Juggling the Stars

by Tim Parks

  ‘Could you show us those letters, Signore? Every scrap of evidence helps.’

  ‘Er, I’ve only got the one still I think,’ - and written before the exams dammit - 'I'll try and bring it to the Questura this afternoon.’ Where the hell had he put the thing? And why had he spoken of more than one letter so casually like that? Tell the truth, for God’s sake, where you could. Otherwise you made them suspicious for nothing.

  ‘We’d be very grateful, Signore. Just one final question. In your opinion, where do you think Massimina is now?’

  Morris shrugged his shoulders, pursed his lips and ran a hand through his hair in a comprehensive gesture of doubt.

  'I’ve no idea. I know what I’m afraid of, obviously, but I really wouldn’t know.’

  ‘And what are you afraid of?’

  ‘Well,’ Morris hesitated, ‘some kind of awful sex murder, don’t you think?’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘You don’t think she may have been kidnapped?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Morris said after a moment’s thought. ‘I suppose she could.’ And he added puzzled, ‘Are they really that rich?’

  ‘I believe so,’ Marangoni said quietly.

  The inspector asked Morris where he would be able to contact him if necessary over the coming days and Morris explained that this could be something of a problem. He’d finished teaching now and had arranged to go on a trip with friends who were driving to Turkey. The inspector considered this for a while and then said he saw no legitimate reason for asking Morris to stay, but he would be grateful if he could keep in touch by phone every few days or so, so that they could call him back to Verona in case of any unexpected developments. A routine arrangement, the inspector explained. Any problem with money and he should feel free to call reverse charge.

  Fine, Morris agreed, he would do that. But then he said that maybe he wouldn’t go away after all now, he wasn’t sure, with this awful affair going on. Even if he hadn’t seen the girl for a month and had given up hope more or less, he still felt very attached. He was in a dilemma really whether to go or not. Either way, he would be over at the Quesiura this afternoon to let them have Massimina’s letter to himself and he would let them know his movements then. At which Marangoni and his assistant seemed quite satisfied and went back into the house to have a word with Signora Trevisan. Strange, Morris was thinking, that nobody seemed to know about Massimina’s having taken that money out of the bank. You’d have thought that was the first thing they’d have checked up on. Unless she’d been lying to him of course.

  Morris refused the Trevisans’ invitation to lunch, then accepted when half-heartedly pressed (one was obviously never going to eat well with Massimina). They sat down to a table of two roast chickens, courtesy of Bobo & Co. no doubt, and ate in almost complete silence, what conversation there was being restricted to the most formal possible (which at least allowed one to savour the food).

  Only when Morris was leaving did Signora Trevisan say she would like to excuse herself if she had offended him in any way, and Morris said, no, it was really he who owed an apology and he said if there was anything he could do for them over the coming days he would be happy to do it. He thought for a moment now they might at least have the decency to ask him to stop over regularly and share their news and suffering, seeing as he was supposed to be in love with the girl. But they said stiffly, no, there was nothing he could do to help, and so Morris hurried off on his remaining errands.

  All afternoon he was in a state of what might best be described as battle-action calm; a frenzied, maniac calm, aware of the tiniest detail, the world of forms, bodies and movement impressing itself every moment on his mind with photographic sensitivity and precision his head racing with thoughts. Yet at the same time everything he did was done calmly and carefully., walking a tightrope as it were, with life and death in mind. In short, Morris was enjoying himself.

  Getting off the bus at Ponte délia Vittoria, he walked the back streets through to Dietro Duomo, waiting twice behind corners to check they hadn’t for some reason sent someone to follow him. The air was dense with heat and unpleasant smells drifting up from gratings and garbage. The cobbles were hot and the winding alleys behind Via Emilei had a fetid tang to them. But in a few days he would be by the sea with any luck. He could get himself a tan, loll on the beach and sort out everything carefully and in peace. Because it was a long road ahead of him now. At two fifteen Morris climbed the broken stairs of Via Accoliti Number 7.

  ‘Getting the ferry from Brindisi around the thirtieth,’ Stan told him, sipping wine through iceblocks. He was cross-legged in his underwear. ‘Be great if you could join us. Well be in Rome the week before that at the Emmaus commune. Ill give you the address if you want to pick us up there.’

  Morris had some teaching that was going on for a little while, privately, he said. But he might just be able to make it if he pushed things. It would be fun.

  ‘Oh Morris,’ Marion Roberts said. She was painting something on the wall. ‘I read something in the paper about you. Weren’t you involved with that girl that’s disappeared? What’s it all about?’

  She was smiling broadly through her traffic-light make up, delighted naturally to have found out something about his private life. Why was it that everybody wanted to know about your private life? As if Morris, for example, could care less whether Stan went to bed with Marion or with the Pinnington girl, or the pathetic Simonetta - or even all three. Or none. He absolutely couldn’t give a damn. He had no interest in Stan’s exploits. Whereas other people thought they’d nailed you against the wall somehow the moment they’d discovered you had a girlfriend. And Morris remembered the amusement of some schoolfriends who had once found his mother’s photograph in his wallet and danced round and round refusing to give it back.

  ‘No, the papers really rather blew it up. I went out with her for a bit a while back, but I haven’t seen her for ages. Somehow they seem to have got it into their heads we might have run away together.’

  Stan sat up. ‘Not the girl you were at the bus stop with the other night?’

  ‘No, that’s another,’ Morris said, trying to listen to the tone of his voice (was it convincing?). As long as nobody mentioned the tracksuit.

  ‘Quite a lover-boy!’ Marion tittered, dashing an abstract red line into the mess she was making of the wall. Damn her. Morris was angry and felt himself absurdly, flushing. She was the kind he just couldn’t stomach. What in Christ’s name did she have to paint the wall for?

  ‘Massimina had already disappeared Friday night,’ he added and watched Stan.

  ‘Massimina hey? High society stuff. Massi-mini-mina! Rich?’

  ‘Fairly.’

  ‘Wow, that’s weird, man. I bet she’s been kidnapped or something.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ Morris said stiffly.

  'Funny the way you use “shouldn’t” there,’ Marion unknowingly came to his rescue. ‘I always teach my students, “wouldn’t”. I mean.’

  ‘Bringing this other chick on the trip then?’ Stan asked, with a wink and a scratch in his beard. The more the merrier, like I said.’

  Morris hesitated. He still had no clear idea what he would do with himself. Never mind with Massimina. Obviously he’d have to keep her occupied somehow.

  ‘It depends if she can get away,’ he said. ‘Parent trouble.’

  Stan grinned sympathetically. ‘All the same, these wops. Family, family and more family. You can never get away from it. Probably dying to be kidnapped the most of them if you ask me.’

  ‘Right,’ Morris said.

  A half hour later he had woken up the director of the English school from a heavy siesta and persuaded the man to sign him his cheque for the last month and pay fifty thousand of what was owed in cash. Morris explained that he had already seen the police and Horace Rolandson, red in the face and obviously still recovering from a heavy bout of Sunday lunchtime drinking, said he was relieved, could do without a scandal. Rol
andson was one of a dwindling rearguard of old-school emigrants who still lived in a colonial compound mentality; he had never learnt to speak Italian without a marked Yorkshire accent and lived or died by the reputation of his dingy school and the 50s theory of language teaching he had brought over with him so many years ago. He shook Morris’s hand rather meatily.

  ‘See you again next term, lad eh,’ and smiled him out of the flat, breathing gin into the dusty air.

  At a quarter past three Morris was at the bus stop again, suffering from a mixture of heat-exhaustion and euphoria. He was back at his flat at nearly quarter to four, dug out Massimina’s letter to himself from the case in the attic, then back to the bus again. He left the letter at the central Questura in Verona with a note for Inspector Marangoni promising to be in touch in the next few days or so. Then off finally to catch the five-thirty train. Two hours later than he intended, but there you were. She would wait.

  9

  Ingenuity was the thing. That was what it was all about and that was what would make it forgivable in the end. The sheer brilliance. It wouldn’t hurt them to part with a little of this world’s goods. Even the inspector had said that, more or less. It might damn well do them some good in fact. And if it gave the signora some twinges of remorse over how she had brought up and handled her children (not to mention how she had handled Morris), then all well and good.

  He would give a tenth of the money to charity anyway. That should look good if it ever came to selling his story to the Mirror. Kidnapper tithes booty. No, the fact was he was a generous person, if only he had something to be generous with,

  Morris started his ransom note in the hairdresser’s. The thing was to get it dead right. In every department. The right sum of money, large enough to be useful, and believable, small enough to be payable fairly quickly, not to make the family throw up their arms in despair and go directly to the police. Because he would have to get it to them without the police knowing, naturally. And the police would quite definitely be screening the Trevisans’ mail. It was a problem. Then the right method of delivering the money too. Some way that would make any intervention impossible. The right tone; frightening and reassuring together, authoritative. A work of art was what was required (what’s always required. Dad, if you’re to get your head above the crowd).

  Morris looked up at Massimina and the girl smiled down at him from the hairdresser’s chair where a middle-aged woman snipped deftly about her head. At Morris’s insistence, Massimina was having her hair cut and permed and hennaed. She’d look much more attractive that way, he said, more chic and less childish, and cooler too for summer. Also it was like a change of personality, cutting your hair, she’d feel a new, independent person, free from her mother - who had doubtless resisted any hair-cutting idea, Morris imagined. And rightly so. The girl’s hair was her pride and glory. He could barely believe he’d managed to persuade her to cut it. And if there was anything he felt guilty about it was that. An aesthetic crime.

  She watched him scribbling away with his silver Biro.

  ‘Writing to Papa again?’ she smiled, dimpling freckled cheeks. Morris made a show of writing his father a postcard from each town they went through and Massimina obviously felt that this was one of his safer character traits and hence to be encouraged. She also wrote a postcard to her family, but it was Morris who always went off to post both of them together.

  'I was thinking actually of inviting him over at the end of summer, when it’s cooler, in September time, and he’ll be able to stand the heat.’

  “Meraviglioso, Morrees. I’d love to meet him.’

  ‘We should be back in my Verona flat by then and we can have him sleep in the sitting room.’

  'Ottimo!' And she blushed under the flashing scissors. If Father slept in the sitting room, they would be in the same bed together in the bedroom, was what she was no doubt thinking. Married. Procreating even. Her eighteenth birthday was on August 10th. Presumably she expected to be a mother before her nineteenth. She opened her mouth to say something else, but the hairdresser bent her head gently downward and she had to look away.

  DEAR SUFFERERS, Morris hazarded. He wrote the rough copy in English in case the girl saw. It was supposed to be to his father after all. She’d never try to understand the thing with her aptitude for languages, DEAR SUFFERERS, WHAT PRICE YOUR LITTLE LOST ONE THEN? FRANKLY I THINK A CLEAR MILIARDO WOULD HARDLY BE TOO MUCH, SUCH A DELIGHTFUL CREATURE SHE IS - I'M WATCHING HER PRETY FACE RIGHT AT THIS MOMENT. SUCH PRECIOUS LONG HAIR! (He would slip a lock of the stuff into the envelope - that was an idea - and he bent down quickly to scoop some up off the floor. Coming up again he caught her eye a moment in the mirror and was obliged to lift the dark hair to his lips and kiss it. She smiled. Love was sweet, wasn’t it?) A CLEAR BILLION, AND CHEAP AT THE PRICE. MY COMPANIONS HERE, HOWEVER, HAVE PURSUADED ME TO OFFER YOU MONEY-MINDED PEOPLE A SMALL DISCOUNT. (This’d teach the bastards to go messing around checking up on Morris after he’d been so damned polite and formal, even offering poor tottering Grandma his arm, for God’s sake!)

  YES, WE ARE WILLING TO SETTLE FOR EXACTLY EIGHT HUNDRED MILLION LIRE - 800,000,000 - ON THE CONDITION THAT YOU DELIVER QUICKLY AND HONESTLY. NO TRICKS. ANY ATTEMPT TO BRING POLICE OR SPRING A TRAP WILL ONLY MAKE US EXTREMELY NERVOUS WITH QUITE PROBABLY TERMINAL CONSEQUENCES FOR SOMEBODY WE BOTH KNOW WELL. (DRAGGING THE RIVERS? GROVELLING IN GARBAGE PILES? PLASTIC BAGS WITH LEGS AND ARMS UNDER MOTORWAY BRIDGES? WHAT DO YOU THINK?) EIGHT HUNDRED MILLION SHOULDN'T BE IMPOSSIBLE BETWEEN FAMILY AND FRIENDS. ALL THOSE WELL-CONNECTED FRIENDS. (It Was Only four hundred thousand quid in the end. Perhaps it wasn’t enough), IN DENOMINATIONS OF NO MORE THAN 50,000 LIRE NOTES, ALL WELL USED OF COURSE.

  Morris sat back a moment watching Massimina’s face in the mirror and tried to divide eight hundred million by fifty thousand. God, what a stupid currency! Knock off the noughts. The same as eight hundred thousand by fifty. Or eighty thousand by five. Sixteen thousand. Morris tried to imagine sixteen thousand banknotes. Certainly a big pack and no mistake. Where the hell to put it? Just one blow like this though. Just one, oh God, and with careful investment you were settled for life, a life of art and leisure. Maybe he would even write a book if he pulled this one off. The confidence it would give you! You could walk on water after this. That’d show Dad who had his head screwed on right, when Morris Duckworth came back and bought old man D. a modern maisonette in Haling. And a book published to boot. A Citadel to Storm, he would call it. Then, seeing as he wouldn’t need money, he could get involved in good works: children’s homes and things where people would respect you and …

  ‘Morris!' She was transferring with a towel over her head to under the drier. ‘Why on earth are you writing in such big print?' Her face with all the hair hidden away under the towel had an impish, round, pixie look, the eyes brighter and darker, nose sharper, cheeks chubbier.

  Morris felt a sudden flush of blood to his face. ‘My father –er - has bad eyesight. He can’t read regular handwriting for more than a couple of lines or so,’ he added quickly, remembering the minute script of his postcards.

  ‘Are you telling him about me?’

  “Naturalmente.'

  'Tell me what you say. Go on. Translate.’

  But the sound of the hairdrier now drowned out their conversation and Morris was able to get back to work.

  … OF NO MORE THAN 50,000 LIRE NOTES, ALL WELL USED OF COURSE. THE MONEY, WRAPPED IN BROWN PAPER, MUST BE PLACED … No, that was awful. Brown paper was awful. Trite. Genius was going to have to shine here.

  Something that couldn’t possibly be checked up on was the point. Something moving perhaps?

  Morris gazed across the shady space of the hairdresser’s to where Massimina’s long hair lay shorn on the tiled floor. Beautiful filaments of black and gold massacred in the half light. Where? Where? Where? It was the ransom arrangements that always blew a kidnap. He’d seen those films where the person delivering has to go to a phone box and gets called by the kidnapper
standing on a nearby flyover who tells him to go to another phone box, etc. But Morris wasn’t up to that on his own. Not with Massimina around. Sucking his pencil he looked up and found the girl still smiiing, head locked in the helmet of the hairdrier, blowing kisses. He half smiled back. A reassuring, you’re-going-to-look-terrific smile. And then he had it!

  THE MONEY MUST BE WRAPPED IN PAPER AND THEN PLACED IN A REGULAR BROWN HOLDALL UNDER A PILE OF NEATLY PACKED CLOTHES. THE HOLDALL WILL SIMPLY BE ZIPPED CLOSED AND THAT IS ALL. NO LOCKS, BOMBS OR TRICKS. MASSIMINA WILL BE THE FIRST TO OPEN IT. YOU WILL PLACE THE HOLDALL ON THE LUGGAGE RACK OF THE MOST FORWARD FIRST-CLASS COMPARTMENT OF THE MILAN-PALERMO EXPRESS LEAVING MILAN AT - ON -(Have to check up the times there and decide on a date. Which would depend on when he mailed the letter of course.) YOU MUST NOT REMAIN EITHER IN THE COMPARTMENT, OR ON THE TRAIN. OTHERWISE OUR LITTLE PRECIOUS ONE HERE WILL NEVER BE RELEASED.

  One felt rather cruel writing it; but then how else were you supposed to write a ransom letter?

  AND NO SECOND CHANCES, GET IT? YOU WON'T SEE ANY MORE LETTERS FROM ME. (No, Not me. Us.) FROM US. ONLY YOUR DAUGHTER. ALIVE OR DEAD. AS YOU CHOOSE.

  Morris thought for a moment he might persuade Massimina to sign the bottom of a letter to his father and then paste the signature over the final ransom note when he’d got it all ready in Italian. To show he had her alive. But it was too tricky. They’d want to know why he hadn’t got her to sign the final copy itself. So he decided to sign it himself.’VENDICATORI DELLA POVERTA. That had a nice sound. Enigmatic, with a hint of terrorism. A truly red herring. And then something else came to him.

  TO PROVE THAT I HAVE HER ALIVE WITH ME I HAVE ASKED MASSIMINA TO REVEAL A PIECE OF INFORMATION THAT ONLY SHE COULD KNOW. SHE TELLS ME HER SIGNORA MOTHER MUST GET UP EVERY NIGHT AT LEAST FIVE TIMES TO GO AND PISS BECAUSE OF A BLADDER CONDITION SHE HAS HAD FOR YEARS. NOBODY BUT HER DOCTOR AND FAMILY KNOW OF THIS.

  That should reduce any desire to show the thing to the press. ‘Forty-five thousand lire,’ the hairdresser announced with a smile that appeared to admire her own handiwork. And in fact Morris had been as wrong about Massimina’s hair as he had previously been about Gregorio’s bronze. She looked splendid with a short hennaed blow-wave, a long curl falling sexily to just above one eye. The face was rounder yes, but it was more alive too, and her ears were little pearls. Who would ever have guessed? In short, an improvement he hadn’t expected. He’d been fearing the worst, something gauche and ostentatious that he’d be embarrassed to be seen in company with. Dead right about the eyebrows though. Plucked to a thin rising arch now, they took the childishness out of her, adding a faint touch of sophistication. But what really mattered, good taste or bad, was that she was damn near unrecognizable.