by Tim Parks
‘No,’ she said. There was her perfume again and, as it were, the swishing of a dress against his leg. ‘O, ti amo, Morrees,’ she cooed. ‘Sei così dolce.’ He closed his eyes on the sweetness of hearing it. Mimi! At last, her voice, unbidden, not ventriloquy. He was barely listening to his brother-in-law now.
‘So I came along here to look at the file. Because I kept copies of the ransom letters, of course. I thought I might compare the handwriting. With yours.’
‘But they weren’t in handwriting,’ Morris murmured, as if in a trance. ‘Ti voglio,’ she was saying. ‘I want you, want you, want you. O, Morri.’
‘No,’ Bobo said, ‘no, they weren’t. I’d forgotten. But how would you know that?’
There was a long silence in which the hum of the bottle factory became hypnotic.
‘Because I wrote them, of course.’
‘Caro, caro, caro,’ she whispered. Just as when she had sat above him. Her tight stomach and big maternal breasts.
Bobo was staring.
‘You see, we wrote them together.’ From under the deep ether of her presence, Morris spoke in spellbound monotone. ‘We planned the whole thing together to get back at her mother for the way she’d kept us apart. We thought we’d run away and get her to send us money.’ He stopped. He was both aware of speaking and unaware, wide eyes unblinking, and the cleverness of what was coming out was her speaking through him. He had never thought of this alibi at all. ‘Then we were just ready to come home, after we’d found out she was pregnant and we knew they’d have to let us marry, when Mimi fell, in Sardinia, from a sort of cliff in the mountains, and killed herself.’
‘Caro‘’ Mimi breathed. ‘So sweet!’
‘Killed herself,’ he repeated, and now it was as though something he’d said in a dream was threatening to wake him up.
Bobo was shaking his head slowly from side to side in what must have been a heady cocktail of incredulity and satisfaction. He couldn’t believe that what he’d imagined was true.
‘It’s what Inspector Trevisan suspected, you remember,’ Morris went on, monotonous, plausible, bewitched, ‘when they found she was pregnant, and that she’d had her hair done, and had a whole suitcase of new clothes with her. He said there must have been some complicity on her part. In fact the truth is that it was her idea in the first place,’ As all of this was her idea now, Morris thought, aware that his eyes were staring blankly at the neon light above Bobo’s head. As if the white tube were numinous somehow. Her power came from there.
‘She was so scared at having to retake her exams. She was in love with me and she wanted us to be married. Yes, but with our own money, so we wouldn’t always have to ask her mother.’ Morris was aware of smiling, at once more automatically and more naturally than he ever did. He was aware of an unusual persuasive power in his voice. That’s why I think the best course of action now would be to leave the whole thing be. It would only upset Paola and Antonella to bring it all out again. They’d have to appreciate how much of it was their fault and their mother’s.’
Bobo hesitated. For a moment it seemed he might yield to whatever power had made a sort of oracle of Morris. Then with an air of crude commercial decision, as though deciding on nothing more than the size of some order or other, he announced: ‘I don’t believe a single word of it.’
There was another mesmerised silence, during which Morris found himself thinking again, thinking with a sort of bewildered lucidity beyond conscious control. And what he thought was that the story she had just invented for him to tell was perfectly feasible, and infinitely more attractive than the various alternatives. How much better to believe that Mimi had been happy those last weeks, and death an almost lucky accident at the moment of life’s greatest exaltation: first love. But his lucidity and bewilderment came together in his appreciation that this was actually true. Yes, she had been happy, far happier than he’d been, that was for sure. Hence the only problem was that the others had no imagination. All they understood was the newspaper fare of kidnap, rape and murder. They saw only the ugly side of everything. They couldn’t imagine the love there had been, couldn’t understand that the exact way she’d died meant nothing beside the momentous fact that they had loved each other. But it would be pointless and humiliating trying to explain this to Bobo. Humiliating to himself and to Mimi too. He wouldn’t even try.
‘Mimi!’ he whispered.
‘Morri!’ she answered so promptly.
Morris felt an immense lassitude sweeping across him. All the nerves in his puppet body had been cut. He could flop. He could sleep. If he was finished, then so be it.’
‘Ti amo, Morri,’ she was whispering. ‘I love you. You were my only lover ever.’ Quite distinctly he felt her hair brush across his face. ‘I forgive you everything,’ she said.
How wonderful! Morris thought. How wonderful.
Bobo had picked up the phone. ‘I was going to talk to Paola about this first,’ he was saying. ‘But now I think we should just get it over with as soon as possible.’ He was dialling.
‘Do it,’ her voice suddenly said. ‘Wake up, Morri. Before it’s too late. Do it. Do what you’re so good at!’
Do what?
Her voice was childishly urgent. ‘Your party piece, Morri. That you’re so good at. Do it!’
But he didn’t want to move. It was so pleasant listening to her. He remembered how her voice had always soothed. Always, always, always. Such an escape from the tortuous back and forth that consciousness inevitably was for someone of his sensibility and misfortune.
Perhaps the police would swallow his story in the end. It was perfectly feasible.
‘Morri!’ She became shrill. ‘Morri, you know I hated Bobo. If you did it to me, the least you can do is do it to him too! It was him stopped us from being lovers at the beginning. He started all this. He ruined your whole life. He was responsible for my death. He killed me, Morri!’
‘Pronto? Polizia? Posenato here. Si. Posenato, Roberto. I’d like to talk to the ispettore capo criminate.’
Still enchanted, moving as if there were no hurry at all, Morris stood up, turned, grasped the back of the heavy office chair, then in a single measured gesture heaved it high in the air. But he wasn’t concentrating. His muscles were slack. As the chair reached its apex, the metal revolving section swung round with the momentum, throwing him off balance. He slipped, let go. A castor came thumping into Bobo’s shoulder, throwing him sideways onto the floor. But that was all. Then the whole chair clattered over the top against the wall.
Kwame pushed open the door and looked in. ‘Maledetto!’ Bobo was shrieking. ‘Are you crazy?’ He grabbed at the phone.
Morris had finally woken up. The noise and confusion snapped him from his hypnotised state. Like water bursting a dam, all his repressed faculties were suddenly released. He had never moved so fast and purposefully. In a second, he tore the cord from the phone, swung himself over the desk, grasped and lifted Bobo by the shoulders, then banged his head down fiercely on the tiled floor. And again. And again. And again. In uncanny silence. For her voice had gone now. There was just the scuffle of clothes and the thump of the head on the tiles. Bang, bang, bang. The face beneath him contorted as if in orgasm. Again, and again. But it was exhausting. He lifted the boy a fifth time, a sixth. Down crashed the head. Then quite suddenly he couldn’t go on. The flood of energy was gone, drained right out of him. He fell back and sat on the floor, shoulders shivering against the wall.
Why had he done that? Or had he known all along that sooner or later it must come to this? Some feeling there’d been between him and the boy, as when you knew that sooner or later a woman would become a lover.
Kwame was staring at him. There was the hum of the bottling plant beyond, freezing air flowing in from the open door.
‘You killed him, man.’
Morris had put his face in his hands. There was the dawning horror that he would have to kill the black now too. It was too awful. And anyway, how? The boy was six-
six. And he didn’t want to kill Kwame. His hands would refuse, his body would rebel, because he liked the boy. Already he was trembling like a leaf, muscles twitching in arms and legs. With a sense of complete unreality, he announced out loud: ‘Mimi, I will not kill anyone I like any more. I won’t do it. Whatever the cost.’
‘Man!’ The whites of Kwame’s eyes had expanded to pantomime proportions.
Face in hands, Morris waited a moment, hoping her voice would respond to this, give some acknowledgement. If only he could be sure of a constant dialogue with her, nothing would be too hard.
This, big trouble!’ Kwame was shaking his head.
Enough. Morris had suddenly seen the way. He leapt to his feet, tossed a bunch of keys across the room. ‘Go and get the car. Bring it right up to the door and open the boot. OK?’
For some reason it never occurred to him that Kwame would not accept the accomplice’s role. He was right. The boy caught the keys and turned. Before he was even out of the room, Morris was on his feet sorting through the file on the desk. But he mustn’t touch. Oh shit! Every time you did this business you had to remember everything all over again. Because he wasn’t a professional murderer, as in love he could never be a Don Juan. Just a sensitive young man reacting to extreme circumstances. Or a hopeless amateur. Unbuttoning his cuffs, Morris pulled his hands inside his shirt-sleeves and clumsily shuffled the papers back into the file. There were photocopies of the letters he had pasted together with bits of cheap novels and newsprint so long ago. How odd to see them again, dear sufferers,
WHAT PRICE YOUR LITTLE LOST ONE THEN? So ingenuous, SO
effective. There was a lesson to be learnt there. Then bank documents referring to the money they had drawn. A single withdrawal from a single account. He should have asked for more.
Morris hesitated. He felt a curious desire to read those letters again, to remind himself of that wonderful time. Oh, but he was going quite crazy now! Anyway, they would still be around later. Hands still in his sleeves, he lifted the whole file, negotiated his way past the body and two fallen chairs, taking care not to look at Bobo’s face. The filing cabinet drawer was still open. He got the papers away and pushed the thing closed with his foot.
Now. He glanced round the room. Must wipe the places where he’d grasped the chair. Otherwise his prints would be quite acceptable in this office. He did work here sometimes after all. It was his company, for Christ’s sake. Oh, but this was hopeless. There was an avalanche of evidence to hold back here. It was impossible. He went to the door that led through to the bathrooms and then the bottling plant. No one out by the bathrooms. The hum of the plant was louder. Mustn’t look in there. Mustn’t be seen. Then he thought: at least he had a challenge worthy of Morris Duckworth on his hands. At least he had killed someone who thoroughly deserved it. Genius and a smidgen of luck and he might just get through.
Kwame came back. Precisely as he appeared, Morris realised how incredibly stupid it would be to use his own car. One hair in the boot and he would be taking university degrees by post for the rest of his life. ‘Move it!’ he shouted to Kwame. ‘Move mine. We’ll use his. I’ll get the keys.’ Kwame went out again. Morris crouched down by the corpse. Assuming it was a corpse. Was it? There was no time to listen for breathing. Somebody might arrive at any moment. Somebody might wonder why the phone was engaged. Would it sound engaged or just as if someone was not answering? Oh God, if he was going to kill the boy he should have planned it. How long would the police take to work out who Posenato was and where he had been calling from? Morris felt, quite sincerely, that he wasn’t up to this. At the same time, turning the corpse over, plunging his hand into one pocket after another, he had never been more happily sure of himself, so that even after he found the car keys he kept looking - outside pockets, inside - it was one of those special moments when intuition reigns supreme. It was thus that he found, serendipity itself, a postcard showing Juliet’s tomb.
He slid it out of the top inside pocket. There was no stamp or postmark.
All it said was: ‘Bobo, carissimo, the morning afterwards is always a dream, you, you, you, as if you were still inside me. Your Bimbetta.’
Morris thought for about ten seconds, then he wiped the glossy surface with the elbow of his jacket and slipped the card two or three papers down in the in-tray on Bobo’s desk. As with the first time he’d killed, there was a sense, Morris realised, in which forces beyond him used him as an instrument of retribution. Genital Giacomo and Sex-Swap Sandra then. Bawdy Bobo now. Yes, that phone call yesterday evening that he had to take in the other room! These nights when he supposedly had to check up on things in the office! It was obvious. The pig! He grabbed Bobo roughly from under the shoulders and began to drag him to the door. Moving, he was careful to keep his trousers from making contact with the blood-sticky hair. When the head fell back and the mouth open, he remarked once again on how truly ugly the boy was. Ugly and corrupt.
Barely ten minutes later, giving the white Audi no more than five to get away, he opened the door of his own car and, hesitating between police and carabinieri, he remembered Bobo had called the former, and thus opted himself for the latter.
16
Carnival was coming. Back in Piazza Bra the children had their Harlequin outfits, their cowboy suits and Zorro cloaks. Alone at last towards four o’clock that afternoon, Morris decided to treat himself to a table outside Bar Baglioni, whence a slanting sun picked out the nylon colours of innocent festivity against the stony backdrop of the Roman arena, where lions had once mauled Christians.
Saddam Hussein leered. A diminutive Dracula turned and showed his bloody teeth. Morris smiled, and smiled again at a yet unpoisoned Snow White. With a little sense of myth and history it wasn’t impossible to feel oneself less monstrous. He wasn’t the first to have faced the question of what to do with an unwanted body. Indeed, you might almost see it as the primeval paradigm of all human dilemmas: what practical arrangements to make for the spirit turned carcass, for the putrefying confirmation of corrupt mortality? Burial, when you came down to it, lay at the origins of all human culture, was the first step in the long road to civilisation, to the properly responsible, fecund, well-ordered and - why not? - sumptuous life which Morris must believe he would one day achieve: harmony, elegance, culture. Otherwise he might as well give up now and confess it all, because at the moment he felt no better than a drunken tightrope walker in thick fog. Lost. Nauseous. God only knew where the wire wobbling beneath him was connected, or whether there wasn’t an executioner waiting for him at the end of it, or simply sawing through strand after strand at this very moment.
Morris took a deep breath, then blew out, as if one could just exhale one’s angst. He frowned. Burial. It was such a depressing hurdle to have to overcome, such a stiff test of one’s cultural and criminal credentials.
The truth was he had felt far more exhilarated when he had killed Giacomo and Sandra eighteen months ago, and so deeply moved when the story had ended for Mimi. Because these things had been intimately related to his being in love, to the noblest and deepest of emotions, which had bathed the whole terrible adventure in a rich light.
Whereas now life was no more than an interminable ‘in memoriam’, a constantly self-perpetuating sense of bereavement, a search to repeat the lost impossible. Farce after tragedy.
He had been a hero when he carried off Mimi: Theseus in complicity with Ariadne, Paris abducting Helen. Brutal stories, but glorious. That summer kidnap had been his Trojan War, his epopoeia. Splendid profiles in Homeric light. After which came the long, weary centuries of tawdry chronicle. Living in the memory. The shadow. Summer then, winter now. He felt nothing for Bobo at all. Neither guilt, nor satisfaction. The whole business had been entirely casual, an incidente dipercorso, as they said here. Like running over a rat on the road.
Though it had to be gratifying, he reflected, sipping a light Custoza, watching witch and fairy queen gather around a trestle table with soft drinks - it had to be grati
fying that he was able to see his actions in these terms. Of how many murderers could it be said that they had a sense of historical perspective? Of how many of his victims? So that if ever he needed to look for justification it was straightforwardly there, in the superior quality of his mind. Indeed, he wouldn’t put it past himself to write a book about it all one day: diaries of a thinking man’s murderer, for posthumous publication only of course. But there was a long way to go till he got there.
And a fair bit even till tomorrow morning, with the carabinieri combing the countryside, grilling the workers at the bottling plant, fingerprinting the office, calling for witnesses. Plus the galling business of having to rely on somebody else. He had never done that before. On a twenty-year-old black boy of whom one knew exactly nothing. Indeed who might perfectly well feel it was in his own personal interest to turn Morris in. But there was also a sort of delicious penance here, in this having to rely on the lowest of the low. A thrill of risk and humiliation. It was picking up the crumbs after what he had had with Massimina, but it would have to do.
Morris stood up and made a point of winking to the waiter and leaving the kind of handsome tip that would be remembered if ever he were asked to account for his movements. Then, moving away from his table across the square and back to his car, he collided with a tiny skeleton being chased by a bear. The painted bones tumbled over and began to weep. Morris leaned down to help the little boy up. How much he wished for a child of his own! A father appeared and laughed: “Povero scheletrino, he should never have left the cemetery!’
