Mimi's Ghost (19 page)

Morris took a deep breath, appeared to hesitate, then seemed to make up his mind: ‘You see, Ispettore,' he said; ‘by the way, it is Ispettore, isn't it, not Colonnello, or something like that? I got very confused with the carabinieri this morning.'

‘Ispettore,' Marangoni said patiently, and obviously felt the moment had come to retreat across the table. ‘Don't concern yourself about that, Signor Duckworth. Just tell us what you think.'

‘I didn't want to offend. No, the point is, Posenato, well, he's the kind of person who has all sorts of enemies. Also he is conducting his business - or rather the Trevisan business; his family, you see, are keeping him out of their own - in the kind of way that, well, I feel disloyal saying this, being part of the set-up myself and so on now, but if it can help Bobo in any possible way then I suppose it has to be said, in the kind of way that could lay him wide open to bribery.'

Having said this, Morris felt like someone who has just run across an entire canyon on nothing more than a washing line.

Maragoni leaned back on his chair and drew on his cigarette, staring intently at Morris, who, irony of ironies, now had to fake his nervousness.

There are various, er, well, illicit practices in the company,' he explained.

The assistant scribbled. Again Marangoni waited, but this time Morris wouldn't oblige.

Patronising and avuncular, the inspector said: ‘That is not entirely unheard of in Italy.'

Morris shrugged his shoulders. ‘I have very little experience of these things, apart from what one reads in the papers.'

‘Just tell me what these illicit practices were.'

Morris took a very melodramatic breath, then didn't plunge. ‘If I say this, does it mean the company will be investigated? Because, I mean, that could lead to its failing.'

That depends.' Marangoni's voice appeared to mix leniency with severity, then came down on the side of the latter. ‘But if you don't tell me what you have to say, you can be quite sure it will be investigated.'

Still Morris wavered. ‘Can I at least have your word that, if it is investigated, you will not inform the rest of the family, and particularly Bobo, I mean Signor Posenato, that it was me who put you on to this.'

‘Yes,' Marangoni was almost too eager. Morris could only reflect what a genius these situations always proved him to be. The only problem now was overkill.

So then he explained that Trevisan Wines had been evading both company tax and VAT for very considerable sums (paying off the officials in the respective collecting offices), that there was also a significant amount of false invoicing, and worst of all that they had been using immigrant labour at night-time for completely unrecorded business, paying neither taxes nor health contributions. To complicate matters, Posenato had been treating these immigrants so badly that Morris had felt obliged on purely human terms to set up a hostel for them to live in, something in which fortunately he had been warmly supported by Signora Posenato who, together with the Church, had kindly supplied a considerable amount of cast-off shoes and clothes. Then last night . . .'

‘Si?'

‘Mi scusi,
I just thought I should let, er, your colleague catch up with his writing.'

‘Just tell me what happened last night.'

‘Last night - and I find it odd that this happened on the very night Signora Trevisan died . . .' Morris stopped as if this curiosity had only just occurred to him. ‘yes, it is odd, isn't it?'

‘Per favore,
Signor Duckworth, last night . . .'

‘Last night Bobo fired all the immigrant workers.'

‘Ah, and why?'

Morris had no difficulty appearing embarrassed.

‘Apparently he found two of them engaging in, er, homosexual practices in his office, early in the morning.'

‘And he fired all of them?'

‘It seems crazy to me too, but he was an irascible person. Or perhaps he felt there was only so long you could continue to get away with something like that.' Morris hesitated. The truth is he had a great aversion to black people.' Then, to his horror, he realised that he had been talking about Bobo in the past tense. For Christ's sake! There was an almost total rebellion of all the muscles about the spine. For a second it was truly as if he were going to crumple. His breath wouldn't come. Looking up, he was perfectly ready to see the handcuffs already opening. Instead, what he read on their faces was merely impatience to hear more. In their imbecile eagerness, neither policeman had noticed. Nor were they taping him. Morris sighed quite audibly, almost theatrically, as though giving them a second chance, the way at chess one might invite an inferior opponent to study the board more carefully before making a hasty move. Had he been their superior he would have fired the both of them at once. Just like that. Never mind the poor immigrants.

Pulling himself together, Morris explained: ‘I had the story from one of the immigrants and from somebody called Forbes, Peter Forbes, another Englishman and a friend of mine, who runs the hostel. I went to the hostel where they live this morning, because Forbes had telephoned me in the car, and they explained the situation: that Posenato had found two of the boys, well, buggering each other, in the office, and that this had proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back. . . .'

When the assistant raised a puzzled face at this expression, Morris explained indulgently with the Italian equivalent: ‘La
goccia che ha fatto traboccare il vaso,
the drop that made the bowl spill. Though somehow,' he added blandly, ‘the English idiom seems more appropriate here.'

‘Quite.' Marangoni was impatient. But . . .'

‘So I went on to the office,' Morris continued, ‘to discuss the matter with Bobo. I was concerned that without the immigrants we wouldn't be able to honour a contract that I myself had recently negotiated with an English company and hence felt responsible for. And that, of course, was when I found what I found.'

He looked directly at the policeman, eyes mild with studied artlessness.

‘But, Signor Duckworth, what I asked you was, did Signor Posenato go to the factory in the middle of the night expressly to fire them?'

‘I've no idea. He couldn't have actually gone to fire them if the problem was his finding them, er, well, I've already said it, buggering in his office.'

‘No. That is precisely why I asked my question.'

Morris managed to pull the face of someone to whom something has just occurred. ‘You're right. In fact, you know, I can't imagine why he went to the office. Perhaps he checked the factory regularly, you know, the night shift I mean. He was very suspicious of these immigrants, always afraid they weren't working well, or would steal things. Perhaps he made checks like that quite routinely, though he never mentioned doing so to me. You'd have to ask his wife, I suppose. I remember just as we were leaving last night - I presume you know we dined together - yes, just as we were leaving he got a phone call; maybe it was something to do with that.'

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.'

‘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.