After he had left, she gathered up the pile of Treacy’s notes, her eye falling on the scrawled “ Fuck you, John.” And yet they must have been friends once. She flipped back to the beginning, past the days in Ireland, which she had read. There was the arrival in London with Monica. John’s name appeared for the first time in the next pages. She took them to bed, undressed, got into red cotton pajamas that were the most comfortable things in the world, switched on her bedside lamp. The dictionary was in the next room, where it could stay. She could look up any unknown words tomorrow.
Monica and I arrived in London and I managed to sell my poor forgery to a failing dealer ready to try anything. He gave me twelve pounds for it, which got us into a squalid bedsit on Queensway. I had brought some but not enough of my painting tools with me, but could not afford to buy any more. The dole kept us going, just. After a month, Monica found a job at the cosmetics department of Selfridges. After one week in the job, she had been asked out eight times. She accepted the eighth invitation. I found out and raged at her, and told her she had a choice: Forget about going out with customers, or forget about me. She interpreted this quite literally, so that six months later, when our paths happened to cross on Hampstead Heath, she was unable to remember me at all, and therefore saw no reason to stop and introduce me to the buck-toothed haw-haw Englishman in the chalk-stripe business suit, who was recounting what must have been one of the most amusing stories ever told for the way it made her laugh.
After Monica had left me, I was lonelier but freer, and without her pressure to find a job, I was able to wander as much as I liked through the city streets. This is how I discovered Ramsauer’s art shop in Cecil Court. Nowadays, London is all spruced up and stressfully tidy (a risk that Rome does not run), but back then, streets were dirtier and rents affordable. The shop now is an ordinary rectangular place with minimalist furnishings and pointless books of utter bollocks (mostly “art photography” as if such a thing existed) for the perennially bored. Then the rectangular plan was divided into a grid of tight corridors whose walls were made of antiques, easels, army surplus stocks, paintings, vases ready to topple over. I wandered through the place, free to steal any of the tiny silver, china, and polished wood ornaments that I chose, or perhaps an eighteenth-century letter-writing set. But I am not a thief. Only when I had explored every corridor, though not every object, did the owner appear from a basement area. He nodded to me, asked me if I needed any help and, when I said I was just looking, disappeared again.
On my third visit, I spotted an interesting painting that looked to me like a work by Coello. Of course it was not, but it almost might have been. The subject was a Spanish nobleman. Mold had eaten away at the painting so much that the face seemed to have decayed and exploded outwards in a burst of gray and green, like something from the Night of the Living Dead.
Interested also in the monogram on the back of the canvas, which seemed to suggest the painting had belonged to Lord Mountbatten, I brought it up to the end of the shop, waited patiently for Ramsauer to appear, and asked him how much he wanted for it. Two guineas, he said. “But see this chalk mark? That means it has already been sold.”
“Who to?” It seems like an impertinent question, but so far I was the only person I had ever seen enter the shop, and I wondered why the buyer had left a chalk mark on it rather than take it home, since it was not a very large painting. Ramsauer explained that the buyer had not had the money on him at the time, but was coming back.
“When?” I asked defiantly. I was conceiving a dislike for this buyer already.
“Later today, sometime tomorrow, or by next Thursday at the latest.” The old bastard didn’t have a clue, of course, but he didn’t really care. The only thing that mattered was honoring his own chalk mark. I wanted to offer more for the painting, but Ramsauer would not have accepted and I did not have it anyhow. Besides, it was not all that great a bargain considering the state of the work.
As it turned out, the buyer was a young man of about my own age, who did not look as if he had that much to spend either. I saw him the following Wednesday (not Thursday, then) pick up the painting and bring it to old Ramsauer and pay for it.
I went over and demanded to know what he intended to do with it. He looked at me in astonishment, and clutched his painting tighter.
“Are you an artist?” I wanted to know.
“No.”
“What do you want with that, then? It’s ruined.”
“It’s my business what I want with it, Paddy.”
I could have given him a clout there and then, but if he fell over he would have broken about a thousand objects.
“Take that back.”
“What?”
“You called me Paddy. Call me that again and you’ll need to put a toothbrush up your arse to clean your teeth.”
He put the painting on the counter and said, “Paddy.”
His eye tooth cut my knuckle when I hit him. He staggered backwards.
“Jesus. Mind the vase behind you,” I said. “It’s a bell krater.”
He obediently moved away from it, and I hit him on the nose.
He cupped his nose between his hands and shouted, “Fucking hell! That hurt! I am calling the police!” He was outraged, as if I had just made a terrible mistake. Then he added, his voice nasal and his eyes watering, “It’s not an original krater, is it?”
“Course not,” I said. I picked up the painting.
I walked out of the shop, then stood and waited for the young man to come out after me.
“Here, give it back. I won’t call the police, and I won’t say Paddy anymore.”
I handed over the painting. “I could restore it for you,” I offered. “For a fee.”
“I can restore it myself, thanks.”
“With what? The canvas is blooming. How do you get rid of that mold?”
“Freeze it.”
His reply stopped me dead. I was expecting him to say Dettol disinfectant and sunlight, which is what most people would have done back then. In fact, it’s a better method than freezing. But in those days freezers were a bit exotic.
“That’s clever,” I said.
“I’m clever,” he said. “Well, if your name’s not Paddy-and it had better not be after that-what are you called?”
“Henry. Henry Treacy.”
He put out his hand. “Well, Harry. How about you buy me a drink at the Lamb and Flag?”
“Henry, not Harry. You have a problem with names. What’s yours?”
“John Nightingale.”
He carried the blasted painting with ghastly precision… we drank pale ale and I said… In those days they had fires in the hearths of London and overflowing ashtrays… One is never as lonely as when…
The manuscript fell with a thump on the floor, and Caterina opened her eyes wide for a moment, turned off the bedside lamp. What was that thump? Manuscript, same sound as the gas made when he lit it. Waited for hours, then lit it. Poor Blume. Propped up like a zinc coffin, the bed tilted pleasantly back.
Chapter 29
“No. it’s half past one in the morning, Beppe. I don’t want to go to a McDonald’s,” said Blume, looking into his rear-view mirror for the tenth time.
Paoloni’s voice sounded both metallic and intimate as it came over the earpiece: “Some American you are. Do you want to meet?”
“Of course.”
“Do you want to know if you’re being followed or not?”
“I don’t think I am,” said Blume.
“Do you want to know for sure?”
Blume sounded his horn at an oncoming car he felt was driving too close to his side of the road, raised a finger as the other car flashed its lights, and swerved toward the bastard to force him over. “I suppose so.”
“You know the McDonald’s at the Agip station on Via Aurelia? Go there. You’ll be coming from Piazza Irnerio. So call me as you get to the piazza. Don’t bring the phone up to your ear or they’ll get suspicious, especially if they’ve tapped your service phone. You start making calls without them hearing anything, they’ll know you know. Use hands-free.”