Mimi's Ghost Page 17

  ‘And how can I help you?’ The inspector’s voice was, if possible, both avuncular and cold.

  Not to be outdone, Morris left a pause himself.

  A little more uncertainly the inspector asked: ‘E allora?’

  ‘I’m not really sure if I should tell you this,’ Morris said, and at the same time saw a smile forming on Kwame’s face. But then he had to shut his eyes as, painfully slowly, the newly appointed chauffeur turned left across a hectically advancing stream of traffic.

  ‘Listen, have you found those two, er, gays yet?’

  ‘No,’ Marangoni said sharply, sniffing criticism.

  It was curious, Morris thought, but the man had seemed more friendly two years ago. For a moment he wondered if he mightn’t be having problems with his marriage. It was a common complaint.

  ‘I can imagine,’ he said consolingly, ‘it must be difficult not having photographs and documents and so on.’

  ‘What did you want to tell me?’

  The fact is,’ Morris said, ‘that Bobo, er, Signor Posenato, kept, er, I suppose you would call it a second safe. I mean, apart from the main one in the wall behind the desk.’

  He paused.

  Tor, well, illegal payments,’ he added, just as Marangoni had begun to speak. So that then he had to repeat because the other hadn’t heard.

  It’s behind the fuse box next to the door.’

  They both waited. Kwame was now cruising quite safely in light traffic along the river towards the very police station from which Marangoni was talking. The black braked sharply and gestured with his thumb. Bobo’s white Audi was jammed between a Cinquecento and a German VW bus in which some Kraut hippies were clearly camping out illegally. Morris nodded and waved him on towards the cemetery.

  ‘Well, I didn’t think to look in there until this morning. I mean, it just didn’t occur to me.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It’s empty,’ Morris said. ‘About two million lire gone, I should say.’

  In his briefcase to be precise. The money would serve to keep Kwame sweet.

  After a long pause Marangoni could say nothing more than ‘Ah.’

  That’s all,’ Morris said, but he was struggling to ignore what was a growing sense of the other’s hostility. Then, quite suddenly, he had one of those awful moments of physical fear, when he felt with every cell in his body that he was making mistakes, that he was going to be caught, and it wasn’t so much the consequences of such a capture that turned his muscles to water, as just the idea of being discovered, of being revealed as false. He felt deeply that he was not false. In some part of himself he was not false.

  ‘Please keep me up to date on developments,’ he managed to finish, and thankfully got the phone down in the middle of the other’s arrivederci.

  Kwame parked outside the cemetery. Morris’s mind was still lost in a fog of things to do, things to remember, a dark turbulence where fear and confidence were constantly confused, colliding or even somehow superimposed over each other. Then the black’s deep voice came rumbling through:

  ‘Boss?’

  Though he had never actually asked for it, the word was heartening.

  ‘We’re here, boss.’

  Morris looked out across the pitted tarmac to the florist’s stall, yellow and gold with chrysanthemums. A man was selling the local paper to those Italians who can’t get by for more than a day or two without visiting their dead; and with yet another start of weary nerves, Morris realised that he hadn’t read the papers yet, hadn’t seen how his exploits were being described. Perhaps there was something there that would explain Marangoni’s scepticism.

  ‘We’re here. What we gonna do?’

  Morris drew a deep breath. ‘Listen, Kwame, I want you to tell me what you think. I mean, about the whole thing.’

  Kwame shrugged his shoulders. ‘Big trouble,’ he said. ‘But boss very smart.’

  It was more or less Morris’s own analysis. But not enough.

  ‘No, I mean, your advice. You see, if these two, I mean Azedine and Farouk, get, well, arrested . . .’

  Kwame said nothing. His face had that purity of intelligence some inarticulate people do have, as if rather than lacking education, life had given him so much he knew there was nothing to say. He hadn’t even asked, for example, why Morris had killed Bobo. Morris felt quite jealous.

  Though, I don’t suppose even in Italy they could really convict them for anything, I mean, without the evidence of the body, or without actually finding the money on them . . . No, as I see it, it’s just a convenient red herring to establish some distance between, between . . .’

  Kwame slapped his hands in a dense rhythm from thighs to steering wheel. Despite his humble origins, he seemed perfectly at home in a Mercedes coupe.

  ‘And then, they are homosexual, and promiscuous, and with Aids and everything they’re really a peril to society.’

  The rhythm that had set in - back and forth from pants to leather wheel - had that sullen knowledge of jungle drumming in films whose designs on their audiences are all too obvious.

  Uneasy, Morris cast about for something that would make the black utter the words of comfort he needed. There were times when he could well convince himself he was nothing more than a poor boy whose mother had died too young.

  ‘Listen, Kwame, I am going to be moving into the family house in Quinzano in another week or so. It’s bigger, and of course Paola, my wife, is expecting a baby, so we will be needing more space. When I do that I’d like you to have the fiat I’ve been living in till now, in Montorio. I mean, obviously you’ll have to be rewarded for your help.’

  Kwame nodded slowly forward and backward as he drummed, though whether in assent or gratitude, or in some instinctive response to the rhythm flowing from his fingers wasn’t clear.

  ‘I thought it was terribly clever when you asked what would happen if Bobo came back.’

  Only the faintest of smiles crossed the big Negro’s features as he stared through the windscreen at the stone-hooded statues over the gate. Then the drumming stopped abruptly.

  ‘You know what I think, boss?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think there is easier ways of dumping a stiff.’

  'Like?’

  ‘In the river. In the mountains. Easy.’

  Morris pondered. But whenever challenged, he tended to feel confident again. ‘No, this is the right way,’ he said. Then conjuring up something that was a mystery even to himself, and thus doubly pleasing, he added: This is the way that fits.’

  To his credit, Kwame didn’t question any further. ‘Let’s check it out, then, man,’ he said. Morris, watching him stride away to the cemetery gate, thought that the black man’s appearance in Via del Gelsomini would doubtless bring down the price of the surrounding property, thus finally getting back at the builder who so far had taken him for a very long ride unscathed. Leaving the car to follow him, Morris stopped at a booth and picked up all three local papers.

  Ten minutes later, as Kwame was pointing out the ossuary and the corner where coffins would be stacked, Morris leaned against a pillar and read the, he felt, inept and certainly racist headline: massacred by gay immigrants? mystery of missing businessman. There was no mention, he noticed with interest, of the billet-doux they had obviously found among Bobo’s papers, but this just underlined the fact that you could never trust the media, or the police, to give you anything like the full picture. He must never forget that there might be things they knew that he didn’t, or that he knew but didn’t know they did.

  Like who had made that anonymous phone call, for example.

  20

  After the biting night air, after the smell of death and its clammy touch,. the weird red pinpoints of the grave-lights and thud of the body falling from the wall, after the tight screws in old wood, the bones and skull and rags of fine clothes, after the muttered exchanges, the screws driven back over a blind face, the long drive up into the hills, where snowy tracks lost themselves in
precipitous woodland, Morris felt that his crime had been more than sufficiently expiated. He had muttered a brief prayer over the closing coffin: ‘Requiescat in pace.’ He had kissed the wood hiding Mimi’s dear dead flesh. Then, having forgotten to squeeze them back in with Bobo in the old coffin, he had tucked Signor Trevisan’s Non-foriuna-sed-labor bones into a capacious dry-cleaning bag and dropped the bag in a bin. A mere wash of the hands now, surely, and all evidence against him would be gone. And with the evidence would go what sin there might have been.

  But that was hardly for him to judge, Morris thought.

  When Kwame climbed back into the Mercedes after dumping the Audi, Morris embraced the boy and held him tight. The black’s skin had a powerful live smell and his arms round Morris’s shoulders were reassuringly robust. They held each other close for some time, until, disengaging, the two of them burst out laughing. They laughed and laughed in the dark of the car, far up in the pre-Alps, where snow glowed on stone walls in a moonless night.

  On the way back, Morris stopped at the bottling plant to let Kwame get back to work. They, decided on the excuse that he had been outside counting carton supplies. Driving off again into the clear cold night, Morris felt at once elated and desperately eager to be generous. Could things feasibly have gone better in the end? For everybody concerned? Could those poor boys have hoped for a better master than himself? As he approached home, towards three in the morning, he actually burst into song, swinging the wheel to left and right on the empty road. The song he sang was ‘John Brown’s Body’. Burial really was such a weight off one’s mind,

  Five minutes later he was still singing when he opened the car door outside the family villa in Quinzano and stepped directly into the arms of a waiting carabiniere. Handcuffs appeared, and snapped. A voice with a strong southern accent explained, superfluously, that Signor Duckworth was under arrest.

  His first thought, in the cold night with the metal clamping painfully round his wrists, was to tell all. So completely did nerves and spirit dissolve into some fetid, evil-smelling liquid, that the best thing to do seemed to be to have it all ooze out at once, to purge himself, to feel at least that it was all over. For a moment he was even eager to tell, to justify himself, to point out how reasonable and how clever he had been, to explain that his crimes were more things he suffered than planned, things that simply happened to him. And he wanted to tell them that Massimina herself had forgiven him, often spoke to him, that it was she who had told him, ordered him, to kill the boy!

  But the two young carabinieri merely bundled their prisoner into the back of their Alfetta and without so much as a polite request for a confession, never mind the kind of violence that would doubtless have extracted all kinds of information from someone as fearful of physical pain as Morris, set off to drive him back to their headquarters at Quinto. One of them lit a cigarette. Morris asked if he could please extinguish it, as, in the present emotive circumstances, cigarette smoke might well make him vomit. The young carabiniere immediately acquiesced, and somehow this obedience and implied respect lifted Morris’s heart. Perhaps it wasn’t all over yet. Or even if it was, he had nothing to lose in playing as if it wasn’t.

  ‘How long were you waiting there?’ he asked tentatively. ‘you must have been dreadfully cold.’

  At least he might find out how long they knew he had been absent. But for all the force’s fame as blockheads, the two carabinieri merely muttered that explanations would come later.

  ‘Can I phone my wife?’ Morris asked. ‘And a lawyer?’ (Though the truth was he knew no lawyers, since any contact with the legal profession he had always thought might bring bad luck.) ‘I mean,’ he added, looking for a little of the male complicity he had always despised, ‘I wouldn’t like her to get the wrong idea.’

  The one driving half chuckled. The other said: ‘All in good time.’

  Another five minutes of this and Morris began to feel like someone who, having fallen from a great height into a dark place and briefly believed himself dead, was now testing his manipulative skills with a little wiggle of this toe, a careful clenching of that hand. Just how much damage had been done?

  ‘In fact, I only heard today,’ he said, ‘that she is pregnant. My wife. I wouldn’t like her to imagine I’d just run for it.’

  He got another chuckle. The more sober fellow grunted: ‘Complimenti.’

  Suddenly at his most uncharacteristically chatty, and with a rapidly rising feeling of hilarity, because this was all quite unreal in the end, Morris asked: ‘And are you folks actually going to charge me with anything?’

  The driver who had been chuckling stopped. There was a short silence. Then his colleague said: ‘Omicidio. Premeditato e pluriaggravato.’

  They drove in through the sliding iron gates of the carabinieri’s barracks. The balloon of Morris’s fragile confidence could not have burst faster. Sitting on the back seat, he brought his knees up and hugged himself tight, a desperate gesture of self-love in deflation. He took trousers and a lump of skin between his teeth and bit them hard. Omicidio! With malice aforethought! When the car door opened it was two or three minutes before they could persuade him to get out.

  The cell was whitewashed concrete with a barred window. There were two bunk-beds, one of them occupied by a corpulent figure with tousled hair who didn’t so much snore as sigh heavily with every drawn breath of dry, centrally heated air. Over the iron door with its Judas window hung the inevitable crucifix, which, curiously, Morris noted, when they turned out the light, must be of some luminous plastic material as it appeared to glow in the dark. Sleepless, self-pitying, Morris gazed at it: that pathetic twisted figure, at once put to death and master of the universe, that figure worshipped and prayed to by the two people who had meant most to him in his life: his mother, Massimina. But this thought only provoked another less pleasant. Did the carabinieri know something about Massimina too? What had they found out? For a while, Morris’s mind churned over the details of the last two hectic days. What concrete piece of evidence could they have? What motive had they unearthed? What were they going to present him with tomorrow morning? Had they already found the body in old Trevisan’s coffin, lying there under the tarpaulin, or had they followed Kwame and him up into the hills where they’d dumped the car?

  And what alibi could he possibly give for the evening without first consulting Paola? How stupid, how hatefully stupid he had been just to rely on her sleeping through his absence, on getting back unnoticed!

  Morris loathed himself when he was stupid. He deserved prison!

  The other occupant of the cell sighed heavily in his sleep and groaned.

  Or had Massimina told him to kill Bobo precisely so he could be arrested and punished for her death too? Could the whole thing simply have been a ghostly trap?

  Footsteps passed along the corridor and for a moment it seemed their heavy, even tread must stretch away to the utmost limits of Morris’s existence.

  ‘Mimi,’ he breathed out loud. ‘You are all I ever cared for. Mimi?’

  There was no answer of course, but, as if in compensation, the small crucifix over the door seemed to glow a little brighter. Morris stared at it. There was the head fallen to one side, the studied contortion of the body, the crown of thorns. The figure seemed to be inviting him to forget his worries in a shared gesture of resignation. ‘Are you weak and heavy laden, burdened with a load of care . . .’ Mother had always sung that over the dishes. Morris stared at the little crucifix, and for the first time in his life - in a carabinieri cell at four in the morning -he became lucidly aware of the possibility of the religious option as a real solution to his problems: complete sacrifice of miserable self to a greater truth and good, sense of one’s allotted and humble place in a divine pattern, redemption not through works - that was beyond him now - but through faith.

  He made a pact: ‘Mimi,’ he prayed, ‘Mimi, if you get me out of this, I will give my heart to God, I promise.’ The words coming from he knew not where, he adde
d: ‘I will be born again in Christ.’

  Thus conscious that he had reached a major turning-point in his life, Morris Duckworth at last fell asleep on this his first night in captivity.

  21

  They came for him at six. He was forced to dress in front of them under hard fluorescent light, scrambling on his trousers, getting shirt-buttons mixed up. A deliberate humiliation. With the fluorescent Messiah still in mind, Morris wouldn’t have been surprised had they jammed a crown of thorns on his head. Only when he sat back on his bed to pull on his shoes did he notice that the cell’s other occupant had already gone. And there was a crumb of satisfaction here in reflecting that he must at some point during the night have slept through a disturbance similar to the one he was now experiencing. For a dazed moment, with the carabinieri standing over him and a stale smell of morning breath and dusty concrete, he thought he was going to make some remark of the variety: The clear conscience sleeps sound.’ But no sooner had he opened his mouth than he realised how pathetic this would seem. He must not appear to be clutching at straws. He must not allow himself to be either brutalised or intimidated. On the contrary, he must aim for that perfect combination of dignity and indignation.

  So in the interrogation room with its ludicrous poster -’Hands Linked across the World for a Better Future’ - he sat down in front of a tall, thin, bespectacled man and immediately told him: ‘I do hope you appreciate how ridiculous all this is. Why wasn’t I given some opportunity to explain myself last night and go home?’

  Attack would be the best form of defence. He would create his own luck. At the back of his mind he heard his own voice whisper: ‘Mimi!’

  And he had a new reason for getting through now. He would become a Christian. He would undertake a mission.

  The colonnello could have been no more than forty and had the unhealthy, thin-nosed pallor of the diligent. Slowly twining long fingers together, he looked at Morris for no more than a second through glinting lenses. His eyes were large and disturbingly colourless. ‘Allora, Signor Duckworth,’ he said in a voice that was surprisingly clipped, ‘explain away. Before you begin, though, could you just say who you are and give date and place of birth and address of present residence.’