“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.
The year is 1996.
“Sometimes there would be a genuine bidder in the room, and that was always to be welcomed. If they went over a certain price, enough to cover the expenses incurred by John and enough to reward my labors, then we would let it go.
“It so happened one day that I was present at the auction, which was unusual. The bidding was taking place in Christies of Rome, and it was a tedious affair. We were not interested in most of the merchandise, mainly silverware and marble busts of God knows who fashioned by an artist justly forgotten. All legitimate, all very dull.
“Then an interesting item came up for sale. I had examined this work in the catalogue before the auction. It was listed as a painting by an ‘unknown Spanish artist’ c. 1680-81. Of course, only an academic would dare place such a precise, and wrong, date on a work that he has just admitted he cannot identify. The painting was a blurred mess. The layers of varnish applied to it over the years had darkened it so much that when the auctioneers placed it on the display easel, all we could see was a shiny black square. Listed in the catalogue as Portrait of a Lady, it might as well have been titled ‘A Study in Bitumen Cracks’.
“I do not believe in a sixth sense, nor fate nor God, come to that. But I do believe the unconscious mind has enormous processing power and that sometimes it sends a clear signal to our conscious mind. There was something in that painting that I wanted.
“The starting price was low, so I raised my finger, which caught John by surprise. ‘We want that?’ he asked.
“ ‘Yes. It’s interesting. And I like the old frame.’
“ ‘Very well. I’ll bid for it,’ said John.
“After three or four bids, the price had risen to around three million lire or thereabouts, but it was already beyond the price John thought the painting was worth.
“ ‘Someone’s bidding against us,’ he said, nodding at a broker across the room. ‘Let them have it.’
“ ‘No. Keep going.’
“The price rose to five million lire, then six. John was getting agitated. It was not the sum itself, which translated into about three thousand pounds, but the fact it was unplanned bidding and he did not feel in control.
“ ‘Keep going,’ I whispered.
“The room, sensing that something might be going on, became tenser and a new bidder joined in. The price, moving in increments of 250 thousand, climbed up to seven million, and the new bidder dropped out. At seven and a half million, the price of a secondhand Fiat, the painting was mine.
“I brought it directly home, placed it in my lean-to greenhouse, which, with the permission of my kind Pamphili landlords, I had added to the side of my house. It has just enough wood in its frame to be counted as a temporary structure, and thus no planning permission was needed. The conservatory is full of natural sunlight, which is far more powerful and penetrating than any artificial light in an auction room. I stood and stared at my acquisition for some time. It was like trying to see the bottom of a barrel of tar. I took out a bottle of acetone and wetted some cotton balls, allowing it to drip down between my fingers and evaporate leaving the unmistakable scent of pear drops in the air, which I inhaled greedily as I tried to calm the manic energy I felt coursing through my muscles and nerves. With my hand trembling, I took a second wad of cotton and soaked it in turpentine (to act as a restrainer, if the acetone was too destructive), which gives off the best smell in the world. It had a good calming effect.
“Beginning in the bottom left, where mildew and damp had attacked the canvas, I applied the solvent, and watched as the black turned green. I worked at the painting for the entire day until the evening sun became too orange for me to be able to judge what I was doing. I went to bed, slept fitfully for a few hours, and was back at work at first light which being weak and gray tends to make one err on the side of caution, which is precisely how you want to be when working first thing in the early morning surrounded by the fumes of turpentine and acetone. At the end of the day I had a painting that was covered in green. Now, rather than frowning into a barrel of oil, I was smiling into a pond of slime.
“By evening, the green had turned to gray, and I was beginning to be sure of what I had here. I was nervous and had to force myself to eat. But I was focused and my hand no longer trembled.
“Another full day passed between swabbing and restraining. The closer I got the more frequently I changed the cotton balls so as not to confuse the colors, dropping one after the other on the floor, where they lay like dark-stained field dressings in a war hospital. Still I kept going, realizing on the third morning that I had not had a drink for two days.
“I could see the face that was emerging, and it made my heart beat and the blood in my chest sparkle with recognition and love in the way that no real person has ever done. The last time I had seen this beautiful young woman, she was pulling aside a curtain and peering down at a spinning wheel in the Prado Museum of Madrid. Even in the painting in the Prado, she is painted with indistinct, almost impressionistic strokes that convey movement and energy, and here the touch was even lighter. She was also poised in a slightly different position. It was a study for a later work, of that there could be no doubt, but it was a study done by the hand of Signor Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez. There is no mistaking the touch of that hand.”