The Fatal Touch (14 page)
“She needed the tax code for the job,” said Blume. “That’s OK. Same everywhere in the world. You apply for your social security number, tax code, tax ID, employment book . . .”
“Right. I can see that. But tax codes are assigned at birth. So I’m interested why she got hers only three years ago.”
“No,” said Blume. “Tax codes are assigned at birth only to people born in Italy. But if you were born abroad, you have to go and get one. I got mine when I was sixteen. Four hours of waiting at Via della Conciliazione, and then I had to go back and have it changed, because they put me down as female.”
“You, a female?”
“It’s the name, Alec. It must have sounded girly to some bureaucrat.”
“Have you got your tax code on you?”
Blume pulled out his wallet and extracted a green-and-white plastic-covered card. “They changed it so I’m not female anymore.”
“May I?” said Caterina. Blume flicked the card onto the table between them. “BLMLCA67B09Z404X,” she read. “So your birthday is February 9. The Z404 shows you were born in the United States, OK?”
“I know that,” said Blume. “I know how to read these things.”
Caterina turned her notebook sideways, so Blume could see what she had written there: MMELDV88M57G713L.
“This corresponds to the name Manuela Ludovisi, born in August 1988,” she said. “This is the tax code that the gallery registered Manuela under. The G713 sequence corresponds to Pistoia, which is precisely what she said. Everything fits—except her accent and the fact this tax code was issued for the first time three years ago.”
Caterina paused to allow Blume to draw the obvious conclusion. But he just sat there looking underwhelmed.
“Either she was born in Pistoia or she was born abroad,” said Caterina. “The code tells us it was Pistoia, but the fact she didn’t have the code until three years ago tells us it was abroad. So, Commissioner, which is it?”
“Italian public offices are not paragons of efficiency,” said Blume. “They probably didn’t assign her a code, then she had to get one when she got her first job. And maybe she’s got rid of her accent in the past few years. I changed language and for the Public Records Office I also changed sex. So she can change accent. As far as I can see, you just don’t like her.”
“I think it was more a case of your liking her too much.”
“I’m not a teenage boy.”
“She is very beautiful. It’s hard to see beyond that.”
“Just what are you accusing her of, exactly?” asked Blume.
“I’m not accusing her of anything. I’m just wondering if she is who she says she is.”
“You mean she’s assumed a false identity? What would she do that for?”
Caterina finished the remains of her drink. “I don’t know, but she worked for two men who sort of specialized in that kind of thing.”
Caterina left the bar saying she had to pick up her son, Elia. Blume returned to the office, and secured the notebooks in the third drawer of his desk, the only one with a working lock and key. On the table was another memo relating to “concentrated instances of microcriminality prejudicial to the image of Rome in critical zones of cultural heritage.”
“Speaking of which,” said Inspector Panebianco as Blume showed him the memo before balling it up and lobbing it in an ambitious parabola toward the wastepaper basket, “I think Rospo wants to tell you something.”
“You mean he has already told you,” said Blume, going over and retrieving the crumbled ball of paper from behind the leg of a chair and firing it at its target from a more reasonable distance. “Spare me an unnecessary meeting with Rospo and tell me yourself.”
“You’ll be getting a report soon enough. I told him to do a proper one. Last night, several hours before Treacy was found dead, an elderly Asian couple was mugged. They failed to file a proper complaint and it seems that Rospo made an executive decision not to burden us with the disturbing news.”
“He wasn’t going to tell us at all?” said Blume, picking up the paper again and dropping it into the trash.
“It’s hard to say. But now he is. The couple are staying—were staying, since they left a few hours ago . . .”
“At the Hotel Noantri,” said Blume. “Good place to target. All that brass, high ceilings, smoked glass, fat, slow, wealthy, and elderly guests. Did Rospo think he could get away without mentioning it?”
“He could have, Commissioner. And the point is he did mention it.”
Dark-haired, sharp blue eyes, mid-thirties, angular, slim, and fit, Panebianco should have been a ladies’ man, but somehow was not. He had a way of looking at people with the air of a grown-up seeing through a child’s hopeless lies. Blume was not sure what his idea of fun might be, but whatever it was, it did not seem to accommodate silliness, disrespect, or dubious taste. Blume counted him as one of his most reliable colleagues, but remained a little wary of his mature restraint.
“The department does not need another disciplinary issue,” said Panebianco. “Not now, and not an incident involving foreign visitors. We already have a problem with Grattapaglia and the diplomat.”
Blume cursed. “Has that started already?”
“Apparently the diplomat got in touch with the Questore directly. He’s given us twenty-four hours to resolve the problem. I think they want Grattapaglia’s head on a plate, plus one scapegoat. In other words, Grattapaglia alone won’t do. They want to discipline a senior officer who was there at the time, which means you, me . . . or Inspector Mattiola.”
“You weren’t anywhere near Grattapaglia, Rosario. Mattiola is new on the job, so . . .”
“That leaves just you, sir.” Panebianco expressed no admiration for Blume’s implied sacrifice.
“Speaking of Mattiola,” said Panebianco, “she asked me to follow up some ideas she had about that girl at the gallery. Did she mention that to you?”
“Yes,” said Blume.
But Panebianco was looking straight at him, waiting for a fuller response, like his father used to do when Blume tried to be monosyllabic about trouble at school. He decided to turn the tables. “What do you make of it?”
“It looks like a simple case of tax evasion,” said Panebianco. “We could pass on the details to our colleagues in the Finance Police.”
“We could,” agreed Blume. “If it served any purpose. They’ll just say fine and sit on their hands waiting for a magistrate’s order that is unlikely to be issued. Same as us.”
“I see there is another aspect that Inspector Mattiola is interested in,” continued Panebianco. “She sees a possible connection between false ID papers, if that’s what we have here, and the fact that Treacy and his colleague John Nightingale were in the art forgery business.”
“You’ve been looking into that, have you?” said Blume.
“Well, not me so much as a very good friend of mine,” Panebianco said. “He works in the Art Forgery and Heritage Division of the Carabinieri.”
“Great, another one,” muttered Blume to himself.
Panebianco put his hand on his hip and said, “Excuse me?”
“Nothing. Is he someone you trust?”
“Absolutely.”
“How is it you know him?” asked Blume.
Panebianco stood back, adjusted his jacket severely. “We play soccer together.”
“Oh, five-a-side?” asked Blume hopefully. The whole force seemed to be made up of amateur soccer players. He wished someone would invite him to play. He was good at defense.
“No, proper soccer. A full-sized pitch. We have a league. A lot of players are former semi-professionals. Serie C. So it’s pretty serious.”
“Full strips and refs and all that?”
“Yes. We have a strip. Green and white. I don’t have to wear it, though. I’m the goalkeeper. My friend plays midfield.”
“And what does your friend say?”
“It seems Treacy did the art, and it was Nightingale who did the paperwork and placed the paintings. So I asked my friend if this Nightingale produced false bills of sale for paintings, but he didn’t know.”
“Is that it?”
“I didn’t want to inquire further without official cause.”
“I see,” said Blume. “Do you think I could talk to this friend of yours?” Blume picked up the receiver from a nearby desk phone and held it out in Panebianco’s direction. “How about now?” he said. “Phone him from here.”
Panebianco took the receiver, but put it down again, saying, “I don’t know his number by heart. I need to go back to my desk.”
“All right. Patch it through to me in my office,” said Blume.
Two minutes later, the phone on Blume’s desk rang. “I have him on hold, I’m putting you through,” said Panebianco.
“Good,” said Blume. “Wait, what’s his name?” But Panebianco was gone.
“Hello? Hello?” said a voice. A southerner.
“Hello, this is Commissioner Alec Blume,
squadra mobile
, who am I speaking to?”
“Lieutenant Colonel Faedda,” said the voice. Blume placed the accent as Sardinian. He pictured a thin and swarthy young man in full dress uniform sitting at his desk carefully arranging pencils.
“Inspector Panebianco didn’t introduce us properly,” said Blume.
“He’s useless, isn’t he?” said the Carabiniere. “You should see him on the pitch. Hopeless. What can I do for you, Commissioner?”
Blume was taken aback by the easy familiarity of the man’s tone. He erased the image of the uniform and the pencils, pictured feet on a desk. “I wanted to talk about John Nightingale and Henry Treacy,” he said.
“Yes, I’ve been looking at files all morning,” said the Carabiniere. “Not just on Rosario’s behalf, of course, since the case has been assigned to us. I’d definitely appreciate any help you could give me.”
This conversation was flowing in the wrong direction. “I don’t have anything I can give you,” said Blume.
“I realize it’s early days,” said Faedda. “We can wait for the autopsy. Then maybe we can meet, compare notes?”
“That’s really for the magistrate to decide,” said Blume rather stiffly.
“I hear the magistrate is Buoncompagno.”
“Yes,” said Blume.
“Buoncompagno is a man who prefers to have his decisions taken for him.”
Blume was suspicious of the casual frankness of the statement.
Faedda continued, “Look, a former colleague of mine—from before my time, really—is involved in the case. Colonel Farinelli. Have you met him?”
“I have,” said Blume, on his guard.
“Already? Well, then you’ll know who’s calling the shots, Commissioner. And the Colonel’s influence outreaches his rank. Have you spoken to John Nightingale yet?”
“No.” Blume felt judged.
“Me neither, and I don’t think I will get the chance. But you might. Now, I don’t know what you’ve found out there, but from our records here I can tell you Nightingale’s specialization is provenance. He appears to be exceptionally good at it.”
“Go on,” said Blume, reaching for a pen and a blank sheet of paper, and wrote down the name Faedda.
“Nightingale knows every branch of every minor aristocratic or rich bourgeois family in England, America, Germany, France. When generating a story, he never begins with a purely fictional character. Let’s put all this in the past tense since he seems to have been pretty inactive over the past few years. When he purported to be reselling on a painting, he always used the name of someone who really existed as having been a previous owner.”
Blume wrote the word “provenance” beneath the picture of the sad dog he had been drawing. “In what way did he use their name?” He started sketching a tree.
“He’d say the person had sat for the painting, commissioned it, ordered it, bought it, sold it, lost it. It didn’t matter. The important thing is to establish a connection with someone with reputation, money, or title who died some time ago.”
Blume tapped the tip of the pen on the branches of the tree, but the dots looked more like rain than leaves. He’d make it a stormy scene. “Don’t the families deny it?”
“I have never seen that happen. A family will go to great lengths to confirm that their ancestors were perspicacious people, ahead of the curve, gifted with good taste, or on friendly terms with famous artists. It’s the celebrity culture, Commissioner, and no one is immune.”
“I am,” thought Blume to himself. He scribbled in some curly storm clouds and wrote “family.”
“Another trick that Nightingale used to do was to attribute paintings to great houses, castles, and mansions that were destroyed in one of the wars. If the place no longer exists because the Americans bombed it, who’s to say what once hung on its walls?”
Blume put down his pen. “It’s more likely that the Germans would have bombed it, no?” he said.
“No, no. The Germans occupied but the Americans did most of the bombing. They still do.”
“Yeah, well . . . Did you find all this stuff about Treacy and Nightingale just now?”
Silence.
“Because it doesn’t sound like it to me,” continued Blume. “It’s almost as if you were following this case before it even happened, and that’s a bit strange . . . what’s your first name, Colonel?”
