Mimi's Ghost (24 page)

‘My apologies,' Morris begged, for he had rather impolitely burst out laughing. ‘I was just. . .'

Fendtsteig raised his eyes to treat Morris to one of his rare Gestapo gazes of unblinking eyes behind cold lenses; lenses, Morris now noticed, which were not as clean as they might have been.

‘I was just thinking what a funny collocation “fell to blows” was.'

Fendtsteig looked down again. Probably the poor fellow didn't even know what ‘collocation' meant. Then exactly as the man began to read, Morris said: ‘Sorry, please do go on.' Fendtsteig ignored it.

‘. . . killed him, perhaps by accident, given the kind of scuffle indicated by the disarray of the furniture and the lack of blood that a conventional weapon would have caused. But perhaps not. Perhaps that was set up. Certainly a number of items had been moved before we arrived, despite your claims to the contrary. In any event, your fingerprints were found in a very unusual position on the upturned chair, on the desktop and on various file drawers.'

What, Morris wondered, was a very unusual position for a fingerprint on a desktop? The kind that Farouk and Azedine would have left? He wouldn't have been surprised if Bobo and his improbable Bimbetta hadn't left a good few themselves.

Could Bobo have actually fired the immigrants because
they
found
him!?
It was becoming harder and harder to concentrate on what the carabiniere was saying.

‘You then put Signor Posenato in his own car. You drove a very short distance and hid the vehicle. Perhaps in a local garage. You then walked back to the scene of the crime and, seeing that nobody had as yet discovered it, called the police from your car phone. It was now ten o'clock. The following night, you left the house in Quinzano after your wife was already asleep, returned to the car and drove it away somewhere to dispose of the body. You then drove it back to its nearby hiding-place, got back into your own car and returned home. That is the end of our version of events. I would now like to invite you to confirm or deny them.'

Good. Morris waited.

‘Perfavore,
Signor Duckvorse.'

‘Colonnello Fendtsteig, please don't feel you have to hurry things for me. If there are one or two other crimes you'd like to accuse me of at the same time, do go ahead.'

The pale man waited, then said quietly: This is a serious matter, Signor Duckvorse. I would be grateful if you could treat it as such.'

‘Worth,' Morris said.

Fendtsteig looked up from his notes but only to gaze past Morris through the window.

Morris sighed. For a moment he almost wished he smoked, since apart from the histrionic effect and the opportunities for playing for time, lighting a cigarette would now have given him an excellent chance to show that his hands weren't shaking one bit. Because they had nothing on him at all! It was all pure speculation, and quite wrong for the most part. Your argument ‘presumably had to do with the Trevisan inheritance'! Indeed! Perhaps in a local garage! Perhaps! Not to mention the fact that they couldn't have found his prints on the chair. It was impossible. Or did they think he was going to be so stupid as to say: Look, I wiped them off with a wet-wipe?

Eventually, he said: ‘Colonnello Fendtsteig, do you ever actually communicate with your colleagues in the polizia? You know? I mean, it would save a lot of time and I wouldn't have to try to remember what I've already said and to whom.'

‘Signore Duckvorse, I asked you to confirm or deny what I read out to you.'

‘Because, as I explained to the polizia yesterday, Bobo fired two of our immigrant workers the night before he was killed

‘You admit, then, that he was killed?'

‘What?' But Morris knew he had slipped up.

‘You know that he is dead?'

Morris made his eyes wide and puzzled. Speaking, he was very aware of how his tone of voice would come over on the tape-recorder. ‘Oh, I
see.
No, I imagined that since you were so convinced he'd been killed you must have found the body or something.' He waited, but had begun to feel nervous again. Sometimes the ice was so desperately thin, and if he went through it he knew there'd be no coming back up. He breathed deeply, forced himself to think. There is also quite frankly the fact that these two men disappeared immediately afterwards and all the petty cash along with them. From Bobo's office. The safe behind the fuse box.'

Fendtsteig didn't immediately reply. He studied his notes. Morris forced himself to be patient. The man obviously cultivated this disturbing habit of avoiding all eye contact and generally refusing to engage in a properly personal conversation. The thing was, Morris thought, to treat it as the pathetic ruse it was and not to be thrown by it.

‘Naturally,' Fendtsteig finally remarked, turning a page, ‘naturally the police informed us of all this. But we are not impressed. The two men were seen leaving the area of Villa Caritas at five in the morning, whereas Signor Posenato spoke to a number of workers arriving for the morning shift at seven. So he was still alive then. As for the petty cash, we have only your word for it.'

It was intriguing, though, Morris thought, that the police hadn't yet told their colleagues that Bobo had called them at nine. Should he? For a moment he hesitated, then suddenly felt impatient again. Enough was enough. It was time to put an end to this charade and get on home for breakfast. He said: ‘Colonnello Fendtsteig, I, Morris Duckworth, categorically deny killing my brother-in-law, Roberto Posenato. I deny being on bad terms with him. On the contrary, we had an excellent business relationship. Over the last few months we have turned the business round and we were extremely pleased with ourselves. I deny going straight from my mother-in-law's house to the company. I stopped in the bar in the piazza in Quinzano, and then went to what we call Villa Caritas, some way beyond Quinto, where I spoke for some time to one of the immigrants, a certain Kwame, before going on to the company. I categorically deny being engaged last night in anything but my own very private business.'

And that, Morris thought, or at least until they did a little more homework, should be that.

The colonnello left another long pause. Again he consulted his notes, leafing through pink-lined pages. To Morris's left, the window was suddenly less black and glossy. A first filtering of winter light found the profile of a car, the outline of a low building beyond. And something of the institutional squalor of it came home to him: grey lines in grey light, the sort of rectangles and compounds they would be trying to trap him in for ever now. Suddenly he felt deeply afraid. For what he wanted was to be free. Free to drive through the countryside, to help the immigrants, to look at art, to make love to his wife, to bring up his child. Were they unreasonable ambitions? Under his breath, he whispered: ‘Mimi!'

‘Mi scusi?
You wanted to say something?'

‘No,' Morris said.

Fendtsteig ran a tooth over a thin lower lip. ‘First: we have no confirmation that you went to the bar in Quinzano. Nobody remembers you going in there that morning. Second: the witness who is supposed to have talked to you at Villa Caritas was not convincing. He was unable to say how long you spoke together, or what about. Third: we have it from your wife, sister-in-law and various workers at Trevisan Wines that you were not on good terms with Signor Posenato. Fourth: there is your long absence of yesterday evening to account for.'

To avoid eye contact this time, Fendtsteig examined the tape-recorder, turned a volume control. It was almost as if they were communicating by fax. Yet the tighter the corner Morris seemed to be getting into, the more determined he became to fight his way out of it. And he began to feel the growing warmth of self-justification. He
had
sat in that bar. He
had
gone to Villa Caritas. And if he had killed Bobo afterwards, he certainly hadn't planned to do so and certainly did not deserve to spend the rest of his life languishing in a prison cell for the fact. He was himself a more attractive and better-educated person than Bobo, or Fendtsteig for that matter, and one presently engaged in various acts of charity, not to mention the religious crisis he was going through. What's more, he had tried to reason with the boy and offered him a perfectly acceptable and even aesthetically pleasing version of the Massimina story which Bobo had refused even to consider.

Morris said: ‘I would be more than happy to go to the bar with you and identify the waitress who served me and describe the boy who passed me the local newspaper. Presumably, you asked if an Englishman had been there and they said no, because my Italian is so good.'

Morris put not a little stress on the word ‘my', as if to suggest that his accent was in fact rather better than Fendtsteig's, the colonnello having doubtless grown up speaking pidgin Kraut in some God-forsaken, snow-buried village above Bozen. As a result of which he quite probably suffered from that appalling Austro-Germanic superiority complex. Morris felt combative. Italian justice would never allow some mean-minded South Tyrolean to condemn him. And ugly to boot. Those moles definitely looked malignant.

‘As for the boy I spoke to at Villa Caritas,' he added, ‘he had been working all night, and in any event, they're all on drugs. Actually, I'm amazed he can remember speaking to me at all. Obviously, what we talked about was the business of Bobo having fired these two workers and then everybody else.'

Fendtsteig pored over his papers, allowing the tape-recorder to pick up nothing more than Morris clearing his throat and the sound of another car pulling into the yard outside. Daylight, mingling with the room's sad fluorescence, was doing nothing, Morris reflected, to improve the colonnello's unshaven complexion. The passing time irritated him. They should put a time clock on the man. Like in chess. Into the silence he tried: ‘Are you ill, Colonnello Fendtsteig?'

‘Prego?'
The man had an ugly ‘r'.

‘You look so pale.'

Fendtsteig chose to ignore him. He looked up and folded his arms, thin face to one side, glasses flashing neon. ‘Please, explain last night,' he said. ‘After which, we have finished.'

Morris hesitated, then thrust back his chair. ‘No, I've had enough of being treated like this. I won't say a word more until I have spoken to a lawyer.'

‘So, we have arrived at the unanswerable question.' Fendtsteig at last managed a smile and looked directly, coldly into Morris's eyes. ‘Or is it that you need time to remember where you were only eight or nine hours ago?'

Meeting that freezing gaze, so perfectly timed, Morris was distinctly aware of having lost the initiative, of having made some awful tactical mistake. He wavered, stood up. ‘Not at all, Colonnello. But if you are so convinced I am guilty, then everything I say will be turned against me.'

Then, as he was getting to his feet, his whole body was swamped with scorching heat. It came up from his groin, fast and prickly, the skin on his hands and cheeks tingled with blood. There was even the thickening of an erection.
If only he
could just solve the whole damn stupid problem by wringing the little
rat's neck!
At the same moment a voice deep inside, as if calling from the bottom of a well, screamed no. The sound swelled and echoed in his head.
No, Morri, no! Don't!
Accompanied by an oppressive darkness. Curtains were being drawn in on either side of the world. Vision was narrowing and narrowing to the last bright glint of Fendtsteig's spectacles.

Swaying on his feet, Morris leaned forward and grabbed at the desk. His hand closed on a great glass paperweight in the shape of a whale. He clutched at it.
No!
her voice was screaming. His head spun.

From a sheet of paper, his fourteenth day in gaol, Morris cut out a cross. More difficult was crucifying Our Lord on it. But he remembered the curious twist the body must have, the curve following through from hips and torso to the head leaning on the left shoulder and then the undulating arms, sinking at the elbow, rising to cruelly nailed hands. Not unlike, he thought, the trained contortions of vines stark in winter sunlight on the Veronese hills. When he turned the hands to leaves his serial-murderer cellmate was most impressed. The face, as it must be, was hers. Androgynous, but identifiable. Morris stared at the nth effort and saw he'd got it right. Perhaps he did have a talent for the visual arts after all. He tucked the top of the cross into a crack above the room's small mirror, then folded the rest of the paper down so that it seemed to divide his reflected face into four small segments around its twin axes of torment. IHS, Certainly Catholicism was more satisfying than his mother's austere Methodism, infinitely richer; and staring at the face he'd drawn, Morris muttered the words he'd learnt at catechism when preparing for his marriage:
‘Ave Maria;
hail, Mary! full of grace, blessed art thou among women.'

‘And blessed,' his psycho-cellmate chimed in, ‘the fruit of your womb, Jesus Christ.'

Morris looked up. The fruit of her womb? He had forgotten that part. The other man's eyes, looking round from the window, were glassily empty. But for Morris the message was only too clear. He had killed the fruit of her womb. In his dear Mimi, he had crucified Christ, even before he could be born. Upon reading the radiant alarm on his face, his cellmate, who it seemed had done away with his whole and remarkably extended family, burst into raucous laughter. The man had a frightening way of blowing out fat cheeks and chuckling for too long over things that weren't funny. Morris, before the cross he had made himself, crossed himself, and fell to his knees. Somehow he would make amends. Indeed, his only real reason for wanting to get out of here, for being alive at all, was to make amends.

But when would he get out? The lawyer, when they finally let him see one, had explained that he hadn't been officially charged as yet, was only being held because if released he might pervert evidence pertaining to a crime. Apparently they could do that for up to six months, though in Italy, Morris often felt, they could do more or less whatever they wanted anyway. And what they wanted most of all of course was for him to tell them what he had been doing that night; indeed they wouldn't let him out until he did, because that would give him the chance, they said, to cook up a story with someone else. His wife for example.