The Fatal Touch
Page 42
“What about you?”
“I don’t want to quit the force. I would not know what to do with myself or where to go.”
“Neither do I,” said Caterina.
“Think about it. Think about your son. You’re on your own. It’s a dangerous job, poorly paid, bad hours, and you carry the violence you see every day inside you. Maybe someday the violence will hit you and your son will be left to fend for himself. Richer people live longer. Don’t just say no to the idea. Think about it.”
“While I think about it, what happens?”
“I think I’ll carry out my plan anyhow, give this back to its rightful owner. Then if she offers you a reward, as I think she will, you can decide then.”
“But you’re not taking anything?”
“I don’t need to. I’ve no one depending on me. I’ve no children, relations, or debts.”
“Always on your own.”
“Yes,” said Blume.
Caterina went over to the sofa, removed the painting from beside him, and sat down in its place.
Chapter 53
She pulled the sheet over her shoulders, shivered a little, and said, “It will never get published, will it?”
Blume pushed the sheet off himself and contemplated light burn marks on his forearm. “I doubt it. He never got to finish it. And Treacy doesn’t get to live happily ever after, does he?”
“You mean he is not eternal like you are?” said Caterina. She reached out and yanked his ear. “Up close like this, I can see your wrinkles, and did you know you’re going gray at the sides?”
“Silver hair, not gray,” said Blume. “He got killed by his own daughter. I hope to do better than that.”
“Maybe you should beget yourself a daughter first before you jump to optimistic conclusions. I think it’s sad that no one will read Treacy. I didn’t even get to read it in the end. Just the beginning bit with you, and then I went ahead on my own for a while before I had to give up. How does it end?”
“With the narrator lying dead on a cold Trastevere street and an Inspector called Mattiola feeling the base of his skull for evidence of a countercoup blow,” said Blume.
Caterina shook her head. “That’s not nice. How does it end, really?”
“I can’t remember exactly,” said Blume. “He was not always chronological; some of it is cryptic, sometimes impenetrable. And we do know the ending. We know it better than he does.”
“What about his version, how does it end?”
“It becomes disjointed, breaks down into notes, half sentences, cryptic phrases, scrawls. He was dying.”
“I liked when you were reading it to me. He was in London when we stopped. What happened then?”
“He went back to Ireland, got fed up, and decided to walk down to Rome.”
“Very funny,” said Caterina. She turned her back on him and pulled the sheet tighter around her shoulders. “I’m interested in finding out how he came to be in Italy, what it was like for him to spend his life here, a stranger in a strange land. I want to know what happened to his parents, whether he saw them again. I want to see how he started off and ended up alone.”
Blume pulled up the bedcover and wrapped it over the sheet and around her shoulders. “No, really,” he said. “He did. He walked through France into Italy.”
“That’s the next bit?”
“Yes,” said Blume. He left the room and came back carrying the first notebook, climbed back into the warmth beside her. He opened it at the beginning, and started turning the pages until he found the place he wanted.
“This is where we were.”
Caterina closed her eyes. “Read it, Alec. Out loud and slowly.”
“After London, I went back to Ireland for a few months, but it did not work out. There was nobody there for me, and all I did was spend the little I had saved drinking pints of plain in Sinnnotts pub. It was one golden afternoon there, when I was on my fourth pint, that I conceived of the idea of walking away from it all. Literally walking away.
“No one believes me when I tell them I walked to Paris and then Rome, but, with the help of one ferry boat, that is just what I did. The walking started in Normandy, but the beginning of my journey was a freezing cold morning of drizzle as I left Killiney Hill Station for Bray to catch the mid-morning train down to Rosslare in Country Wexford, where that evening I boarded the ferry that would bring me to Cherbourg. It was June, but the Atlantic was still in a swollen and wintry mood, and rolled me back and forth across the lounge bench inside where I tried to sleep, without success, and doused me in icy spray when I went up on deck to vomit, with great success.
“We docked in Cherbourg at lunchtime, and having completely emptied my stomach of all content during the night, I was ravenous. Every time I go to France now, I search for a croissant as buttery, savory, and perfect as the one I had that morning in a bar in Cherbourg. I had to mime my wishes and point to what I wanted to eat like a well-trained monkey, and I was aware of seamen smelling of diesel oil and surrounded in black tobacco smoke laughing at my expense, but hunger swept away all embarrassment. It also swept away four days’ of the allowance I had given myself. It was not until my third day in France that I realized how much they had overcharged me.
“I had travelers’ checks in British pounds and some francs. The travelers’ checks were a parting gift from my stepfather on the night before I left. He pulled them out of his jacket pocket with a jocular expression on his face, as if someone had put them there unbeknownst to him and he was just discovering them, like a kindly uncle might discover candies and thruppenny bits in his pocket. Ho-ho-ho, what are these? My inheritance, you bastard. Enough to live on for one frugal month.
“To be fair to my mother and stepfather, they were probably expecting me back soon, but I never saw either of them again. My stepfather died suddenly of heart failure a few weeks before I reached Rome. My mother had sent a telegram followed by several letters to a poste restante address at the main post office in Piazza San Silvestro, but I arrived several weeks later and did not bother checking for letters until several weeks after that. By the time I had read through the letters, my stepfather was dead almost two months and my mother was so hurt she had decided not to speak to me again. Nor did she, though I do not think she ever intended permanent silence. But eight months later, when I finally had an address of my own in Rome and wrote to the post office asking them to divert the mail to it, I received a letter from a lawyer telling me that she, too, was dead of a stroke. The funeral was over. He assured me it had been a dignified affair, and he had looked after the funeral costs and would forward the ‘remaining’ inheritance, which he did. The last trace of him was his signature on a check for a scandalously modest amount that arrived just in time for my first Italian Christmas.
“But that morning in Cherbourg, with the sea wind stabbing my ears and the strap of my army surplus backpack already rubbing my shoulders raw, I set off on the first stage of what was to become a six-month two-thousand-mile meandering walk.
“It is hard to say now why I decided to walk. Part of the idea was to arrive in Rome, the inevitable destination in 1969 for an aspiring painter who preferred the classical style, with a certain sophistication of manner. I thought I would learn French by walking through France—and I was not entirely mistaken, though I learned far less than I hoped. I had read Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Leonard Cohen. I wore my hair long and heeded the spiritual advice of psychedelic rock stars. And I wanted to take a long, slow walk away from Monica, Ireland, and my old self.
“I had a small tent. The tent had a small hole. It did not rain that night, but the wind whistled. I started walking in the wrong direction on a minor road that skirted the coast. I set up my tent in a plowed field, near a place named Cosqueville. All the villages there were named something-ville. I slept between the ridges of two furrows, and woke up half dead from cold, damp, and lumbago and raging with thirst. I had filled a water bottle in the toilets at the Cherbourg docks, and thought
it would do me.
“I found the farmhouse. Or, better, as I drew near the farmhouse I was chased, caught, crowded, and cowed by a pack of dogs. I think I was crying when the farmer finally came out to shoot me dead with a very military-looking rifle.
“He looked at me, paying particular attention to my hair, then deciding that I was obviously some sort of bewildered half woman and posed no threat, sent me in to his wife. ‘Eau, eau,’ I kept saying. The farmer and his wife thought this was very funny. But they gave me water and milk and rolled-up buckwheat pancakes, and pointed me in the direction of Saint Lô, which they seemed to imagine was my ultimate destination, for who could go farther than that? Or maybe that’s what they thought I meant with my pathetic cries of ‘eau, eau?’.
“But night fell before I had even reached Carenten and I turned left by mistake and started heading back toward the sea. I had to pitch my leaky tent in another field, and lie there listening to the sea turning in its sleep, the slap and drag of rocks on a beach nearby, trying to imagine what warmth and Italy would be like. The rain came in slantways, and in the morning, the frost was so sharp and hard, I thought it would pierce my boots. It may have been the hunger, the cold or just the age I was, but that morning, in which I could have died from exposure, I felt brighter, more alive, and bristling with hope than I ever have since. I turned my back on the Atlantic and finally started walking inland, toward my future in Paris, Provence, Florence, and finally Rome with its ochre architecture, crumbling decay, and endless days of heat and sun.
“All this beautiful life lay before me.”
Caterina slept, her breathing regular, her mouth open in a tiny “o.”
He closed the book.
Acknowledgments
I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Cormac Deane for his structural and creative assistance, and to Ciaran Deane for psychological support, constructive criticism and encouragement. I could not have finished or even begun this without the love and patience of my family here in Rome. Thank you, Marion, for the regular phone calls and for hearing me out as I complained and updated in equal measure. My thanks also to Sarah Ballard, Michael Fishwick and Ben Adams.
I am indebted for certain technical aspects to Giuseppe De Rosa, whose website is to be found at www.ilcollezionista.it, as well as to Ispettore “Beppe”, Sovrintendente “Mimmo” and the excellent journalist Luca Pietrafesa.
A Note on the Author
Conor Fitzgerald has lived in Ireland, the UK, the United States, and Italy. He has worked as an arts editor produced a current affairs journal for foreign embassies and founded a successful translation company. He is married with two children and lives in Rome. The Fatal Touch is his second book.
By the Same Author
The Dogs of Rome
First published in Great Britain 2011
Copyright © Conor Fitzgerald 2011
This electronic edition published 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright Page