The Fatal Touch (52 page)
“Yes.”
“Including the cuckolding and the deception?”
Nightingale nodded.
“Good. Keep thinking of that.”
The Colonel, standing about half a meter away now, raised his pistol, and shot Nightingale through the ear.
The crack was loud but the room absorbed it quickly. Nightingale fell to the floor with a soft thump, and the thunder outside rolled and rain began to patter loudly on the panes. Blume expected Angela to scream. But the only one who had shouted out was himself, and his voice was drowned by the shot, the thunder, and the rain. Angela already held Nightingale’s head in her arms, but was dry-eyed.
“I never liked him,” said the Colonel, almost as a casual aside to Blume.
“And he’s the only other person who knew you sold forgeries to the Mafia,” said Blume.
“Except you,” said the Colonel, “and maybe Angela.”
Angela was standing upright, her foot planted in the half-moon pool that had leaked from under Nightingale’s head. In her hands, she held three paintings of similar size.
“Those are about the right size,” said the Colonel. “Smart girl. We’ll start with the top one. Put the other two on the table, on the drawings.”
Beneath a treacle veneer and thick ridges of poorly applied paint, the face of a bearded man stared out in anguish. Two doves, or angels, or clouds, or billows of mold and mildew appeared in the background.
“It’s not going to be there, Colonel,” said Blume. “He’s hidden it somewhere else. You need to read the text of his memoirs more carefully.”
“I reckon there is an eighty percent chance of your being right,” said the Colonel. “But it is a hundred percent chance that you would say anything to regain some control, prolong your life. So let’s just see, shall we?”
Blume turned his head in the direction of Angela to communicate some sort of apology for his failure, but her gaze was fixed on the Colonel. Not on the pistol, but on the Colonel’s face. In her hand she held a retro-chic silver Dunhill lighter, its top flipped back, her thumb on the roller switch, the corner of the painting a centimeter distant.
“Don’t even think . . . ” began the Colonel.
Still watching the Colonel, she flicked her thumb, and the lighter spat out a wispy orange flame. It licked at the corner of the canvas, then seemed to die. But just as it gave up, a ghostly blue wave of flame rolled diagonally across the face, then left the canvas, and continued up Angela’s arm. She let out a cry and threw the painting away from her. She successfully slapped away the blue flame which seemed to carry no heat. The discarded painting, looking none the worse, wafted down to the table, and landed on top of the other paintings. The Colonel seemed to relax. Lazily, the blue flame followed its descent, and then swam back and forth over the glistening painted surface of the canvas, puttering and almost on the point of going out.
Blume now noticed that a sputtering offshoot of the original flame was hovering around the bottles of solvent and turps at Angela’s feet, and yet another flame, this one yellow, had wound itself around the leg of the easel. The Colonel, moving faster than Blume had ever seen, was advancing toward the table with the sketches. He pushed them aside to get to Angela. They tumbled and glided, creating an up-current of air. Finally the shining solvent and kerosene on the face of the man with the unhappy eyes exploded, and the flame immediately caught hold of the edges of the others in the pile. Angela leaped out of the way, and kicked over the bottle of turps and the can of kerosene. Blume jerked himself out of his armchair, the surge of power in his legs and the left side of his upper body easily overriding the dizziness and pain in his head.
Angela reached him as he got to a standing position. The last blue flames rose upwards and with a sudden outward pulse of air, the entire area where Angela had been standing burst into yellow and orange fire. The Colonel stood in the middle of it roaring. He fired two shots at them, one of which whined like a mosquito as it passed. Nothing followed. Now he seemed to be hurling fireballs, as he tried to throw the burning sketches out of the circle of flame. He seemed to be dancing, too, in a rage or in fear as the flames caught the lower half of his legs.
Without so much as a preliminary smoldering, the bookshelf and all the books behind flashed yellow and joined in the blaze, filling the room in seconds with heavy sooty smoke. The back of the chair on which Blume had been sitting was burning in sympathy. Angela seemed to be moving not away from the Colonel, but toward him. Small conflagrations started dropping from the ceiling, even though it did not seem to be on fire.
With pain and difficulty, Blume grabbed Angela with his left arm and pulled her away, his intention being to help, but he found it was he who was leaning on her. The Colonel continued to roar. They made it through the door into the kitchen, but somehow it too had filled with smoke. They stumbled onwards, sweeping away the bead curtain, and found themselves in the glass-covered greenhouse. Both of them suddenly stopped in amazement as they felt the coolness and heard the rain drumming away on the glass above. Blume breathed in deeply.
The doorway through which they came was blowing out masses of black smoke, and the bead curtain rattled and clicked wildly as the billow of smoke flapped it from behind. The lower beads were on fire now, crackling and then exploding like popcorn. It seemed impossible that they had been in there. Without warning, the curtain became a series of fiery pillars, and then suddenly was gone, and they could see a great ball of rage was coming toward them. Blume watched the object with a sense of detachment, dimly aware that it was the Colonel hurtling toward them, trying to escape.
What Angela did next was to fix itself in Blume’s mind for many years to come. She reached over to the stove, and with extraordinary strength, grabbed the large copper pot on top. She glanced into it, where she may have seen her own face reflected back at her. It was full of liquid, and as the Colonel staggered to the doorway, she hurled it on him.
Perhaps she saw water in the pot, and if so, her intentions were merciful. But the pot contained not water but stand-oil. Linseed oil that had been boiled for several hours under pressure, as Treacy himself explained in his never-to-be-published book.
Even before it hit the Colonel, the oil ignited. With a strangely dry-sounding thud that shook the floor, the smoky orange flames enveloping him flashed yellow and then white. The Colonel vanished behind a hot sheet of flame, leaving a scream behind.
Angela ran directly through the greenhouse to the door communicating with the outside, and yanked it open, then vanished into safety. The freshly opened door sent a blast of delicious wet and cool air into the room, which reversed the direction of the swirls of smoke coming out of the burning room, and now seemed to be sucking back in all that it had belched out a moment before. Blume’s vision suddenly cleared. It looked as if the fire had decided to spare Treacy’s greenhouse.
Calmly, feeling sorrowful at all that was happening, Blume went over to the granite sink and slowly filled a terra-cotta pitcher with fresh water. He picked it up, stepped through the smoking gap where the beads had been, traversed the blasted kitchen, noting with regret that it, too, was burning on high, and reached the white blaze that marked the doorway into the living room. A massive dark shape was rolling on the ground, and Blume, full of pity, cast the contents of his pitcher at it. But the water droplets turned to steam and the steam exploded with almost as much force as the oil had, sending the Colonel crawling madly away from his new tormentor, back towards the living room where the fine shoes of a smaller, silent body were also beginning to burn.
Blume gagged as an overwhelmingly sweet and burnt fast-food smell rushed out of the room. He ran back through the kitchen and into the cool greenhouse. From above his head came a cracking and squeaking sound like thousands of ice cubes being thrown into hot water. He looked up and then down again quickly, as a shower of glass exploded overhead and came crashing down, with the rain following. The fire was sparing nothing.
The flames had insinuated themselves across the lattice of wooden frames holding the sloping glass roof, and were crisscrossing the timber beam holding up the glazing. The glass was blackening and shimmering and breaking everywhere, some shattering as it dropped in full panes to the floor. The Colonel made a final bellow like a distant bull, and from the other side Blume heard Angela calling. He ran toward her and the coolness of the night air, glass, sparks, and burning wood falling about him.
The fire crew parked their engines on a bed of cream narcissus flowers in the garden and attacked the fire from there, leaving the street outside free. It soon filled with Carabinieri from the neighboring barracks, some of them under umbrellas, and a crowd of American students from John Cabot. The crowd was becoming quite festive as the fire raged on and the rumors of what had happened started circulating. In the middle, unnoticed and unexamined, sat the Colonel’s car.
One of the first to arrive on the scene was Rosario Panebianco, solicitous, gentle, and persuasive. He had Angela in an ambulance and under escort within minutes. When Blume told him to fuck off, he nodded with understanding and was soon back with a blue waterproof jacket with “Polizia” written on the back in reflective letters, and a colorful golf umbrella. He ordered an Agente to stand close to Blume and hold it.
“Commissioner,” she said, “you are shivering and there is blood on your collar and back. Put on the jacket.”
Blume decided to comply.
Caterina arrived as the medics were on the point of asking his colleagues to force him into the ambulance. Blume called her over, told the Agente with the umbrella to get lost, and nodded in the direction of the Colonel’s car.
“Treacy’s manuscript is on the backseat. Get it. Then hold it or destroy it. It’s just a copy.”
“I know,” said Caterina. “I was there when he made the copy, remember?”
Blume looked at her in confusion. “We need to get rid of them all, originals, copies, the lot.”
“I’ll see to it.” She pointed at the flames and smoke shooting up from behind the wall. “Is it true what they’re saying about the Colonel being in there?”
“Yes. Nightingale, too.”
“Oh no,” said Caterina. “Any chance he made it out?”
“None,” said Blume.
She stepped over a puddle on the cobbles, and turned around. “When I left the house this morning, Rospo was asleep in a car opposite. He wasn’t in a great mood, says you were supposed to relieve him. I began to worry about you then. Then you called and immediately after I heard about Paoloni, and then you disappeared again. I should have guessed it would be here. Sorry.”
Blume tried to wave a forgiving hand, but he couldn’t feel his arm or quite remember which muscles to tense.
“Alec, will you please stop sitting out here shivering and bleeding in the rain. You look so bad people are frightened to come over and tell you to get into the ambulance.”
Blume allowed himself to be taken to San Camillo Hospital. He was left languishing for an indeterminate amount of time in a small white-and-green room, which smelled of tuna, then a doctor came in, examined him, shone a light in his pupils, and went jogging out, returning five minutes later in the company of three male nurses and a trolley. Half an hour later, Blume was undergoing emergency surgery to relieve a build-up of pressure in his skull.
Then he slept.
When he awoke, the nausea and headaches has decreased to a manageable level, and Blume announced himself fit and ready to leave. He made the announcement several times without drawing any response. They had shaved the back of his head and placed an oversized white bandage on it, but it did not hurt in the slightest. Not even to the touch. He thought he might make it home, clear up his apartment, and have some supper. He left the room and outlined his plans to a nurse in the corridor, who led him back to bed.
Blume protested in authoritative tones, but was hushed.
“You’ll wake the other patients up.”
“What time is it?”
“Half past four in the morning.”
He slept fifteen more hours and found himself groggily agreeing to spend one more night in hospital. The following morning, he thanked them all for the excellent treatment. Even the doctor. If he had one complaint, he said, it was the excessive hygiene and the constant smell of bleach from the lime-colored wall.
The doctor actually went over to the wall and smelled it, then came back and announced Blume would have to stay for another battery of tests.
“What for?”
“Phantosmia.”
“What’s that?”
“Olfactory hallucinations. Could be serious.”
The following morning, he learned that the results of the test would be ready in two more days. He announced he was discharging himself anyhow.
“You shouldn’t drive. Can someone pick you up?”
Blume called Caterina.
“I’m on duty.”
“Is that a no?”
“Just that I need to let the others know where I’m going.”
“As long as you’re not ashamed,” said Blume.
As she drove him back to his house, she filled him in on some of the developments. “Angela Solazzi was discharged from the hospital immediately. She’s staying with Emma now. She’s been in contact twice, says she’ll cooperate as much as we want.”
