Caterina, “she is.”
Blume looked over at Caterina. Again, he saw only the side of her face, the rigid outline of her body, her legs out straight, like she was a two-dimensional figure in a three-dimensional space.
She did not answer him or look at him, so he continued alone. “Another thing, you went to great lengths to hide her identity and to keep up the pretence, yet at the same time you didn’t.”
“I don’t understand you,” said Nightingale.
“It took Inspector Mattiola less than half a working day to ascertain Emma’s identity as your daughter. She became suspicious immediately, thought about it for a while, then ran a basic background check beginning with the tax code. We’re talking about a few hours’ work to discover your daughter’s identity. It’s the strange mix of thoroughness and carelessness that has me wondering.”
Nightingale seemed to be studying the swirls on his fingertips. Finally, he said, “Let me address your outrage at my lack of paternal feelings first.” Nightingale turned toward Caterina as he said this, then getting little response, focused on Blume again. “Before Emma came to the gallery to work with us, I had met her exactly five times.”
He held up a fist and splayed his fingers. “I held her in my arms just once, and it was on the day I first saw her. She was three. She was showing me how she could jump higher than anyone, and she landed on a book she had been reading, slipped, and banged her head hard on the side of a low table. I scooped her up and tried to stop her from crying, but she had this huge bruise and Angela, who hadn’t seen the incident, seemed to think it was my fault, and maybe it was. So, you see, Commissioner, we really were strangers. And if I hid her identity carelessly, it’s because it was well enough hidden already. We did not risk a spontaneous outburst of affection. Emma herself only learned my identity a few weeks before she came to work in the gallery.”
“You and Emma’s mother had a difficult relationship?”
“You can’t call my later contacts with Angela a relationship, really. Our story ended before Emma was born. It’s completely my fault. I’m the one who walked away.”
Finally Caterina spoke up, using English. “She didn’t say anything to you about a daughter until Emma was three?”
“You’re English?” asked Nightingale, surprised.
“No. Just answer my question,” said Caterina.
“Emma’s mother was trying to be sometimes an artist and sometimes a critic, as if they could ever go together, and if they ever could, she was not the person to do it. She became desperate for money, and that was when she swallowed her pride and called me.”
Blume eliminated a smirk he felt growing at the side of his mouth by the expedient of rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “So she presented you with this little girl and you…”
“Look, Commissioner, I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering what made me so sure she was mine.”
Blume raised his palms in denial of such a thought.
“Well, to start with,” said Nightingale, “have you looked at her?”
“Me, looked at Emma? Well, yes… she’s very beautiful.”
“Thank you. She is. Can’t you see the resemblance?”
Blume looked at the man in front of him. Nightingale had the pale blue eyes of many northern Europeans. Emma’s eyes were also blue, he remembered, though hers were almond shaped and had green tints. Her eyes soaked in the light and darkened it, his just reflected it straight back. He had high cheekbones and a triangular face. She had high cheekbones, too, but her face was oval. He remembered it well. There was a difference of sex and forty-something years between them.
Blume decided to be diplomatic. “Yes, I think I do.”
“That, of course, is the most obvious thing, and I was always afraid Treacy would notice. Treacy had a sharp eye for detail, though he used it in painting, not in the real world. Also, I saw Emma’s birth certificate.”
“And that was enough? I mean, of all people to trust a piece of paper, surely you…”
Nightingale interrupted, “Emma was born six months after I broke up with Angela. When we were together, Angela and I were utterly inseparable. We had been going together for three years, living together for a year and a half, and we were on our way to being married. When we had sex, we took no precautions. We had sex all the time. We were together all the time. We rolled all our strength and all our sweetness up into one ball, and we traveled around the country, around Europe, and farther abroad. We went to India, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Guatemala, California, and New York. And when we had finished traveling, we bought-I bought-a run-down casale near Anzio, and we spent all day every day fixing it up.”
“You fit this in with what you did at the gallery?”
“Not really. I was-I feel embarrassed even saying this now-I was thinking of giving up the art world and becoming a poet. I thought if we fixed up the house we might take in Dutch and English holidaymakers. You know, long-term, cultured guests. Angela thought she might cook for them, though she was even lousier at cooking than painting…”
“Well, if the guests were to be English and Dutch that would hardly be a problem,” said Blume. “What ended the idyll?”
“We fell out. Silly stuff but, in the end, serious, too. Toxic little asides from me to her, her to me, like when she told me I had made a travesty of a Tasso poem I was translating, which was bloody annoying coming from a woman who couldn’t speak English and, if the truth be told, couldn’t paint for toffee. She couldn’t judge paintings either, or write a decent essay. Long pretentious sentences full of jargon, dismissive judgments of things she didn’t understand, which was most things… One day, she gave me a choice: my work or her. So I went back to speculating in the art market. She persisted for three more years, a bit longer, trying to make it as an artist, and then she contacted me, asked me for some money. I’d already left her the house in Anzio, so I told her to get stuffed. That was when she revealed the existence of Emma.”
“Did she threaten to sue for maintenance?” asked Blume.
“No. She wasn’t like that. She was not greedy for money, though I wasn’t sure then. After the house, she asked me for money just this once. It was a decent sum, I suppose. Ninety million lire. This when a middle-range car cost around ten million lire, a small apartment in Rome around two hundred million. She gave up her painting and started working in a bank. I waited for her next demand for money, but it never came. The years went past without any more contact or requests, and, when Emma was about to start secondary school, I phoned up and asked her if I could pay for her education. Angela said public schools in Italy were better than private, so she didn’t need it. So I offered to pay for books, holidays, sport clubs-that sort of thing. She said she’d think about it. She phoned me back about a month later and invited me to the house.”
“The one near Anzio. She still lived there?”
“Yes. She’s in Pistoia now, but that’s recent. So I went. It was the second time I met Emma. Angela said she’d be happy to accept my money, and I could choose to give her whatever I deemed fit. But she made one condition, which was that the money should be a fixed sum to be paid at regular intervals. She said she did not want to see the sum going up and down reflecting my mood or opinion of her.”
“Why did you conspire to give Emma a false identity?”
“I did not. That is to say, we hid her identity; we did not really create a new one.”
“Manuela Ludovisi, whose real name is Emma Solazzi, false tax code, false background…”
“Yes, but as you said yourself, it was not deeply done. It was to obscure her identity, not set up a new one forever. We just wanted to hide it from Harry.”
“Why?”
“To avoid awkwardness. You see, long ago, before she was with me, Angela was Harry’s.”
Caterina interrupted. “I beg your pardon? She was his-as in she belonged to him?”
“Yes. Exactly that,” he said with irritation. “He owned her. That’s what Harry was like. It was he who persuaded her to paint, told her she had talent, when she manifestly did not, drew her into a bohemian way of life, molded her to fit his idea of what he thought his woman should be. Then when he tired of her, he walked away, calling her bourgeois. People still used that as an insult back then. People like Harry, anyhow.”
“I don’t see the need for the subterfuge all those years later,” said Caterina.
“Angela had told Harry she had had her tubes tied. She told me that. Maybe she did, maybe she had a reverse op, and maybe Emma is a miraculous birth. Angela used to say she never wanted children, made a sort of philosophy of life out of it. Kids kill off sex in the home, they are little Disney-fixated capitalists, and they kill your
