Painting Death

by Tim Parks

  Too bad he couldn’t recall it to savour the moment again.

  For some time Morris walked this way and that around the huge chair on which Volpi had sat. Naked. Dead. Perhaps he was about to find some telltale clue. Some object would gleam on the floor. He would recognise it and memory would flood back. He would remember everything. He would know what he had done and why and consequently what to do next.

  How stupid! Even if he had been entirely compos mentis throughout, Morris realised, even if his mind had retained every tiny detail, or recovered it all now, he still wouldn’t understand. In the end, what had happened that mysterious night was no more than emblematic of a debilitating ignorance that had haunted this English expat for decades. Morris had never understood who he was or who he had spent his life with. Certainly he had never understood Italy.

  ‘But I don’t want to understand!’ Suddenly he shouted the words out loud in defiance and frustration. ‘I don’t want to understand. I want out!’

  With the thought came a wave of emotion. Morris began to cry. He wanted out; out of his marriage, his family, his work, his life. Out of Italy. Out of a culture that had transformed him into an ugly and helpless killer. He did not want to make a fortune digging a tunnel under the Torricelli, or building mosques on property that had lost its value. He did not want to fall forever into their provincial Catholic mesh.

  ‘I WANT OUT!’

  Control yourself, Morris muttered. Get a grip!

  ‘Dottor Duckworth.’ A voice called quietly from above. It was Mariella. Morris recrossed the storeroom and climbed the stairs.

  ‘Before you open the package, please put the gloves on.’

  They were in Volpi’s office. Morris had been here now for more than an hour. Mariella had brought him two cups of coffee, an excellent brioche from a pasticceria in Via Roma. It was oddly as if he were the one shortly to be executed, enjoying a final meal, not the executioner at all. But Morris had always thought the roles interchangeable. He had wandered round the room and tried to recall exactly how it had looked that morning he had brought San Bartolomeo to the storeroom then come up to the offices on the off-chance. Everything had been in disorder, but in a rather inconsequential way, it occurred to him now. If you were really looking for something there was hardly any need to push over chairs and scatter papers on the floor. Would Volpi really have left a porn video running on his PC? Surely not. Zolla had put it there, to discredit the man. Killing him wasn’t enough. His reputation had to be ruined. So that the guilty parties could feel less guilty.

  Idly, Morris turned on the computer but it demanded a password. He stood up and walked round the room again, looking at the old panels and posters against the walls. An advertisement for a show on De Chirico. What an oddball he had been: Roman temples, armchairs, tailors’ dummies. And here was the panel he had seen behind Zolla when the man had sunk to the floor that morning: ‘Devotees of the Bianchi made their pilgrimages barefoot, slept on straw, abstained from meat-eating, and scourged themselves while calling for mercy and peace.’ It must be a caption for some quattrocento altar panel. Volpi had come north, Morris mused, infiltrated the local religio-political-Masonic confraternity, then begun to use his knowledge on behalf of old friends in Naples, or Benghazi even. The mayor’s Arab delegations. But this sounded like any of a million conspiracy-obsessed articles crowding the pages of supposedly serious organs of investigative journalism. More likely he just enjoyed bossing his younger lover about.

  Talk of the Devil. With no warning, the door opened and the cardinal and Zolla came in.

  ‘My dear Morris, my good man,’ the cardinal cried. ‘I knew you wouldn’t let us down.’

  White-faced in blue pinstripe, carrying a large padded envelope under his arm, Zolla looked distraught. The art history professor placed the package on the desk and with barely a glance at Morris trod stiffly across the room to the window.

  ‘Buon giorno, Angelo,’ Morris said. Nothing cheered him more than another’s uneasiness.

  Zolla kept his back to them. He was looking out at the river. The cardinal, resplendent in red, but with a rather vulgar gold chain round his neck, narrowed his eyes and grimaced, as if to confirm for Morris their shared superiority to the younger man.

  ‘Before you open the package,’ the ecclesiast warned, ‘remember you need gloves. There’s a pair in the first drawer on the left.’

  The cardinal’s voice carried a calm authority. Morris opened the drawer and found a pair of white cotton gloves. Surprisingly, the scourge Volpi had once showed him, the same black leather stick with lashes that he had also seen at the scene of the crime, was now back in the drawer along with an assortment of staplers, scissors and pens. Shouldn’t this be a police exhibit?

  The cardinal was watching him carefully, squinting as he lit a cigar. Morris pulled on the gloves and found them way too big. The fingertips hung empty like the tips of so many condoms. For some reason Zolla had shaved his moustache. He looked naked.

  ‘Sit down, Morris, take your time, open the envelope, study the details,’ the cardinal said.

  Morris sat. But Volpi’s swivel chair was huge. He seemed to be falling backwards into something deep and soft. Opening the envelope, he said:

  ‘By the way, Angelo, I love the way you’ve laid out the show. Really, congratulations.’

  Zolla didn’t turn. Through the fine wool of his suit, his back radiated an unhappy tension.

  ‘It was great to see some of my ideas still in there. Thanks for that.’

  Zolla breathed deeply. He had too much gel on his hair.

  ‘Particularly the captions.’

  ‘The captions are all the work of the author Tim Parkes,’ the show’s curator said sharply.

  ‘I emailed Parkes some of my own attempts,’ Morris said. ‘The opening Cain and Abel one, for example. He was most appreciative.’

  Rusconi interrupted: ‘Gentlemen, I know we still have half an hour but Morris needs to look at these papers now. He has a job to do.’

  The cardinal lifted the skirts of his cassock and sat on the chair across the desk. Watching his English assassin, he seemed to be mouthing silent words around the damp stub of the cigar. Saying a rosary? Morris wondered. He reached a hand into the envelope, which was unsealed, and pulled out first the gun, then three sheets of paper. The gun was already complete with silencer. It had a very ordinary, kitchen-utensil feel to it. Not at all nervous now, Morris laid the weapon on the desk, then unfolded the sheets of paper. The first was a printed programme for the day’s events, beginning with a presentation of Painting Death to the press and ‘friends of the museum’. Doors open at 10:00. Curator’s address, 10:30. Drinks and guided visit to the show, 11:00 till 12:00. Followed by lunch.

  ‘Prepared a good speech, Angelo?’ Morris asked coolly. ‘Mariella was telling me you will be having yourself videoed.’

  Suddenly Zolla turned. ‘Why do we have to deal with this monster?’ he demanded. His face was white. From his breathing it would have seemed he had just run up five flights of stairs. ‘He’s already made one holy mess for us. How can we possibly trust him?’

  The cardinal cleared his throat and raised a thick eyebrow, but said nothing.

  ‘Holy mess, holy Mass,’ Morris said lightly. ‘By the way, that was my caption Parkes used for Gentileschi’s Holofernes. The “Dressed to Decapitate” one. Did you like it?’ Turning to the second piece of paper he found his own schedule.

  ‘10:25 take up position in the Interactive Room. 11.05 slide back the safety catch on the gun. Circa 11:15. Your target will be one of the first to enter the room. He will be in conversation with the cardinal who will guide him to the hologram of John Lennon entering the Dakota building on Central Park West. As soon as you have positively recognised your target, step towards him through the hologram, push the gun into his heart and shoot four times. There are four bullets in the gun. Please use all of them.’

  Fascinating, Morris thought, the use of ‘please.’

&
nbsp; ‘Lennon was shot in the back,’ he observed. It was taking some effort not to rush to the third paper and see who this target was.

  ‘Please follow instructions and shoot at the heart,’ the cardinal said matter-of-factly. ‘Your man will think you are part of the show. After the first shot I will hold him to stop him from falling and you will fire the other three in quick succession.’

  Morris shook his head. ‘Is there any particular prayer I should say, around 11:10 maybe? The Lord is my shepherd? Now let thy servant depart in peace?’

  The cardinal smoked and smiled. ‘You could profitably ask the Lord to guide your hand, Morris. This is not a decision we have taken casually. You can consider yourself an emissary.’

  ‘Stop!’ Zolla yelled. ‘Stop all this nonsense. I’m not having it in my museum!’

  The cardinal sighed. His rugged features were unruffled.

  ‘Cold feet?’ Morris enquired, looking up at Zolla. He unfolded the last piece of paper and found himself looking at four photographs of a middle-aged Arab man, thickset and solemn. That was a relief. He had been anxious that his target might be someone he knew, someone who would recognise him as he pulled the trigger.

  ‘Or would you prefer to pull the trigger yourself?’

  Zolla was beside himself. ‘I insist that this madness be called off.’ He had begun to walk up and down the room in a strangely jerky kind of way.

  Rusconi smoked and observed the younger man intently.

  ‘It will ruin the show. It will damage the town’s reputation. It will be a catastrophe.’

  ‘It will save our skin,’ the cardinal said coolly. ‘It will link the two murders as something quite extraneous to our confraternity.’

  Morris watched. He wouldn’t even try to understand, he decided.

  ‘I AM NOT GOING TO ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN,’ Zolla yelled. ‘This is my museum now. This is my show. This is my day. There must be other ways.’

  The cardinal checked his watch. It was fourteen minutes past ten. Morris looked at the Arab man in the photographs. He had an oddly oval head, chubby cheeks, very smooth skin, and small black eyes behind severe glasses. In all four of the pictures he was wearing a thin green tie. A man in the first phase of maturity, Morris thought, mid to late forties, intelligent, committed, perhaps passionate. The assassin began to feel a liking for his target.

  Zolla tried to reason, but he was breathing hard. ‘We are not the secret services. So why are we doing their work for them?’

  The cardinal smiled. ‘You know the answer to that all too well, Angelo. Now that Giuseppe is no longer with us there is no reason why our victim would not use all he knows to—’

  ‘You are not going to do this to me,’ Zolla shrieked. ‘And above all you are not going to ask Duckworth to do it. He’s a madman. And a bungler with it. A murderer who collapses and has to be walked home, for Christ’s sake. We’ll all be in gaol.’

  Zolla was trembling. Morris was fascinated at the way all this stuff was finally coming out.

  ‘Explain to the cardinal, Angelo,’ he said quietly, ‘about putting that knife in my hand before the ceremony.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Explain to him that your little fuck Tarik, the Arab boy, had told you I was high. I would do anything.’

  Zolla simply stared.

  ‘I saw you two leave his apartment in San Zeno together earlier in the evening. For one of your little sessions.’

  ‘That’s a lie!’ Zolla shouted.

  The cardinal was intrigued.

  ‘You wanted Volpi dead. He was humiliating you every day. He didn’t want you sharing Tarik. And you knew the cardinal wanted him dead too. You put the knife in my hand, because someone had told you I’d murdered in the past. I was coked to the eyeballs, Angelo. But I remember perfectly.’

  ‘This man is talking slanderous nonsense,’ Zolla snorted. But his hand on the desk was trembling.

  ‘We’ll do the show together, you said. You and me, without Beppe getting in the way.’

  ‘This is complete fabrication!’

  The cardinal’s voice cut in calmly and evenly. ‘Angelo, there’s no time for this little squabble now. As for today’s business, I am satisfied that what we are doing is right and that this is the propitious moment to do it. Afterwards five witnesses will describe the killer as a young Arab man. The murder will appear to be part of a feud between the moderates and the jihadists.’

  The cardinal paused and puffed. He looked down at his cigar and then up at Zolla, who had the trembling lips of a panicking adolescent.

  ‘Let’s be clear too about your situation, Angelo. You owe your career to Volpi’s infatuation. You are implicated in various unpleasant activities he was involved in. Now you owe this to us, and to the city of Verona, which needs neither mosques nor gun money.’

  Zolla clenched his fists. ‘I have my publications like any other professor. All in respectable journals.’

  ‘Funded and edited by Volpi,’ the cardinal chuckled.

  There was silence. The minutes were ticking by. The gun was sitting on the desktop. Morris looked at the safety catch and reflected that it resembled nothing more than the sliding switch on an electric train he had owned as a child.

  ‘Do it,’ a voice said.

  Morris started.

  ‘I said do it, Morrees.’

  She was back!

  With flaunted sangfroid, Morris asked Zolla: ‘What exactly are you planning to say in your opening speech, Angelo?’

  Standing while the other two were sitting, the art historian seemed displaced and vulnerable.

  ‘Do it,’ the girl repeated.

  ‘Actually, if it’s any consolation to you, Angelo,’ Morris said smilingly, ‘I can’t think of better publicity for this particular show than a murder on the first day. The media will be thrilled.’

  Suddenly, Morris felt extremely confident.

  Zolla turned to the cardinal. ‘He behaved crazily last time, why should he do any different now?’

  ‘Coraggio! ’ Mimi was laughing softly. Morris felt as though heat were rising from the floor through the soles of his feet. Thighs and buttocks were glowing.

  ‘As I understand it,’ the cardinal said calmly, ‘by the time Duckworth was contacted that unfortunate Saturday evening he was drunk and possibly drugged. Today he is sober and prepared, and if he does not do the job as asked he will spend the rest of his life in gaol for murder.’

  ‘Do it,’ the girl repeated. First she didn’t speak for weeks, now she was interrupting him when he needed to think.

  ‘I do kill better when I’m compos mentis,’ Morris agreed cheerfully. ‘Though come to think of it, I would very much like to see this famous video you have of my Eglon tableau.’

  Both men seemed taken aback.

  ‘As the good cardinal says, I was in quite a state that evening. It would be good to see how it looked.’

  ‘You’re disgusting,’ Zolla told him.

  ‘Afterwards,’ the cardinal said. ‘Professor Zolla will show you the video at the first possible opportunity.’

  ‘They’ll never show it to you,’ Mimi shouted. ‘They’re setting you up again.’

  Morris felt extremely lucid and extremely excited.

  ‘Just tell me exactly who this guy is I’m to kill. So I feel I have a reason for pulling the trigger.’

  The cardinal frowned, looked at his cigar and stubbed it out in an ashtray on the desktop.

  ‘Time to go,’ he said. ‘You will just have to trust me, Morris.’

  ‘I’m not going to kill unless you tell me.’

  ‘He’s officially a Libyan diplomat,’ Zolla said abruptly. ‘But actually supplying all kinds of unpleasant people with dangerous things.’

  ‘With Volpi’s help, I suppose?’

  Evidently irritated that Zolla had given this information, the cardinal shook his head. ‘It’s not quite that simple, Morris. Please do not try to understand just now. I assure you that within the week y
our name will be cleared and you will be back with your beloved wife, who by the way is here this morning for the opening of the show.’

  ‘She hates you!’ Mimi whispered.

  Again the cardinal looked at his watch. ‘Angelo, you’ll have to get moving now. People will be waiting. And please pull yourself together. For your own sake. Weren’t you going to have the video relayed to your mother? You wouldn’t want to let her down. Morris?’ The cardinal turned to look at the Englishman. ‘Keep the papers in your pockets, please. They mustn’t be found lying around. You will have time to read the instructions again while waiting. As soon as you have carried out your task, you leave through the emergency door in the Interactive Room behind the Martin Luther King exhibit. Mariella will be waiting to escort you out. Check the route carefully.’

  The churchman got to his feet and shook out the skirts of his cassock. ‘I will take you there now.’

  ‘Now,’ Mimi whispered.

  Morris picked up the gun in his gloved hand, got to his feet and walked round the desk. Only Zolla seemed unable to get moving. He had pulled two sheets of paper from his pocket and was trying to read, his lips moving with the words. Morris approached him while the cardinal was already heading for the door.

  ‘All prepared for the big speech?’

  Zolla couldn’t answer.

  ‘It must be exciting to think your mamma will be watching you open a major international show.’

  The art expert was trembling.

  ‘You will mention my sponsorship at least?’

  Morris moved up close.

  Zolla began to stutter. ‘Id-d-diota! B-buffone!’

  ‘Now, Morrees!’

  ‘Ing-glese di merda.’ Zolla’s face twisted in a panicky sneer. ‘Inc-capace! ’

  That did it. Lowering his left hand to release the catch on the side of the gun, Morris raised his right, pressed the barrel into Zolla’s chest and pulled the trigger.