“One day when Mrs. Heath had left us alone in her house while she went out to pick some apples, Monica pointed at a large oil painting over the mantelpiece of redcoat soldiers, rearing horses, and an elephant. ‘What’s that painting?’ she asked.
“ ‘Just because it’s the biggest doesn’t mean it’s the best or the most valuable in the room,’ I declared, trying to sound more authoritative than I felt in an effort to deflect the conversation from where I knew Monica was going to take it.
“ ‘You don’t know who it’s by,’ said Monica (it was a Francis Hayman but she was right: I did not know that then). ‘What about that one over there, the one with the two sad dogs? I like that one.’
“ ‘That’s not good art,’ I said importantly. ‘It’s by a man called Landseer. Actually, it’s lousy.’
“ ‘Is it now?’ said Monica. ‘It looks grand to me. But if it’s so terrible, you could do one just as good, couldn’t you?’ She pointed to another frame. ‘Look, there are two wee cartoons even I could copy. All them squiggly lines, little men dressed in black.’
“ ‘That’s Jack Yeats. I could do him all right.’
“She smiled at me. ‘Well, we have to start somewhere. How much would that sketch there of your man carrying the turf get us?’
“ ‘I don’t know. About twenty-five quid?’
“ ‘At that rate the big one with the dogs must be worth a thousand. D’ you think her ladyship’d miss her Yeats if we just took it off the wall?’
“I was thinking that if I did a quick copy it might stand in for a day or two without anyone noticing while I copied the original. A plan formed in my mind and I explained it to her, but she found it too elaborate.
“ ‘All that for just twenty-five quid.’
“ ‘That’s a decent amount of money. It would pay the deposit on a flat in London, if that’s where we’re going,’ I said.”
Blume suddenly remembered something, and stopped reading. “There’s a half blank page here, more crossings-out, and this is not strictly relevant.”
Caterina did not say anything until she had finished writing out her last note. Her arm ached and her wrist had seized up like a lobster’s claw, but she wanted to go on.
“Does he copy the painting?” she asked.
“Knowing how he spent the rest of his days, I’d say he does. Otherwise, why would he be telling this?”
“Maybe he wanted to talk about Monica. Let me see.” She leaned in to look at the notebook. “I don’t know how you can read his handwriting so fluently. I’m going to be much slower.”
“He uses abbreviations and plus signs for ‘and,’ and he’s not a great speller,” said Blume. “Well, you have the photocopies. Don’t tell anyone you have them, OK? Read ahead if you want, but maybe skip the early years.”
“I think this works, you reading and me taking notes,” said Caterina. “You could stay for dinner and we could continue after. Just to finish this first section this evening.”
Blume closed the notebook and stood up. “That’s very kind. But I’ve just remembered I have a dinner appointment. It takes me at least half an hour to get home from here, so…”
Caterina picked up her notes and held them against her chest. “Oh, well, that’s not a problem.”
“It’s just more work, really.”
“I don’t mind. I’ll continue reading by myself after you’ve gone.”
“I mean this dinner. It’s work-related.”
“Oh, right. Well, so is this,” said Caterina.
“Yes. Everything’s just work,” said Blume.
Chapter 15
He looked forward to meeting Kristin. Never having officially acknowledged any attachment to each other, they had conducted an on-off relationship, now locked in the “off ” position.
At Via degli Umbri, he went a few meters in the wrong direction on a one-way street to stop at a bar with a good selection of wines, and bought a bottle of Mater Matuta from Casale del Giglio. It would probably remain unopened, but Kristin sometimes drank.
He reversed back up the street to Piazza dell’Immacolata and had to bully his way back into the traffic, using the fact that anyone who hit him from the rear would pay the insurance. Eventually he forced a white van to yield. The car behind it blared its horn, and Blume glanced absently in his rear-view mirror to see what sort of fool was driving, but the van hid it from sight. All he could see were a gray Skoda and a blue Lancia farther down the street.
The traffic was snarled up at Porta Maggiore, as always. An ancient green tram seemed to have died from the effort of switching tracks, and the cars had to edge around it, some in front, some behind. Blume went in front, which meant he had to angle the car over a patch of grass and avoid a stone bench that had been covered in graffiti before being cleft in two.
Blume cut diagonally across the flow to get through an arch in the Aurelian fortifications, and made it. The driver he had cut off was too busy texting on his cell to notice. A hairy arm and crooked elbow from the car behind that showed total relaxation. Nor did the blue Lancia behind them seem in any hurry.
Blume found a parking spot reasonably near his apartment block, picked up his bag with the notebooks, the bottle of wine, and walked up Via Orvieto. Where the street intersected Via la Spezia, a blue car was angling itself into a parking space. Blume wondered if he would have time for a shower before Kristin arrived.
Back home, Blume smashed a handful of Calabrian chili peppers under the mortar and tipped the flakes on top of the hamburger, now frying in the pan. He added crushed garlic, chives, stirring with a wooden spoon, yanking the pan off the heat, and shaking the contents about. He added tomato paste to color the meat. He turned on the oven to heat the tortillas, and mixed powdered cumin, cocoa, coriander, and his secret ingredient, mustard powder, which he poured on top of the meat, then turned it down to simmer. The kitchen clock showed ten minutes to 9. He shredded the lettuce, added salt to the chopped tomatoes in the blue bowl, put the tortillas in the oven. Kristin had said 9 o’clock and was never late. They would be ready exactly on time. He shook Tabasco droplets over the mixture. In the living room, the phone started ringing.
It was Kristin.
“Hey there, Alec. Did you set the table yet?”
“Sure. But we’re gonna be using our hands for most of this. It’s Tex-Mex, Calabrian style. You into that?”
“Great,” she said. “But you’re going to have to wait. At least an hour later than I said. Something came up.”
A sudden high-pitched beeping noise filled the room and, within seconds, Blume felt like it was in his head.
“What’s that?” asked Kristin.
“The sound of tortillas burning,” said Blume.
Blume took off his shoes, stood on the counter, opened the smoke alarm, took out the battery, and sighed in relief as the noise stopped. He noticed that he had turned on the grill rather than the oven. He switched it off, opened the door, and allowed himself to be enveloped in a black cloud of smoke. He opened the kitchen window, allowing in a blare of traffic noise that was almost as bad as the alarm. He leaned out and took a breath of cool evening air and glanced casually up the street. The blue car sat snug behind a green dumpster.
He threw out the black tortillas and opened two cans of tomatoes and two of borlotti beans, poured them into a casserole and added the meat mixture and a dash of habanero. They would have chili con carne instead. He added some herbs, then looked through his dwindling collection of spices from Castroni, and found a small jar of Sambal Setan, which he added to the pot.
He walked into the living room and took Treacy’s notebooks from his bag, and, instead of resuming where he had left off with Caterina, flicked back and forth through the three volumes looking for references to the Colonel. After setting aside the one volume that seemed entirely dedicated to the technical aspects of Treacy’s work, and
