Conor Fitzgerald - Fatal Touch

“Yeah, well… ” said Rospo.

“Then two months after that, there was a mysterious fire at the Corsi Hotel. It was a minor thing-basically a perimeter wall was blackened-but the Vigili Urbani and the Fire Department inspected the premises, found around eighty health and safety violations, and closed down the hotel directly afterwards. It never reopened. I followed this up, and Agnolo Corsi…”

“ Agnolo? ” said Rospo. “That’s the gayest name I’ve ever heard.”

Caterina smiled. “Apparently that’s the poor man’s name. Agnolo filed a complaint in which he alleges that Leporelli and Scariglia were working for the Hudson amp; Martinetti Hotel chain, owners of the Noantri Hotel, which is where most of the mugging victims were resident. The Hudson amp; Martinetti Hotel chain sued for defamation, and the case is pending. The investigating magistrate appointed to look into the accusation wrote off Corsi’s claim as ‘highly improbable’ and ‘delusional,’ which it is. A few months later, the first mugging, perpetrated against a guest from the Noantri Hotel, occurred.”

“It’s bullshit that Leporelli and Scariglia were working for the Hudson amp; Martinetti Hotel,” said Rospo.

“Of course it is,” said Caterina. “But it’s interesting Corsi should make this claim.”

“That’s a strange… ” began Blume. He stopped as his cell phone rang. He excused himself and answered, walking away from Caterina and Rospo toward his office. The caller was Paoloni, who sounded very pleased with himself.

“I thought you’d like to know,” he said. “Two men have just broken into your apartment.”

When blume clapped a phone to his ear and wandered off to his office while she was in mid-sentence, and Rospo, already annoyed at being upstaged by her that morning, returned to his desk with a shrug, Caterina had to work hard to keep the disappointment and anger from her face.

She decided to wait for Blume to emerge from his office and advise on her next step. But when he did reappear it was only for the time it took him to walk quickly out of his office, through the operations room, and down the corridor.

She started mapping out an investigative approach, trying to find something for Rospo that he would not find demeaning and might possibly do well, when she got a call from downstairs to say that a certain Emma and Angela Solazzi were looking for her.

Blume had specifically removed her from the case, yet the arrival of these two was something she knew he would be interested in. Her hand hovered over her phone, but she made no call. Seeing as he saw fit to leave without saying where, and they had asked for her, not him, Caterina had them sent to the interview room.

Mother and daughter, alike in the shape of their noses and in their posture, but little else, sat side by side at the far end of the table when Caterina entered.

Emma Solazzi said, “I thought it would be like killing two birds with one stone, interviewing us together.”

“Are we allowed to smoke in here?” asked Angela. “I’m nervous.”

“No one asked you to come here,” said Caterina. “And, no, you’re not allowed to smoke.”

“Smoking gave me these crow’s feet around my eyes. I probably have cancer of the something, too. But I like my husky voice.” And continuing in her husky voice, she said, “I wanted to clear up a few things about John Nightingale. And about Henry Treacy, too.”

Caterina shifted her gaze to Emma. “And you?”

“I’m here to hear what she has to say.”

Caterina glanced at her watch to make a point. “OK, but let’s make this quick. I have other business. What sort of person is John Nightingale, Emma?”

Her asking Emma the question caught both visitors by surprise for a moment. Emma shrugged and said, “He is decent enough, I guess. Gentlemanly. Generous. Kind of… boring? I hardly know him. Ask her: she’s the one who slept with him.”

“She’s right,” her mother said, nodding at Caterina. “John is very dull. Mostly in a good way. I have come to appreciate dullness in people. They are safer, more dependable, less violent. That’s essentially why I am here. I want you to know that John Nightingale is not violent. It is not possible that he had anything to do with Henry Treacy’s death.”

“Who told you that he did?”

“No one,” said Angela. “But I know that if you’re investigating, this is certain to come up as a possible line of inquiry. John would not hurt a fly. If there was a dangerous one, it was Henry.”

“Did you have a relationship with Henry, too?”

“Oh, yes. I thought that was clear.” Angela looked taken aback and her daughter looked embarrassed. “Haven’t you been investigating? I worked for them, just as Emma does now. Henry was my… Emma, if you lean any further away from me, you risk falling off the chair.”

“I am not very comfortable with this sort of thing. It’s only natural,” said Emma.

“Of course, darling. But Henry was my lover. There, it’s not so bad a word now that I have said it. Henry came long before Nightingale, and was, well, he was Henry and John is just John. But I had to leave Henry.”

“Was he violent?” asked Caterina.

“He was a raging fire who burned people up. Literally. Look.”

Angela rolled up the left sleeve of her black cashmere cardigan, revealing a long white scar that curved up her forearm, branching as it went. “It reaches up to my clavicle, down to my breast. It doesn’t look too bad now. But for years when I tanned, it would remain stubbornly pale, like a white snake.”

“Treacy did that?”

“Accidentally. A splash of boiling linseed oil. He whipped it out of a pot with a ladle when I was standing behind him. I held my arm up to protect my face. He was drunk.”

“Please, mother,” said Emma.

“What? He was.”

“It’s obvious you were naked at the time, which is why it burned your breast. I can do without that picture in my head.”

“That was accidental,” said Caterina. “He seems to have managed to burn himself as well. Did he ever hurt you deliberately?”

“Oh, yes. Henry hit me in the mouth twice. Once he punched my shoulder so hard I couldn’t lift my arm for weeks. He apologized for hitting me in the mouth, but he never took that shoulder punch seriously… He threw a bottle at me once, aiming to miss, I like to think.”

“How much of that did you go through before leaving him?”

“I had already left him for Nightingale when he threw the bottle. It’s why he threw it.”

“When did you meet Henry Treacy for the first time?”

“In 1974,” said Angela.

“No, sorry. I was talking to Emma here,” said Caterina.

“Me? When I went to Galleria Orpiment. Three years ago.”

“And you knew these stories?”

“Well, more or less.”

“I warned her,” said Angela. “I warned her not to put up with anything, and I mean anything, from Henry. I told her some of the stories, though not in full detail. I didn’t want to be too prejudicial. Even so, I told her to keep her identity secret and her wits about her, and never, never to go drinking with him.”

“So what did you think when you saw this man who had hurt your mother like that?”

“I don’t know. He wasn’t what I expected. He was far older. I knew he would be, but when I saw him, I couldn’t make the connection. My image of him was from a photograph my mother showed me a few times over the years. He was young then. Handsome, too. Like that self-portrait in his room in the gallery. I’d see this old guy sitting there, with this blond Adonis painting above him, and it was like the young man had gone away, and Henry was his father, sitting there, ageing, waiting for the boy in the picture to come back. I half expected him to walk in the door one day.”