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.
“He was a collector of some sort as well as an artist?” said Caterina. “He seems to prefer unfinished drawings to paintings.”
“Art forgery,” said Blume. “The name had been bothering me for a while but I remember now. Treacy. My father mentioned him a few times. Admiringly, if I recall. Not an artist, an art forger.”
Caterina tapped a thumbnail against her bottom teeth. “That means corrupt dealers, theft, fencing goods, high prices. There is a possibility of some background to the death. At least we have a category of suspect.”
The pictures and the books in his room reminded Blume of his parents and their apartment, the one he still lived in. Their books, reproductions, and papers, most of which he had preserved after their death, remained in their study, but not gathering dust. He kept it clean, spending hours in there himself, like he did as a child, just looking at the pictures in the art books.
He went over to a leather-topped writing desk, picked up some papers, and looked through them. They consisted of bank statements, utility bills, discarded receipts, a few stubs from airplane tickets. He looked at the bank statements, and saw Treacy had a balance of € 243,722 in his Unicredit checking account. Not bad. The plane ticket stubs were all for London and Rome. Treacy had made at least two round trips in the last year. The utility bills were modest. An injunction demanding payment for a TV license lay on top of a brochure for holiday homes in Umbria.
“It’s legal to copy pictures, you know,” he said, dropping the papers back on the desk. “Only the moment a fake is offered for sale as an original does it become a crime, and even then it’s hard to prove intent. See this?” Blume pointed to a drawing of a nude male in red and black chalk on what looked like old paper.
“A naked man,” said Caterina. “He drew that?”
“It looks like a Pontormo, but it’s signed Treacy,” said Blume. “Also, it’s hanging here in his own room.”
“What does that signify?”
“Nothing. Just that he was a very good draftsman.”
Blume wandered over to a mahogany bookshelf. The lower shelves had been removed to make room for large volumes, mostly art books and reproductions, but Blume also saw coverless dictionaries, road maps, atlases, and journals piled up.
The upper shelves contained mainly novels. Amis, Arpino, Atwood, Banville, Barnes, Beckett, Bronte. An organized man. A man of leisure. A foolscap-size notebook with a marbled cover lay open on the writing desk.
“No date on this,” said Blume, looking at the spidery script. It was written with black fountain ink.
“Not great penmanship for an artist,” said Caterina, coming over. “I can’t make out a word.”
“He was getting on in years and if he was in pain, it would have an effect.”
Marking the open page with his thumb, he turned to the inside cover of the notebook, and saw Treacy had written his name. Below that he had written “Diary,” then crossed it out and written “Untitled,” which was crossed out and replaced with “Painting my Outward Walls,” also crossed out. The final title seemed to be “An (im)practical handbook for…” but he had evidently not decided who it was for. Blume returned to the page he had found lying
