Painting Death

by Tim Parks

  ‘Why The Levite and his Concubine?’ Tarik asked. ‘Are there any Arabs in that?’

  ‘I thought you might want to comment that this, hmmm, shameful story, entirely within the Jewish community, has so few images, while a triumph over their Arab enemies, Judith decapitating Holofernes for example, is endlessly celebrated and reproduced.’

  ‘What was the story?’ Samira asked.

  The woodcut they were looking at showed a man raising a rather splendid axe over a woman’s body already cut into six or seven hapless chunks.

  Morris explained.

  ‘Poor concubine,’ the girl breathed. She pulled her head away from Morris’s shoulder. ‘Gang-raped, left to die, then cut to bits. I hope that’s not supposed to be a warning.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake!’ Morris was alarmed.

  ‘She sacrificed herself to save her man,’ Tarik said, clucking his lips, apparently impressed.

  ‘Not willingly,’ Morris pointed out. ‘The Levite just pushed her out in the street to satisfy the hoodlums who’d actually been after him.’

  ‘Typical,’ Samira complained, ‘a man gets tired of his woman and throws her to the sharks.’

  ‘But darling—’

  ‘Interesting,’ Tarik said, ‘that the hoodlums first thought they would rape him, then raped his whore instead.’

  Right. It was the kind of detail, Morris agreed, you just never heard from a Church of England pulpit. But the Bible was clear on the point. They had wanted the Levite’s butt.

  The young Arab was smiling that marvellous smile that lit up just one half of his face. ‘Perhaps our Levite was good-looking.’

  ‘Trust you!’ Samira said.

  Uncomfortably, Morris remembered the days when he himself had been an object of sexual interest to other men. Forbes for example. He’d never have guessed if Massimina hadn’t warned him.

  ‘Not at all,’ he said firmly. ‘It was because they had issues with him.’

  ‘Issues!’ Tarik laughed unpleasantly. ‘What issues?’

  ‘The Bible doesn’t say.’

  ‘Was that how they used to deal with issues? Forcing their opponents into anal sex?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’ Morris became aware of a wave of heat rising as if from the seat, through intestines and belly. ‘Anyway,’ he hurried on, ‘when the Levite cut the corpse up and sent the twelve pieces of concubine to the twelve tribes of Israel—see the messengers standing round with baskets to carry the bits?—they agreed that her death had to be avenged and about a hundred thousand people were killed in the ensuing battle.’

  ‘Christ!’ Samira said.

  ‘No it was BC,’ Tarik laughed.

  Morris began to dislike the boy.

  ‘Quite a lesson!’ Samira was still shaking her head.

  ‘How am I supposed to get all that plus an opinion into five hundred characters?’ Tarik demanded.

  ‘If you don’t feel up to it, I can find someone else,’ Morris said coolly.

  ‘Easy,’ Samira sang, ‘they wanted to fuck him, he tells them to fuck her, then everyone gets fucked!’

  Tarik laughed out loud. As he did so his left hand dropped carelessly from his neck to fall on Morris’s right thigh. Morris looked down and glancing through the glass tabletop saw the boy’s strong fingers brush Samira’s for a moment. The heat in his bowels intensified. He pushed back his chair and sat up.

  ‘By the way,’ he announced, ‘are you two busy Sunday morning? I’d like you to help me move a painting.’

  Chapter Ten

  HE REALLY COULDN’T WAIT any longer. Between a meeting with American buyers and another with Tunisian suppliers—it was important to keep the two well apart—Morris had stepped out of the office to pick up his now soberly framed honorary citizenship scroll from the corniciaio, and then, in the hardware store in Corso Milano, something to break a stout padlock. ‘A garage on a property we have in the country,’ he explained blithely. ‘I’m afraid I lost the key to the padlock.’

  Then coming out of the hardware store, reflecting, as he so often did when he found a heavy object in his hand, that this bolt cutter could definitely kill, and break fingers off too if you were that way inclined, he was simply overwhelmed by the need to solve this business of the loan requests once and for all. What was the point of all this mental ferment, this constant thinking about the various paintings, their arrangement, their captions, the overall effect on the public, if the show was never going to happen? What was the point of grabbing San Bartolomeo if the saint flayed was not to be a saint displayed? Rather than waste time walking a hundred yards back to the office for his Alfa, Morris stepped into the street and hailed a cab.

  ‘Castelvecchio, per favore.’

  Sitting in the back, Morris was again overwhelmed with indignation that a worm of a man like Zolla could call himself an art historian. The pedant didn’t want to take on board that these paintings Morris had put together were throbbing with life, heavy with death. The real thing. And instead Zolla was talking chronology and framing history, school of this, school of that. And as a result the Louvre had already said no. Other museums had asked for more information. And Zolla had replied, giving, he reassured Morris, ‘full details of air, humidity and temperature inside the museum and the travel and insurance arrangements’. For Christ’s sake! When what any serious museum director would want, Morris felt, was some compelling reason for lending his priceless heritage to this out-of-the-way show! He, Morris, had to sort this out now! Life is now.

  ‘Grazie,’ he told the taxi driver, tipped him generously and ignored his gratitude. He had to explain to those directors why they would one day be proud to have contributed to a groundbreaking exhibition which would bring together in the most explosive and illuminating fashion the beauty of form and the ugliness of murder. Otherwise Holofernes had been killed in vain. The Baptist had been decapitated to no end. Christ crucified for nothing.

  Morris marched into the museum, assured the guard on the door that he was not about to break the locks on the display cases and steal their swords and daggers, left his package and bolt cutter in the cloakroom and hurried through the permanent exhibition, then up the stairs to the offices.

  Zolla’s secretary seemed flustered.

  ‘Did you have an appointment, Signor Duckworth?’

  She blocked him outside Zolla’s door, which, unusually, was closed.

  Affable, if breathless, Morris explained that something had just occurred to him that made it imperative he have a word with Professor Zolla at once. A lot was at stake, he said. He walked past the young woman’s desk.

  ‘He’s not in,’ the secretary said, sidestepping to block him again. She was a cheerfully plump creature, dark-eyed and demure, but her suddenly brilliant smile now, as she stood with her shoulders to Zolla’s door, was oddly unfathomable. Morris stopped and stared at her. The secretary was smiling, as it were, determinedly. Morris raised his right scar-brow in a question. The secretary smiled harder, as if willing Morris to please understand, but simultaneously withholding the information that would get him there. The burden of it must be, Morris thought, that Zolla was in his room, but had told the secretary to say he wasn’t. She, in her zealous ignorance, had not understood that such an order could hardly apply to so important a visitor as himself. Again he made for the door. Again she blocked him.

  Morris sighed.

  ‘I’m sorry I’ve never asked you your name.’

  ‘Tosi.’ She cocked her head to one side. Her breasts were generously maternal.

  ‘I meant your first name.’

  ‘Mariella.’

  ‘How lovely,’ Morris said graciously.

  ‘Grazie.’

  ‘I’ll wait, then.’ He looked around to see if there was a free chair.

  The big girl still wasn’t happy. ‘I’m afraid he may be a long time.’

  Morris thought a moment.

  ‘OK, why don’t we do this? I’ll just pop down to the museum for half an hour. I have to
check a couple of wall measurements. In the meantime, if you have a chance to be in touch with him, can you let the professor know that I need to speak to him urgently?’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do, Signor Duckworth.’

  ‘Morris,’ Morris said.

  The secretary smiled still, but was too canny to use his first name. Her smile was a smile of power now, and obvious relief, and as Morris walked back through the office he was intensely aware that they all, yes, all five of the other workers, were wearing that same smile on their busy, dutiful and utterly hypocritical faces.

  Down in the museum he needed to check whether the door that led to the basement storerooms was usually kept locked or open. He walked past the arch of saints, and along the line of stony trecento dukes and knights to the double door in the far corner that bore the legend ‘L’ingresso e severamente vietato ai non autorizzati’. Morris smiled. He still loved the way it was never enough for Italians to forbid something. It had to be severely forbidden. Which only made it the more exciting just to press the handle down and see if . . . yes, it opened. There. But now he could hardly just close it again. How suspicious would that look? He breezed through, shut the door behind him and found himself in the pitch dark.

  Damn. Morris stood still for a moment and noticed at once that the air quality was different from that in the display rooms. It smelt dank. No humidity control. Hardly ideal for storing things. Running his hand over rough plaster to the left and right of the doorway, he eventually found a switch that lit a descending staircase. In for a penny. Morris walked down and discovered a large shadowy space dustily cluttered with what must be sculptures under heavy plastic sheeting and, along the wall to the right, stacks of canvases, some protected, others not. Morris picked his way over there. One rather charming stone griffin squatted under a coating of grime. Were these things valuable or not? Morris had often wondered whether the storerooms of museums might not be used by art traffickers, with a little internal collusion, as the ideal places to hide stolen artefacts until a buyer was found. The police would hardly go looking in the vast reserves of the V&A for stolen paintings. It might be interesting to know exactly what was under all these wraps. Of course it would be the merest prejudice to imagine that because Volpi was Neapolitan he might be up to something. Yet why do we have prejudices in the end? Because more often than not experience bears them out.

  Morris frowned. Exploring a little further in the room, he found a row of metal cupboards. He moved along the doors. Padlocked. Padlocked. Open! Inside were a dozen swords and daggers in a loose pile. Morris stopped. This was interesting. He stared. The light wasn’t good. Just naked bulbs strung along the central vault of a low ceiling. All the same, these were clearly antique pieces, presumably an extension of the collection on permanent display upstairs. It was strange that they weren’t even labelled. He picked one up. The haft felt a little small for his grip. But the weapon was pleasantly heavy. ‘A dagger which had two edges, of a cubit length.’ Morris smiled. ‘And he did gird it under his raiment upon his right thigh.’ Morris stood up, opening his jacket, and tried to slip the thing under his belt. Damn it was sharp! The point caught his thumb. He had a nasty scratch. Morris sucked the wound to stop the blood staining his clothes. How irritating! He put the knife back in the cupboard. There was something wrapped in a cloth and he unwrapped it one-handedly—a tiny stiletto—then thrust his thumb into the cloth which felt as if it had been gathering dust for years.

  He squatted in front of the cupboard, lost in thought. The weapons seemed rather pathetic, piled haphazardly in an old cupboard in a dank, gloomy room, like any junk people no longer have any use for; yet ready to flash out too, he knew, like genies from a bottle, ready to spring into the willing hand and accomplish some awful destiny. Weapons call to the willing hand. There was no doubt about that. Morris chuckled, savouring that moment when suddenly all indecision is behind you, you have the knife by the handle, you are going to strike, and the Devil take the hindmost.

  Hindmost. Another wonderful word.

  Then he was furious with himself. What on earth was he wasting all this time for, gloating over rusty swords? Once again the impulse that had driven him to the museum an hour or so ago returned with renewed force; he must head straight back upstairs and simply force Zolla, who was no doubt skulking in his office—masturbating quite probably, or entertaining a girlfriend—to write the kind of letter that might still save his exhibition. That was the only thing that mattered. Do it now.

  Hurrying back up the stairs from the storerooms, Morris banged out of the severely forbidden door, almost knocking over a dozy museum guard who had chosen precisely this quiet corner to while away the next sleepy but salaried hour. Without stopping to apologise, he rushed straight back upstairs and in no time at all, wounded hand thrust in jacket pocket, was striding between the desks of the office staff whose faces once again broke into smiles as he appeared. Zolla’s door was open now, but again the secretary stood up and shook her head. She wore too much eyeliner, Morris thought. It was vulgar.

  ‘I’m afraid, the professor’s still out.’

  ‘I’ll wait in his room if that’s OK, Mariella.’

  ‘I don’t think he’ll be back at all this morning.’

  Her nails were a luminous turquoise.

  ‘I’ll take the risk,’ Morris said.

  He pushed determinedly forward and into Zolla’s office. Behind him he had the impression that everybody in the room was about to burst into laughter. The Six-Dagger Massacre, he muttered a headline to himself: When it came time to close the offices, wrote Corriere della Sera, the museum caretaker found the institution’s entire administrative staff skewered to their swivel chairs and drenched in blood.

  Morris plonked himself in the armchair in the corner. The computer was on, he noticed. Zolla’s deodorant was in the air. How far away could the guy be?

  The secretary had followed him in and now stood helplessly at the door.

  ‘You really shouldn’t insist, Signor Duckworth,’ she said.

  ‘Morris,’ Morris smiled. ‘Call me Morris.’ From the wall beside him he picked out an old catalogue entitled L’onore delle armi. A show in 2004. The Honour of Arms. The Castelvecchio Collection.

  Since the young woman was watching him, he couldn’t pull his left hand from his pocket with its bloody rag. He could still feel the thumb pulsing. All the same he managed to rest the catalogue on his knee and, holding the bulk with his right hand, let the pages open one by one. There were tribal spears and shields from the Congo. Italy’s colonial wars. A sabre from Turkey. Rifles and bayonets from 1917.

  ‘The portrait gallery,’ he read on one page, ‘of gentlemen in armour at the turn of the sixteenth to the seventeenth century includes exponents of the Sagramoso and Pompei families from Verona. The finest portrait, that of Francesco Sagramoso, by Felice Brusasorci, is also the only one of a contemporary personage.’

  The secretary was still standing in the doorway.

  ‘Did Professor Zolla write this?’ Morris asked innocently.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘he always looks after the catalogues.’

  Morris glanced up and saw that she understood what he was thinking: the text was dire.

  ‘Lots of stuff about honour and gentlemen,’ he laughed, ‘but not much indication of what these unpleasant little jiggers actually did to people’s insides.’

  The secretary didn’t reply.

  Morris flicked leisurely through the catalogue. The woman hung on.

  ‘So, do I take it that all these weapons are held here at the museum?’

  ‘Not everything,’ she said. ‘But a lot of them. There are all kinds of things in the storerooms.’

  Morris put the catalogue down.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ she frowned. ‘I really couldn’t recall. There’s an inventory of course. We could have two or three permanent displays, if we had the space.’

  ‘An inventory? If you have it on Excel or
something, could you email it to me?’

  The secretary looked helpless now.

  Morris smiled his most reassuring smile.

  ‘Cara Mariella, you really don’t need to stand guard over me like an anxious mastiff. As co-curator of a forthcoming show, not to mention a major sponsor of the museum, I have some urgent business with the professor. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll just sit here reading catalogues until the professor shows up.’

  The woman sighed, lifting her ample breasts in an almost cartoon gesture. The moment she turned and retreated into the main open-plan room, Morris was on his feet and standing at Zolla’s computer. The screensaver was Donatello’s David. Naff. Pulling his left hand from his pocket, shaking off the rag and giving his thumb a good suck, Morris opened the search window in the bottom right of the screen and typed in ‘passwords’. A huge list of documents scrolled down. Morris looked at their file names. Spasso alla spiaggia. Il diritto e la privacy. Le leggi suntuarie nel 400 fiorentina . . .

  Too many. And his thumb was still bleeding. How ridiculous!

  Another hard suck and Morris went back to the search window and typed ‘skype email username banca biblioteca codice fiscale pin login’. Again various names appeared. But this time Le leggi suntuarie nel 400 was dominant. Morris clicked the file and, bingo! There they were, all Zolla’s passwords in a neat list. So much for fifteenth-century sumptuary laws. What an idiot imagining he had hidden the file by giving it an oddball name. Morris selected and copied the lot, closed the file, switched to Explorer which was already open on Zolla’s email, addressed a message to his own email account, MAD@duckworth.com, pasted in Zolla’s passwords, sent the mail, then deleted it, first from Posta inviata then from Posta eliminata. He opened the Documenti recenti folder to delete Le leggi suntuarie from that. Done? Yes. All in less than a minute. He really could have been a professional criminal. Morris returned the email window to Posta in arrivo and noted that the most recent message was from Volpi. Twenty-five minutes ago, but already read. He moved the cursor to it and a preview appeared. ‘Gioletto, get your sweet ass into my office now!’