by Tim Parks
‘What were you thinking of?’ Mimi demanded. ‘What if they’re drug dealers or something? What if this whole Libyan thing is about trafficking? Here in Italy.’
‘Arms,’ Bobo suggested.
‘Paintings,’ Forbes thought.
‘Prostitutes,’ Paola volunteered.
It was Morris’s turn to be silent. Eventually, he muttered, ‘From the moment Stan went to the police, I’d felt I was living on borrowed time. Then that evening there was spring in the air, and Samira looked so good.’
‘Liar,’ Paola said. ‘You’d seen her naked a thousand times.’
On his back on the bunk, Morris’s forehead knitted into a painful frown.
‘It was the boy.’
There was a sharp intake of breath.
‘It was the first time you’d seen Tarik naked.’
‘That’s true,’ Morris acknowledged. ‘Usually he was rather unfriendly. Surly. And instead, all of a sudden . . . It was new to me. I don’t know.’ He hesitated. ‘Having chosen not to kill Stan, I’d been feeling rather virtuous. Like I deserved a treat.’
‘Chosen?’
His friends didn’t seem impressed.
‘It was only the low ceiling,’ Bobo said drily.
‘Is the Arab well hung?’ Forbes enquired.
‘Oh for heaven’s sake!’ Mimi wailed.
Then, pulling a blanket over his face, one arm underneath lolling indigently across his belly, Morris told his seven old friends in unsparing detail how it had all happened. The moment when, eyes closed, he had realised that the lips kissing his possessed an unusual beardy roughness; the moment in the shower kneeling between the two young bodies as the water streamed off them, and then the beautiful moment, dancing together, shoulders closed in a circle, hands on buttocks, to the languid wail of some Arab compilation. Marijuana and sandalwood in the air. Until, a couple of hours later, or perhaps longer, all memories abruptly ceased.
‘Wow!’ someone breathed.
‘Morris dancing!’ Sandra giggled.
‘Well I’ll be buggered,’ Forbes remarked with fruity indulgence.
Then the frivolity faded and there was a long silence in the tiny cell. It was rather like at the end of the Communion service back in St Barnabas when everyone had partaken of the body and blood and knelt in their pews to reflect.
Finally Paola said softly: ‘Dear Mo, sometimes it feels like you’ve had to do the living for all of us.’
Morris accepted this interpretation. Then remarked, ‘But it’s hardly going to help with my defence.’
There was a general shuffling, a certain embarrassment even.
‘Well,’ Sandra said thoughtfully. ‘Now you’ve had the good grace to tell us what really happened that evening, let me ask this: have you ever heard of TGA?’
‘TG what?’ Morris sat up.
‘Temporary global amnesia,’ the English girl said. ‘I read about it in some magazine. There was a famous case. In America, of course. It happens to people in their fifties; you get about six to twenty-four hours of total amnesia. It’s triggered by some mind-blowing experience. Often sexual.’
Morris was very alert now. And yes, dimly, distantly, he recalled that he too had read about this. It rang a bell.
‘So, I have wild sex and lose my memory for a few hours, is that it? Right when the murder happens.’
‘I only read the article,’ Sandra said. ‘I’m not an expert.’
‘But what would it mean?’ Morris asked. ‘That I could have done things I don’t know about?’
‘I’ve no idea. You’ll have to do some research. Get on the net.’
Which of course was impossible in a prison cell. The problem was that Morris needed to know now. Otherwise, how could he ever put together an alibi?
‘Perhaps there are clues in what happened the following morning,’ Bobo suggested.
‘In what sense?’
‘When you went to get the picture, did Samira and Tarik give some hint about what happened the evening before?’
Morris wasn’t sure. He would have noticed.
‘You didn’t know the old fat boy had been skewered at that point, Boss,’ Kwame pointed out. ‘You weren’t looking for hints.’
‘Go over it again,’ Paola told him.
‘But it was exactly as in my report to Carla.’
‘Not altogether,’ Mimi said severely.
‘OK. Early morning Antonella woke me in The Art Room and asked me when I’d got home. That’s when I realised I couldn’t remember anything.’
‘And did you tell your wife?’
‘Of course not! I felt confused, and rather guilty too, for what had happened the previous afternoon.’
‘What a useless hypocrite you are,’ Paola said with an intensity of contempt that Morris found both humbling and exciting.
‘Then we went to church, only to find that Don Lorenzo wasn’t—’
‘Could he be involved?’
‘Who?’
‘The priest.’
It was Sandra again. Morris was rather surprised at the extent of her participation.
‘After all, why was he out in the middle of the night, and why did he have a heart attack when he got home?’
‘Because he was visiting a deathbed,’ Morris said.
‘Yeah, Volpi’s!’ Sandra insisted.
‘Hardly a deathbed,’ Kwame quipped.
‘He’s a strange priest if you ask me,’ Sandra said. ‘How did they get your boy Mauro out of gaol in the end, Morris? Whose coffin was it fell on his foot that he never wants to confess?’
Morris felt lost.
‘I was molested by a priest,’ Sandra said. ‘I was only twelve. It was after choir practice in—’
‘For Christ’s sake, Sandy,’ Giacomo interrupted.
‘Anto hurried to the hospital,’ Morris resumed, ‘while I set off to San Zeno again.’
‘And . . . ?’ Paola took over the questioning.
And Morris had had to ring the bell two or three times before he was buzzed in. They were barely out of bed.
‘No mention of the previous evening’s antics?’
‘Not at all. Or not at first.’
Over breakfast—Morris had brought the Libyans cappuccinos and pastries from the café in the piazza—Samira had rather unexpectedly said something about their relationship being at a crossroads. Either he, Morris, was man enough to leave home and make an honest woman of her, or they had to stop seeing each other. It was too painful for her to get any deeper in a relationship if it was just going to end.
‘An honest woman,’ Mimi objected. ‘That’s rich.’
‘Obviously I have no intention of leaving home,’ Morris reassured his seven servers. He had always understood that the Duckworth ghosts were profoundly conservative.
‘Anyway, enough of my relationship with Samira, since it’s got nothing at all to do with Volpi’s murder.’
‘It might have a lot to do with it,’ Bobo said, ‘and it certainly will have a lot to do with how those two kids responded when the police questioned them.’
‘For example,’ Paola resumed, ‘what you didn’t tell Carla in your statement was that at the church in San Briccio they weren’t just making fun of the paintings, they were making fun of you.’
Morris said nothing.
‘Of your sexual prowess to be precise,’ Paola said. ‘Or lack thereof.’
‘Of how you struggled,’ Mimi said quietly.
‘Did not your dusky damsel say,’ Forbes chuckled, ‘and I quote: “I thought Methuselah was going to blow a gasket”?’
Morris tried to be patient. ‘I just don’t see what this has got to do with Volpi’s death.’
‘Why didn’t you tell the two of them you couldn’t remember anything?’ Paola enquired. ‘It might have been a more honest way to deal with the situation. Look guys, what on earth happened to me yesterday evening? I can’t remember. Maybe they’d have told you. Maybe you’d have an alibi now. Or at least you’d kno
w you did it.’
He hadn’t asked because he had felt insecure, Morris confessed, anxious that he would come across as incipient Alzheimer’s. Anxious that he was Alzheimer’s maybe. After all, he’d already fainted once and forgotten an hour or so. ‘Anyway, whatever I did when I wasn’t remembering, it clearly wasn’t anything with them or they would have referred to it, wouldn’t they?’
‘So, your position,’ Paola summed up, ‘is that if you killed Volpi when you weren’t remembering anything, you didn’t do it with the Arabs, or things would have been different Sunday morning, because surely they would have referred to it.’
‘Right!’ Morris said.
‘So if they did it,’ Paola went on, ‘they did it in your absence.’
‘Right,’ Morris agreed again.
‘Unless of course they knew that you were in a special state and wouldn’t remember anything.’
‘Hard to imagine,’ Morris shook his head. ‘But surely it’s far more likely that someone quite different did it, someone I know nothing about and who has nothing to do with Sammie and Tarik.’
Silence.
‘I mean, about this famous mise en scène, the Eglon cameo, supposedly so damning, in that I had just purchased the woodcut and so on.’
‘Yes?’
Morris hesitated: ‘Well, I may have been a warm advocate of using the image in the show, but I certainly never did any of that unhealthy stuff when I killed in the past, did I? I mean, I just killed because I had to and got out fast. Without arcane messages or perverse theatricals.’
There was an awkward pause.
‘So a murder like this would be a major departure for me, wouldn’t it? I mean, in a way, it would have been something to be proud of. I almost wish I had done it. But given my performance with Stan, it hardly seems likely that . . .’
More silence.
Finally, in a very low voice, Mimi said, ‘I wish you’d shown a bit more respect with me, Morris. Stuffing me in bin bags. With my bottom hanging out as well.’
‘In the boot of a car,’ Bobo reminded him.
‘Under rubble,’ Forbes protested.
‘Sent up in flames,’ Kwame sighed.
‘OK, I was rushed, but I mean, precisely because of that I didn’t go for the big symbolic display, did I? That’s just not me. Not my signature. I only kill because I have to then I get out fast.’
‘You’ve changed a lot over the years,’ Paola pointed out. ‘You’ve acquired this art obsession.’
‘And you were high on dope and group sex,’ Mimi added.
‘Unfortunately, Morris,’ Bobo observed caustically, ‘the police don’t know you have a record as a different kind of killer, do they? I mean, Grimaldi’s not going to say, Ah, no, this can’t be Morris Duckworth; when our honorary citizen kills he just bashes his victim over the head, bundles the body into any filthy hole he can find and gets the hell out.’
There was some tittering.
Morris felt exasperated, and exhausted. In a way it was exciting, but there was only so much you could take. He yawned. His legal team chattered on. They were discussing the chances of uncovering seamy aspects of Volpi’s life. ‘He didn’t end up nude in the museum basement by accident.’ Morris was too drowsy to keep track. They wondered what Zolla’s alibi might be. They worried whether the Arabs would tell the police about the intimate nature of their relationship with Morris, or whether Morris was right to assume their omertà over this point. Had Morris considered the idea that they might not be brother and sister? What if they were members of the Libyan secret services? And being Neapolitan, was Volpi perhaps a camorrista? What if the police did now finally make connections to the disappearance of Forbes? Bobo complained what a shame it was the dead didn’t have access to the net to check up on the causes and consequences of temporary amnesia. Was it something that regularly happened to killers? Was this fainting habit Morris appeared to have a blood-pressure problem? The last thing Morris heard before falling into a deep sleep was Kwame’s voice offering the common-sense reflection that in the end it hardly mattered who had actually killed Volpi; their only concern should be to concoct a credible alibi that shifted the suspicion on to someone else’s shoulders. ‘Pass the buck, Boss. Pass the buck.’
Chapter Fifteen
MORRIS WATCHED FROM THE window. Hidden behind a removals van, two policemen had pulled over yet another car making the illegal left into Via Quattro Stagioni from the busy Viale Venezia, the main Verona–Vicenza trunk road. There were the usual angry gesticulations, protests no doubt that there was no reason to forbid the left turn at this particular junction, that if the police really wanted to enforce the rule they could have put a barrier in the middle of the road, that if they hadn’t put the barrier the only reason must be to collect fat fines from those who understandably made the turn to avoid a kilometre and more of pointless and polluting driving. And so on. Morris admired the patience of the police officers as they ignored these remonstrations and filled in their forms. He had always, he thought, been on the side of law, order and civic obedience. Not once had he been fined for a traffic offence.
Yet despite all his best efforts Morris had come to this: a lonely man in his mid-fifties, bereft of position and purpose in life, gazing emptily through the smeared windowpane of a poky one-bedroom flat in the nondescript suburb of an insignificant northern Italian town.
A man stripped of his power, Morris muttered to himself. Deprived of his authority. Deprived too of the groundbreaking show he should have been curating. A man bereft of all belongings. Prospero without his magic books. Bereft of all affections. A man abandoned even by the Dead. His ungrateful Dead. Abandoned even by Mimi. They and she had stopped speaking to him.
Morris Duckworth had confessed. The public prosecutor was satisfied that the case was closed; house arrest could now be granted. On an unpleasantly hot day in June, Morris found no one waiting for him at the prison gates. How was that possible? Not even the press. One expected at least notoriety. He had to beg the guards to reopen the gates, walk back to reception and ask them to call a taxi. Returning to the road, he waited under hazy sunshine. Frogs were croaking in the ditches. The word unruly came to mind. Rowdy, refractory, rebellious.
Morris frowned. Why was nobody here? Why wasn’t there even a pavement beside the high prison wall? Grass grew through cracks in the asphalt. Not even a white line in the middle of this provincial road. Perhaps he really should have stayed in England, which, for all its faults, did offer some basic services in return for taxes. Just as the taxi drew up from the left, Morris saw his own elegant Alfa Romeo approaching from the right. ‘Not me,’ he told the taxi driver, casting a quick glance around. ‘Must be someone waiting inside.’
‘Ciao Papà.’
It was Mauro. The big boy was sitting in the back, chauffeured by an Indian Morris didn’t recognise, someone fished up from the bottle factory floor, no doubt. In jeans. The man got out and put Morris’s suitcase in the boot.
‘He ought to be wearing a uniform,’ Morris observed.
Mauro raised a quizzical eyebrow, but didn’t reply. During the awkward silence as they drove, Morris was acutely aware that something important had shifted between them. It was like returning to a room to find the furniture moved.
‘How’s business?’ he asked.
Mauro frowned. He reflected. The crisis was squeezing profits, he said. The English were buying less wine and were obsessed by pricing and quality. On the building side, the banks were starving the contractors of credit. ‘The whole country is grinding to a halt,’ Duckworth Junior finished. ‘We’re in a deep recession.’
Morris tried to pay attention, but suddenly none of this seemed important. The empire he had built was anyway slipping away from him; what happened to it when he was definitively behind bars hardly mattered.
‘And Hellas?’
‘Going into the play-offs for Serie A.’
‘You must be excited.’
Mauro shrugged meaty shoulders in
a smart linen jacket. His hair was neatly parted, which somehow made it seem slightly less flamingly red than his father remembered it. ‘At the moment, I hardly have time to think about football.’
They imprison you unjustly, Morris reflected, and lo and behold your son comes of age in your absence. The young man was wearing a sober tie, he was speaking Italian rather than dialect. Morris felt proud, resentful.
‘And Massimina? Any news?’
‘I’ll tell you when we arrive.’
Apparently there were things that couldn’t be said in the presence of the driver. Speaking of whom, Morris realised that the man was going the wrong way. He leaned forward and tapped his shoulder.
‘You should have taken Via Montorio,’ he said. ‘It’ll take forever this way.’
The Indian half turned for confirmation. He was unpleasantly pockmarked, Morris thought. There was a gold tooth.
‘You’re doing fine,’ Mauro told him, ‘continue as instructed.’
Having driven south to the Verona–Vicenza Statale, the car now turned west toward the city.
‘We’re not going home, Dad.’
Thus did Morris learn that his pious wife would be playing that role no longer. Indeed, in his absence she had set wheels in motion to claim that they had never been man and wife at all; Antonella had applied to the Sacra Rota to have the Duckworths’ twenty-two-year marriage annulled.
‘Just like that!’ Morris was appalled. He couldn’t take it in. And appalled too by the suffocating room in which Mauro eventually explained all this: just four metres by three, including sofa, table, two chairs and a few spartan kitchen accoutrements. The bedroom was even smaller, with a single bed, the bathroom minuscule. Since Antonella was sole owner of the palazzo in Via Oberdan, it seemed she had the right to lock him out. Or she was assuming that right, whether she had it or not. This was where Morris must spend the months before his trial. There was no air conditioning.