Chapter 28
Elia was asleep on his feet as she steered him toward the apartment. His grandmother thought it unforgivable that Caterina should insist on dragging him out of bed and back to his own house. But Caterina wanted him at home.
Because he is my son, she told her mother.
As she was opening the front door of their apartment building, a dark figure she had noticed standing at the street corner began to walk quickly toward them.
“Get in,” she told Elia. She handed him the house keys. “Here, can you open the front door by yourself?”
“No.”
“Take the elevator. Wait for me upstairs… Go on!”
Reluctantly the child entered the building and she pulled the front door shut behind him, stood back, and moved her hand down to her weapon, then back again to a more relaxed position as she recognized the tall shape and sloping gait of the man.
“Grattapaglia phoned me to say you were going straight home,” said Blume as he arrived. “But you took longer than I expected. You had to pick up Elia.”
Caterina stood away from the door. “And now he has the keys, and we’re locked out.”
“Wait till he’s in the apartment, and then ring the intercom,” said Blume.
“He can’t open the apartment door. He’ll be standing in the corridor as I stand here outside. Why didn’t you just phone?”
“I wanted to see you in person, and I am a little distrustful of my cell phone. Do you have a neighbor who stays up late?”
“The woman above me, she brings men home sometimes, and they clump about above my head and worse until late. She owes me.”
Caterina pressed the intercom button and, after some time, got a very belligerent challenge before the door clicked open.
“She doesn’t have a man tonight, I guess,” said Blume.
Caterina held the door open with her foot. “You had better come in.”
She called the elevator, and they squeezed in together. Caterina pressed the button to the third floor. When they got out, Elia was leaning his head against the front door, with his eyes closed.
“We’ll talk in a minute.” She put Elia to bed, kissed his forehead, already clammy. She felt his hands. Slightly waxy. Harder than they used to be, bigger, too. His breath was OK. A child in his class had diabetes. Elia didn’t, of course. She shouldn’t worry.
When she returned to the living room, Blume began speaking as if they had been in mid-conversation, as if it was not half past eleven at night in her apartment after a long and stress-laden day, the day in which her son had briefly disappeared, she had betrayed her own principles… She closed her eyes.
“So,” said Blume, sounding inappropriately cheerful, “the Colonel has had a copy of the notebooks since this morning.”
“Yes, I’m sorry. I should have told you everything at once,” said Caterina.
“What you did was justifiable, though I don’t think it was right, or wise. I’ve brought the originals with me. I’m going to put them in a safe place.”
Caterina sighed and stood up.
“You’re tired. Make some coffee. I’ll have some, too.”
“You want coffee, you make it,” said Caterina.
A few minutes later, she was seated on her sofa. Blume’s voice, careless of sleeping child, boomed out from behind the kitchen partition at the far end of the room. “Tell me what you discovered about Emma this evening,” he poked his head around the corner and looked in.
Caterina opened her eyes wide. “Grattapaglia was reporting to you on me?”
“I asked him to tell me when you were going home. He volunteered the rest of the information about Emma and Treacy being seen together at the bar. He also told me you seem to have learned something from one of those drop-out kids, but that it could not have had anything to do with the muggings, since you said nothing. Where’s the coffeepot?”
“On the stove, straight in front of you. No! Straight in front as in Straight. In. Front. Well done.”
She summarized Sandro’s brief account of the old man and the young woman in the piazza, as Blume washed the pot and spent some time looking for the garbage can for the coffee grounds.
“If we connect that to the evidence that Emma was with Treacy at the bar beforehand,” said Caterina. “We’ve got the bartender as a witness and, well, there’s something else.”
“Coffee?”
“Second shelf, left, in a blue box with golden stars on it.”
“Got it,” called Blume. “What’s the other thing?”
“Emma’s got one of those BlackBerry phones. It would be easy to track her movements using phone mast triangulation and GPS positioning. We can check whether she was at the bar and whether she was at the piazza when Treacy was killed. We should have checked before now.”
“You’re right,” said Blume. “Except we don’t have a magistrate to issue an order to the phone company. The Colonel does.”
“But there are ways of getting the information without a magistrate’s sanction.”
“Sure,” said Blume. “As long as we don’t try to use it as evidence. But you are right. The Colonel will already have that information.”
“I don’t feel comfortable with the Colonel knowing this about Emma. I think he’ll misuse it.”
“Eventually. But I think he is going to be distracted by something else in Treacy’s writings. Unless he knew already, which is possible since Treacy was a drunk, and drunkards like to boast, reveal themselves, and then forget… How do you turn on this gas? I mean light the gas. I think I turned it on some time ago.”
“Press the black button but first…”
A blue flame flashed and the thump of the displacement of air was forceful enough to rock the crockery in the cupboards above.
“Found it,” said Blume. He spent some time turning the gas knobs in an effort to lower the heat. Then he rubbed his hands, in anticipation of the coffee and in satisfaction at a job well done.
“The fact that the notebooks are in English might slow the Colonel down, but not by much. Somewhere across town, at this very minute, he and the Maresciallo are probably sitting together at a table, reading through the photocopies and discovering what I discovered last night. We need to keep a step ahead.”
Blume brought coffee to Caterina, which he had saturated with sugar. He sat in the chair opposite, rapped the marbled cover of the top notebook, and then started leafing through the pages.
“After you left today, I read out a related passage to Nightingale. I wanted to see if what Treacy was talking about made any sense to him, and I am sure it did not.”
He gulped back his coffee.
“… But of course, my works were never found out. Not once. It is not just that I am good, and I see no point in false modesty here, I am also self-critical and without illusions. If one of my works was not good enough, we never made a play with it. I would study it, see where I went wrong, and then either re-cover the canvas, if it was an antique one, or destroy the work. At any one time, I am not afraid to say, I would have fifteen, twenty unsuccessful works lying about my house…”
Blume stopped. “Sorry, I started a bit early. Though that’s interesting there, isn’t it? It implies the works we found in his house, the ones I am supposedly trying to sell with the Colonel, aren’t worth much.”
She watched him leaf forward a few more pages and wondered if reading those few lines had really been a mistake, or he felt she needed more persuading of his honesty. His big foot hit the coffee cup on the floor and sent it spinning away, but he did not notice.
“Right. Here’s the bit. He’s talking about how he and Nightingale worked together, about how he sourced his materials, especially old canvases, and about the workings of Galleria Orpiment.
