Painting Death Read online

  Also by Tim Parks:

  Fiction

  Tongues of Flame

  Loving Roger

  Home Thoughts

  Family Planning

  Cara Massimina (first published in the United States as Juggling the Stars)

  Mimi’s Ghost

  Shear

  Europa

  Destiny

  Judge Savage

  Rapids

  Cleaver

  Dreams of River and Seas

  Sex Is Forbidden (first published as The Server)

  Nonfiction

  Italian Neighbors

  An Italian Education

  Adultery & Other Diversions

  Translating Style

  Hell and Back

  A Season with Verona

  The Fighter

  Teach Us to Sit Still

  Italian Ways

  Copyright © 2014 by Tim Parks

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First North American Edition 2015

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.

  Visit the author’s website at www.tim-parks.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Painting death : a novel / Tim Parks.

  —First North American edition.

  pages; cm.—(Duckworth and the Italian girls; take 3)

  ISBN 978-1-62872-593-3 (hardcover: acid-free paper)—ISBN 978-1-62872-620-6 (ebook) 1. Serial murderers—Italy—Fiction. 2. Verona (Italy)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6066.A6957P35 2015

  823’.914—dc23

  2015019650

  Cover design by Marion Blomeyer

  Cover illustration: Getty Images

  Cover photo: Shutterstock

  Printed in the United States of America

  For the Veronese,

  who put up with this Englishman for thirty years.

  Part One

  Chapter One

  MORRIS WOULD ARRIVE LATE for the ceremony. That was appropriate for someone of his importance. It was in his honour after all. But not so late as to be disrespectful; if one disrespects those doing the honouring, one diminishes the recognition. He watched in the mirror as steady hands pushed a Tonbridge School tie tight into the still-firm skin of his strong neck. He would look smart, without being obsequious; neither formal, nor casual. These were fine lines to tread and that he could do so with ease was one of the rewards of maturity. Ease: that was the word. Morris would appear at ease with the world, at ease with himself, his scarred face, his thinning hair; at ease with his wealth, his wife, his fine family, fabulous palazzo and now, at long last, this distinction conceded in extremis. All’s well that ends well. You’re a happy man, Morris Duckworth, he told himself out loud, and he smiled a winning smile. No, a winner’s smile; not a single niggle that nagged, not a prick of the old resentment. Thank you, Mimi, he mouthed to the mirror, admiring the brightness in blue British eyes. Thank you so much!

  ‘Cinque minuti,’ sang a voice from below. It might have been the dear dead girl herself !

  ‘Con calma!’ Morris called cheerfully. After all, they lived only a stone’s throw from the centre of civic power. If he had one regret, it was that this was only Verona, la misera provincia; Piazza Bra, not Piazza di Spagna. But then think how dirty Rome was.

  How chaotic. And how grey, grim and gauche Milan. This prim little town is your destiny, Morris. Be happy.

  As he left the bathroom, the flick of a Ferragamo cuff revealed a Rolex telling him it was indeed time. Le massime autorità would be waiting. The maximum authorities! For Morris!

  ‘Papà!’ came the voice again. His daughter’s wonderful huskiness, so like dear Mimi of old. She was impatient. All the same, Morris couldn’t resist and stepped into The Art Room for a moment of intimacy with his most recent acquisition.

  The heavy old frame rested on a chair. Morris hadn’t quite decided where to hang it yet. He ran a finger down its mouldings. How austere they were! The gilt had gone gloomily dark, from candle smoke, no doubt. It was a pleasure to think of sombre old interiors made somehow darker by their flickering candles. But in the painting itself the two women were walking down a bright street. It was the Holy Land, millennia ago: two bulky figures, seen from behind, in voluminous dresses. Between them, trapped by hand against hip, the woman on the right held a broad basket. It was partially covered, but the white cloth had slipped a little to reveal, to the viewer, unbeknown to the two ladies as they sauntered away, not a loaf of bread, not a heap of washing, not a pile of freshly picked grapes but, grimacing and astonished, a bearded male face: General Holofernes! His Assyrian head severed.

  ‘Papà, for Christ’s sake!’

  Now there came a deeper voice, ‘Morrees! You mustn’t keep the mayor waiting.’

  Morris frowned, why did he feel so drawn to this painting? Two women carrying a severed head. But the scene was so calm and their gait so relaxed it might as well have been the morning’s shopping.

  ‘Dad!’

  In her impatience, Massimina switched to English. Morris turned abruptly on a patent-leather heel and strode to the broad staircase. As he skipped down stone steps, running a freshly washed hand along the polished curve of the marble banister, his two women presented themselves in all their finery: Antonella magnificently matronly in something softly maroon; Massimina willowy in off-white, and both generously bosomed in the best Trevisan tradition. Morris smiled first into one face, then the other, pecking powdered cheeks and catching himself mirrored in the bright windows of four hazel eyes. Only his son had inherited the grey Duckworth blue.

  ‘Where’s Mauro?’ Morris asked, pulling back from his wife. Her gold crucifixes still galled, but he had learned not to criticise. He was not a control freak.

  Antonella was already making for the door where the ancient Maddalena stooped with her mistress’s mink at the ready. Antonella pushed her arms into sumptuous sleeves. ‘The cardinal will be there,’ she was saying, ‘and Don Lorenzo. We’re late.’

  ‘But where’s Mauro? We can’t go without Mauro.’

  Morris couldn’t understand why his wife wasn’t taking the problem more seriously. Or why the decrepit maid wasn’t wearing a starched white apron over her black dress, as specifically instructed. This was an occasion for family pride.

  ‘I don’t think Mousie came home last night,’ Massimina said.

  ‘Don’t think?’ Morris stopped on the threshold. ‘Home from where? Haven’t you phoned him?’ He was not happy with the thought that a son of his could be nicknamed Mousie.

  ‘I’m sure he’ll meet us there,’ Antonella said complacently. She was standing in the courtyard now where threads of water splashed across the stony buttocks of a young Mercury apparently leaping into flight from a broad bowl of frothy travertine. All around, vines climbed the ochre stucco between green-shuttered windows while just below the roof a sundial took
advantage of the crisp winter weather to alert anyone still capable of reading such things that Morris was now seriously late for the ceremony that would grant him honorary citizenship and the keys to the city of Verona.

  ‘He went to the game.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Brescia away. I called him, but his phone is off.’

  ‘He knows when the ceremony is, caro.’ Antonella hurried back and took her husband’s arm. ‘We were chatting about it yesterday.’ Her manner, if only Morris had had the leisure to contemplate it, was a charming mix of anxiety and indulgence. She treated her husband as a troublesome boy, which rather let their obstreperous son off the hook. ‘I’m sure we’ll find him there before us. But we mustn’t keep the mayor waiting. In the end, the only person who really counts today is you, Morrees.’

  This was such a pleasant thought that Morris allowed himself to be pulled along, outside the great arched gate and into the designer-dressed bustle of Via Oberdan. All the same, he hadn’t begged his boy two days’ truancy from one of old England’s most expensive schools, and paid a BA flight to boot, to have the lout abscond at this moment of his father’s glory. For some reason the word ‘coronation’ came to mind: Morris was to be crowned King of Verona. He frowned to chase the thought away; one mustn’t lose one’s head.

  ‘By the way, who won?’ Antonella asked. Morris’s wife had a magnanimous air; it was the mink’s first outing this season.

  Massimina took her father’s arm on the other side. ‘Alas, Brescia,’ she sighed. ‘Own goal in injury time.’

  Comfortable between them, though it was disconcerting that his daughter was so tall, Morris marvelled that his lady-folk should be aware of such trivial things. What was injury time in the end? He had never really understood. Dad had not wanted company when he set off to Loftus Road and anyway his son would not have been seen dead with a man wearing a green and white bobble cap.

  ‘But if he didn’t come home,’ he protested, ‘where did he spend the night? And why wasn’t I told?’

  There was no time to hear an answer, for on emerging from Via Oberdan into the wide open space of one of Italy’s largest squares, it was to discover that Piazza Bra was not, right now, wide open at all. They had chosen this of all mornings to erect the stalls for the mercatino di Santa Lucia. Damn. From the majestic Roman arena, right along the broad Liston, past Victor Emmanuel on bronze horseback and as far as the Austrian clock, palely illuminated above the arch of Porta Nuova, the whole cobbled campo was chock-a-block with gypsies, extra-comunitari and assorted exempla of Veneto pond life scrambling together prefabricated stalls for the overpriced sale of torroni, candy floss and other vulgar, sugar-based venoms. It was a dentist’s Promised Land, which fleetingly reminded Morris that this was another area in which his son was proving an expensive investment.

  Through clouds of diesel from trucks unloading trifles and baubles of every bastard variety, not to mention the construction of a merry-go-round, Palazzo Barbieri on the far side of the square, solemn seat of the Veronese comune, suddenly seemed impossibly distant. Morris almost panicked. What if they called the event off? What if they mistook his belated arrival for a deliberate snub? One could hardly blame the traffic, living only three hundred yards away. Morris began to hurry, at first dragging his women with him, then freeing his arms to dive between a wall of panettoni and their leering vendor, the kind of squat, swarthy figure one associates with black markets the world over. It was a disgrace! He would say something to the mayor.

  ‘Da-ad!’ his daughter protested. ‘Why do you always have to be in such a rush?’ Only now did Morris realise the girl had put on four-inch heels, to cross a sea of cobbles. The original Massimina, who had been half her height, would have known better. And he had thought his first love dumb!

  Antonella laughed. ‘This way, Mr. Nonchalant,’ she said and pulled her husband to the left, out of the throng and down the small street that ran behind the arena. Here, almost immediately, the way was clear and though the change of route had added a hundred yards or so to their walk, Morris understood at once there would be no problem. Thank God he had married such a practical soul! So much more sensible than her dear departed sisters. Nevertheless, he kept up a brisk pace, past beggars and chestnut vendors, just in case something else should come between him and his overdue due. The complacency of ten minutes before now seemed a fool’s paradise and Morris knew from bitter experience that there was nothing to be gained from seeking to retrieve it. It took carefree weeks and important art acquisitions to consolidate a mood as positive as that, or at least an afternoon’s revelling with Samira. For a moment, then, passing on one side a café advertising hot chocolate with whipped cream and on the other the arena ticket office promising the world’s largest display of Nativity scenes—from the Philippines to the Faroe Islands!—Morris found himself struggling to relate two apparently remote but peremptory thoughts: first the memory of how he had ignominiously scuttled through these same streets thirty years ago, a wretched language teacher hurrying head down from one private lesson to another, always at the tight-fisted beck and call of people richer and stupider than himself (dear Massimina among them, it had to be said); and second, the reflection that his son was hardly likely to have taken his Tonbridge School uniform to a winter evening football game; so that even if the boy did make it to this morning’s ceremony after a night slumming with thugs in foggy suburbs, he was not going to be sporting a burgundy and black striped tie that matched his own. Only now, still striding along in the shadow of the Roman amphitheatre with Antonella panting to keep pace in her furs, did Morris realise how much he had been looking forward to that little touch of father–son complicity; it was the kind of quietly significant detail he liked to think a fashion-conscious Veronese public would register with a twinge of envy: style the Italians might have in abundance, but never the sober solidity of a great British educational institution. In which case, come to think of it, the ungrateful boy might just as well not turn up for the ceremony at all. Perhaps I should pull him out of Tonbridge, Morris wondered, save myself thirty grand a year, and have the boy eke out a living teaching English, as I once had to. There! Realising that the two apparently separate thoughts had after all found a very evident and purposeful link—his spoiled son needed reminding what was what—Morris suddenly felt pleased again: whatever happened this particular morning, or any other morning for that matter, he would always have his wits, his wit. Hadn’t he, in the end, Morris Duckworth, got himself to Cambridge University from Shepherd’s Bush Comprehensive, the first and very likely the last pupil ever to do so? Let Mauro ‘Mother’s Boy’ Duckworth do the same!

  ‘I asked, have you prepared a speech?’ Antonella was saying. ‘Morrees! Eih, pronto? Aren’t you listening?’

  They had arrived at the bottom of the grand steps. The columned facade was above them.

  ‘Of course,’ Morris said, realising as he spoke that he had left the thing at home: three sheets of A4 on the windowsill beside the loo. He had allowed himself to be distracted by Judith and Holofernes.

  His wife reached up to straighten the lapels of his jacket. Very quietly, she said: ‘Just be careful not to say anything stupid.’

  Morris was taken aback.

  ‘Like the time at the Rotary.’

  The English husband felt a dangerous heat flood his loins. ‘It will be fine,’ he said abruptly.

  ‘Only trying to help,’ she explained, brushing something off his shoulder. But he knew she was laughing.

  ‘I was drunk,’ he insisted.

  ‘I know,’ she smiled.

  ‘The punch was too strong. They should have been gaoled for poisoning.’

  ‘We’re late, Morrees,’ she said calmly. ‘Come on.’

  Right. But now where was his daughter? Son or no son, at least the three of them could ascend the town hall steps together. Morris turned but couldn’t find her. The ridiculous Verona trenino was passing, a fake electric steam locomotive, bright red, with an open
carriage behind and piped Christmas music deafening the dumb tourists on board. ‘Hark the Herald.’ How anybody could have imagined introducing such an atrocious eye-and-ear sore into the centuries-long sobriety of the city’s ancient piazzas was beyond Morris. Had anyone ever sung ‘Hark the Herald’ in Italy? ‘Late in time behold Him come!’ Indeed. Just as Morris fought off a fleeting memory of his carol-singing mother (he himself had soloed ‘Once in Royal David’s’ at St Bartholomew’s, Acton) the train lurched forward with the clanging of a bell and Massimina emerged from behind, swaying impressively as she stepped out to cross the road, closely watched, Morris noticed, by three motorcycle louts smoking outside the wine bar at the corner. The girl was too attractive by half, too present and alive for her own good. Those heels would have to come down an inch or three. Confident nevertheless that his daughter was still a virgin, otherwise he would surely have known, Morris held out his hand as if to draw his child toward him. They would cut a fine figure entering the corridors of power side by side. Except that now an ancient gypsy woman reached up from the pavement—Grazie, grazie she wheedled—she must have imagined the wealthy man’s outstretched arm held an offering of change. Irritated, Morris was about to shoo the crone away when he caught his wife’s quick intake of breath. They were in full view of a dozen dignitaries and newspaper photographers standing under the portico at the top of the steps. Morris reached into his pocket and found the fifty-cent coin one had to keep ready for such occasions, because to open your wallet was always a mistake.

  For the next fifteen minutes, it would have been hard to imagine a more gratifying occasion. On the door they were greeted by the faithful Don Lorenzo, for many years the family’s spiritual adviser, who took them into the first reception room to meet Cardinal Rusconi, gorgeous in stiff scarlet. Morris kissed a puffy hand and agreed that, for all the commercial exploitation, Christmas never quite lost its magic, while Antonella spoke of the importance of sponsoring Nativity scenes in the poorer suburbs where the camels and shepherds created a much needed sense of festive spirit. Glasses of bubbly in hand, nobody seemed to have noticed how late they had arrived and Morris couldn’t decide whether this was wonderful or irritating. He might just as well have been on time, which certainly came more naturally, in which case he could have enjoyed feeling superior to the latecomers. A radio journalist wanted him to explain yet again the circumstances that had led to this honour, but under the prelate’s approving if somewhat haughty gaze, and nodding to a fellow Rotarian across the room, Morris demurely told the sycophant that it would hardly be appropriate for him to sing his own praises: the mayor, he said, would no doubt put forward the motivazione during his presentation. Massimina, he noticed from the corner of an ever observant eye, was chatting to Beppe Bagutta, son of the man who ran the Verona Trade Fair and quite a few other things besides; decent results at art college were all very well, but a little more would be required if the girl was to make her Duckworth mark on the world. Nearer at hand, there was a pleasant buzz of mutual congratulation with the ascetic Don Lorenzo telling the corpulent cardinal how much he had appreciated his article ‘A Eucharist for Our Times’—he and Antonella had studied it together, he said—and the cardinal actually deigning to ask Morris how he thought Italy might come out of the present financial crisis; a subtle way of fishing for some kind of donation perhaps. Why else would such a powerful man have bothered to turn up for a ceremony of no religious significance? Old acquaintances and business partners, gallery owners and building contractors waved their hellos but Morris decided he would be best served standing beside the ecclesiastical red, so similar, it suddenly crossed his mind now, to the Father Christmas outfit Dad had donned to hand out half-bottles of Teacher’s to shop-floor friends on Christmas Eve. Was Samira here, perhaps? That was an exciting thought. He hadn’t invited her, but you never knew. The girl was clearly infatuated. Or even inspectors Marangoni and Fendsteig, from the old days? That too would be oddly exciting. But the meddling policemen must have retired long ago, Morris reflected. Just as well, with all this DNA wizardry they’d recently come up with. He smiled at the cardinal who smiled back as though they had been friends for ages, and Morris was just rummaging through the clutter of his mind to see if there was some favour he could ask of the prelate before the prelate asked whatever it was he planned to ask of him, when, at the blast of a trumpet, four extravagantly befeathered Bersaglieri raised four ceremonial flags to form an arch of honour at the door to his right: there were Europe’s circle of quarrelling stars, Italy’s bureaucratic tricolour, the razzmatazz of the dear old Union Jack and finally, white on red, the ladder of Cangrande della Scala, erstwhile Duke of Verona. Morris bowed his head as he stepped beneath these proud symbols into the great Sala degli Arazzi and that world of honoured tradition he had always, after his rather particular Duckworth fashion, aspired to.