hoping some of their knowledge had rubbed off on you, and it seems it has.”
“Did you delve deep, Colonel?”
“A cursory glance, just to see who I would be dealing with. I am very impressed, Commissioner. Really. That was a terrible thing that befell your parents. What made you decide to stay in this awful country afterwards?”
Blume wagged his index finger at the Colonel, warning him off the subject.
“I don’t mean to intrude on your private grief,” said the Colonel. “Though it can’t have been easy. All these years on a police salary? We public servants, risking our lives, grossly underpaid, unrewarded, unrecognized. Policemen fall into arrears on a mortgage, take stupid risks, some even kill themselves out of despair. Some have killed their families. It doesn’t take much to get into a hole, especially if the first place you go to is the criminal underworld instead of your colleagues in law enforcement. A house sale falls through, your kid needs braces, some bastard sues you for some trivial mishap. And there we stand, vulnerable, outbid, underpaid, in debt.”
He opened a box with a sigh and a sad shake of his head that caused his cheeks to wobble. “Get those two glasses over there, the ones by the sink, would you?”
Blume stayed where he was.
“Go on,” said the Colonel. “I had them washed earlier. The corkscrew, too, if you’d be so kind. And some knives, forks, spoons from that drawer.”
Blume spread his hands out in an apologetic way, and said: “Sorry, Colonel. You want a valet, call your Maresciallo in.”
The Colonel sighed theatrically. “Look, Commissioner, I am a fat man. What is simple for you is difficult for me. I suffer from diabetes. I have gout in my left toe.”
“Gout? Nobody gets gout anymore.”
“Nowadays they call it metabolic arthritis. It’s been getting worse. It comes in the spring, stays for the summer, and is gone by the winter. Like some sort of evil migrating bird.”
Blume went over and retrieved the glasses, corkscrew, and silverware, brought them back to the table.
“To the side of the refrigerator there, in the rack, the bottle third from the top-no, the other. That’s it,” said the Colonel.
Blume brought the bottle of wine over, set it in front of the Colonel who was now lifting things out of one white box.
“The thing is,” said the Colonel, “our man was not known for forging tempera paintings, and I found only two in the house. His real specialty was pen, ink, wash, sketches, preparations for prints. He was a great draftsman, but maybe his eye for color was not so good. Maybe you need to be Italian to appreciate the full palette of color.”
“Do you?” said Blume. “Well, then maybe he just liked eggs a lot.”
“There was a lot of milk in that refrigerator, too,” said the Colonel. “Both fresh and sour. Anglo-Saxons always have so much milk.”
“The fresh milk tells us Treacy was here recently,” said Blume. “Not that it’s likely to make much difference.”
“Why would he keep sour milk, Commissioner?”
“Milk is used as a fixative for pencil and chalk, which is what you say he mainly used. Sour is as good as fresh for that. Or maybe he made his own soda bread.”
“Soda bread? Good stuff that. You use sour milk? You must tell me about that another time,” said the Colonel. “Speaking of bread, did you notice the basket with the stale bread in it?”
Blume went over to a wicker basket sitting on the counter, pushed off the top, and produced two pieces of broken dirty bread which he rapped against the counter.
“Rub breadcrumbs over a chalk drawing, and you get an old look,” said the Colonel. “Treacy was a bit of a pig, but I don’t think he kept dirty bread to eat.”
“It’s hardly the only way to get a drawing to look old,” said Blume.
“You’re right again,” said the Colonel. “Just one of many techniques.”
“So maybe it was just stale bread,” said Blume.
“What else did you notice?” asked the Colonel.
“There was gelatin in the fridge, which maybe he used for glues or for preparing paper, something like that.”
“I see garlic, potatoes, vinegar. They can all be used, too, can’t they?”
The Colonel had dipped his spoon into the pot on the table. He twirled it niftily between his fingers as he pulled it out, opened his mouth, and dropped in a glob of honey.
“Honey is used for pastels,” said the Colonel, his voice slow and thick.
“Vinegar, wine, oatmeal,” said Blume. “There is an ice-cube tray full of ink over there, and it looks like he used the pastry-board as a drawing board. Under the sink in the greenhouse, I found denatured alcohol, white spirit, benzene, turps. You can smell the turps in here. Also, he was doing something with oils in that double boiler.”
“You haven’t missed a trick,” said the Colonel.
“Yes, I have,” said Blume. He walked over to the zinc fruit bowls and scooped up a handful of small acorns, shook them in the hollow of his hand, then let them drop. “Why did he collect dry acorns?” He went to the other bowl and picked up the woody fruits he had examined earlier. “And I don’t even know what these are.”
“Oak apples,” said the Colonel. “Or galls.”
“Galls?”
“Houses for insect larvae.”
“Sorry. I still don’t get it,” said Blume.
“I don’t know much about the nature side of it,” said the Colonel. “These things grow on oaks, maybe on other trees, too. They contain wasp larvae. What you do is pluck them, dry them out in the oven or the sun, then crush them with a pestle; you mix in acorns, too. But I don’t know what the proportion is. You mix it with water, maybe other things, and you get iron ink for drawing.”
“And that’s the end result in the ice-cube tray?” said Blume.
“You don’t use your nose enough, Commissioner. Bring your face down to that ink, breathe in, slowly, use your mouth as well as your nose. Open the back of your throat, too. Get the taste.”
Blume put his face over the tray and sniffed. “Nothing,” he said. “Maybe a bit like a sweaty cheese rind.”
“You need to learn to use all your five senses, Commissioner, and never despise smell which is our most basic, our most reptile sense. That is not gall ink. That’s cuttlefish ink. You can smell the salt. Damn, I can taste it in the back of my throat from here. Wonderful stuff. It looks black, draws brown. But gall-it burns through paper, but that’s good if all the paper you have available is half ruined. Gives you an excuse for all the wear.”
The Colonel pointed to the raised brick fireplace where a half-burned log lay in ash. “It’s too warm to be lighting fires for comfort,” he said. “So we can assume that had another purpose. Mix the soot with rainwater and you’ve got bistre which, in the end, is going to be the ink he used most.”
“Does it have to be rainwater?” asked Blume.
“Definitely. Especially here in Rome. Too much limescale in the tap water, too many salts in the bottled stuff. Besides, it’s free. You know who used bistre a lot?”
“Who?”
“Nicolas Poussin,” said the Colonel. “And you know when I first met Henry Treacy?”
“Tell me.”
“In 1973, when he was accused of trying to sell a fake Poussin landscape. An oil painting. He wasn’t so good with oils. Good, but not that good.”
Blume did some mental arithmetic.
“I turn sixty-three on November 13, Commissioner. That’s what you’re trying to work out. Two years ago I moved out of the Carabiniere Art Forgery and Heritage Division in Trastevere and was posted to Madonna del Riposo.”
The Colonel picked up a flat painting knife from the table, stabbed it into the top of the second box, and slit it open. He pulled out several flat and several bulky packages and a half loaf of Genzano bread, then set about unfolding and unwrapping each package. The flat ones contained salamis and cured hams, the bulky ones cheese.
The Colonel broke off a triangle of cheese and popped it into his mouth. He shoved the corkscrew into the black bottle before handing it to Blume. “If you’d be so kind, I’m a little breathless?”
