The Fatal Touch (40 page)

She started mapping out an investigative approach, trying to find something for Rospo that he would not find demeaning and might possibly do well, when she got a call from downstairs to say that a certain Emma and Angela Solazzi were looking for her.

Blume had specifically removed her from the case, yet the arrival of these two was something she knew he would be interested in. Her hand hovered over her phone, but she made no call. Seeing as he saw fit to leave without saying where, and they had asked for her, not him, Caterina had them sent to the interview room.

Mother and daughter, alike in the shape of their noses and in their posture, but little else, sat side by side at the far end of the table when Caterina entered.

Emma Solazzi said, “I thought it would be like killing two birds with one stone, interviewing us together.”

“Are we allowed to smoke in here?” asked Angela. “I’m nervous.”

“No one asked you to come here,” said Caterina. “And, no, you’re not allowed to smoke.”

“Smoking gave me these crow’s feet around my eyes. I probably have cancer of the something, too. But I like my husky voice.” And continuing in her husky voice, she said, “I wanted to clear up a few things about John Nightingale. And about Henry Treacy, too.”

Caterina shifted her gaze to Emma. “And you?”

“I’m here to hear what she has to say.”

Caterina glanced at her watch to make a point. “OK, but let’s make this quick. I have other business. What sort of person is John Nightingale, Emma?”

Her asking Emma the question caught both visitors by surprise for a moment. Emma shrugged and said, “He is decent enough, I guess. Gentlemanly. Generous. Kind of . . . boring? I hardly know him. Ask her: she’s the one who slept with him.”

“She’s right,” her mother said, nodding at Caterina. “John is very dull. Mostly in a good way. I have come to appreciate dullness in people. They are safer, more dependable, less violent. That’s essentially why I am here. I want you to know that John Nightingale is not violent. It is not possible that he had anything to do with Henry Treacy’s death.”

“Who told you that he did?”

“No one,” said Angela. “But I know that if you’re investigating, this is certain to come up as a possible line of inquiry. John would not hurt a fly. If there was a dangerous one, it was Henry.”

“Did you have a relationship with Henry, too?”

“Oh, yes. I thought that was clear.” Angela looked taken aback and her daughter looked embarrassed. “Haven’t you been investigating? I worked for them, just as Emma does now. Henry was my . . . Emma, if you lean any further away from me, you risk falling off the chair.”

“I am not very comfortable with this sort of thing. It’s only natural,” said Emma.

“Of course, darling. But Henry was my lover. There, it’s not so bad a word now that I have said it. Henry came long before Nightingale, and was, well, he was Henry and John is just John. But I had to leave Henry.”

“Was he violent?” asked Caterina.

“He was a raging fire who burned people up. Literally. Look.”

Angela rolled up the left sleeve of her black cashmere cardigan, revealing a long white scar that curved up her forearm, branching as it went. “It reaches up to my clavicle, down to my breast. It doesn’t look too bad now. But for years when I tanned, it would remain stubbornly pale, like a white snake.”

“Treacy did that?”

“Accidentally. A splash of boiling linseed oil. He whipped it out of a pot with a ladle when I was standing behind him. I held my arm up to protect my face. He was drunk.”

“Please, mother,” said Emma.

“What? He was.”

“It’s obvious you were naked at the time, which is why it burned your breast. I can do without that picture in my head.”

“That was accidental,” said Caterina. “He seems to have managed to burn himself as well. Did he ever hurt you deliberately?”

“Oh, yes. Henry hit me in the mouth twice. Once he punched my shoulder so hard I couldn’t lift my arm for weeks. He apologized for hitting me in the mouth, but he never took that shoulder punch seriously . . . He threw a bottle at me once, aiming to miss, I like to think.”

“How much of that did you go through before leaving him?”

“I had already left him for Nightingale when he threw the bottle. It’s why he threw it.”

“When did you meet Henry Treacy for the first time?”

“In 1974,” said Angela.

“No, sorry. I was talking to Emma here,” said Caterina.

“Me? When I went to Galleria Orpiment. Three years ago.”

“And you knew these stories?”

“Well, more or less.”

“I warned her,” said Angela. “I warned her not to put up with anything, and I mean anything, from Henry. I told her some of the stories, though not in full detail. I didn’t want to be too prejudicial. Even so, I told her to keep her identity secret and her wits about her, and never, never to go drinking with him.”

“So what did you think when you saw this man who had hurt your mother like that?”

“I don’t know. He wasn’t what I expected. He was far older. I knew he would be, but when I saw him, I couldn’t make the connection. My image of him was from a photograph my mother showed me a few times over the years. He was young then. Handsome, too. Like that self-portrait in his room in the gallery. I’d see this old guy sitting there, with this blond Adonis painting above him, and it was like the young man had gone away, and Henry was his father, sitting there, ageing, waiting for the boy in the picture to come back. I half expected him to walk in the door one day.”

“And how did he behave himself with you?”

“Oh, he was charming,” said Emma, shaking her shoulder in an involuntary shudder.

“Wait, what do you mean by charming?”

“Theatrically charming. He used a lot of words. He was always saying things that . . . like he was saying something else. Not double entendres. Opposites. Constant irony. Like he’d say I was an ugly little bat that would ‘scare the horses,’ which is a weird phrase he used, and I knew it was a compliment. I’d have a new dress, he’d ask me what garbage dump I found it in, what was wrong with my hair, why I was born cross-eyed, stumpy-legged. But you could tell he meant the opposite, and if I was feeling a bit sad, he’d pick it up immediately and not make any jokes that day. He could be really funny.”

“And he never guessed whose daughter you were? Never made any reference to your mother here, or to Nightingale?”

“No. He knew nothing.”

“Emma, are you sure that Henry Treacy did not know who you were? Can you be one hundred percent positive about that?”

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Angela fingering her scar.

“I don’t see why this is so important,” said Emma.

“Frankly,” said Caterina, shifting her gaze to include Angela, “I don’t either, but you two are the ones who contrived to hide the fact from Henry Treacy, by now an elderly man, and not your partner, Angela, for, what, decades? You’re the ones who did all the hiding. You’re the ones who decided it was so important to do, and now you feel it’s important to tell me.”

“It wasn’t as if I had a strong paternal bond with Nightingale,” said Emma. “He is more like a godfather or a great-uncle. It wasn’t hard to pretend I didn’t know him, because I wasn’t really pretending.”

Caterina turned to Angela. “You asked if you could smoke. Well, here is your chance. There is a coffee machine on the second floor at the end of the corridor, then a small balcony that gives you a nice view of the Galleria Pamphili. If anyone questions your right to be there, tell them I sent you.”

“Is my daughter in trouble?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you want to talk with her alone. Is she?”

“Have two cigarettes, with a pause of about five minutes between one and the next, and then come back here.”

Angela fished a packet of cigarettes from her purse, pulled out an elegant silver lighter. “I’ll leave my bag here?”

“Fine.”

When Angela left the room, Caterina turned to Emma. “You said Treacy could be funny. When was he funny?”

“When he began drinking. Before he got drunk.”

“Did he drink at work?”

“No. He was hardly ever there.”

“So when did you see him drinking?”

Emma hesitated before seeming to dismiss the possibility of a denial. “I went out a few times with him in the evenings.”

“Exactly as your mother told you not to.”

“My mother is extremely protective. She still thinks I’m a baby.”

“Whereas you are not, of course,” said Caterina. “Just you and Treacy?”

“No, no. With Pietro. He’s like a boyfriend.”

“Like a boyfriend? Whose?”

“OK. He’s my boyfriend.”

“What did he call you?”

“That’s kind of embarrassing . . . Sometimes he’d call me his little . . .”

“Not in that sense! What name did he call you by?”

“Oh,” she blushed. “Manuela. I was really getting used to it.”

“You must have despised him a bit if you never even told him your real name.”

“I didn’t despise him.”

“You must have felt he was someone you couldn’t trust with a secret.”

Emma bit her lip. “Well, I think he liked me. He still does, by the way. A lot.”

“When you were out with Treacy, was Pietro always there?”

“Almost always. Not that we went out all that often together. When we did, it was to the Bar San Callisto. We’d have a drink or two, and then we’d leave and Treacy would stay. Treacy was entertaining. The thing about Treacy was he knew so much and he seemed to have met a lot of famous people: Woody Allen, de Chirico, Francis Bacon, Samuel Beckett, Mitterrand, Gore Vidal, Mick Jagger, Harold Pinter, Charles Saatchi, Van Morrison, Damien Hirst, Gigi Proietti, Christian De Sica, the whole Pamphili family, Patricia Highsmith, and George Clooney. Who’s probably the only one of them who isn’t dead.”

“So you enjoyed his company?”

“He was cool. For an old man. I admired him.”

“You know he wasn’t that old. You keep saying how old Treacy was. Maybe it was because he was sick.”

Emma looked at her without comprehension.

“Forget it. Were you with him on the night he got killed?”

“On the night he died, you mean? No. But I knew you would be the person to ask me that.”

“Why did you think that?”

“You don’t like me.”

“That is absolutely not true, but it’s not my concern to persuade you. Where were you that night?”

“At home with Pietro.”

“So he’s your alibi?”

“Yes.”

“Do you mind giving me his telephone number?”

Emma shrugged, with what Caterina gauged to be exaggerated nonchalance. “Sure,” she said.

“Now,” said Caterina.

“I don’t know it by heart.”

“It’s in your phone, I imagine.”

“Oh, right.”

Emma pulled out her phone, slid it open, and tapped on the buttons with her clear polished nail. She read out the number, which Caterina wrote down.

“Thank you,” said Caterina.

“You’re welcome.”

“May I have your phone a minute?”

“What for?”

“I just need to check the number.”

Emma slid the phone across the table, giving it a sharp spin as she did so, but Caterina caught it. “Under Pietro, or under his surname—what is his surname, by the way?”

“Quaglia.”

“Here we go.” Caterina pursed her lips, checked her notebook, and then the phone. “You seem to have reversed the last digits. It ends in 37, not 73,” she said.

“Or you wrote it down wrong.”

“I am pretty sure I wrote it down exactly as you dictated it,” said Caterina.

“Well, I am borderline dyslexic,” said Emma. “I sometimes do that. You can ask my mother.”

“I’m going to call this Pietro, you know.”

“I know you are.”

“What’s he like?”

“You’ll see,” said Emma. “Pietro worships the ground I walk on.”

“You’re not the sort of woman who lets men walk all over her,” said Caterina. “Like your mother does.”

“Like she used to, but she learned from her mistakes. No man is going to hurt her again. She has taught me to strike first, told me if she ever got a second chance, that is what she would do. Strike first.”

“Does she have any photos of Treacy?”

“A few photos, yes. Out of sight of John. Not because she was afraid of John, but just so as not to hurt his feelings.”

“Any other mementoes?”

“Well, there are some Treacy Old Master imitations on the walls. They are signed, so they are not pretending to be the real thing. They’ve always been there. And then there is the one Mother keeps in her bedroom. It’s by far the worst.”

“How do you know it’s his?”

“Because when it arrived, first she told me, and was all happy about it, but then she panicked and asked me not to mention it to anyone, like it was a big secret. If she hadn’t said anything, I would have forgotten all about it.”