Juggling the Stars (10 page)

In the railway station he bought four likely looking detective novels and a return ticket to Verona. It was going to be a hectic day. And the joy of it was he still hadn't done anything anybody could reasonably expect to put him away for. Minimum risk till the very last moment, that was the watchword.

First he read her letter that she had sealed up and made him promise not to read, ‘or you'll never get your head through a door again.' Her handwriting, he noticed, was as full and plump as her breasts, touchingly innocent, and each of the strokes below the line had curious, flirtatious little tails.

So he was lazy, was he? And he lied because he felt inferior - him, Morris, inferior! And this was what they called love. A month to see if they were fit for each other! That is, if he was fit for her. As if he was somebody to be weighed up like a sack of potatoes and given five or six out of ten on the matrimonial ratings. Which settled it. He was going through with it. They needed a damn good shaking up, the whole lot of them.

As soon as he was off at Verona Nord, swinging his detective novels in a plastic bag, Morris bought the
Arena
, the local Verona newspaper., then caught the Number 8 out to MontoriOj arriving at his fiat shortly after nine o'clock. During his bus trip he had already found what he was after in the paper.

LA
B
ELLA MASSIMINA STILL
MissiNG, an inside headline announced,
ELOPED OR KIDNAPPED?

There were a few details of Massimina's sudden disappearance on Friday night with nothing but a bright red tracksuit. Untill the police had managed to contact Signor Morris Duckworth, however,
il fidanzato
rejected by the family, there were still hopes that it was merely a question of passionate elopement, although as each hour passed the possibility of something more terrible became ever more likely. (Indeed it did.)

Inspector Marangoni, in charge of the case, said they couldn't rule out kidnapping, murder, or even suicide. In an interview with the press, the director of the Nelson School of English, Horace Rolandson, had described Morris as a subdued and conscientious teacher, certainly not the rash or overtly passionate type, and he was sure Morris would be back the next week to pick up his pay cheque for the courses he'd just finished (though he probably hoped the contrary). The fact that Morris hadn't as yet been paid for his last two weeks' work was considered a strong element against elopement (what a cynical world!).

The mystery, the
Arena
concluded, remains unsolved, while the anxiety of the family grows; Signora Trevisan remains firmly convinced that in the unlikely event that Massimina has run away, she would certainly make at least some attempt to contact the family and spare them this agonizing uncertainty.

‘Massimina is a generous, traditional girl,' Signora Trevisan told us, ‘not a drug addict or a spoilt modern child. She certainly would not have left her home while her grandmother was dangerously ill in hospital.'

You could see there wasn't much going on in the provinces, Morris thought. The
Telegraph
wouldn't have given it two lines.

To one side of this article there was an extremely flattering portrait photograph of Massimina which would be of no help to anyone in identifying the girl. Family vanity had won hands down over practicality there. The only remaining problem being that Stan and Gregorio had actually seen him with Massimina Friday evening. But Gregorio would already be on his way to Sardinia and it was extremely unlikely that Stan ever read or even was capable of reading Italian newspapers. Still it was dicey. Maybe he should admit having been with her for an hour or so. Go and tell the police right away. Morris wrestled a while with the problem but couldn't resolve it. Play it by ear then.

Once in the flat the first thing was the diary. He wrapped it in brown paper and inserted the following letter, scribbled in the same fiercely childish script:

Morris considered this letter for some time. He didn't feel happy about some of the phrases. It was all rather heavy-handed, children's TV stuff, but he didn't have time to think of anything else. It would have to do, that was all. He must hang on till he was back in Vicenza before posting it though. Shouldn't send the man two letters from Verona.

Next the detective novels. Morris dropped onto the couch in the sitting room and spread out the four books in front of him. Then almost at once he stood up again and was off into the bedroom looking for scissors. And Sellotape too. He must have some Sellotape somewhere. And gloves, dammit! Because the Sellotape would show fingerprints. He was proud of himself a moment then for having thought of that. No fool he, oh no.

He stopped, passing through to the bathroom again, and watched himself in the mirror there - tall and blond, smiling, elegant in his white shirt and trousers. Quite charming. A garden-party type. He had enjoyed the garden parties at Cambridge. Quite the only part of the social life he had liked. For a few seconds., Morris had a wonderful sense of the attractive physical presence of himself. The flesh was firm in his trousers, the neck rose clear and clean over a clean Italian collar. What more did they want, for God's sake? And who could blame him now if they'd brought him to this? He hurried back into the living room and sat down with his novels.

They were stupid of course. Crimes of passion, crimes of politics murders for love(!) and money, murders to settle old enmities, old debts; clever little eccentric men solving everything with their polite interrogation methods and winning ways with women. Crap and crap. The same humanistic garbage over and over, the world a nasty place where the good guys take a beating but somehow win through on the last page and who cares whether it's Maigret, Miss Marples or Bond. Garbage. You wondered whether any of them had ever read a newspaper in the end, or tried to get a job. And failed, that is. Again and again. Failed to find a place for themselves. No, failure was certainly what they didn't seem to know about. Or rather, it would feature for a while and then happily go away - tension and release. If it continued then it was deserved. And if it led to drastic decisions then it was perverse.

Not novels of the ‘80s, Morris, critic manqué, reflected. Nowadays the motive could be taken for granted. Humanity.

But the days when he could permit himself the luxuries of philosophy were numbered. He had a hell of a lot to do if he was going to get back to Vicenza this evening. He dampened an index finger and leafed through a silly Simenon. Sulky passions and murky Parisian bars, but nothing he was really after. No. Agatha Christie then: long dresses and love letters, people lighting pipes and scratching behind pink ears, traces of arsenic in an apple crumble. Zero. But the third book was more promising, even if more stupid, and on page thirty-five Morris found just what he was after.

Morris was rather delighted with this splendid ransom note. As a first stab, it fitted the bill perfectly. To a camel's hair, no less. Nothing more terrifying than farce, than not knowing whether it was serious or not. He slipped on a pair of rubber gloves from the kitchen and proceeded to cut it out.

Then it was just a question of finding ‘daughter' to Sellotape over ‘son' (there'd been a daughter on the first page of the Agatha Christie, hadn't there? The heiress. Yes.), then ‘her', instead of ‘him', even easier. Where the original said. Bedouin Freedom Fighters, he cut out a few question marks and taped them over the top of the line, and where the ransom was described, he found a line in the Simenon where Maigret says, ‘We can tackle that problem when we come to it,' and taped the sentence diagonally across the whole section. The envelope he would buy in town, touching it only with rubber gloves, and the address he could lettroset on a spare counter in the post office. Who knew what modern science mightn't be up to these days, but certainly this way they couldn't put anything on him at all. They'd have no idea he wasn't Italian; probably they'd imagine one of the regular indigenous kidnapping bands. God knew there were enough of them.

One small problem though. Morris bit the inside of his lips, very excited now. (At last, this seemed to be the life he was cut out for. It really did!). He must give some indication he really had her. Some detail, not too definite, but something that certainly pointed that way, that made what might seem a practical joke gnawingly possible. He leapt up, went over to his single shelf of books and looked up ‘mole' in his English-Italian dictionary; and then ‘armpit.'

He was already snipping the words out when the folly of this occurred to him. If they could recognize the edition somehow, if they found out he was using an Italian-English dictionary? No. He went to the bedroom, climbed on a chair and rummaged through the ex-tenant's belongings in an upper cupboard. After a few moments he pulled down the regular Italian dictionary he remembered seeing there; then it was the work of two or three minutes to cut out the nouns he needed and mix them with a verb and a couple of prepositions from the novels.

Lei ha un neo sotto l'ascella sinistra
- She has a mole under her left armpit. Perfect!

Morris slipped the completed letter inside his newspaper and began to tidy up the flat. The detective books would have to go out with the rubbish; all his clothes and possessions he packed into a second suitcase and three cardboard boxes which he carted upstairs to the communal attic. The only thing he left in the flat was Gregorio's worthless bronze, gesturing on top of the living room bookshelf. It was foolish to leave it there, obviously, near madness in fact. Except that Morris had a vague feeling as he began this enterprise that the gods would side with the rash and the imaginative. Not those who weren't ready to gamble. (Let Dad call him a pansy now!) Morris, Morris told himself, was tossing his bread upon the waters (whatever that meant), offering himself as a hostage to fate.

An hour later he got off the bus at the terminus in Quinzano, climbed up two steep hairpin bends above the little square and rang the bell outside the huge, cast-iron gate that barred the long driveway to casa Trevisan. He faced the little tele-camera above the bell-push squarely and honestly.

‘Sono io, Morris
. I read the papers and came directly,'

The lock sprang and the gates swung automatically apart. Morris strode up the raked, white-stone drive between lowering magnolias. It was blisteringly hot and so he could be forgiven, he thought, the drops of sweat that were rolling down his temples.

In less than two minutes Signora Trevisan was telephoning Inspector Marangoni. The inspector, it seemed, wanted Morris to go immediately to the
Questura
in the town centre, but Signora Trevisan insisted that he come out to them. She hadn't had a moment to speak to the boy herself yet. After three or four minutes' argument the inspector said he would come.

‘No, I went to Milan yesterday,' Morris explained, ‘to the opera, and missed the last train home. Then I had to spend the night in the station because I hadn't enough money on me for the hotel and it was only when I saw the
Arena
this morning that I discovered what had happened.' Say he'd stayed in a hotel and they'd check up immediately. He'd found a review of yesterday's
Madame Butterfly
at La Scala, so he was quite ready there.

Signora Trevisan watched him attentively from a face grey with worry.

‘Go and make us coffee,' she said quickly to Paola. Her eyes were bulging and red. ‘Oh God, I was so hoping she'd run away with you or something stupid like that.'

‘I'm afraid not,' Morris said politely and tried a faint smile. But she turned away. Explanation over - she had no time for him of course. He was only ‘something stupid', a harmless hypothesis that sadly had to be jettisoned.

‘You're saying you haven't seen her at all then?' Bobo asked curtly.

This was more difficult. Morris turned and found the scrawny lad's face a mask of severity. He was getting off on playing family protector, naturally, in the absence of other menfolk.