Mimi's Ghost (20 page)

On his back as she laboured away above him, he sucked in the dusty smell of the old coverlet and stared at the family photo on the bedside table where Mamma was only forty-odd, the elder sisters in their teens, and dear Mimi a rather chubby pre-pubescent schoolgirl. How he wished he could have known her then! Everything innocent and all ahead of them. It wasn't so much a regret he felt as an intense desire to be other, which was somehow gratifying in itself. Approaching orgasm, he remembered that the first time he had ever made love in his whole life had been with Mimi immediately after killing Genital Giacomo and his girlfriend, as tonight he somehow felt it was her he was embracing after dispatching Bobo.

Except that with that first love there had been no contraceptive, but a fuller, more trusting intimacy.

‘Mimi!'

In the moonlit afterwards, Paola asked: ‘Mo, what did you do between eight-thirty and ten o'clock?'

‘Sorry?' He had just remembered he was supposed to be up early to meet Kwame. The truth was there was just too much going on. He needed a secretary.

‘You called me about quarter to nine. You called the police about ten. What were you doing in between? You know he was assaulted or abducted or whatever around nine-thirty.'

‘Heavens, you don't think I did it!'

She said nothing.

‘I went to Villa Caritas,' he said indignantly. ‘And if you must know, the police already have their suspects. Apparently Bobo fired two of the immigrants last night. The inspector obviously thinks they were responsible. He says it would explain why they took his car.'

‘Oddio!'
she said quietly.

Then nothing. He had expected she would want to talk more about this, to hear the details. But she was strangely silent and while this disturbed Morris, he didn't feel it would be wise to volunteer any information. What, after all, could she know?

Just as he was drifting into sleep, she rolled over to him and whispered: ‘It was pretty weird you calling me Mimi, by the way.'

‘What!' It took a moment for alarm to sharpen in the mists of gathering drowsiness.

‘Actually, I rather liked it. There's something, I don't know, sexy about thinking the other person is imagining someone else. Next time I'll call you something different. I'll pretend I'm having it off with Bobo or something. What do you think?'

What Morris thought was that no fate could be bad enough for someone with a mind like his wife's, because if he had been able to marry his first love he would never, never have left her or betrayed her or played these kinds of sick games with her all his life long. Turning away, he snuggled down in the sheets where Mimi had once slept and again tried to imagine her smell, her voice. Perhaps salvation lay quite simply in making her a constant presence, to advise and guide him in what looked like being a very long road ahead.

Tomorrow he would tell Paola they were moving here permanently. He felt closer to her here.

There is an extent, of course, to which flagrancy is the best method of concealment, a sort of hiding things in the light itself, while the suspicious parent, partner or detective pokes about in the shadows. So one does not look for one's husband's billets-doux in the papers on top of the sideboard, because one imagines he will have the good sense, and shame, to keep them tucked away in the bottom of some trunk somewhere. Nor does one search for stolen car and corpse in the line of tightly parked vehicles directly opposite the police station along a busy riverside road.

Or so Morris hoped. For that is where he had told Kwame to park the thing. Only after the burial - itself to be an act of exquisite flagrancy - would the car be abandoned in a more conventional hiding-place deep in the country, where no doubt it would promptly be found.

So just as he had once concealed his kidnap victim on the crowded beach of Rimini, Morris now hoped to slot this again unfortunate and certainly unpremeditated crime into two of the classical focal points of Italian life: the car park and the cemetery.

Coming downstairs at six o'clock, he made a coffee for poor Antonella and took it into the darkened
soggiotno.
He looked into the coffin, sighed at what he saw there, said it was important to find the will in case there were any particular instructions for her funeral, and heard Antonella promise she would get it from the safe at home. Good. First thing, though, he suggested, was that she should phone the police to hear if there had been any developments. Pushing wisps of unwashed hair from her face, she came out into the hallway and, in what was a still-uncracked dawn, phoned. Morris waited beside her, hoping she would interpret his anxiety as sympathetic concern. Putting the receiver down, she began to weep.

Morris had his arm round her.

They've found him?' He held his breath.

‘An anonymous phone call,' she sobbed.

‘What?'

‘Saying he'd got what he deserved.'

Still holding her, Morris simply stared through the gloom of his future home. How could there have been a phone call? Why was there always a wild card in every pack, always someone more perverted than oneself?

In the car, he called directory enquiries and dialled a number, forgetting of course that Stan would never be up at this hour. There was the shamefully poor Italian of his answering machine. Morris had just started to leave a message when a sleepy voice said: ‘Hi, gee, it's early.'

Morris excused himself. He'd been up all night and it hadn't occurred to him. Then he explained that Signora Trevisan, Antonella's mother, had died and that Antonella had asked him to tell Stan that they would have to suspend lessons until further notice. He himself would pay off any outstanding lessons. How much was it?

Stan apparently consulted a diary, improbable though this seemed. A hundred and forty thousand for four lessons.

Outrageous, Morris thought, hanging up. Thirty-five thousand an hour! Incredible! When he himself had never asked more than twenty-five, despite being an infinitely better teacher.

‘Wasn't I,
cara?'
he asked. He had started talking to her even before he picked up the phone. But Mimi was silent today, and it occurred to Morris how feminine this was, this only talking when she wanted to, this wilful muteness followed by unexpected interference, this making him miss her for so long, then whispering something when he least expected it, so that, like a god, she had complete control.

‘You do appreciate,' he said, ‘that I would never have killed Bobo if you hadn't told me to.'

Still he got no reply.

It was you I made love to last night,' he went on. ‘I was looking at your photo. I called your name.'

Apparently she was unimpressed. The hell with her then. Morris put the phone down. At the same time, he thought that if he couldn't actually buy or steal her portrait from the Uffizi, then perhaps he might be able to commission some passable artist to do a copy. Certainly it was the kind of painting that would look well in Casa Trevisan, and infinitely preferable to bleeding Jesuses. He would mention the matter to Forbes.

‘What' - he picked up the phone again, driving fast up the Valpantena - ‘do you actually think of your sister? Come on, Mimi, I mean, we would never have got into any of that kinky stuff, would we? We were such simple lovers. Whey can't she just have a child and settle down? The way you wanted to. I would love to be a father, Mimi.'

Very faintly, through the receiver, the voice said: ‘Mora, she is having a child.'

Morris was so shocked he had to pull over to the side of the road. For a moment he stared at the phone, then thought that in the remote event that the police were following him they might find this suspicious, think he'd dumped the body here, or was meeting somebody or something. He pulled out again in the path of a truck, and glancing in his mirror at the irate driver realised it was Doorways coming for their wine, which might well not be ready with the immigrants fired. But Morris was so excited he hardly cared.

‘How can she be?' he asked. ‘Since when? She always insisted on using contraceptives.' Then he remembered the times he'd played various games with his fingers.

But like an oracle Massimina was not to be quizzed. In fact it was precisely in this cryptic, sibylline style that the voice's authenticity lay. Who would ever believe in a ghost, an apparition that just chatted to you? The Madonna, the goddess, appeared and disappeared - a sort of distillation of one's experiences with the world in general, here now, gone now. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Her words were fragments plucked out of the gale of contingency, fragments from which one constructed the implied whole. Morris, Morris thought with some satisfaction, was thus plugged in to a long and honourable cultural tradition.

And Paola was pregnant. Very soon Morris was going to be a very happy fellow indeed.

Forbes was writing on the big table in the kitchen. He wore at least three sweaters and an overcoat against the freezing cold, while the young Ramiz shivered opposite, munching stale bread. On entering, Morris experienced the feeling of the father who has been absent precisely when needed. These people had been cut adrift yesterday morning and he hadn't been there to give them help or guidance. Immediately, even as he crossed the threshold, he dictated three sharp beginning-of-the-day orders to himself: he must sort out these people who depended on him; he must get things straight with his wife about living in the Trevisan household and having a decent family; most of all, having committed this murder, he must exploit it to the full to establish a successful, generous, well-ordered and solidly based life, both social and commercial. He must become a public figure.

Good.'

If ever he, Morris Duckworth, lost sight of these goals, he would be no more than flotsam in a storm, dross in a slip-stream, tossed and blown from one police interrogation to the next, lost in the maze of his paltry misdemeanours.

Worse, he would have killed Mimi for nothing.

Leaning over Forbes's shoulder he read: Tor the serious and sentient student eager to absorb Renaissance culture
in situ
. . . . Just five miles from the splendid city of Verona, Professor Forbes's School of Italian Art is situated in the suggestive Villa Catullus, where the motto that rules our daily life and vision of human creativity is
gratia placendi.
Students attending the four-week courses will . . .'

Morris asked: ‘Where are the others?'

Forbes was tired and clearly out of sorts. His paper was full of blottings and erasures. He explained that Azedine and Farouk had disappeared yesterday night. The Senegalese had taken fright when the police came and searched the place. The others were now upstairs packing and trying to decide what to do.

Morris asked where Forbes intended to place the ad.

‘Various publications,' he said rather vaguely, ‘in the, er, private education sector.'

Tut the name of the school in caps,' Morris told him, with that tone of authority that was coming so naturally these days. ‘You can say that the starting date is July. We should have the place ready by then. Meanwhile
_‘
I'd be grateful if you could get everybody downstairs for breakfast and have a fire lit in the study. I'll be back in ten minutes.'

He then went out to the car again, drove to Quinto, bought twenty croissants from the
pasticceria,
a new pack of coffee, milk, sugar, , butter and jam. He already had his hand on the ignition key, when the kind of indulgent, generous idea he could never resist crossed his mind. He got out of the car, walked back to the local tobacconist's and asked for two hundred of the best cigarettes they had. ‘Not for myself, you understand,' he explained, for he hated to be thought of as a smoker. Smoking was so ugly. The sleepy young woman, however, was clearly entirely indifferent to Morris's habits. She climbed on her chair and tugged at packets on a top shelf, allowing him to see a fair way up the skirt of what was no more than a flimsy night-dress with woollen jacket worn over. People, he reflected as he watched, were so used to each other's shortcomings, each other's shamelessness, that he might perfectly well have picked up one of the awful pornographic magazines they were selling (something he had never dared to do), or even told her he was a serial killer, and she wouldn't have batted an eyelid. What could you expect of people in such an age? Any kind of respectability had to be fought for tooth and nail.

Ten minutes later, when he had those destitute immigrants all gathered round a smoky fire with their
caffe latte,
croissants and Phillip Morris cigarettes, he explained that he was now personally in control of the company. Everything depended on him. They were thus being immediately taken on again, and this time officially. Their papers would be put in order, taxes and contributions would be paid and they would have proper contracts of the standard union-subscribed variety. So long as they behaved themselves, they would have permanent jobs and need not fear for the future.

Sitting on the corner of the room's big table, informally, like the teacher who likes to eliminate the distance between himself and his eager students, Morris was moved in the silence after he had spoken to observe the incredulity on their dusky faces, the faintness of the smiles on sullen black and brown cheeks, the extent to which they were clearly so used to things going wrong they couldn't actually believe their good fortune, their having found a benefactor.

‘Permanent jobs,' he repeated. Already it was as if killing Bobo had been the right, no, the necessary thing, and terribly worth while, and if they arrested him it would be them committing the real crime, putting a spoke in the wheel of interracial co-operation.

After a short pause, Kwame asked: ‘What if Mr Posenato, he come back?'

Some of the others nodded and muttered, but Morris was thinking: how brilliant, what a perfect accomplice the boy was, and he said that they would deal with that problem when it arose. Tor the moment the police are working on the theory that he has been killed or kidnapped by Azedine and Farouk.'