Mimi's Ghost

by Tim Parks

  The defence lawyer had begun another question, but Morris ploughed on: ‘It must be said, however, in favour of Colonnello Fendtsteig, that given the circumstantial nature of the evidence available, whether against the two accused (apart perhaps from the bloody knife) or against myself for that matter, it is quite amazing to me that this case has been brought to court at all. After all, in circumstantial terms third and even fourth solutions are available. That Bobo was killed or abducted by his lover’s husband, for example, if only we knew who that was. Or that Bobo staged the scene in the office and ran off with his mistress. What I’m saying is that without the body, or even the missing car, I don’t see how anybody can be tried for . . .’

  ‘Please,’ the elderly judge interrupted, but kindly. ‘You are here to be cross-examined by the defence for the two men being tried, not to engage in fantasies and personal reflections.’

  ‘Mi scusi, Signor Giudke.’ Morris was properly self-abasing. ‘What I was really trying to say is that the fact that I am obliged to defend myself does not mean that I wish the two accused to be found guilty willy-nilly.’

  The defence lawyer turned abruptly to the judges. ‘Your honours, let us come to the point. In my summing up later on, I shall be trying to show not only that the evidence against my two clients is pathetically thin, but also that it is far more likely that if a murder were committed it was carried out by Signor Duckworth, who had both motive and opportunity. Of course, as he himself has said, it seems improbable that he could have acted alone. I will thus be suggesting that he was aided by the tall Negro known only as Kwame, who later died together with Paola Trevisan, Signor Duckworth’s wife. Signor Duckworth admits that he spoke to the Negro at the so-called Villa Caritas immediately before proceeding to the office. For the next two hours the black’s movements are unknown. Then only a few days after Posenato’s disappearance, Signor Duckworth allowed this young black immigrant to move out of the hostel and into his own private flat. He also rewarded him with the gift of his Mercedes and gave him administrative control of the company in his absence in prison, a development which inevitably brought the black into close contact with Signor Duckworth’s wife, a woman whose marital infidelities appear to have been well known to all members of the family and indeed many people outside it. What I am suggesting is that this circumstantial evidence is considerably greater than that being offered by the prosecution against my clients, who are guilty, I suspect, of nothing worse than not being Caucasian. I will therefore be asking that the case be dropped and that investigations continue into the activities of the present witness.’

  If there was immediately an explosion of chatter at the back of the courtroom, the effect on Morris himself was devastating, not unlike that of a great artillery shell missing by a hair’s breadth. Or perhaps not missing at all. The livid red of his scars turned with electric quickness to white while his hands trembled visibly on his knees and for the first time in his life he felt an involuntary twitch seize the left corner of his mouth and drag it violently downwards.

  There is also the curious fact,’ the defence lawyer went on, ‘the curious fact that as his fellow workers have explained to the court, though at the time the fact did not perhaps seem relevant the Negro Kwame actually turned up to his night shift four hours late on the second night after the crime, with the pathetic excuse that he had been outside rearranging stacks of bottles, something nobody did at night, since at night the guard dog was freed from his chain and would attack anybody coming out of the building. Hence the whereabouts of the Negro Kwame must be considered unaccounted for on the very night that Signor Duckworth was allegedly weeping over the remains of his lost beloved. In short, the two of them together had ample time to dispose of a body.’

  This certainly was a direct hit. The only miracle was that it had been so long in coming. ‘Mimi,’ Morris croaked, though happily his voice was lost in the general hubbub of people finally seeing a whole picture come into focus. ‘Mimi!’ All at once Morris felt as though he had not a scrap of energy left. Clearly he was finished. If he wasn’t going to confess now it was merely in order to have a few last days of semi-liberty so as to put his papers in order and read the Bible a last time or two with Antonella.

  ‘Meester Duckworrth,’ the lawyer turned to him, I put it to you that you saw the sacking of Azedine and Farouk as a cover for killing your partner when an argument broke out between you as to the future of the company and your shared inheritance.’

  Morris opened his mouth. No, wait. He snapped it shut, then shut his eyes too. They were so harrowingly close to the kill now that he simply would not and could not speak for fear of saying the wrong thing. No, he would not answer until Mimi appeared to him, until she actually told him word for word what to say. And what was God’s will for him. Even if it meant waiting a thousand years. Thirty seconds passed. A minute. ‘Meester Duckworrth,’ the lawyer said, ‘would you please respond to my question.’

  Nothing. The court had fallen silent, waiting. Behind his closed eyes Morris was seeing deep red while the silence began to throb with blood draining down and away from consciousness. Another moment and he would faint. Someone shuffled a chair nearby. At the back of the room there was a whisper, the slightest rustle of paper. Until, into this silence pressed full of passion, the sudden sound of a door opening and footsteps running came as a liberating explosion.

  ‘Signor Giudice! Signor Giudice!’

  Opening his eyes, dazed by nausea, Morris barely made out what seemed to be Inspector Marangoni’s assistant of old hurrying across the courtroom. He went directly to the judges’ bench and began to talk to them in a low voice. Glances were exchanged. The judges looked up and called over the two lawyers. People in the courtroom began to talk. The older judge called them to order. And Morris finally came back to his senses just in time to hear the words: ‘Signore e signori, due to the discovery of a new and apparently conclusive piece of evidence, this court will be adjourned for an hour while the prosecution decides whether he wishes to continue the case against the accused.’

  34

  May had brought the poppies back, a brilliant red dapple in the green patchwork of the countryside. Riding up the Valpantena for his mornings in the office, Morris was reminded of the pointillists and pictures he had seen at the National Gallery as an adolescent. On two occasions he called his father, first to invite him to the funeral, second to point out to him the misfortune they now had in common. Both had lost a young wife. Both in terrible accidents. Though unlike Ron, Morris didn’t have the consolation of a child to remind him of his spouse.

  Morris was moved by how genuinely upset his father was on his behalf. In the first phone call. In the second, the man seemed more dismissive, more himself. The burden of it was that Morris should pull his socks out of the spilt milk and get on and find somebody else. He’d always tended to be a bit of a crybaby.

  ‘She was pregnant,’ Morris whimpered. ‘It only came out in the autopsy.’

  ‘I,’ his father was already saying, ‘didn’t wait long after Alice died, because I couldn’t see that anybody had anything to gain out of me being a miserable old bastard. Not your mother, not you and not meself. Or am I right?’

  Morris hung up. He resented his father taking his mother’s name in vain. At cruising speed, he admired the thick freshness of everything, the vine leaves racing along their wires and poles, the stark verticality of the cypress, the waving silver of the birches (like light on water, his artist’s eye told him). ‘How everything grows back and back,’ he told Mimi on the phone.

  ‘Like our love,’ she said. For she often answered now. She seemed to have lost the reticence of earlier days. She asked: ‘Where are you going now, Morri?’

  ‘But you know where I’m going,’’ he laughed, ‘you know everything, Mimi.’

  ‘Yes, but I like to ask, and for you to answer.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ He smiled, taking his hand from the wheel one risky moment to push it through blond hair that was
growing back. Though he didn’t try to catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror on the sunshade as once he used to. ‘I’m going to see Forbes,’ he said.

  There was a brief silence. The car purred past the ugly industrial developments outside Grezzana. Morris drove more carefully and sedately these days. Then she said: ‘I still think Forbes is dangerous, Morri.’

  Morris couldn’t help but agree. There were indeed all kinds of problems.

  ‘He knows so much,’ she said.

  ‘But he did give me the letters back,’ Morris reminded her. ‘And he doesn’t so much know everything as imagine it. I mean, he doesn’t actually know I wrote those letters, just that I had them in my pocket, and he doesn’t know what I did to Paola and Kwame. By the way, it seems they were never apart while I was in hospital.’ Into a brief space he added: ‘Actually, I miss Kwame.’

  ‘Forbes knows,’ Massimina said sombrely, and with something final in her voice.

  But Morris was quite relaxed. ‘He doesn’t know I put the pubic hair and so on in the car, does he? Only that I drove it off into the hills. And in the end it must have been Kwame who brought it back to the villa, not me. Right? Probably planning to spray it and resell it or something. I wondered why the police hadn’t found it. So the idea that it was them who killed Bobo must seem quite feasible to him. Even if he suspects otherwise. The logistics of it are a bit tight, but just about possible.’

  ‘I love your voice,’ she said. Her own was soft in the elegant phone. Though when Morris put the receiver down it was intriguing that she kept on talking to him just the same. You only needed the phone to get things started these days.

  ‘Really, still?’ he asked.

  ‘Still,’ she said. Her voice had a way of filling the whole car, as if it were on every side of him, coming out of the four-speaker stereo perhaps.

  ‘The thing is,’ Morris said, ‘that I know he wrote those two ransom letters to try to save Farouk.’

  ‘But you can’t prove it. Whereas he could tell the police that he and Stan saw you in Piazza Bra that day.’

  Morris laughed: ‘Thank God Stan’s so incredibly out of it.’ He waited patiently to get past a girl on a bike being pulled along by boyfriend on moped. The kind of thing the police incredibly never stopped people for.

  He added: ‘You’re right about that. But the question is, would it ever be in his interest to go to the police? I mean, I’m financing his little dream there, all the little boys he’s always wanted to seduce.’

  ‘He might go to them, if he was afraid of you.’

  ‘But why should he be?’

  ‘He might think you’re so afraid of what he knows that you will try to kill him.’

  Stuck behind the inevitable tractor now, Morris had to admit that this was feasible.

  ‘Or he might think you’d kill him because he was homosexual, the way you’ve spoken about homosexuality sometimes.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that. I mean, I’m hardly a mad mass murderer or anything.’

  ‘But he doesn’t know that. When I think of some of the things you’ve said to him.’ She laughed. ‘I was furious with you. I was dying to tell you. You were so blind.’

  Morris rather liked that use of the word ‘dying’. ‘So why didn’t you?’

  ‘I was shy, I suppose. I hadn’t found my voice.’

  ‘Whereas now you’ve become quite a little chatterbox.’

  ‘Yes.’ There was a brief silence. ‘Perhaps the truth is,’ she went on softly and her voice seemed to breathe through the air vents now, ‘that I hadn’t made up my mind whether to forgive you or not.’

  ‘Ah.’ He felt a rush of warmth and emotion. ‘But now you have?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re so sweet, Mimi,’ he said. ‘So sweet and so important.’

  ‘Morri.’

  Then with genuine concern he enquired: ‘Do you think Paola will ever forgive me?’

  But perhaps it was a mistake to ask this, because now there was a very long silence indeed. The Mercedes cruised on between country ditches towards Villa Caritas. At last she said mysteriously: ‘From the place where Paola has gone, no word comes forth. Remember Dante: “Lasciate ogni speranza vox che entrate.” We shall never know whether she forgives you or not. You must forget all about her.’

  Morris felt chastened. He drove intently.

  Massimina went on: ‘But you still haven’t told me how you’re going to settle this problem with Forbes.’

  ‘Because I’ve no idea,’ Morris said. ‘I mean, I don’t see how I can. The last thing I want to do is hurt him. I like him. Very much. And then there’s Fendtsteig. The truth is, I shall have to keep my head down for years now. Which is only what I ever wanted anyway.’

  ‘Well, I’ve got an idea,’ Massimina said. Her voice was suddenly at its most soft and seductive.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘But I don’t know if you’d be willing to go through with it.’

  ‘If you tell me to I will.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘I promise,’ Morris said. ‘If you give me an order, I’ll do it.’

  ‘But I don’t want to give you orders, I want you to do it because it’s the best thing.’

  ‘Anything you so much as suggest is an order for me,’ Morris told her. He was curious to know what it was now, what he was letting himself in for.

  ‘Look, you’re almost there,’ Mimi said. In fact they had just passed through the village. ‘I think you should pull over so we can discuss this before we get there.’

  How death had changed her! Matured her! She would never have spoken like this to him when she was just a sweet little girl.

  ‘Of course.’ Morris pulled over to the side, so that now he was hard against a stone wall mottled with sunlit capers, though the plane tree beside, he noticed, had two syringes stabbed into its bark. Nothing was ever, he had time to reflect, quite idyllic.

  ‘Make love to him,’ Mimi said.

  ‘What!’

  ‘Make love to him. To Forbes. Or rather, let him make love to you.’

  For the first time Morris was furious with his guardian ghost. How could she even suggest such a thing? How . . .

  ‘First because it’s logical.’ Her little voice spoke with a bluntness he would never have expected.

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘It would show that you’ve come round to his way of thinking as far as homosexuality is concerned, so that he needn’t be afraid you’re going to do anything to him just because he’s gay.’

  ‘Mimi . . .’

  ‘And it will form a bond between you that would make it very unlikely that he would ever do anything to you. Also . . .’

  Morris was in a state of shock, breathing very deeply, trying to control a sudden rebellion of various inner organs. And one outer one too. Despite the Mercedes’s controlled environment, it was as if there were no air in the car.

  ‘Also, because it’s something you’ve always wanted to do. That’s why you’re feeling so excited now.’

  ‘But, Mimi, it’s against my faith, it’s against . . .’

  ‘St Paul was homosexual,’ she told him. ‘I know that for a fact.’ When he still protested, she went on: ‘Anyway, I’ll shrive you, Morri, I’ll forgive you the way I did when you were with Paola and Kwame. Just as long as you watch me throughout.’ Her voice was positively oozing sex now. ‘Like last time.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, faintly.

  ‘You know that was wonderful for me too, Morn,’ she breathed, ‘the way you looked at me. With your poor hurt face.’

  There was a moment’s silence. An elderly woman passed by, labouring at the pedals of an ancient bicycle, huge shopping bag in one hand. Then a petrol tanker. Morris made a last attempt to fight back: ‘Look, the truth is, I still feel disgusted by what I did then. You know, I keep waking and vomiting.’

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t. You love it, and you were beautiful.’ Then in no more than a velvet whisper, she told him: �
��You’re so lovely when you’re naked, Morri. Your body. And your face, even now, when you come. It’s so epic.’

  ‘And you, Mimi,’ he answered. ‘You were lovely. Your expression was lovely. So holy. With the crucifix in your hand.’

  ‘That’s settled then,’ she said. ‘You’ll feel so much better afterwards. So much happier. Anyway, the only reason you never did it before was because your father accused you of it.’

  Morris could think of nothing to answer to this. So he started up again. The car slid out onto the road. The last mile of fertile countryside unfolded, the young corn and the speckled drift of fallen cherry blossom. As he turned up the drive to Villa Caritas, he suddenly felt moved to ask: ‘Apart from that, you do know what I’m planning with Antonella, don’t you?’

  She said: ‘Of course, Morree.’

  ‘And you don’t mind?’

  ‘She’s very lonely and sad,’ Massimina said wistfully.

  Morris insisted: ‘Listen, Mimi, I won’t do anything unless I have your blessing. Anything, in all my life, I promise you that.’ But already he was excited at all it seemed Massimina was going to let him do, no, to tell him to do.

  ‘Keep my portrait always in your room,’ the ghost whispered. ‘Promise me I will always be the first.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes!’

  ‘If you do that you can have sex with anybody you like. Because I love watching you. And you watching me. You know that in the end it will always be me you’re doing it with.’

  ‘Oh, always,’ he promised. ‘Always, always always.’

  Then quite peremptorily, she said: ‘Masturbate, Morri.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I want you to masturbate.’

  ‘Just like that?’ he asked.

  They were in the drive to Villa Caritas now, deeply rutted by the builder’s truck. She laughed. ‘Just like that. In fact, it’s an order, Morri. Pull the car into the trees.’

  Again, Morris was both shocked and excited by this new development. It was almost as if she were taking over the role that Paola had had in his life, but so much more sweetly.