The Fatal Touch (49 page)

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-to-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 thought. 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.

During the night, Blume’s cell phone died. In the morning, as he stood in the ransacked kitchen, Blume realized the thieves had stolen his recharger, too.

He cleaned up his house a bit, and as he was doing so, the buzzer sounded. Blume allowed a man to come up and measure the door frame. They haggled a bit over the price and vehemently disagreed over the utility of expensive anti-theft features. Blume said he didn’t want them, the man pointed to his apartment and expressed surprise that Blume had not learned from bitter experience.

“They’d have got in anyhow,” said Blume.

“Not with the anti-thrust, kick-stop, reinforced frame with anti-intrusion . . .”

“No,” said Blume.

“The police recommend that you have a door with these features.”

“The police know nothing,” said Blume.

The man looked offended. Then he had another idea. “They won’t insure you unless you have . . .”

“No!” said Blume. “Look, I’m sorry. I can’t afford it. How long will it take to get the door replaced?”

“Seeing as you are not interested in extras, and it’s a standard frame, we could do it today. If the warehouse has one in stock. This afternoon?”

“Great. Someone will be here for you.”

He saluted the disgruntled workman, then hunted around for his telephone book. He had not used it in years, but Paoloni’s number had to be in there somewhere. He decided to clear up the scattered books and papers as he looked for it, and for a while forgot the original reason for his cleanup. He hunted with more purpose, but it was nowhere to be found. Using his home phone, he called directory inquiries, but Paoloni was not listed.

Eventually, he decided to go directly to Paoloni’s house. Typical of Paoloni not to bother phoning him at home.

Blume plugged his phone into the recharger in the car and tried to use it immediately, but the battery symbol flashed and the phone would not even switch itself on.

He circled for a while below Paoloni’s apartment building before finding a narrow space three streets away into which he slotted his car. All the buildings in the area were part of the same massive development from the early 1980s. Pale yellow brick facades, square windows with brown roll-down shutters, cement gray cornices. The place looked better at night.

He walked back one hundred and fifty meters to Paoloni’s building. He caught the front door as it swung shut behind a woman with a shopping bag, blocking the door with his hand before it hit his face and sweeping away the woman’s apology with his other hand. Still smiling politely, while absently filing away aspects and curves of the woman’s body in memory for later contemplation and evaluation, he stepped into the elevator, which took him to the third floor. As he stepped out, a door at the far end of the hall clicked softly closed, as if he were not the person they had been waiting for.