Juggling the Stars

by Tim Parks

  The mystery, the Arena concluded, remains unsolved, while the anxiety of the family grows; Signora Trevisan remains firmly convinced that in the unlikely event that Massimina has run away, she would certainly make at least some attempt to contact the family and spare them this agonizing uncertainty.

  ‘Massimina is a generous, traditional girl,’ Signora Trevisan told us, ‘not a drug addict or a spoilt modern child. She certainly would not have left her home while her grandmother was dangerously ill in hospital.’

  You could see there wasn’t much going on in the provinces, Morris thought. The Telegraph wouldn’t have given it two lines.

  To one side of this article there was an extremely flattering portrait photograph of Massimina which would be of no help to anyone in identifying the girl. Family vanity had won hands down over practicality there. The only remaining problem being that Stan and Gregorio had actually seen him with Massimina Friday evening. But Gregorio would already be on his way to Sardinia and it was extremely unlikely that Stan ever read or even was capable of reading Italian newspapers. Still it was dicey. Maybe he should admit having been with her for an hour or so. Go and tell the police right away. Morris wrestled a while with the problem but couldn’t resolve it. Play it by ear then.

  Once in the flat the first thing was the diary. He wrapped it in brown paper and inserted the following letter, scribbled in the same fiercely childish script:

  TOUCHÉ CARTUCCIO! MANY THANKS FOR YOURS OF THE 25TH. NOT WISHING TO INCONVENIENCE EVEN A DISGUSTING FELLOW HUMAN BEING LIKE YOURSELF (REMEMBER PENTHOUSE), I ENCLOSE YOUR LEATHERY DIARY. BE SURE THOUGH, MY PIGSKIN FRIEND, THAT I HAVE PHOTOCOPIED ALL RELEVANT PAGES AND THAT MY ENQUIRIES WILL NOT END HERE, IF YOU HAVE ANY CAUSE TO BE ASHAMED, YOU SHALL HEAR FROM ME AGAIN. UN ABBRACCIO MORTALE, IL TUO AMICO, IL DIPLOMATICO.

  Morris considered this letter for some time. He didn’t feel happy about some of the phrases. It was all rather heavy-handed, children’s TV stuff, but he didn’t have time to think of anything else. It would have to do, that was all. He must hang on till he was back in Vicenza before posting it though. Shouldn’t send the man two letters from Verona.

  Next the detective novels. Morris dropped onto the couch in the sitting room and spread out the four books in front of him. Then almost at once he stood up again and was off into the bedroom looking for scissors. And Sellotape too. He must have some Sellotape somewhere. And gloves, dammit! Because the Sellotape would show fingerprints. He was proud of himself a moment then for having thought of that. No fool he, oh no.

  He stopped, passing through to the bathroom again, and watched himself in the mirror there - tall and blond, smiling, elegant in his white shirt and trousers. Quite charming. A garden-party type. He had enjoyed the garden parties at Cambridge. Quite the only part of the social life he had liked. For a few seconds., Morris had a wonderful sense of the attractive physical presence of himself. The flesh was firm in his trousers, the neck rose clear and clean over a clean Italian collar. What more did they want, for God’s sake? And who could blame him now if they’d brought him to this? He hurried back into the living room and sat down with his novels.

  They were stupid of course. Crimes of passion, crimes of politics murders for love(!) and money, murders to settle old enmities, old debts; clever little eccentric men solving everything with their polite interrogation methods and winning ways with women. Crap and crap. The same humanistic garbage over and over, the world a nasty place where the good guys take a beating but somehow win through on the last page and who cares whether it’s Maigret, Miss Marples or Bond. Garbage. You wondered whether any of them had ever read a newspaper in the end, or tried to get a job. And failed, that is. Again and again. Failed to find a place for themselves. No, failure was certainly what they didn’t seem to know about. Or rather, it would feature for a while and then happily go away - tension and release. If it continued then it was deserved. And if it led to drastic decisions then it was perverse.

  Not novels of the ‘80s, Morris, critic manqué, reflected. Nowadays the motive could be taken for granted. Humanity.

  But the days when he could permit himself the luxuries of philosophy were numbered. He had a hell of a lot to do if he was going to get back to Vicenza this evening. He dampened an index finger and leafed through a silly Simenon. Sulky passions and murky Parisian bars, but nothing he was really after. No. Agatha Christie then: long dresses and love letters, people lighting pipes and scratching behind pink ears, traces of arsenic in an apple crumble. Zero. But the third book was more promising, even if more stupid, and on page thirty-five Morris found just what he was after.

  Sheik Shaktiar, Your beloved son is in the hands of Bedouin Freedom Fighters who will not hesitate to dispatch him to the most doleful destiny if you do not comply with our every demand. Before the third sun sets, therefore, you will place a thousand dinars in gold, wrapped in camelskin, on the Tomb of Abdullah. The Barbarous at Ouajakd Oasis. Should you try any kind of subterfuge, your son’s doom will be sealed and he will be dining with his blackguard ancestors in hell before the first moon wanes.

  The Avengers of Islam

  Morris was rather delighted with this splendid ransom note. As a first stab, it fitted the bill perfectly. To a camel’s hair, no less. Nothing more terrifying than farce, than not knowing whether it was serious or not. He slipped on a pair of rubber gloves from the kitchen and proceeded to cut it out.

  Then it was just a question of finding ‘daughter’ to Sellotape over ‘son’ (there’d been a daughter on the first page of the Agatha Christie, hadn’t there? The heiress. Yes.), then ‘her’, instead of ‘him’, even easier. Where the original said. Bedouin Freedom Fighters, he cut out a few question marks and taped them over the top of the line, and where the ransom was described, he found a line in the Simenon where Maigret says, ‘We can tackle that problem when we come to it,’ and taped the sentence diagonally across the whole section. The envelope he would buy in town, touching it only with rubber gloves, and the address he could lettroset on a spare counter in the post office. Who knew what modern science mightn’t be up to these days, but certainly this way they couldn’t put anything on him at all. They’d have no idea he wasn’t Italian; probably they’d imagine one of the regular indigenous kidnapping bands. God knew there were enough of them.

  One small problem though. Morris bit the inside of his lips, very excited now. (At last, this seemed to be the life he was cut out for. It really did!). He must give some indication he really had her. Some detail, not too definite, but something that certainly pointed that way, that made what might seem a practical joke gnawingly possible. He leapt up, went over to his single shelf of books and looked up ‘mole’ in his English-Italian dictionary; and then ‘armpit.'

  He was already snipping the words out when the folly of this occurred to him. If they could recognize the edition somehow, if they found out he was using an Italian-English dictionary? No. He went to the bedroom, climbed on a chair and rummaged through the ex-tenant’s belongings in an upper cupboard. After a few moments he pulled down the regular Italian dictionary he remembered seeing there; then it was the work of two or three minutes to cut out the nouns he needed and mix them with a verb and a couple of prepositions from the novels.

  Lei ha un neo sotto l'ascella sinistra - She has a mole under her left armpit. Perfect!

  Morris slipped the completed letter inside his newspaper and began to tidy up the flat. The detective books would have to go out with the rubbish; all his clothes and possessions he packed into a second suitcase and three cardboard boxes which he carted upstairs to the communal attic. The only thing he left in the flat was Gregorio’s worthless bronze, gesturing on top of the living room bookshelf. It was foolish to leave it there, obviously, near madness in fact. Except that Morris had a vague feeling as he began this enterprise that the gods would side with the rash and the imaginative. Not those who weren’t ready to gamble. (Let Dad call him a pansy now!) Morris, Morris told himself, was tossing his bread upon
the waters (whatever that meant), offering himself as a hostage to fate.

  An hour later he got off the bus at the terminus in Quinzano, climbed up two steep hairpin bends above the little square and rang the bell outside the huge, cast-iron gate that barred the long driveway to casa Trevisan. He faced the little tele-camera above the bell-push squarely and honestly.

  ‘Sono io, Morris. I read the papers and came directly,’

  The lock sprang and the gates swung automatically apart. Morris strode up the raked, white-stone drive between lowering magnolias. It was blisteringly hot and so he could be forgiven, he thought, the drops of sweat that were rolling down his temples.

  In less than two minutes Signora Trevisan was telephoning Inspector Marangoni. The inspector, it seemed, wanted Morris to go immediately to the Questura in the town centre, but Signora Trevisan insisted that he come out to them. She hadn’t had a moment to speak to the boy herself yet. After three or four minutes’ argument the inspector said he would come.

  ‘No, I went to Milan yesterday,' Morris explained, ‘to the opera, and missed the last train home. Then I had to spend the night in the station because I hadn’t enough money on me for the hotel and it was only when I saw the Arena this morning that I discovered what had happened.’ Say he’d stayed in a hotel and they’d check up immediately. He’d found a review of yesterday’s Madame Butterfly at La Scala, so he was quite ready there.

  Signora Trevisan watched him attentively from a face grey with worry.

  ‘Go and make us coffee,’ she said quickly to Paola. Her eyes were bulging and red. ‘Oh God, I was so hoping she’d run away with you or something stupid like that.’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ Morris said politely and tried a faint smile. But she turned away. Explanation over - she had no time for him of course. He was only ‘something stupid’, a harmless hypothesis that sadly had to be jettisoned.

  ‘You’re saying you haven’t seen her at all then?’ Bobo asked curtly.

  This was more difficult. Morris turned and found the scrawny lad’s face a mask of severity. He was getting off on playing family protector, naturally, in the absence of other menfolk.

  'That’s correct,’ Morris said, taking the plunge. ‘Not since I came to dinner here, in fact.’ If only the damn girl hadn’t left the house in that stupid tracksuit he wouldn’t have to worry about this at all. Only a halfwit ran away in a red tracksuit. He felt quite angry with her.

  Bobo was exchanging glances with the mother when the telephone rang and Morris was so tense now he started in nervous surprise, a twitch of all his right arm and shoulder. If Massimina …

  It was Antonella to ask somebody to come and take her place at the hospital. She couldn’t stand it any more.

  ‘How is the old lady?’ Morris asked Bobo in a low, respectful voice.

  ‘ln coma,’ he said with relished grimness. “Dying.’

  'I'm sorry,’ Morris said (if he’d had a hat he’d have been holding it in his hand - he could see it now). ‘All these things coming together one on top of the other,’ he commiserated as Signora Trevisan put down the phone. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  The woman looked about to burst into tears and dispatched Paola at once to take over from Antonella. All at once, seeing those damp eyes, Morris felt genuinely sympathetic. Still, if only they’d let him court the girl in a regular conservative fashion, none of this would ever have happened.

  Inspector Marangoni was bulky and somewhat aggressive. Having been obliged to drive out of Quinzano under a blazing sun, he was obviously determined not to show any excessive deference to the Trevisan family, however miserable their plight might be. He sat down hard in the inevitable straight-backed chair and addressed himself exclusively to Morris. Beside him sat his assistant, small and slim; a dry, expressionless, olive face with quick eyes. Morris was pleased to notice they were both sweating quite as much as he was.

  ‘Parla italiano, Signare, capisce tutto?’ The others watched.

  ‘He really speaks very well,’ Signora Trevisan began.

  ‘Please allow me to carry out the questioning alone. Signora. To satisfy regulations I must have the answers from the young man’s own lips.’

  Morris smiled, deferential and indulgent together. ‘I speak fairly well. If there’s anything I don’t understand, I will say.’

  ‘You have some kind of documents identity card?’

  Morris felt inside his leather case and produced his passport. ‘Her Britannic Majesty … requests …’ Most decent of her.

  ‘Permesso di soggiorno in Verona?’

  Tm afraid I don’t have it with me at the moment.’

  ‘It’s not important.‘ The inspector paused, staring directly into Morris’s eyes. ‘So, you had some kind of relationship with the missing girl?’

  ‘I wanted to have. Her mother forbade us to see each other.’

  Signora Trevisan opened her mouth to objects but the inspector hurried on.

  ‘You never had any intention of running away with the girl?’

  ‘Not at all. In any case, Massimina is still seventeen, so any kind of elopement would be considered a crime.’ He smiled.

  'Technically speakings yes.’ The inspector leaned over and whispered a word to his assistants who was scribbling notes.

  ‘Did you ever talk about the idea?’

  ‘She did, but I was against it, I was of the opinion that her mother would come round.’ He looked up blandly at Signora Trevisan in a gesture of reconciliations but her face was hard. So much the worse for her then. ‘I thought it was best to give it time.’

  ‘And when was the last time you saw Massimina?’

  ‘A month ago now. More. When I came to dinner here.’

  ‘You haven’t seen her since then?’

  ‘No, nor spoken.’ He felt a muscle tremble in the corner of his eye.

  The inspector exchanged another word with his assistant.

  ‘Signora, I would like to have a word with Signor Duckworth on his own, Signor Duckworth, would you mind stepping out into the garden for a moment. We can talk there.’

  ‘Not at all.’ But standing up, Morris felt his bowels almost dissolve away inside him. They knew he had seen her Friday evening, then. Stan had said something. Or Gregorio. How could they forget a red tracksuit? How could he ever have imagined they would forget it? He must keep cool. He could say he was afraid they would think him involved, perhaps. Damn it, why had he posted that stupid letter before coming here? If it wasn’t for that, if he could intercept it maybe somehow, there still wasn’t anything they could really nail him for. Only a few lies. But when the letter arrived… and then if that Signor Cartuccio went and saw something in a newspaper …

  ‘Signor Duckwort.’ They sat, incongruously, at a small marble-topped table under a lattice of wistaria that gave a green fishbowl feel to the air, hushed and cool. 'I must warn you that Signora Trevisan has informed us that you lied to the family on a number of counts when you spoke to them about your private life and that she considered you a person not to be trusted - at all. Bobo, Signore Posenato, that is, supports this testimony.’

  Morris could barely conceal a sigh of relief. He pushed a hand into blond hair for a moment, covering his expression, and tried to settle his features into a look of mildly irritated resignation.

  'That’s perfectly correct. I lied to them about my job and my prospects and my father’s position.’

  ‘And may I ask why?’ But there was already a faint grin on the heavy man’s face. Morris could see it under the glistening sweat.

  'They’re rich. I thought they’d be very negative if I told them how precarious my circumstances really are. So I blew things up a bit. I thought by the time the relationship really became serious, if it did, I’d be bound to have a better position.’

  The inspector grunted, the assistant dropped his head to hide a smile as he scribbled.

  ‘I had no idea they’d be so suspicious as to go and check up on everything. I mean, you don
’t …’

  ‘No, quite. Signor Duckworth, I have just one or two other questions to ask you while I have you on your own, and then you’re free to go.’

  Plain sailing. ‘Go ahead.’

  'There is no possibility that Massimina is pregnant, is there?’

  Morris was surprised, genuinely, and showed it with a start. ‘Not at all. Absolutely out of the question.’

  ‘Excuse me, Signor Duckworth, but my job sometimes obliges me to ask unpleasant questions.’

  Marangoni found a handkerchief and rubbed it thoughtfully over a big damp waxy face. He was suffering. He was thinking of his nice air-conditioned office. And his teeth were bad, poor man. If Morris had had teeth like that, he would have gone to the dentist tout de suite and paid whatever it took.

  ‘So you weren’t having sex?’

  ‘No, no. To tell the truth, she’s more Catholic than the Pope. She wouldn’t hear of it. Her idea was to get married right away. Hence our engagement.’

  ‘Quite, good. Second, then, do you have any reason at all to suppose that Massimina may have taken her own life?’

  Morris shook his head quickly. ‘No, not that. She isn’t that kind of girl.’

  'Think about it, Signore, did she have any reason to be upset recently?’

  Morris made a show of thinking. ‘Well, I know she was very depressed about failing her school exams, and also about her grandmother being ill. I mean, really down. I got the impression her grandmother was her only real friend in the family and the others just felt she was a bit of a dunce and bossed her around all the time.’

  At which point Morris suddenly realized that if he was supposed not to have spoken to the girl for as long as a month, he couldn’t have known whether she had failed her exams or not, nor her reaction to the grandmother’s illness. But he kept on bravely.

  'Then I suppose she was rather upset about not being able to see me. Certainly she wrote a couple of desperate letters. All the same, I still don’t think she …’