vacations, have a home help, and not have to work as a policewoman any more. Not untold wealth, just a large amount of money that would make your life easy and would not humiliate your past efforts at making do or propel you into an alien social circle. That would be better, wouldn’t it?”
“I suppose,” said Caterina, looking at the black object squatting on the sofa beside Blume. “But… ”
“Wait. Who does this painting really belong to?” asked Blume.
Ridiculous though it seemed, Caterina feared it was a trick question, and thought for some time before answering.
“The Republic of Italy, I suppose. Or Angela. If it was Treacy’s to begin with, then he definitely gave it to her,” said Caterina.
“Exactly. So the beneficiary is Angela and, by extension, Emma. She’ll inherit the wealth afterwards. The daughter who pushed her father dead on the ground,” said Blume. “Maybe, after a fifteen-year legal battle, they will show their gratitude. Even if they gave you half a percent of the probable value of this, you could probably quit the force.”
“What about you?”
“I don’t want to quit the force. I would not know what to do with myself or where to go.”
“Neither do I,” said Caterina.
“Think about it. Think about your son. You’re on your own. It’s a dangerous job, poorly paid, bad hours, and you carry the violence you see every day inside you. Maybe someday the violence will hit you and your son will be left to fend for himself. Richer people live longer. Don’t just say no to the idea. Think about it.”
“While I think about it, what happens?”
“I think I’ll carry out my plan anyhow, give this back to its rightful owner. Then if she offers you a reward, as I think she will, you can decide then.”
“But you’re not taking anything?”
“I don’t need to. I’ve no one depending on me. I’ve no children, relations, or debts.”
“Always on your own.”
“Yes,” said Blume.
Caterina went over to the sofa, removed the painting from beside him, and sat down in its place.
Chapter 53
She pulled the sheet over her shoulders, shivered a little, and said, “It will never get published, will it?”
Blume pushed the sheet off himself and contemplated light burn marks on his forearm. “I doubt it. He never got to finish it. And Treacy doesn’t get to live happily ever after, does he?”
“You mean he is not eternal like you are?” said Caterina. She reached out and yanked his ear. “Up close like this, I can see your wrinkles, and did you know you’re going gray at the sides?”
“Silver hair, not gray,” said Blume. “He got killed by his own daughter. I hope to do better than that.”
“Maybe you should beget yourself a daughter first before you jump to optimistic conclusions. I think it’s sad that no one will read Treacy. I didn’t even get to read it in the end. Just the beginning bit with you, and then I went ahead on my own for a while before I had to give up. How does it end?”
“With the narrator lying dead on a cold Trastevere street and an Inspector called Mattiola feeling the base of his skull for evidence of a countercoup blow,” said Blume.
Caterina shook her head. “That’s not nice. How does it end, really?”
“I can’t remember exactly,” said Blume. “He was not always chronological; some of it is cryptic, sometimes impenetrable. And we do know the ending. We know it better than he does.”
“What about his version, how does it end?”
“It becomes disjointed, breaks down into notes, half sentences, cryptic phrases, scrawls. He was dying.”
“I liked when you were reading it to me. He was in London when we stopped. What happened then?”
“He went back to Ireland, got fed up, and decided to walk down to Rome.”
“Very funny,” said Caterina. She turned her back on him and pulled the sheet tighter around her shoulders. “I’m interested in finding out how he came to be in Italy, what it was like for him to spend his life here, a stranger in a strange land. I want to know what happened to his parents, whether he saw them again. I want to see how he started off and ended up alone.”
Blume pulled up the bedcover and wrapped it over the sheet and around her shoulders. “No, really,” he said. “He did. He walked through France into Italy.”
“That’s the next bit?”
“Yes,” said Blume. He left the room and came back carrying the first notebook, climbed back into the warmth beside her. He opened it at the beginning, and started turning the pages until he found the place he wanted.
“This is where we were.”
Caterina closed her eyes. “Read it, Alec. Out loud and slowly.”
“After London, I went back to Ireland for a few months, but it did not work out. There was nobody there for me, and all I did was spend the little I had saved drinking pints of plain in Sinnnotts pub. It was one golden afternoon there, when I was on my fourth pint, that I conceived of the idea of walking away from it all. Literally walking away.
“No one believes me when I tell them I walked to Paris and then Rome, but, with the help of one ferry boat, that is just what I did. The walking started in Normandy, but the beginning of my journey was a freezing cold morning of drizzle as I left Killiney Hill Station for Bray to catch the mid-morning train down to Rosslare in Country Wexford, where that evening I boarded the ferry that would bring me to Cherbourg. It was June, but the Atlantic was still in a swollen and wintry mood, and rolled me back and forth across the lounge bench inside where I tried to sleep, without success, and doused me in icy spray when I went up on deck to vomit, with great success.
“We docked in Cherbourg at lunchtime, and having completely emptied my stomach of all content during the night, I was ravenous. Every time I go to France now, I search for a croissant as buttery, savory, and perfect as the one I had that morning in a bar in Cherbourg. I had to mime my wishes and point to what I wanted to eat like a well-trained monkey, and I was aware of seamen smelling of diesel oil and surrounded in black tobacco smoke laughing at my expense, but hunger swept away all embarrassment. It also swept away four days’ of the allowance I had given myself. It was not until my third day in France that I realized how much they had overcharged me.
“I had travelers’ checks in British pounds and some francs. The travelers’ checks were a parting gift from my stepfather on the night before I left. He pulled them out of his jacket pocket with a jocular expression on his face, as if someone had put them there unbeknownst to him and he was just discovering them, like a kindly uncle might discover candies and thruppenny bits in his pocket. Ho-ho-ho, what are these? My inheritance, you bastard. Enough to live on for one frugal month.
“To be fair to my mother and stepfather, they were probably expecting me back soon, but I never saw either of them again. My stepfather died suddenly of heart failure a few weeks before I reached Rome. My mother had sent a telegram followed by several letters to a poste restante address at the main post office in Piazza San Silvestro, but I arrived several weeks later and did not bother checking for letters until several weeks after that. By the time I had read through the letters, my stepfather was dead almost two months and my mother was so hurt she had decided not to speak to me again. Nor did she, though I do not think she ever intended permanent silence. But eight months later, when I finally had an address of my own in Rome and wrote to the post office asking them to divert the mail to it, I received a letter from a lawyer telling me that she, too, was dead of a stroke. The funeral was over. He assured me it had been a dignified affair, and he had looked after the funeral costs and would forward the ‘remaining’ inheritance, which he did. The last trace of him was his signature on a check for a scandalously modest amount that arrived just in time for my first Italian Christmas.
“But that morning in Cherbourg, with the sea wind stabbing my ears and the strap of my army surplus backpack already rubbing my shoulders raw, I set off on the first stage of what was to become a six-month two- thousand-mile meandering walk.
“It is hard to say now why I decided to walk. Part of the idea was to arrive in Rome, the inevitable
