Juggling the Stars

by Tim Parks

  … Signor Alfredo Todeschini, owner of a pensione in Via Fama, admitted that he had let the couple have a room for three nights without seeing any documents or even putting a name on the register. The couple seemed very happy he said, as if they were running away from home and wanted to keep themselves to themselves. The blond man had a marked foreign accent, but Signor Todeschini was unable to say where from. In the couple’s room police have found a number of prints which correspond to those found on the door of the victims’ room. The motive of the atrociously violent attack remains obscure, though police feel fairly certain that they must be dealing with some kind of maniac, or at least a mentally unstable criminal. All border points have been alerted under the assumption that the murderer may be a foreign tourist who will soon try to return home. Interpol has been asked to co-operate by providing information on similar unsolved crimes in other countries. Police said they would be considering bringing charges against Signor Todeschini and other hotel owners who failed to register guests.

  Marked accent, my arse, he hadn’t even managed to identify the country. ‘Atrociously violent’ was another newspaper cliché. What other kind of attack did they want? A rather gentle murder was committed today …

  Morris gazed at the identikit. They had missed something about the eyes, and the bridge of the nose was too narrow. But all in all it was pretty good. He could grow a beard of course, but that was exactly what they would be expecting, a week’s scrub of a beard would give him away immediately. (And if Signor Amintore Cartuccio of Gucci’s saw the picture, if he read about the blond hair and the accent. What then?)

  Massimina returned with a spray of roses, which seemed inappropriate to Morris, though he didn’t venture an opinion. They sat for a while over cappuccinos at a small café in Via Mazzarino and Massimina said if he felt so ill perhaps they should just get the train back to Verona right away where he could be in his own flat and see the doctor and so on and …

  But he hadn’t even said anything, Morris protested. He hadn’t said he felt ill. But he looked so pale, she said, and seemed so listless and down that …

  He wasn’t going back to Verona untill after they were married, Morris said firmly, otherwise her mother would find some way of ruining it all. Massimina was solemn. After paying the bill at the pensione, she said, they only had two hundred thousand lire left which meant …

  But they wouldn’t have to spend anything once they got to Sardinia; Morris struggled to stay patient - why the hell did she have to bother him with this crap now?

  So why didn’t they go directly to Sardinia today?

  Because Morris felt too weak to travel a long distance today.

  (Just hold on one more day and the jackpot was his.)

  He kept them sitting at the café untill nearly eleven before going back to the pensione. Signora Ligozzi should have started cleaning the rooms upstairs by now. She had. Morris stayed in the lobby and sent Massimina up to look for her with thef lowers. He glanced round quickly at the shadowy space where just one or two tourists lounged in ancient armchairs with their guidebooks and foreign papers open on their laps. He reached up above the desk, took down the address book, found 'T’, released the spring mechanism that held the pages, removed the page, folded it in his pocket snapped the spring home again and put the book back. But then he changed his mind. He took the book down again, found a spare page in the back., inserted it in the T’ section and wrote, ‘Massimina T …. Think of another name that began with T’, an Italian name. But he couldn’t, damn it. He didn’t seem to know any other Italian names that began with T. Tibaldo, Tramonto, Toloncino, but he was inventing. Who knew if they were really names or not? Oh God. Untill something came back to him from the newspaper. Todeschini, the man with the pensione. Massimina Todeschini, and he scribbled a false address and phone number.

  ‘Morri, Signora Ligozzi’s out for a minute.’ Massimina was at the bottom of the stairs with the retarded daughter who was twisting her mouth awfully to speak.

  ‘Out?’ (To phone the police?)

  'Yes.’

  But she had a phone here. She wouldn’t have gone out.

  ‘What are you doing?”

  ‘I just wanted to check you’d put the Verona code with your phone number, you know how much bother it is looking for things like that.' And he slipped the book back. They left the. roses on the desk with a message and set off for the station.

  Massimina thought perhaps instead of going to the beach Morris should go to the Questura and sort out his documents for when they could get married; but Morris pointed out that the Questura in Rome would be much more of a crush than some quiet country place in Sardinia and anyway it always took a few days to get any document from the Italian bureaucracy and so if they weren’t going to be here after tomorrow it wasn’t worth it. And this was true.

  ‘You’re sure you want to get married, Morri?’ She wasn’t so much suspicious as simply after another of those lovey dovey moments again, like when they’d looked in the mirror together.

  Yes, he told her and kissed her forehead. He really did.

  If only it were that easy.

  ‘You’re a real nut for newspapers,’ she said on the train out to the Lido as he scrutinized the Arena he’d managed to pick up in the huge station newsagent’s. There was nothing about the ransom letter. Which was as it should be this time.

  ‘l like to feel I’m part of things,’ he said and he read her an article about town council proposals to put a plastic cover over Verona’s huge Roman amphitheatre, an idea which made good old traditional Massimina quite indignant.

  The beach at Lido di Roma is vast and on this particular day the sea was blue and the weather kind. Morris and Massimina hired a sunshade in the third row and Morris lay down and closed his eyes while Massimina read from I Promessi Sposi.

  Morris listened only intermittently and it occurred to him that when he had a bit more time to relax and do as he pleased he might actually write a rather better book with the same title where the hero out of penury and desperation kidnaps a girl but then falls in love with her and she with him and they decide he must give himself up and they will marry. But the police of course insist on putting the lad away for most of his life and the two can only see each other once a month across the grille of the prison visiting room and she dies of a broken heart while he wastes hopelessly away.

  This was such a subtle little plot, he thought, and so amusing that he began to laugh out loud and when Massimina asked why, he told her the story (why not?) and she said yes, it was terrific, it would make a marvellous book or even film and she’d always thought just from the way he spoke and from the letters he wrote that Morris would make a marvellous writer. They laughed together under the sunshade. Only it would be better, maybe, she said, if during the actual kidnap, at the beginning, something goes wrong and he goes and kills somebody by accident. The girl falls in love with him and she makes a terrific effort to forgive him and to understand about him being poor and so on, but the crime destroys any hopes they have for the future.

  Morris sat up, trembling. She didn’t know. She couldn’t.

  ‘Good idea,’ he said, clearing his throat to hide a broken voice. ‘So what happens?’

  ‘At the end?’ She was sprawled in the deckchair in her green and white costume. She looked so much more adult recently. Morris noticed how the elastic sank ever so slightly into the flesh around the top of her legs.

  ‘Well,’ she puckered her lips to think, all her freckles smiling, 'the girl says for him, the kidnapper, to go and collect the ransom and run away and then she’ll go to the police as if she’d just been released and say she was blindfolded all along and didn’t know who the kidnapper was and then when everything’s safe they can meet normally and marry. But he, the boy, is overcome with remorse. He says he isn’t worthy of her, refuses that way out, confesses to the police and is condemned to death and executed.’

  'They don’t have the death penalty here,’ Morris told her quic
kly. Did they? No. He was sure they didn’t. You would have heard about executions every now and then. And they hadn’t executed the terrorists, had they?

  'Pity,’ she laughed. Oh God, she was really enjoying herself. ‘But you can always set the story in some country where they do.’

  ‘You cruel thing,' Morris said and lay down again. The sun on his closed eyelids burnt deep reds and blues.

  ‘I’d love it if you became a writer, Morrr. I’d be so proud.’

  ‘It doesn’t pay,’ he said.

  All afternoon he watched the vast sea of lesh shifting across the beach, padding off for their ice-creams, or for a swim, or to the loo. There were slender girls and bulky old women and young boys running everywhere kicking up sand and waddling their plump little bums. How could you say life wasn’t expendable! If a hand reached down from the sky now and removed someone from the beach? The lad scratching his mosquito bite, for example. Who could possibly care? (Had anybody, bar himself, really and truly wept for his mother? Did anyone remember her? Did he really remember her himself, or was it just part of his own life, a feeling, an atmosphere he remembered?) And when you thought of Asia! BBC documentaries of streets in Calcutta, a solid wall of dark skin, unimaginably thick with bodies, shifting and squirming like maggots in a fisherman’s bait box. Life, Morris thought, was like being in a burning cinema. You had to get well out of the crowd and the crush or you were dead.

  'If we really want to save a bit of money,’ he said towards six in the evening, ‘why don’t we sleep on the beach?’

  And that was what they did. Ate in a restaurant, ham and mushroom pizza, then strolled through the town till late quite happily (truly) arm in arm and finally down to the beach at nearly midnight to stretch out their towels hidden between the deserted sunshades and try to sleep. Which saved registering at any more hotels, showing passports.

  ‘I wonder what Mamma and Grandma are doing now?’ Massimina whispered. She held his hand and squeezed it lightly from time to time. Heat lightning flickered out at sea. ‘I was thinking today, maybe we should just go back now and have done with it. To Verona. I mean, I don’t think they could do anything now. Not when they’ve seen how close we are and how happy together.’

  'If you really want,’ Morris said.

  ‘I just don’t want them to worry too much.’

  He laughed indulgently. ‘Why should they worry after all the letters and postcards we’ve sent? They can’t have had so much post in years.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. 'I'm just being stupid, I suppose,’ and she giggled nervously in the warm air.

  ‘When we get to Sardinia,’ Morris said, ‘there’ll be a phone and you can call them from there.’

  16

  Morris was rather pleased with himself for not having rushed to Stazione Termini too early and got himself caught there for hours trying to explain to Massimina why they didn’t take the first of the frequent trains out to Civitavecchia and the boat. No, he had timed it perfectly. Their local from the Lido pulled in at a quarter to one, leaving them barely fifteen minutes to book tickets to Civitavecchia and check out the ferry times before the espresso would arrive from Milan. Then ten more minutes before their own train, Morris even felt an unexpected tinge of gratitude towards the Italian railway system which as yet showed no sign of letting him down. In her excitement at the prospect of a long boat trip Massimina had now forgotten all ideas of going home, and, ordering their tickets in the great throbbing entrance hall of the station, they felt quite like a regular holiday couple, her with her straw hat on and him with a bit more colour to his cheeks after yesterday.

  To waste a couple of minutes he took her to buy a pair of sunglasses. (Why on earth hadn’t he thought of that before?) His choice was the biggest and roundest and darkest pair there were and after something of a squabble over the price (she was right, it was absurdly high, but they were designer frames as the shop attendant patiently explained) the glasses were bought. Stepping out of the shop and back into the station, the p.a. announced the imminent arrival of the Milan-Palermo espresso on platform six. Right on the nail. Morris looked at his watch and told Massimina he just wanted to phone his friend in Sardinia to let him know when they were arriving more or less. In the meanwhile she should wait on platform fifteen where the train for Civitavecchia would leave.

  Sensing her eyes following him, he went towards the station S.I.P. as she would expect. And had a stroke of genius. He did have four or five minutes before the espresso actually pulled in. The idea was right. He slipped into a booth and phoned the Verona police directly. Inspector Marangoni was out for lunch, but his assistant Tolaini, was available.

  ‘No developments then?’ An apparently very discouraged Morris.

  ‘No, Signor Duckworth. Nothing significant.’

  ‘You didn’t find that man on the bus?’

  ‘Not a trace.’

  ‘But I don’t understand it. Surely if someone has kidnapped her they’d ask for a ransom or something, I mean …’

  ‘Well,’ the young detective was hesitant, but obviously happy to talk. He was there manning the phone through a lonely lunch break after all. ‘Obviously we’re expecting some kind of ransom demand any moment, but there’s been nothing so far. My own personal suspicion is that somebody may have managed to get in touch with the family behind our backs and be arranging a deal without telling us.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Is that normal?’

  ‘So far as any of these things are, yes. It’s a pretty desperate situation for the mother of course and the family of the victim have a natural tendency to think that the police aren’t really doing enough and don’t care and so on. From a psychological point of view it’s a fairly well documented phenomenon.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ Morris said. He was positively itching to get at that train now. They didn’t know a single damn thing. It would be rolling in any minute. Get on it and grab the cash. But he managed to go on talking to Tolaini with polite interest for a full two minutes more on his watch.

  Platform six was in total confusion. All the better. On one side, to the right, the espresso was still hissing and clanking the last few yards down die oil-stained rails, while to the left a rapido to Venice was expected in at any moment. Soldiers, backpackers, old women, plus all the usual anonymous crowd buzzed about, jockeying for position laughing and smoking, wishing they’d booked a seat no doubts or hoping they’d be able to find the one they had booked. (How many hours in the corridor to Naples? The loos would be filthy.) Children whined and scampered and there was a group of toddlers all waving balloons in the care of a single ancient nun. Morris suddenly felt perfectly calm. It was a piece of cake.

  The train was still. A slight final lurch and then every door was banging open and a great crowd of people tumbled out onto the platform into the equally eager crowd struggling to get in, each man and woman clutching his cumbersome bag and knocking it against the legs of all the others. Morris, without any baggage, pushed quickly through the mêlée glancing up at each compartment for the first-class stickers and found the first one in the third carriage. He walked on to the fourth carriage, waited his turn in the confusion, climbed up and pushed his way down the corridor back to his goal. As soon as he was in the third carriage and the first-class section, the crowd eased off, the compartments were half empty: there were just one or two people standing around in the corridor smoking quietly. Which meant less cover of course. But then Morris wasn’t expecting trouble.

  An older man was standing outside the first compartment in a light silver-grey suit with thinning hair slicked back, watching the crowd outside. Plain-clothes policeman? They’d been taking him for a ride perhaps. And of course if they did know everything then naturally they’d give him that shit on the phone (and he shouldn’t have posted the letter in Rome if he was going to collect here).

  Except they couldn’t know. They mustn’t.

  The compartment door was closed and all the blinds drawn. He couldn’t see in. A trap? Morri
s bit his lower lip and tensed his body ready to spring into action. But the muscles still felt terribly weak. He had lost weight through the illness. He wasn’t well. And then a scuffle was no good. If they knew about it, they’d be armed. If they knew about it, it was already too late.

  To open the compartment door he had to squeeze round the man in the suit. (A suit in this weather? He had to be fake.)

  ‘Permesso.' ‘Prego, prego.’ Holding his breathy expecting the handcuffs at any moment, feeling them already on his wrist, Morris slid back the door. The compartment was in deep shade with only a pencil of light coming through from under the lowered blinds and just one middle-aged lady sat silent in a corner., head thrown back and mouth disturbingly open, breathing deeply. The air was stale with sleep.

  His eyes went up to the luggage racks and two huge suitcases, hers and the man’s outside presumably, matching Moroccan leather with bright buckles. They must be man and wife. And then above the woman’s head a small brown holdall! Yes, as if he had dreamed it and there it was. As if he had willed it there.

  Morris looked over his shoulder. The man by the window hadn’t moved, appeared to be lighting a cigar. Morris took two steps to the far corner, lifted the holdall from the rack, stepped backwards careful not to brush the woman’s legs, and without waking her was already outside the compartment.

  ‘Permesso. ‘ He pulled the door to. The man in the grey suit glanced at him, curious, from over a cigar he was lighting.

  ‘My wife went and left her bag there back in Milan,’ Morris smiled a sweet smile with just a hint of ‘you-know-what-women-are-like’ about it. The man puffed, said nothing.

  Morris hurried back up the corridor in the direction he had come and under his breath found himself muttering, 'Thank you God, thank you, thank you,’ which was what he used to say after he read the exam results outside the headmaster’s door. He laughed. Oh he had done it this time! He had really done it. If the money was in there, that is. But it must be, it …