Cara Massimina

by Tim Parks

  He went back over the bedroom, cleaning meticulously. Every sign of her must go. He had overlooked a nail varnish bottle, a box of Tampax, a tissue on the bedside table with toe-nail parings (after telling her to let the things grow!). And then there was the pregnancy test. How on earth could he have forgotten it? Morris stopped a moment to read through the instructions on the box, but it was too complicated, he didn’t have time. And who cared anyway? He swept the thing into a plastic bag with the other odds and ends, carried them outside and pushed them inside the open mouths of the fertilizer sacks. He would have to tie those up later. Keep his eye open for a good piece of rope.

  Towards eight thirty Morris was giving the sitting room floor a last careful wipe with warm water and alcohol, whistling now because he was almost through, singing sometimes—‘Through the night of doubt and sorrow, Onward goes the pilgrim band’—when his voice was suddenly drowned by the sound of a car racing up the drive. A squeal of brakes, scrunching wheels on gravel, a slamming door, running feet.

  Still wearing Signora Ferroni’s apron that he’d put on to clean, Morris blundered towards the door, the confession already forming on his lips. What was the point of denying it? If only they’d come an hour or two earlier to stop him. Morris felt close to tears and suddenly desperately lonely. Dear Mimi. If only they’d come earlier.

  ‘Ciao, Morris! So you are here. Why didn’t you answer the phone earlier? It did ring, didn’t it?’

  Gregorio ran up the steps. He was in shorts and his long athletic legs had a strong brown healthy look to them. Likewise his face under a mop of dark curls. Oh he was so terrifically glad to be back! And he’d just got his exam results, he said. He’d done it, passed, would you believe it? And he burst out laughing. Morris stared, backing away into the darkened house. Did he have to kill Gregorio too?

  ‘Buono, in English. Buono! Mamma nearly fainted.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ Morris croaked.

  A moment later he was helping the boy bring his bags in.

  ‘I know it was early but you might have answered, you lazy bastard. I came on the night boat and was hoping you’d get me some breakfast ready.’

  ‘You’re back earlier than you said.’ Morris was almost accusing.

  ‘Yes, they let Papa out of hospital early and I . . . What on earth have you been doing in the sitting room; washing the floor at eight in . . .’

  ‘I was about to go,’ Morris said, looking for a voice with something natural about it, and putting down the suitcase he’d brought in, he moved quickly to lift the shutters so as to dispel that air of covertness. And the smell? Did the room smell, it suddenly occurred to him? Only of cleaning alcohol surely.

  ‘Going?’

  ‘Yes, that must be why I missed this call you say you made. It’s all a bit complicated though. Come into the kitchen while I make you a coffee and I’ll tell you about it.’ His voice sounded about as natural as something from Wagner. But foreignness was on his side here. Gregorio would put it down to his English way with Italian. Put on a bit of an accent perhaps?

  They sat on stools watching the coffee pot, Gregorio munching biscuits, and Morris explained how he had had a girlfriend with him and . . .

  ‘Oh, a girlfriend, I thought you were coming with a boy?’

  ‘No, really? How come?’

  ‘You said amico on the phone.’

  ‘Did I?’ Morris looked innocently at Gregorio and held his gaze until he caught the faintest blush behind the boy’s tan. ‘No, no, a girl. Anyway . . .’

  ‘Not the one I saw you with in Piazza Bra that night? With the red tracksuit.’

  ‘Who? Oh no, this was my real girlfriend.’ He tried a little grin and thought he made it. ‘Anyway, we had a hell of a row last night—about getting married inevitably enough, she thought she was pregnant—and then when I refused, she took it into her head she was going to leave immediately, on the first bus from the village, so I had to walk her down there, carry her bags.’

  ‘But I phoned at six, you weren’t surely . . .’

  ‘The village is a good five kilometres and the first bus back to Olbia was 7:10.’ Morris had no idea when the first bus was, but then nor would Gregorio. The only time Gregorio noticed buses was when he was overtaking them in one of Papa’s cars. A warm feeling of justification began to throb back through Morris’s veins. He too would have a car soon. (Oh damn, he must get the cash out of Gregorio’s wardrobe!)

  ‘Yes, I told her she should wait till nine or so and then call Roberto, but you know what girls are; I was a beast and she was going to get away as soon as she could. So of course “the beast” here ended up lugging her cases five kilometres down there and himself five kilometres back.’

  He could see it all, was even beginning to feel hard done by. ‘Anyway, when I got back I thought I’d just clean up and go myself, seeing as it’s not too much fun being in a place all on your own.’

  Actually, now he thought about it, there was nothing he would have liked more than a few days’ rest here on his own.

  Gregorio appeared to swallow it all and then while he was swallowing his coffee too Morris said he had to go to the toilet for a minute. He dashed into Gregorio’s bedroom and quietly eased the plastic bag out from behind the pullovers. Excellent. He padded into his own room and packed the thing into his suitcase. Had he forgotten anything? Was there anything at all anywhere that could give him away? He had washed the paperweight and put it back. Traces of blood in the sink? He thought not. There’d hardly been any blood. The floor was clean. All her things were gone. Everything.

  ‘You’ll stay a few days though now I’m here?’ Gregorio’s voice behind him had him starting a moment.

  ‘A day or two maybe, but I’m kind of eager to be back. Find myself some work before the money runs out.’

  How long would it be before the corpse began to smell, before Gregorio for some reason wandered behind the garden shed?

  ‘What are you doing today?’ Morris asked point-blank.

  ‘I thought a lazy day on the beach with Roberto would hit the spot. Then I need a haircut.’

  These people didn’t do anything but spend lazy days on the beach. And it was a scandal they’d passed him in English. His mother must have known the examiner or something. He followed Gregorio into the bathroom and watched him beginning to shave.

  ‘I was wondering if you could maybe do me a favour then.’ And he explained that when he had come over on the boat he had met a rich industrialist who was apparently a count or something and this man had hinted that Morris might be able to work for him in his office in Vicenza. He’d invited Morris to drop over and see him at his villa in La Caletta, and what he’d been intending to do was get the bus down there and from there to the ferry, but if he was going to come all the way back here to stay another couple of days, then . . .

  ‘Sure, take the car,’ Gregorio said, slicing through white foam on his neck. Morris noticed a pack of old-fashioned Gillette blades on the glass shelf in the corner of the bathroom. People really were so vulnerable. It was ridiculous.

  ‘We’ll just go to Roberto’s first, I’ll get off there and you can go on.’

  20

  The only problem was that to go back and load Massimina into the car he would have to turn round and drive back in front of Roberto’s hotel, going in the wrong direction for where he’d said he was going. There was no other road. Could it make them suspicious? It could. But Morris had learned by now that where there was no choice it was better not to worry about the danger of doing something. You just did it. He drove quietly past the white hotel, careful not to accelerate or do anything unusual, then once out of sight cruised moderately back to the villa. He’d seen an old skipping rope somewhere in one of the cupboards that he could use for tying her up.

  Morris backed the car almost to the shed and went to the house for the rope. But the door was locked and he didn’t have the key now. He’d given it to Gregorio. Damn. He’d have to buy a rope then. He could ge
t a skipping rope when he passed through Palau. No problem in a seaside town.

  A scuffling behind the shed as he approached froze him. Bird. It must be. It was. A sparrow was scrabbling around the sacks. He dragged the corpse away, imagining it would have stiffened now and be easier to move, bent up as it was. But no. The thing flopped and seemed determined to come out of the sacks. So much for rigor mortis. It was unmanageable. One didn’t want to be undignified with the girl but there you were. He heaved the package any way he could as far as the back bumper and fiddled with the keys. He must have the key to the boot, damn it. Try them all again. Yes, there. The boot was half full of clutter. Old shoes, jeans, a few tools, accessories for skiing. A knife. Morris shoved them to the back and wrenched up the corpse. But shapeless as it was in the sacks and with all her clothes and odds and ends swimming about and occasionally falling out, it was difficult. He couldn’t tell what he was grabbing. Then the belt slipped away from neck and feet allowing the whole body to open up. The top sack with her head was just inside now but the bottom slipped down, the sack slithering away to show her white backside.

  Morris was suddenly boiling with anger, furious at this continued rebellion of the now inanimate girl. Anybody might drive by any minute. Somebody might be looking down from the hill behind. Damn and damn. He slapped her hard and the skin was cold as putty. ‘Get in for Christ’s sake!’ He heaved up the legs, jammed them in somehow and slammed down the boot. A pair of blue panties lay on the ground by his feet. No. He picked them up, found the key again (he mustn’t mustn’t mustn’t go and lock the keys in the boot or something stupid like that), shoved the panties inside a sack, which brought his hand in contact with her skin for just one unpleasant second, and had the boot down again. Morris stood up straight and made himself breathe deeply for two or three full minutes.

  Ten o’clock. He turned off the coast road and drove southwest along Route 133. The rain of the evening before had left the country glistening and freshly scented. The car climbed steeply through hills of flowering gorse, occasional thickets, sheep, broken-down farms, modern holiday villas. Sardinia wasn’t really all it was cracked up to be, Morris thought.

  It was a long time since he’d done any driving and he had to go easy, especially in such a powerful car. His experience was limited to his father’s old 1100. He turned on the radio and twiddled the dial a little, hoping for news or business reports, but it was all light music crap. There was nothing he hated more than light music. He settled down to enjoy what there was of a landscape, driving slowly and carefully. At Lake Coghinas he joined the main road and stopped a little later in Oschiri to get hold of every paper he could lay his hands on. With the car parked safely in sight across the road he sat in a small dirty cafe and went through the lot of them. But nothing. There wouldn’t have been time for them to get anything in on her phone call of course. If they had managed to trace that he was done.

  He was going to order a second coffee when it suddenly came to him that with the sun beating down on the car like it was, she would be smelling awfully in no time. And for some reason it was this idea of smell that bothered Morris most of all. As if once to experience the smell of a victim’s corpse would taint him for life. He jumped up, paid and left. Seeing a petrol station open just a hundred metres away he thought for a moment he might buy a can of petrol and arrange a little cremation. But it would probably attract more attention than it was worth. Like digging holes.

  A further ten kilometres and he left the main road at Ozieri, taking the car snaking up into the rugged hills around Biti. This was the heartland of Sardinia now—bandit country: sheep, shepherds, roughnecks and miles and miles of wild empty country. No tourists either, by the looks of it; no expensive villas, no people wandering across the countryside on exploratory walks every day. Morris watched the occasional untarred tracks that snaked off the road to either side, looking for one that was overgrown, disused.

  He found it a few kilometres before Nuoro. The ground was wet, which was unfortunate. He would leave tracks. But then there was no search going on, was there? He put the car into second and took it very slowly up the rutted track into the hills, until, passing through a thicket, he had trees brushing their branches against both sides of the car. He stopped and walked a little way. Bushes, undergrowth, no sign of a path. It was as good as he was going to find.

  Back at the car he heaved her out again, textbook stiff now. But he had forgotten the rope. He was going to have to drag her tugging at the edges of the plastic sacks again, tearing out his fingernails. And he did, any old how, through bushes and nettles, the hell with respect. He was making far too much damage too, but what could you do? Nature would repair herself in a couple of days. A bit of luck was all he needed—a bit of luck. ‘With a little bit, with a little bit . . .’ No, he must try to breathe only through his mouth in case it smelled—and look away when the lower sack continually slipped down round her nether parts. But better that than her face. He felt like a long-distance runner, exhausted, but nearing the end of the course. If he could just hold on a bit longer. After a few hundred metres he found a particularly wild bush, crept under the branches and pushed the body around the trunk, grunting and sweating with the effort, shivering and boiling together.

  It was ten minutes’ driving later that Morris realized that leaving all those clothes and things in the sack with her was pretty well the craziest thing he could have done. They would be bound to identify the body sooner or later, they were geniuses at that kind of thing these days. And then all those tags from Vicenza, Rimini, Rome and Porto Torres would trace out the itinerary of the kidnap down to the last detail and thus give the police just the lead they needed. He pulled into the side of the road and turned the car round. He felt rather proud of himself really to find he had the courage to go back there, and when he arrived proud again to see how quickly and efficiently he stripped the sacks off her and took all the clothes and shoes and odds and ends away. He didn’t seem to mind the body at all, nor its faint smell. It did occur to him that he really ought to smash up her face with the car jack. But there were limits. And the St Christopher? Leave it. It was a gift he had given her and she could keep it. Nobody would connect it with Giacomo anyway. And it was a challenge, a snub to fate. Like Gregorio’s bronze left on the coffee table in his flat.

  Coming out of the track for the second time onto the country road, Morris almost ran over an elderly man walking with a stick.

  ‘Scusi, mi scusi Signore, buon giorno,’ Morris said from his open window at his breeziest and best. He looked the old peasant straight in the eyes. Tonight he would whoop it up with Gregorio and Roberto, get thoroughly drunk and then tomorrow or the next day back to Verona.

  ‘Buon dì,’ the man with the stick replied from a leathery old face.

  Morris returned via Genoa, which meant a thirteen-hour trip. He travelled at night with a private cabin and kept himself to himself. Before turning in he stood at the boat’s rail and watched a warm Mediterranean moon shining full and bright over the boat’s lazy wake. Not a wave was in sight. The sea was a pond. He looked backwards towards the last winking lights of Sardinia and added up the cards, for and against.

  There was the box of tampons Gregorio had come across by the garden shed, a strange place to lose such a thing. Then the corpse might be discovered immediately and identified immediately with the Sardinian papers publishing photographs good enough for Roberto or Gregorio to recognize. Give it a month though and they’d both be back on the mainland. There was the heap of fertilizer too, plus the two hundred extra kilometres he’d put on Gregorio’s Alfa Romeo that day. There was Stan who had seen the girl from a platform away in Rome and knew Morris was going to Sardinia. There was Signor Cartuccio who might have seen the Identi-Kit of the Rimini murders suspect, not to mention the possibility that the police could have traced his phone calls, might decide at any moment to check up on his supposed trip to Bari, who his friends were, where he had stayed. And against all these dangers Mo
rris held but one card, which he must trust and pray would prove the ace of tramps—his unsuspectability, the leap of imagination that would be required on the part of a group of people who had shown themselves sadly lacking in that quality.

  As soon as he was back in Verona he would get over and see Inspector Marangoni and have a frank talk about it all, especially about that last strange phone call, which according to yesterday’s Corriere had been too brief to trace. He would ask the policeman if there was anything he could do, if there was any hope left at all. He would weep maybe and beat a fist on the man’s desk. Yes, he could see himself doing it already.

  Back in his first-class cabin with a bottle of spumante to celebrate, he drank quietly, going over his plans—the investments, photography, the book (he must buy a typewriter)—then rummaged in his suitcase for the dictaphone. Where had he put the new batteries? In the zip pocket. Good.

  He installed the batteries, lay back and reflected. What was it he had said last? He wound back a little and switched on ‘. . . the choices I was made to take, that destiny knew I would and will take in a certain way because . . .’ His own voice stopped, to be followed immediately afterwards by a crackle and then a strange female voice.

  ‘Che cosa mai dici in tutti questi nastri, Morri? Non capisco un cavolo. Sei cosi misterioso sai.’

  The voice stopped. Morris, with his heart in his mouth, replayed it. It didn’t seem her voice. The words were long and drawn out by those dying batteries he had just replaced. A moan it seemed; a moan from beyond the grave. ‘Che cosa mai dici . . . Morri . . . What do you say in these tapes, you’re so mysterious.’

  A moment later Morris was at the rail again, hurling the dictaphone far out on a moonlit sea. He wouldn’t have been surprised really had a female arm reached out to take the thing. He was going crazy. Quite mad. And he stood at the rail for a long while, weeping quietly on his own.