The Fatal Touch (6 page)
Grattapaglia stepped back without a word.
Blume nodded to Caterina. “Inspector, shall we go?”
Blume spoke as he walked down the lane, “We still have to treat a death from unknown causes as if it was a murder. Because it could be a murder. And to do this properly, we have to convince ourselves that it
is
a murder, which means ignoring all my experience which says it isn’t. Are you following?”
“I wish you had not humiliated Grattapaglia like that in front of me,” said Caterina. “You were the one who said I had to start getting on better with people.”
“Too bad. You blew your chance. I detailed you and him to go door-to-door together, and you didn’t.”
“So you’re punishing me too, by angering him all the more?”
“Sort of. You need to learn to handle this sort of petty stuff. I don’t know what it was like in Immigration Affairs, but it seems to me you must have been surrounded by selfless superior beings such as the rest of the force can only dream of.”
Caterina increased her pace to keep up as Blume hurried down Via Benedetta. She caught up with him as they reached Piazza della Malva. “Most of my old colleagues were petty bastards, too. Was he married?”
“Treacy? Not according to his ID card, but he could have been living with someone. We’ll see now. You know, I’ve been turning that name over in my mind. It’s familiar to me. He was an artist, according to his ID card.”
“A painter?” asked Caterina.
“I guess so. It’s bad enough putting down ‘artist’ as your profession, but it’s almost justifiable if you’re a painter.”
“Or a musician.”
“Yeah, a musician might do that, but it would not be justifiable. As long as he was not a writer or a photographer, I’ll forgive him his pretention.”
Blume waited till a small knot of American students outside the John Cabot University had passed, then turned on to Via Corsini. Caterina wandered over to the first house on the short terrace to check the number. “Which house?” she asked.
“Number 15. Down the far end, probably,” said Blume.
Only one side of the street had buildings on it. The other was flanked by railings that fenced in the overgrown courtyard of
Villa Corsini. The last house was number 14.
In front of them was the entrance to the Botanical Gardens, to their left was the Podogora barracks of the Carabinieri.
“Where the hell is number 15?” asked Blume.
“We could ask the Carabinieri for directions,” said Caterina.
“That would look good, wouldn’t it?” said Blume. “Phone lovely Linda and get a confirmation of the house number.”
He stood at the front gate of the Botanical Gardens and found himself looking directly at a dark-suited park keeper with a full beard, who sat in his white booth gazing down the strangely rustic street with a proprietorial air, like some Sicilian
gabellotto
. Blume folded his arms, nodded, and was ignored. He decided to let it go and drifted over to the side of the street out of the man’s line of vision, and found himself before a green wooden door that seemed to be a side entrance into the gardens. A square marble slab was attached to the wall beside the door, the number 15 chiseled into it, off-white against white. Below it was an intercom with a clear plastic button and a single name: Henry Treacy.
By the time Caterina arrived to say they had confirmed the address, Blume had pressed the intercom button three times.
“Nobody there,” he said after a while. He put his bag on the ground and stood back, looking up to the top of the wall as if he had half a mind to scale it. “This looks like a side door into the Botanical Gardens,” he said. “Did Treacy live in a flower bed or something? We need to go around to the other side.”
The guard in the white box watched carefully as they came through the main entrance. Blume took a few steps to the right, but he could already see there was nothing there but wall.
“Hey!”
Blume stopped and put down his bag which was beginning to weigh. He waited for Caterina to flash a police ID card and send the guard reluctantly back to his post.
Together they stepped over a red-and-white plastic chain that looped around a square of manicured lawn bordered by outsized yellow daisies.
Caterina looked at the wall, then back at Blume, and shrugged. He went over to the wall, folded back a deep curtain of ivy, slapped the dusky ocher wall behind, then clapped the dust off his hands. “This is the perimeter wall,” he said. “The green door on the other side was more or less at this point here, which means there must be two walls and a narrow passageway between them. And they must lead to that garden lodge there.” He pointed to a small two-story house with a red tile roof to their left. “We could get in from this side, or go back and enter through that green door. I have some picklocks in the tactical bag.”
A few minutes later, Blume was working at the tumbler lock on the door. “Almost have it,” he said after five minutes. “I’m a bit out of practice.”
Eventually, he pulled out a crowbar from the same bag, stuck it into the wood frame next to the strike plate, and hurled his body against the door. The wood of the door jamb was so damp and spongy that the only noise it made as it gave way was a squeak and a sigh.
Directly in front of them was the wall they had been looking at from inside the Botanical Gardens. Blume pushed the door half closed against its splintered frame, and turned right into a passageway that was not quite wide enough for two people to walk abreast. Both sides were covered in ivy and wet moss. The passage was about ten yards long and led up to another door, this one a little sturdier. No longer keen to hone his lock-picking skills, Blume slammed the crowbar under the lock mechanism, jerked it around roughly till he felt it reach deeper in, then started wrenching it back and forth. After several attempts he motioned Caterina over.
“On the count of three,” he said, steadying his hands on the bar in preparation. When he reached three, they pushed against the door, but their timing was slightly off. They did it again, and the door burst open so easily that they almost fell over each other.
The sudden brightness in the room into which they now entered was disorientating. They stood there blinking for a few moments, Caterina trying to understand how the inside of a house could have so much light. As her eyes adjusted, she realized they were standing below a sloping glass roof. Ficus, bamboo, dracena plants, and small trees she could not identify grew from wide-bodied blue glazed urns sitting on a terracotta floor. “We’ve just broken into one of the botanical hothouses.”
“No,” said Blume. “This is part of the house. A sort of add-on greenhouse used as a workroom. Hot in here.”
He bent down, rummaged in his bag, and came up with a box of latex gloves, and wiggled his fingers like an important surgeon as he put them on.
The glass room contained wickerwork chairs with yellow cushions, a ceramic-topped table with a demitasse coffee cup on it. Blume noticed some bookshelves and, in the far left corner, a high, long work desk, like he remembered from science lessons in school, except this was made from mahogany. A leather-bound folio-size volume lay beneath three quarto volumes, also leather bound. Beside them sat an ebony box, open to reveal five rows of silver-topped jars, filled with colored powders. Three crystal jars held dozens of paintbrushes.
Blume peered at the top book, but the lettering on the cover was too faded for him to make out the title. He opened it; the text was in Latin.
In the corner of the greenhouse, next to the bead curtain, stood a squat cast-iron wood-fired stove, on top of which sat a tall copper stockpot and beside it a double boiler.
A clacking noise made him turn around as Caterina pushed aside a bamboo bead curtain covering what must have once been the back door to the building. She stepped inside.
“There’s a kitchen here,” said Caterina’s voice. “And another stove.”
Blume followed Caterina in. The light was less intense and the whitewashed walls, the gray marble washstand, and the heavy brass taps made the room feel cool. A pastry-board lay half across a large rectangular ivory marble table, on which three boxes of eggs and an earthenware jug of what appeared to be milk sat. An ice-cube tray filled with black liquid shimmered slightly in response to the impact of Blume’s footsteps as he moved around the table, taking it in. A zinc box contained herbs, flakes of charcoal, dried leaves, and a collection of gnarled woody fruits of some sort. In here was another stove, only this was modern, boxy, made from burnished gunmetal steel.
He opened the refrigerator. “A lot of eggs. Milk, cheese,” he announced.
The milk smelled old. “Beer. Garlic, feta cheese, some withered greens. A single man’s refrigerator.” The cold green bottles of beer clinked invitingly as he closed the refrigerator. Tuborg and Peroni. He used to drink both. He felt thirsty. There was no real need for him not to drink. It wasn’t as if he had had a problem. Apart from the weight thing, but not drinking hadn’t helped much there. He’d think about it later.
The next room, the living room, was lit by two dirty-paned windows. Blume immediately noticed three easels. One was folded and propped in the corner. One was gripping a pristine white board holding red-tinted paper with the first gray lines of what looked like a foot.
Stacked behind the third easel was a collection of paintings and drawings of different sizes, some framed, some mounted on matt boards, some loose. Blume estimated they numbered around thirty, and began to leaf through them. The furniture was old and uncomfortable. The settee was stuffed with horsehair, the chairs hardbacked and spindly, the walls and window frames had the yellow and gray patina of ancient paint. The front door was made of heavy wood and held in place by rusted strap hinges. The grit and cobwebs showed it had not been opened in years. The greenhouse where they had come in was the only functioning entrance. The walls of this room were covered with framed pictures. Some were paintings, but many were sketches, mostly unfinished.
“No TV,” said Caterina, “and the furniture is decrepit.”
“You don’t like it?”
“I love it. Who wouldn’t? I’m just trying to make myself feel better that I rent a small apartment and it takes me an hour to get to the station, while an unemployed foreign drunk gets to live in the Botanical Gardens in the center of town. Or does that sound resentful?”
“Want to buy mine?” said Blume. “It’s near San Giovanni.”
“You’re selling?”
“I might have to. The man in the apartment below me is suing for
€
85,000 in damages.”
“What happened?”
“Plumbing problems in my bathroom. Leaked into his apartment. You don’t need the details.”
“Yeah, but
€
85,000 in damages. He’s obviously exploiting the situation,” said Caterina.
“Two things. First, he’s a lawyer. Second, he doesn’t even live there. That’s why the damage got so bad. It looks like the leak had been going on for at least seven months but no one was in there to notice. He didn’t discover it until he opened up the apartment with the idea of renting it. I saw it myself. I don’t think he’s exaggerating, to be honest. The effect was very unpleasant. Getting it fixed cost me just a couple of hundred. But I may have to sell my apartment to pay for the damages below.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Commissioner. What about building insurance?”
“Ha-ha.”
“Do you have a good lawyer?”
“I don’t think I want a lawyer. Just cost more money, and there’s not much to contest when you fill your neighbor’s apartment with . . . Guercino.”
“Guercino?”
“There. The artist. Barbieri was his real name. He was cross-eyed, so they called him Guercino.”
Blume was squinting at a pen-and-wash figure. “That’s definitely Guercino,” he said to himself, surprised at knowing the style of drawing so easily; surprised, too, at hearing his father’s labored pronunciation in his head. He remembered his father’s effort to get his foreign tongue to make the “tsch” sound of the soft Italian “c,” while trying to remain casual and natural about it. To Caterina he said, “And what makes you say he was unemployed?”
“Who?”
“Treacy. Concentrate on where we are, Inspector. You called Treacy an unemployed foreign drunkard.”
“The fact he died drunk and the way he was dressed. But if he had this place and these paintings—I don’t know what to make of him now.”
“A lot of northern Europeans, even if they have money, don’t dress as well as they might,” said Blume. He remembered his father’s habit of wearing socks with his Birkenstock sandals, white legs, checkered shirts. “Americans, too. And don’t feel resentful. Treacy lives nowhere now.”
“It came out wrong,” she said. She watched as he resumed leafing through the canvases and sheets on the table again, this time more slowly. “You’re looking at those pictures like they meant something.”
“My mother specialized in works such as this. This etching by Fontana . . . If any of these are authentic, the only question is why Treacy didn’t live in a grander place than this.”
They continued their exploration of the house. A cast-iron spiral staircase in the far corner of the room led up to a single bedroom which gave on to a larger bathroom containing a huge enamel tub with lion-claw feet and a large rosewood medicine cabinet with latticework windows. The ceiling was low and sloping.
