The Fatal Touch

by Conor Fitzgerald

  Caterina put the palm of her hand on Blume’s cheek and, hooking her finger over his ear, pulled his face toward hers. His lips were dry and his neck was tense, but it still felt good, and she liked his breath. But then he turned away.

  “I still need you to look in front of you. Look at the scene in front of us now.”

  Caterina examined the concave area, the pine trees in the background, the embankment that formed a proscenium, the white marble wall curving away from them, the niches, the masonry. It was the scene in Treacy’s picture.

  “Give me the picture.”

  “Here,” said Blume.

  She held it in front of her.

  “It’s here. It’s the view from where we are now. That tree is a little taller now, and there seems to be an extra—no, wait . . . ” She stood up and walked a few paces to her right. “From here it’s perfect. Like he was standing here. Come and see.”

  Blume came up behind her and they looked at the painting. “Treacy knew this park like no one else. He walked through it undisturbed. He would have explored its hidden nooks and crannies and hiding places. The pentimenti converge in the middle of the painting, which corresponds to the chamber there.”

  “Do you think Henry Treacy hid his Velázquez in that grotto? What about damp?”

  “The oldest paintings in the world are in caves,” said Blume. “Rock often creates very dry environments.”

  “Why did he not just give the painting to Angela?” said Caterina. “Wouldn’t that have been easiest?”

  “Who says he wanted it to be easy? If she kept the painting and if she also read his notebooks or autobiography or whatever it was intended to be, all the clues were there. He hid it where they fell in love.”

  “And if she hadn’t kept the painting or the letter or read his autobiography?” asked Caterina.

  “Then it would mean she had not forgiven him, and his pentimenti would mean nothing, and in exchange, she would have got nothing from him.”

  “So it was repentance with a ‘but’ built in.”

  Caterina lifted up the bag and together they approached the grotto. When they reached it, Blume peered in and said, “It would be easy to climb over this gate without removing the padlock. There’s another door in there, which must open into a cavity under the embankment behind. So, now, tell me what you think: Is there going to be a Velázquez hidden in there, or have I read this all wrong?”

  Caterina watched him peering through the bars like a child at a zoo. In her hand she held a heavy pair of bolt cutters, far too powerful for the flimsy padlock holding the gate shut, and waited for him to get over his self-doubt and out of the way. Then she cut through the chain like it was made from paper clips, and they walked into the empty hollow. The sunlight from outside slanted in so that the central area was bright and the walls to the side dark. They were white and smooth, plastered without so much as a rose, flute, or scroll, but filthy and covered in graffiti. People had evidently scaled the gate to come in here simply to spray-can the place. Every building in Rome was “tagged” already, so this must have made a tempting target.

  “You know,” he said, looking at the black, purple, and red squiggles of paint all over the walls, “my apartment block is covered in this shit, too.”

  “Every building in Rome is. The Vigili Urbani aren’t so good at catching the kids,” said Caterina.

  “You know what the message scrawled on my building is?”

  “W la fica, Fuck The Police, Debora ti amo, Lazio Merda?” asked Caterina.

  “No. It’s ‘impossible is nothing.’ That’s an advertisement for a watch or a soda or something. These kids are spouting corporate messages. They aren’t rebels; they’ve no philosophy, no message, and no courage. Look, there are your putti.”

  Caterina looked. Carved into a niche was a bas-relief of little boys with angel wings intent on beating each other up, same as the painting in the Pamphili Gallery. But here they had been spray-painted and their features chipped off.

  In front of the entrance was a second door, warped by damp and age. There was no padlock or chain, and though closed it was not locked. The space behind was a narrower, darker version of the first chamber, and Caterina took out the flashlight and shone it around.

  The room was airless and lifeless, almost without insects. A few withered leaves on the ground made an unpleasant scratching noise as they moved in the slight breeze.

  “More graffiti, and an old blanket,” she said, shining the flashlight along the walls and concrete floor. “Cigarette butts and an old Rizla packet.”

  “This is mostly old-style graffiti,” said Blume. “Less spray-paint, more penknife cuts and indelible pens.”

  “The graffiti archaeologist,” said Caterina. “There’s an erect penis, there’s another, and, oh, look, there’s another.”

  “Pair of tits over there,” said Blume. “Not bad. Some soccer scores from bygone years. Liverpool 4 Roma 2. A gloating Lazio fan spent some time in here, in the early ’80s.”

  “This one Kossiga = Amerika comes from the seventies or eighties,” said Caterina. “Juden Raus, now there’s an old favorite. Someone’s done a sweet little bunny rabbit face.”

  “I got a Smurf over here,” said Blume.

  “What sort of person penetrates a hidden room to deface a piece of baroque architecture with a picture of a rabbit or a Smurf ?” said Caterina. “Someone’s done a picture of a dog fucking a cat. It’s pretty good, actually. So is this one. It’s a rifle sight and there’s the face of someone in the middle. Cossiga again, I think.”

  “I used to do that as a kid,” said Blume. “In fact, I still do. I draw circles around faces and add in the crosshairs.”

  “Lots of Celtic crosses and anarchist ‘A’ symbols,” said Caterina, waving her flashlight about, and looking up at the ceiling. “We can’t reach the top of the wall without something to stand on.”

  Blume was running his left hand along the walls, stopping now and then to rub his fingertips clean on his jacket.

  “Let’s start by looking in areas that are easy to reach,” he said. “Let’s start at eye level. Now this entire back wall is very slightly dusty, so there is some damp coming from the embankment behind. I wouldn’t put it there. But the wall between this chamber and the one in front is perfectly dry.”

  “It could be in the first chamber, too,” said Caterina.

  “It could,” said Blume. “But if I were hiding something, I’d choose this room where there is no chance of being seen from outside rather than the first room. If it was daytime, the sunlight reaches into the first room, so that would have been a risk, and if it was night, then he definitely would not want to be in the first room because any light he used would be very visible from outside. Also, I think we need to remember that at this point, he’s just concealing it in a safe place, not hiding it from anyone who is in here specifically looking for it. He wanted Angela to find it.”

  “The walls are smooth plaster. Could he have plastered over that well?”

  “Sure. He made his own frames, paints, ink, boards, paper, solvents, I’m sure he had a go at fresco painting. He’d be an excellent plasterer.”

  “That meant he had to carry a bag of plaster in here.”

  “Yes,” said Blume. “Maybe he left it in here the day before . . . what are you doing?”

  “This.” Caterina had taken the crowbar from the bag and slammed it against a crude image of an ejaculating penis.

  “Ouch,” said Blume as he saw the shock travel up her wrists and arms. “Try stabbing it at the wall instead.”

  Caterina did so, but only left pockmarks and scrapes.

  “We could try the battering ram,” said Blume.

  “Let me try your side first,” she said.

  Blume moved out of the way. “I was thinking,” he said, “that knocking a hole into a solid wall and then refilling it is a lot of work. You would choose a place that already had an alcove or shelf, then cover it over. So we should tap the wal
l and listen for where it might be hollow.”

  Caterina shone the flashlight at the wall against which Blume had been leaning. “There’s another of your telescopic sight things,” she said.

  “No,” said Blume. “That’s supposed to be the peace symbol.”

  “Right,” said Caterina. “Someone’s even put a peace dove next to it, and some wag has painted a rifle sight over it. All this clever irony going to waste in here.”

  But Blume did not reply. He took the flashlight from her. Then he turned it on the graffiti showing the dove caught in the crosshairs of the rifle sight.

  “Do you know what the Pamphili symbol is?” he said.

  “I would have said bees, but from the way you’re staring at that dove . . . If that’s what it is. A bird with backward wings like that could never fly.”

  “The Barberini family were the ones with the bees, the Pamphili are doves. But there is something you don’t know, because I never thought of mentioning it until now. The third of Treacy’s notebooks had a fore-edge drawing. You know, a picture drawn on the edges of the pages.”

  “I used to do that with school textbooks, while you were drawing sharpshooter sights and crosshairs,” said Caterina.

  “Right. Well, the image Treacy drew on the edge of the paper was a dove. It just seemed like a doodle, which is what it was. You would never have seen it because you only had a photocopy, and the Colonel, too, would never have seen it.”

  Caterina was standing beside him, crowbar in hand. “Shall I?” she said.

  “Go for it.”

  She jabbed the sharp point of the crowbar at the eye of the dove, and drove a hole straight through the plaster.

  Chapter 52

  Moving the crowbar back and forth she easily levered away pieces of plaster. The aperture she had opened was arched, more or less the same shape and size as the flap of a mailbox. The wall on either side was made of tufa and every time she hit it, crumbles of orange and yellow grit poured out at their feet, but she was not making much progress.

  “Try striking downwards,” said Blume.

  “Shut up. And keep the light steady.”

  She raked away at the wall with the gooseneck. The plaster and loose cement gave way easily, causing her to sneeze. Within a few minutes she had hollowed out a keyhole-shaped aperture in the wall.

  “It’s a narrow niche, a bit like the ones on the outside. There is probably one next to the other side of the door as well,” said Blume. “But this has to be the one we want.”

  Caterina hunkered down and clicked her fingers impatiently over her shoulder until Blume handed her the flashlight, which she shone into the narrow space. Then she stood up and made an attempt at dusting herself down.

  “It’s there,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “There is a package wrapped in yellow cellophane and some sort of masking tape.”

  “Can you reach it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why didn’t you pull it out?”

  “I thought you might want to do it,” said Caterina.

  “You do it,” said Blume.

  He held the light as she put both hands in and pulled out the heavily wrapped package, small enough to fit under one arm.

  Caterina propped it against the wall and they stood there in the semi-darkness. She allowed herself to lean against his shoulder a little, and felt him lean back into her.

  “We can hardly see anything in here,” said Caterina.

  Without saying a word, Blume stooped down, picked up the package, and put it under his arm. “I am going to take this back to my house. I will wait for you. Go back to the station, sign in the squad car, collect your own, and come back out to my place,” he said. “But off duty.”

  She drove him back in perfect silence. He sat there clutching the package, looking straight ahead.

  “See you here in an hour,” was all he said as he got out of the car.

  She was back in thirty-five minutes. The package was intact, propped up against the slashed sofa cushions.

  Blume sat on the floor of his living room, box-cutter in hand.

  “It’s in a carrying box, from the feel of it.” He slashed the blue plastic, and started pulling away reams of bubble wrap, a silicon sheet, white cotton strips, and finally a backing board. Then he turned it around for her to see.

  “It’s brown,” was all that came to her. The small work, no bigger than a folded newspaper, seemed to consist of three shades: coffee, tea, and piss. Her disappointment was as enormous as the picture was small.

  But he was looking at it with reverence.

  “I know you don’t get it, yet, but wait . . . ” He left the room and returned so quickly with a large art book, that it must have already been ready and open in the next room. “Look. The woman to the left pushing back the red curtain and looking down at the spinning wheel. Now look at the painting. No curtain, no spinning wheel, no color, but look at that pose. It’s a study for the same thing. Look at the canvas, look at the line . . . I don’t know. I’m not an art expert but I believe this. I believe Treacy. This is genuine.”

  “You trust the word of a dead forger?” She did not want to deflate him, but nor did she want to get carried away on a wave of misguided belief.

  “I trust his story.”

  “Why?” asked Caterina.

  “Because he did not write to deceive. He painted to deceive, but even then he left the real lies to Nightingale. I believe he was earnest in his writings. They allowed us to find this.”

  “It is all that valuable?”

  “Oh God, yes, Caterina. Beyond reason. Once they prove that this is really by Velázquez, it will sell for—I don’t know. Tens of millions of euros easily. It will take a lot of time for it to be proved that this really is his. Especially since Treacy is the source. The notebooks will help. That means I might have to go back on my word to Kristin.”

  “Who’s Kristin?” said Caterina.

  “A woman at the American Embassy—I’ll tell you some other time.”

  “Tens of millions?” It did not seem right that a yellowing rectangle was worth lifetime after lifetime of work by her and her colleagues.

  “Yes,” said Blume. “Tens of millions. In a few years, perhaps, once it has been completely authenticated. But take this to the right people, make some promises, they’d spot you an advance of a few million. If you wanted, you could turn this into serious money in two days.”

  Caterina sat down. From this angle the picture looked black rather than brown. Blume’s eyes were bright, as if he had a fever. She moved her head and the work seemed to change color again. Now it reminded her of dried old glue on the broken spine of an old dictionary. Blume had sat down beside it and was cradling his arm over the frame, glancing at it sideways, shifting it to catch different light angles.

  She decided she did not like it.

  “What are we going to do with it?”

  “We could both become very rich,” said Blume.

  “Our ownership would be challenged. We’re public servants. This belongs to the state. For now.”

  “If you find something like this, you get to keep it,” said Blume. “That’s how it works. Use the money to buy lawyers, then more lawyers. Unmanageable wealth in a few years. You’re not into this, are you?”

  “No. The Colonel had me convinced for half a day that you could be bought, and then you proved him and me wrong, and I was ashamed,” she said. “But now . . . ”

  “You are afraid.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Do you not find it tempting?”

  “Yes. But it disgusts me and frightens me, too.”

  “Great art is for keeping the people down, you know,” said Blume. “That’s what it’s all about. We can’t help but think something is great if it fetches a great price, or if a lot of rich and educated people talk about it a lot. Treacy knew this, but I still think he really enjoyed this find. It’s a sketch for something that came later, becam
e part of the canon. What’s exciting about this is the potential. The drawing in itself . . . Who knows how good it is?”

  “I don’t want to have anything to do with it,” said Caterina.

  “It’s the size of the sums involved, isn’t it?” said Blume. “Suppose you and I got, what, fifty million euros each. Think of all the Ikea furniture you bought, the making do with old things, slowly building up your collections of books, that nice carpet that was a big extravagance but you don’t regret. All those years and years on the lowest-paid police force in Europe suddenly blown away. It would retroactively mock all that effort. You could buy a lifetime’s possessions in a single afternoon, using less than one year’s interest on the principal. That’s what I don’t like about the idea of sudden massive wealth. It would invalidate all your earlier struggles, make your life up to now seem pointless.”

  Caterina felt her chest relax as he said this. She had not realized how tense she had been. Hearing him say these words was a huge relief, and she was still nodding in happy agreement with his reasoning, when he said, “But sudden affluence, now that is a different matter.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean imagine getting enough money to buy a larger house, to send Elia to college abroad, go on vacations, have a home help, and not have to work as a policewoman any more. Not untold wealth, just a large amount of money that would make your life easy and would not humiliate your past efforts at making do or propel you into an alien social circle. That would be better, wouldn’t it?”

  “I suppose,” said Caterina, looking at the black object squatting on the sofa beside Blume. “But . . . ”

  “Wait. Who does this painting really belong to?” asked Blume.

  Ridiculous though it seemed, Caterina feared it was a trick question, and thought for some time before answering.

  “The Republic of Italy, I suppose. Or Angela. If it was Treacy’s to begin with, then he definitely gave it to her,” said Caterina.

  “Exactly. So the beneficiary is Angela and, by extension, Emma. She’ll inherit the wealth afterwards. The daughter who pushed her father dead on the ground,” said Blume. “Maybe, after a fifteen-year legal battle, they will show their gratitude. Even if they gave you half a percent of the probable value of this, you could probably quit the force.”