Juggling the Stars

by Tim Parks

  The elevator hadn’t moved since Sandra came up. Morris got in, rode down, breezed through reception without being noticed as far as he could tell, and was out in the street before he realized he hadn’t brought down that copy of the Arena. Dear Christ! He stopped outside the glass door of the hotel and slumped against the stuccoed wall beside. Open at the very page. The kidnap spread out right there in front of the first policeman who came. He would have to go back up.

  Why on earth had he done it? Why? It had been the moment to bow out, take the first flight home to Britain.

  Unless perhaps he had done it because he wanted to stay with Massimina. No.

  He looked at his watch and counted an interminable ten minutes just to be absolutely sure there had been no alarm. Nobody had paid any attention to the screams. Perhaps they hadn’t been as loud as he thought. Then he started quickly back in. The receptionist was giggling on the telephone and didn’t even glance. But the elevator wasn’t there. Morris saw the stairs to his right and made himself, forced himself, to walk up the three floors slowly and normally, without getting out of breath. He would just go straight into the room, pick up the Arena from the bottom of the bed, slip it into his plastic bag, wipe the desk handles while he was at it (and the tap, of course, the tap!) and then out again.

  But the door was locked. For a moment Morris panicked. He dropped the plastic bag, grabbed the handle and heaved at it. How on earth could he have been so stupid as to forget that the doors were self-locking? Why hadn’t he taken the key for God’s sake? He was nothing more than a stupid amateur, when all was said and done, a boy in a mess, and if they got him now it really was the end. He should have confessed everything to Giacomo and got out of it as best he could, taken the girl home and had done. Or he could have agreed to the holiday foursome and offered Giacomo half the ransom in return for his silence. He would have gone for that, the rat, the pig, you could see from his face he would have stopped at nothing to get inside a girl’s pants. At least Morris wasn’t like that. At least he had some sense of decency.

  While these thoughts rushed wildly through his head, Morris was rattling and tugging at the doorhandle, untill he heard the lift whine to a stop round the corner to his right. He picked up the plastic bag, made a dash for the stairs to his left and just got round the wall out of sight before a couple came into the corridor behind him. They stopped outside the door next to Giacomo’s, laughing and joking in German. Morris peeped a glance round the wall to see when they would disappear and he could have another go at the door (he could pick the lock maybe). The couple, in their mid-forties, were embracing tightly against the wall.

  It was at this moment, waiting for them to open their door and disappear that Morris noticed a series of dark red smears along the creamy polished marble compound that was the floor of the corridor. He stared, not quite understanding for a few seconds, then lifted a leg to look at the underside of his sandal. The sole under the toes was sticky with blood. Standing on one leg as he was he swayed and almost blacked out. He grabbed the metal bannister for support, breathing deeply to recover. His vision seemed to narrow under a great weight of darkness all around and then slowly to open out again, despite a fierce pain flowering now in the dead centre of his skull. How was it those two hadn’t seen the stains? He must have left them in the lobby too. Trembling, he slipped off the offending sandal, then the other, put them in the plastic bag with the wallet, the camera equipment, the bloody telephoto lens - there was a cluster of blondish hairs stuck to it he noticed - and then breathing hard, God you needed so much air in your lungs, he hurried barefoot down the stairs. Nobody passed him on the way down, but the lobby was busy now. It was lunchtime and people were filing through to a restaurant behind swing glass doors at the back of the lobby. Morris padded around a small group by the reception desk and out into the street.

  Brilliant sunshine had replaced the clouds and the fresh black tar of the pavement was already burning. Morris went and stood under the meagre shade of a pine tree and quickly examined his clothes. His white cotton trousers had a speck of blood just below the knee and there was a small stain on his right cuff. Make a plan. He must make a plan and sort all this out. He looked at his watch. Twelve fifteen. He’d left Massimina alone for more than an hour and a half. God knows what she would be thinking. He started to walk down the street towards the canal realized he’d taken the wrong direction and doubled back. His feet were quite scalded by the pavement now, so that he’ had to half walk half run, always trying not to attract undue attention. A dog on a lead barked and strained after him.

  ‘He doesn’t like bare feet,’ the owner laughed. Morris tried to smile back. Couldn’t. He must have looked daggers at the chap.

  The canal was glittering in the sunlight now, smelling strongly of diesel, dead fish and the sea. Morris walked quickly along the wharf where the painted fishing boats were tied end to end with here and there a pump rattling or a man spreading nets or painting a guard rail. What tranquillity! He walked a good two hundred yards, almost to the last of the boats where the path seemed completely deserted, and stopped. He reached inside the bag, careful to keep away from the telephoto lens and the bloody sandal and lifted out Giacomo’s wallet. May as well profit by the crime now it was done. But there was only twenty thousand lire. There were documents, a driving licence, tickets for the Brindisi. Igoumenitsa ferry, a photograph, polaroid, of a middle-aged, pleasantish woman holding two young children and another of a naked, dark girl cross-legged on a double bed, hands behind her head to make her nipples point at the camera. This was neither Sandra nor the other woman and Morris was pleased to have this further confirmation of Giacomo’s immorality. (Consider he’d done it for the wife’s sake - those whom God hath joined together …) Finally, in a small pocket that closed with a stud, wrapped in thin tissue paper, there was a tiny St Christopher on a thin silver chain, wound round an old, worn wedding ring.

  Morris took the twenty thousand for what it was worth, the two tickets just in case, and the St Christopher for no reason at all. Then he slipped the documents and ring back in the wallet and the wallet back in the bag and knotted the plastic handles tight. Looking around, he walked a few paces and quickly dropped the bag into the canal between two boats, where, under the weight of the cameras, it sank like a stone.

  ‘For me?’ Massimina was delighted. ‘Morrees!’

  'That’s why I'm so late,’ Morris felt weak, absolutely exhausted. He couldn’t remember ever having felt so tired. And the police were bound to put two and two together with that newspaper right beside the corpses open on the very page of the kidnap. He sank onto the bed.

  ‘Oh, and then one of my damn sandals broke, I caught it on a kerbstone, so I spent half an hour looking for some new ones and then of course when I found what I wanted I discovered I’d spent all the money on the St Christopher.’

  ‘Quanto sei caro!' she laughed.

  It was interesting, Morris thought, fishing for lucidity, how many different ways he could have spent that hour and a half and ended up coming home with no shoes on his feet and a silver St Christopher in his pockets. Murder might have been just a nightmare.

  To protect us on our travels,’ she said solemnly, linking the thing round her neck. He hadn’t thought of that angle. It was all terribly appropriate. She came over with a thank you kiss, but suddenly now he remembered the blood on his cuff and trouser leg and pushing her aside he sprang to his feet.

  ‘l seem to be sweating like a pig these days. My clothes are stinking.’

  The room was the typical pensione, suffocatingly small, a double bed, wardrobe and tiny table, bare wooden floor and a washbasin with a mirror in one corner. Morris turned on the tap, slipped off his trousers and unbuttoned the shirt; he plunged them into the water and without even turning round quickly rubbed the stain on the trouser leg against that on the cuff of the blue shirt. The marks dissolved and bled away to nothing almost immediately. So much for the ‘Out damned spot’ side. Nothing easier than w
ashing away a bit of blood.

  Then when he turned round to grab a towel he found Massimina was standing behind him, quite naked. She had let drop the pearl grey skirt which was crumpled now about her feet and peeled off the red T-shirt. Apparently she’d had no underwear on. Her pubic hair was a great bristling bush under the perfect curve of her belly. Morris froze. He was too tired to face another crisis so soon after the last. Very slowly he dried his hands, staring, tensing.

  The room wasn’t bright. The window was blocked by the buildings on the other side of the ancient street. Massimina stood, quite beautiful and more shapely than he had imagined., in the filtered half light. She cocked her head to one side with half a smile.

  ‘It isn’t wrong, Morri. You know it isn’t. I know I love you. And you have such generous thoughts for me, bringing me presents like this, I feel so secure now …’

  He felt he was swaying and shut his eyes a moment.

  ‘Morri?’ She lifted her slim brown arms, palms outward and upward in a gesture of offering. She thought it was oh so hellishly romantic of course. She was copying the crap she read in books. But his eyes were filling with tears. Affection was welling up inside him, overwhelming his old disgust, the visions of Dad and Eileen on the couch, the grunts.

  ‘Come to me, Morri. Vieni, vieni. She stepped out of the skirt round her feet. Her body swayed. Her belly eased against him.

  ‘Cara,’ he muttered, his arms around her, ‘cara Massimina.'

  The dying afternoon had a liquid, dreamy feel to it in which even the room’s dozens of flies moved lazily and silently.

  ‘By the way,’ Massimina was saying brightly. She had sat up now and squashed the grand straw hat gaily over her perm. ‘While you were out this morning I phoned home …’

  'You what?’

  ‘l phoned home four or five times. The landlady said I could use her private phone and pay afterwards. But there was nobody there.’

  Morris closed his eyes under a great wave of relief. Grandmother’s funeral, it must have been. But he could cheerfully have strangled her.

  13

  They were on the train at eight fifteen. Morris wanted to take the rapido but Massimina wouldn’t hear of paying the surcharge and so they were caught in a compartment full of the ‘plebs’ as dear Sandra would have called them. Massimina sat opposite and away to the right of Morris and gave him sweet little smiles every time he turned in that direction which was irritating. He was longing to read the report in the newspapers and yet couldn’t buy himself a paper in the station because then of course she might have seen it. He tried to imagine the words they would use and he thought it was odd but you couldn’t think of a murder - or a kidnap if it came to that - outside the words the press would use to describe it, not even if you’d done it yourself. It was like a football match, or a debate in parliament, or a new theatre performance, you had to read what the critics said before you really knew it had happened.

  He was feeling a little more himself this morning and strangely (madly?) carefree. What if he had left the Arena in there? Looking back on it now in the clear light of another day he saw it would take a genius to make the leap required to pin the murder on Massimina’s kidnapper. And then another giant hop, skip and jump to nail Morris as that kidnapper. Living in Verona it was perfectly logical that Giacomo should have bought an Arena and who cared what page it was open at? The other thing was that he didn’t feel profoundly changed in any way. He had checked very carefully through his mind for some kind of trauma or horror or general mental handicap resulting from the event, and instead nothing. Absolutely all clear. No, all that bothered him was he couldn’t be alone to read the papers and maybe dictate a jubilant letter to Dad, get his thoughts down. He hadn’t intended to kill after all. There had been nothing premeditated about it- quite the opposite. He’d been forced to it by that stupid lascivious idiot who hadn’t deserved any better in the end anyway and Morris was damned if he was going to eat his heart out about it. (Murder should be judged on the value of the victim, his claim to live, not on the merely academic aspect of whether the death was murder or not and if so who did it.)

  Added to which, the experience with Massimina had been very promising. He could do their funny business as well as the best of them it seemed. He felt rather protective towards her. Happier in her company. It was almost as if one experience had cancelled out the other. He had slept all night with her, her warm smell and heavy breasts not unlike Mother’s those times. Really, he felt quite tempted to tell her everything. Maybe she would play along perfectly happily.

  “Panino, Morri?’ They had stopped at Fano and Massimina wanted him to pick up a sandwich from the man pushing his trolley up the platform. She refused to pay a small surcharge to travel in relative style on the rapido and then wanted him to waste money hanging out of the window to buy dry sandwiches from some gippo on the platform.

  “No,’ Morris was firm.

  Wait for her to go to the lavatory and then he’d ask to borrow the paper off the lady beside him and flick through what was important as quickly as possible. Massimina had to go to the lavatory quite often, he’d noticed, which was rather convenient. Ply her with drinks should be his policy.

  ‘Cara, the sandwiches these people sell are terrible, but I’ll get you a can of coke if you want. You can’t go wrong with a can.’

  ‘No thanks,’ she said and sat back and smiled sweetly.

  Morris had to wait untill beyond Senigallia before nature finally called.

  HORROR IN RIMINI HOTEL MYSTERY MURDER, the headline ran, though they’d relegated the thing to page four oddly. Morris felt the adrenalin stir in his veins.

  'Terrible,’ the lady who had been so kind as to lend the paper remarked. She was a frail decaying creature wrapped in a shawl despite the stale heat of the compartment. Morris smiled sadly, raising half a blond eyebrow.

  Police have admitted they are completely baffled by the double slaughter of a man and woman in Albergo degli Ulivi, Riminij yesterday. The corpses were discovered late in the evening after a receptionist realized that despite having gone up to their room some hours before, Signor Giacomo Pellegrini and Miss Sandra Delaforee, his English companion, repeatedly failed to respond to the telephone. A master key was used to enter the room where the two bodies were found horribly beaten to death by repeated blows to the skull. Police experts later revealed that a number of weapons had been used, including a heavy plant pot and an unidentified metal implement.

  Funny they didn’t mention the pillow. But then Morris had never really trusted the papers for detail. ADULTERY CLUE - there was a subheading.

  Although police were uncertain both as to the number of the assailants and the motive for the massacre, they were following possible suggestions that the murder may have been committed for passionate revenge. (How Italian of them.) Giacomo Pellegrini was a married man with two children only recently separated from his wife. ‘Someone might have had cause to take revenge,’ police sources said, ‘though the clumsy, violent way in which the killings took place would appear to rule out a premeditated murder.’

  Police found bloodstained shoe-prints both in the lift and on the stairs which would seem to indicate either that there were two killers, or that a single killer had left the room and returned again. If the motive for the attack was theft, the attacker may have realized that he hadn’t taken Miss Delaforce’s handbag which was found to contain 6oo,ooo lire. Police believe that Signor Pellegrini’s wallet was taken, plus some camera equipment.

  ‘Morri.’

  Barely two minutes and she was back already. She couldn’t have …

  ‘It’s Ancona. We’ve got to get off,’ They were rolling into a station and he hadn’t even noticed. 'It was occupied,’ she whispered as they heaved down the two suitcases.

  ‘Veramente orrendo,’ Morris commented handing back the paper to the old woman (he felt more than ever the actor today) and when she asked if he would be so kind he got her bag down and gave her a hand onto
the platform. The thing about old people was they were so formal so polite. You felt perfectly safe with them.

  The original idea had been quite simply to cross the peninsula from east to west putting as much distance as possible between himself and Rimini before he posted the ransom letter. Seeing as neither of them had ever seen Rome before, Morris had suggested this elopement of theirs was an opportunity absolutely not to be missed; heaven only knew when they would find time to visit Rome after they were married with setting up home and everything. So they had taken the earliest train from Rimini and were to change at Ancona with a half-hour wait before the espresso to Rome came in. Massimina dashed off directly to the ladies’ while Morris lugged their two suitcases to a bench and sat down to think. He disliked travel of this kind, the dust and dirt of railway compartments the grime you discovered on the backs of your arms that had got there you knew not how, under your fingernails behind the elbow; and then the long waits for unaccountably delayed trains, the pushing and shoving. If one had to travel it should be in style Morris thought with a little leg room the possibility of buying a cool drink any time you wanted. After the purgatory of this awful business, when he could start really livings. he must try doing some travelling that way.

  Funny, it was somehow impossible to remember how life had felt before all this began.

  Morris the murderer.