The Fatal Touch

by Conor Fitzgerald

  “Which poor bastard?” asked the Colonel.

  “Aldo Moro,” said Blume.

  “Ah, him. Yes. That’s the sort of thing Chichiarelli did. Not under my instructions, of course.”

  After a few moments, Blume said, “Well?”

  “Well what, Commissioner?”

  “I’m waiting for the end of your story.”

  “There isn’t an end. Not a proper one.”

  “If you handled Chichiarelli, you must know quite a lot about what really happened in the Moro case.”

  “No one knows anything,” said the Colonel. “There are too many centers of power, none of which trusts the other, and too many transversal operators like Chichiarelli. Apart from me and a few others, most of the people from then are now dead—or in Parliament, of course. Now Treacy’s dead, too. I just need to see what he wrote. You are quite sure you found no notebooks or diaries or anything of the sort?”

  Blume shook his head. He did so with vigor and relish, but felt he might have overplayed it.

  “It would be a bad idea to lie to me,” said the Colonel. “Especially now that we are negotiating a possible joint venture that, let me remind you, involves no victims, no loss to the taxpayer, and no betrayal of colleagues. Let’s say the person who would be most upset at the idea of fruitful collaboration without his knowledge is Buoncompagno.”

  “I could live with that,” admitted Blume.

  “Good. Also because certain works, smallish, easy enough to transport, have been removed from this house and, I regret, not logged properly. It as if they never existed, or as if they were here when you arrived, and vanished during the search you and your inspector carried out. If they were to appear on the market and, say, Buoncompagno were to get a tip-off, and then the records show that the works were never logged by us or you, but you were in here first without a magistrate giving oversight, well then, unjust though it would be . . .”

  “I understand,” said Blume. “That will do.”

  “Excellent, so we have a deal?”

  Blume remained silent.

  “I am going to interpret that as a reluctant and principled yes,” said the Colonel. “Now, I hate to insist, but, in my capacity as your temporary business partner, I find it odd that you’re not interested in finding out more about Treacy’s papers.”

  “That’s funny,” said Blume. “Because I was just about to ask you, in my capacity as a permanent policeman, how you are so certain they exist.”

  “A word of warning,” said the Colonel, sitting forward in his seat. His drooping eyelids gave a soft and tired expression to his face, but, as Blume now saw, he had the eyes of a younger man, and his gaze was sharp and unremitting. Blume stared back, assuming a look of mild interest, waiting for the Colonel to deliver his warning.

  “Nobody interrogates me. Is that clear?” said the Colonel. “Nobody. I will not be questioned.” He allowed his eyelids to close for a moment, and his voice took on a more jovial tone. “At least not before lunch. Perhaps you will join me?”

  Blume stood up.

  “It’s too early for me, Colonel. But I wish you luck in your hunt for these papers.”

  “Thank you, though I am pessimistic. We shall be in touch soon, you understand that?”

  “I look forward to it,” said Blume.

  Chapter 10

  As blume left Treacy’s house, a sudden hard bang rang out and echoed blankly against the wall beside him. It took him a full two seconds to recognize it as the noon cannon, fired from the top of the gardens behind him. The sound was martial and startling, quite different from the muffled thud he heard when in his office across the river. The Maresciallo sat in a car directly in front of him, watching. He must have seen him jump and duck as the cannon was fired, but he showed no outward sign of amusement. Blume walked past him as if he had noticed neither the car nor its occupant.

  Blume reached the corner of the road where his car was slotted diagonally into the corner. Behind him, American students sat drinking beer outside a cafe. Blume was thinking about having coffee himself, when a woman rose from one of the tables and waved at him. It took him a moment to recognize Caterina. He went over and sat down opposite her. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve just had lunch.”

  “Didn’t I tell you to get back to the office?”

  “No, you didn’t, actually. And my shift’s over.”

  “Well, you need to go back, write up reports, and file . . . do you still have those notebooks?”

  “Yes,” Caterina pulled her bag from under the table.

  “You didn’t log them in as crime scene evidence?”

  “No.”

  “That’s not how it works, Inspector.”

  “I know. But what with Buoncompagno, the Carabinieri . . . I thought you might want to look at them first.”

  Blume leaned over and took out the notebooks. “Have you looked at them?” He opened the first one at random in the middle. “You know, you’re going to have to stop doing that.”

  “Doing what?” said Caterina.

  “Touching the hollow of your throat with your finger when you’re embarrassed.”

  Caterina brought her hand down from her neck and hid it under the table.

  “So you were reading them here, looking like a student—no, a teacher, I think we said—drinking Coca-Cola.”

  “I just wanted to get an idea of what they were.”

  “And?”

  “Two seem to be a sort of diary going right back to the sixties, and one a manual, full of instructions. It’s filled with formulas, ingredients, trade names. I was waiting for you, Commissioner. And I haven’t really had time to read them. I’ve been doing other things, too.”

  “Oh? And what would that be?”

  Caterina stroked water beads off her glass and said, “Do you know what my father calls ‘Coca-Cola’?” She poked her finger into the glass and spun the remaining shards of ice. “He calls it ‘hoha-hola.’ He can’t pronounce the letter “C,” because he’s a Tuscan. From a town called Signa, know it?”

  “Sure. It’s the exit on the A1 that always has a long line, adds thirty minutes to the trip.”

  “It’s famous for other things,” said Caterina. “It makes straw hats, for instance.”

  “Really?” said Blume.

  “You almost make it sound as if that’s not interesting. I only mention it because of that girl, Manuela, in Treacy’s gallery.”

  “The one you don’t like, I picked that up,” said Blume.

  “No, you’re wrong. She has the arrogance of youth, that’s all,” said Caterina. “I don’t think she’s a bad person at all. Spoilt and unhappy, maybe. But seeing as you were picking things up, did you notice her accent?”

  “Her accent? No, not really. It must have been one of the things I didn’t pick up.”

  “Me neither,” said Caterina. “Not at first, because she has no accent we might recognize easily. But she’s supposed to be from Pistoia. That’s what she told us, right?”

  “I see what you’re getting at,” said Blume. “But young people don’t have such pronounced accents as they used to. All the dialects are dying out in Italy. And now that you mention it, her accent wasn’t entirely Roman, so maybe it was Tuscan.”

  “She doesn’t have a trace of a Tuscan accent. Not a trace. I know what it sounds like. Maybe Umbria, north Lazio. Somewhere nearby.”

  “That’s more or less Tuscany,” said Blume. “What’s the difference? Why would she say she was from Tuscany if she wasn’t? Only a Tuscan could think that everyone wants to come from Tuscany.”

  “I don’t know why she said it. Also there’s no trace of her birth in the records.”

  “You checked her out?”

  “Sure,” said Caterina. “I can make phone calls from here.” She leaned over to retrieve her bag from in front of Blume, pulled out her notebook, and flicked through it. “According to the APR, three Manuela Ludovisi’s have been born in Italy, but the old
est of them is only eight.”

  “So, she was born abroad,” said Blume. “Did you check that out, too?”

  “No. I didn’t have time,” said Caterina. “But I did check school enrollments, ID card records, and driving licenses. Or rather, Rosario did. He helped me from the office. He also downloaded and printed out the photo of her in the Public Records Office. The one in her false ID.”

  “Inspector Panebianco thought he should do that? I ordered him to get copies of Treacy’s ID photo, I’m glad to see he found the time to satisfy your requests, too.”

  “He obviously thought it was worth pursuing,” said Caterina, annoyance creeping into her tone. “He didn’t comply immediately, but then he found out some things, and phoned me back and told me he had put a copy of her photo on my desk.”

  “What sort of things did he find out?”

  “Manuela Ludovisi got her first ID card three years ago. Her tax code dates back to the same time. In other words, both her tax code and her ID card date back to a month or two before she got the job at the gallery.”

  “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.”

  Chapter 11

  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 o
f 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?”