The Fatal Touch (21 page)

“No, no, it’s cool,” said Greg and disappeared again.

The kitchen table was still set for two. Kristin added a placemat, then went to the silverware drawer.

“We only need spoons and bowls. It’s chili con carne. The tacos burned.”

“I was wondering about the smell,” she said. “Can I close the window now?”

Blume shrugged. He blew out a red candle on the table. “That was supposed to get rid of the smell, but it didn’t,” he said. He filled a pitcher with tap water and put it in the middle of the table, and removed the silver candlestick.

Kristin sat down and Blume returned to the stove, turned off the flame under the chili, which was beginning to stick, and stirred it.

Greg returned, looked around the kitchen appreciatively, and took the chair opposite Kristin. “Alec, this is a really great little place you got yourself here. Hey, where are you going to sit? You want me to get you a chair? Just tell me where to go.”

Blume opened his mouth to do so, but Kristin stood up. “I’ll get Alec a chair from the living room.”

“Thanks,” said Blume. “I don’t usually have this many visitors.”

“I wonder why that might be,” said Kristin as she passed him.

“Kristin was telling me you don’t drink,” said Greg. “I admire that.”

Blume slapped the heavy serving spoon into the palm of his hand, enjoying its weight and potential. “It’s not all that admirable.”

“It says to me you know how to handle personal issues.” Greg poured some water into a glass.

“Is that what it says to you?” Blume brought the pot over to the table and ladled out three servings.

Greg raised his glass. “Can I get some ice and lemon slices with this?”

“I don’t know,” said Blume. “But you’re perfectly welcome to try.”

Greg smiled and looked around as if for an interpreter.

“There, in the refrigerator,” said Blume.

When Kristin came back with the chair, Greg had his head in the freezer and was saying, “How come you don’t have ice?”

Kristin put the chair at the head of the table, went over to Greg, ushered him back to the table.

“I’ve got a lemon in the refrigerator,” said Blume.

Kristin yanked at the refrigerator door until it opened with a reluctant sigh, and pulled out a wizened half lemon filled with blue mold, which she held aloft. “This the lemon?”

“Yup, that’s him,” said Blume.

The three of them sat down. Greg opposite Kristin, Blume at the head. Greg leaned over to pour some water into Kristin’s glass and said something as he did so.

“No. First we eat, then we talk,” said Kristin. “So what, we use spoons for this?”

“Seems the best way,” said Blume. “It’s a bit more watery than I usually make it.”

He took a spoonful, blew on it, put it into his mouth. Salt, it definitely needed a touch more salt. It didn’t need any more chili pepper, though. Definitely not. He could feel the back of his lips, the roof of his mouth reacting to the heat.

At first he loved the sensation of heat streaming down the back of his throat and from there into his sinuses. As he took a second spoonful, Blume realized that the intensity of the afterburn from the first was still sharpening. The inside of his lips began to numb, and the raw burning in his throat became acute. The sides of his tongue suddenly felt blistered and ragged, and his nose had begun to run freely. By now the trail of heat had wound its way down his esophagus and was attacking the top of his stomach. His intestines were already tightening and loosening and tightening again, trying at once to close off the incoming toxin and preparing to expel it as quickly as possible, explosively if necessary. His eyes were leaking and he started sucking in air in an effort to cool his mouth.

Blume reached for the water pitcher at exactly the same time as Greg, who was just a little quicker. With a reverse flick of his wrist, Blume slapped Greg’s hand out of the way. He poured a glass and downed it without relinquishing hold of the pitcher, which he held hostage in his other hand off the table. He refilled and drank. It seemed only to aerate and intensify the capsaicin. Kristin had put her hands over her ears, pressed her thumbs against her chin, and appeared to be weeping. He passed her the pitcher and she drank the rest of the water. Greg had already gone over to the kitchen sink and was gulping back glassfuls of water, suddenly unmindful of the absence of ice. Blume’s sinuses were streaming freely now, and a sweat had broken out all over his body. He got up from the table and walked quickly to his bedroom and the bathroom, where he splashed his face with water, wiped his nose, sat down on the toilet seat, and clutched his stomach.

Fifteen minutes later, he returned to the kitchen. Greg had his hand pressed against the side of his face like he had a toothache, and Kristin, whose face glistened, had untucked her blouse and opened another button.

“That was pretty intense, Alec,” said Kristin.

“Eating bread is supposed to help,” said Blume.

“So I’ve heard,” said Kristin, “but you seem to have filled your bread box with bread-shaped rocks.”

They left their plates abandoned on the kitchen table and went into the living room. Kristin took the sofa, Blume the armchair and Greg returned to the kitchen for the wooden chair. They sat there like three exhausted swimmers, dripping and breathing heavily for a while, until Kristin, straightening her back and doing up a blouse button, said, “Greg has been here three months. He’s a legat, too, like me. He’s attached to the cultural affairs section.”

“Does he speak Italian?” said Blume, looking at Greg as he asked the question.

“My Italian was graded excellent,” said Greg. “That’s why they sent me. I also speak Spanish and French.”

“As rare as a white fly, aren’t you?” said Blume.

“Whatever that means. Look, Alec, eighteen months ago you agreed, as an American citizen, to leverage your particular competencies to contribute to the knowledge base of the embassy, correct?”

Blume looked over at Kristin, but got no sympathy.

“Alec, I was talking to you?” said Greg.

Blume picked up the remote control and turned on the TV where the studio guests were shouting as they watched a slo-mo replay of a disputed offside by Zlatan Ibrahimovi
ć
.

“Alec, turn off the TV,” said Kristin.

“No, wait a moment . . . I want to hear this. Jesus, Roma lost to Siena. Can you believe that? Siena!”

“Alec!” Kristin walked over and turned off the TV. “Come on, this isn’t helping.”

“Stop wasting my time, then,” said Blume. “Let’s talk about Colonel Farinelli. You’re interested in him, or you and your boy wonder wouldn’t be here.”

Kristin laughed. “Alec, grow up. Greg has something to tell you. It concerns events that happened before he was born, but he’s learned all the details.”

“OK, Alec,” said Greg. “I’m going to cut right to the chase if that’s OK with you: the embassy fears embarrassment.” He paused to see if this had any great effect on Blume, then continued: “It’s all ancient history, so it’s not that important, but it would be nice if Farinelli and this Treacy investigation did not mushroom, and open some old wounds.”

“It’s not the history that’s ancient, it’s you that’s young,” said Blume. “After Moro got killed, Cossiga took the reins of power, then handed over to Andreotti who shared with Craxi who passed it on to Berlusconi, and here we all are happy in the present again.”

“That’s pretty simplistic,” said Greg. “And you left out a lot of prime ministers.”

“Simplistic? I’ll tell you what’s simplistic . . .” began Blume, but Kristin intervened.

“OK, Greg, I’ll take it from here,” she said. “Alec, have you heard of Richard Gardner?”

“Wasn’t he the American ambassador back then? I remember my parents got invited to a few opening nights when he was in charge.”

“Right. He was ambassador from 1977 to 1981.”

“During the Carter administration,” said Greg.

“Thank you for that, Greg,” said Blume. “What about him?”

“He wrote a book about his experience here, called
Mission Italy
. It came out a few years ago,” said Kristin. “It’s a pretty good book. Well written, elegant, polite, learned—a bit like Gardner himself.”

“Well, that’s nice,” said Blume.

“Yes, it is. It reflects well on the embassy, and gives a lucid and straightforward account of US policy in Italy during the Moro kidnapping and murder.”

“What was the policy?”

“To be helpful without getting too involved. Hands-off. Our Chief Security Officer, a guy called Arthur Brunetti, wrote a sort of bible on the Red Brigades and the Moro murder. The US administration sent over a guy called Steve Pieczenik, a hostage negotiator; see if he could help the Italian government by speaking with all sides. Turns out he couldn’t, so he went home.”

“Couldn’t what, speak?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. He spoke French, Russian. He spent fifty-five days in the company of Cossiga and a few Carabinieri.”

“Including Farinelli?”

“Possibly.”

“Is Pieczenik still alive?”

“Yes. He’s over seventy now. You know Tom Clancy, the writer? Well, Pieczenik is his co-author. He co-writes all those Net Force and Op-Center thrillers.”

“How do you spell Pieczenik?”

Kristin spelled out the name. “One of his books is about the Moro kidnapping,” she said. “He couldn’t get it published with a real publisher . . .”

“If he writes with Tom Clancy, but couldn’t get this published, the only reason is someone stopped him.”

“He couldn’t find a mainstream publisher, so he self-published, and that should be enough to dispel your conspiracy ideas about some agency trying to suppress his revelations. His book is called
Terror Counter Terror
. And it may have lightly fictionalized versions of real people in it.”

“This is just a can-of-worms situation?”

“Basically. We far prefer Gardner’s and Brunetti’s elegant narratives of those years to any other. If Farinelli gets back in the news and starts reminiscing about his days with the forgers Treacy and Chichiarelli, it might force us into a position where we have to issue damage limitation statements. We can do that, but we would prefer not to.”

“No problem. I think Colonel Farinelli shares the embassy’s opinion that the less said the better.”

“As a matter of fact, he does. But a man died last night who may have written a draft of a book that talks about precisely those things the embassy, Farinelli, the government, and most of the opposition parties would prefer to forget about.”

“How do you know this?” asked Blume.

“By funny coincidence, not long after you called about the Colonel, the Colonel called about you. He seems convinced you might have these writings in your possession. Do you?”

Greg decided it was his turn. “It’s not like we want to suppress anything, we’re not . . . Iran or China. But it would be nice if we could see what sort of stuff to expect.”

“Prevention is better than cure, even for a minor chill,” said Kristin.

“This could mean suppressing publication?” asked Blume.

“No way,” said Greg. “That’s just not us.”

“Who says anyone would want to publish the ravings of a discredited art forger anyhow?” said Kristin. “By the way, it sounds to me like you do have them, Alec.”

Blume stood up, went into the kitchen, opened the window, and leaned out, scanning the courtyard gate and the street three floors below. The blue car was still there.

He turned back from the window, picked the notebook off the refrigerator, and returned to his guests.

“Hey, Greg,” he said pleasantly, “let me read you a bit from the notebooks, tell me what you think.”

He located the passage on Moro he had seen earlier and read it out.

“In May that year, the two American students J. had been talking to found a leather bag in the back of a taxi. It contained a Beretta pistol, an unopened packet of Muratti cigarettes, the brand that the assassinated Prime Minister used to smoke, eleven 7.65 bullets, the same number as were pumped into Moro’s body, an ink-stained golf ball, a key ring and keys, a false driving license, camera flashcubes, a piece of paper, a packet of Paloma tissues, the same make stuffed into the bullet holes on Moro’s body, and a map showing the Vigo lake area and several pages in code . . . The two students brought the bag to the Carabinieri barracks of Podogora, and were interviewed by Captain Farinelli. Farinelli never laughed, but even he must have smiled sardonically to see the evidence he and Tony had so carefully planted in the taxi come straight back to his own desk. If those American kids had only brought the evidence to another station, or better still, to the Polizia. Instead, it all came back like a boomerang, and suddenly everyone was suspicious of Farinelli. A lot of people suspected the two American kids were in on the plot, but they weren’t.”

Greg looked stunned. “Eleven 7.65 bullets. The same number as were in Moro’s body . . . it’s all there!” He looked up at Kristin and said, “I don’t get the bit about the golf ball, though.”