by Tim Parks
‘But to return to your question of a moment ago,’ the cardinal continued, ‘the fact of our not being able to help you once arrested and the rather drastic decisions your consort has taken in your regard were not, I’m afraid to say, unrelated. You see, it seems that the, er, mystery of Santi Apostoli was not the only thing that poor Don Lorenzo in his delirious deathbed state revealed to the good lady. Hence we were briefly afraid that it might prove pointless trying to help you, if all this, er, rich background, were to fall into the public domain.’
Morris sat absolutely still. In the end, the hell with it, he thought. Let them lock him up in a tiny cell to the end of his days. It would be a relief.
‘Morris’—the cardinal was sitting again—‘Morris, I know you English have a rather poor opinion of the Italian intellect, but you can’t really imagine that there are not one or two people among the elite in this town who are, er, cognisant of your past. News does get around you know, and then of course we clerics have the advantage of the confessional, do we not? Things come out. This is very largely where our power resides. No, no,’—he raised a hand to postpone what he imagined was Morris’s indignant interruption, whereas in fact the Englishman had merely started to splutter when a drop of Oban went down the wrong way—‘please, let me explain. There are times when a man with a, I think we can fairly say, tormented curriculum, becomes an extremely valuable and productive citizen, precisely because of that torment. Murder does tend to make a man solemn, does it not? Or at least a certain kind of man. It makes him think, reflect. Aware of the gravity of his, er, misdemeanours, this fellow recognises his good fortune in being allowed to continue his life of liberty and, as the years pass and he is blessed with worldly success he may become a major contributor to the community. He feels he should give back what he has taken, as it were. Such has been the case, Morris, with yourself, and those of us who have, over the years, allowed this, er, virtuous circle to develop, rather than crudely rushing to have you walled up for a lifetime at considerable public expense, those of us, I was saying, here in Verona, who felt clemency was in the public interest, can feel justified now, Morris, in seeing everything you have accomplished for the town over the years. I know Don Lorenzo in particular was extremely proud of his part in your, er, rehabilitation and its felicitous consequences. At the last count, as I recall, charitable contributions from the Trevisan estate were reckoned at several hundreds of thousands of euros. So we all felt, after much prayer and heart-searching, yes, many an evening spent on ageing knees, that what we were doing was of great benefit to the community and altogether in line with our confraternity’s goals. But alas, at the end, poor Don Lorenzo, perhaps under the influence of powerful modern pharmaceuticals, or perhaps burdened with guilt over the fate of poor Beppe, Volpi I mean, at the end Don Lorenzo let something slip. At the same time you were arrested for what looked like the nth crime.’ The cardinal sighed. ‘In short, we felt it might be wise to wait a month or two before trying to come to your aid.’
‘I’m appalled,’ Morris said flatly.
‘I can imagine. It must be very hard to accept that someone close to us knows all the truth of our hearts.’ The cardinal appeared to shiver.
‘I meant,’ Morris corrected him coldly, ‘appalled that you could imagine that I was ever responsible for anyone’s death.’ This was a lie. What really appalled Morris was that these worms had been letting him buy his liberty. He had been a cash cow.
‘Tut tut,’ the cardinal laughed. ‘There are no bugs in this apartment, Morris. We can be quite frank with each other here. Would you like a cigar by the way? I should have offered.’
‘I suppose,’ Morris said, waving away the offer to indulge in a vice as ugly as it was harmful, ‘that since I no longer have control of the Trevisan wealth there is now no reason for keeping this sinner out of gaol.’
The cardinal had his head bowed over his lighter. He looked up, breathed out a cloud of smoke, appeared to reflect. ‘Money is not everything,’ he eventually said. ‘In fact, often more highly appreciated than money are good works.’
Morris waited.
‘Which brings us, as you will have no doubt guessed,’ the cardinal sighed, ‘to the purpose of our late night meeting. What we would like you to . . .’
Morris had a revelation.
‘You were the one in the room that morning.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Your laugh a moment ago. I’ve heard it before. You were in Volpi’s office when Zolla was weeping on the floor and I walked in.’
‘Indeed I was.’ The cardinal looked puzzled. ‘I assumed you were aware of that.’
‘Ah.’ Morris had merely given away his ignorance again. ‘So what do you really think about these meetings?’ he demanded.
‘What meetings?’
‘Scourging. What do you think of all this scourging?’
The cardinal smoked. He had a way of holding his cigar poised as it if was a pen with which he was about to jot down some extremely intelligent idea, or sign some historically important document.
‘Morris, I do appreciate your eagerness for debate, but I’m afraid we really don’t have all night. I wouldn’t like the police to become aware of our meeting here. As for scourging, what can I say? You must distinguish between the old confraternità proper, in plenary session, and one or two rather grotesque offshoots and appropriations, for private interest perhaps. The confraternità as I have always known it, meets, as it has done since the fourteenth century, once a month, and, traditionally, the members engage in a general mea culpa before getting down to business. Do we really need to discuss such matters? One is rarely well advised to change an ancient ritual, however strange it may seem in the modern world. Quite possibly what Volpi, Zolla and his Arab pals were up to was quite a different matter. What disturbs me is the presence of those three or four regular members, whom I would never have suspected of getting themselves involved in such unacceptable activities. Though, Don Lorenzo, poor fellow, has paid the price. Indeed, in a way, the confraternity has to thank you, Morris, your extraordinary, er, rashness that is, or whatever it was that, er, inspired you on that unhappy occasion, for, however erm unwittingly, bringing this disgraceful splinter group to light. There is no doubt that Volpi was seeking to appropriate the authority of the confraternity for dealings that went far beyond his, er, remit, or even,’ the prelate acknowledged, ‘the admittedly remarkable scope of his libido.’
Morris had had enough. He drained his second Oban and set the glass down on the coffee table with a sharp click. ‘Let us by all means hear your sermon on good works,’ he said, ‘before the day dawns. What is it that I have to do to be free?’
Chapter Seventeen
WHEN HE RETURNED FROM his morning trip to the supermarket, they were already there, in a plastic bag outside the door. A laptop and a phone. Mid-afternoon the paintings should arrive, as requested: Lippi’s Madonna, in Forbes’s excellent copy; Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes. Hopefully this would encourage Mimi to start talking to him again. ‘I can’t think without them,’ Morris had explained to the cardinal.
Having bought himself a handsome squash, the first thing he did when he had the computer online was look up a recipe for squash soup. An onion, a potato, half an apple, a small squash, vegetable stock, black pepper, coconut milk, curry powder. Coconut milk he hadn’t thought of, but the hell with it. Morris worked methodically, chopping up the squash with a bread knife. The kitchen needed more equipment. The weather was warm again, though there was thunder in the air. As he sliced, he tried to come to terms with all that had been said and proposed last night. Essentially, it seemed, he had become a debt slave: his past crimes were a kind of overdraft he had taken out, offering his own person as security. Now the debts were being called and there were just two ways of paying back: go to prison, or do the ‘work’ they asked. Unfortunately, prison would be prison for life; and the job they wanted him to do was . . . beyond me, Morris thought. Quite beyond me.
They hadn’t understood Morris Duckworth’s psyche at all.
The onion had his eyes streaming. But the truth was he was beyond tears. It was too baroque. How can I know, he had asked the cardinal, that after I have done what you require, assuming I do it, that you won’t have me gaoled anyway, and gaoled for that as well? Also: how can I know you won’t ask me to do something else equally abhorrent further down the line, or all kinds of abhorrent things for the rest of my life, since I’ll hardly be in a position to object?’
‘I give you my word,’ the cardinal had said, ‘as a man of God.’ He spoke drawing on a cigar in the corner of his mouth and added, ‘You have no choice, Morris, don’t you see? And I’m afraid this, er, intervention, has become absolutely necessary for us. Meantime, we will do our best to convince your dear spouse that Don Lorenzo in his agony was raving about things he couldn’t possibly have known and that you are the same old innocent, much maligned Englishman she had always supposed you to be.’
Basically they were promising to put Humpty together again, if only he would be a good egg and kill the red queen. Talk about Wonderland.
All the same it wasn’t unpleasant, Morris thought, to be preparing a squash soup for oneself in a tiny proletarian appartamentino. One had to live in the moment, forgetful of past and future. The colour of the squash flesh in particular was rather beautiful: a firm, pale orange. There was a pleasure too in the precision of the little peeler he’d acquired. The neat strips it tore from a knobbly spud put him in mind again of poor San Bartolomeo. It was a shame not to have had a good look at the picture.
Later, while the veg was simmering, he opened Word and tried to jot down what he had understood from last night’s conversation. Clearly he had been there when the deed was done and most likely done it himself. There was video footage, though the cardinal, who it seemed hadn’t been present, had been a little evasive as to exactly what this footage showed, no doubt imagining that Morris knew perfectly well. Then again, if the video hadn’t been given to the police it could only be because it showed other people who mustn’t be implicated in such goings-on. Don Lorenzo for one. No doubt the ugly melodrama had brought on his stroke. And Zolla too, of course, though the cardinal hadn’t actually said as much. The cardinal was head of some kind of fraternity, or confraternity—what was the difference?—and as such was trying to sort things out on behalf of the others present, also confraternity members. Morris had read something about this confraternity tradition in one of those potboiler, Christmas-gift history books on the glamorous Medici. That scribbler Parker again. Or Parkes. Medici Cash, some such crass title. Rich men, politicians and priests got together in secret, away from any official institutional framework, justified and absolved themselves with a few leisurely lashes, pious paternosters and noxious notions of divine entitlement, then proceeded to carve up the city’s wealth between them. A dictatorship of the Catholic bourgeoisie. Occasionally, no doubt, such gatherings would be transformed into jolly festini of the bunga-bunga variety. Is there anything new under the sun?
Morris cut himself a crust of bread and started to chew, watching his pot simmer. Don Lorenzo, he thought. Hadn’t the man made some remark, in The Art Room one day, that had suggested his position on women and celibacy was not quite as pure as it ought to have been? Meantime, Antonella must surely have known about this Rotary of Rotaries, this inner sanctum of ageing patricians baring their chests together for the pleasures of the scourge. Wouldn’t her father, as Mayor of Sanguinetto, have been a member? Might it not even have been the case that their whole married life had been a sort of theatre of Morris’s naivety; his wife constantly smiling over her husband’s charming ignorance? That discussion about how Don Lorenzo hurt his leg, for example; what if that had been an elaborate private joke between them? Antonella knew from the start it was a coffin that had crushed the priest’s foot and knew, what’s more, whose coffin it was. Her father’s? Was Don Lorenzo, then, the mother’s lover? Perhaps Antonella’s real father? Morris stirred vigorously. In any event, imagine Antonella’s anger when it turns out that Don Lorenzo has been keeping secrets from her, secrets he shared with Morris, and that made a mockery of their whole marriage. No wonder she didn’t want to see him.
Morris lowered the flame and covered the pot. One felt virtuous cooking greens, he thought, in a way one did not, for example, grilling a steak or roasting lamb. Perhaps that was why he had become a vegetarian in the end. One built up a sort of moral capital with the lentils and sorghum and hummus, which could then be carefully invested. But how many years of squash soups and lentils would be required before he could offset, as was now required of him, a contract killing?
But back to the death of King Eglon. Why had Morris been there? Had he blundered into the situation? Towards midnight? In Castelvecchio? Surely not. Or had he been invited? If so, why? To make him some kind of offer? The cardinal had heard proposals for his initiation. You can be involved in the show, Signor Duckworth, if you agree to help us in our shady dealings with . . . the older Arabs, the cardinal had said. Did that mean the Arab trade delegation? Nothing was impossible. But in the event Volpi had provoked him. Why? Morris had hit back. With the cubit-long knife. Or was that part of some initiation ceremony? This time he hadn’t fainted. But he had lost his memory. Or perhaps he had fainted. Perhaps the video, if he ever got hold of it, would show Morris falling back in a faint as the filth began to flow from Volpi’s gaping wound. Fainting and banging his head on the floor. That would explain so much. The unsteadiness of his walk as he proceeded along Via Roma in the small hours. For example.
Morris stirred the thick soup. There was something very beautiful about speculation, he thought, beautifully provisional. Like the simmering pot, everything was ahead of you, everything possible. It was definitely preferable to fact and truth. He prodded a spud. Then returning to his computer, he opened Google. What had Sandra called the condition? Temporary global amnesia. But why had the dead deserted him? One day they were there. There had been almost too much conversation. Then he was on his own. Had he said something to upset them? He couldn’t think what. His confession? Sitting down, listening a moment, hoping for Mimi’s whisper, hearing only silence, Morris found himself reflecting that this was the rather sad state most ordinary folk lived in; a monotone consciousness, empty of voices. Hopefully, the paintings would bring them back. Perhaps it was one of the functions of art to facilitate communication with the dead.
‘Transient global amnesia (TGA),’ Wikipedia’s entry began—how much more attractive ‘transient’ was than ‘temporary’!—‘is a syndrome in clinical neurology whose key defining characteristic is a temporary but total disruption of short-term memory.’
It existed!
But at once Sandra’s theory about his sexual exploits went out of the window. Crucial to the idea of TGA was that the victim/sufferer forgot the event that had brought on the amnesia. So it couldn’t have been the wild threesome with Samira and Tarik, which Morris remembered all too well. What had brought on the forgetting, then, must have been the violence sometime later. ‘While seemingly back to normal within twenty-four hours,’ Wiki concluded, ‘there are subtle effects on memory that can persist longer; in particular a complete lack of recall for the period of the attack and an hour or two before its onset.’
A smell of burning dragged Morris back to the oven. Talk about amnesia! He turned off the flame and left the pot to cool. Back at the screen Wiki surmised that the probable cause of the memory loss was a small stroke; a tiny blood vessel gave way in a very particular point in the brain. Well, if he had fainted trying to club Stan over the head it was quite possible that worse would have befallen him when that dagger plunged into King Eglon.
But suddenly Morris realised he hadn’t checked up on the show. For heaven’s sake! ‘Painting Death, Castelvecchio, Verona,’ he typed. And what was the image that sprung up: a Poussin? A Caravaggio? A Titian? No. A photograph of Professore A. Zolla.
‘Curator of a daringly innovat
ive show that is attracting attention from all over the world.’
Morris was livid. His jaw set hard. With grim meticulousness, he went through all the blurbs, the teasers, the quotations on murder from famous writers, the list of masterpieces to be shown. It was all his work, all part of the package he had prepared to encourage those snob museums in Paris and New York to lend their bloody masterpieces. Yet, at no point was any name mentioned but Zolla’s.
Morris stared at the man’s photo, above a pale pink tie, the overly neat moustache conferred a sort of fake virility on simpering lips. Zolla had been so friendly that last time they had discussed the show. Hypocrite. He gets himself promoted way above his abilities—the ancient freemasonry of the gay—then kicks away the ladder that got him there. Volpi is killed, Morris is accused of killing him. Perhaps he had been invited to do the murder. The dagger put in his hand. Then filmed. Framed. In any event it was perfect, for Zolla, who now took all the credit for one of the most extraordinary art shows of recent memory.
Morris shifted the cursor to the little cross at the top right corner of Zolla’s enlarged image and clicked. Gone. When you thought about it, he realised, there was really no need for him to understand what had happened between himself and Volpi that night. There had been some kind of weird event. Stuff had happened. This was Italy. All he had to do now was accept the cardinal’s offer, do what was asked of him and earn back his certificate of virginity. Think about the future, Morris, not the past. This was a world of every man for himself, and the Devil take the hindmost, who, if Morris had anything to do with it, would be Zolla.
In the event it was Mauro who arrived towards three with the paintings. What a curious line of communication, Morris thought, through a cardinal to my son. No doubt via Antonella.
The copy of Lippi’s little Madonna was quickly unpacked, but the other canvas, alas, was not Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes. ‘They took a few things away for the Castelvecchio show about ten days ago,’ Mauro explained. He had brought Forbes’s copy of Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus instead. ‘It looks the kind of thing that might cheer you up,’ the boy said.