The Fatal Touch

by Conor Fitzgerald

  Buoncompagno gave his long gray hair a decisive flick and pointed at the Carabinieri. “Search the whole place,” he ordered. “Start in the bedroom. Rip down the walls if you have to. Anywhere that . . .”

  “Wait!” called Blume. “Don’t touch anything. This is a crime scene. Pursuant to Articles 354, 355, and 360 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, I ask all non-essential persons to clear the premises immediately to avoid contamination of the scene.”

  The magistrate waved his search warrant. “This has precedence.”

  “Oh, and pursuant to Article 254, paragraph 2, and . . . a few other articles I forget. I don’t suppose you can remind me, Magistrate?”

  “Don’t try to get smart with me, Commissioner. No public prosecutor has received notification of this alleged crime, and therefore as the most authoritative person in this room . . .”

  The Colonel, still struggling to control his breath, spoke so quietly the magistrate was forced to come closer to hear. He said, “Magistrate Buoncompagno? Please, just be quiet.” He looked sadly over at Blume, seeking fellowship of understanding between intelligent men.

  He inclined his head slightly toward the nearest two Carabinieri. “You, accompany the magistrate back downstairs to his car. I am sure he has other urgent crimes to solve.”

  “They could still be here, Colonel,” said Buoncompagno. “Let them look in the bedroom at least.”

  The Colonel plucked a crumb of something from his lip and flicked it in Buoncompagno’s direction. “You never miss an opportunity to ruin the silence by speaking, do you?”

  “Agenti,” said Blume, looking at the very confused patrolmen, “I want this place dusted for prints.”

  “Now you’re overdoing it, Blume,” said the Colonel.

  “Someone trashed my house. I intend to find out who.”

  “Carabinieri,” barked the Colonel. “We are going.”

  When they had left, the first Agente came over. “You OK, sir? Did they do this?”

  “Of course not. It was thieves. Really. Write up a report, take a few latents from the walls, give it the usual treatment. No special privileges for me.”

  “We need to do more than that, sir. We can’t let them get away with robbing a Commissioner’s house. If word gets around, it’ll look bad.”

  “It can’t be helped. I prefer this to blow over. I prefer it not to get within earshot of the Questore, though it’s probably too late. Look, tell you what you can do for me, get someone to come around and fix that door. If they need to put in a new one, fine. Accept any price up to . . . I don’t know. How much is a new door?”

  “Reinforced and all that, around two thousand euros,” said the Agente.

  “May as well hang a bead curtain for all the good it does. Call me if you need me. I can’t stay here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Chapter 36

  “Do we always have to meet at McDonald’s?”

  “Do you prefer Burger King? I think their buns are too sweet. We could go for a kebab if you prefer.”

  “This food will kill you,” said Blume. “Have you ever read . . . ?”

  “No,” said Paoloni.

  “Right. Dumb question.”

  Paoloni received his tray and turned from the counter. “You didn’t order anything after all that time in line?” he said. “Let’s get those two seats over there. Grab me some of those paper . . . thanks. Anyway, it’s air that kills you in the end. I saw a program on the Discovery Channel the other day. Oxygen, they say, gives you wrinkles and breaks down your . . . something inside that you need not to die, basically. Turns out, oxygen is what makes us grow old.”

  “Not the passing of time?”

  “Apparently not. So, how did it go?”

  “They might have trashed the place a bit less,” said Blume.

  “You said you wanted it to look authentic.”

  “It was authentic. They took money I left beside the bed, and the paintings of course. At least I’m presuming they found them there.”

  “Yeah. They were hidden in your closet. All together. They used a suitcase to take them out.”

  “I noticed,” said Blume.

  “You want the suitcase back? I can arrange it.”

  “No. This needs to run its natural course. I don’t want any contact with these guys. I want to know absolutely nothing about them. The only thing I want is a heads-up if they make a move to sell those paintings.”

  “You want, I can stop that, too.”

  “No. Let them do what they want. They’ll keep Farinelli occupied for a while.”

  “Did they respect your parents’ room?”

  “Yes. They left it alone. Were they wearing gloves?”

  “It’s not like I was there,” said Paoloni. “But these guys are professionals. You’d need a lot of forensic work and lab time to catch their fibers, hairs, and so on. It’s just not worth it for a burglary. Oh yeah, almost forgot. The car watching your place did not register back to the Carabinieri, nor was it stolen, nor did it seem to belong to anyone. The motorizzazione de-lists vehicles for special uses so that’s Farinelli using his spooky contacts. Anyhow, they walked up unnoticed and unremarked to your apartment, did what they did, walked out with a suitcase. Then you arrived and Captain Sudoku spotted you and alerted the Colonel.”

  Blume left Paoloni to his lunch, and drove back to the station, conscious that the Colonel and the Treacy case were distracting him from his proper duties. He was letting things slip badly, and it would be noticed, once the rewards and benefits of catching the muggers and seeing the two extortionists jailed had been distributed and absorbed.

  As he stepped into the operations room, Rospo bobbed up. “Inspector Mattiola took it upon herself to take the initiative while I was . . .”

  From behind him, Sovrintendente Grattapaglia, nodding pleasantly at Blume, came up, put his hand on Rospo’s shoulder in what seemed like a friendly gesture, but he held his hand there.

  “The meeting with the investigator went like a fucking dream, Commissioner. Eight minutes. I timed it. He told me we needed one more meeting for the sake of appearances, and then I would be back to work.” Grattapaglia smiled. “I must say, I haven’t felt this good for a while.” His knuckles whitened as he tightened the grip and dug his fingers into the space below Rospo’s clavicle, drawing a gasp of pain from the Assistente Capo. “You and me, Rospo, we’re going to have a nice little talk about Inspector Mattiola and the recognition of merit. Come over here.”

  Rospo winced as Grattapaglia steered him away from Blume, who looked across the room to where Caterina was sitting, apparently unaware of his arrival. Her head was bent slightly forward as if she were reading a breviary, but her hands held nothing. Blume went over to her.

  “I expected to see you flushed with victory. What’s the matter?”

  “He died,” she said. “Old man Corsi died. I just heard from the hospital. The stab wound was superficial, but they say he died from hypovolemic shock.”

  Blume abandoned his self-serving plan to reprimand her for disobeying procedures and entering a suspect’s house alone and for not trying hard enough to keep him in the picture.

  “Why are you so upset about Corsi?” asked Blume. “I mean, sure, it’s a bad thing, but he was an old man and old men die easily. Besides, it’s not as if you knew him.”

  “Come to that,” said Caterina, “the few minutes I spent in his company were enough to tell me I didn’t like him much either. It’s not him; it’s the son I feel for. I passed by Mariagrazia Gazzani, the magistrate who was in charge of the investigation into the Corsis’ denunciation of Leporelli and Scariglia. It turns out the failed hotel was the son’s venture, but the affidavit on the attempted extortion was made by the father. It’s a stretch to say this, but I have a feeling the son would have paid off Leporelli and Scariglia just to stay in business. He was trapped and the hotel was his bid for freedom. When it all fell through, he took it out on the Noantri Hotel. I think he was trying t
o escape, and instead he’s lost everything and killed his only family . . .”

  “That’ll do, Inspector,” said Blume. “Don’t waste your sympathy. He’s a mugger, now he’s a parricide. He made his choices.”

  “Do you believe that’s all there is to it?”

  “No,” said Blume. “I don’t. But if you feel like this for him, how are you going to deal with the devastation of the truly innocent?”

  “I have seen dead children. I have seen murdered young women. They were Chinese, Nigerian, Kurdish. When I worked in immigration I saw things you wouldn’t imagine. Well, the public wouldn’t imagine, or couldn’t be bothered to imagine, because they were foreign and illegal.”

  “Exactly,” said Blume. “So don’t waste your sympathy.”

  “He didn’t mean to kill his father, I’m sure of it. I was there.”

  “Sometimes I think we should just get rid of this whole business of distinguishing between what people meant to do and what they actually did,” said Blume. “Think how many lawyers we could get rid of. The ancient Romans didn’t allow for intentionality, you know. They just looked at the result of an action. I think it is a sensible approach. Their punishment for parricide, by the way, was to whip the culprit raw, sew him into a leather bag with a dog, a viper, a cock, and, where available, a chimpanzee, then throw the bag into the Tiber. The poena cullei. That’s the name of the punishment. It’s not on the statute books any more, unfortunately.”

  “That’s horrific . . . a chimpanzee?”

  “Apparently,” said Blume.

  Caterina repressed a giggle.

  “I’m not making this shit up,” said Blume.

  She straightened her shoulders and looked directly at him. “You have a weird way of cheering people up.”

  “You did great work, you know,” said Blume. “And I heard what you did for Grattapaglia. That’s great. A fantastic move. It will put us all in the clear.”

  Caterina nodded. “Thanks.”

  “You’ve also cleared the decks of work, and given us a bit of breathing space. Even if now you’ve got to write up the reports on this morning. Then I’m going to have to sign off on the paperwork.”

  “There’s something else,” said Caterina. “Angela and Emma came in this morning, after you had gone. And then Grattapaglia and I established that Emma’s not telling the truth about her movements on the night Treacy died. Where were you this morning, by the way?”

  “I was going to tell you that.” He glanced around the room, saw Rospo sitting at his computer massaging his shoulder, his forehead a map of angry creases.

  “Come into my office.”

  Chapter 37

  After having caterina set forth the details of her conversations with Emma and her mother, Blume was very complimentary. “And I know you’re protecting Rospo by playing down the fact of his absence.”

  Caterina ignored all this and looked at him expectantly.

  “Your turn,” she said. “You answered the phone while I was talking, and left directly afterwards, what was that about?”

  “I asked you for a report in my capacity as your commanding officer. It doesn’t necessarily work the other way round.”

  “What are you talking about? You have no right to reticence. None. I’m directly involved in all this and so is my son. Jesus, you are an irritating bastard sometimes.”

  “You can’t talk to me like that. Not when we’re inside these walls. That’s why there are rules to stop this sort of thing from developing.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “You know . . . the personal entering the workplace.”

  “No. Spell it out.”

  “You know exactly what I mean,” said Blume.

  Caterina laughed. “You should see the color of your face now. Tell you what, just tell me about what you’ve been doing. It’ll be a cinch in comparison with this conversation.”

  “It’s really better you don’t know. For your sake.”

  “If it’s for my sake, I give you permission to disturb my peace of mind,” said Caterina.

  “No. Not in this building,” said Blume. “We can’t speak like this in here.”

  “Where then?”

  Blume stood up quickly from his desk. “Come on.”

  “Where?”

  “Have you ever seen a Velázquez?”

  “No, I haven’t. Treacy spoke of the portrait of the pope, I can’t remember his name.”

  “Innocent the tenth. Giambattista Pamphili, if you prefer.” Blume went over to his window and pointed. “It’s about twenty paces from where I am standing now.”

  They left the police station and turned right. A few steps past heavily grated ground-floor windows brought an impressive entrance with a green flag announcing Galleria Doria Pamphili over it.

  “In here?” asked Caterina.

  “No. That’s the old entrance,” said Blume. “We need to walk around to the Via del Corso.”

  “You’ve been in there recently? I don’t think I’ve been in a gallery since I was on a school trip,” said Caterina. “Do you visit them a lot?”

  “A bit,” said Blume.

  “Did you study art or something?”

  “I was brought up in it. My parents were art historians.”

  They turned on to Via del Corso, and Caterina got caught behind a group of tourists in bermuda and cargo shorts who had aggregated into a tortoise formation and were proceeding along with defensive care, determined not to be forced by the natives off the sidewalk and into the path of the deadly buses. By the time she had managed to navigate around them, Blume had disappeared. She was walking blithely past a massive arched entrance to what she had always assumed to be a bank, when he stepped out and gently pulled her into a peaceful courtyard. He flashed his police badge at a man in a glass box selling tickets, who shrugged and scowled, and led Caterina down a long quiet hall toward a flight of curving steps.

  “My father is dying,” said Caterina into the silence. “I don’t know why I said that. Nor why it should feel like a confession.”

  “It feels like a confession because you’re telling me you don’t know how you’ll manage without him,” said Blume. “But you will. When they are alive, your parents are like two fires: the focus of comfort, warmth, and light but also of anger, rage, and heated battles. When they die, they leave a sort of after-smoke which keeps expanding until it seems to be everywhere and in everything you do and drains the color from it. So you accept that for the rest of your life you’ll be walking around in that smoke. Then one day you notice the smoke is thinning out, which is good, but you feel bad about it, too.”

  They entered the gallery and found themselves standing in front of a bronze centaur, and Caterina almost pointed like a little kid to say: “Oh, look!”

  “We’re the only ones here,” said Blume. “Not even a tourist. Wonderful.”

  A tall blond couple entered the room speaking Dutch.

  Caterina stood feeling suddenly self-conscious in the middle of the room between lines of white statues with muscular bodies. The bright ceiling frescos showed scenes from stories she did not know. The walls were not just hung with paintings, but stacked with them. Lines of paintings one on top of the other, most of them too high to see. Those that were at eye level shone back the light as a black varnished sheen beneath which she could see almost nothing.

  She followed Blume down to the end of a long corridor.

  “Wait! Have you seen this!” Caterina pointed at a picture of six naked cherubims grappling and wrestling each other. “That’s so sweet! I mean it’s funny, too. Mainly it’s funny. I can see you’re giving me a look—I don’t have any taste for these things. Don’t make me feel ignorant.”

  “Putti in battle,” said Blume. He peered at the nameplate next to the frame. “It says it’s by someone called Andrea Podestà. Never heard of him. Funny, I thought . . . never mind. I’ve seen it before. Not here.” He touched her on the arm and ushered her into a small square room ju
st big enough for the two of them, and said, “There!”

  Staring sideways daggers at them was a large portrait of Pope Innocent X.

  “Doesn’t he look really hassled at our intrusion?” said Blume. “I love that.”

  “He doesn’t look pleased at all,” said Caterina. She turned to examine a calmer white marble bust of the same man, his eyes blank, uninterested, who seemed to be avoiding looking at them. “Nor here.”

  “You can tell that Velázquez had status by the fact they allowed him to paint the pope like that and Pamphili himself didn’t object,” said Blume. “Not flattering, but therefore flattering. Like when someone picks up on your faults? It’s annoying as hell, but since it means you’re interesting enough for them to notice, you should eventually take it as a compliment.”

  He gazed at the picture, nodding at it with the utmost approval. “Also,” he said, “imagine being able to give people a fuck-off look that lasts for centuries. Who could resist that?”

  They left the portrait, and walked slowly through the next room. Blume halted before a painting of a woman raising her hands in despair over a dying warrior. “That’s a Guercino,” said Blume, tapping the identifying tag on the wall. “He was one of the artists Treacy liked to copy.”

  “Erminia Finds the Wounded Tancredi,” read Caterina. “Who were Erminia and Tancredi?”

  “I don’t know,” said Blume. “Wasn’t Tancredi one of those Norman knights who conquered southern Italy? It’s still a name used down there.”

  “There’s a Tancredi in Il Gattopardo, too,” said Caterina. “Not this guy, obviously.”

  As they stood there looking at the work, which, if truth be told, she did not like, Blume began to tell her about Faedda, the staged housebreak-in and his idea of tempting the Colonel into making a rash move to get back the paintings.

  “Is Farinelli really going to believe that Treacy hid something beneath the paintings?”