Painting Death

by Tim Parks

  ‘But surely she understands that my confession was strategic!’ Morris protested. ‘Hasn’t Carla told her?’

  ‘Carla who?’

  Mauro had found a coffee pot and was making an espresso. When he opened a cupboard Morris saw it was stocked with the bare essentials. Rice. Pasta. Salt.

  ‘The lawyer. Carla Cogni. They must have been in touch.’

  ‘Mamma has her own lawyer. I don’t think she’s interested in your defence.’

  ‘But just because I confessed ? Surely she realises that that was the only way I could get out of gaol a while and find who the real murderer was! The actual killing couldn’t possibly have happened the way I confessed to it. Give me your phone and I can sort this out in a second.’

  Mauro stood with his back to the cooker. Morris was struck by a new gravitas in the boy’s posture.

  ‘It’s not about your confession,’ he said quietly. ‘She decided weeks ago.’

  Morris sat heavily on a chair that creaked. The place was sweltering. For some reason his mind went back to his first meeting with the Trevisan family all those years ago, when Massimina had taken him home and he had massaged the truth about himself, his career, oh just a smidgen, to gain the hypercritical Mamma’s acceptance. She had checked up on his story at once and forbidden him to see his beloved any more. That was where it had all begun, all his woes, with their ungenerous, unwarranted suspicions. If they had afforded him even a grain of credit, even a husk, nothing need ever have happened. And now the wife whom he thought he had convinced, the woman he believed was his faithful partner, was betraying him in the same way; she was pulling the plug on Morris Duckworth, ignoring all the work he had done to turn a plonky wine business into a major construction company, declaring all their years together null and void. Cutting my head off as surely as Judith decapitated Holofernes, Morris thought. Was this what those terrible dreams had been about?

  Mauro watched his unhappy father.

  ‘Apparently Don Lorenzo said something to her.’

  ‘Don Lorenzo?’ Morris jumped to his feet. ‘Let’s go and talk in a café. I can’t sit in here. I’m suffocating. It was cooler in prison.’

  Mauro didn’t move. ‘You’re under house arrest, Papà. You can’t go out.’

  Morris had forgotten. The arrangement was a half-hour’s fresh air mid-morning and another towards evening. At any other time the police could come to check whether the accused was present. If he broke the rules, they would send him back to his cell.

  Mauro poured the coffee. Morris was struck by the poor quality of the espresso cups. If this place had been furnished specifically for him, the intention was hardly to keep him in the manner to which he was accustomed.

  ‘I imagined Don Lorenzo would have passed to a better world,’ he said.

  ‘He’s dead, yes, if that’s what you mean. But before he died he said some stuff in his coma.’

  ‘People don’t speak in coma,’ Morris objected. ‘Or it wouldn’t be a coma, would it?’

  Mauro raised a wry eyebrow. ‘You’re so weird, Dad,’ he said. ‘It’s like you never focus on the thing that matters.’

  Hearing this, Morris was acutely aware that three months in gaol had left him out of training for the abrasive back-and-forth of domestic conversation.

  ‘Whatever state he was in,’ Mauro continued, ‘Don Lorenzo said things that upset Mamma so much she decided to go to the Sacra Rota.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘She wouldn’t tell me. Said no son should ever hear such things about a father.’

  ‘Let me call her,’ Morris said. ‘Have you brought me my phone?’

  Mauro frowned. ‘Papà, you’re not supposed to communicate with the outside world. You’re under house arrest.’

  As in the whole silly saga of the boy’s trial for assault, Morris was struck by his son’s literalism when it came to rules. The police knew perfectly well that they couldn’t stop a man in his own home from using a mobile and writing a few emails. Probably the whole purpose of house arrests was to monitor the accused’s calls so they could get some more evidence.

  ‘At least I should know what it is I’m supposed to have done wrong.’

  Mauro drained his coffee and looked at his watch.

  ‘You wanted to know about Massimina.’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’ But as he acquiesced Morris was wondering how many blows a man could take without going mad. There was a speech along those lines in Lear. Another father who had lost a daughter and been betrayed by everyone.

  ‘I did as you asked in your letter,’ Mauro said. He was standing at the window now, his back turned towards his father. ‘I went to see Zolla. And for a couple of weeks I paid someone to follow your Arab friends.’

  ‘No friends of mine,’ Morris said quickly. ‘Just tell me. Is Mimi OK?’

  ‘Well, we had a postcard from her. Her writing, signed by her. About ten days ago.

  ‘Thank God. What did it say?’

  Mauro turned round and shook his head. ‘Sto bene.’

  ‘That’s all? She just tells us she’s well and that’s it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Could be worse,’ Morris observed. ‘Where was it sent from? What was the picture?’

  Mauro hesitated. ‘San Diego,’ he said.

  After his son had gone, Morris stood at the window for hours. He was in a daze. It was so strange to have even this restricted freedom. On the other hand if he wanted to eat, he would have to prepare his food himself, something he hadn’t done for literally decades. Not that he felt hungry. He felt numb. When the police car pulled up across the road behind the removals van, he imagined it had come to keep watch on him, then had to smile when the two men started flagging down illegal turners. Unless they were there for him and this traffic duty was a cover, or something they did for amusement while really keeping watch on the front of the apartment block. Killing the proverbial two birds. With the state of police finances, it would be an excellent idea to hand out a few fines while actually involved in surveillance.

  His flat was part of a large block. He was on the first floor, over the entrance, but there were five floors above and a row of windows both to left and right. It was a Chinese wall of humdrum social endeavour, without grace, without distinction, the kind of place his father should have lived in, not Morris. Now the police had stopped a top-of-the-range BMW and a uniformed man climbed out and remonstrated, gesturing to the back of the sleek black vehicle. Morris didn’t understand. A policeman bent to peer inside, then, suddenly respectful, almost bowing, backed off. The car looked vaguely familiar. No! As it roared away Morris caught a glimpse of scarlet on the back seat. Vatican plates. He shook his head. What a country! When an old Cinquecento with a Hellas pennant on the roof now made the same illegal turn, the two policemen were ferocious. They got the young man to put his arms and forehead on the roof of the car. They frisked him. They crouched down to check the tyres. One of them got inside and began emptying the glove compartment. Morris would have liked to phone his son to give him this confirmation of his views on police prejudices, but he didn’t have a phone, or a computer for that matter. There was nothing for him to do but look out of the window and reflect how strange it was that Cardinal Rusconi should be turning into Via Quattro Stagioni.

  And how bizarre too that Massimina had run off with Stan Albertini. Could that really be true? In which case who was the Gio who had sent the miss-you message on her phone? Mauro had explained that Stan hadn’t returned to the States for almost a month after Morris’s arrest. On the contrary, he had been constantly round the house in Via Oberdan. So what had Massimina been doing in the meantime? Getting a passport and visa? Where had she been staying? In Stan’s hotel? What was the age difference between them? Thirty-five years? It was outrageous! I really should have killed him, Morris thought. I should have done it. And yet if there was one thing that made him happy from time to time it was that he hadn’t killed Stan. Why, he had no idea. Perhaps secretly he act
ually liked Stan, or felt some kind of deep connection with him. In any event, a Stan wrapped around his daughter’s long legs on some Pacific surfing beach was not a Stan who would be standing up in court remembering moments in Roma Termini twenty and more years before. The day Morris picked up the ransom for Mimi.

  The news Mauro had brought his father about Samira and Tarik was also puzzling. The girl continued to work at the Cultural Heritage office. She must have got her contract extended. But the boy rarely left the apartment they shared. When he did so, it was to be driven off in a black SUV with Arab plates that invariably headed for the autostrada at Verona Sud and sped off west. It seemed the boy returned in the early hours, always driven by the same portly Arab, in his fifties.

  ‘You know there’s been stuff in the paper about some arms-for-oil deal with the new Libyan government.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Apparently one condition is that they allow Moslems to open more mosques here.’

  Morris frowned. ‘So?’

  Mauro had shrugged. ‘I suppose I just started noticing the word Libyan. The Church has been complaining. And the Northern League. They’re furious.’

  ‘Oh for heaven’s sake!’ Morris interrupted. ‘What about Zolla?’

  Mauro shook his head. ‘Talk about creeps!’ He had gone to the man’s office in Castelvecchio. ‘Is it a poker he has up his backside?’ Zolla had said he couldn’t understand why anyone would come to talk to him about the matter. ‘And if you’re thinking he might have killed the guy,’ Mauro added, ‘I doubt he would have had the guts.’

  ‘Whereas I would?’ Morris said drily.

  ‘More than him, for sure.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

  ‘Take it any way you like.’

  For a moment father and son had looked at each other very frankly.

  ‘You think I did it,’ Morris said.

  Mauro sighed and frowned together. ‘Honestly, Papà, I don’t know what to think.’ He hesitated. ‘People say so many things about you.’

  ‘You believe them?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter whether I believe them or not, does it? Let me go now, I’ve got appointments.’ The boy smiled at his father. ‘A last check-up with the dentist in fact. I’ve finally had my teeth fixed.’

  * * *

  At five, Morris set out to the shops. It was still hard to believe how completely he had been abandoned. Mauro had left him a debit card and some change and that was that. He walked in the warm evening down a drab street: miserable seventies apartment blocks, dusty asphalt, untidy balconies, stout women with too many bags, pensioners wobbling on ancient bicycles. Who am I without my fine house, he wondered, without my wife, without The Art Room?

  ‘Mimi,’ he enquired out loud. There was a flaking Madonna beside a grey gate. But he already knew she wouldn’t reply. It was as if Morris had abruptly been kicked out of his own life, his own self-narrative. All the dead had left him. The police weren’t even bothering to keep him in a cell any more. He was a complete nobody.

  In the supermarket he found he had no idea what to buy. A pasta sauce. There had been some penne in the cupboard. A bottle of wine. Suddenly, he found himself gazing at the familiar Trevisan label. Classico Superiore. No. He would boycott the brand. He chose an expensive Piedmontese Grignolino. Mauro hadn’t told him what account the debit card drew on, only the pin. Were they legally in their rights to chuck him out of the house and the company he had built up? Morris had the strange feeling that if he just walked away along the street, away from this meaningless suburb, away from Verona and his Italian past, no one would stop him. If he just marched northwards and over the Alps he could perhaps put these thirty years of madness, his adult Italian life, behind him. He would wake in a bed in East Croydon and find it had all been a bad dream and he was still in time to get the 8.12 to Victoria and put in an ordinary day at the Milk Marketing Board.

  Aimlessly, Morris filled his trolley. At the till the girl asked if he had a loyalty card.

  ‘Loyalty?’ Morris repeated.

  ‘Have you need the bag?’ the girl asked, apparently in English.

  ‘Sì, grazie,’ Morris told her.

  * * *

  Back in the flat he was too tired to cook. He missed the guards, the prison routine. For a moment he thought he might draw, but couldn’t find pencil or paper. Why wasn’t there a television at least? A radio? He sat at the table, nonplussed. The idea that he might, on his own, find out who had committed a crime that had occurred two months before now seemed ridiculous. Added to which he might well become the first detective to find out he had committed the crime himself. But if there was nothing he could do now, why had he confessed? To what end? This is really happening, he kept telling himself. He was tempted to go out again and visit someone, Samira perhaps, just to see if they really would arrest him on the way and take him back to gaol.

  Having put on a pot of pasta, he forgot about it and stared out of the window. Forty minutes later it was gunge. He threw it away. The room was unbearably hot. Eventually, he discovered a magic marker in a kitchen drawer. Sitting on the bed he began to draw on the white wall. The flat had been recently whitewashed. Without thinking, he drew a large throne and a fat man slumped across it. That cameo ended my life, Morris thought. Then it occurred to him: if Don Lorenzo hadn’t read out the famous passage from Judges that evening—the Eglon and Ehud story—would the murder have taken place weeks later in the way it did? Although he felt sure he hadn’t done it, nevertheless Morris couldn’t help but feel there must be a connection. As if he had done it, but in a dream. Speaking of which, what awful truths, or perhaps fictions, had Don Lorenzo muttered in his dying sleep to Antonella? Idly, Morris sketched in lines for the murdered king’s four or five bellies, then a black gash for a wound. Magic marker poised, he tried to imagine the scene around the victim at the moment of the crime. Had there been other people in the room? ‘I went to the museum just before it closed on Saturday,’ he had told Grimaldi. ‘I was hoping to identify one or two artefacts to take away for my own collection. In particular, a knife. Volpi surprised me. Why he was there I have no idea.’ Morris had chased the fat man back into the throne room and stabbed him. Then removed his clothes and surrounded him with fetishist items to make it look like some ritual or other.

  ‘How did you get the body on the chair?’ Grimaldi had asked. ‘Eh?’

  ‘With great difficulty,’ Morris replied.

  ‘Why did you dispose of the clothes?’

  ‘Instinct.’

  ‘And where?’

  ‘In the river.’

  ‘Why did you return the following morning?’

  ‘The recovery of San Bartolomeo was already scheduled. I deliberately got rid of the Arabs because I wanted to go up to the offices and look through Volpi’s computer. Unfortunately I didn’t realise I’d stepped in the blood.’

  What a stupid story! Yet Morris started to think he might somehow have been there when it happened. He even had moments, inklings, when he felt he was beginning to remember. A knife, the movement of the hand. It was strange.

  Staring at his drawing on the wall above the bed, he wondered again who were the other people in the scene. It was like trying to imagine a whole painting from a fragment. Remember the way the throne was turned when you found it, he told himself. Remember the position of the mats and cushions in the photos you took. Draw, Morris suddenly told himself. Just draw, damn it! Trust to inspiration, to the artist in you. At random he traced a vertical line, and at once it was a back, a man’s rigid back. Kneeling. It was Zolla! There were his knees, his bare feet. The meeting was organised to punish Zolla! Yes. To scourge him. The thought came to Morris’s mind. Am I a psychic? Even without my ungrateful dead? He definitely saw Zolla. Very quickly he sketched him in, supplicant at Volpi’s feet. There was something round his neck. What? A sort of halter? Morris drew it. Attached where, to what? The ceiling? Some iron ring set in the wall? No. To Volpi’s hand! Like Pozzo
and Lucky in Godot. The gross fat man and the elegant forty-year-old. The Dominant and the Submissive. They had been playing a game and something had gone wrong. Perhaps because of the third person in Volpi’s office that day, the one who laughed. I knew that laugh, Morris thought. He shook his head, drew one line, then another. There was definitely some force guiding his hand, he thought, in the darkness behind closed eyes. He put in four, five confident lines. A squiggle here, a squiggle there. He stopped, eyes still closed. When I open them I’ll know who the murderer is. I’ll have drawn the murderer! He felt convinced. He was definitely psychic. He prayed, briefly. When he opened his eyes the wall was a complete pig’s ear. Morris went back to the sitting room/kitchen, opened the Grignolino and drained two glasses in quick succession.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘DOTTOR DUCKWORTH. DOTTOR DUCKWORTH.’

  Morris knew he must be dreaming. He was alone in the apartment. He was in bed. The door was locked.

  ‘Dottor Duckworth!’

  It was a low urgent voice. Morris felt a hand plucking at his pyjama sleeve. Were they going to cut off his head again?

  ‘Wake up! Per favore.’

  ‘I am awake.’

  That was a funny thing to say when you knew you were dreaming.

  ‘It’s Mariella.’ The name was whispered.

  Morris whispered back, ‘Ah. Is that so?’

  ‘From Castelvecchio.’

  ‘I know, Mariella with the magnificent breasts.’

  Perhaps it was going to be an erotic dream.

  ‘Dottor Duckworth, per l’amore di Dio, wake up!’

  Responding to a brusque tug on his sleeve, Morris sat up abruptly and clashed heads in the dark with the figure leaning over him.

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Shhhh, Dottor Duckworth, the place is bugged.’

  ‘Mariella!’

  The woman was there in the flesh. All of it.

  ‘I have a key. Follow me. Don’t put the light on. Don’t worry about clothes. Just follow.

  He was being liberated, Morris thought. Fantastic. But why?