by Tim Parks
How could one not be impressed! How could the tears not flow, particularly for a man like Morris, who had lived through these experiences? As you entered the exhibition, emerging from a little passageway of modern screens offering far too much by the way of introductory text—acknowledgements, curator, sponsors, themes, technicalities—the great painting was suddenly there, not hanging on the wall to one side, but right in your face, almost too close, mounted on its own stand, a visual blow to match the blow Cain struck. Morris was delighted. If he wept, it was as much for joy as horror, gratitude as repentance. They had even kept his caption, word for perfect word. This was too good to be true. Except of course that it was attributed to Tim Parkes. This is my destiny, Morris muttered. A talented also-ran. But the game wasn’t quite over yet.
How had Zolla arranged the other exhibits? Had crude chronology carried the day? All alone in the museum, Morris left Titian and headed into the first room: here to the left three more Cain and Abels hung on a black background while to the right three David and Goliaths stood out against a creamy white. KILLINGS ABHORRED BY GOD, read a banner over the black, KILLINGS APPROVED BY GOD, ran another crowning the white.
Not bad, Morris thought, not bad at all! He appreciated this polarity. Even his own poor murders, he reflected, could easily be divided into the abhorrent and the admirable. To kill the pure young Massimina had been utterly unforgiveable; but when it came to extinguishing Forbes, he had been as much an instrument of God’s wrath as the young David with his sling.
And the murder he was supposed to carry out today?
Today Morris did not even know whom he would be killing, nor in what cause.
Mariella had woken him at five. Morris had his smartest black suit and Tonbridge School tie laid out ready on the sofa. Somehow it seemed appropriate to dress exactly as he had for the ceremony that had conferred upon him his honorary citizenship.
Together they went down the stairs to the underground garage. Morris covered himself with a blanket on the back seat of Mariella’s Punto until they were beyond the CCTV camera that watched the entrance to the block.
‘Seems crazy going to work this early,’ she remarked when he threw off the blanket and sat up. The streets were empty and the traffic lights flashing yellow. The dawn had barely greyed the sky, but Morris was wide awake. It was to be the defining day of his life, what was left of it.
‘You weren’t there the night it all happened,’ he remarked, offhand.
‘Women are hardly invited,’ Mariella observed.
Morris faked a yawn. ‘As Zolla’s secretary, though, you would have been involved in the arrangements, I suppose.’
‘Actually, no.’ A wry expression curled her lips. Eventually she said: ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to get coffee at the machine at the office, Dottor Duckworth. It wouldn’t do for you to be seen in a café.’
‘In any event, I just wondered if you had seen the video.’
She hesitated. ‘You mean, what Professor Zolla filmed on his mobile?’
Morris waited. What else could he have meant?
‘Yes I have.’
‘And what, pray, was your impression?’
Mariella hesitated. ‘Mostly boring. I mean the whole initiation process.’ She laughed. ‘You’ll think me naive, Dottor Duckworth, or perhaps presumptuous, but I’ve always felt that these solemn male associations are rather childish. The silly symbols, the nudity. I’m amazed they take themselves seriously.’
Extraordinary, Morris thought, how you asked people for facts and they were immediately eager to establish some sort of moral and intellectual superiority.
‘You looked like a fish out of water, to be honest.’ She half laughed.
‘Really?’
‘I mean, it was obvious they’d pulled you in at the last minute. You just look bemused, dazed even.’
‘And why do you think they did that?’
Mariella frowned. ‘Surely you know that better than I ever could.’
‘I’m just eager to hear what you thought.’
‘Well, I know one of the director’s Arab contacts felt you might help with building a mosque for them. Apparently they have some property up on the Torricelli.’
Above the prospected tunnel, Morris thought.
‘Then I had the impression Don Lorenzo wanted you and Volpi to be reconciled. What a lovely old man he was. Actually, I half wondered whether it wasn’t your wife who had told him to arrange that, since of course she has a lot of contacts with the confraternity members.’
‘That’s true,’ Morris acknowledged.
Mariella hesitated. ‘But I also think the director was punishing Professor Zolla in some way. Giving you prominence.’
‘Ah.’
Morris felt as if an icy clump of ignorance was slowly thawing. But too slowly.
‘One thing I would love to know,’ he hazarded, ‘is what actually happened that morning when I found Zolla in a heap on the floor of Volpi’s office.’
A deep sigh lifted the lady’s blouse.
‘Dottor Duckworth, wouldn’t it be wiser of you to concentrate on your task today? If all goes well, in forty-eight hours you’ll be a free man.’
‘Far from concentrating, I need a little distraction. Why don’t you tell me? What can it possibly matter?’
Unexpectedly, she started to speak: ‘Dottor Duckworth, over the last few years, our museum director had become, well, embarrassing. I’m sure you’d understood that. Paolo, Cardinal Rusconi, had gone to talk to him. During their meeting, Angelo let something slip about certain interests of theirs, I believe in the Middle East. It was the breaking point for Paolo. Volpi was furious, called Zolla an imbecile, said he should never have raised him from the gutter.’
This was a completely different version from the one Morris had heard from Cardinal Rusconi.
‘So it wasn’t to do with their fighting over the same younger man?’
Mariella actually laughed. ‘I wouldn’t know anything about that.’
Morris didn’t believe a word of it.
‘And the murder?’ He reckoned he had five minutes to get something definite out of her.
The Punto was stuck behind an empty bus.
‘It all happened so quickly. Then of course Professor Zolla dropped his phone, so there’s only the audio at the actual moment.’
‘Screaming?’
‘Exactly. More Angelo than the director. He had one of his fits of hysterics. You could hear the others clearing out.’
‘You didn’t actually see the knife go in?’
‘Thank heavens, no.’
‘Or my fainting?’
‘No. Did you?’
‘I think I did, yes.’
After a moment, Morris asked, ‘And did you feel I was in any way . . . justified?’
‘How so?’
‘I mean, with Volpi provoking me and so on.’
Mariella glanced in the rear-view mirror and their eyes met.
‘I’m sorry, but I couldn’t see how you were provoked at all. One moment you were kneeling in front of him—it’s such a stupid ceremony—the next you pulled the knife from nowhere. Then the picture went.’
Morris’s mouth had gone dry. As she described it, he saw it all, but without remembering.
‘So why do you think I did it?’
Mariella hesitated. ‘You really want my opinion?’
‘I do, yes.’
She breathed deeply. ‘Because you’re mad, Dottor Duckworth.’
The woman drew the car to a halt. They were still about a hundred metres before the museum. ‘There are no TV cameras here,’ she explained. ‘Don’t walk to the main entrance. Go through the park where they’re doing building work on the Arch. There is a gap in the fence that will bring you to the service doors. The code on the touch pad is 83381. 83381. You have the instructions for deactivating the alarm?’
‘Yes.’
The woman smiled. ‘Enjoy the show, Dottor Duckworth. I know it means a lot to you.�
�
So it did, so it did. Though Caravaggio’s David, Morris reflected now, was definitely gay, or at least an object of homosexual desire; that bare shoulder and the pretty nipple of his adolescent torso, the way the decapitating sword was held so that its tip seemed to disappear into the boy’s own suggestively swelling crotch. Parkes had missed a chance here, Morris felt, to talk about the scandalous homoeroticism in so much Renaissance art. Not to mention the linkage of all that eroticism with moments of violence and killing. Donatello’s David was another; the younger sexier person always seemed to be in complacent possession of an old and grizzled head.
For a few moments, enjoying the wonderful painting and the extraordinary privilege of being here alone, Morris tried to make some sense of homosexuality and its constant closeness to art and religion. He could not. He remembered Tarik that evening in San Zeno. Why had it been so exciting, even revelatory? And how could the boy pass straight from that extraordinary intimacy to Zolla and Volpi and no doubt a host of other filthy, insignificant men who just gave him cash? Was that what had inspired his fury against the fat man? Three nights ago Morris had finally contacted his daughter on a mobile phone in San Diego.
‘Papà. Che bello! ’
She had seemed genuinely enthusiastic, as if wondering why it had taken her father so long to be in touch. He asked if she was well. As if by prior agreement, no mention was made of his arrest.
‘Sorry if I sounded a bit odd when you called that night,’ he said.
‘No, you were sweet!’ she protested. ‘I was expecting you’d be grumpy, waking you up as well to give you difficult news like that. But I thought it was better than having you worry.’
‘I can’t remember,’ he tried, ‘whether I actually told you what happened that evening.’
‘You were so happy,’ she laughed. ‘You said something about joining an important club and making great art.’
Morris didn’t know what to think.
‘You really don’t mind my being here?’ she asked. ‘With a girlfriend?’
‘I’m just glad it isn’t Stan,’ Morris had told her.
Full daylight was streaming through the castle’s barred windows now. Morris had been told he could stay in the exhibition till just before eight, then must retire to the basement until they called him up to give him the name and the gun. Leaving Cain and David, Abel and Goliath behind, he moved into a room where the killers were all women. Excellent! No sooner, it seemed, had Morris been removed from the scene than Professor Zolla had felt free to adopt all his ideas. Here Judith hacked at Holofernes’ neck, Jahel placed her giant nail against Sisera’s sleeping temples, Bonnaud’s Salome sat in naked splendour on her silky bedspread with the Baptist’s severed head gazing on in admiration.
The thing to have commented here, Morris thought, reading an uninspired caption that merely summarised the Salome story, was surely the dish. Why had the dancing girl asked for the prophet’s head on a dish? All the artists had picked up on this, from Andrea del Sarto right down to Frey-Mook. Gold dishes, silver dishes, dishes of dark blue glass. Parkes had completely failed to comment. It must have to do, Morris realised, with a desire to shift attention from the act itself, the ugly hacking at the neck, to the notion of an aesthetic presentation; the head became a sculpture, a work of art framed, haloed even, by a shiny dish, at which point the unpleasant narrative behind the killing disappeared. As with a well-basted beast on a gleaming platter, butchery became beauty. Who could disapprove?
Morris was just congratulating himself on these incisive reflections when he remembered Samira’s account of his phone conversation with Don Lorenzo just a couple of hours before Volpi’s death. Why had they invited him that evening? And why had the meeting so rapidly culminated in Volpi’s murder? Was it the cocaine? And today? What if he were to lose his memory definitively this time? He was too old to kill, he lacked the psychological strength. That had been evident in the church with Stan. Morris shook his head. Volpi must have provoked him. When had he ever killed anyone unprovoked and unthreatened?
He stood staring at Titian’s version where the sad modesty of Salome’s girlish face and the serenity of the Baptist’s quietly closed eyes seemed to make the ugly event at once beautiful and inevitable, desirable even. And at last a new thought occurred to him. An almost convincing explanation. Might it not be that the lurid scene-setting that night in the old museum, the great throne, the robed man’s naked obesity, all in all the amazing similarity with the biblical woodcut of the Eglon and Ehud drama, had simply invited Morris to, as it were, complete the picture. He had seen the tableau, found himself in it rather, and in his delirious state, had felt compelled to strike. Instead of sublimating his murderous instincts, art had guided his hand.
And the elaborate nature of the execution had nothing to do with coded messages between mafias. It was painting.
Was that possible?
Morris left Salome and walked through into a room of martyrs. San Bartolomeo had cleaned up nicely. His flayed muscles gleamed like . . . well, like fresh paint, as if it was the artist’s scarlet brush that had peeled away the pale skin. Masaccio and Caravaggio crucified San Peter upside down. Vasari stoned St Steven. Mantegna shot San Sebastian full of arrows. They loved it, Morris realised. He couldn’t be bothered to read the captions now. The works were overpowering. The old masters loved painting death and violence. Supposedly evoking piety and pathos, they revelled in brutality. And we love looking at it, Morris thought. We always have. In a way we’ve all killed a million times, in our heads. What did it really matter who actually pushed the knife into Volpi or why? These things happen. Art requires them.
In the next room painters of all schools and centuries had a go at slaughtering the Innocents. This was my idea! Morris thought, shocked by its gruesome impact. These originals were so much more powerful than any copies. Giotto’s heap of dead white babies simply glowed. Pietro Testa’s murderous sword shone as it pierced an infant navel. Morris shook his head. What if some nutcase visited the exhibition then went straight off to a nursery school to hack a few bambini to bits? A private art room was one thing, but here all this awful negative energy was to be made available to a huge international audience. There would be those less sound of mind than Morris who would not be able to handle it.
Why on earth did I want this? he wondered.
Disorientated, Morris looked at his watch. 7.45. To his left now was the space they had set aside for Interactivity. Another idea he had rejoiced in. A series of booths invited you to contemplate mocked-up murder scenes—Julius Caesar, Thomas à Becket—to finger sharp weapons and watch archive footage of famous assassinations, Kennedy and Luther King. Would it make people feel sick of violence, Morris wondered, or would it thrill them? Might someone decide they hadn’t lived till they had killed?
All of a sudden he wanted no more of it. Leaving half of the show unexplored, he turned, hurried back the way he had come and opened the door leading down to the storerooms where he must wait till they called him. Why did I agree to this? he wondered. So I can return to a meaningless life with a woman I don’t really love, a woman who doesn’t love me? So I can occupy an honoured place in a dishonourable world, accumulate a wealth I can’t really enjoy, because I am not free and never have been from the moment I first killed? For nigh on thirty years, Morris told himself, stepping carefully down the steep stone stairs into the storeroom, I have lived on sufferance, closely monitored by a Catholic Church that collected my conscience money and waited for the day when my ‘special skills’ could be turned to advantage. Don Lorenzo was my minder, Morris realised.
What if, far from planning a reconciliation, Don Lorenzo had encouraged Morris to stick Volpi? Or Zolla for that matter? That would be another way of explaining the absence of provocation, as reported by Mariella. What if Tarik during his disgraceful embraces with Zolla had informed the man that Morris was so high on dope and coke he would commit any crime they cared to ask of him? Just put a knife in his hand
and set the scene.
‘The outcome might even be described as an answer to prayer,’ the cardinal had said. ‘Volpi had overstepped himself.’ ‘Something about a painting he wanted someone to paint,’ Samira had said. The King Eglon tableau? If only Morris could get access to that famous video footage.
Down in the basement, everything was uncannily similar to the scene he had explored some months before; there were the same canvases and sculptures under wraps, the same ancient metal cabinets, locked and unlocked, the same harsh, ugly light from fluorescent tubes. Morris walked through the damp dusty air, lifting a piece of plastic sheeting here, a filthy cloth drape there. There was no sign that the place had been thoroughly searched. Even the medieval daggers were still heaped in their cupboards. Again Morris took one in his hands, careful this time not to touch the point. The Trecento arms industry, he thought. Suddenly he laughed, thinking of his thuggish son attacking a policeman with a plastic stick weighing eighty grams. How droll!
The door to the passageway that he had discovered that fateful morning was closed. But not locked. Morris went through. There were no police seals to prevent entry to the scene of the crime. Could it even be that the police themselves were only going through the motions? They had decided (been told?) Morris was the killer and that was that. Tomorrow they would be told he wasn’t. After Morris had dispatched the appointed culprit. There was nothing more convenient than finding dead men guilty of old crimes.
He found a light and turned it on. The various pieces of lush furniture—thrones and chaises longues—had been covered with dust sheets. The blood had been scrubbed from the stone floor. The rugs had been rolled against the far wall. Fat Volpi had met his death here. Morris still found it hard to believe he had been responsible. One moment you were kneeling in front of him. An initiation ceremony. The next you pulled the knife. Said Mariella. You were so happy to have joined the club, Papà! To have made great art. Massimina. Had he had to take his clothes off? Morris wondered. Or just to bare his back for a few slaps of the scourge. When had he stashed the dagger in his belt? Or had Don Lorenzo given it to him? Or Zolla? After all that coke, I would happily have killed him, Morris realised. Probably it was a huge pleasure. A relief too, after the failure with Stan, to know he could still raise a dagger. Old age hadn’t blunted him.
