by Tim Parks
At this Marangoni and his assistant exchanged the kind of knowing glance that Morris had always found so distasteful, the sort of nudge-nudge-know-what-I-mean look his father had endlessly exchanged with the friends he brought home from the pub when they were finally thrown out. Immediately he objected: ‘No, I don’t think it could be anything like that.’
Marangoni raised thick eyebrows: ‘Like what?’
Morris steadied himself. ‘I don’t think he was the kind of man to be having, erm, an affair.’
The inspector smiled, then pushed back his chair and got to his feet. ‘The two main immigrants who were the cause of the problem, are they available for interview?’
‘I imagine so,’ Morris lied with increasing fluency. ‘You’ll have to go along to the hostel to speak to them.’ He explained where it was.
‘You didn’t tell any of this to the carabinieri.’
‘Any of what exactly?’
The irregularities in the company. Signor Posenato’s firing the immigrants.’
Morris looked apologetic. ‘I suppose really I should have, but to tell the truth I was in a bit of a daze. I mean, with finding the office like that. All they asked me about was how I’d found the place. What time. Where I’d phoned from and so on. It was all rather cursory, I thought. They only kept me about an hour, and most of the time they were busy taking photographs and measuring things.’
‘Quite, quite.’ Marangoni and his assistant exchanged satisfied smiles.
Morris offered: ‘Really it was only a couple of hours later, you know, that it came to me that it might have something to do with the people he fired.’
In fact it had been exactly two minutes ago, and the solution was ideal: the immigrants had done it. He could have spat in a contrary wind for not having told the carabinieri the same. Anyway, the thing to remember was that, however someone was really murdered, there was always another completely feasible way in which they might have been, because in the end so many of us have such excellent reasons for wanting to do away with each other.
The two policemen were heading for the door now, taking their leave, but Morris was on such a rollercoaster of virtuosity, he stopped them: ‘Sorry, didn’t you say at the beginning that there were two things you wanted to talk to me about. I mean, I don’t want to have to go through this again.’
They were standing in the hall, with its polished black-and-white stone floor, the lacquered portraits against dusty plaster with ironwork candelabra above. There was certainly a lot of work to be done on Casa Trevisan before one could feel happy here.
‘Ah.’ For a moment Marangoni looked puzzled. The assistant consulted his notebook. Then they remembered. ‘Yes, yes, our only other question was: what time exactly did you leave the house here after paying your respects to your mother-in-law? What time did you set off for the office?’
‘No, the hostel first,’ Morris corrected, ‘and then the office. Well. . .’ But he caught his breath. ‘Oh, I see, you mean where was I when the, ah . . .’He appeared to think. ‘Well, as I said to the carabinieri, you know, I really wouldn’t know exactly what time it was. I mean, first I raced over here - we’re talking about something like seven-thirty or eight - because of Signora Trevisan; then going back I stopped at the bar in the square, I mean, I was so shocked by it all. It reminded me of my own mother dying.’ He balked a little at the unfaithfulness of that. ‘Then I drove over to the hostel, where I spoke to an immigrant called Kwame. Do you want me to spell that for you? I don’t know his surname. Or maybe that is his surname. In any case, you can ask him when I arrived, because I’ve no idea.’
‘Did you phone anyone from the car?’
Morris thought. ‘No, oh yes, wait a minute, my wife, Paola. To discuss funeral arrangements and so on.’
‘What time?’
Again Morris shrugged. ‘Really, I’ve no idea. I’m afraid you’ll have to ask her. The whole day has been a complete whirl for me. I can barely believe it’s happened.’
Then as the policemen were fretting to go off and pick up Azedine and Farouk, he continued garrulously: ‘You know, I feel a million miles away from where I was when I woke up this morning, with my mother-in-law dying and then this thing, and the situation at the company to sort out and the funeral and . . . I mean, have you ever had the feeling that things are completely unreal and . . .’
The portly Marangoni was staring at him through the domestic gloom with such piercing eyes that he stopped short. ‘In fact, I’d better hurry,’ he said. ‘There are all the people to invite to the funeral.’
17
‘Mo,’ his wife whispered through the candlelight. He raised his head and, before turning to the door, exchanged another of those looks of intense sympathy with Antonella. Between them, the corpse now held flowers in her hands and had been doused in a scent that mingled promiscuously with the wax of polished floor and furniture. Then a gloriously pompous clock began to chime out midnight. Already it was another day.
‘Mo!’
Remembering to cross himself as he moved out of the presence of the corpse (or was that rather overdoing it?), he went to her at the door. She was in her night-dress already.
‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’ Paola’s small eyes were bright in candle-gloom that just picked out a sacred ceramic heart bleeding from a watching Christ on the wall, the kind of bric-a-brac that would be in the bin just as soon as was decently feasible.
I’ve been waiting more than an hour,’ she protested. ‘I mean, that’s why we’re staying here tonight, right?’
There was a bloom, Morris noted, on her young skin which quite possibly suggested she had already brought herself off once or twice, an idea that both depressed and excited him.
‘I didn’t expect your sister to stay.’
‘Who cares if she does? You don’t have to impress her, do you? What’s wrong with you?’
‘But . . .’
‘You’re not planning to sit up all night with a stiff, are you? Mamma’s dead. It makes no difference to her.’
While Morris was still some way from actually believing in God, he did feel that a certain respect for tradition (as distinguished from its cheap wall-hung souvenirs) was both decorous and, in a young woman, becoming.
‘I don’t want to offend anybody,’ he said.
Across the thickly odoured room, Paola called: ‘We’re going to take a short break now. Well be down later.’
Antonella didn’t so much as respond. Again, Morris reflected that given the extraordinary double whammy she’d been hit with today, his sister-in-law was behaving with remarkable poise, even nobility. Climbing the stairs ahead of him, his wife lifted her night-dress over a perfect backside, wiggled, and whispered: ‘Lick it.’ Morris flinched.
Stress, of course, is supposed to inhibit sexual performance. Apart from his growing desire to be close to Antonella, one thing that had stopped Morris from leaving the corpse and rushing upstairs was his concern that he might not be able to satisfy the expectations that in a different mood earlier on in the day he himself had so frivolously aroused. But in the end the old four-poster bed in the deliciously sombre room did for him what Paola’s buttocks pressed into his face halfway up the stairs could not. The thought of the years Massimina had slept in this heavy feather mattress beside her mother, first as a little girl when her father died, then as an adolescent; the thought of those breasts slowly budding, hairs softly forming, while the old woman beside her, now dead downstairs, gradually withered and decayed; and then the thought that he in some marvellous way had appropriated all this, had almost swallowed it up somehow, as Zeus had supposedly swallowed the whole universe, or been swallowed up by it in some ultimate form of communion and sacrifice - these ideas could not help but give him the kind of erection that was all in the end dear Paola - so innocently really - required of him.
On his back as she laboured away above him, he sucked in the dusty smell of the old coverlet and stared at the family photo on the bedside table w
here Mamma was only forty-odd, the elder sisters in their teens, and dear Mimi a rather chubby pre-pubescent schoolgirl. How he wished he could have known her then! Everything innocent and all ahead of them. It wasn’t so much a regret he felt as an intense desire to be other, which was somehow gratifying in itself. Approaching orgasm, he remembered that the first time he had ever made love in his whole life had been with Mimi immediately after killing Genital Giacomo and his girlfriend, as tonight he somehow felt it was her he was embracing after dispatching Bobo.
Except that with that first love there had been no contraceptive, but a fuller, more trusting intimacy.
‘Mimi!’
In the moonlit afterwards, Paola asked: ‘Mo, what did you do between eight-thirty and ten o’clock?’
‘Sorry?’ He had just remembered he was supposed to be up early to meet Kwame. The truth was there was just too much going on. He needed a secretary.
‘You called me about quarter to nine. You called the police about ten. What were you doing in between? You know he was assaulted or abducted or whatever around nine-thirty.’
‘Heavens, you don’t think I did it!’
She said nothing.
‘I went to Villa Caritas,’ he said indignantly. ‘And if you must know, the police already have their suspects. Apparently Bobo fired two of the immigrants last night. The inspector obviously thinks they were responsible. He says it would explain why they took his car.’
‘Oddio!’ she said quietly.
Then nothing. He had expected she would want to talk more about this, to hear the details. But she was strangely silent and while this disturbed Morris, he didn’t feel it would be wise to volunteer any information. What, after all, could she know?
Just as he was drifting into sleep, she rolled over to him and whispered: ‘It was pretty weird you calling me Mimi, by the way.’
‘What!’ It took a moment for alarm to sharpen in the mists of gathering drowsiness.
‘Actually, I rather liked it. There’s something, I don’t know, sexy about thinking the other person is imagining someone else. Next time I’ll call you something different. I’ll pretend I’m having it off with Bobo or something. What do you think?’
What Morris thought was that no fate could be bad enough for someone with a mind like his wife’s, because if he had been able to marry his first love he would never, never have left her or betrayed her or played these kinds of sick games with her all his life long. Turning away, he snuggled down in the sheets where Mimi had once slept and again tried to imagine her smell, her voice. Perhaps salvation lay quite simply in making her a constant presence, to advise and guide him in what looked like being a very long road ahead.
Tomorrow he would tell Paola they were moving here permanently. He felt closer to her here.
18
There is an extent, of course, to which flagrancy is the best method of concealment, a sort of hiding things in the light itself, while the suspicious parent, partner or detective pokes about in the shadows. So one does not look for one’s husband’s billets-doux in the papers on top of the sideboard, because one imagines he will have the good sense, and shame, to keep them tucked away in the bottom of some trunk somewhere. Nor does one search for stolen car and corpse in the line of tightly parked vehicles directly opposite the police station along a busy riverside road.
Or so Morris hoped. For that is where he had told Kwame to park the thing. Only after the burial - itself to be an act of exquisite flagrancy - would the car be abandoned in a more conventional hiding-place deep in the country, where no doubt it would promptly be found.
So just as he had once concealed his kidnap victim on the crowded beach of Rimini, Morris now hoped to slot this again unfortunate and certainly unpremeditated crime into two of the classical focal points of Italian life: the car park and the cemetery.
Coming downstairs at six o’clock, he made a coffee for poor Antonella and took it into the darkened soggiotno. He looked into the coffin, sighed at what he saw there, said it was important to find the will in case there were any particular instructions for her funeral, and heard Antonella promise she would get it from the safe at home. Good. First thing, though, he suggested, was that she should phone the police to hear if there had been any developments. Pushing wisps of unwashed hair from her face, she came out into the hallway and, in what was a still-uncracked dawn, phoned. Morris waited beside her, hoping she would interpret his anxiety as sympathetic concern. Putting the receiver down, she began to weep.
Morris had his arm round her.
They’ve found him?’ He held his breath.
‘An anonymous phone call,’ she sobbed.
‘What?’
‘Saying he’d got what he deserved.’
Still holding her, Morris simply stared through the gloom of his future home. How could there have been a phone call? Why was there always a wild card in every pack, always someone more perverted than oneself?
In the car, he called directory enquiries and dialled a number, forgetting of course that Stan would never be up at this hour. There was the shamefully poor Italian of his answering machine. Morris had just started to leave a message when a sleepy voice said: ‘Hi, gee, it’s early.’
Morris excused himself. He’d been up all night and it hadn’t occurred to him. Then he explained that Signora Trevisan, Antonella’s mother, had died and that Antonella had asked him to tell Stan that they would have to suspend lessons until further notice. He himself would pay off any outstanding lessons. How much was it?
Stan apparently consulted a diary, improbable though this seemed. A hundred and forty thousand for four lessons.
Outrageous, Morris thought, hanging up. Thirty-five thousand an hour! Incredible! When he himself had never asked more than twenty-five, despite being an infinitely better teacher.
‘Wasn’t I, cara?’ he asked. He had started talking to her even before he picked up the phone. But Mimi was silent today, and it occurred to Morris how feminine this was, this only talking when she wanted to, this wilful muteness followed by unexpected interference, this making him miss her for so long, then whispering something when he least expected it, so that, like a god, she had complete control.
‘You do appreciate,’ he said, ‘that I would never have killed Bobo if you hadn’t told me to.’
Still he got no reply.
It was you I made love to last night,’ he went on. ‘I was looking at your photo. I called your name.’
Apparently she was unimpressed. The hell with her then. Morris put the phone down. At the same time, he thought that if he couldn’t actually buy or steal her portrait from the Uffizi, then perhaps he might be able to commission some passable artist to do a copy. Certainly it was the kind of painting that would look well in Casa Trevisan, and infinitely preferable to bleeding Jesuses. He would mention the matter to Forbes.
‘What’ - he picked up the phone again, driving fast up the Valpantena - ‘do you actually think of your sister? Come on, Mimi, I mean, we would never have got into any of that kinky stuff, would we? We were such simple lovers. Whey can’t she just have a child and settle down? The way you wanted to. I would love to be a father, Mimi.’
Very faintly, through the receiver, the voice said: ‘Mora, she is having a child.’
Morris was so shocked he had to pull over to the side of the road. For a moment he stared at the phone, then thought that in the remote event that the police were following him they might find this suspicious, think he’d dumped the body here, or was meeting somebody or something. He pulled out again in the path of a truck, and glancing in his mirror at the irate driver realised it was Doorways coming for their wine, which might well not be ready with the immigrants fired. But Morris was so excited he hardly cared.
‘How can she be?’ he asked. ‘Since when? She always insisted on using contraceptives.’ Then he remembered the times he’d played various games with his fingers.
But like an oracle Massimina was not to be quizzed. In fact it was p
recisely in this cryptic, sibylline style that the voice’s authenticity lay. Who would ever believe in a ghost, an apparition that just chatted to you? The Madonna, the goddess, appeared and disappeared - a sort of distillation of one’s experiences with the world in general, here now, gone now. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Her words were fragments plucked out of the gale of contingency, fragments from which one constructed the implied whole. Morris, Morris thought with some satisfaction, was thus plugged in to a long and honourable cultural tradition.
And Paola was pregnant. Very soon Morris was going to be a very happy fellow indeed.
Forbes was writing on the big table in the kitchen. He wore at least three sweaters and an overcoat against the freezing cold, while the young Ramiz shivered opposite, munching stale bread. On entering, Morris experienced the feeling of the father who has been absent precisely when needed. These people had been cut adrift yesterday morning and he hadn’t been there to give them help or guidance. Immediately, even as he crossed the threshold, he dictated three sharp beginning-of-the-day orders to himself: he must sort out these people who depended on him; he must get things straight with his wife about living in the Trevisan household and having a decent family; most of all, having committed this murder, he must exploit it to the full to establish a successful, generous, well-ordered and solidly based life, both social and commercial. He must become a public figure.
Good.’
If ever he, Morris Duckworth, lost sight of these goals, he would be no more than flotsam in a storm, dross in a slip-stream, tossed and blown from one police interrogation to the next, lost in the maze of his paltry misdemeanours.
Worse, he would have killed Mimi for nothing.
Leaning over Forbes’s shoulder he read: Tor the serious and sentient student eager to absorb Renaissance culture in situ . . . . Just five miles from the splendid city of Verona, Professor Forbes’s School of Italian Art is situated in the suggestive Villa Catullus, where the motto that rules our daily life and vision of human creativity is gratia placendi. Students attending the four-week courses will . . .’
