  I walked out of the shop, then stood and waited for the young man to come out after me.

  “Here, give it back. I won’t call the police, and I won’t say Paddy anymore.”

  I handed over the painting. “I could restore it for you,” I offered. “For a fee.”

  “I can restore it myself, thanks.”

  “With what? The canvas is blooming. How do you get rid of that mold?”

  “Freeze it.”

  His reply stopped me dead. I was expecting him to say Dettol disinfectant and sunlight, which is what most people would have done back then. In fact, it’s a better method than freezing. But in those days freezers were a bit exotic.

  “That’s clever,” I said.

  “I’m clever,” he said. “Well, if your name’s not Paddy—and it had better not be after that—what are you called?”

  “Henry. Henry Treacy.”

  He put out his hand. “Well, Harry. How about you buy me a drink at the Lamb and Flag?”

  “Henry, not Harry. You have a problem with names. What’s yours?”

  “John Nightingale.”

  He carried the blasted painting with ghastly precision . . . we drank pale ale and I said . . . In those days they had fires in the hearths of London and overflowing ashtrays . . . One is never as lonely as when . . .

  The manuscript fell with a thump on the floor, and Caterina opened her eyes wide for a moment, turned off the bedside lamp. What was that thump? Manuscript, same sound as the gas made when he lit it. Waited for hours, then lit it. Poor Blume. Propped up like a zinc coffin, the bed tilted pleasantly back.

  Chapter 29

  “No. it’s half past one in the morning, Beppe. I don’t want to go to a McDonald’s,” said Blume, looking into his rear-view mirror for the tenth time.

  Paoloni’s voice sounded both metallic and intimate as it came over the earpiece: “Some American you are. Do you want to meet?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you want to know if you’re being followed or not?”

  “I don’t think I am,” said Blume.

  “Do you want to know for sure?”

  Blume sounded his horn at an oncoming car he felt was driving too close to his side of the road, raised a finger as the other car flashed its lights, and swerved toward the bastard to force him over. “I suppose so.”

  “You know the McDonald’s at the Agip station on Via Aurelia? Go there. You’ll be coming from Piazza Irnerio. So call me as you get to the piazza. Don’t bring the phone up to your ear or they’ll get suspicious, especially if they’ve tapped your service phone. You start making calls without them hearing anything, they’ll know you know. Use hands-free.”

  “I’m already using a Bluetooth earpiece,” said Blume.

  Paoloni asked Blume for his car make, color, and license, and they estimated meeting in half an hour.

  A kilometer before the rendezvous, Blume called again.

  Paoloni answered after half a ring. “I’m about 300 meters behind you. No sign of anyone. Now, just as you reach the turnoff for the Euronics warehouse on your right, hit your brakes twice.”

  “OK, I’m there . . . now.” Blume tapped his brake pedal twice as he passed it.

  “I see you. OK, you’re not going to turn into McDonald’s, though I am. Go straight past the forecourt, don’t even slow down. Go on to the next overpass, which is a mile ahead or a bit less. Use it to reverse direction and start heading back into the city. After the road sign marking the city limits, take the entrance road and another overpass to reverse direction again to get to the McDonald’s you’re now passing. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Blume pulled into the McDonald’s parking lot. Five vehicles were parked as close to the door as possible; one, a white Audi Q5, was parked near the exit. That would be Paoloni.

  Blume parked near the entrance and waited. Five minutes later the Audi drew up alongside him and Paoloni disembarked. Blume picked up the notebooks, climbed out of his car, and proffered his hand, but Paoloni punched him on the shoulder instead, saying, “None of the next thirty or so cars behind you reappeared on the ramp bringing you back here. Only two other cars took that entrance road and overpass in the five minutes after you. When you reversed direction down the Via Aurelia, they might have called it off. If they’re good, they won’t have sent a car onto the second overpass to follow you. If you had a tail, you’ve lost it for now, though they might pick you up again afterwards. I am assuming they exist, because it might just be that you’ve finally cracked. I’m starving. You can tell me who the bad guys are over a Big Mac.”

  The harsh white light of McDonald’s did no favors to Paoloni, but all things considered, he was looking better than he had during his last days in the police force. He had put on a bit of weight in his face, and seemed to have developed a liking for sunlamps, for his skin was a bright glowing orange rather than the jaundiced yellow Blume remembered. Getting out of the police also seemed to have liberated his inner bling. Chains dangled from his wrists and he had taken to wearing rings on his thumbs and a flat silver link chain around his neck. He had sculpted his hair so that it stood like a bristly gray cube on his head. He was wearing a white sleeveless hooded training top, and his tattooed arms showed signs of weight training. The gym look was completed by Capri shorts with untied strings that dangled down his bare calves.

  “You’re looking well,” said Blume.

  “Thanks. Business is good. I should have left the force years ago.”

  Blume stood behind a pot-bellied man in flip-flops who was speaking Russian on his phone. Paoloni placed himself in front of the Russian, who paused his conversation, said a few words, and hung up. A
man in a porter’s uniform finished his order. Paoloni stepped up to the till, and the Russian followed and tapped him on the shoulder.

  “I am in front of you.” He jerked a thumb behind him. The girl behind the counter glanced backwards in search of support from the kitchens.

  Paoloni looked the Russian up and down, then gave him a light backhanded swat on the stomach, and wagged his finger.

  “You’ve eaten at McDonald’s before, haven’t you?” He allowed the Russian to go in front of him, stood beside Blume, and said, “What are you having?”

  “Anything that doesn’t begin with a ‘Mc,’ I think.”

  Paoloni looked at the overhead menu. “Coca-Cola or Fanta?”

  “Coca-Cola, please.”

  As they took their seat next to a plate glass window, Paoloni said, “These people who you imagine are following you? You don’t think they want to shoot you too? Because we’re sitting like two goldfish in a lighted bowl here.” He flicked open his hamburger box, poured the French fries into the top flap, and ripped open two packets of ketchup.

  Blume sipped his Coke and shook his head. “Uh-uh. I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

  Paoloni caught a sliding disk of gray meat between his fingers and deftly reinserted it with ketchupy fingers into his bun. “OK, but first things first. Leporelli, Scariglia: it’s all arranged. I even met the two scumbags myself, and they are very keen to turn themselves in. Magistrate Gesti really annoyed the Ostia gang. Those two clowns will pay the price once they get to prison.”

  “That is well beyond my scope of competence,” said Blume. “Where are they now?”

  “Somewhere in Casetta Mattei.”

  “They are not going to resist arrest or try to flee or anything?”

  “That wouldn’t make sense.”

  “What they did doesn’t make sense,” said Blume. “Why are criminals usually so stupid? Even the relatively clever ones seem to choose retards as associates.”

  “It’s because they cannot advertise to get good people,” said Paoloni, with the air of a man who had spent some time considering the question. “So they have to depend on blood relations, which is no guarantee of excellence, or else on people they have always known from the neighborhood. But if they’re still living in the same neighborhood, chances are they’re not too bright.”