Mimi's Ghost

by Tim Parks

  At which it occurred to Morris that of course cemeteries were where one buried people. Particularly if you wanted to bury them with style. And if anybody knew the cemetery, it was Kwame.

  Signora Trevisan was in the salotto, watched over by Antonella. Stepping in discreetly, Morris noted how extraordinarily well the coffin blended in with the rest of the room, as if only now the inspiration behind the heavy mahogany décor, the marble door surrounds, grim credenza and gloomy chandelier was at last revealed: to host a wake, to welcome a great black-lacquered casket with bellied sides and brass fittings. Perhaps, Morris thought, a whole tradition of Latin furnishings had been developed around the wake. Perhaps no provincial salotto was truly complete until it had its coffin. Certainly he felt a sense of propriety and repose, taking one of the rigidly straight-backed chairs and bowing his head in silent prayer, face in hands. Going through the motions had always been one of his greatest pleasures.

  Then it would do no harm of course to impress poor Antonella, to whom at some point he would be obliged to report on the way he was managing the company. For a moment he tried to use the breather to make the necessary plans. If the body was found before he could bury it? If it wasn’t found, how to bury it? Was this cemetery idea feasible? But as in the cafe an hour before, serious decisions proved impossible. His mind just would not focus on the sequence of actions and precautions necessary to get him through. His intelligence was not of that variety. All he could really do was to react, to feel the rope trembling beneath his feet and take the next step, while what he had of wit was engaged not in the action at all, but in watching himself doing it, in reflecting upon it, in hoping all would turn out for the best. The fact was, Morris thought, that the qualities you most despised in yourself - whimsy, spontaneity - were also the things you were most proud of.

  Restless, he peeped out from between his fingers as he always had in church with Mother beside him. Antonella stood up and went to draw the room’s heavy curtains against the last of winter twilight. Shadows rushed as candlelight stabbed out in the dark by head and toe of the deceased. Dropping his hands and glancing up as if after prayer, Morris noticed how Antonella’s face as she returned to her seat looked truly fine in the softly lambent glow, noble in her suffering. Apparently bereavement became her. He smiled sadly at his sister-in-law across her mother’s corpse.

  Antonella burst into tears.

  “Povera Mamma, povera Mamma, and now I can’t even mourn her properly for worrying about Bobo. O Dio!’ The young woman sobbed, voice a little slurred (from sedatives they’d given her perhaps?). “Povera, povera Mamma, she was such a wonderful woman.’

  ‘Si,’ Morris gravely agreed. ‘Sì, a truly wonderful woman.’ But it was interesting, he reflected, that nobody else was in the room. For being so marvellous, old Signora Trevisan had hardly made a great deal of friends, had she? The more fool her, then, to have rejected Morris’s friendship when it had been offered, to have spurned his perfectly appropriate courtship of her youngest and by no means brilliant daughter. No doubt the old bitch was now plummeting down to the first circle, where crimes of arrogance and presumption were most properly dealt with.

  Antonella looked up from her tears. They exchanged glances, and it seemed the day’s constant see-saw of exaltation and despair had left Morris hyperaware of every detail: the honest, untrimmed bushiness of her eyebrows; the lank modesty of her hair, just pinned back behind one rosy ear. He felt he had never really looked at her before, and the very intensity of the looking, rather than its object, somehow excited him,

  Of the three, should he perhaps have married Antonella?

  ‘Was there any blood?’ she now forced herself to ask, voice trembling. ‘In the office, I mean.’

  Morris hesitated. ‘Only a little,’ he answered truthfully. ‘On the floor, by the desk. Just a smear really. As if somebody had scraped their elbow there or something.’

  ‘O Dio. O Dio, Di O Dio! Why does everything have to happen at once?’

  ‘I know,’ Morris said, and couldn’t have agreed more. If Kwame ratted on him he was quite dead.

  The inspector’s talking to Paola in the kitchen.’

  ‘I know,’ Morris repeated. To cheer her up, he said: ‘Bobo must have put up quite a terrific fight though. You ought to be proud of him. The office was complete havoc.’

  Antonella burst into tears again. She bent forward and sobbed in her hands. The candles flickered, as if in response to her emotion. Shadows slithered back and forth across her face, caressing her slim forearms, the heavy bosom of her black dress. In her coffin Signora Trevisan’s stern wax nose seemed to rise and fall.

  Morris stared, mesmerised by the visual richness of it all. He was an artist in the end, that was his problem: the carnival, the wake, the nuptial bed. They were all the same to him.

  ‘Comfort her,’ Mimi whispered then.

  Immediately there was the smell of her perfume, and the vision before him was as if transformed into a completed picture: Antonella, the coffin, Signora Trevisan, they were oil on canvas. The perfume made him part of it.

  ‘You must comfort her, Morri.’

  Mimi! Morris pushed his chair back. Moving round the coffin on its trestles , he was already lifting his hand to lay it on his sister-in-law’s shoulder, when Paola called him from the door. The picture disintegrated into mere people and places, faces and furniture.

  They want to talk to you.’ His wife’s eyes glinted in the pool of dark beyond the candle.

  “Va bene. I’m coming.’

  When he got to the door, she whispered: I told them you phoned me at nine-fifteen. This morning.’

  Morris stared at her. Why do you say that?’

  She opened her brown eyes in a sudden intense complicity. ‘Nine-fifteen,’ she repeated. Half an hour later than the truth.

  Unnerved. Morris shrugged his shoulders and crossed to the dining-room, where two men in light raincoats were sitting around the huge wooden dining-table in the way people will when they wish to emphasise their outsideness, to maximise a sense of official intrusion. Even before the bulky figure to the right turned to greet him, Morris recognised Inspector Marangoni. Of old. For a second he closed his eyes. He simply couldn’t believe it. It was like drawing the hanged man from a seventy-two-card tarot pack. For heaven’s sake, surely the Verona police force must have more than one inspector!

  “Buona sera,’ Morris said at his most ingratiating, but knowing his skin had drained to paper. Beside the inspector, the same thin, olive-skinned assistant was already scribbling in a notebook.

  ‘I’’m truly sorry,’ Marangoni said, ‘to have to meet you once again in such sad and dramatic circumstances.’

  Sì, sì, è vero.’ Then, too quickly, Morris added: ‘Actually, as you must be aware, I’ve already told all I know to the carabinieri, this morning on the spot. I don’t, er, see what else . . .’

  Marangoni, Morris noticed, still had the kind of bad teeth that suggested either that police salaries were too low, or his personal priorities all wrong. Unless it was some form of intimidation by grossness. The lower left incisor was completely black. Lighting a cigarette in a room where the absence of ashtrays made it clear nobody indulged, the heavy man explained: The carabinieri in Quinto are responsible for the territorio extraurbano. The polizia are responsible for the city. Given that this may be a kidnap aimed at a family resident within the official confines of the city, both forces will naturally be involved,’

  ‘Ah.’ So not only, Morris thought, did he have a corpse on his hands, a stolen car and the kind of accomplice who was probably visible from satellite photographs, but there were now actually two police forces looking for him: carabinieri and polizia. Still, he was suddenly pleased it was Marangoni again. Any déjà vu was welcome if it brought him close to Mimi.

  ‘I have to repeat everything then?’ he said wearily, and wearily aware of the irony.

  ‘Sit down.’ Marangoni gestured condescendingly to a chair which very soon wo
uld be Morris’s own. ‘Actually, we have the main facts from our colleagues. My interest is in just one or two small additional questions.’

  Morris sat opposite the inspector, while his impassive assistant continued to write with a rapidity quite unjustified by the very little that had been said. For a moment Morris began to wonder whether something in clothes or behaviour wasn’t visibly giving him away. He looked down at his hands on the table to check there was no blood in the fingernails.

  Only to find, much worse, that wrists and fingers were trembling.

  ‘Two questions, to be precise. First, shortly before whatever happened happened, Signor Posenato telephoned the police.’

  ‘Davvero!’ Morris was almost too quick to be surprised. The carabinieri didn’t tell me that.’

  ‘Because they don’t know.’ Marangoni grinned fatly. He had certainly put on weight since the Massimina business. ‘Because Posenato called us, the police, not them.’

  To say what? Presumably this solves the case.’ Only as he said it did he realise what a trap he had just avoided.

  ‘No, you don’t understand. The call was interrupted.’

  ‘Ah, ah, I see. That would explain why the phone had been smashed.’

  ‘Yes, but the odd thing is that the operator who took the call said that Posenato’s voice was not particularly urgent.’

  Marangoni paused, and his piggy eyes were staring straight into Morris’s now. But to no avail, for Morris was beginning to relax. It was like riding a bicycle in the end. Once you’d got the hang of it, you never forgot. Even after years, it all came back in a moment or two. His features slowly arranged themselves into a perfect image of puzzlement. ‘He wasn’t urgent. And so?’

  Then when the call was interrupted and something in the room happened, Posenato shouted out: “Are you mad?” or something of the kind, indicating that he was more surprised than frightened.’

  Morris shook his head in apparently bewildered reflection. The inspector’s assistant had now stopped writing and was rather unnervingly smiling at him through glasses that caught dim light from the chandelier. Morris noted that the man had a ridiculously tropical tie on, all lemons and bananas, the kind of thing you only wore to scream that you didn’t consider yourself the loser you obviously were. Feeling on top again, Morris decided he would install wall lighting and never buy a bulb of less than sixty watts.

  ‘This would seem to suggest that he knew his assailant,’ Marangoni concluded.

  Morris offered a pantomime of hesitant agreement. ‘Could be.’

  The inspector leaned suddenly and heavily across the table: ‘Now I want you to tell me who that assailant was, Signor Duckworth.’

  Morris was alarmed. He hadn’t been expecting such sudden confidence and aggression. To gain time, he said: ‘So you don’t think it is another kidnap?’

  This left Marangoni a little exposed in his position of attack across the table.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Per niente.’’

  ‘In which case it would be a case for the carabinieri, not the police,’ Morris managed, as if surprising himself with this irrelevant thought.

  But Marangoni was having none of it. ‘Signor Duckworth’ -he put all the stress on the second syllable -’I asked you who the assailant was,’

  Morris took a deep breath, appeared to hesitate, then seemed to make up his mind: ‘You see, Ispettore,’ he said; ‘by the way, it is Ispettore, isn’t it, not Colonnello, or something like that? I got very confused with the carabinieri this morning.’

  ‘Ispettore,’ Marangoni said patiently, and obviously felt the moment had come to retreat across the table. ‘Don’t concern yourself about that, Signor Duckworth. Just tell us what you think.’

  ‘I didn’t want to offend. No, the point is, Posenato, well, he’s the kind of person who has all sorts of enemies. Also he is conducting his business - or rather the Trevisan business; his family, you see, are keeping him out of their own - in the kind of way that, well, I feel disloyal saying this, being part of the set-up myself and so on now, but if it can help Bobo in any possible way then I suppose it has to be said, in the kind of way that could lay him wide open to bribery.’

  Having said this, Morris felt like someone who has just run across an entire canyon on nothing more than a washing line.

  Maragoni leaned back on his chair and drew on his cigarette, staring intently at Morris, who, irony of ironies, now had to fake his nervousness.

  There are various, er, well, illicit practices in the company,’ he explained.

  The assistant scribbled. Again Marangoni waited, but this time Morris wouldn’t oblige.

  Patronising and avuncular, the inspector said: ‘That is not entirely unheard of in Italy.’

  Morris shrugged his shoulders. ‘I have very little experience of these things, apart from what one reads in the papers.’

  ‘Just tell me what these illicit practices were.’

  Morris took a very melodramatic breath, then didn’t plunge. ‘If I say this, does it mean the company will be investigated? Because, I mean, that could lead to its failing.’

  That depends.’ Marangoni’s voice appeared to mix leniency with severity, then came down on the side of the latter. ‘But if you don’t tell me what you have to say, you can be quite sure it will be investigated.’

  Still Morris wavered. ‘Can I at least have your word that, if it is investigated, you will not inform the rest of the family, and particularly Bobo, I mean Signor Posenato, that it was me who put you on to this.’

  ‘Yes,’ Marangoni was almost too eager. Morris could only reflect what a genius these situations always proved him to be. The only problem now was overkill.

  So then he explained that Trevisan Wines had been evading both company tax and VAT for very considerable sums (paying off the officials in the respective collecting offices), that there was also a significant amount of false invoicing, and worst of all that they had been using immigrant labour at night-time for completely unrecorded business, paying neither taxes nor health contributions. To complicate matters, Posenato had been treating these immigrants so badly that Morris had felt obliged on purely human terms to set up a hostel for them to live in, something in which fortunately he had been warmly supported by Signora Posenato who, together with the Church, had kindly supplied a considerable amount of cast-off shoes and clothes. Then last night . . .’

  ‘Si?’

  ‘Mi scusi, I just thought I should let, er, your colleague catch up with his writing.’

  ‘Just tell me what happened last night.’

  ‘Last night - and I find it odd that this happened on the very night Signora Trevisan died . . .’ Morris stopped as if this curiosity had only just occurred to him. ‘yes, it is odd, isn’t it?’

  ‘Per favore, Signor Duckworth, last night . . .’

  ‘Last night Bobo fired all the immigrant workers.’

  ‘Ah, and why?’

  Morris had no difficulty appearing embarrassed.

  ‘Apparently he found two of them engaging in, er, homosexual practices in his office, early in the morning.’

  ‘And he fired all of them?’

  ‘It seems crazy to me too, but he was an irascible person. Or perhaps he felt there was only so long you could continue to get away with something like that.’ Morris hesitated. The truth is he had a great aversion to black people.’ Then, to his horror, he realised that he had been talking about Bobo in the past tense. For Christ’s sake! There was an almost total rebellion of all the muscles about the spine. For a second it was truly as if he were going to crumple. His breath wouldn’t come. Looking up, he was perfectly ready to see the handcuffs already opening. Instead, what he read on their faces was merely impatience to hear more. In their imbecile eagerness, neither policeman had noticed. Nor were they taping him. Morris sighed quite audibly, almost theatrically, as though giving them a second chance, the way at chess one might invite an inferior opponent to study the board more carefully before making a hasty move.
Had he been their superior he would have fired the both of them at once. Just like that. Never mind the poor immigrants.

  Pulling himself together, Morris explained: ‘I had the story from one of the immigrants and from somebody called Forbes, Peter Forbes, another Englishman and a friend of mine, who runs the hostel. I went to the hostel where they live this morning, because Forbes had telephoned me in the car, and they explained the situation: that Posenato had found two of the boys, well, buggering each other, in the office, and that this had proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. . . .’

  When the assistant raised a puzzled face at this expression, Morris explained indulgently with the Italian equivalent: ‘La goccia che ha fatto traboccare il vaso, the drop that made the bowl spill. Though somehow,’ he added blandly, ‘the English idiom seems more appropriate here.’

  ‘Quite.’ Marangoni was impatient. But . . .’

  ‘So I went on to the office,’ Morris continued, ‘to discuss the matter with Bobo. I was concerned that without the immigrants we wouldn’t be able to honour a contract that I myself had recently negotiated with an English company and hence felt responsible for. And that, of course, was when I found what I found.’

  He looked directly at the policeman, eyes mild with studied artlessness.

  ‘But, Signor Duckworth, what I asked you was, did Signor Posenato go to the factory in the middle of the night expressly to fire them?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. He couldn’t have actually gone to fire them if the problem was his finding them, er, well, I’ve already said it, buggering in his office.’

  ‘No. That is precisely why I asked my question.’

  Morris managed to pull the face of someone to whom something has just occurred. ‘You’re right. In fact, you know, I can’t imagine why he went to the office. Perhaps he checked the factory regularly, you know, the night shift I mean. He was very suspicious of these immigrants, always afraid they weren’t working well, or would steal things. Perhaps he made checks like that quite routinely, though he never mentioned doing so to me. You’d have to ask his wife, I suppose. I remember just as we were leaving last night - I presume you know we dined together - yes, just as we were leaving he got a phone call; maybe it was something to do with that.’