by Tim Parks
The Indian driver with the gold tooth was again in assistance, leaning the big painting against the wall behind the sofa. There would barely be room to hang it. Morris waited till he was gone to tell his son that all the paintings in The Art Room had been bought in his, Morris’s, name, and required his written permission to be lent anywhere.
‘You spent too much on cultural sponsorships,’ Mauro reflected. ‘I’m cutting back.’
Morris stared at him, was about to object, then reflected that he didn’t give a damn. Instead he found himself saying: ‘And please make it clear to your mother that I will not cooperate with the annulment of our marriage in any way. Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder. Or at least not until there has been a proper discussion of the motivation.’
‘Dishonesty,’ Mauro said.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘She says you didn’t tell her some important truths about yourself at the moment of the marriage. She said if you wanted to argue the point in court she’d be happy to offer plenty of evidence.’
‘Court! A few old priests?’ But Morris decided to shift attention elsewhere. ‘Anything more from Massimina?’
‘No.’
‘She doesn’t even keep up her Facebook page, that sort of thing?’
‘It’s been a while since I looked,’ Mauro admitted. ‘I mean, now we know she’s safe, her life is up to her.’
‘Isn’t your mother furious about her running off with a man thirty-five years older than her? A man who pretended to be her friend? Talk about dishonesty!’
Mauro was hovering at the door. He looked more handsome these days. His nose was thinning; the chubbiness of adolescence was drying out.
‘According to Mamma there is a lot to be said for older men.’
‘Is there indeed? And what is that supposed to mean?’
Mauro shrugged. ‘Actually, I’m not sure Mimi is with Stan.’
‘I beg your pardon? Why else would she have gone to San Diego?’
‘Maybe Stan was just facilitating . . .’
Only a few months ago Morris would have been delighted to know that his son could use a word like ‘facilitating’.
‘In what sense?’
Neatly dressed in a coal blue linen suit, the young man seemed possessed of an authority beyond his years.
‘She wanted to escape.’
‘Don’t we all?’
‘She wasn’t happy.’
Morris was sobered by the boy’s solemn tone.
‘I thought you didn’t care about her.’
Mauro shrugged. ‘I had my own stuff to get through.’ He hesitated. ‘Actually, she had a friend, Dad. Un’amica.’
‘Ah. Un’amica?’
‘I think they left together.’
‘Not un amico?’
‘No.’
Morris drew a deep breath. A ‘strange love’, the girl had said.
‘Giovanna, would that be?’
The boy frowned. ‘How did . . .’
‘And you’ve known all along?’
‘She thought she would be criticised if the truth came out with you and Mamma. Stan told her things would be easier in San Diego.’
‘You knew all along she was safe and didn’t bother to tell me!’
‘You’ve been in prison, Papà. Since the morning it happened. By the way, Mamma still thinks she must be with Stan. I haven’t told her yet.’
‘And she’s not furious?’
‘She’s furious with you,’ Mauro said.
As soon as his son was gone, Morris went back to the computer and opened an email account, [email protected]. His own would be under surveillance. He would write to Zolla. Of course the police might perfectly well be checking the professor’s email too, but the hell with it.
Dear Angelo,
Finally, I have use of a computer. But don’t worry, I won’t bother you with my vicissitudes. No doubt the misunderstanding will be cleared up soon enough. I just wanted to congratulate you on the web pages for the show. It looks like it is coming on wonderfully. Only a month to go now! You must feel proud and excited. I was hugely impressed by the number of important paintings you managed to get in the end. If only I could be there to watch them arrive!
I did have one question, or rather one offer to make. Are all the captions ready? I have time on my hands and could easily write some for you. Let me know.
With respect and best regards,
Morris
Chapter Eighteen
MORRIS STARED INTO THE dark. For a moment he hoped he had woken in response to a voice, a touch. Mariella was there, perhaps. Or Mimi had finally spoken. He had hung her on the wall opposite. Instead he just needed a pee. Returning to bed, he lay awake. He waited for sleep, knowing it wouldn’t come. The darkness had that feel to it. The air was fresh after a summer storm, laden with a kind of urgency. He was intensely aware of being here, really here, mortal flesh and blood, a precarious, vulnerable Morris in a world where everything had gone wrong. His wife had abandoned him. His beautiful daughter was lesbian. His son despised him, assuming Mauro was his son. The great art exhibition that was to have redeemed his life had become a trophy for a man he loathed. ‘Caro Morris,’ Zolla had replied instantly to his email, ‘much thanks for your generous proposing. However, having myself too many duties consequent to poor Giuseppe’s decease, I invited our local English author, Timothy Parkes, to prepare the captions. I am hoping very much you can be able to come and see the success! With my regards. Angelo Zolla.’
Damn Parkes! It was curious, Morris thought, that after so many years in the same tiny town of Verona he and this odious compatriot had never met. Pious Parkesie has everything, Morris thought: money, celebrity, freedom; and I have nothing. He lives a privileged life while I am hounded by the furies. I have a brilliant idea and he gets the recognition, when the only difference between us is that I was once obliged to kill someone. It was the mark of Cain. Parkes’s sacrifice had been found pleasing to God. He was a meat man, no doubt. Duckworth’s, the vegetarian’s, had not. Suddenly it seemed to Morris that it was actually Parkes’s fault that he had suffered as he had, as if there were only two roles an Englishman in Verona could possibly occupy and by claiming the other for himself, the lauded role, the respectable role, the artist’s role, Parkes had condemned Morris to a life of deviousness and villainy.
For perhaps an hour Morris lay on his bed piling as much fuel as possible on the pyre of his misery. The window was open and the fresh night air brought wafts of oxygen to the coals of his unhappiness. Fact was that in Via Oberdan, with his wonderful art collection, his respectable wife, two rebellious children, a dusky mistress, a peevish maid, not to mention his position at the head of a major local company, Morris Duckworth had had an identity. Not an easy one: he had been living a lie, of course, multitudinous lies; but he knew what the lies were and what they added up to and how to give them direction and purpose. Actually it was the lies, the needing to be simultaneously both this and that, both the upstanding head of a prosperous household and the philandering multiple murderer, that had given Morris his deepest sense of self. But here in Via Quattro Stagioni, deprived of both duty and depravation, he was lost. Life had no consistency beyond the reality of his ageing body, tossed on this bleak, proletarian shore. He was flotsam after the wreck. There was nothing his mind could attach to and build on. No wife, no work, no mistress, no project, unless you counted the gun they wanted to put in his hand. He would become a hired killer. At least Cain killed for himself.
Morris rebelled. ‘Mimi!’ His whole soul cried in anguish.
Lippi’s Madonna was just visible through the dark. Beautiful, serene, devout.
‘Mimi, Mimi, Mimi!’
Why wouldn’t she speak?
Morris sat up. ‘If you don’t talk, I’ll call Sammy,’ he threatened.
Distant lightning flickered across the painting. The Madonna would not stir. It was as if there were a direct relation between his wife’s r
equest for annulment and her long-dead sister’s abandonment. It was both or nothing.
‘Not only will I call her, but I’ll give myself to her forever,’ Morris insisted. ‘I’ll leave you and Antonella, for Sammy! I’ll start a new life.’
Nothing.
This, then, Morris thought, as the minutes passed, was the famous dark night of the soul. No, that too was an illusion, too noble and transformative to be true. In reality it was just another dark night.
Samira, then. Morris turned on his new phone, but of course the girl’s number wasn’t there. Where could he find it? On the net? A pretty girl like Sammy wasn’t so stupid as to put her number on a chatline.
How?
Then Morris remembered that there were such things as online mobile accounts. Once, no doubt, he must have logged on to his. Naked, he padded back to the living room and the laptop. Waiting for Windows to boot up, his eye wandered to the tumble of bodies and bedclothes in Delacroix/Forbes’s Sardanapalus, the jewellery, weapons and carved elephants, the prancing horse, black slaves and white breasts. Everywhere coiffed hair and bare buttocks, a lush panic of drama, sex and death. At the top of the painting, behind and above the mayhem, stretched on his bed in a white nightgown and about to enjoy the carafe of wine that a young slave was bringing on a wicker tray, the bearded Assyrian king surveyed the orgy in much the way a modern insomniac might watch a porno film in bed. His trusty servants were slaying his cute concubines before the foreign soldiers broke down the doors. That is the difference between this scribbler Parkes and me, Morris thought. He watches it all onscreen, remote in hand, sipping his wine, courtesy of Grub Street; but I’m the man in the action, the man who plunges a dagger down a pretty woman’s throat, who slaughters on command, before himself being overcome by slaughter. Morris shivered with excitement and fear. ‘Parkes is just a frustrated spectator,’ he muttered. ‘I’m the one who’s really in there.’
And now Morris was in the Vodafone website. He typed out his old phone number for the username. The password?
mass1m1na.
No.
ma221m1na.
No.
ma223m4na.
No.
a1n1m1ssam.
Yes! Welcome to Vodafone, Morris Duckworth. It took a while to work out how to get to a calling list, but finally he had it: Dettaglio costi e traffico. He called up the month of April, the last days of his freedom. He would recognise her number at once, he thought. It ended with 33.
Got you!
Morris began to key Samira’s number into his new phone. What would it be like to speak to her again? Had she too betrayed him? But now another idea occurred. Why not check the details of that fatal Saturday evening, 28 April? He went back to the screen and scrolled down. There had been various calls through the afternoon. Work no doubt. The site gave only numbers, not names. Then a break after six, when the phone would have been turned off. That made sense. Then, yes, at ten-thirty a call to him, to Morris. He didn’t recognise the number. How interesting. And towards eleven, another number. Also unrecognisable. But how many numbers did one actually remember these days? Then there was just one other call, at 1.30 a.m. That was late. This number was familiar, though. Morris glanced up at the Assyrians, carousing in paint. Think! He looked again and remembered. Massimina. Departing for her alternative life, his daughter had called him. Damn. How sweet. The conversation had lasted three minutes. What did Morris say to her and she to him? Did the exchange have any bearing on what happened? Did she tell him of her decision? Was it possible that Massimina might be able to tell him something about his own movements that evening?
Morris stared at the calling list. Why hadn’t the police asked him about this? What were they thinking of? Two calls just before and one perhaps just after the murder. Three people who might be able to tell him where he was around the crucial time. Always assuming he had told them, truthfully, where he was, during the call. His daughter would have ditched her Italian phone, of course, but why not call these other numbers now? Did he have anything to lose?
He dialled the first. Waited. Numero inesistente, the recorded voice said. He checked that he had dialled correctly and dialled again. Numero inesistente. He called the second number. Il numero da Lei chiamato è inesistente. It was maddening. And again. Inesistente. Two numbers that had called him and only two months ago, and now both of them were . . . dead.
Don Lorenzo and Volpi?
Morris dialled Samira’s number, but then decided against and hit the red button. He couldn’t face a conversation of possibly negative outcome. Better a text.
Dear Sammy, do you still love me? I have left my wife. I am all yours. Come and find me in Via Quattro Stagioni 18, staircase b, #4. Don’t ring from outside or be seen. I’m under house arrest. Enter through underground garage when a car goes in and KNOCK SOFTLY on my door. REPEAT DON’T RING.
An hour later, she arrived, though it seemed she had been knocking, softly, for fifteen minutes before Morris woke and heard. He was amazed she had come so soon and most impressed that she had had the patience not to hit the bell.
‘The apartment is bugged,’ he whispered.
‘My darling old paranoid,’ she cooed.
So much for the rules of house arrest, Morris thought.
As soon as she was there and he saw and smelt and touched her, all doubt evaporated. Samira was his girl. She too asked for no explanation. As if there had been no two-month silence, no charge of murder. Or perhaps it was precisely these things that made this present moment so exciting. In silence they went to the bed and made love. Once again, Morris found himself switching between despair and delight in a far shorter time than he could have imagined possible. Afterwards, they sat on the single bed, drinking beer and whispering.
‘So you’re mine,’ she smiled. ‘You’ve promised now. I have the text.’
‘I’m under arrest,’ Morris reminded her. ‘I’m accused of murder. And leaving my wife I will lose most of my wealth.’
She shook her raven hair. ‘Morris, you never believed I loved you, did you?’ She had a marvellous way of narrowing her bright eyes with teasing affection. ‘You always thought it was just for your cash.’
‘A question of modesty,’ Morris said carefully. ‘You’re too beautiful to love a scarred old man like me, Sammy.’
‘I never think of you as old,’ she murmured. She ran the tip of her tongue down his cheek along the line of his scar. ‘You’re more like a mischievous little boy who’s always getting into trouble.’
This all seemed too good to be true.
‘What’s the real story about you and Tarik?’ he demanded. ‘Tell me where you went when you left me at the museum that morning. The uncle story was obviously rubbish. You knew something about Volpi, didn’t you?’
She sat back. ‘Morris! You really don’t want to be happy, do you?’
‘I need to know,’ he said. ‘Especially after what happened with Tarik the previous evening.’
The Arab girl chuckled. ‘You were fantastic.’
Morris felt confused. ‘Come on, tell me. You’re not really brother and sister, are you?’
She shook her head. ‘I hope this room is bugged, or we’re going to feel really stupid having whispered all night.’
‘It is, definitely.’
‘But how do you know?’
Morris decided to tell her about Mariella’s visit and the conversation, carefully edited, with the cardinal. ‘I don’t trust them,’ he wound up some minutes later. ‘But I do believe them. If you see the difference.’
‘Italy!’ Samira frowned. ‘This country hasn’t changed since Cesare Borgia.’
Not for nothing, Morris realised then, was he choosing a foreigner as a companion. He was through with Italians. Or was this all a dream? Forty-eight hours ago he had been in solitary.
‘Pinch me,’ he invited.
She reached manicured nails beneath his scrotum. Morris giggled.
‘Shhhh.’
‘OK, trial
of love!’ he announced.
The girl leaned forward to put the tip of her hooked nose against his. ‘Do I have to walk through fire?’ She giggled. ‘Or just, hmm, swallow a litre of sperm?’
‘I’m going to tell you the truth about the evening when Volpi was murdered. Or at least, my truth.’
Samira moved away, pulled the sheet over her waist and became extremely attentive.
‘I have no idea what happened,’ he said.
She pouted. ‘Don’t tease!’
‘I’m not. The truth I’m telling you is that I lost my memory.’
‘Don’t bullshit me, Morris.’
Then Morris Duckworth at last succumbed to a need that had been growing for many weeks. He exposed all his vulnerability to the girl. He told her about the memory gap between their Saturday evening threesome and the Sunday morning awakening. He explained that a couple of weeks earlier there had been another memory loss after fainting in the company of his American friend Stan. But this was drastic. Twelve hours almost. Morris admitted that he had even suspected that Tarik might be responsible for the murder.
‘You didn’t.’
‘I did.’
Finally, he told her what the cardinal had proposed last night. To get him off the hook.
‘Can you imagine? Me, killing?’
Samira didn’t hesitate. ‘Absolutely,’ she smiled. ‘You’re a special person, Morris. That’s why I love you.’
As she pulled him into her soft strong arms again, Morris realised that the night was growing old. The girl should be going. On the other hand, it seemed perfectly likely that the apartment wasn’t being checked at all. The police had just parked him here without his passport till the trial. They thought their case was cut and dried.
Twenty minutes later, after Samira had taken a trip to the bidet, making a detour to the fridge on her way back to fetch another beer, her mood had changed. She was matter-of-fact, practical.