by Tim Parks
Remodel his ear! The truth was he was in a sort of swoon of disbelief,
‘You don’t know Earrrls Court?’ the nurse insisted.
‘I went to the Ideal Home Exhibition once,’ Morris confessed (when Mother was still alive, of course - it was with people like Mother and Massimina that you went to venues like that).
‘Ah, Olympiad,’ Dionisio remembered. ‘Olympia. The Idea Lome. Verry, verry beautiful.’
Morris almost choked. There probably wasn’t a decent home within a mile of Earls Courts, never mind an ideal one. Certainly the miserable Duckworth ménage had never even been an also-ran.
‘Why don’t you go back, then?’ he asked, getting another fierce stab of pain from stitches in the corner of his mouth. ‘If you like it so much.’
Dionisio got to his feet and smiled rather sadly: ‘I must for the moment look after my old mamma ‘ere. She is sick. Then I go back.’
Lucky to have a mother to look after! Morris watched the small man push his trolley away. As soon as the ward door swung to behind him, he lifted the tray from off its support, extricated himself from the bed, found uncertain feet, and stumbled across to the lockers.
Thus, over the next ten tumultuous minutes, Morris discovered: first, that, no, his coat, and hence the ransom letters, was not in the locker; second, that, yes, his face looked far worse than anything he had ever done to any of his victims; and third, that, amazing but true, the police, or rather carabinieri, appeared to be paying serious attention to the ransom note Signora Posenato had received, if for no other reason than, as the local paper put it, ‘its curious similarity to letters sent after the kidnap of the missing man’s sister-in-law, Massimina Trevisan, some two years ago’.
Morris almost passed out. Finding Dionisio in the corridor as he tottered back to the ward, he begged the little man for a tranquilliser. But after consulting the clipboard at the end of his bed, Dionisio assured him that he had already been given the maximum permitted dose. He was already tranquillised. That was normal in disfigurement cases. He smiled apologetically. ‘I tell you the what. No sooner I am feenished with taking the medicine, I come back and we keep everybody other the company. What you say?’
Kindly, Morris said nothing, but headed for his bed, his horror, his self-pity.
28
Early afternoon of the fourth day Paola arranged the screen around his bed and wanted to indulge in some kind of activity there and then. First the three weeks in prison, and now this. With only one night at home in between! It was sufficient cause for divorce!
Was this kind of jolly jolly talk intended to cheer him up? Ever more obsessed with the missing coat, Morris watched her face, and came to the conclusion, even as she slipped an arm into the sheets, that there was something wrong, something not quite Paola, perhaps precisely because of this exaggeration of her Paolaishness.
She had penetrated his pyjama now, but was clearly disappointed.
The drugs had wiped out his libido, Morris explained.
Tut your hand up my skirt,’ she said. ‘God, but you’re sexy, all bandaged up like that!’ She was pressing her knees against the edge of the bed. Sure enough she had no knickers on. Morris’s thumb slid neatly into her. In a sort of pantomime of her erotic self, she rocked slowly back and forth on his wrist.
‘Pull it out,’ she ordered, ‘suck it, then kiss me.’
Morris did as he was bidden, her hands already forcing his thumb back in as she kissed the cuntiness on his lips. Quite definitely, he thought, this was an act. But to cover for what? Did it mean that she knew? And if so, how much? Just Bobo? Or Bobo and Massimina? Was it that she had found the coat, the letters? Did she imagine he knew she knew? Was she showing him she could use that power to turn him into a sex slave for the rest of his days?
And when would her belly start to swell with their baby? Mimi had assured him she was pregnant. The child, Morris felt, would mark the beginning of his reformed life. His wife at that point would surely ease up, become someone one could imagine spending one’s life with. It was simply a question of hanging on.
Then her face had just begun to take on the rather coarse contortions it always did at this point in the proceedings, when Kwame’s woolly head popped up above the screen behind her.
For Christ’s sake! What squalor! He tried to ease out of her, but she grabbed his arm, thrusting herself hard against him to squeeze out the titbit. Her breath was coming quick and deep.
Above the screen, Kwame grinned broadly. Morris could do nothing else but hang on, her hand clutching his under her skirt, her thighs squeezing and squeezing his wrist. He felt deeply humiliated.
‘O Dio!’ Paola gasped. ‘O Dio, Dio, Dio!’ Then opening her eyes, she asked: ‘Why on earth did you do that, Mo? Antipatico! I almost missed my slot.’
Retrieving his hand and wiping it on the sheet, Morris said: ‘We were being observed.’
Paola glanced over her shoulder. Kwame’s features had settled back into an enviable impassivity.
‘Hello, boss,’ he said.
‘Oh, Kwame.’ Paola was straightening her skirt, an unembarrassed flush on her face. ‘I thought you were going to stay in the car.’ Rather than seeming upset she even managed a smile, which was the kind of whore she was of course.
‘I wanted to see the boss about the work,’ the big black said. ‘And this is the only time for visiting.’ He came round inside the screen. ‘I want to tell him about the threats I am getting.’
Apparently there had been messages under his door, telling the black to get out or else. A brick tossed through the soggiorno window. ‘Veneto per i Veneti’ scratched on the side of the car.
Morris promised he would inform the police. He then gave them both a series of instructions about what must be urgently done at the company: messages for Doorways and other clients, clarifications of orders, an explanation of how Bobo had managed to account for the money paid under the table to suppliers. Because if they didn’t get things moving, he said, Trevisan Wines would simply wind down and die. Paola complained that it was all too complicated, that Morris would have to do it himself when he was out. But Kwame rather surprisingly took a small diary from the pockets of quite fashionable trousers and made careful notes, asking the boss to repeat everything very precisely. So that despite the embarrassment of what had come before, not to mention the huge repertoire of worries he was currently engaged with, Morris experienced the genuine pleasure of having a worthy pupil, a good apprentice. When his eyes met the black’s across the length of the bed, a dark and reassuring complicity passed between them.
‘Povera faccia selvaggia,’ Paola was cooing. ‘My poor savaged savage!’
Did she know or didn’t she? And if she didn’t, why that strange determination to be more normal than normal, bringing herself off like that?
‘By the way’ - addressing both of them at once, Morris tried to be completely offhand - ‘after they killed that bloody dog, you don’t know what happened to my coat, do you? I think I must have had my wallet in one of the pockets.’
There was a very brief silence.
‘You was all covered in the blood, boss. That big dog, he was tearing you up like a demon.’
Then the police shot him,’ Morris said. ‘Or so Forbes tells me.’
‘First we try to pull him off, then they shot him. Man, was he crazy!’
‘But why?’ Paola asked. ‘He’d never done that before.’
‘Police said somebody try to poison him, lady,’ Kwame explained.
Once again, Morris was impressed by the boy’s talent for lying, or rather for telling the innocent half-truth, for saying exactly what he would have said if he hadn’t known the half of what he undeniably did. Also it pleased him that, despite having watched as he had, he still addressed Mrs Duckworth with the utmost respect.
‘I just wondered what happened to my coat?’ Morris repeated.
Kwame shook his head. ‘You still had it on when I help with the stretcher, boss.’
/> ‘You didn’t have the credit cards in it, did you, Mo?’ Paola wriggled a little inside her skirt and mixed a grimace with a smile.
Very well, Morris thought, if it came to playing it hard and long, he was as good as the next man. But that coat and the letters inside it must have ended up somewhere.
The following morning, only twenty-four hours before the operation now, Antonella came to visit, and after a few moments’ hesitation agreed to read to Morris from his English Bible. She was demurely dressed in brown and black. Morris had explained to her about his conversion, his desire to serve, his intention, as long as she agreed, to combine Trevisan Wines’ commercial operations with a charitable organisation, to build a chapel in the grounds. Now she sat beside him, her hands pale on the black book, her long black hair falling forward to brush an ample bosom.
‘What do you want me to read?’ his sister-in-law asked.
‘Anything,’ he said. Tour favourite passage.’
‘I’m afraid I’m really rather ignorant,’ she flustered. ‘Catholics don’t tend to read the Bible that much.’
Her fumblings were endearing.
‘Perhaps when I get better we could study it together,’ he suggested. ‘It would be an adventure. Perhaps it would help you to take your mind off things. Or we could even study it in English. Mix learning and devotion. That would be a good way to start lessons again. Now Stan can’t do them any more.’
He sincerely hoped nobody had told the American he was in hospital. The last thing he needed was for the fawning Californian to come and visit and for Antonella to go and meet him in the lift. She smiled gratefully, while Morris reflected that the very fact his sister-in-law had come to see him at all meant that, even if someone had found the coat and put two and two together, the cat was certainly not out of the bag yet. Otherwise she would have been gouging his eyes out.
‘Open it at random,’ he said, nodding to the gilt-edged pages. If he ever wrote a book himself he would like it to have gilt-edged pages.
She did so, and finding reading glasses (he hadn’t known about those, but made no comment) in a black handbag, began to read: “Oh, that I were as in months past, as in the days when God preserved me.” ‘
She looked up at him from the pages, the briefest glance, her features brimming with a pain made all the more noble by those wonderfully serious glasses.
“When his candle shined upon my head, and when by his light I walked through darkness.”
Morris sighed.
“As I was in the days of my youth, when the secret of God was upon my tabernacle.”
He watched her intently. There was a fine trembling about swollen lips, a splendidly womanly intensity, which in Paola was mere voracity.
“When the Almighty was yet with me, when my children were about me,
’“When I washed my steps with butter, and the rock poured me out rivers of oil.”
Antonella burst into tears. ‘Oh, Morris,’ she cried. ‘Why did it have to happen to us?’
He sat up and put a hand on hers. He felt genuinely upset and desperately attracted, quite in spite of himself, since he was committed to Paola now.
Washed my steps with butter! He should have started studying the Bible long ago.
Suddenly, Antonella was sobbing. ‘First with Mimi and now Bobo. You know we’ve had this horrible letter. Just like the ones for Mimi. I was pleased at first, I thought it meant he must be alive, but then I remembered what happened to her. O Dio, it’s so awful. I can’t understand why God would let it happen twice in the same family. And now I go and open the Bible right at Job!’
She wept.
Cautiously, Morris asked in what way this letter was similar to the ones they had got for Mimi. He had never seen them, he reminded her. And himself.
‘Cut out of novels and newspapers,’ she said, taking off her glasses to wipe her eyes with a tissue. ‘Not a word of handwriting. Full of strange threats.’
Morris was concerned. ‘Could I see it?’ he asked. It turned out she had a photocopy of the thing in her handbag. She leant down to the floor and rummaged. Morris spread the paper open on his sheets.
Immediately he started, his whole body stiffened, so complete a déjà vu it was.
DARK PRINCESS OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS!
The thing had obviously been cut out from some third-rate translation of an even worse novel. Gothic, for young teenagers.
IT IS MY BEHOLDEN DUTY TO APPRISE THEE THAT NUMBERED ARE NOW THE DAYS OF THY EVIL REIGN OVER THE LONG-SUFFERING PEOPLES OF ZORN. EVEN AS MY HAND SETS FORTH THIS MISSIVE, I DIP MY QUILL IN THE BLOOD OF THY MALEFICENT SON, BLACK THOMAS, WHO WRITHES TORMENTED AS ONCE HE TORMENTED OTHERS IN IGNOMINIOUS SHACKLES. GNASH THY TEETH, CHRISTENDOM’S FELL OPPRESSOR! IF BEFORE SUNSET OF THE SECOND SABBATH THOU DOST NOT LAY ALL THY ILL-GOT GAIN AT THE FEET OF GENTLE KNIGHT RUDOLPH AND SWEAR ALLEGIANCE UPON HIS MIGHTY SWORD, THEN HE ONLY THAT THOU LOVEST, HE ONLY WHO IS DEAR TO THY FOUL HEART AND FOULER SOUL, SHALL BE DISPATCHED SANS SHRIVE OR MERCY TO MEET THE MOST JUST WRATH OF HIS ALL-HOLY MAKER.
Gnash thy teeth indeed! Morris thought. What miserable prose! But the exact same ruse as his own first ransom letter. The teasing horror of the absurd. Some stupid adventure for retarded adults turned into reality. It was signed: rodolfo il rosso, difensore BELLA FEDE, PROTETTORE DEI POVERI, FLAGELLO DI SATANA Etutte le sue opere. Beneath the cheap publication’s caps a small piece cut from a local newspaper said: The authorities promised that technical details relative to the payment of the new tax will be released over the next few days.’
Morris let out a deep breath. Actually, it was pretty damn clever: a perfect imitation of his own earlier pastiche, at once daring the recipient not to take it seriously while allowing the sender to pretend, above all to himself perhaps, that for all its horror it was no more than a joke. Morris was just about to look up and comfort Antonella and insist that she absolutely must not pay - since, after all, nothing had been gained from paying all that money for Massimina, had it? - when a male voice asked:
‘Allora, your opinion, Mr Duckvorse?’
It was the first, but by no means the last, time that Morris would appreciate the advantage of having had his face half chewed to pieces. For however keenly he sensed the blood draining from his cheeks, his eyes widening to a stare, surely no one could have read anything from the mess of stitches and bandages his once handsome features had now become. He shivered and, turning his eyes to the apparition of a Fendtsteig more Gestapo-like than ever in full uniform and rimless spectacles, told him truthfully: ‘Colonnello, I’m afraid it’s a complete mystery to me.’
‘If you could leave us alone for just one moment?’ Fendtsteig said to Antonella, rather coldly, Morris felt, given all that the poor woman was going through. However, the carabiniere’s uniform was impressive with its white holster strap and red-striped trousers. Aesthetically a considerable improvement on the rather workaday uniform of the polizia.
Antonella slipped away, fumbling reading glasses into an open handbag. Morris appeared to gaze at the spot where she had disappeared.
‘Signor Duckvorse,’ Fendtsteig began at once, ‘I’m afraid we must have yet another talk.’
The Englishman’s face was a mask of resignation.
‘Signor Duckvorse, a man has disappeared, for more than a month now, apparently after a struggle.’ He paused, bit at his lips, brought the tips of his fingers together. ‘In terms of opportunity to kill or abduct we have three suspects: you and two rather pathetic extra-contunitari.’
‘Homosexuals,’ Morris said.
Fendtsteig ignored this. Could the carabiniere be a homosexual? Morris wondered. He would not be surprised. The world seemed to be swarming with them and their sad diseases just at the moment.
Fendtsteig continued to consider his fingertips, as if deep in thought.
‘On the evening following the crime, you were absent from your house until two in the morning. I repeat, two in the morning. You refused to clarify your whereabouts. Because
of this, firmly believing that you were the murderer or abductor, I had you imprisoned to prevent you establishing any alibi with anybody else, a provision available to me under decreto legge of the penal code 776/91.’
Tedium. Morris’s eye strayed to the cobweb-caught crucifix above the door. It surely suggested something of a breakdown in ward hygiene, both practical and spiritual. And when was this obnoxious, nit-picking Tyrolese going to tell him whether or not they had found the letters in his coat? So that Morris could know whether he needed to keep fighting his corner or whether he mightn’t do better just to relax and resign.
‘You then contrived,’ Fendtsteig went on, using the same dull, machine-like tone he had used on their first meeting, ‘I repeat, contrived, and only after three weeks’ hard thinking at that, to create the most bizarre alibi for your absence on that evening. In interviews with the prison psychiatrist you claimed that . . .’
‘Per favore, Colonnello,’ Morris interrupted. ‘It really is too painful. I know perfectly well what I said, please let’s not talk about it.’
Fendtsteig hesitated, though without appearing to acknowledge Morris’s interruption, then continued: ‘However, it was sufficient for me, under the terms of the above-mentioned decreto legge, to have a story, however unlikely, just so long as I could later, if necessary, prove it to be wrong. In fact the weaker and more ridiculous the story, the better.’
He paused, but again without exchanging glances with Morris, who muttered into the silence: ‘If I had known the man would tell people about what I’d said, I would never have told him. I imagined any discussion with a doctor was in confidence.’
Fendtsteig’s thin, bespectacled face above the high military collar showed how little he was convinced of this. Which Morris genuinely felt was unreasonable. Especially since the description he had given of the point at which he had climbed over the cemetery wall, and the way the coffins were stacked and so on, had been extremely accurate and, presumably, verifiable. Let them think what they liked, quite clearly he had at some time or other in his life climbed over that cemetery wall. And for what other reason if not to moan over the coffin of his dead mistress, which, again, had been available for weeping over only on that one special evening?