Juggling the Stars

by Tim Parks

  They sat in a restaurant spread out across the flagstones of Piazza Navona and ate torteliini with ham and cream, then veal with a side salad and finally ice-cream. The waiter was fast and dapper, the square full of young people, girls on bicycles, groups of young boys watching hungrily or dreamily, being watched in turn. The air had something definitely Latin and foreign about it, the smells, the temperature, a hint of anarchy, and Morris felt blissfully calm and secure. Who would ever find you out in such a city?

  ‘Perhaps we should live here,’ he said, and almost added, ‘when your old mum pays up.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Massimina said. ‘Let’s.’

  And most probably she was thinking how much more scope there would be to show herself off here. And why not? Morris conceded generously. The glory of the whole -thing was precisely the show. He wasn’t going to be possessive about the girl for God’s sake, though she must learn not to sit quite so carelessly when she had short skirts on.

  As they came back through Corso del Rinascimento some teenagers were dancing round a Vespa blaring music from a cassette player. Their bodies moved gracefully in the last of an inky twilight and staring streetlamps. Massimina had drunk too much wine and wanted to join in, but Morris drew a line here.

  ‘A disco then, Morri. Let’s find a disco. You know I’ve never been to a real disco. Mamma never let me, she …’

  Morris said he didn’t like dancing. Despite nightfall the air was still very warm and this was one of the things that always made him feel delightfully far from home. He wanted to relax now, soak it up.

  ‘But how can you not like dancing? It’s just moving your body. It’s just fun. Go on, there must be millions of discos round here and …’

  Morris was adamant.

  ‘I bet it’s because you’ve never tried,’ she said archly. ‘You spent all those years at university reading books and things and you never even tried.’

  And when Morris was silent, ‘Go on, I’ll show you. It’s fun.’

  As they went past the Pantheon and into Via Seminario, she said, ‘Morri?’ Her voice was softer than before. ‘Morri, you haven’t been out with many other girls, have you?’

  It was precisely the kind of conversation to get right on his nerves and ruin a good day. He said nothing. Ignore it.

  ‘I mean, when you, we …’ She tried to hug tight to him, but he hurried. ‘When we, when we did it the other day, together, I got the feeling it was the first time for you too and …’

  ‘And what?’ he snapped. God damn.

  ‘I felt so happy, Morri. I mean, don’t be angry, I’m so happy if you’ve never been with anybody before, it makes it so pure and right and …’

  ‘Well it wasn’t the first time,’ he said sharply. And she began to cry. They sat in a bar then in Piazza Quirinale and Morris drank two carafes of Frascati almost entirely on his own.

  ‘You’re very cruel sometimes, Morrees,’ she said when they were undressing at last in the pensions. The room was freshly whitewashed with a huge old double bed, a few items of recently - polished furniture, a crucifix over the bed, Madonna opposite, and the pleasure of a clean window complete with modern and operable blinds. A step up.

  ‘You’re not easy to be with sometimes,’ she said.

  ‘Sacrifice yourself then,’ he said. His first damn day in Rome and she had to ruin it like this. ‘Or go home to Mamma if you like.’

  ‘Maybe I will,’ she said.

  What a farce.

  ‘Maybe I will,’ she repeated.

  Over somebody’s very dead body.

  And now he woke up sick as a dog. At first he thought it must be just the excess of wine the previous night. He climbed out of bed, shivering violently and hurried down the passageway to the communal lavatory. Diarrhoea. Very nice. What a moment for it too. Oh God, he looked in the mirror to find his face positively grey and glistening with sweat. His forearms were prickling with goosepimples. He washed his face and hurried back to bed, head swaying from side to side, unable to think, unable to balance himself. He mustn’t vomit was all. Not here in the passageway so as to draw attention to himself.

  Back in the room he half raised the blinds and seeing it was light outside tried to get dressed. He must stay on his feet or how was he to keep an eye on Massimina all day? But he couldn’t. Bending down for a fresh shirt from his suitcase he almost passed out and had to stumble back to bed.

  Massimina went out to buy milk and brioches for breakfast. Morris managed a few sips of milk but couldn’t hold down the food at all. He laid his head back and groaned.

  ‘I told you you shouldn’t drink so much.’

  Bang. A shot in the head from point-blank range. Blow her to bits. He was dying most probably, hunched up in an embryo. shivering and she had to talk about drink.

  Or was it a punishment from God?

  Or venereal disease somehow? What if …

  She fluffed up his pillow. ‘I’ll go and have a word with the padrona. If I explain the situation I'm sure shell let me have a change of sheets. You’re sopping with sweat,’

  ‘No,’ Morris began, ‘really, I …’

  ‘You do what you’re told when you’re ill,’ she said stoutly, with what was obviously her mother’s voice. His own mother’s too, come to think of it, her odd days of revenge with Dad when he was felled by his filthy colds. 'For your own good,’ the archetypal woman was still lecturing him (‘My own good’ll be the death of me’ - Dad, mid 1960s). She left the room. He felt too weak to follow. Too weak altogether the muscles in his shoulder were twitching. Somebody could make a fortune, he thought, insuring criminals against illness during action. Advertize in the specialized press.

  He must have dozed because when he looked at his watch again it was nearly eleven. She’d been gone an hour and still wasn’t back. Morris heaved himself onto his elbows, alarmed. She had discovered something, spoken to somebody, read a newspaper, gone to the police. He would have to get up, get out. But he couldn’t get up. He reached under the bed instead and fished for a while till he found his case and dragged it out, smothered in dustballs. (You wanted to live well, artistically, generously, to move gracefully among beautiful things thinking clear and accurate thoughts, and what happened? You ended up dying of some filthy Latin disease in a cheap hotel where nobody had swept under the beds for months - and he had thought the place above average!) He scrabbled through layers of clothes in the case untill he came across the dictaphone, then lay back in the damp sheets.

  ‘Dear Dad, I'm in Rome, where I appear to be suffering from some kind of serious illness.’ Morris shivered. Just the effort of speaking and clicking the thing on and off was exhausting. His blond hair was sodden with sweat. ‘What I ask myself about the major events of my life is …’ Well, what was it? There was something. He had certainly meant to say something. It should be on the tip of his tongue. There was something deep down he had really always thought about all this - himself, Dad, Mum, women, his life, his end. Something that explained it all in a nutshell, that the world ought to know. And why shouldn’t he have profound and recordable thoughts? He had been to Cambridge with the best of them (the finals were a mere formality). And if he was going to die here, because this was serious, he could feel it - and he would rather die than simply be arrested anyway (would he? really?) - if he was going to die and they found out all about it then he would like these tapes to be published as a kind of justification, because they’d be falling over each other to condemn him of course, nothing better than someone they could trample all over and condemn without seeing anything of themselves there, as if they were condemning some kind of monster from outer space or something. Look at the fun they’d had with the terrorists. As if none of them would have given genital Giacomo the good hiding he deserved.

  Morris played back the last sentence, 'ask myself about the major events of my life is …’ The batteries were running down, damn it. His voice sounded heavy and comically drawn out. (Fate’s last little joke? To leave him batteryless
on his deathbed.) So now he tried to finish very fast. Partly because he felt tired too. God knows, he didn’t have time to start a university thesis or anything is how much of this is destiny and how much I chose myself. (Would I have killed Giacomo, for example, a psychoanalyst might ask, if his sexual promiscuity hadn’t reminded me of yours. Dad? Or did I do it just for my own convenience?) Destiny or choice, then, or as if maybe the two are somehow interlinked and destiny has simply offered, and will go on offering, the choices I was made to take, that it knew I would and will take in a certain way despite the freedom …’

  There were quick footsteps and somebody fiddled a moment with a key in the lock, Morris just managed to drop the dictaphone in his bag and roll back across the bed before Massimina came in. She was weighed down with two shopping bags and carrying a sheaf of newspapers and magazines under her arm. Her lightly freckled face was bright and busy.

  ‘Slip this under your tongue and read the papers while I go and get the fresh sheets. The padrona, she’s called Signora Ligozzi by the way, said they wouldn’t be ready till eleven.’

  Morris found a thermometer in his mouth and a copy of La Mattina in his hand.

  RIMINI MURDERS, NEW FACTS’s NEW MYSTERY. The article seemed to leap at him from the bottom right-hand corner. He even felt the pain of it striking his naked eyes. How could she not have seen it? He felt at once extremely grateful to her for being so thoughtful; she saw he liked reading papers, so she got him them (when had anybody bothered so much with him before?), and at the same time it was as if he was sinking into a nightmare, trapped in a space that was hotter and darker and more bloody and suffocating with every moment that passed. If he couldn’t watch her then the only logical thing to do was … Morris was sick, his vision was blurring. His fingers trembled with the pages as she went out of the room and he sucked the thermometer hard. He had never meant to kill anyone.

  Police have now definitely established that only one assailant was involved in the horrific murders that left two lovers lying in a pool of blood in their hotel room in Rimini, Thursday evening.

  Pool of blood was a gross exaggerations and lovers they most certainly were not. Adulterers was the word they should have used. He and Massimina were far more lovers than they were.

  So it is clear now that the murderer tried to return to the slaughter soon after the crime and from various fingerprints found on the door, police are convinced he was not able to enter, having closed and thus locked the door on his first exit. The question Inspector Rodari and his team must now answer then, is...’

  At the sound of voices approaching down the corridor, Morris folded open the newspaper to page two and almost bit the head off the thermometer.

  His temperature was 41. Multiply by 9/5 and add 32. No, he couldn’t do it. High anyway, if the distance from the normal line was anything to go by. Higher than he’d ever had since mumps. The padrona, Signora Ligozzi, a big-boned, no-nonsense woman with a studied under-the-weather-but-bearing-up look about her and a pile of starched sheets in her arms, considered her young guests dubiously.

  ‘Better see a doctor.’

  ‘Right,’ Massimina agreed and asked Morris if he had his health card with him.

  Morris lay back watching from glassy eyes how flies whirled around the centre of the room. He managed a weak smile for Signora Ligozzi, which surprisingly drew a very warm motherly smile back. Obviously Massimina had told her somethings softened her up in some way. (‘We’re running away together. We’re getting married next month.’) So that now the woman was going to be indulgent. No, he hadn’t got his health card, he said, and didn’t want to see a doctor. He had a thing about doctors. It was just a touch of diarrhoea, or something like that, a bug, something in the food he’d eaten yesterday maybe, and if Massimina got him something for it from the chemist that would be fine, it would go away in a day or so.

  Massimina wanted to insist, but Signora Ligozzi changed her tune now and said she knew what he meant about not wanting to see a doctor; the problems they’d given her over the tiniest little polyps she’d had, being pushed from one doctor to another for examinations and signatures for authorizations for further examinations and long waits in surgeries and hospitals exposed to all the diseases everybody else had and then after wasting the best part of a month rushing around worrying herself near to death, the last doctor, the big consultant specialist, decided the whole thing was nothing at all, prescribed her a cream she could have bought at the chemist in the first place and that was the end of it.

  Morris tried to enthuse to this conversations but found his voice was breaking. When was the last time he’d been ill? A century ago. It must be a punishment. He tried to remember how stupid that idea had seemed when he had read the same thing about Raskolnikov - no, he must hold onto reason. But then he began to cough. Signora Ligozzi came over and put a hand on his forehead (as if there was any need for that crap now they had the evidence of the thermometer).

  “You need clean sheets and a good sleep, caro mio,' she announced, and a moment later Morris was being bundled away to the bathroom in his drenched pyjamas with a blanket round his shoulders so he could sit on the loo while they made up the bed. They enjoyed playing mother of course. They enjoyed the reversal of normal roles, the strong man weak, the second fiddle happily taking the place of the first (and for Signora Ligozzi there was a few days’ steady rent). Well, let them. Morris’s only chance he thought now was to play ill enough to keep the girl by his bedside twenty-four hours a day like a guardian angel at death’s door. He scooped up the newspapers and padded off to the bathroom.

  She had bought La Mattina and La Stampa, neither of which would have anything about the Verona kidnap, Morris could be certain. Plus a few mags. Panorama, political, Europeo, likewise, and Gente which was just gossip, pictures of abundant girls with famous footballers and the like (got that for herself presumably). All safe as houses. He sat on the toilet, reread the Rimini article, tore it out and flushed it away. Tomorrow there would be nothing at all most probably. They’d made all the discoveries they were going to make and without new developments a murder wasn’t worth anything after three days. And rightly so. Even he was beginning to get a bit bored by it. What was done was done. Morris leafed quickly through Gente, waiting to be called back to bed, and was about to put the thing down and relax (his bowels felt so weak, so shivery shivery), when a tiny item in the curiosities column caught his eye.

  KIDNAP VICTIM SENDS GET WELL CARD. Hopes were raised on Wednesday morning for the fate of kidnap victim Massimina Trevisan when her family received a get well card addressed to the girl’s grandmother who was seriously ill at the moment when Massimina disappeared. Posted in Rimini and bearing the message, ‘Hope you’re better now, I’ll be back soon,’ the card was believed to indicate that the kidnappers had established a human relationship with the girl and were unlikely to carry out their threat to kill her. It is the first known kidnap of a purely criminal nature in which such a letter has been sent. Sadly, Massimina’s grandmother was not able to see the card as she died less than a week after the girl’s disappearance.

  What crappy writing, Morris thought as he stumbled down the passageway back to his own bedroom. (He seemed to be in a dream. He didn’t believe it, couldn’t take it seriously.) If the kidnappers really had let a girl send a get well card he was sure as a journalist he could have made a better story of it than that, KIDNAP VICTIM’S MESSAGE JUST TOO LATE FOR CROAKING GRANDMA. Something like that. But Morris had applied for work with every halfway decent and indecent newspaper in the British Isles with negative results.

  What it did mean of course was that Massimina was less likely than ever to suspect anything. She had mailed the letter with her own hands.

  Only a week to go now.

  Morris shivered in the dim corridor, his hand on the door. Stop. Wouldn’t the police be surprised the kidnappers didn’t know Granny was dead? The criminals would be bound to be reading the Arena every day, no? So the police would reason
. And if they knew, how could it be considered humane and kind to let the girl send the card? Unless they were playing a game with him perhaps. Perhaps the card had said something else. The card had given it away (‘Morris sends his love’), and now they were just waiting for him to phone with all their tracking and tapping equipment at the ready so they could nail his location once and for all and swoop. And then the Rimini post-mark - they must already have linked it up with Giacomo, with that copy of the Arena open on the bed beside the corpses. How could they miss it?

  Morris breathed deeply, leaning against the wall. His forehead was bursting with sweat and his stomach was in knots. He closed his eyes. Was it possible he had been hallucinating? Still was? He should read the article again. But he had already flushed it down the loo. For a moment, with strangely perfect lucidity, he imagined a juggler who, in the middle of his most famous act, sees one more ball in the air than he thought he had thrown. Oh for another hand to catch it with!

  15

  Rome hummed outside Morris’s bedroom window. The great metropolis he’d barely glimpsed, cradle of the culture and heritage he aspired to and yearned to be able to afford - it was all just a stone’s throw away. Traffic throbbed in a distant street while somebody beat a tennis ball against the wall below his window. Caesar had been murdered not half a mile from here. St Paul had defended himself at the emperor’s court. Michelangelo had worked just down the street. And instead of enjoying it all, soaking it up, Morris had to shiver there under a mountain of covers. He had to keep Massimina busy, he had to reflect on the fact that Signora Ligozzi still held his passport, he had to scrutinize each morning’s paper with red and burning eyes to be quite sure there wasn’t anything he couldn’t let Massimina see. And even after checking every column inch of the thing, still when she casually picked it up and began to leaf through page after page, licking the tips of her fingers under the now painted nails (‘I want to look nice for you, Morri, even when you’re ill.’) - still he could barely keep himself from biting his own nails in anxiety. All the old aplomb was gone.