“He wasn’t going to tell us at all?” said Blume, picking up the paper again and dropping it into the trash.
“It’s hard to say. But now he is. The couple are staying-were staying, since they left a few hours ago…”
“At the Hotel Noantri,” said Blume. “Good place to target. All that brass, high ceilings, smoked glass, fat, slow, wealthy, and elderly guests. Did Rospo think he could get away without mentioning it?”
“He could have, Commissioner. And the point is he did mention it.”
Dark-haired, sharp blue eyes, mid-thirties, angular, slim, and fit, Panebianco should have been a ladies’ man, but somehow was not. He had a way of looking at people with the air of a grown-up seeing through a child’s hopeless lies. Blume was not sure what his idea of fun might be, but whatever it was, it did not seem to accommodate silliness, disrespect, or dubious taste. Blume counted him as one of his most reliable colleagues, but remained a little wary of his mature restraint.
“The department does not need another disciplinary issue,” said Panebianco. “Not now, and not an incident involving foreign visitors. We already have a problem with Grattapaglia and the diplomat.”
Blume cursed. “Has that started already?”
“Apparently the diplomat got in touch with the Questore directly. He’s given us twenty-four hours to resolve the problem. I think they want Grattapaglia’s head on a plate, plus one scapegoat. In other words, Grattapaglia alone won’t do. They want to discipline a senior officer who was there at the time, which means you, me… or Inspector Mattiola.”
“You weren’t anywhere near Grattapaglia, Rosario. Mattiola is new on the job, so…”
“That leaves just you, sir.” Panebianco expressed no admiration for Blume’s implied sacrifice.
“Speaking of Mattiola,” said Panebianco, “she asked me to follow up some ideas she had about that girl at the gallery. Did she mention that to you?”
“Yes,” said Blume.
But Panebianco was looking straight at him, waiting for a fuller response, like his father used to do when Blume tried to be monosyllabic about trouble at school. He decided to turn the tables. “What do you make of it?”
“It looks like a simple case of tax evasion,” said Panebianco. “We could pass on the details to our colleagues in the Finance Police.”
“We could,” agreed Blume. “If it served any purpose. They’ll just say fine and sit on their hands waiting for a magistrate’s order that is unlikely to be issued. Same as us.”
“I see there is another aspect that Inspector Mattiola is interested in,” continued Panebianco. “She sees a possible connection between false ID papers, if that’s what we have here, and the fact that Treacy and his colleague John Nightingale were in the art forgery business.”
“You’ve been looking into that, have you?” said Blume.
“Well, not me so much as a very good friend of mine,” Panebianco said. “He works in the Art Forgery and Heritage Division of the Carabinieri.”
“Great, another one,” muttered Blume to himself.
Panebianco put his hand on his hip and said, “Excuse me?”
“Nothing. Is he someone you trust?”
“Absolutely.”
“How is it you know him?” asked Blume.
Panebianco stood back, adjusted his jacket severely. “We play soccer together.”
“Oh, five-a-side?” asked Blume hopefully. The whole force seemed to be made up of amateur soccer players. He wished someone would invite him to play. He was good at defense.
“No, proper soccer. A full-sized pitch. We have a league. A lot of players are former semi-professionals. Serie C. So it’s pretty serious.”
“Full strips and refs and all that?”
“Yes. We have a strip. Green and white. I don’t have to wear it, though. I’m the goalkeeper. My friend plays midfield.”
“And what does your friend say?”
“It seems Treacy did the art, and it was Nightingale who did the paperwork and placed the paintings. So I asked my friend if this Nightingale produced false bills of sale for paintings, but he didn’t know.”
“Is that it?”
“I didn’t want to inquire further without official cause.”
“I see,” said Blume. “Do you think I could talk to this friend of yours?” Blume picked up the receiver from a nearby desk phone and held it out in Panebianco’s direction. “How about now?” he said. “Phone him from here.”
Panebianco took the receiver, but put it down again, saying, “I don’t know his number by heart. I need to go back to my desk.”
“All right. Patch it through to me in my office,” said Blume.
Two minutes later, the phone on Blume’s desk rang. “I have him on hold, I’m putting you through,” said Panebianco.
“Good,” said Blume. “Wait, what’s his name?” But Panebianco was gone.
“Hello? Hello?” said a voice. A southerner.
“Hello, this is Commissioner Alec Blume, squadra mobile, who am I speaking to?”
“Lieutenant Colonel Faedda,” said the voice. Blume placed the accent as Sardinian. He pictured a thin and swarthy young man in full dress uniform sitting at his desk carefully arranging pencils.
“Inspector Panebianco didn’t introduce us properly,” said Blume.
“He’s useless, isn’t he?” said the Carabiniere. “You should see him on the pitch. Hopeless. What can I do for you, Commissioner?”
Blume was taken aback by the easy familiarity of the man’s tone. He erased the image of the uniform and the pencils, pictured feet on a desk. “I wanted to talk about John Nightingale and Henry Treacy,” he said.
“Yes, I’ve been looking at files all morning,” said the Carabiniere. “Not just on Rosario’s behalf, of course, since the case has been assigned to us. I’d definitely appreciate any help you could give me.”
This conversation was flowing in the wrong direction. “I don’t have anything I can give you,” said Blume.
“I realize it’s early days,” said Faedda. “We can wait for the autopsy. Then maybe we can meet, compare notes?”
“That’s really for the magistrate to decide,” said Blume rather stiffly.
“I hear the magistrate is Buoncompagno.”
“Yes,” said Blume.
“Buoncompagno is a man who prefers to have his decisions taken for him.”
Blume was suspicious of the casual frankness of the statement.
Faedda continued, “Look, a former colleague of mine-from before my time, really-is involved in the case. Colonel Farinelli. Have you met him?”
“I have,” said Blume, on his guard.
“Already? Well, then you’ll know who’s calling the shots, Commissioner. And the Colonel’s influence outreaches his rank. Have you spoken to John Nightingale yet?”
“No.” Blume felt judged.
“Me neither, and I don’t think I will get the chance. But you might. Now, I don’t know what you’ve found out there, but from our records here I can tell you Nightingale’s specialization is provenance. He appears to be exceptionally good at it.”
“Go on,” said Blume, reaching for a pen and a blank sheet of paper, and wrote down the name Faedda.
“Nightingale knows every branch of every minor aristocratic or rich bourgeois family in England, America, Germany, France. When generating a story, he never begins with a purely fictional character. Let’s put all this in the past tense since he seems to have been pretty inactive over the past few years. When he purported to be reselling on a painting, he always used the name of someone who really existed as having been a previous owner.”
Blume wrote the word “provenance” beneath the picture of the sad dog he had been drawing. “In what way did he use their name?” He started sketching a tree.
“He’d say the person had sat for the painting, commissioned it, ordered it, bought it, sold it, lost it. It didn’t matter. The important thing is to establish a connection with someone with reputation, money, or title who died
