Conor Fitzgerald - Fatal Touch

Warming to his theme, Elia wondered who she thought they should use as the center-forward for the game against Palermo on Wednesday night? She frowned, thinking hard, until he offered a few names and thoughts of his own. She picked a name. Baptista. Elia was amazed. It was exactly the name he had been thinking of. Clearly she was not so completely out of the loop as all that. Now, as regards the defense, was Mexes better than…

When he had finally finished, she told him to go to bed. She went into her bedroom, took her pistol from its hiding place in the closet, loaded it. By the front door she unhooked a framed poster from the wall to reveal a cavity in the wall that housed the electricity meter. She placed the pistol there, and hung up the poster, looking at it for the first time in years. It was an impressionist’s work, showing a beautiful garden. She checked the name of the artist. Camille Pissarro. Probably Italian in origin. All the best artists were Italian.

Caterina looked at her watch. It was a quarter to ten already. Elia had to be in bed by nine-thirty and was usually asleep within twenty minutes or less. They had by unspoken mutual consent abandoned her attempts to read him bedtime stories. Instead, she listened to more soccer facts, while she helped him undress, brush his teeth, and climb into bed. She sat there for a while

stroking his head until he told her to stop. She picked up his trainers and carried them to the shoe cupboard in the hall. They were like two dirty white barges. Size 35. One size smaller than hers.

At a quarter past ten, she went into her son’s room, kissed him on the forehead, noting again how much he sweated in his sleep. Usually she left his door ajar, in case he called out. They liked to remind each other of their company in the apartment. He called out less often now. Tonight she would close it.

She undressed and put on a green sweatshirt, gray soft cotton pants, a pair of red woolen socks. It was not the most alluring getup, but it was her house and this is what she wore indoors. Besides, she was far from certain she wanted to allure anyone. Blume was coming round because her child had been threatened. Hardly a reason to put on makeup and high heels.

While she was in the bathroom removing her makeup, the buzzer to her apartment rang. She stopped in mid movement, a blackened cotton ball pinched between her fingers, staring into the mirror at her tense face staring back. Then she said aloud to herself, “That will be him. Early.”

She let the cotton fall into the sink and walked toward the front door. The buzzer rasped again, and she unhooked the Pissarro, touched her Beretta, then answered the intercom.

“Inspector Mattiola?”

Not Blume. A woman. A girl. “Emma?”

“Yes, can I come up?”

“Are you on your own?”

“Yes.”

Caterina paused, her finger hovering over the button.

“I really need to talk,” said Emma. “And I have something I want to show you.”

“Is there no one down there with you?”

“No. What do you mean? There’s a police car across the street, two policemen in it, if that’s what you mean.”

“Police or Carabinieri?”

“Police.”

“How did you get my address?”

“You’re in the book. You are the only Mattiola, C. in Rome.”

She waited, listening to Emma’s breathing and the background sound of traffic.

She watched the corridor through the peephole in her door, and just as Emma, who was carrying something, stretched out her hand to knock, she swung the door open, catching the girl by surprise and leaving her with a slightly guilty look.

Caterina led Emma into the living room, and watched as she cast around looking for a place to sit. She finally chose the armchair, and placed the object she had been carrying flat on the floor, face up. It was a framed picture. Caterina looked down at it. It was filled with dark greens, blues, and a muddy brown. It seemed unfocused, or like someone had smudged it while it was drying. A garden again, maybe before a storm. The garden of a big house, or maybe a public garden. She preferred her Pissarro.

Caterina sat down on the sofa.

“Are we alone?” Emma asked quietly.

“My son is in bed asleep.”

“I’m sorry about this,” said Emma.

Caterina nodded. “Tell me what it is before apologizing for it.”

“As you know, the Colonel and that Maresciallo turned up at my mother’s house today,” said Emma. “I’ve been staying there, in Pistoia. The Colonel said they were looking for paintings that Treacy had sent or she had taken, and my mother, looking him straight in the eye, said Treacy had sent her a painting once and she had sent it back. I never knew she could lie like that. But the Colonel did not believe her, and they just started looking around.”

“You could have called the police.”

“The two of them are pretty intimidating, and maybe they had a magistrate’s warrant. It’s easier to imagine all the things you should have done afterwards,” said Emma. “After a bit the Colonel comes back. Behind him is the Maresciallo, seven framed paintings under his arms. Four of them are works by Treacy, ‘in the style of Old Masters,’ as he used to put it in his dishonest way. The fifth-I can’t remember what it was. I think it was an original painting by some seventeenth-century Dutchman. I can’t even think of a name, now. Ter Borch, maybe-probably another Treacy fake. And the last two were nothing to do with Treacy. He left us all the modern-style works, making sure he damaged them and my mother’s feelings first. He says, ‘These modern works here are obviously yours,’ and starts circling the room, unhooking the paintings, breaking open the backing boards as if this was the most natural thing in the world, then checking out the canvas, smelling it. At one stage I think he even licked his finger, smiling all the time and shaking his head to show how pathetic he thought they all were.”

Emma sat back with a sigh, and said, “Have you got a drink?”

“Only bottles of sweet stuff that I take out and put away again at Christmas without opening. Do you want some of that?”

“No vodka?”

“No.”

“All right,” said Emma. She half slipped a stockinged foot from her shoe. Caterina looked down at her own spreading thighs, her cotton running pants.

“I’m waiting,” said Caterina.

Emma resumed. “Then he sits down. The Maresciallo comes up, hands him a file folder and a tin. He puts the tin in the middle of the table, opens it, picks out a round brown ball wrapped in crinkled plastic, unwraps it, pops it into his mouth.

“ ‘Give me your hand,’ he says, plucking another ball from the tin. I refused. ‘From England. Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls. Very hard to find here.’ Then he pulls out pages of numbers with the TIM logo on it and fans them out on the table. He explains it showed the connections my BlackBerry had made with cell masts and the GPS satellites during the day on which Treacy was killed. It showed, he says, that I was with Treacy until late. So I asked him how he knew Treacy was with me all that time, and for a moment he stopped sucking the candies, then he smiles, and says, ‘Good point. I like that. We’ll have to get witnesses, too, won’t we?’ Then he asks if I had accompanied Treacy to the place where he was found dead, and I told him I had accompanied him part of the way.

“ ‘So you do not deny you were with him moments before his death,’ said the Colonel. And I sort of shrugged at that. I expected more questions, but then he announced, ‘None of that matters, the case is being filed away since we do not suspect foul play.’ ”

Emma stopped talking and looked down at the picture. “The painting he was looking for is this one here.”