The Fatal Touch

by Conor Fitzgerald

  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 confess 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.’

  “I think I screamed,” continued Emma. “I pushed him hard. Really hard, in the chest with the heel of my hand. I hit him there three times, and he fell backwards. I heard his head crack against the cobbles, only I didn’t believe then that sound could have been made by his head. I only heard the crack afterwards, thinking back. I hear it now. But at the time I didn’t hear it and Treacy wasn’t even unconscious, because he kept calling my name as I ran away.”

  Emma sat with her hands folded in her lap as she spoke, her voice calm. She even gave a deeper and heavier intonation when repeating Treacy’s words, and she would have been a model of perfect composure had it not been for the tears on the sides of her face.

  Caterina thought of the handsome fair-haired youth that sat above Treacy’s desk in the gallery, and wondered how neither Emma nor Nightingale had ever seen the likeness. She wondered how Emma’s mother could have hidden the story from her daughter all these years, and why.

  Emma asked for the bathroom and when she came back she had washed her face clean. She went back to the chair, picked up her purse, and pulled out her BlackBerry and showed it to Caterina, saying, “Look. It’s switched off. That way she can’t call me and the Colonel can’t find me.”

  “So your mother can’t call you?” said Caterina. She did not bother mentioning that Emma would need to remove the batteries, too, if she didn’t want to be traced.

  “I need to find a place to stay,” said Emma. “But where? With my lying mother, my pathetic boyfriend Pietro . . .”

  “What about your own place?” said Caterina.

  “The apartment paid for by the gallery? In other words, by my dead father and my ex-father or whatever I am supposed to call them. I’m not going there.”

  “Sooner or later you are going to have to talk to them about it.”

  “Why should I? My mother didn’t tell Nightingale, Nightingale thought he was fooling Treacy. I kill Treacy, and now it’s up to me to stage some sort of family reconciliation? Nightingale, Treacy. I don’t even use their first names.”

  “Emma, if you say once more that you killed him, if you indicate to me that what you did was deliberate, I will arrest you now and have you taken to the station to be charged.”

  Emma looked at Caterina in shock.

  “So, tell me, did you deliberately kill Treacy?”

  Emma shook her head. “No. I . . . no. I was just clearing space between us . . . no.”

  “Did you think he was badly hurt when you ran away?”

  “I didn’t care.”

  “I repeat: Did it occur to you that he might be badly hurt?”

  Emma closed her eyes and let out a long breath. “No. It did not. I have never hurt anyone physically in my life. I had no idea it could be so easy.”

  “People are frail,” said Caterina. “Even so, you withheld vital information from us when we arrived the following day, and that is an offense with which you will be charged. But we can do that tomorrow some time.”

  “Can I stay here?” said Emma.

  “What? No. Of course not.”

  “Just for tonight?”

  “There are two bedrooms. My son is in one. I’m in the other.”

  “I could sleep on the sofa you’re sitting on.”

  “Out of the question,” said Caterina. “Apart from everything else, there’s the legal aspect. I am a police inspector. You have just admitted to what could be construed as involuntary manslaughter . . .”

  “Oh. You just said . . .”

  “Forget what I just said. I’m sure there is a hotel you could check into. I don’t think money is much of a problem for you, is it?”

  “No. That’s not my problem. It’s just I get this feeling I’m being followed. The Colonel frightens me. You can’t send me out there.”

  “I am expecting Commissioner Blume to arrive soon. He can accompany you somewhere. You’ll be safe with him.”

  “Will he arrest me?”

  “I don’t know, Emma. He might have to.”

  Caterina’s cell, set to silent, began to vibrate against the glass coffee table between them, and rotated around till it faced Emma who leaned over to look at the name on the display. “That’s your Commissioner now.”

  Caterina wondered how Blume would react to her proposed change of plans for the evening, and was anxious about what he would say to her having Emma in her apartment like this. But she need not have worried. As soon as she answered, he announced, “Can’t make it. Something else has come up.”

  Then he hung up without waiting for a response, without asking her whether she and Elia were OK.

  Bastard.

  Half an hour later, as she applied cold cream to her face and massaged the tense area around her eyes with her fingers, she thought of the almost elegant movement with which old Corsi had knelt down before stretching out on the floor of his dilapidated palace, stabbed in the back by his clumsy, unhappy child. She wiped the sink shiny with the towel she had just used and set out a fresh towel over the edge of the bathtub.

  Passing the living room on her way to her bedroom, whispering so as not to wake Elia, she said, “The bathroom’s free now, Emma.”

  Chapter 42

  Would it be by phone or face-to-face? Blume opened his car door, threw in the accursed notebooks, and pulled out his phone and looked at it in case it had rung on silent. Nothing. He walked back toward Paoloni’s house, back down the sidewalk covered in dogshit and trash. A dark car came the wrong way up the one-way street.

  Face-t
o-face, then, thought Blume.

  The car stopped beside him. The Colonel rolled down his window and spoke out of the dark. “Where’s your friend going?”

  “Aren’t you people following him?”

  “My resources are a little stretched,” said the Colonel. “Where is he going?”

  “To look for his son,” said Blume.

  The Colonel considered this. “His son is fine,” he said after a while.

  “He’d better be,” said Blume.

  “I didn’t want to worry the poor man,” said the Colonel. “The idea was that you would see what was at stake.”

  “I see what is at stake,” said Blume. “Where is Fabio?”

  “The son? Torvaianica, I believe. We used your name to pick him up. Now he thinks he’s being recruited for something exciting, and has been sworn to secrecy. Apparently the hardest thing was to keep a straight face as they told the kid to check for people following and to search out a certain face in a bar. It’s been an evening of entertainment for everyone.”

  “When is he coming home?”

  “When are you going to get my paintings back?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon,” said Blume. “That’s the earliest I can do it.”

  “Then that’s when your friend’s son is coming home,” said the Colonel. “Simple enough.”

  The Colonel’s words disappeared into the blackness of the car, and then reappeared inside Blume’s head. It would not do, but he had to keep calm.

  A blue flare turning yellow lit up the Colonel’s cheeks and nose. Blume watched and waited as the Colonel set his cigar aglow, and took comfort that the ritual suggested the Colonel was prepared to negotiate. He moved closer, picking up a scent of sweet wood and orange peel from inside the vehicle. The Maresciallo was in the driver’s seat.

  “Beppe Paoloni is my dear friend. The first thing he will do if he thinks his son is missing is enlist my help and demand my constant presence,” said Blume. “As long as he does that, I cannot move to get the paintings, and as long as he is looking for his child, he cannot help me.”

  “Do you need his help?”

  “The people who took the canvases don’t want to deal with law enforcement. They’ll do a deal with Paoloni, though. As long as the son is missing, everyone is wasting time.”

  A puff of smoke came out the window, and the Colonel said, “That sounds like a valid argument. And I really don’t want to waste time. Here.” His plump hand emerged and offered Blume a chunky Nokia with too many buttons.

  “I don’t know how to use that.”

  “It’s already ringing. Connected by now, I should say,” said the Colonel.

  Blume brought the phone up to his ear, and noticed that the Colonel had a second phone and was talking into it.

  “Yes?” A young man on the other end of the line. Blume realized he didn’t even know Fabio’s voice.

  “Fabio?”

  “Commissioner Blume?” The kid’s voice wavered between disappointment and relief.

  “The test is over. Can you call your parents? Call your father. He’s looking for you.” This was going to take some explaining to Paoloni afterwards.

  “Yes. I was going to.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “On the Via del Mare. On our way back in. They said I did well.”

  Blume heard a man in the background say something and Fabio’s voice, uncertain, nervous, saying thank you.

  “They’re going to drop me off at the Line B underground. I’m not to mention this test to anyone except you. I’ll just say I was with friends and my phone was dead.”

  “No,” said Blume. “Say it was off, not dead. You need to use it now to call your parents.”

  “I’ll just tell them I recharged it at a friend’s house.”

  Maybe the kid would make a good agent after all. The lie came easily to him.

  “Good,” said Blume.

  “Satisfied?” asked the Colonel as Blume handed back the phone. But now his own was ringing, and he answered.

  It was Paoloni wondering if he had heard anything.

  “No, Beppe. I called in. No accidents or anything. I’m sure Fabio will be OK. Maybe his phone is out of credit or something.”

  “Definitely something like that,” said Paoloni. “It’s his mother. She’s very anxious. She’s phoned me twice. Listen, things are moving faster than I thought here, which is good. It turns out these two guys . . .”

  But Blume did not want Paoloni to talk about this now, as he stood there in front of the Colonel. He pretended to scratch his ear with his thumb and surreptitiously hit disconnect, then made a few grunts of assent, and pretended to finish up the conversation. He switched the phone off completely as he slipped it back into his pocket in case Paoloni called straight back.

  “Colonel, this abducting and threatening children, for all that you do it so subtly and gently, and make sure the victims don’t even realize it . . . someday you will get burned. You know that? Eventually something will go wrong, someone will find out, and you will be killed.”

  “I have been in this line of business since you were a child, Blume. I have not been caught yet.”

  “You have not been punished, you mean. But you have been caught. People know who you are, what you do. The American Embassy has a file on you. Older Carabinieri, police, criminals, and politicians remember you, some younger Carabinieri want rid of you.”

  “Lieutenant Colonel Faedda, for instance? Do you think I would allow a queer Sard kid to control me? You’re tricky, Blume, I’ll give you that. I want you to contact me tomorrow. We meet, exchange the paintings, maybe hammer out a new deal of some sort, and then that will be that. We won’t have to meet again. If the truth be told, I didn’t even want to get involved in this case. I was semi-retired, you know. This will be the last case. And as such, Velázquez or no Velázquez, money or no money, the ending will be dictated by me. I will decide your fate; I will decide who deserves favor, which gets punished. That’s how it will be.”

  He closed the window and the Maresciallo drove away, flashing his lights as he sped the wrong way up the street.

  Blume switched his phone back on. It rang almost immediately.

  It was Paoloni. “We got cut off earlier,” he said. “Anyhow, got them. It was that easy. Oh, by the way, Fabio called. He’s on his way home. Thanks for your help there. Little bastard had his mother worried sick.” Blume smiled as he heard Paoloni trying to keep an offhand tone. “Shall we meet back at my place?”

  “No,” said Blume. “I need to get home. Remember, Beppe, the front door to my apartment is broken. It closes, but anyone could get in. I’d prefer not to leave it unguarded.”

  “I could bring the paintings around to your place. Then tomorrow, you sell them on to the Colonel. You ask five times what I paid for them, we split the difference, and I get a nice quick return on this evening’s investment. Everyone is happy, except maybe the Colonel, but fuck him.”

  “I think the Colonel’s men may be watching my place,” said Blume.

  “If they are, I’ll spot them.”

  “They’re better at surveillance than we thought.”

  “Let’s leave it, then. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Chapter 43

  The devastation of his apartment looked worse at one o’clock in the morning. For a moment he thought he had been burgled all over again, and his chest trembled with incipient rage, at himself for allowing this to happen. They had polluted his apartment. Nothing felt clean. A strange smell, pungent like fermenting piss, permeated the apartment. Piss and salt. What had they done to his home? Beneath the ammoniac stink of the piss was something worse. Something that smelled of corruption, death.

  It was strongest in the kitchen. Moving with a hunter’s careful steps, he searched the cupboards. He opened the refrigerator. On the middle shelf, a gray sea bass lay shimmering in a pool of its own liquefaction.

  The trip downstairs with the stinking fish cleared his mind of all though
t. Back in the kitchen, he opened a package of bicarbonate of soda and tossed fistfuls of it into his fridge, raising a storm of white which he shut inside by slamming the door closed.

  He washed and washed his hands. Now the idea of picking up things from the living-room floor was overwhelming. Even the thought of preparing for bed was exhausting.

  Propped against the cracked spine of Volume one of Lotz’s Architecture in Italy, his mother looked out of a silver-framed photograph. She looked like someone else. Unfamiliar, and younger than him. More than twenty years had passed since they died together, leaving him here. Now his memory struggled to retrieve clear images of both together. Was forgetting a sign of things getting better or worse?

  There was a fabric conditioner called Chanteclair Marsiglia that brought back his mother. He wished it was something less synthetic—and it was probably poisonous—but nothing worked better. He kept a bottle under the sink and occasionally, but not too often, would add it to his washing.

  He undressed. In the bathroom, he eyed his toothbrush with suspicion and decided not to use it. He would get a new one in the morning. He rotated the mattress back into place, pulled up the sheet, and dropped the duvet on top of himself.

  The quickest route to remembering his father was a whiff of eucalyptus between the marshlands of Maccarese and the sea, or someone in the office unwrapping a medicinal mint, and there he was, Professor James Blume, standing beneath a balsam-scented tree in Seattle, his face still shining with sweat from the race he had just lost to the fastest ten-year-old in America.

  As fast as the wind, Alec, all I could see was the dust behind you, he said, before slapping the white-lined bark with his hand. Black cottonwood makes your mother sneeze. Standing in the shade cast by the trunk, his father fingered the fissures in the bark. The triangular leaves above rotated in the wind and splintered the sunlight into bright shards and dark shadows, so that Blume could hardly make out his face at all.