Thank God for hair. He felt tears of joy.
“I seem to have knocked you stupid, Commissioner,” said the Colonel, who was holding his pistol upwards, almost as if he intended to put it into his own mouth. “Try to talk sense. Why are you here alone? You always need at least one other person to help you. I’m without my Maresciallo, and it’s almost impossible. Luckily, these two were together when I found them at Nightingale’s apartment. Then we traveled over to the gallery to pick up Treacy’s flattering portrait of himself. Nightingale was kind enough to do all the driving.”
Blume looked at the portrait again. The face had been scrubbed and dissolved away, the blond hair remained. He looked at another painting, lying discarded on the floor, a colorless smudge running diagonally across its surface. There was another and another. Paintings from the gallery, from Angela’s house, from here. Beside them, in an ignored pile, were the charcoal cartoons, pen and wash sketches, and drawings. Simple, direct, to the point and without layers. They were incapable of hiding anything beneath, and Blume felt a rush of affection for them. In the end, they were better than all the paintings. These preparatory sketches showed hope, potential, freedom.
The Colonel walked into the middle of the room and raised his pistol and pointed it directly at the woman. “I gather you two have never met. Alec, this is Angela, Emma’s mother, the failed artist and woman of easy virtue. I found her with John cuckold Nightingale here at his house. It’s funny that we know more about Treacy and Angela fucking than anyone else, except for Angela, of course. John here, his eyes have been opened to the ways of the world. We have just a few more of these to get through. Though I am not hopeful.”
It had turned dark. Angela was working in a pool of light cast by two standing lamps. She took a wad of cotton balls from the table. From the floor in front of her she picked up a bottle of solvent and drenched the cotton and her hands in it, filling the room with a sharp scent, then made a swipe at the picture on the easel. On the first pass, the canvas merely glistened as if another coat of varnish was being applied, on the second it dulled, and on the third she left a messy streak. She concentrated on the lightest part, rubbing at it. Outside the thunder rumbled, and Blume remembered why it should be so dark.
“See, she’s as keen as I am,” said the Colonel. “OK. Switch to kerosene now, sweetie.”
Blume planned ahead, making sure what he was going to say would come out right. “You really think you’ll find a Velázquez under one of those paintings?” he asked.
“I said my hopes were fading on that front,” said the Colonel. “But if not, I am going to talk to you about it after we’re done here.” He gestured at Angela. “Look at that woman. She used to look like she stepped out of Filippo Lippi’s Annunciation. Her daughter does not resemble her. Her daughter was the spitting image of Treacy, whose youthful face I just allowed Nightingale here to cancel. Very symbolic that.” He looked over at Angela. “Or do you object to being objectified?”
“You’re the one with the gun,” said Angela.
“Well observed. Dear God, these fumes are going to my head. Commissioner, aren’t you going to try to rush me or something heroic? You need to make up for that pathetic entrance. Nightingale, John, throw that piece of shit aside, we can see nothing lies below. Try that one there, the over-darkened portrait of a woman. It looks suspicious. It also looks highly glossed and hardened. Start with sandpaper, then the solvent.”
“Why are you here, Colonel?” said Blume. “Why didn’t you take the paintings and flee to somewhere safe, check them at your leisure?”
“I cannot abandon my Maresciallo. What do you take me for? Also, you seem to be laboring under the illusion that I need to flee, Commissioner.”
“Oh, trust me on this. You need to,” said Blume. He was thinking straight and remembering now. The dribbling at the back of his head had stopped, the throbbing was waiting for another time, and the image of Paoloni was pin sharp.
“Remember Craxi?”
“I remember Craxi,” said Blume.
“What was his big mistake?”
“It’s hard to know where to begin,” said Blume.
“Cowardice,” said the Colonel. “He fled the country to hide in Tunisia and spent the next few pathetic years of his life threatening his former political allies. He died with a whimper. The politicians he was threatening, people like Andreotti, Cossiga, Berlusconi, Forlani, Amato, they stayed behind. Within a few years they were all back in power, and he was dead. He did carry out his threat to tell all, by the way, but we simply made sure no one was listening.”
“What’s your point, Colonel?” Blume figured he could reach the pistol in three moves. If he saw a way of reducing it to two moves, he’d try. Then, with a shock, he recognized the pistol the Colonel held was his own. That decided him.
“My point is as long as I stay here, I’ll triumph. If I flee, I fail. Once I leave the country, I lose leverage and power. I am not even sure any painting is so valuable as to compensate for that loss.”
“You killed a former policeman.”
“Paoloni. An ex-bank guard, a criminal facilitator, a shady character. Not nearly as good at throwing off a tail as he thought he was. He brought the paintings back to his own house, which shows he had no imagination. I was there, waiting outside in the car. I didn’t kill him. That was my dear, loyal, and, for once, careless Maresciallo, who met with surprising and uncalled-for violence when all he was doing was trying to prepare the ground for negotiations.”
“If you want something done well, you’d best do it yourself,” said Blume.
“I’m still not sure of that. My Maresciallo has always served me perfectly. But you may have a point.” The Colonel looked over to the painting and moved closer to it. “Angela, use a light touch, there’s a good girl. I have a good feeling about this portrait. John, make yourself useful and stop standing there like a pointless cuckold. Give her some kerosene.”
Blume shifted his weight in his chair. If the Colonel took another step to the right, he could push himself over the arm of the chair.
He tried to move, but the Colonel leaned in toward him at the same moment and slapped him in the forehead with the side of the pistol.
The Colonel stood back, still pointing the pistol at him, his hand steady, and saying something, his voice booming but muffled and far away. Blume braced himself to receive a bullet, but the Colonel was now sitting down and wiping his forehead with the back of the hand that held the weapon. There was no question of rushing him now. No question of standing up out of this chair. The fumes in the room were choking him.
“I can read thoughts, Commissioner,” the Colonel was saying. “Your intent was in your eyes. I expected you to be more phlegmatic, even a little disinterested in the justice or the injustice of all this, instead you get whipped with your own pistol. More worrying now, isn’t it? If I’m waving yours about, maybe it’s because I am planning on using it, then ducking the blame.”
“The painting you are looking for is not there,” said Blume.
“Well now, you would say that, wouldn’t you?” said the Colonel. “Buy time. Always buy time. In this case, I believe you.”
“It’s not there.” Blume wanted to save his breath and not speak, but he needed to speak to save his life. He closed his eyes and focused on getting the right words out. “We can sit here and watch. I can’t do much else. When she has wiped the last canvas down, you’ll see I’m right. I may have bled to death by then.”
“Lean forward,” ordered the Colonel. “And a little to your left. Do it.”
Blume did.
“Not that much blood behind you. Where is the hidden painting?”
“Hidden.”
“Yes, yes. Predictable to the end, Commissioner. Hey, cuckold, where’s the Velázquez?”
“What Velázquez?” said Nightingale. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“John,” said the Colonel. “You and I go way back. Mid-seventies. You know I am capable
of killing this woman. Perhaps that would please you, now that you’re finding out what sort of person she is. She came around to your place this morning to confess, didn’t she?”
Nightingale nodded.
“Do you want me to shoot her dead now?”
“No!”
“Weak. You always were weak. You’re not a father. You’re not a husband or a lover or an artist. You’re not a man. Treacy was strong, honest. No, I exaggerate, no point in sentimentalizing his memory. He was not in the slightest bit honest, but if he was here now, he would be lying there dead, or I would be lying there dead. One of us, because he would not have allowed me to talk to him or his woman in this way. I forgot that there is no reason you would know of the Velázquez, but Henry found one. He didn’t tell you that either. Work out where it is. I give you three minutes.”
“A Velázquez, Harry? Look, Harry and I, we used to come across a lot of really stupid stuff. There is so much bad art, you know? Old and black and cracked with a whitish face of some unknown, bourgeois non-entity painted by a talentless hack, and people think it’s an heirloom worth millions. Just because it’s old, doesn’t mean—Trees are older. Rocks are older. No, sorry, I must organize my thoughts.”
“I’ll point the pistol at the dazed Commissioner, if that calms you a little,” said the Colonel.
“Colonel, you remember how we did the double-bluff stings? Harry would do a fine forgery using original paper, careful signatures. Then, when it was quite done, he would paint over it. To make sure we were caught, he had to allow the new paint to be too soft, or he’d use an anachronistic color. But the forgery underneath would be of a relatively important painter only. Or a scuola. We never stretched credibility. It is unthinkable he would hide a Velázquez in this way.”
“John, John, you’re not following. This time he would be hiding it to hide it, not to have it discovered.”
“No, I’m not following. Harry would never have painted over a work by Velázquez.”
“So where would one be, if he had it?”
“Here?” said Nightingale. “Or in a bank vault. I really have no idea.”
With a soft sigh, the Colonel stood up, glancing down affectionately at Blume as he passed by. “Come here, John,” he said, making a coaxing motion with his left hand, keeping the pistol trained loosely on Blume.
Nightingale came over, an uncertain smile on his lips as he continued to explain. “So the dealer thinks he’s discovered an authentic painting, you see, and accepts my suspiciously low asking price for the alleged Bronzino or—?”
“Yes, yes. I know all this stuff. It has nothing to do with this. Now I want you to think about three things I know. Put your hands down by your side, and close your eyes while I tell them to you.”
Nightingale closed his eyes, but they flickered open immediately.
“No, relax and listen. Henry Treacy continued to fuck Angela and neither of them told you until Angela decided to confess this morning, when she had no choice. No, no. Keep your eyes closed. The daughter you thought was yours is his, and he knew who she was from the moment she arrived in the gallery. Now please, don’t open your eyes in surprise when I say she is in some way responsible for his death. Good. And the last thing is that Treacy discovered an original painting by Velázquez, and had you buy it, then hid it from you for years. Can you remember the time he asked you to bid for a painting?”
Nightingale nodded.
“Can you remember how big it was?”
Nightingale stretched out his arms, drew a rectangle in the air. “Not so big. About 170 by 90 centimeters.” He widened his arms, “Maybe a bit more. 200 by 100.”
“Excellent.” The Colonel took a step closer. “Now are you still thinking about what I have just told you?”
“Yes.”
“Including the cuckolding and the deception?”
Nightingale nodded.
“Good. Keep thinking of that.”
The Colonel, standing about half a meter away now, raised his pistol, and shot Nightingale through the ear.
Chapter 45
The crack was loud but the room absorbed it quickly. Nightingale fell to the floor with a soft thump, and the thunder outside rolled and rain began to patter loudly on the panes. Blume expected Angela to scream. But the only one who had shouted out was himself, and his voice was drowned by the shot, the thunder, and the rain. Angela already held Nightingale’s head in her arms, but was dry-eyed.
“I never liked him,” said the Colonel, almost as a casual aside to Blume.
“And he’s the only other person who knew you sold forgeries to the Mafia,” said Blume.
“Except you,” said the Colonel, “and maybe Angela.”
Angela was standing upright, her foot planted in the half-moon pool that had leaked from under Nightingale’s head. In her hands, she held three paintings of similar size.
“Those are about the right size,” said the Colonel. “Smart girl. We’ll start with the top one. Put the other two on the table, on the drawings.”
Beneath a treacle veneer and thick ridges of poorly applied paint, the face of a bearded man stared out in anguish. Two doves, or angels, or clouds, or billows of mold and mildew appeared in the background.
“It’s not going to be there, Colonel,” said Blume. “He’s hidden it somewhere else. You need to read the text of his memoirs more carefully.”
“I reckon there is an eighty percent chance of your being right,” said the Colonel. “But it is a hundred percent chance that you would say anything to regain some control, prolong your life. So let’s just see, shall we?”
Blume turned his head in the direction of Angela to communicate some sort of apology for his failure, but her gaze was fixed on the Colonel. Not on the pistol, but on the Colonel’s face. In her hand she held a retro-chic silver Dunhill lighter, its top flipped back, her thumb on the roller switch, the corner of the painting a centimeter distant.
“Don’t even think . . . ” began the Colonel.
Still watching the Colonel, she flicked her thumb, and the lighter spat out a wispy orange flame. It licked at the corner of the canvas, then seemed to die. But just as it gave up, a ghostly blue wave of flame rolled diagonally across the face, then left the canvas, and continued up Angela’s arm. She let out a cry and threw the painting away from her. She successfully slapped away the blue flame which seemed to carry no heat. The discarded painting, looking none the worse, wafted down to the table, and landed on top of the other paintings. The Colonel seemed to relax. Lazily, the blue flame followed its descent, and then swam back and forth over the glistening painted surface of the canvas, puttering and almost on the point of going out.
Blume now noticed that a sputtering offshoot of the original flame was hovering around the bottles of solvent and turps at Angela’s feet, and yet another flame, this one yellow, had wound itself around the leg of the easel. The Colonel, moving faster than Blume had ever seen, was advancing toward the table with the sketches. He pushed them aside to get to Angela. They tumbled and glided, creating an up-current of air. Finally the shining solvent and kerosene on the face of the man with the unhappy eyes exploded, and the flame immediately caught hold of the edges of the others in the pile. Angela leaped out of the way, and kicked over the bottle of turps and the can of kerosene. Blume jerked himself out of his armchair, the surge of power in his legs and the left side of his upper body easily overriding the dizziness and pain in his head.
Angela reached him as he got to a standing position. The last blue flames rose upwards and with a sudden outward pulse of air, the entire area where Angela had been standing burst into yellow and orange fire. The Colonel stood in the middle of it roaring. He fired two shots at them, one of which whined like a mosquito as it passed. Nothing followed. Now he seemed to be hurling fireballs, as he tried to throw the burning sketches out of the circle of flame. He seemed to be dancing, too, in a rage or in fear as the flames caught the lower half of his legs.
Without so much
as a preliminary smoldering, the bookshelf and all the books behind flashed yellow and joined in the blaze, filling the room in seconds with heavy sooty smoke. The back of the chair on which Blume had been sitting was burning in sympathy. Angela seemed to be moving not away from the Colonel, but toward him. Small conflagrations started dropping from the ceiling, even though it did not seem to be on fire.
With pain and difficulty, Blume grabbed Angela with his left arm and pulled her away, his intention being to help, but he found it was he who was leaning on her. The Colonel continued to roar. They made it through the door into the kitchen, but somehow it too had filled with smoke. They stumbled onwards, sweeping away the bead curtain, and found themselves in the glass-covered greenhouse. Both of them suddenly stopped in amazement as they felt the coolness and heard the rain drumming away on the glass above. Blume breathed in deeply.
The doorway through which they came was blowing out masses of black smoke, and the bead curtain rattled and clicked wildly as the billow of smoke flapped it from behind. The lower beads were on fire now, crackling and then exploding like popcorn. It seemed impossible that they had been in there. Without warning, the curtain became a series of fiery pillars, and then suddenly was gone, and they could see a great ball of rage was coming toward them. Blume watched the object with a sense of detachment, dimly aware that it was the Colonel hurtling toward them, trying to escape.
What Angela did next was to fix itself in Blume’s mind for many years to come. She reached over to the stove, and with extraordinary strength, grabbed the large copper pot on top. She glanced into it, where she may have seen her own face reflected back at her. It was full of liquid, and as the Colonel staggered to the doorway, she hurled it on him.
Perhaps she saw water in the pot, and if so, her intentions were merciful. But the pot contained not water but stand-oil. Linseed oil that had been boiled for several hours under pressure, as Treacy himself explained in his never-to-be-published book.
The Fatal Touch Page 38