Conor Fitzgerald: Fatal Touch

The glass room contained wickerwork chairs with yellow cushions, a ceramic-topped table with a demitasse coffee cup on it. Blume noticed some bookshelves and, in the far left corner, a high, long work desk, like he remembered from science lessons in school, except this was made from mahogany. A leather-bound folio-size volume lay beneath three quarto volumes, also leather bound. Beside them sat an ebony box, open to reveal five rows of silver-topped jars, filled with colored powders. Three crystal jars held dozens of paintbrushes.

Blume peered at the top book, but the lettering on the cover was too faded for him to make out the title. He opened it; the text was in Latin.

In the corner of the greenhouse, next to the bead curtain, stood a squat cast-iron wood-fired stove, on top of which sat a tall copper stockpot and beside it a double boiler.

A clacking noise made him turn around as Caterina pushed aside a bamboo bead curtain covering what must have once been the back door to the building. She stepped inside.

“There’s a kitchen here,” said Caterina’s voice. “And another stove.”

Blume followed Caterina in. The light was less intense and the whitewashed walls, the gray marble washstand, and the heavy brass taps made the room feel cool. A pastry-board lay half across a large rectangular ivory marble table, on which three boxes of eggs and an earthenware jug of what appeared to be milk sat. An ice-cube tray filled with black liquid shimmered slightly in response to the impact of Blume’s footsteps as he moved around the table, taking it in. A zinc box contained herbs, flakes of charcoal, dried leaves, and a collection of gnarled woody fruits of some sort. In here was another stove, only this was modern, boxy, made from burnished gunmetal steel.

He opened the refrigerator. “A lot of eggs. Milk, cheese,” he announced.

The milk smelled old. “Beer. Garlic, feta cheese, some withered greens. A single man’s refrigerator.” The cold green bottles of beer clinked invitingly as he closed the refrigerator. Tuborg and Peroni. He used to drink both. He felt thirsty. There was no real need for him not to drink. It wasn’t as if he had had a problem. Apart from the weight thing, but not drinking hadn’t helped much there. He’d think about it later.

The next room, the living room, was lit by two dirty-paned windows. Blume immediately noticed three easels. One was folded and propped in the corner. One was gripping a pristine white board holding red-tinted paper with the first gray lines of what looked like a foot.

Stacked behind the third easel was a collection of paintings and drawings of different sizes, some framed, some mounted on matt boards, some loose. Blume estimated they numbered around thirty, and began to leaf through them. The furniture was old and uncomfortable. The settee was stuffed with horsehair, the chairs hardbacked and spindly, the walls and window frames had the yellow and gray patina of ancient paint. The front door was made of heavy wood and held in place by rusted strap hinges. The grit and cobwebs showed it had not been opened in years. The greenhouse where they had come in was the only functioning entrance. The walls of this room were covered with framed pictures. Some were paintings, but many were sketches, mostly unfinished.

“No TV,” said Caterina, “and the furniture is decrepit.”

“You don’t like it?”

“I love it. Who wouldn’t? I’m just trying to make myself feel better that I rent a small apartment and it takes me an hour to get to the station, while an unemployed foreign drunk gets to live in the Botanical Gardens in the center of town. Or does that sound resentful?”

“Want to buy mine?” said Blume. “It’s near San Giovanni.”

“You’re selling?”

“I might have to. The man in the apartment below me is suing for € 85,000 in damages.”

“What happened?”

“Plumbing problems in my bathroom. Leaked into his apartment. You don’t need the details.”

“Yeah, but € 85,000 in damages. He’s obviously exploiting the situation,” said Caterina.

“Two things. First, he’s a lawyer. Second, he doesn’t even live there. That’s why the damage got so bad. It looks like the leak had been going on for at least seven months but no one was in there to notice. He didn’t discover it until he opened up the apartment with the idea of renting it. I saw it myself. I don’t think he’s exaggerating, to be honest. The effect was very unpleasant. Getting it fixed cost me just a couple of hundred. But I may have to sell my apartment to pay for the damages below.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Commissioner. What about building insurance?”

“Ha-ha.”

“Do you have a good lawyer?”

“I don’t think I want a lawyer. Just cost more money, and there’s not much to contest when you fill your neighbor’s apartment with… Guercino.”

“Guercino?”

“There. The artist. Barbieri was his real name. He was cross-eyed, so they called him Guercino.”

Blume was squinting at a pen-and-wash figure. “That’s definitely Guercino,” he said to himself, surprised at knowing the style of drawing so easily; surprised, too, at hearing his father’s labored pronunciation in his head. He remembered his father’s effort to get his foreign tongue to make the “tsch” sound of the soft Italian “c,” while trying to remain casual and natural about it. To Caterina he said, “And what makes you say he was unemployed?”

“Who?”

“Treacy. Concentrate on where we are, Inspector. You called Treacy an unemployed foreign drunkard.”

“The fact he died drunk and the way he was dressed. But if he had this place and these paintings-I don’t know what to make of him now.”

“A lot of northern Europeans, even if they have money, don’t dress as well as they might,” said Blume. He remembered his father’s habit of wearing socks with his Birkenstock sandals, white legs, checkered shirts. “Americans, too. And don’t feel resentful. Treacy lives nowhere now.”

“It came out wrong,” she said. She watched as he resumed leafing through the canvases and sheets on the table again, this time more slowly. “You’re looking at those pictures like they meant something.”

“My mother specialized in works such as this. This etching by Fontana… If any of these are authentic, the only question is why Treacy didn’t live in a grander place than this.”

They continued their exploration of the house. A cast-iron spiral staircase in the far corner of the room led up to a single bedroom which gave on to a larger bathroom containing a huge enamel tub with lion-claw feet and a large rosewood medicine cabinet with latticework windows. The ceiling was low and sloping.

Blume opened the cabinet and stood back. “Maybe he ran a pharmacy on the side. No one can be that sick.”

“That’s not too bad,” said Caterina. “My father takes about that many.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Blume.

“Prescriptions accumulate, and before you know it, you’re taking ten, twenty pills a day.”

“Then you need to stop taking them,” said Blume, “before they mount up. That’s what I did. First it was Zantac, then they wanted me to take Zocor. Maybe if they didn’t make them sound like the bad guys in a comic book.”

“Palonosetron, Venlafaxine, Baclofen,” read Caterina. “The man was in pain. I think he had cancer.”

“Well, that’s different,” said Blume. “You should probably take pills then.”

She picked up another bottle. “Nexavar.” She turned it around. “Doesn’t say what it does.”

“Bag them,” said Blume. “We can look them up, maybe get the labs to check them.”

When they returned to the living room downstairs, Caterina started looking more closely at the framed works on the walls.