Painting Death

by Tim Parks

  ‘It didn’t sound like it was about Mauro,’ Antonella finally said.

  Morris said nothing. The previous evening they had argued. A rare event. After leaving the police station in Brescia—and he had taken care to chat politely to the policemen for five minutes before departing—Morris had asked Tarik to drive him to Caprino Veronese. On the way he had spoken to his lawyer, Carla Cogni, an overweight workaholic in her mid-forties. Whenever possible, Morris explained to Tarik, while waiting for Carla’s receptionist to put him through, he preferred to work with women: they took more pleasure in his Englishness, had more sympathy for his facial scars and were generally impressed without needing to compete. ‘Oh, if all the world were women and me the only man!’ he laughed. ‘Me and you, that is, Tarik.’

  Tarik did not smile. The fog was thicker than ever.

  ‘Carissimo Signor Duckworth!’ the lawyer exclaimed, her voice far louder than necessary. Morris had to hold the phone some distance from his ear. ‘My warmest congratulations on your honorary citizenship. We are all very proud. In what way can I be of service to you?’

  Morris loved these Latinate formulas which he still contrived to hear in English, even as they were being pronounced in Italian. They sounded so much more old-fashioned and dignified with only a literal translation, which was just as well, given the tawdry situation in hand. He began to explain.

  ‘Not wise to speak on the phone,’ she stopped him.

  ‘I know, I know, Avvocatessa, but I’m afraid he has already said as much to the police. He seems—’

  ‘That’s as maybe,’ the lawyer told him. ‘But nothing is irreversible, Signor Duckworth.’ Speaking very firmly, as if addressing someone she knew was hiding behind a filing cabinet, she added, ‘The fact is we know that he hasn’t done anything wrong.’

  ‘Of course,’ Morris agreed. Returning the phone to his pocket he was shaking his head in admiration. If anyone could get the boy out, it was Carla.

  They drove in silence until Tarik quite unexpectedly announced, ‘I think I like your son.’

  This was a surprise.

  ‘You wouldn’t if you knew him. He goes around with a bunch of racist Hellas Verona fans. Complete louts.’

  ‘That’s rhetoric,’ Tarik said complacently. ‘When they’re supporting their local team they like to shout “Verona for the Veronese” and feel everybody else is an enemy. It’s just part of the game. We do it back in Tripoli too.’

  How confusing! Morris took a deep breath. On the outward journey the young Arab had got furiously worked up about Morris’s professional interest in Judith Slaying Holofernes, a marvellously conceived and brilliantly executed painting by the incomparable Artemisia Gentileschi, and here he was on the return trip endorsing a bunch of yobs who quite probably tossed bananas at black football players. Meanwhile, Morris noticed how wonderfully sinister Tarik’s quiet smile was. It lifted the right side of his face, leaving the left absolutely expressionless. The lips were thin and stayed firmly shut while the eyes lit very faintly as if to suggest that the boy was aware of much more than what had been said. It was splendid.

  ‘Racist or not, he’s a fool.’

  ‘You say they ambushed the police and fought them in an open fight?’

  ‘That would be one way of putting it.’

  Tarik shook his shock of black hair. ‘Quite a guy.’

  Morris was irritated. ‘But not in a noble cause, Tarik! Out of mere adolescent bloody-mindedness. He’s a beefy yob with more energy than sense.’

  Tarik continued to make admiring clucks with his lips and little nods of the head. Morris’s irritation became exasperation.

  ‘What is the point of paying a fortune for a child’s education, if he goes and gets himself put away for a decade? It’s not respectful to me or his mother.’

  ‘The police started it,’ Tarik objected. ‘Didn’t they? They’re the real fascists.’

  Exasperation morphed into amazement. Sometimes it did seem to Morris that he was the only halfway law-abiding citizen on the planet.

  ‘Listen, I’d much rather have you for a son,’ he announced bluntly. ‘Think how easily you’d get into the LSE if you’d been to Tonbridge School. I can’t imagine you getting yourself put away for a stupid brawl. You’re far too smart.’

  In response to this enormous compliment, with its hint of promise too, the boy said nothing.

  Amazement hardened into pique.

  ‘Perhaps I’m so upset because I went to gaol myself once. I know what it means to lose my freedom.’

  When Tarik showed no interest, he added dangerously, ‘They put me on trial for murder, you know.’

  The Alfa was held up by a slow van that wouldn’t move in from the fast lane. Flashing his, or rather Morris’s, headlights, Tarik asked:

  ‘Who were you supposed to have killed?’

  ‘Oh, a business partner.’

  Morris didn’t mention that Bobo had been his present wife’s husband, or that his death had allowed Morris to take over Fratelli Trevisan.

  ‘But they didn’t find you guilty?’

  ‘Because I hadn’t done it.’

  The van moved in and Tarik could accelerate. ‘So who had?’ he asked, hurtling into complete invisibility now.

  ‘One of the immigrant workers,’ Morris said carelessly. ‘Bobo treated them rather badly, I’m afraid. Talk about racist! I did warn him.’

  Tarik frowned. ‘And they caught this man, the murderer?’

  ‘A Nigerian, yes. Not exactly caught. They found out he had done it after he was killed, burned to death by racist arsonists who objected to his sleeping with a white woman. It was most unpleasant.’

  Morris didn’t mention that the white woman was his first wife.

  There was a long pause before Tarik remarked, ‘How convenient.’

  What was that supposed to mean?

  Morris felt irritated, yet at the same time realised he was liking the boy more and more, the expert nerviness of his young fingers on the wheel, his extreme alertness as he drove too fast in the fog.

  Morris asked: ‘Have you had another think about that show I mentioned?’

  Tarik didn’t reply. He was negotiating the autostrada exit. Morris gave him directions and the car started to climb north into the hills above Lake Garda.

  ‘It would be a real novelty,’ he insisted, ‘to have an Arab point of view on our biblical art. People would be intrigued.’

  All at once the fog thinned and then in just a few metres they were above it, driving through a winter twilight of white stone walls, inky cypresses and flaking roadside Madonnas.

  ‘How beautiful!’ Morris exclaimed. Turning back, you could see the whole North Italian Plain as a sea of luminous grey with just here and there a campanile or an archipelago of office blocks poking through.

  ‘Isn’t Italy marvellous?’

  The boy grimaced.

  ‘Do it for Samira,’ Morris suggested. ‘She’d be proud of you. You’ll make a name for yourself, I promise.’

  ‘No.’

  They arrived in Caprino Veronese where Morris left Tarik in the car again, to go looking for the contractor he had mentioned to Cardinal Rusconi. In a small overheated cabin amid mountains of building materials on an apparently idle building site, they had talked about the school in Sant’Anna and how much might be done without spending anything at all. ‘The important thing for them politically,’ Morris said, ‘is to get the foundations dug. Send over an excavator when you have one spare and put it on the bill for this place.’

  Old Zuccato was a taciturn man who rarely offered more than a grunt in reply. Morris thought of him as one of the world’s geniuses in the art of subcontracting; there was not a single task on Zuccato’s building sites that was not subcontracted to the most disparate suppliers imaginable, most of them southern, Slav or African, all astonishingly cheap. Morris explained the concept to Tarik as they drove back to Verona.

  ‘Zuccato would subcontract his own bodily functions if i
t made economic sense.’

  Tarik didn’t find this funny.

  ‘Call in quotations for getting his wife with child.’

  Nor this.

  So Morris phoned the boy’s sister.

  ‘Sammy.’

  ‘Tesoro!’ she whispered. ‘What a nice surprise!’

  ‘Bellissima,’ he said huskily.

  That would show the boy who was boss.

  An hour later, crossing his home courtyard in Via Oberdan, Morris was in a classically mixed mood: on the one hand there was the honorary citizenship (if it hadn’t gone spectacularly well, the ceremony had at least happened); then the idea of the art show (a startling confirmation of his creativity); plus this curious new intimacy with Samira’s brother (Morris felt sure the boy would change his mind)—all that was positive and exciting—but on the downside there was the huge and no doubt time-consuming problem of Mauro who was, like it or not, a Duckworth, and as such capable of dragging the family name into the mud. ‘My son, my son,’ Morris sighed; he was just giving a wistful caress, as he always did—because sculptures are there for the touching—to Mercury’s marbly buttocks, when he was stopped in his tracks by a voice calling:

  ‘Here comes the Honourable Citizen! Hey Morris, man!’

  A window creaked open on the first floor and a grinning face was looking down: a middle-aged and very Jewish face, pointed chin and receding, if not terminally receded hairline. Together with the rush of adrenalin that immediately flooded Morris’s body, came the alarming reflection that if there was one person in the whole world who should never have been admitted to The Art Room it was Stan Albertini.

  ‘I can’t believe,’ were Morris’s first furious words, as Antonella and her guest came to greet him in the hallway, ‘that you two are looking at pictures when our Mauro is in gaol.’

  No sooner had he said this than he appreciated his mistake. Hadn’t he himself taken Don Lorenzo up to see Judith Slaying Holofernes after this morning’s ceremony? Hadn’t he insisted that it was better that he, Morris, handle police and lawyers alone while his wife get on with life as if nothing had happened? And had he ever used the expression ‘our Mauro’ before? Never. Then specifically to mention the paintings! Achilles might as well have removed his ankle boots beneath the walls of Troy.

  ‘Where’s Massimina?’ he went on, almost in panic.

  Antonella was confused. ‘What’s Mimi got to do with it?’

  Amazingly, Stan didn’t seem to take in the fact that the people around him were going through some kind of family crisis; but then the American was famous for missing the obvious. He had never really registered the fact that he had seen Morris together with Massimina the afternoon she was supposedly kidnapped; nor grasped the coincidence that he had again run into the Englishman at Stazione Termini the very day someone picked up the ransom there. It seemed entirely possible that Stan could be relied upon until the end of time never to smell even the most stinking of rats. On the other hand, could one, should one, allow one’s freedom to depend on someone else’s crass stupidity?

  ‘How you doin’, you old fraud?’ The unwelcome visitor embraced him and slapped him on the shoulders. ‘Long time no see, eh?’

  If only it could have stayed that way.

  ‘I’m just here for a month or so, on vacation.’

  A month!

  ‘Taken early retirement,’ Stan went on. He waved be-ringed hands around and occasionally clapped himself in his enthusiasm, as if his hosts could have any time for small talk with their son in a cell facing serious charges.

  ‘I was hoping to hook up with old Mike. Forbes. Remember?’

  The man just wouldn’t stop.

  ‘Great paintings by the way. Kind of Tarantino before Tarantino. Pulp baroque. Love the one of the lady hammering the big nail into the guy’s skull. Talk about splatter, man!’

  If I had a hammer, Morris thought, I’d hammer in the morning.

  ‘We need to persuade Massimina,’ he improvised, addressing his wife, ‘to talk some sense into Mauro. Sorry Stan, but you’ve arrived at a tricky moment. The situation is actually worse than we thought,’ he said urgently to Antonella. ‘Much worse.’

  That should refocus her attention.

  ‘I know, I know, my own are the same,’ Stan was immediately agreeing.

  I’d hammer all day, Morris thought. Fleetingly, he wondered if Antonella and the American had already shared an aperitivo. They seemed altogether too relaxed.

  ‘My oldest,’ Stan was babbling, ‘totalled his Toyota the day before I flew. Wasn’t hurt fortunately.’

  ‘I’m here, Papà.’ Massimina tapped Morris on the shoulder. Apparently she’d been standing behind him the whole time. The tall girl laughed at her father’s absent-mindedness. ‘We’ve been grilling Stan about how you were when you first arrived in Italy.’

  Morris was lost. Why weren’t they more worried about Mauro?

  ‘And how was I?’ he asked coldly.

  Stan couldn’t stop chuckling, ‘You know those little hermit crabs that kinda nip your fingers if you try to pull ’em out of their shells? Complete recluse! There were people thought our Mo was way way off the rails.’

  ‘Our son Mauro,’ Morris announced very loudly, ‘has confessed to the police that he assaulted them deliberately. He is facing ten years’ imprisonment. We have to discuss this at once.’

  They had moved to the salotto where, sitting together around the monumental fireplace, Morris had insisted that Mauro must be persuaded to lie. Lying was absolutely the only sensible course. He was aware of speaking too much and too fast. The lawyer agreed with him, he said. The boy must say he had given his confessional statement under extreme duress after being beaten within an inch of his life. Massimina must convince him to do this. The best way would be to tell him that his mother was so overcome with shock and hysterics she had had to take to her bed and been put on tranquillisers. ‘If you visit looking fit and well,’ he added quickly as his wife opened her mouth to protest, ‘he just won’t realise the harm he’s doing. The boy lives in a different world. He seems to take some sort of crazy pride,’ Morris concluded, ‘in claiming that he would never stoop to lying, which is fine if you have nothing to hide. But the truth is there are moments when lying is the only honest course of action.’

  Morris finally stopped speaking to accept and immediately drain a glass of prosecco. The ancient maid was hovering with bottle and ice bucket as she had been instructed to do on all occasions when there were guests. Evidently it hadn’t occurred to her that this was hardly a moment to celebrate, but given that she had poured a glass Morris decided he might as well take it. He badly needed a drink. Just the presence of Stan seemed to plunge him into agonies of adolescent insecurity, as if he hadn’t become a pillar of society at all, but remained a sore thumb in need of a bandage. Sipping the sharp wine as the others stared at him, he was aware of having said something that didn’t make sense but, precisely because of that, achieved a certain profundity: lying is the only honest course of action. What could that mean? He tilted his head and emptied the glass. Perhaps the contradiction might be resolved through the idea of consistency: if it was noble and honest to be consistent, then once you had lied it was surely noble and honest to go on lying. What good, for example, would Morris be doing anyone if he owned up now to six half-forgotten murders? Or was it seven? No good at all. But Mauro, it seemed, wouldn’t even start lying. What could you do with a boy like that?

  Antonella wore a heavy grey cardigan over a long olive-green gown. Casa Trevisan was never the warmest of environments; there hardly seemed much point in trying to heat such a vast space. She was drinking tea not wine and Morris noticed a quietness and reserve about her as if she were gathering energy for some difficult task. Normally admirable, today the pose seemed threatening. Crucified in her cleavage, Christ was sulking; he wouldn’t raise his head to Morris’s gaze. Then, smiling wearily and putting down her cup, the lady of the house turned to Stan, who had chosen to s
it back to front on one of the room’s old wooden dining chairs, and with a heavy sigh said: ‘Can you believe Morris gave a talk along these lines at a Rotary dinner a couple of months ago? The importance of lying in the creation of prosperity. I nearly died of shame.’

  Leaning dangerously into the creaking carpentry of the antique chair, Stan laughed raucously and slapped his knees: ‘Inglese italianizzato, inglese indemoniato,’ he declared.

  It was a cliché Morris had heard at least a thousand times, though never perhaps in such an Americanised Italian.

  ‘Why on earth did you tell him that?’ he demanded a moment later when Stan hurried off to the loo. ‘It’s humiliating.’

  Antonella sighed over her teacup. ‘Because you really mustn’t say those things, Morris, and especially not in front of people who are not family. What kind of idea will he have of you? And you never know who he might run off and chatter to.’

  ‘Well then get rid of him! This is a family emergency and he’s hanging around as if we were having a summer picnic!’

  ‘He’s here for you, not for me, Morris. You get rid of him.’

  Morris had been convinced it was the other way round. Hadn’t Stan been Antonella’s private English teacher, in the old days? Weren’t they always in each other’s pockets translating Jim Morrison and the Authorised Version? In any event, both husband and wife knew that if the American had not changed his ways he wouldn’t take any hints about leaving until absolutely stuffed with food.

  ‘The old prostate,’ Stan grinned ruefully, still buttoning up as he came back into the room. ‘Did the op, you know, but it seems to have gotten worse rather than better.’

  ‘How interesting,’ Morris agreed.

  ‘No, I won’t stay to dinner, thanks,’ Stan was saying now in reply to Antonella’s offer, ‘not with you folks wound up over your boy. Just one thing: I was wondering if you could put me on the trail of Old Mike. Forbes. I’m really hoping I can find him.’