Mimi's Ghost (18 page)

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 gratifying 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!'

At which it occurred to Morris that of course cemeteries were where one buried people. Particularly if you wanted to bury them with style. And if anybody knew the cemetery, it was Kwame.

Signora Trevisan was in the
salotto,
watched over by Antonella. Stepping in discreetly, Morris noted how extraordinarily well the coffin blended in with the rest of the room, as if only now the inspiration behind the heavy mahogany décor, the marble door surrounds, grim credenza and gloomy chandelier was at last revealed: to host a wake, to welcome a great black-lacquered casket with bellied sides and brass fittings. Perhaps, Morris thought, a whole tradition of Latin furnishings had been developed around the wake. Perhaps no provincial
salotto
was truly complete until it had its coffin. Certainly he felt a sense of propriety and repose, taking one of the rigidly straight-backed chairs and bowing his head in silent prayer, face in hands. Going through the motions had always been one of his greatest pleasures.

Then it would do no harm of course to impress poor Antonella, to whom at some point he would be obliged to report on the way he was managing the company. For a moment he tried to use the breather to make the necessary plans. If the body was found before he could bury it? If it wasn't found, how to bury it? Was this cemetery idea feasible? But as in the cafe an hour before, serious decisions proved impossible. His mind just would not focus on the sequence of actions and precautions necessary to get him through. His intelligence was not of that variety. All he could really do was to react, to feel the rope trembling beneath his feet and take the next step, while what he had of wit was engaged not in the action at all, but in watching himself doing it, in reflecting upon it, in hoping all would turn out for the best. The fact was, Morris thought, that the qualities you most despised in yourself - whimsy, spontaneity - were also the things you were most proud of.

Restless, he peeped out from between his fingers as he always had in church with Mother beside him. Antonella stood up and went to draw the room's heavy curtains against the last of winter twilight. Shadows rushed as candlelight stabbed out in the dark by head and toe of the deceased. Dropping his hands and glancing up as if after prayer, Morris noticed how Antonella's face as she returned to her seat looked truly fine in the softly lambent glow, noble in her suffering. Apparently bereavement became her. He smiled sadly at his sister-in-law across her mother's corpse.

Antonella burst into tears.

“Povera Mamma, povera Mamma,
and now I can't even mourn her properly for worrying about Bobo.
O Dio!'
The young woman sobbed, voice a little slurred (from sedatives they'd given her perhaps?).
“Povera, povera Mamma
, she was such a wonderful woman.'

‘Si,' Morris gravely agreed. ‘Sì, a truly wonderful woman.' But it was interesting, he reflected, that nobody else was in the room. For being so marvellous, old Signora Trevisan had hardly made a great deal of friends, had she? The more fool her, then, to have rejected Morris's friendship when it had been offered, to have spurned his perfectly appropriate courtship of her youngest and by no means brilliant daughter. No doubt the old bitch was now plummeting down to the first circle, where crimes of arrogance and presumption were most properly dealt with.

Antonella looked up from her tears. They exchanged glances, and it seemed the day's constant see-saw of exaltation and despair had left Morris hyperaware of every detail: the honest, untrimmed bushiness of her eyebrows; the lank modesty of her hair, just pinned back behind one rosy ear. He felt he had never really looked at her before, and the very intensity of the looking, rather than its object, somehow excited him,

Of the three, should he perhaps have married Antonella?

‘Was there any blood?' she now forced herself to ask, voice trembling. ‘In the office, I mean.'

Morris hesitated. ‘Only a little,' he answered truthfully. ‘On the floor, by the desk. Just a smear really. As if somebody had scraped their elbow there or something.'

‘O
Dio. O Dio, Di O Dio!
Why does everything have to happen at once?'

‘I know,' Morris said, and couldn't have agreed more. If Kwame ratted on him he was quite dead.

The inspector's talking to Paola in the kitchen.'

‘I know,' Morris repeated. To cheer her up, he said: ‘Bobo must have put up quite a terrific fight though. You ought to be proud of him. The office was complete havoc.'

Antonella burst into tears again. She bent forward and sobbed in her hands. The candles flickered, as if in response to her emotion. Shadows slithered back and forth across her face, caressing her slim forearms, the heavy bosom of her black dress. In her coffin Signora Trevisan's stern wax nose seemed to rise and fall.

Morris stared, mesmerised by the visual richness of it all. He was an artist in the end, that was his problem: the carnival, the wake, the nuptial bed. They were all the same to him.

‘Comfort her,' Mimi whispered then.

Immediately there was the smell of her perfume, and the vision before him was as if transformed into a completed picture: Antonella, the coffin, Signora Trevisan, they were oil on canvas. The perfume made him part of it.

‘You must comfort her, Morri.'

Mimi! Morris pushed his chair back. Moving round the coffin on its trestles , he was already lifting his hand to lay it on his sister-in-law's shoulder, when Paola called him from the door. The picture disintegrated into mere people and places, faces and furniture.

They want to talk to you.' His wife's eyes glinted in the pool of dark beyond the candle.

“Va bene.
I'm coming.'

When he got to the door, she whispered: I told them you phoned me at nine-fifteen. This morning.'

Morris stared at her. Why do you say that?'

She opened her brown eyes in a sudden intense complicity. ‘Nine-fifteen,' she repeated. Half an hour later than the truth.

Unnerved. Morris shrugged his shoulders and crossed to the dining-room, where two men in light raincoats were sitting around the huge wooden dining-table in the way people will when they wish to emphasise their outsideness, to maximise a sense of official intrusion. Even before the bulky figure to the right turned to greet him, Morris recognised Inspector Marangoni. Of old. For a second he closed his eyes. He simply couldn't believe it. It was like drawing the hanged man from a seventy-two-card tarot pack. For heaven's sake, surely the Verona police force must have more than one inspector!

“Buona sera,'
Morris said at his most ingratiating, but knowing his skin had drained to paper. Beside the inspector, the same thin, olive-skinned assistant was already scribbling in a notebook.

‘I''m truly sorry,' Marangoni said, ‘to have to meet you once again in such sad and dramatic circumstances.'

Sì, sì, è vero.'
Then, too quickly, Morris added: ‘Actually, as you must be aware, I've already told all I know to the carabinieri, this morning on the spot. I don't, er, see what else . . .'

Marangoni, Morris noticed, still had the kind of bad teeth that suggested either that police salaries were too low, or his personal priorities all wrong. Unless it was some form of intimidation by grossness. The lower left incisor was completely black. Lighting a cigarette in a room where the absence of ashtrays made it clear nobody indulged, the heavy man explained: The carabinieri in Quinto are responsible for the
territorio extraurbano.
The polizia are responsible for the city. Given that this may be a kidnap aimed at a family resident within the official confines of the city, both forces will naturally be involved,'

‘Ah.' So not only, Morris thought, did he have a corpse on his hands, a stolen car and the kind of accomplice who was probably visible from satellite photographs, but there were now actually two police forces looking for him: carabinieri and polizia. Still, he was suddenly pleased it was Marangoni again. Any
déjà vu
was welcome if it brought him close to Mimi.

‘I have to repeat everything then?' he said wearily, and wearily aware of the irony.

‘Sit down.' Marangoni gestured condescendingly to a chair which very soon would be Morris's own. ‘Actually, we have the main facts from our colleagues. My interest is in just one or two small additional questions.'

Morris sat opposite the inspector, while his impassive assistant continued to write with a rapidity quite unjustified by the very little that had been said. For a moment Morris began to wonder whether something in clothes or behaviour wasn't visibly giving him away. He looked down at his hands on the table to check there was no blood in the fingernails.

Only to find, much worse, that wrists and fingers were trembling.

‘Two questions, to be precise. First, shortly before whatever happened happened, Signor Posenato telephoned the police.'

‘Davvero!'
Morris was almost too quick to be surprised. The carabinieri didn't tell me that.'

‘Because they don't know.' Marangoni grinned fatly. He had certainly put on weight since the Massimina business. ‘Because Posenato called us, the police, not them.'

To say what? Presumably this solves the case.' Only as he said it did he realise what a trap he had just avoided.

‘No, you don't understand. The call was interrupted.'

‘Ah, ah, I see. That would explain why the phone had been smashed.'

‘Yes, but the odd thing is that the operator who took the call said that Posenato's voice was not particularly urgent.'

Marangoni paused, and his piggy eyes were staring straight into Morris's now. But to no avail, for Morris was beginning to relax. It was like riding a bicycle in the end. Once you'd got the hang of it, you never forgot. Even after years, it all came back in a moment or two. His features slowly arranged themselves into a perfect image of puzzlement. ‘He wasn't urgent. And so?'

Then when the call was interrupted and something in the room happened, Posenato shouted out: “Are you mad?” or something of the kind, indicating that he was more surprised than frightened.'

Morris shook his head in apparently bewildered reflection. The inspector's assistant had now stopped writing and was rather unnervingly smiling at him through glasses that caught dim light from the chandelier. Morris noted that the man had a ridiculously tropical tie on, all lemons and bananas, the kind of thing you only wore to scream that you didn't consider yourself the loser you obviously were. Feeling on top again, Morris decided he would install wall lighting and never buy a bulb of less than sixty watts.

‘This would seem to suggest that he knew his assailant,' Marangoni concluded.

Morris offered a pantomime of hesitant agreement. ‘Could be.'

The inspector leaned suddenly and heavily across the table: ‘Now I want you to tell me who that assailant was, Signor Duckworth.'

Morris was alarmed. He hadn't been expecting such sudden confidence and aggression. To gain time, he said: ‘So you don't think it is another kidnap?'

This left Marangoni a little exposed in his position of attack across the table.

‘No,' he said.
‘Per niente.''

‘In which case it would be a case for the carabinieri, not the police,' Morris managed, as if surprising himself with this irrelevant thought.

But Marangoni was having none of it. ‘Signor Duckworth' -he put all the stress on the second syllable -'I asked you who the assailant was,'