Painting Death

by Tim Parks

  ‘He was an excellent painter,’ Morris said severely.

  Mauro thought about it. ‘Not if all he did was copy.’

  The car fretted behind a garbage truck up the last slope to the village square. What was growing old for, Morris asked himself, if not to learn patience? In just a few moments he would be back where it had all happened. He knew this would give him a big shot of adrenalin.

  ‘It takes a special genius to copy,’ he told his son. ‘A determined suppression of your personality. But of course, only people with a bit of personality know how important it is to curtail it.’

  Obviously this was way over the boy’s head.

  ‘So why did he stop if he was so good?’

  ‘Good question. Very good indeed, why did Forbes stop?’

  So saying and smiling, Morris twisted the wheel sharply to the right and, with a little yelp of nice new tyres, braked hard into a parking place against the cemetery wall. The boy’s computer game shot off his lap and into the darkness beneath the dashboard.

  ‘Christ, Papà!’

  Morris wondered how this could be the same boy who laid in wait for well-armed policemen.

  The church of the Santi Apostoli del Soccorso stood among tall cypresses at the top of the hill with the cemetery to one side and the canonica to the other. The priest, it turned out, had changed since the days when Morris had come out here with Forbes to ask permission to set up an easel in the nave and copy the painting they were interested in. Why, he wondered, was the Curia moving its priests around so much? The sprightly young man who opened the door of the canonica was too pleased with himself by half and putting on airs beyond his age. But more and more this seemed to be the case with everyone under forty. Morris was damned if he would call him Padre.

  ‘How very strange,’ Don Gaetano said after hearing Morris’s request. ‘No one in the four years I’ve been here, and then all of a sudden two in as many days.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Two people in as many days to see Jezebel Defenestrated. I had no idea anyone rated the painting.’

  ‘Who?’ Morris demanded.

  The priest wanted them to come into the house now. Perhaps they would ‘break bread’ with him, he suggested. A door opening to the left of the living room emitted wisps of steam and there was the sound of someone knocking pots and pans together.

  ‘I’ve always thought it a rather strange painting myself,’ the gangly priest went on. ‘It has a sort of raw look for its age. Too aggressively restored, perhaps. I’m not an expert on these things.’

  ‘Who came to ask about it?’ Morris asked with brutal directness.

  ‘Maddalena,’ the young priest called, half enthusiastic, half apologetic ‘we have guests. Could you lay the table for three?’

  Another Maddalena. They were a race. And what a lonely bunch these priests must be, Morris thought, inviting every casual visitor to drink coffee and break biscuits together at the drop of a biretta.

  ‘We’ve probably just got time for a quick viewing before the food is on the table.’

  Don Gaetano took a black overcoat from a hook and ushered them out of the door, lowering his voice to say, ‘The poor dear gets upset if we don’t eat our minestra piping hot.’

  Who was we, Morris wondered?

  They walked round the side of the house to the priest’s private entrance at the back of the church and Morris repeated his question, ‘But do tell me who else has been here to see the painting.’

  ‘An elderly American.’

  Morris relaxed. Surely Stan Albertini could hardly be described as elderly.

  ‘It was a curious story,’ Don Gaetano went on; he held the door to let them in, then headed for the light switch. ‘Apparently he had a friend who had been making a copy of the painting some time ago, they had been corresponding about it, some technical detail or other, then they lost touch. He hoped maybe I knew the man.’

  Suddenly it wasn’t exciting being here at all. As if exposed to a blast of intense heat, Morris felt the same acute anxiety that had always beset him when he feared Mother would catch him stealing cash from her purse or, worse still, penis in hand on the brink of orgasm. Chest tight, it seemed he must faint. He had to put a hand on a stone pillar. Life was so unfair. He had no desire now to see Jezebel Defenestrated, no desire at all to stand a few feet beneath Forbes’s remains. The ceiling would surely crumble, he thought, and the rotten old corpse come tumbling down to point a skeletal finger.

  Mauro joined them this time. Had he seen his father’s reaction to the priest’s tale? Wouldn’t he be surprised that his father hadn’t acknowledged that he too knew the man who had come here to copy a painting? Morris felt he was inside a house of cards at exactly the moment someone removes the central support.

  ‘I insist on having genuine candles,’ Don Gaetano was confiding as they walked into a cold airy nave. ‘The truth is that for many people prayer does require a certain aura, don’t you think, the same way a book needs a good cover, one might say.’

  What on earth was he on about?

  They reached the small side chapel toward the back on the right and there was Jezebel Defenestrated exactly where Morris had rehung her before leaving the church that winter morning five, or was it six years ago: a woman in a bright blue dress plunging headfirst from an upper floor into a group of armed horsemen on the street.

  ‘An unusual subject for a small church like ours,’ Don Gaetano observed. ‘You see what I mean about the aggressive restoration work? Bits of it look like it was painted yesterday.’

  ‘I’ll need to be paid a lot more, old chap,’ Forbes had observed, ‘if you’re going to swap the canvases. Satis superque, if you know what I mean.’

  Morris didn’t.

  ‘Enough,’ the Eton man grinned crookedly, ‘and more than enough. Superque! Lovely word.’

  He stood there paintbrush in hand and artist’s beret on his head, far far far too pleased with himself.

  Morris had offered double. Forbes still wasn’t satisfied.

  ‘But you don’t need all that money,’ Morris had insisted. ‘I’ve given you a house. I’ve guaranteed you an income. Haven’t I?’

  ‘Decet verecundum esse adolescentem.’

  It was infuriating, but also rather wonderful how effortlessly Forbes trotted out these tags. Morris had waited.

  ‘It befits a young man to be modest.’

  ‘Michael,’ Morris did his best to show the old pervert some respect, ‘I simply meant that I’d relieved you of all practical worries. How can you need so much money?’

  Forbes had answered slowly, as though to someone who was having rather too much trouble seeing the obvious: ‘Morris, at my age it isn’t, er, quite so easy as it used to be to get what one, er, wants. But I assure you that I still do want it. Such is life.’

  The pig.

  Then Forbes had said casually: ‘I know quite a lot about you, old chap, actually. And I think you know I know. Don’t you? What really happened to young Posenato, for example.’

  That was when the candlestick jumped into his hand. What else could one do? Accept a lifetime’s blackmail from a self-confessed insatiable pederast? And now here it was again, eighteen inches of lumpen brass, standing exactly where Morris had left it on the white altar cloth in this quiet side chapel. He had washed it, of course. He had washed and wiped its polished curves with immense care. He had washed and wiped everything. The floor in particular. There was a big sink in the bathroom beyond the vestry. He had filled tin buckets. But doubtless with the tools they had today some minuscule particle of DNA could easily be found, if ever anyone started to look.

  The priest was telling Mauro the story of Queen Jezebel. She had allowed the people of Israel to worship foreign gods, notably Baal.

  ‘And as a result she got the push?’ Mauro grinned.

  ‘That’s right. It seems she knew it was going to happen and made sure she was well dressed for the occasion. Hence the fancy dress in the pictur
e.’

  Morris was fighting to stay compos mentis. There were times when reality fizzed with such chemical intensity that the only real choice seemed to be between lying down under the already hissing blade of the guillotine or grabbing a Kalashnikov and slaughtering every last soul in sight. For a moment he thought he heard the noise of bony fingers and toes scraping their way out from under a pile of builder’s rubble above his head.

  ‘Guy fell from the upper ring of the terraces last year,’ Mauro observed. ‘Neapolitan. They reckon he was pushed. Seems he’d brought some Napoli fans right into the Hellas curva. Crazy.’

  How, oh how to organise the same fate for Stan Albertini!

  ‘You see what I mean, about the brushwork seeming too fresh for something from the seventeenth century?’ Don Gaetano was bending forward across the top of the altar to look carefully at the work. ‘Your American friend thought the same.’

  Friend? How could these idiots not put two and two together? Surely Stan would remember the rather duller and dustier Jezebel he had seen in Morris’s Art Room.

  Morris went to stand beside the young priest, his body pulsing with a dangerous heat. ‘Typical, I’m afraid,’ he said. He made a massive effort to stay calm, or at least give the impression that his anger was to do with the supposedly poor condition of the painting. ‘Just the sort of invasive restoration job that was in vogue back in the nineties.’

  However, looking at the canvas across the marble top of the altar, his cheek almost touching the candlestick, Morris couldn’t help feeling that Forbes had indeed improved on the original, sharpening up its Vaselined baroque into something more urgent and almost hyper-real. You felt you could hear the doomed queen’s cry. No, the better of the two paintings was definitely the one here in the church of Santi Apostoli del Soccorso, not in The Art Room in Via Oberdan. How ironic!

  ‘Heavens, we’d better hurry back,’ Don Gaetano exclaimed with a sudden violent rustling of his cassock. ‘Or Maddalena will make mincemeat of us all.’ He laughed out loud as if this were an excellent joke.

  Morris lingered a moment in the porch to text Samira. ‘Phone me in ten minutes. Please!’ He set the ringtone on loud and hurried after the others.

  The call came just as Don Gaetano was winding up his Latin grace with Morris tucking a fiercely starched napkin under his chin. Sammy knew the routine by now and put down as soon as Morris picked up.

  ‘Pronto?’ Morris frowned. ‘O santo cielo!’ He stood abruptly and walked into the porch to talk in low and urgent tones, then returned and announced that there was a crisis at the bottling factory, a man had been seriously injured, they would have to leave at once.

  The old perpetua was livid.

  Chapter Nine

  MORE THAN ONCE, DURING the most intense periods of his life, it had occurred to Morris to think of himself as a juggler. Now, crossing Piazza Bra at carnival time, a bright cold morning in February, his attention was caught by a street artist juggling. Dressed as a convict, standing in the midst of a field of cobbles, Roman ruins before him and Austrian pomp behind, the man began with large rubber balls, including, with regular jerks of his knee, the larger ball, evidently hollow, attached to his foot by a long red plastic chain. It was amusing enough, but nothing special, until his sidekick, who had thus far pretended to be one of the gathering spectators, began to pull all kinds of odd objects from a large rucksack and lob them at the juggler: first a knife, then a gun, now a chisel, now a torch which he first set aflame, and finally, miracle of awful miracles, a small electric chainsaw that the man actually turned on before tossing it, to a sigh of general amazement, at his friend.

  Morris was riveted. His apprehension of imminent catastrophe was so powerful he had to look away. It seemed extraordinary that the crowd, many of them masked as sheiks, popes and leering Berlusconis, could enjoy the sight of a man taking such frightening risks to earn a few coppers. How callous! At any moment blood would spurt, clothes would catch fire and the air would be full of grief and pain. Yet, when he found the courage to look again, the juggler was laughing, exhilarated, the centre of rapt attention and loving every moment of it. Each time something new was thrown at him he let one of the rubber balls drop into a capacious bag between his feet until, at the end, there were only these frightening objects plus the larger ball at the end of its chain, circulating around his steady hands and rhythmically jerking foot, while his eyes lifted in a smile of faint amusement to watch the missiles arching over his head.

  How long could it go on? Morris found himself sweating. And how could the man ever free himself from the slavery of keeping so many threats in the air? Most of all that whining chainsaw. The crowd had begun to clap. Little children, dressed as penguins and fairies, were getting dangerously close. It was surprising that the local authorities would allow such perilous performances in an open public space. At last the sidekick, himself masked as a policeman, took a hand grenade from his bag, pulled the pin with his teeth and lobbed the grenade into the air. Up it flew. It looked terribly real. The juggler caught it, apparently without looking, spared it only a passing glance as it circulated a second time, seemed merely, momentarily intrigued, until, suddenly understanding, his eyes and mouth opened wide in theatrical alarm. The grenade was smoking! In two seconds of frantic dexterity, he caught the knife between his teeth, contrived to have the whirring saw intersect the plastic chain that held his convict’s ball, slicing it in two, and, suddenly free, torch in one hand, gun in the other, was firing blanks into the crowd as he stepped back from the grenade which fell, neatly, into his performer’s bag, whence, with a loud bang, it sent a shower of confetti into the air together with a plume of orange smoke.

  Enormously relieved by this innocent conclusion, Morris pushed brusquely through a cheering group of dwarves, Snow Whites and cackling harlequins to place a hundred-euro note in the policeman’s upturned cap. At his friend’s side, the juggler looked at the contribution in amazement. Their eyes met: escape artist and multiple murderer. That man is me, Morris thought. I wish I had his panache. I wish I could make such good use of every weapon they throw at me.

  The truth was there was rather too much going on in Morris’s life now: to the point that his normally frantic job of running a major business seemed a mere rubber-ball routine compared to the new and urgent claims on his attention. The formal charge at his son’s first appearance in court had alarmed him; they wanted to send Mauro down to some juvenile institution for five years and more. It would be a serious stain on the family’s reputation. It would compromise Morris’s influence in the town. Meantime, Tonbridge School insisted that the Duckworths pay the year’s fees, despite withdrawing the boy. Morris refused. They could take whatever legal action they liked, but he was damned if he was going to pay to support a privileged class that had always excluded him.

  In Sant’Anna, Zuccato’s third-rate, drunken Moldavian subcontractor had backed his bulldozer into a war memorial for which the local council was seeking damages, from Morris. Nor had there been a word of gratitude from Cardinal Rusconi, which was all justification enough, Morris decided, if any was required, for recovering the Martyrdom of San Bartolomeo scorticato from San Briccio free of charge. All he had to do was to find the time and the right accomplice. Samira perhaps? Week by week the girl was becoming more affectionate but also more demanding. She wanted him to accompany her openly to the theatre, to concerts, to restaurants, to cinemas. In Verona that was tricky. Morris drove her to Milan and Bologna. It was time-consuming. Her brother too had grown more deferential, apparently accepting Morris as a fixture in their Libyan lives, inviting him to holiday in Tripoli. ‘Perhaps one day you will convert to Islam,’ he had said rather disquietingly. ‘I think it would be a better religion for you.’

  Massimina (Morris’s daughter) was increasingly locked into some interminable exchange of text messages which had begun to make Morris worry for her studies and sanity, while Massimina (the murderer’s guardian angel) complained constantly that The Art Ro
om was too cold for her poor baby and that Morris was making a terrible mistake with this proposed exhibition at Castelvecchio. ‘It’s the beginning of the end,’ she kept repeating, ‘the end of our life together, Mo.’

  On Antonella’s warm invitation, Stan Albertini had come to dinner three times in as many weeks and spoken anxiously of his old friend Mike and the man’s mysterious disappearance, asking Morris to show him the paintings Forbes had copied, as if these might hold precious clues. Did they? Could they? Had Forbes perhaps written what he knew about Morris on the back of a canvas? Or between canvas and frame? On one occasion Mauro had been at the dinner table with them, and Morris had been concerned that the boy might mention their visit to Jezebel Defenestrated. Meantime, he had removed the painting from The Art Room and filled the empty space with a decidedly below-par Tarquinio and Lucrezia. Sooner or later these worries would make him ill. To cap it all Don Lorenzo had remarked between mouthfuls of roast that Forbes had come to confess himself—and it had been the first time in a decade—shortly before his abrupt departure, but of course he, Don Lorenzo, would never abuse the secret of the confessional by revealing what had been said on that occasion. Morris made a mental note that he must find out who had been in the coffin that had destroyed the priest’s foot.

  Above all there was Volpi. On return from Christmas in Naples the museum director must have realised, Morris supposed, that the Arena had not published a correction to his interview about the forthcoming show. In the town’s cultural circles people were talking about nothing else. It was getting harder and harder for the museum to back out of the project. So how would King Eglon react? It had surprised Morris when the man did nothing. What he had expected was some heated but inconsequential argument that would have got the issue out of the way and cleared the air. It wasn’t forthcoming. Instead, Volpi made himself scarce, leaving a secretary to put Morris in touch with Professor Zolla, the resident art historian who was sending out the loan requests and would eventually co-curate the show, assuming it came off. This should have been promising, but Morris couldn’t believe the director wouldn’t strike back, and the longer he waited to do so, the more Morris feared that the strike would be decisive.