The Fatal Touch

by Conor Fitzgerald

  “ ‘Who is coming for me?’ I asked. ‘Is it my mother?’

  “ ‘No, son, they’ve sent a taxi.’

  “When I was younger, each month was a compact unit containing so many events and changes that they had to be compressed just to fit. But now an entire year can drift by empty of significance. I thought when I started this I might be able to unpack some of those compressed events and examine them in detail, but I find I have forgotten most of them. Life then was brimming, but I still have to pass over years as if they had hardly happened at all.

  “After my expulsion from Clongowes, they sent me to the Presentation Brothers in Bray, but I got kicked out of that, too, this time for setting fire to an outhouse. No one saw me, but I was stupid enough to turn up to my next lesson reeking of paraffin and smoke, and was sent to the headmaster’s office, from whose window the smoldering heap across the field was still visible. A red fire engine stood in the middle of the field, one fireman dribbling his hose on the black patch of ground, a second fireman watching. The headmaster waved his arm at the window, and declared,

  See you yon dreary plain, forlorn and wild,

  The seat of desolation, void of light,

  Save what the glimmering of these livid flames

  Casts pale and dreadful?

  “Then he burst out laughing, and took some time to get himself under control. As he dabbed his watering eyes with the back of his hand, I figured it was probably going to be all right after all if he found it so funny, but then he said, ‘I’ve phoned your house, and nobody is in, so I’m afraid it is up to you to tell them you have been expelled. We are also considering prosecution, and shall certainly be seeking damages. That is all.’

  “I ended up in Ballybrack Technical College, and, in between the metalwork, remedial English, and getting beaten up, finally learned something useful: basic carpentry. But after less than a year, I had left that school, too. This time I was not expelled, I merely wandered off and no one seemed to notice.

  “One morning, I was sitting on the number 45 bus on my way to Bray when a group of kids, three boys and a girl, in front of me started slashing the rubbery blue seats with penknives. One of them turned around to see if I wanted to make something of it, then nudged his companion. Here comes trouble, I thought. Then the girl turned around and said, ‘Henry!’ And I looked at her for a while, then finally said, disappointed but also kind of awed, ‘Monica!’

  “She was going through her anti-authority phase. Cut adrift and allowed to do her own thing. I was the perfect companion.

  “In the summer of 1966, a woman called Mrs. Heath, who was connected in some vague way with someone who knew my stepfather, allowed me to use an empty mews in her garden. The deal was that I would do odd jobs, like washing the forty-two windows of her house (each of which had four panes and, of course, two sides, so it was no small task), weed the garden, clean some of the slime from around the pond, cut the grass, run errands. In exchange, I got to live in an empty stone mews without electricity. But it had running water, a bathroom, a permanently damp bed, some black oak furniture, and was effectively my first apartment. It was an unheard-of freedom that rendered me attractive to Monica.

  “For a West Brit, Mrs. Heath was a good woman. She encouraged me to paint, and paid for the supplies. When I did something, she would ‘air’ it in the house, since the mews was too damp. I thought she was ancient, but she was probably only in her thirties. After a few months she trusted me enough not to follow me around the house as I cleaned the windows or carried mahogany chairs and tables from one room to another, for she was always rearranging her life, ready to start afresh.

  “One morning, Monica and I found ourselves alone in the drawing room. Mrs. Heath was away for a few hours and had asked me to dust the room. As I was lifting silverware and china trinkets from the mantelpiece, Monica said, ‘We should steal something.’

  “I turned around to see if she was serious.

  “ ‘Something really valuable. To make it worthwhile. Something that we could sell and then use the money to go somewhere.’

  “Her suggestion was to go to London, a city where everything was happening. I was attracted by the idea, too, but did not want to steal from Mrs. Heath. But I knew Monica would be disappointed if I made bourgeois moral objections to her idea, so I pointed out the practical difficulties of getting a flat, putting down a deposit, finding a job. Since she still lived with her parents and I was the one with the independent life, she deferred to me on these points. But the result was to set Monica thinking along more ambitious lines.

  “One day when Mrs. Heath had left us alone in her house while she went out to pick some apples, Monica pointed at a large oil painting over the mantelpiece of redcoat soldiers, rearing horses, and an elephant. ‘What’s that painting?’ she asked.

  “ ‘Just because it’s the biggest doesn’t mean it’s the best or the most valuable in the room,’ I declared, trying to sound more authoritative than I felt in an effort to deflect the conversation from where I knew Monica was going to take it.

  “ ‘You don’t know who it’s by,’ said Monica (it was a Francis Hayman but she was right: I did not know that then). ‘What about that one over there, the one with the two sad dogs? I like that one.’

  “ ‘That’s not good art,’ I said importantly. ‘It’s by a man called Landseer. Actually, it’s lousy.’

  “ ‘Is it now?’ said Monica. ‘It looks grand to me. But if it’s so terrible, you could do one just as good, couldn’t you?’ She pointed to another frame. ‘Look, there are two wee cartoons even I could copy. All them squiggly lines, little men dressed in black.’

  “ ‘That’s Jack Yeats. I could do him all right.’

  “She smiled at me. ‘Well, we have to start somewhere. How much would that sketch there of your man carrying the turf get us?’

  “ ‘I don’t know. About twenty-five quid?’

  “ ‘At that rate the big one with the dogs must be worth a thousand. D’ you think her ladyship’d miss her Yeats if we just took it off the wall?’

  “I was thinking that if I did a quick copy it might stand in for a day or two without anyone noticing while I copied the original. A plan formed in my mind and I explained it to her, but she found it too elaborate.

  “ ‘All that for just twenty-five quid.’

  “ ‘That’s a decent amount of money. It would pay the deposit on a flat in London, if that’s where we’re going,’ I said.”

  Blume suddenly remembered something, and stopped reading. “There’s a half blank page here, more crossings-out, and this is not strictly relevant.”

  Caterina did not say anything until she had finished writing out her last note. Her arm ached and her wrist had seized up like a lobster’s claw, but she wanted to go on.

  “Does he copy the painting?” she asked.

  “Knowing how he spent the rest of his days, I’d say he does. Otherwise, why would he be telling this?”

  “Maybe he wanted to talk about Monica. Let me see.” She leaned in to look at the notebook. “I don’t know how you can read his handwriting so fluently. I’m going to be much slower.”

  “He uses abbreviations and plus signs for ‘and,’ and he’s not a great speller,” said Blume. “Well, you have the photocopies. Don’t tell anyone you have them, OK? Read ahead if you want, but maybe skip the early years.”

  “I think this works, you reading and me taking notes,” said Caterina. “You could stay for dinner and we could continue after. Just to finish this first section this evening.”

  Blume closed the notebook and stood up. “That’s very kind. But I’ve just remembered I have a dinner appointment. It takes me at least half an hour to get home from here, so . . .”

  Caterina picked up her notes and held them against her chest. “Oh, well, that’s not a problem.”

  “It’s just more work, really.”

  “I don’t mind. I’ll continue reading by myself after you’ve gone.”

  “I
mean this dinner. It’s work-related.”

  “Oh, right. Well, so is this,” said Caterina.

  “Yes. Everything’s just work,” said Blume.

  Chapter 15

  He looked forward to meeting Kristin. Never having officially acknowledged any attachment to each other, they had conducted an on-off relationship, now locked in the “off ” position.

  At Via degli Umbri, he went a few meters in the wrong direction on a one-way street to stop at a bar with a good selection of wines, and bought a bottle of Mater Matuta from Casale del Giglio. It would probably remain unopened, but Kristin sometimes drank.

  He reversed back up the street to Piazza dell’Immacolata and had to bully his way back into the traffic, using the fact that anyone who hit him from the rear would pay the insurance. Eventually he forced a white van to yield. The car behind it blared its horn, and Blume glanced absently in his rear-view mirror to see what sort of fool was driving, but the van hid it from sight. All he could see were a gray Skoda and a blue Lancia farther down the street.

  The traffic was snarled up at Porta Maggiore, as always. An ancient green tram seemed to have died from the effort of switching tracks, and the cars had to edge around it, some in front, some behind. Blume went in front, which meant he had to angle the car over a patch of grass and avoid a stone bench that had been covered in graffiti before being cleft in two.

  Blume cut diagonally across the flow to get through an arch in the Aurelian fortifications, and made it. The driver he had cut off was too busy texting on his cell to notice. A hairy arm and crooked elbow from the car behind that showed total relaxation. Nor did the blue Lancia behind them seem in any hurry.

  Blume found a parking spot reasonably near his apartment block, picked up his bag with the notebooks, the bottle of wine, and walked up Via Orvieto. Where the street intersected Via la Spezia, a blue car was angling itself into a parking space. Blume wondered if he would have time for a shower before Kristin arrived.

  Back home, Blume smashed a handful of Calabrian chili peppers under the mortar and tipped the flakes on top of the hamburger, now frying in the pan. He added crushed garlic, chives, stirring with a wooden spoon, yanking the pan off the heat, and shaking the contents about. He added tomato paste to color the meat. He turned on the oven to heat the tortillas, and mixed powdered cumin, cocoa, coriander, and his secret ingredient, mustard powder, which he poured on top of the meat, then turned it down to simmer. The kitchen clock showed ten minutes to 9. He shredded the lettuce, added salt to the chopped tomatoes in the blue bowl, put the tortillas in the oven. Kristin had said 9 o’clock and was never late. They would be ready exactly on time. He shook Tabasco droplets over the mixture. In the living room, the phone started ringing.

  It was Kristin.

  “Hey there, Alec. Did you set the table yet?”

  “Sure. But we’re gonna be using our hands for most of this. It’s Tex-Mex, Calabrian style. You into that?”

  “Great,” she said. “But you’re going to have to wait. At least an hour later than I said. Something came up.”

  A sudden high-pitched beeping noise filled the room and, within seconds, Blume felt like it was in his head.

  “What’s that?” asked Kristin.

  “The sound of tortillas burning,” said Blume.

  Blume took off his shoes, stood on the counter, opened the smoke alarm, took out the battery, and sighed in relief as the noise stopped. He noticed that he had turned on the grill rather than the oven. He switched it off, opened the door, and allowed himself to be enveloped in a black cloud of smoke. He opened the kitchen window, allowing in a blare of traffic noise that was almost as bad as the alarm. He leaned out and took a breath of cool evening air and glanced casually up the street. The blue car sat snug behind a green dumpster.

  He threw out the black tortillas and opened two cans of tomatoes and two of borlotti beans, poured them into a casserole and added the meat mixture and a dash of habanero. They would have chili con carne instead. He added some herbs, then looked through his dwindling collection of spices from Castroni, and found a small jar of Sambal Setan, which he added to the pot.

  He walked into the living room and took Treacy’s notebooks from his bag, and, instead of resuming where he had left off with Caterina, flicked back and forth through the three volumes looking for references to the Colonel. After setting aside the one volume that seemed entirely dedicated to the technical aspects of Treacy’s work, and contained sketches and diagrams as well as words, he estimated how long it would have taken the writer to get from his childhood and early adulthood to meeting the Colonel. He focused on the first third of the second volume and, after ten minutes of looking, his eye finally alighted on a promising passage.

  As he read it, he wondered if it was sufficiently compromising for the Colonel to want it suppressed. It seemed to consist of yet another half-baked eyewitness account of the circumstances surrounding the murder of Aldo Moro. Did anyone actually care? He doubted it. Treacy, too, seemed to get quickly bored with the subject, ending it after a short paragraph that stood in apparent isolation in the middle of a polemical piece on a dead art historian called Federick Hartt, whose offense seems to have been he claimed a forger could never imitate the pentimenti, the redrawings, corrections, and second thoughts of the artist.

  Blume gave up. He’d just have to read from start to finish. He returned to the opening chapter, wondering if Caterina was still in her kitchen doing the same, or had taken the photocopy to bed with her, anxious before she slept to find out how things turned out between Henry Treacy and Monica.

  My replica of Jack Yeats’ sketch was an instructive experience in several ways, not all of them good.

  Jack Yeats had an impressionist’s eye for color, but he was not a great draftsman. A good one, to be sure, with fine penmanship, but I could see why he eventually chose color and worked with thick swirling and increasingly confused grays and blues in an effort to capture Irish light. The work I was copying, however, was from his youth, a pen and ink wash, with no color. At first, it seemed little better than what you might see by an unknown illustrator in the Saturday Evening Post, except there was a peculiarity to his style that only became interesting as I tried to imitate it. The lines were undulating, often drawn thickly from a heavily inked pen guided by a confident hand. They never overlapped or showed signs of hesitation. Similarly, even the finest and closest strokes left a distinct white space between them, so that although he covered much of the paper in ink and although the drawings were tiny, he created a sense of space and movement.

  Moving in and out of Mrs. Heath’s house, sometimes left alone for a few hours, I was able to copy a rough version of the picture onto a piece of paper that I kept folded in my pocket. It was strange to copy a picture line-by-line in frenetic bursts. If I had asked her, Mrs. Heath would of course have let me stand there all day copying it openly. I think she might even have lent me the original, bless her. But I had embarked on a furtive enterprise, and I was interested in seeing it through.

  After several days, I had completed my copy. I brought it home and unfolded it on my pine table. It was a complete mess. It was so bad I burst out laughing as I looked at it. It was like a sketch done by a committee, in which each member was allowed to draw a quadrant without reference to what the others were doing. Each time I had copied a piece I seemed to have brought a different style to it. Worse still, the elements in the sketch were completely out of proportion with each other. Being young and histrionic, I burned it there and then when simply throwing it out would have done as well.

  And so I learned how not to copy a work. But I also learned that the easiest way to capture an artist’s style was to do it freehand, without direct reference to the original. Over the next two days, working from memory in my mews and without so much as a glance at the original on the drawing-room wall, I sketched my own version of Jack Yeats’ turf-carriers. The result, though clearly different to the original, also resembled its style very clo
sely. I now had my first proper forgery, though I did not know it at the time. It would go into the frame as a temporary replacement, so that I could borrow the original copy, hold it in my hand, and copy it at my leisure.

  The opportunity to do the changeover came one Friday afternoon. Mrs. Heath was having guests and wanted me to help her polish and set out silver and crystal. She brought out some wine, and asked me to open a bottle to test it. I did as I was told, and she instructed me to pour it into a crystal stem glass and drink some. I did, and it tasted OK, though I felt it was very much an old person’s drink.

  She came over, poured herself a glass, drank it, and spat it straight back out, which I have to say shocked me a bit. Apparently it was “corked.” And so was the next bottle and the next and the one after.

  “What a bloody nuisance. I need to get some wine. That means driving all the way down to Dalkey,” she said. She asked me to polish the serving platters while she was gone.

  As soon as I saw her car leave the gate, I grabbed the Yeats and rushed with it back down the garden to my mews. I removed the original, and hid it in a book. In my rush, I lost two staples from the back of the frame and tore the backing paper as well. When I came to put my stop-gap sketch into the frame, it was too big. It was also bright white, and the new ink gleamed. It would be noticed immediately. I rushed into the kitchen and pulled out the rubbish from below the sink. I emptied the contents on the floor and scooped up handfuls of old tea leaves and broken eggshells (being practically all I ate or drank back then). I threw them on my overclean drawing. If I had destroyed it, I would just have put the original back and started again. Or I might have abandoned the idea and led a different life and become a better person.