Mimi's Ghost

by Tim Parks

  Morris felt he was already on the home straight. Soon it would merely be a question of learning how to accept congratulations with the right poise and grace.

  Driving back around the north of the city, sedately now, he called Paola at his leisure with the excellent news.

  ‘Everything equally? Are you sure?’

  ‘Sure I’m sure. I mean, the way she said it, it was as if it was something everybody had known for years. Written into the natural order.’

  ‘Mo,’ there was a brief pause, then his wife’s voice had thrilled to a whisper, ‘Mo, I’m going to give you hell tonight. That’s a promise. I’m going to make somebody’s cock pay and pay and pay for being so rich and fat. Oh, this is such good news!’

  Very casually, Morris suggested: ‘So, how about making love in her bed?’

  ‘Cosa! Whose?’

  ‘Your mother’s.’

  ‘Mo!’

  Finally, he thought, he had gone one better than her.

  ‘Antonella’s going to have the coffin set up in the living-room, for the wake. Somebody’s going to have to spend the night there. Our turn to show filial respect, I think. All we have to do is change the sheets.

  Paola appeared to hesitate. ‘You know, sometimes you’re really strange, Mo. I mean, what turns you on.’

  ‘I could say the same of you sometimes,’ he said evenly. But what he was thinking was how Mimi had said the exact same words into his dictaphone shortly before she died: ‘Che strano che sei, Morri che strano! How strange you are sometimes!’

  Suddenly he felt desperately excited by the idea that he would be making love in the bed she had always slept in, right where he had felt her presence most strongly. Putting his hand in his jacket pocket, there was the underwear that must have been hers. He clenched it tight in his fist.

  ‘Va bene, caro mio,’ Paola was saying. ‘Va bene. Mamma was always so strait-laced about sex. Let’s do something really outrageous. It’ll be like a revenge.’

  It would also be the first step in getting his wife to agree to move in there, Morris thought, when he thankfully got the phone down. Or maybe he could even get her pregnant tonight. Hole in the johnny job. Why not? His instincts were so perfectly honed today, it was as if he were snipping out the future with a pair of new scissors (in leather-gloved hands). He would be so thrillingly erotic, he’d be able to get her to agree to anything.

  For a moment Morris wondered whether, if he let go of the steering wheel and just closed his eyes, the car wouldn’t all the same take him exactly where he ought to be going, so in tune did he feel with the universe round about, the stars, the circling spheres.

  15

  Morris drove up the Valpantena, turned off at Quinto and pulled in at Villa Caritas. But a sense of urgency was returning now and it wasn’t a moment for hanging around and listening to Forbes spouting Latin, however appropriate his maxims might mysteriously be. Fortunately, he found Kwame sprawling on the swing couch in the cold sunlight. Morris told him to put out his cigarette and hop in at once, then immediately was reversing fast back down the drive to the gate. Not that he needed company, quite the contrary, but Kwame, he felt, was the kind of presence who could only be persuasive.

  Why had Bobo acted like that?

  The bottling plant was humming. The dog was on his chain. So successful was Morris feeling this morning, so sure that everything could simply be worked out by forthright expression of commonsense and legal entitlement, that he decided he might not poison the brute after all. ‘Here, Volfi!’ he called to the creature, though he had no idea what its baptismal name might be. ‘Here, Volfi-Volfi!’ He held out a hand as if to caress.

  But there must have been something in Morris’s voice, genuinely friendly as he meant to be, that gave him away, something that irritated or mocked, as if he could never quite convince anybody, even the dumbest animal, of his good intentions. The same way, despite a certain blond charm and handsome suavity, he had never in the end managed to persuade anybody to give him a regular job. In response to his blandishments, the animal leapt to the furthest reach of its chain, went up on its hind legs, pawing, then bayed quite horribly in a red-grey slaver of teeth and strangled fur. Kwame cowered back, clearly frightened. Morris stood just beyond the animal’s range, smiling. In the end, given the robustness of the chain, it was not the kind of relationship one need feel unhappy with.

  ‘Evil, man,’ Kwame said. ‘He got an evil spirit in him, that dog.’

  Morris was wondering if Bobo would put up the same display of animosity, despite the now established chain of legitimate inheritance. With an expression that he hoped balanced sobriety and insouciance while still catching the essential, willing-to-help-but-determined-not-to-sell-himself-short Morris, he pushed open the office door without knocking.

  Bobo was on the phone. The unpleasant boy sat round-backed over piles of neatly clipped, tissue-pink-and-blue papers marshalled across the gun-metal desktop in the prosaic glow of the Apple Mac. With his correct but, for an Italian, ill-cut suit and one hand both holding the receiver and tugging the lobe of a protruding ear while the other scribbled figures in blunt pencil, the whole scene (right down to the Fratelli Ruffoli bottle squidged between a model’s sunbathing buttocks) reeked of tawdry commerce, seemed impossibly far removed from the tasteful setting of yesterday evening’s dinner. Morris, thought Morris, would move all the company’s offices into the centre of town and spruce them up; that designer look of lush efficiency Italians were so good at. Some expensive furniture from Milan perhaps.

  Into the receiver, Bobo was apologising to Antonella for the fact that he wouldn’t be able to make it over to see the corpse for at least a couple of hours. There was a crisis in the factory, he said, raising mousy eyebrows towards Morris (the eyes themselves had the dull beadiness of teddy bears and stuffed birds). No, no, he would explain later. But he certainly wouldn’t have stayed out half the night for nothing, would he? A crisis was a crisis.

  Sensing that if he seemed too deliberately to be waiting for his brother-in-law to be polite enough to cut his conversation short, he would begin to feel edgy and humiliated, Morris launched into ostentatious chatter with Kwame. In English.

  ‘Everybody OK back at Villa Caritas?’

  Kwame kept his voice low. He seemed nervous. ‘Everybody pretty black, man.’

  Morris chose not to pun on this.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, making no concessions to Bobo’s phone talk. ‘Forbes did sound rather upset about it all on the phone. But don’t worry, it’ll all sort itself out.’

  ‘He is just wild with Azedine, man!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The old fellah.’

  ‘Forbes? With Azedine, why’s that?’

  ‘I thought you would know that, boss.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  Only now did Morris realise that he had spent the ten minutes driving over here without asking one useful question, so mentally busy had he been bobbing about on the geyser of his euphoria, enjoying the vertiginous view from the summit of a frothing pile of imagined money.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, with mature concern.

  ‘Man, that Azedine, him and Farouk, that was the old man’s special friend. . . .’

  But the moment the phone clattered down, Bobo’s voice was a shrill bark: ‘I want that dirty Negro out of here. Maledetto!’

  Morris was shocked. If there were moments when he reasonably felt that other races were inferior, he would certainly never have expressed his feelings so coarsely.

  ‘Out!’ Bobo said peremptorily.

  ‘But why? I want him in here.’ Then Morris said: ‘Actually, now that Signora Trevisan has passed on and I’m to become, er, a full partner, I’ve decided to train Kwame up to be my personal assistant.’

  Bobo stared. Why, Morris thought, why wouldn’t this wretched boy’s elder brothers just die, so he could go away and run Daddy’s chicken empire? Something about his plucked beadiness made him painfully suitable. Morris added: ‘Fran
kly I find racism detestable.’

  ‘I said I want that Negro out of here and off the premises.’

  Kwame looked uncertain.

  Morris said: ‘Don’t worry, just wait for me outside the door. I won’t be long.’

  As the tall figure slipped out there was the sound of furious barking again.

  ‘Vicious brute,’ Morris remarked, but if he had hoped for a vague ambiguity as to whom this might refer, it went over Bobo’s head.

  ‘And I want you out too,’ his brother-in-law said. ‘Do you understand? I want you out.’

  The rich boy had obviously been tensing himself for this confrontation. He was both seething and determined to be cold. Probably he was confused too, Morris thought, by what had apparently been a long night.

  Still, there was no denying that one had been caught very much by surprise. Morris decided to sit down on a swivel chair by the other desk. He did a complete 360-degree turn, collecting his thoughts. Had Antonella been wrong about the will? Was that possible? Or had Bobo destroyed it, and produced another? Taking possession of the whole estate, he was simply kicking Morris out. But it seemed improbably melodramatic and nineteenth century.

  ‘Tell me about this crisis we’ve got on our hands,’ Morris said reasonably.

  Again Bobo was staring at him. Their eyes met, Morris’s a clear, innocent, well-slept blue, Bobo’s small, red-rimmed. The Englishman felt almost sorry for his brother-in-law and decided to forgive all this unpleasantness just as soon as it had blown over. Bobo opened his mouth. He was obviously having trouble expressing himself. Embarrassed perhaps?

  Morris became even more accommodating.

  ‘Just tell me why you fired the entire night shift. Did they do something awful?’

  Bobo drew breath. ‘You will have to leave the company,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you here. Or your crazy ideas. I’d be grateful if you would leave the room now.’

  Morris was perplexed. ‘But why did you fire them?’ he repeated. ‘Any disagreement between ourselves is one thing, but they’re quite another. They need the money. It’s life or death to them.’ He felt that swell of strength that comes from moral rectitude. Not only was he more handsome than Bobo, he was also better, as a person. Certainly the pornographic calendar would have no place in the offices he envisaged. Had he put anything of that nature in his own little cubby-hole in town? Certainly not. Immediately he decided he would terminate the rent contract this very day and move into somewhere more salubrious, or just work from his new Quinzano home.

  Bobo sighed. ‘When I came in last night, two of them were using this office for obscene acts.’

  It was Morris’s turn to stare. ‘What do you mean, obscene acts? And why did you come here anyway?’

  ‘S’inculavano,’ Bobo said brutally. They were giving it each other up the arse.’ He laughed.

  Morris didn’t know whether to be more shocked by the coarse way his brother-in-law expressed himself, or by what he claimed had happened.

  ‘Who?’ he demanded.

  ‘What does it matter?’

  ‘Of course it matters. You could have had those two fired immediately and I would have chucked them out of Villa Caritas and that would have been the end of it. I agree entirely to firing the two you found.’

  ‘They’re all the same,’ Bobo said flatly. ‘That’s why the staff didn’t want them to use the toilet. All queer. They’ve probably got Aids. It was time for them to go. I’ve had enough of this farce.’

  Morris was furious, but at the same time pleased to have at least discovered that the problem was nothing more than diehard provincial racism of the most ignorant variety. He could just about believe the story about the couple in the office - and it occurred to him that this must have been what Kwame meant when he talked about Azedine and Farouk - Forbes was obviously furious with the Moroccan for perverting a minor -but the idea that they were all queer, or just in some way dirty, was simply ridiculous, nothing more than the kind of prejudice that had once made his father accuse him, Morris, of being homosexual simply because he read a lot of books and went to art galleries. Again, however, Morris decided to be understanding. He was eager to reach a compromise. Ten minutes and everything would sort itself out. He could relax and celebrate.

  ‘Listen, Bobo,’ he suggested. ‘Early this morning, Signora Trevisan died. From what I have frequently heard from Paola, and Antonella for that matter, the family business is being left equally to the two sisters. Given that they’re not interested in running the show, it would thus seem to be up to us two to do the job on equal terms. Only last night we were happily having dinner together after all. Weren’t we? And I must say that I for one enjoyed myself. In the circumstances, then, don’t you think that rather than making any hasty decisions it would be wise to finish this contract and then assess the situation?’

  ‘You will have to go,’ Bobo repeated. ‘And since you’re going they may as well go too.’ His fingers drummed nervously on the desk. Clearly there was something he couldn’t quite decide to blurt out.

  Morris became almost avuncular: ‘Caro,’’ he said, ‘I can appreciate that you don’t really like me, but from a legal point of view . . .’

  Bobo suddenly thrust back his chair. He moved quickly, with the purposefulness of someone who has just changed tack. ‘I didn’t mention,’ he said nervously, going over to the kind of depressing grey filing cabinet which Morris would very soon be replacing, ‘why I came to this office in the middle of the night. Did I? Not something I do every day.’ He squatted down and from the very back of the bottom drawer pulled out a file.

  At last Morris appreciated that something was very seriously wrong. It came not as a vague fear, but as total and desperately sudden conviction. From the base of his spine, heat began to pump up through his body. As on the evening before, the tension in his wrists was suddenly as if wires had been strung to breaking point.

  Bobo returned to his desk. Without looking up, he said: ‘Last night Stan said you didn’t go to Turkey with him that summer.’

  ‘Yes, but, as I explained, I went on my own.’

  Bobo snorted. Reading upside down, Morris now managed to decipher the heading typed on the file the boy had got. Immediately, the heat in his bowels dissolved to shivers, then came surging back to scorching point, massimina trevisan. This simply wasn’t fair!

  Bobo opened the file. ‘After you so, er, precipitately left, I asked him what date it was he says he saw you at the station in Rome.’

  Morris pretended puzzlement.

  ‘He said it was sometime in late July.’

  Bobo looked up. Morris was quite rigid.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, I have a note here in the diary I kept then in which I record a phone call from you in Ankara on August 2nd, more than a week after the ransom was paid and only the day before Massimina tried to speak to her mother but was cut off.’

  There was a pause which Morris chose not to fill. His mind was as if scurrying around a holed ship. Could it be repaired, or had the moment come to trust himself once more to waves and storm?

  ‘Stan said that you . . .’

  ‘I can’t quite see what you’re trying to imply. As I said, I went to Turkey on my own. Having decided not to go with Stan, I told him I hadn’t gone at all, so as not to offend him. As for the date when we ran into each other in Rome, you can’t honestly expect a cretin like Stan to remember what day of the month it was.’

  Bobo waited a few seconds. ‘He also said he remembered you were with a girl. Somebody he’d seen you with before in Verona.’

  Even as he spoke Morris had already reflected that presumably not a word of this had been said to Antonella, otherwise she would hardly have been so pleasant this morning.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Morris repeated, ‘really, but I can’t see what any of this has got to do with anything. It’s perfectly normal to run into people at a railway station. They are nodal points. People have to pass through them. And yes, I think I was in company w
ith a girl, but just somebody I’d met on the train, not from Verona.’

  Bobo rubbed a hand over his chin. Both elated and grim, acne inflamed in pale cheeks, it was as if he wasn’t listening to Morris at all. He didn’t need to. Making a deliberate effort to keep his voice calm, he said: ‘I didn’t actually see it all at once, you know, while we were talking, I mean the way it fits so perfectly, but later on everything clicked. I came straight over to the office. I’ve been here since four.’

  Morris shook his head. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He tried an incredulous little laugh, but it came out painfully forced, and thus became a giveaway. The blood now flushed right to the surface of his face. Why - he ground his teeth - why had nature bestowed so very little talent on him in the way of dissimulation? And how on earth could he have imagined he’d got away with last night merely by saying he had been to Turkey, but not with Stan? Ridiculous complacency. What an idiot he had been not to stay on till the bitter end of the evening, so as to be able to counter and neutralise anything the American came out with. Christ! ‘Be sure thy sins will find thee out,’ he heard his mother’s old warning. Directed at Father, of course. Suddenly he hated himself. He was completely useless, pathetic. No, he was a wretched, miserable, beaten Morris. He deserved to go to prison. And if he had the courage to hang himself there, well then, so much the better.

  It was then that her darling soft voice said: ‘No, Morn.’

  “... Of course, the ransom was placed on the Milan-Palermo express,’ Bobo was saying. ‘I put it on the train myself, in a brown holdall on the luggage rack of the most forward first-class compartment. That was July 23rd. Right around the time Stan was talking about. And the Milan-Palermo express stops in Roma Termini, non è vero. The money could have been picked up there. Then her body was found in Sardinia. And of course the train from Roma Termini goes straight to Ostia and the ferry.’