Juggling the Stars

by Tim Parks

  'i'm sorry,’ Morris said, bringing up a hand to cover his forehead, 'but I’m afraid I feel rather ill. It must be the sun.’ And to Massimina. ‘Mimi, I know it’s a bore but I’m going to have to go and lie down in the cool inside. Coming?’

  ‘Meet us for dinner,’ Giacomo said brightly.

  ‘Okay,’ Morris agreed, ‘seven o’clock at the bottom of the pier.’ Just to be rid of them. And he propelled Massimina back through the city to their pensione.

  ‘How the hell did he find the place?’ Morris whispered fiercely once they were in the back of the car. Faced with the fait accompli of the two of them actually arriving in their room in the pensione there had been nothing for it but to accept the invitation to dinner in a country restaurant. Morris felt as one who must run some awful gauntlet before he can breathe again. The whole evening, holding his breath.

  ‘I’d told Sandra where we were staying. While you were off buying the ice-creams. ‘

  ‘And what in God’s name do you mean telling everybody where we’re staying?’

  ‘Why not?’ she said brightly.

  Why not indeed.

  It had taken Massimina more than half an hour to apply her new make-up, purchased that afternoon. Against his better, that is his aesthetic judgement, Morris had advised her to buy brilliant colours, sharp reds and blues, thinking it would look common and take her even further away from her normal self. And instead, she applied them so carefully and well as to highlight her natural prettiness quite perfectly, so that her face had taken on the classic lines of that flattering picture they’d published the first day in the newspaper and would no doubt reprint every time they mentioned the case. Morris felt exasperated (he’d changed her, yes, but in the wrong direction). Then he could have sworn pastel shades were the thing for her camellia skin with its curious milkiness and breadcrumb freckles, and here she was looking an angel with these neon reds and blues attracting all the wrong kind of attention to herself. Giacomo’s attention. A Veronese.

  'I suppose it hasn’t occurred to you how easily it could get back to your mother where we’re staying.’ She was wearing too much perfume too. It seemed to fill the car. ‘Has it?’

  ‘No,’ she laughed, hugging herself into his arm. ‘But there’s no need to get neurotic, Morri. And then who cares if it does get back to her? We’ll tell her it’s too late and I’m pregnant and we’ll have to marry.’

  ‘We’re eloping,’ she said out loud then to the two in the front of the car. ‘My mamma didn’t like Morrees but we decided to run away anyway.’

  Morris’s fingers clenched tight into the skin of his thighs till the blood sang with anger.

  ‘Shut up!’ he hissed.

  Giacomo’s car spun quickly along the narrow country roads up into the Apennines with the sun throwing sharp shadows amongst the peaks. He wanted to take them to a restaurant on the steep terraced slopes under San Marino where he had been before and eaten well.

  ‘We’re running away too, aren’t we, Giacomo?’ Sandra said, ruffling the coal-grey curly hair at the back of his neck.

  ‘Proprio cost,’ Giacomo said. ‘Turtledoves all,’ and despite the curving road he turned to the back of the car and winked.

  Which meant he’d ditched his poor wife, the bastard, Morris thought. Like Dad with Mother. How long after her death before that Eileen woman was giggling downstairs on the couch, trying to wriggle Dad’s hand out of her pants. And Cartuccio too, most probably. Wife-dead indeed! How the hell was Morris supposed to check up on that? Unless he’d killed her. Most probably that. Morris watched over one precipice after another as the car wound tightly up into the hills. If only you could tilt the wheel a bit and somehow manage to get out before … but the car was a two door and he was in the back. (Was he going mad? What had he done in the end: run off with her, written a letter, lied to the police. It was their fault for making it all so easy. Otherwise he would never have started.)

  San Marino floated into view. Picture-book battlements and pink sunset castles rose hewn and cobbled a thousand steep feet above, like some corny illustration in Lord of the Rings, or a backdrop for a TV costume show. Relax, relax, play it as it comes. The tyres scrunched across the gravel surface of the restaurant car park and they bundled out to eat under a panoply of vines, the distant twilight view of San Marino half blocked by the silhouette of an illegally parked Dutch camper.

  'There’s a certain kind of tourist one just has to hate,’ Sandra said in her plummy English to Morris, indicating the camper. She worked at the BBC as a production assistant apparently. Her father was a political analyst for Radio Four. (Surprise, surprise.)

  ‘I know what you mean,’ He was desperately trying to keep half an ear on Massimina’s conversation in Italian with Giacomo, ready to intervene at the slightest hint of address exchanging. But perhaps because of his own delicate situation, Giacomo seemed to be steering thankfully clear of any attempt to find common acquaintances. He hadn’t even had occasion to ask her surname yet, so far as Morris could tell. And why should he ask her? Did he know Stan’s surname? Marion’s?

  'They come all the way down from Holland,’ she went on, ‘and then just spend the whole time on the beach eating pizza and blocking the views with their damnable caravans.’

  Giacomo had put a friendly hand on Massimina’s naked shoulder for a moment. No, it was really incredible the liberties people took. Morris would never have done that with somebody else’s girlfriend. Sandra, for example. Sometimes he seemed to be the only one around with any morals, with any sense of who was whose. The older man whispered something in the girl’s ear, but that would scarcely be a request for her surname would it, Morris thought.

  'And then if they do go to a museum they just browse around for ten minutes and think they’ve seen the whole thing - Italy. What they never do is actually try to soak in the real art of the way these people live and how that relates to the glorious past. The mosaics at Ravenna for example.’

  Morris poured himself another glass of wine. He was drinking too much. He must be careful. The thing to remember was that he was better than these people, genuinely better smarter and quicker. In every way. Mentally morally. So there was no need to be nervous.

  'For you?’ He offered the bottle.

  At least it was exciting.

  ‘Yes, please,’ Sandra nodded and drained her glass. ‘No savoir faire at all. All beer, beach and TV and no consideration for others. I often think the most important thing about artistic people is their sensibility towards others. I mean, they’re more likely to be considerate because …’

  Bullshit! Look how considerate gammy Giacomo was being. What the hell did she know about art anyway with that silly gauche mauve dress cut to a theoretical cleavage and geometric earrings like parts of some intellectual puzzle the well-to-do buy in Harrods for their children’s Christmas stockings. Give a girl a plummy voice, a hockey stick before she’s ten and a horse at puberty and a few years later you can bank on it she’ll think she has carte blanche to talk about art till the cows come home.

  ‘Mind you,’ she was going on, ‘half the people at the BBC are the same really. Like Daddy always says, culture’s no more than screen-deep with that lot. Despite all their airs.’ She hitched up the strap of her dress a little and, leaning nearer to Morris, smiled knowingly from all her Princess Anne-sharp teeth. This ‘screen-deep’ and ‘airs’ thing was obviously the family bon mot.

  ‘I mean, in the end I’d rather a real pleb than half these twits and pansies who go on about theatre and culture on the television all day without really knowing anything about anything. There’s no virility about them or contact with life, whereas there’s something natural and earthy about a pleb, straightforward. He parks his camper in front of a view of San Marino and says, “What the bloody hell!” ‘

  So now she had come round 360 degrees. And without him even contradicting. Dad would have fucked you black and blue, Morris thought. And sent you packing afterwards (as he had with Eileen - and
the others).

  But then so many women seemed quite happy that way.

  Sandra leaned back, laughing. She must have drunk nearly a whole carafe all by herself and was obviously under the impression she was shining.

  ‘Giacomo’s a real artist, though. You should see the book he’s done called Middle Ages at Twilight It’s really something else. Isn’t it Giacomo?’ And she took advantage of the opportunity to butt in on his conversation with Massimina and grab his arm.

  ‘I’ll pick up a copy,’ Morris promised. And piss all over it. At which he suddenly realized he needed to go to the lavatory quite desperately, but couldn’t of course, for fear of what turns the conversation might take in his absence. He was going to have to hold on the whole damn evening, which would ruin his first good meal for a week.

  12

  Eleven o’clock. A surprisingly dull morning with a spot of rain, but bright for Morris. He threaded his way from the pensione at the back of town through to the main street and headed towards the newsagent’s. He definitely liked, he thought, the way they covered every empty wall with a great haphazard sea of posters in Italy. Every possible colour and message; dance lessons, ladies’ underwear, the Radical Party. On the oldest buildings too. To show they weren’t overly respectful of the past, that they lived now, in the present; at tonight’s meeting of Democrazia Proletaria, for. example. Forza compagni! Good for them.

  And the girls walking arm in arm. That was another thing Morris liked to see. Not afraid of expressing an innocent affection for each other, not in danger of being considered lesbians the moment they linked arms or kissed each other’s cheeks. Even some of the boys could grab each other affectionately without attracting the shameful inferences that such a gesture would inevitably provoke on the streets of suburban London.

  Morris hurried through the fresh morning whirl, albeit under a grey sky, and felt at one with the world. He had dreamt of Dad last night; he had dreamt they were sitting together on the sofa watching TV. Nothing else, just him and Dad watching the box and laughing together, as if they’d never hated each other. The odd thing was that on the TV screen, he’d suddenly realized, they were showing himself and Massimina, her rubbing cream into his shoulders as he lay on the bed, and Dad was laughing - ‘Christ, what a pair she’s got, up hers any day,’ and for some reason Morris was laughing with him.

  Yes, the morning had got off to an exceptionally good start, Massimina had lain in quietly till ten nursing a terrible headache which had given Morris a clear couple of hours to finalize his letter, snip snap all the words from the mags he’d bought (a huge pile) and tape the whole thing together. At half ten he left the poor girl in the pensione, hashing up a picnic brunch with yesterday’s bread rolls, and went down to the street. Apart from the hangover, she seemed in a state of semi-shock over the amount of money they’d spent the previous evening.

  ‘Forty thousand lire, Morri! It’s mad!’

  ‘l told you we shouldn’t have gone out with them. He was just trying to get you drunk, and for fairly obvious reasons.’

  But the evening couldn’t really have gone better as far as Morris was concerned. No addresses exchanged, no common acquaintances unearthed, no surnames mentioned even, and most of all, after Morris’s coldness and fine show of jealousy towards the end, no mention whatsoever of a further meeting. Given that the two would be picking up the boat from Brindisi to Greece in a few days’ time there thus seemed little likelihood they’d ever be in a position to cause trouble for Morris. All well then, and he hadn’t killed anybody. (What a stupid idea that was, Morris was far too smart to be a killer.) He smiled his smile feeling the corner of his lip lift. He was going to come out of this clean with all the money and live happily ever after without so much as a smudge on his conscience. On the contrary, he was going to feel very proud of himself. But Morris remembered that strange tightening of the muscles he’d felt the evening before, the overwhelming sensation of physical heat, a moment’s blinding determination. It was curious.

  He popped into the same newsagent as yesterday, picked up one of only two copies of the Arena and there it was. The letter had arrived. A small headline in the margin of the front page led him to an article inside. The police were now definitely considering the matter a kidnap - excellent -though given the curious nature of the letter they still hadn’t absolutely ruled out the possibility of some kind of macabre practical joke. Fair enough. It was oddball stuff. But the mole must have been convincing. (Unless even her family had never noticed it? Most people were blind after all.) The search was concentrating on the area around Vicenza, the paper said, where the red tracksuit had been found and Inspector Marangoni was quoted as saying that he expected there would be concrete developments within the next forty-eight hours.

  Oh no he didn’t, Morris thought, and positively skipped out onto the street. Oh no! He didn’t expect anything of the kind. That was just the crap they fed the press with. No mention of himself either, which could only be positive. The only minus was a reprint of Massimina’s photograph, admittedly in smaller dimensions this time, but now looking remarkably like the blow-waved, eyebrow-plucked made-up girl who’d sat beside him last night. (What had the photographer done, for God’s sake? How much had they paid him?) A friend or even relation might never recognize the creature as she was now, but half the world would - if they were in the habit of scrutinizing photographs in out of town newspapers. Still, Morris was feeling sufficiently secure this dull humid morning to actually welcome a ghost of a challenge (where was the excitement otherwise?) and his face creased into its smile of sly triumph. He stopped a moment to share the smile with himself in the reflection of a window full of children’s clothes. Tall, blond, quite handsome - a little indistinctive was the only problem. It wasn’t a striking face. Rather boring. Thank God he hadn’t kidnapped Sandra though: could you imagine having to put up with that kind of conversation day in day out? Count your blessings, Morris Duckworth.

  He bought stamps and an express sticker and then enquired his way to the local S.I.P., the phone centre. Safely installed in a booth, he dialled the number Inspector Marangoni had given him. Perfectly safe, he felt. Ready for a long chat, ready to give his best opinion; he would even offer to go back to Verona if the police thought it could be of any help.

  ‘’Pronto, Questura di Verona.'

  ‘Pronto, vorrei parlare con l'Ispettore Marangoni.’

  The inspector was busy; if Morris would like to leave a message perhaps?

  Morris wouldn’t. He didn’t want to communicate through some lackey and be misunderstood.

  This is a long distance call about the Trevisan kidnap. Tell the Inspector it is Morris Duckworth speaking and that I have some new information for him.’ That should stir things up.

  ‘Pronto,' Inspector Marangoni was on the line in a matter of seconds. ‘Ah, Signor Duckworth, come va?’

  ‘Non c’è male. I'm in Bari.’

  ‘Marvellous, how’s the weather?’

  ‘Hot,’ Morris said, which was scarcely taking a risk, ‘Look, I saw the news about Massimina this morning. I don’t know, I feel really shocked. It really is a kidnap then, you’re sure? Did the letter ask for money, I mean …‘

  ‘I can’t give you any of the actual details I'm afraid. Confidential. The man was obviously determined not to use his own handwriting though. Used bits of newspapers, lettroset.‘

  ‘Oh - is that unusual?’ Morris asked.

  ‘So, so. Maybe he has some special reason for hiding his handwriting. Someone close to the family. Or he could be left-handed, you can usually tell that immediately even from printed caps. Hence the lettroset where he couldn’t find bits of newspaper.‘

  ‘Oh?’ Morris felt a shade unnerved. The Inspector’s voice was heavy and slow, professional, and Morris remembered the businesslike manner of the man in the garden at Quinzano, the impression of experience. How long would it take him to come up with the real reason behind that messy collage?

  ‘Yes, in
which case leaving the tracksuit in a bin in Vicenza - you heard about that, didn’t you? Yes, they left it at the rail station - that might just be some kind of deliberate red herring, trying to take us away from the immediate family circle. But my assistant here tells me you have some new information.’

  ‘Well, I'm not sure if it’s really useful, but it’s something I remembered yesterday and then when I saw about the kidnap …’ Damn! How on earth could he have seen about the kidnap in Bari? No Arena there. Rimini was one thing, just a couple of hundred kilometres south of Verona and crawling with tourists from the northern towns, but Bari? Morris trembled, switching the phone from one sweaty hand to another. It was awfully close in the booth. Nobody would ever want an Arena in Bari, surely.

  'Yes? Pronto?’

  ‘Well, Massimina mentioned to me that there was some strange character always bothering her on the bus when she came home from school. He used to try and sit or stand next to her and stare at her.’

  ‘She didn’t give you any description?’

  ‘No. Oh, only that he was very hairy, and that his eyes were odd. I got the impression he must have been around forty, but I don’t know if she actually told me that. I just told her to stick near the bus driver or the other people and not to worry too much. I mean, the world is full of people like that and they’re generally harmless. But now …’

  ‘No other description? She didn’t say where he got on, where he got off, what time of day it was?’

  Morris left himself an authentic pause for thought. He was feeling confident again. The inspector was swallowing it.

  ‘Well, she went to school at the Stimate and got the bus straight home when the school closes at one. So it would have been around that time. But where he got on and off I don’t know. I can’t imagine he got off at Quinzano itself because if so she’d have known him. Everybody knows everybody there.’

  ‘Quite.’ Inspector Trevisan was obviously writing as he spoke which gave Morris a breather. ‘Quite. We’ll have some men check out the bus route around that time for a few days.’