Mimi's Ghost

by Tim Parks

  They climbed into the Mercedes and once more Morris gave Kwame the keys. ‘From now on,’ he said, ‘you keep the car. Just make sure that you arrive at our house in Quinzano no later than seven-thirty every morning. You then remain in my company or parked outside whatever building I am in until I go to bed in the evening.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  ‘You don’t have trouble waking up, I hope. I hate people arriving late.’

  ‘No, boss.’

  ‘OK, so now straight to Trevisan Wines, then Villa Caritas, then church.’

  Morris shut his eyes as Kwame overtook at a leisurely pace on a completely blind bend. But he admired the boy’s aplomb, and he admired the amazing reticence he showed vis-à-vis the crime they had committed together, the way he asked nothing about what Morris might have said during questioning, offered nothing about what he himself had said, as if entirely unconcerned about his fate. Or rather, entirely trustful that Morris had everything under control.

  In the way, Morris thought that Massimina had been entirely trustful. It was so fascinating comparing people, contrasting them. For about two minutes, perhaps, he felt immensely gratified.

  ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘they’ve charged Azedine and Farouk. They’re going to be tried quite soon.’

  Kwame only nodded, driving too close to a three-wheel van piled high with scrap metal. A small dog sitting on a swaying heap of rusty bed springs looked as if it might leap onto their smooth white bonnet. Which had Morris thinking of the sponge in his pocket again. It was going to be quite a morning. First the builder, then the dog.

  ‘I don’t think they’ll ever really be able to nail them on the evidence they’ve got. What do you think? But it does rather take the pressure off us.’

  Kwame, however, seemed entirely unconcerned. And this was perhaps a little callous of him. For Morris was perfectly aware that there was a moral issue here. Somebody else was suffering for what they had done.

  They’ve probably both got Aids anyway, poor guys, with what they were up to.’

  The black took a sharp corner, in third.

  ‘Don’t you think?’

  Finally Kwame grinned. ‘Is a pity about that big Audi, boss,’ he said. ‘Man, I like that big, big car.’

  Morris promised: ‘All in good time and I’ll get you one.’

  Clearly he was not going to get much change out of Kwame when it came to weighing up moral issues.

  When they arrived at Trevisan Wines, the Dobermann was as hostile as ever, snapping and slavering about the car door. Presumably one of the workers was under instruction to let the thing off its chain at weekends. Now he had his paws on the car window, black lips drawn back on a well-fed snarl. Morris found the plastic bag in his pocket, pulled out the meat-soaked sponge with two fingers, ordered Kwame to buzz down the window a snout and pushed it into the brute’s maw. Thus demonstrating how incredibly naive it was to keep animals as guards, for the dog immediately set about gobbling the thing up, letting them by to unlock the office door.

  An agonisingly slow death, the veterinary student turned pederast had explained.

  Time would tell.

  And how curious, Morris thought, as he stepped through the door, to be back in this squalid office, just four or five months after that other holiday morning (i l giorno dei morti of all days!) when he and Bobo had so ominously clashed. He glanced around, checking that nothing had changed: the desk, the filing cabinet, the safe, the fuse box, the crucifix . . . nothing. Except that the girl, who had been suggestively licking around the top of a Fratelli Ruffoli bottle in early February, now in mid-March appeared to be trying to open two of them at once with nothing more than both gloriously hard, dark nipples. Morris stepped briskly across the room, removed the calendar and was going to put it in the bin where it belonged, when it occurred to him that he might, quite charitably, and without offending either Mimi or the sad crucifix over the door, offer it to Kwame. After all, one could hardly expect everybody to convert at exactly the same moment.

  The black grinned appreciatively and flicked through the thing, rather oddly turning it this way and that, as if the vertical was not a position that inspired him. And while Morris was now pulling open the drawer with the fatal Massimina file inside, his accomplice’s deep voice chuckled and said: ‘You know where I stick dis ‘ere bottle, man?’

  Quickly folding the various letters and papers, Morris hardly needed to ask.

  Kwame was laughing. ‘I stick it right up her sweet white fanny, that’s where.’

  Although this was the kind of conversation he had spent most of his life trying to avoid, Morris felt it would be churlish to criticise, having just been responsible for giving the boy the miserable thing. Anyhow, if it kept him out of more serious sin, there was a lot to be said for it. Better the hand than the gland, so to speak.

  Fearing the waste bin was too risky, he slipped the offending papers into his inside coat pocket and turned to go. ‘We haven’t got time now,’ he explained, ‘but over the next few days, I want you to go through all the files in the cabinet, paper by paper, so as to get to know the company. And if you find any notes in handwriting, or anything obviously personal, I want you to get in touch with me right away. OK?’

  Outside, the dog was coming to terms with the fact that the sponge was not exactly what he had expected. Throat stretched upwards, he was opening and snapping shut his all too impressive teeth. For the last time, Morris hoped. In any event, occupied as the creature was with swallowing the unswallow-able, there was plenty of time for them to walk the few muddy paces to the Mercedes undisturbed.

  ‘Drive,’ he told Kwame.

  Nobody was up on their arrival at Villa Caritas. At nine-thirty now. It made Morris wonder how Forbes would fare when he had to run a school and have the boys at their lessons or other activities in reasonable time. But he was pleased to see that the big house was being kept quite tidily with spring flowers (narcissi) on the big table in the dining-room-cum-lecture-room and some drawings, clearly attempted by the immigrants under Forbes’s instruction, pinned up on the wall. There were some rather rough sketches of the garden with its pergola and pomegranate tree, one or two of the surrounding hills to the north, a frank set of life drawings of a young man sprawled on a couch, and then a remarkably delicate production of a young Slavic face, features almost melting into the soft pillow he lay on. Morris recognised Ramiz. Forbes’s work presumably. Very impressive.

  But now Morris was staring. Was there something of Massimina in it too? Could it be? No. He was just becoming paranoiac, or psychotic or whatever it was. Seeing her in everything. Unless it was that, not having the more promising subject of a woman to hand, Forbes’s work had imbued the boy with something of the transparent loveliness of the subject he had recently been copying from the Uffizi. Her beauty was infectious.

  Morris was pleased with this reflection.

  He was just setting off up the stairs to remind Forbes that he had asked to be taken to Mass at Don Carlo’s church in Quinzano, when Kwame called him back. Rather urgently.

  ‘You let me go get the old man, boss!’

  ‘No, no, it’s OK.’ Morris was at the turning of the stairs.

  But Kwame shouted: ‘No, I mean, I thought, man, maybe, we could wake the poor old fellah with the cup o’ tea. He like that.’

  Well, this was a generous idea. Once again Morris was impressed by the boy. He came back downstairs. ‘I used to wake my mother with a cup of tea,’ he remarked, perhaps unwisely, because now he was remembering how furious his father had been when an adolescent Morris had refused to continue this courtesy for himself and his various fancy women after Mother died. Immediately he was aware of the old poison in his blood, that bitterness you could actually feel in your bowels. For a moment it occurred to him that his father might have heard from some tabloid rag about his being in prison on a suspected murder charge. Well, good, that should show the old lecher who was a mother’s boy.

  In the kitchen Kwame wa
s bustling about. ‘Just going to get something from my old room, boss,’ he said as soon as he’d got the kettle on the gas. He hurried off, long legs taking the stairs three at a time. So that when Morris took up the tea ten minutes later, his discreet knock drew an immediate and very plummy: ‘Veni Creator Spiritus!’ and Forbes was already wide awake, sitting up in bed, alone, reading a book. The rather sweet smell came from a lighted joss-stick on a surface crammed with medicines and haemorrhoid creams. Morris had the good manners to avert his gaze.

  ‘Wonderful to see you, my lad,’ the old man said loudly. ‘Splendid!’ When Morris dutifully complimented him on the excellent artwork he was doing with the boys, Forbes, in the most cheerful mood his benefactor had ever seen him, spread his striped pyjama arms and announced most lyrically: ‘Virginibus puerisque canto.’ As he spoke, he was shaking his head slowly from side to side and looking Morris directly in his blue eyes. He seemed terribly amused by something. Morris thought he had never liked his cultured friend more. He immediately told him about his conversion, how he planned to spend the rest of his life in an orgy of philanthropy, of which Forbes’s school was to be the corner-stone. ‘At least two of the pupils,’ he insisted earnestly as the old man shook his head in what looked very much like wonder, ‘must be from poor families, their fees being paid directly by myself.’

  26

  The service could best have been described as a long rhythmical murmur. Don Carlo’s voice was low and toneless. The responses came as soft waves, barely breaking on the stone floor of San Tommaso in Organo. The undertow was a shuffle of shoes, a rustle of expensive clothing. And already Don Carlo’s voice was gently drawing his congregation into another ‘che Gesù vi benedica’, another ‘ave Maria, madre di Dio’, another ‘amen’, In the small church, the thickly smoking incense was soporific wafting this way and that, coiling and melting in a shaft of sunlight that lay like a great bright girder across the chancel pulpit while, deep in shadow all around, the frescoed figures of the Passion beckoned like ghosts on the fatal shore.

  In short, nothing could have been more congenial. Morris genuinely regretted not having made this a habit years ago. If only he could have persuaded Paola to come! What a happily married family life they could have, standing proudly together here with two or three innocent little children. Why couldn’t he inspire the woman with this healthy vision? It was a goal to work toward.

  Morris contemplated the Crucifixion. For the first time in a long time he found himself deeply relaxed, placed as he was beside the impeccably genuflecting Forbes and the towering Kwame, who stood, sat and knelt just a fraction of a second after the others like some awkward black flotsam bobbing and dipping on the smooth surface of their communal piety. And when it came to filing out to take the host, Morris managed to time things so that he was alongside Antonella, who was sitting in the opposite row of chairs. But he didn’t look at her, didn’t search out her gaze or even try to follow the practised grace of her devotion. He kept his head bowed and, standing at the chancel steps, immediately closed his eyes in prayerful concentration, lips moving ever so faintly as the body and blood melted on his warm tongue. ‘Cara Massimina,’ he prayed, ‘intercede for me with the saints and the blessed Virgin, that I may redeem my soul and be forgiven my many sins.’ It was a heartfelt request. Somehow the ransom letters in his pocket made him feel desperately close to her.

  Morris lingered a moment longer than the other communicants, lips faintly moving. Until, as if in a sort of divine version of instant feedback, Antonella, turning to go back to her seat, whispered in his ear: ‘I’m so glad that misunderstanding has been cleared up, Morris. I was so upset when they arrested you. I never believed it could be true.’ Morris was only disappointed to register that on her other side she had Bobo’s more handsome elder brother.

  Later, on the steps overlooking the piazza with its miserably modern war memorial, they all chatted together for some minutes in the spring breeze. Bobo’s brother was grimly pleased that the police had finally charged the immigrants. The important thing was to have this horrible business behind them so that they could begin to live again. He looked to Antonella for approval. But the young woman had tears in her eyes, and in an attempt to correct the other man’s fatuous insensitivity, Morris said that he for one still chose to believe that Bobo was alive, and that some explanation would soon come to light. It was all too easy for the police to arrest people and then accuse them of the most appalling things merely to appease a voracious local press, and probably for no other reason than that the poor boys weren’t white. Heavens, they’d even accused him of murdering poor Bobo at one point, just because he and his brother-in-law had occasionally disagreed about how to run the company, as if everybody who disagreed necessarily ended up killing each other. When there wasn’t even a body! He smiled sadly. Forbes, however, returning from a trip to the lavatory, was hearing the news about the murder charge for the first time, and had turned to chalk.

  ‘Quid hoc sibi vult?’ the old man whispered. ‘It can’t be true! Not Farouk!’ For a moment It seemed as if he might faint, so visibly was the blood draining from his face. He clutched at the basin of a fountain where grubby marble cherubs were not performing. Morris was moved then to observe how the tall Kwame, who had been standing respectfully outside the group, now leant down to mutter some words of comfort to the old man. For a few seconds he was thus able to enjoy the extraordinary Image of the black’s big blood-dark lips softly moving beside a tuft of white hair sprouting from Forbes’s waxy ear. It was the kind of thing that had he been a painter he would have painted. Or perhaps Caravaggio already had.

  Don Carlo emerged from the church and, taking Morris to one side, assured him that he had done what he could to smooth over the bureaucratic problems they had spoken about the previous month. The immigrants would all be granted the appropriate papers, so long as Trevisan Wines gave them official employment and paid their health and insurance contributions. Morris asked what he could possibly do to repay such generosity, to which Don Carlo replied that a good work on behalf of the poor could never be construed as requiring payment; on the contrary, it had been a duty, but if Morris should ever feel a debt of gratitude towards his Creator, he was always welcome to make a contribution to the Church. The most pressing concern for San Tommaso at this particular moment was the sad state of the stonework on the campanile. Far from making the gauche gesture of simply pulling out his cheque-book, Morris nodded sagely and decided to make an anonymous cash donation sometime in the next week or two, perhaps with some tiny mistake in the Italian on the envelope announcing the campanile as the benefactor’s desired destination for the money. Feminine for masculine should be sufficient. Or he could spell ‘milione’ with a double T.

  ‘Padre,’ he said, as the priest was about to turn.

  ‘Sì, figlio mio.’

  But this reminder of his prison confession was too poignant. Morris simply stared the old man in his honest eyes. For a moment he was aware of that feeling he had felt the one time he had been in love, of his soul lying just below the surface of his face. Mimi was near.

  ‘Is something troubling you, my son?’ the priest asked.

  Morris waited perhaps fifteen seconds. Then clearly making a considerable effort, he said: ‘I’m seriously concerned about my sister-in-law, padre.’ This was true. I’d like you to try to be close to her.’ In a lower voice, he added: ‘I’m afraid it is probably true that her husband was seeing someone else.’ Again he stared at the deeply lined old face before winding up: ‘La ringrazio, Father, for all your help. You have been a great support to the family.’

  ‘May God bless you, figlio mio,’ the priest said. These must be hard times for you.’

  It then occurred to Morris that if he hadn’t married with such foolish haste, he might himself have made an excellent priest. Certainly he had plenty to teach people and was always willing to listen to their little problems. The strict observance of ceremony would have been a pleasure for someone of
his aesthetic leanings. Nor would the detail of a vow of celibacy have presented a serious obstacle. Indeed the more physical enjoyment he got from the whole charade that was sex these days, the more it disturbed him. Only with Mimi had sex been something holy.

  Tears filled Morris’s blue eyes as he bid the priest good day and called to Kwame to buzz open the car.

  Then, wanting to check that the dog was indeed dying the atrocious death he believed it must, Morris asked the black to make a detour on the way back to Villa Caritas. ‘Just a couple of files I forgot to pick up,’ he explained to Forbes, who was still bothering him in the back seat about the plight of Azedine and Farouk, something Morris genuinely found difficult to understand when he remembered how reluctant the older man had originally been at the idea of having anything at all to do with any immigrants. Presumably it was just another way in which he, Morris, had influenced those around him for the better. He assured Forbes that such a charge was just part of the interminable farce of Italian public life, where everything was announced and nothing ever done. If they invariably let Mafia bosses out on the most minor of technicalities, was there any chance at all that they- could condemn two men for murder without a corpse to show and on the most slender of circumstantial evidence?

  Forbes said glumly: The real murderer must be laughing.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ Morris was in a position to insist with sincerity, ‘he’s probably not even relieved. I mean, he will already have seen me accused of everything under the sun and then summarily released. He can’t imagine the charge will stick on these two.’

  ‘Fiat justitia, ruat caelum,’

  To which grimly delivered and incomprehensible pronouncement Morris had just deigned the usual polite enquiry for enlightenment, when, rounding the bend beyond Quinto, they saw a patrol car with flashing light drawn up outside the locked gate of Trevisan Wines.