Conor Fitzgerald - Fatal Touch

“Nothing.”

“You just go to her house and read her bedtime stories, huh?”

“I think she’s got instinct,” said Blume.

“What makes you say that?”

Blume told him about Caterina’s trip to Pistoia that morning and her discoveries about Emma and Nightingale.

“You keep adding bits,” Paoloni complained. “Is that it, you’ve told me everything now?”

“More or less,” said Blume. He decided to hold back on the Velazquez angle for now.

“OK, but something’s still missing here, Alec. The Colonel’s stringing you along, just as you’re doing to him, but you both know the paintings aren’t worth all that much. The Colonel says he wants the notebooks because of what it says about what-Gladio agents, the CIA Stay Behind operation in the 1970s, his past dealings with Treacy-all that secret agent stuff. I don’t believe it. No one cares about that shit. Andreotti is a life senator, Cossiga got made a life senator, Berlusconi’s in power, there are seventy convicted criminals sitting in Parliament. No one gives a damn.”

“I forgot. There’s also this thing about the Colonel and Nightingale selling stuff to the Mafia.”

Paoloni turned and addressed the four empty bucket seats to his right. “Now he tells me.”

As Blume explained, Paoloni methodically shredded the food cartons on the table. Then, scooping them onto the tray, he placed the tray on the table next to them, crumpled his straw into his cup, and sucked his teeth.

“Except, it’s still bullshit, Alec. Maybe the Colonel found out about the notebooks through Nightingale, but if his main concern was about some minor Sicilian Don finding out he was swindled fifteen years ago, and the Colonel knows you’ve read the notebooks, then he’d have come to you, spoken to you about it, tried to buy or force your silence. But he didn’t do that. I don’t think he cares too much. The way you have told me this suggests the Colonel wanted to see what was in the notebooks, and he has some good reasons for not wanting them to go completely public. But he doesn’t seem all that worried that you have read them. It may have started out like that, but now it’s basically the other way around. You are more concerned about what he might find in them. There’s something else, isn’t there?”

Blume watched the Russian sleepwalk in their direction wondering whether he was going to come to their table or walk right on by. The Russian could be a hit man. This could be a hit. No reason it should be, but it could be.

“I think he is looking for something else in there,” said Paoloni. “And I think that whatever it is, you have found it.”

The flip-flopped Russian walked right out.

Paoloni said, “You don’t want to tell me.”

Blume said nothing.

“Hey, Alec, we’re good friends, right?”

“Yes, we are.”

“Then it’s cool. Friends don’t have to tell their friends stuff if they don’t want to. A friend is not someone who doubts, hassles, probes, questions, and disbelieves you: that’s what wives are for. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t tell you.”

“Christ knows I’m glad you don’t,” said Blume.

“See? Friendship is all about not sharing,” said Paoloni. He floated his hand in the air, and Blume slapped it. “Maybe you’ll tell me later, huh?”

“Tell you what?” said Blume.

“That’s my man.”

After four hours’ sleep, Blume stood under the shower listening to his cell phone ringing. When he had dried himself, mopped up the floor, and made his bed, he picked the phone up and pressed the callback button.

It was Inspector Rospo, who spoke in a tired voice with an undertow of insolence. He told Blume that at five in the morning Leporelli and Scariglia, accompanied by a lawyer, had presented themselves at the Corviale station and confessed to an accidental hit-and-run. The only thing greater than their panic at the time was their remorse now, according to their lawyer. They had agreed that Scariglia was the driver.

Already, it was no longer a police concern. From here on it was the prosecutor versus the lawyer. On past form, the prosecutor was not one to let them get away with it.

Rospo said he was ready for reassignment. The purpose of his phone call seemed to be to impress upon Blume the extent of his wasted effort. Blume told him to put himself at the disposition of Inspector Mattiola for the mugging investigation, and hung up.

Blume rinsed the floor cloth and decided to do the bedroom and hallway floors, too. He sprinkled pink alcohol down the hallway and mopped his way backwards into the sink, then set about washing and putting away the plates and saucepans from his Mexican failure. He wrung all the dirty water from the floor cloth into the washbasin then wiped the limescale and dirt from the aluminum using white vinegar. When the counters, steel furnishings, and fridge were shining, he opened the window to air and dry his house and to check if anyone was watching him. The higgledy-piggledy parked market vans below shone innocently back at him in the morning sun. He scrubbed his coffeepot till it gleamed, then made himself a good cup of Illy coffee, and sat down. The sunlight illuminated an annoying smudge on the window.

His phone rang again.

“Commissioner Blume?”

It was what’s-his-name, the Lieutenant Colonel from the Carabinieri Art Forgeries and Heritage Division. In his effort to remember the name, Blume failed to register what the man had said.

“What? Who?”

“Lieutenant Colonel Nicu Faedda.”

“Yes, I knew that. What do you want?”

Faedda transmitted an offended silence down the line.

Blume tapped the side of his phone with his thumb. One tap a millimeter or so to the left on the red button would close the conversation.

“I am calling you as an act of courtesy.”

Touchy formal bastard. Especially for one so young. It must be part of being Sard.

“Several hours ago, the paintings that the Colonel deposited in the storeroom were removed,” said Faedda.

“Removed by who? Colonel Farinelli?”

“Not personally. It’s not important who moved them. It was a Carabiniere who may have been acting in good faith and was certainly acting under orders. This is something that need not concern you and will someday be the subject of an internal inquiry.”

“How?” asked Blume, but he already knew the answer. Similar things had happened more than once with police evidence. All it took was someone with authorization to enter the storeroom.

“I think it was during the removal of a group of recovered Roman bas-reliefs which-it’s not important. They’ve gone, and they disappeared less than a day after you and I met. I believe the Colonel must have learned of our meeting.”

Finally it dawned on Blume that there was an implied accusation behind the information.

“You think I told the Colonel? You think I have something to do with this?”

Significant silence. Blume counted one beat, two beats, three, and just as the Carabiniere officer drew breath and began to speak, he hung up.

The market on Via Orvieto was already crammed with elderly women buying fish and prodding at vegetables. Although a shadow of what it was when Blume first arrived here as a child with his parents, it still reached down to the end of the street, which remained closed to traffic. You could park there the night before, but once the market opened you would be trapped until lunchtime. The only place to watch his apartment, therefore, was at the corner of Via La Spezia. Blume walked up to the bar on the corner, passing by a metallic green Ford Mondeo in which a man was studying something. As he sipped a cappuccino, Blume watched the man in the car suck a pen and make a mark in his book.