The Fatal Touch (56 page)
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, became 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.”
“What about you?”
“I don’t want to quit the force. I would not know what to do with myself or where to go.”
“Neither do I,” said Caterina.
“Think about it. Think about your son. You’re on your own. It’s a dangerous job, poorly paid, bad hours, and you carry the violence you see every day inside you. Maybe someday the violence will hit you and your son will be left to fend for himself. Richer people live longer. Don’t just say no to the idea. Think about it.”
“While I think about it, what happens?”
“I think I’ll carry out my plan anyhow, give this back to its rightful owner. Then if she offers you a reward, as I think she will, you can decide then.”
“But you’re not taking anything?”
“I don’t need to. I’ve no one depending on me. I’ve no children, relations, or debts.”
“Always on your own.”
“Yes,” said Blume.
Caterina went over to the sofa, removed the painting from beside him, and sat down in its place.
She pulled the sheet over her shoulders, shivered a little, and said, “It will never get published, will it?”
Blume pushed the sheet off himself and contemplated light burn marks on his forearm. “I doubt it. He never got to finish it. And Treacy doesn’t get to live happily ever after, does he?”
“You mean he is not eternal like you are?” said Caterina. She reached out and yanked his ear. “Up close like this, I can see your wrinkles, and did you know you’re going gray at the sides?”
“Silver hair, not gray,” said Blume. “He got killed by his own daughter. I hope to do better than that.”
“Maybe you should beget yourself a daughter first before you jump to optimistic conclusions. I think it’s sad that no one will read Treacy. I didn’t even get to read it in the end. Just the beginning bit with you, and then I went ahead on my own for a while before I had to give up. How does it end?”
“With the narrator lying dead on a cold Trastevere street and an Inspector called Mattiola feeling the base of his skull for evidence of a countercoup blow,” said Blume.
Caterina shook her head. “That’s not nice. How does it end, really?”
“I can’t remember exactly,” said Blume. “He was not always chronological; some of it is cryptic, sometimes impenetrable. And we do know the ending. We know it better than he does.”
“What about his version, how does it end?”
“It becomes disjointed, breaks down into notes, half sentences, cryptic phrases, scrawls. He was dying.”
“I liked when you were reading it to me. He was in London when we stopped. What happened then?”
“He went back to Ireland, got fed up, and decided to walk down to Rome.”
“Very funny,” said Caterina. She turned her back on him and pulled the sheet tighter around her shoulders. “I’m interested in finding out how he came to be in Italy, what it was like for him to spend his life here, a stranger in a strange land. I want to know what happened to his parents, whether he saw them again. I want to see how he started off and ended up alone.”
Blume pulled up the bedcover and wrapped it over the sheet and around her shoulders. “No, really,” he said. “He did. He walked through France into Italy.”
“That’s the next bit?”
“Yes,” said Blume. He left the room and came back carrying the first notebook, climbed back into the warmth beside her. He opened it at the beginning, and started turning the pages until he found the place he wanted.
“This is where we were.”
Caterina closed her eyes. “Read it, Alec. Out loud and slowly.”
“After London, I went back to Ireland for a few months, but it did not work out. There was nobody there for me, and all I did was spend the little I had saved drinking pints of plain in Sinnnotts pub. It was one golden afternoon there, when I was on my fourth pint, that I conceived of the idea of walking away from it all. Literally walking away.
“No one believes me when I tell them I walked to Paris and then Rome, but, with the help of one ferry boat, that is just what I did. The walking started in Normandy, but the beginning of my journey was a freezing cold morning of drizzle as I left Killiney Hill Station for Bray to catch the mid-morning train down to Rosslare in Country Wexford, where that evening I boarded the ferry that would bring me to Cherbourg. It was June, but the Atlantic was still in a swollen and wintry mood, and rolled me back and forth across the lounge bench inside where I tried to sleep, without success, and doused me in icy spray when I went up on deck to vomit, with great success.
“We docked in Cherbourg at lunchtime, and having completely emptied my stomach of all content during the night, I was ravenous. Every time I go to France now, I search for a croissant as buttery, savory, and perfect as the one I had that morning in a bar in Cherbourg. I had to mime my wishes and point to what I wanted to eat like a well-trained monkey, and I was aware of seamen smelling of diesel oil and surrounded in black tobacco smoke laughing at my expense, but hunger swept away all embarrassment. It also swept away four days’ of the allowance I had given myself. It was not until my third day in France that I realized how much they had overcharged me.
“I had travelers’ checks in British pounds and some francs. The travelers’ checks were a parting gift from my stepfather on the night before I left. He pulled them out of his jacket pocket with a jocular expression on his face, as if someone had put them there unbeknownst to him and he was just discovering them, like a kindly uncle might discover candies and thruppenny bits in his pocket. Ho-ho-ho, what are these? My inheritance, you bastard. Enough to live on for one frugal month.
