Juggling the Stars (15 page)

‘What on earth did you do with the tracksuit?' he demanded.

‘I threw it away.'

‘But why, for God's sake?' Anger helped him to feign the necessary surprise. He twisted his head round sharply on the pillow to catch her grinning. Strangle the girl immediately, he suddenly thought. Now. That would settle it. Dump the body safely and then he could just cruise through it, pick up the ransom and go back to his flat in Verona with no more of this awful fuss.

‘Why though? You're always droning on about saving money and then you go and chuck out something perfectly good.'

Strangle the girl.
It was strange, but his whole body suddenly filled with heat at this terrible thought. (And when he had been beginning to like her. When he had even had slight inklings of what love might be - that time she pressed her thigh against him with a wriggle and giggle walking along the sea front.)
Strangle her
. Nothing easier. And who would care in the end? (Hadn't life definitely been easier when Mother was dead, for all his ostentatious mourning, for all if he'd ever loved anyone it was her? The conflict had gone out of everything, the sense of guilt, of Mother-wouldn't-like-that. He'd felt freer. Perhaps all lovers in the end would be happier if their loved ones died.) Kill her. She was a nobody. Failed all her exams at school. (When had Morris ever failed an exam and look where it had got him?) Plus she deserved it. That letter she'd written to her mother (‘… perhaps he does lie sometimes …'), plus going and dumping the tracksuit like this! Morris felt his mind suddenly slipping into a nausea of fury that was also the nausea of his sunburn and the unbreathably stale air in this darkened, fly-filled cheapest of cheap cheap rooms. He could easily do it, he was much stronger than her. Just …

‘You said I didn't look nice in it. I only want to wear things that please you from now on Morri. I... '

What was he going to do with her at the end anyway? Imagine they gave him the money, what …

‘So I did it for you, you see.'

She rubbed in the lotion, knelt on the bed beside his tortured back. She rubbed softly over the tops of his shoulders where it was worst. ‘You have a gorgeous back,' she whispered, bending to his ear.

He shivered and was hot together, flexing his damp fingers where they lay above his head. Her voice became husky. 'I'd so much like to make love to you Morri, if only we were …' He didn't move. He seemed to be getting hotter and hotter.

'I'm not going to dinner with those two others. He was staring at you all the time.'

‘Whatever you say, boss,' she laughed and her slim fingers slithering in oil down his back slipped inside the top of his bermuda shorts. His body tensed to a cord of steel.

‘Morri …'

Any moment now, if she just …The heat in his body was intolerable. If she …

There was a knock at the door. Morris twisted over and sat up straight and sharp as if caught in the act. She likewise, shooting off the bed, so that her wrist caught him in the jaw.

‘Avanti!' Who in God's name was it? Police? He brought his hand up to his face. One of her rings must have caught him and his mouth was bleeding. ‘Avanti, prego.' And Sandra came into the room with boyfriend Giacomo.

Having thrown away the
Arena
, Morris had returned to the beach with three cardboard cartons of zabaglione to find another development he hadn't expected. (And he'd considered himself so prepared, so sharp.) Sandra's boyfriend. Sandra's
Italian
boyfriend. Morris had imagined that when she spoke of ‘we', she had been referring to herself and her English boyfriend, or girlfriend, or at the very worst a whole group of English people, none of which would have been the least bit dangerous. Such people were unlikely to know that Massimina Trevisan was supposed to have been kidnapped. But an Italian boyfriend was different. And especially one who seemed to have more eyes for Massimina than for his own companion. (Morris didn't actually think Massimina was quite so attractive as to deserve all this attention, though her breasts were certainly impressive - and that was precisely the department poor Sandra was weak in.)

Giacomo was obviously considerably older than Sandra, and smaller. He walked with a serious limp, wearing long trousers to hide whatever problem it was he had with his legs, and his dapper, inevitable Italian moustache was grizzled and grey. He snapped his fingers every few moments and rubbed his hands together and his conversation which dominated everybody else's, was a constant stream of jokes, witty remarks and innuendos darting around the borderline of the acceptable.

Finally it came out he was a photographer, an art photographer in fact, which explained why Miss Green-Belt Plummy-Voice Hadley had taken up with such a dwarf, Morris thought, though the greater part of his mind was still wondering whether, having found the tracksuit, the police would have the sense to go and check the hotels and pensioi! in Vicenza or whether, considering it a kidnap, they wouldn't bother. If only his letter had arrived. And if only the letter itself had been a bit more serious; if only he hadn't hung back, hedging bets, giving himself the let-out it might just be a practical joke. Because if they thought that, they might still follow up the ‘runaway' hypothesis, which meant checking hotels. Damn and damn.

‘From Napoli,' Giacomo was saying, eating the ice-cream Morris had bought for himself. ‘But this will be the first time I've been back to the old breeding ground for a good ten years or so. I live in Verona now.'

Verona? Morris turned in one split second to stone, then waded into the conversation like a bull in a china shop. Before Massimina could swallow her zabaglione and start asking whether they had acquaintances in common, he said desperately:

‘And how long have you been travelling then?'

Giacomo was a shade unsure for a moment, given the patently false, forced-interest tone of Morris's voice, whether the question indicated mere social incompetence or downright rudeness. But Sandra's Italian wasn't up to nuances and tones of voice.

‘A week now,' she said. ‘Four days in Venice, a couple in Ravenna …'

Morris breathed again. They'd left before the story broke. Get out now and it was plainest sailing. Sandra was saying how much she'd adored the mosaics in Ravenna, ‘really breathtaking,' she suddenly finished in English, turning to Morris. For it was becoming embarrassing the glances Giacomo was throwing at Massimina's breasts and the part where her lime-green costume tapered up from crotch to hip.
Porco!
His face had a grin of typical Latin lasciviousness, the little crumpled man who can never prove himself often enough. The exact opposite of himself, Morris thought. He could perfectly well do without women in the end. A slave to no animal urges.

'i'm sorry,' Morris said, bringing up a hand to cover his forehead, 'but I'm afraid I feel rather ill. It must be the sun.' And to Massimina. ‘Mimi, I know it's a bore but I'm going to have to go and lie down in the cool inside. Coming?'

‘Meet us for dinner,' Giacomo said brightly.

‘Okay,' Morris agreed, ‘seven o'clock at the bottom of the pier.' Just to be rid of them. And he propelled Massimina back through the city to their pensione.

‘How the hell did he find the place?' Morris whispered fiercely once they were in the back of the car. Faced with the fait accompli of the two of them actually arriving in their room in the pensione there had been nothing for it but to accept the invitation to dinner in a country restaurant. Morris felt as one who must run some awful gauntlet before he can breathe again. The whole evening, holding his breath.

‘I'd told Sandra where we were staying. While you were off buying the ice-creams. ‘

‘And what in God's name do you mean telling everybody where we're staying?'

‘Why not?' she said brightly.

Why not indeed.

It had taken Massimina more than half an hour to apply her new make-up, purchased that afternoon. Against his better, that is his aesthetic judgement, Morris had advised her to buy brilliant colours, sharp reds and blues, thinking it would look common and take her even further away from her normal self. And instead, she applied them so carefully and well as to highlight her natural prettiness quite perfectly, so that her face had taken on the classic lines of that flattering picture they'd published the first day in the newspaper and would no doubt reprint every time they mentioned the case. Morris felt exasperated (he'd changed her, yes, but in the wrong direction). Then he could have sworn pastel shades were the thing for her camellia skin with its curious milkiness and breadcrumb freckles, and here she was looking an angel with these neon reds and blues attracting all the wrong kind of attention to herself. Giacomo's attention. A Veronese.

'I suppose it hasn't occurred to you how easily it could get back to your mother where we're staying.' She was wearing too much perfume too. It seemed to fill the car. ‘Has it?'

‘No,' she laughed, hugging herself into his arm. ‘But there's no need to get neurotic, Morri. And then who cares if it does get back to her? We'll tell her it's too late and I'm pregnant and we'll have to marry.'

‘We're eloping,' she said out loud then to the two in the front of the car. ‘My mamma didn't like Morrees but we decided to run away anyway.'

Morris's fingers clenched tight into the skin of his thighs till the blood sang with anger.

‘Shut up!' he hissed.

Giacomo's car spun quickly along the narrow country roads up into the Apennines with the sun throwing sharp shadows amongst the peaks. He wanted to take them to a restaurant on the steep terraced slopes under San Marino where he had been before and eaten well.

‘We're running away too, aren't we, Giacomo?' Sandra said, ruffling the coal-grey curly hair at the back of his neck.

‘Proprio cost,' Giacomo said. ‘Turtledoves all,' and despite the curving road he turned to the back of the car and winked.

Which meant he'd ditched his poor wife, the bastard, Morris thought. Like Dad with Mother. How long after her death before that Eileen woman was giggling downstairs on the couch, trying to wriggle Dad's hand out of her pants. And Cartuccio too, most probably. Wife-dead indeed! How the hell was Morris supposed to check up on that? Unless he'd killed her. Most probably that. Morris watched over one precipice after another as the car wound tightly up into the hills. If only you could tilt the wheel a bit and somehow manage to get out before … but the car was a two door and he was in the back. (Was he going mad? What had he done in the end: run off with her, written a letter, lied to the police. It was their fault for making it all so easy. Otherwise he would never have started.)

San Marino floated into view. Picture-book battlements and pink sunset castles rose hewn and cobbled a thousand steep feet above, like some corny illustration in
Lord of the Rings
, or a backdrop for a TV costume show. Relax, relax, play it as it comes. The tyres scrunched across the gravel surface of the restaurant car park and they bundled out to eat under a panoply of vines, the distant twilight view of San Marino half blocked by the silhouette of an illegally parked Dutch camper.

'There's a certain kind of tourist one just has to hate,' Sandra said in her plummy English to Morris, indicating the camper. She worked at the BBC as a production assistant apparently. Her father was a political analyst for Radio Four. (Surprise, surprise.)

‘I know what you mean,' He was desperately trying to keep half an ear on Massimina's conversation in Italian with Giacomo, ready to intervene at the slightest hint of address exchanging. But perhaps because of his own delicate situation, Giacomo seemed to be steering thankfully clear of any attempt to find common acquaintances. He hadn't even had occasion to ask her surname yet, so far as Morris could tell. And why should he ask her? Did he know Stan's surname? Marion's?

'They come all the way down from Holland,' she went on, ‘and then just spend the whole time on the beach eating pizza and blocking the views with their damnable caravans.'

Giacomo had put a friendly hand on Massimina's naked shoulder for a moment. No, it was really incredible the liberties people took. Morris would never have done that with somebody else's girlfriend. Sandra, for example. Sometimes he seemed to be the only one around with any morals, with any sense of who was whose. The older man whispered something in the girl's ear, but that would scarcely be a request for her surname would it, Morris thought.

'And then if they do go to a museum they just browse around for ten minutes and think they've seen the whole thing - Italy. What they never do is actually try to soak in the real art of the way these people live and how that relates to the glorious past. The mosaics at Ravenna for example.'

Morris poured himself another glass of wine. He was drinking too much. He must be careful. The thing to remember was that he was better than these people, genuinely better smarter and quicker. In every way. Mentally morally. So there was no need to be nervous.

'For you?' He offered the bottle.

At least it was exciting.

‘Yes, please,' Sandra nodded and drained her glass. ‘No savoir faire at all. All beer, beach and TV and no consideration for others. I often think the most important thing about artistic people is their sensibility towards others. I mean, they're more likely to be considerate because …'

Bullshit! Look how considerate gammy Giacomo was being. What the hell did she know about art anyway with that silly gauche mauve dress cut to a theoretical cleavage and geometric earrings like parts of some intellectual puzzle the well-to-do buy in Harrods for their children's Christmas stockings. Give a girl a plummy voice, a hockey stick before she's ten and a horse at puberty and a few years later you can bank on it she'll think she has carte blanche to talk about art till the cows come home.