Juggling the Stars (28 page)

‘But I want to speak to her now. I have to tell her. She must be worried to death, Morrees.' Massimina had begun to cry with anger, frustration and disbelief. Behind her back the television was still on, advertising brandy now. Morris guarded the phone and tried to take her in his arms.

'You have to let me explain first.'

She struggled and backed away. Her staring eyes were full of suspicion now and a hint of fear. But Morris wouldn't give up.

‘Explain what?' she asked.

He searched for his softest tone of voice. ‘Just sit down, sit down there and I'll tell you, okay? Just promise not to do anything untill I've told you.'

The roar of the car outside told them Roberto had gone. They were alone in the villa with the next house a good half mile away on a road where the asphalt was only a memory.

Morris snapped off the television.

'The point is,' he said,1I thought at the beginning that if I told them we'd run off together, they'd come after us directly out for our blood. Or rather my blood. So I simply didn't tell them. I thought they'd just take you away from me and split us up for good and always.'

‘But…'

Morris sat down opposite in one of the great white leather armchairs. His nerve was coming back now - it was a part he could believe in and act well. And then he felt a sort of decision had been made. He would give the girl this one chance. It was up to her. Her decision.

'When I went to see them in Quinzano I said I didn't know where you were and then I destroyed the letters we wrote to them …'

'You what!'

‘Of course, after the first couple of days I regretted it, I saw it was stupid, but I was in it up to the eyeballs by then and I couldn't change my story because then they'd all know I'd been lying in the first place. You see, the awful thing was, when I was at your mother's the police arrived and I had to tell them the same story I'd told her, so that… I think this was why I was ill in Rome, really. I mean,1 was getting so nervous and worried about it - you remember how tense I was - that I...' He let his voice tail off.

Massimina was bearing up better than he had hoped. The tears had dried up and she had just the usual worried frown on her face while the eyes watched him searchingly.

After he had been silent for some moments, she said ‘God, you
are
an idiot.'

‘Yes.' He was humble.

‘But for heaven's sake, after the first days, when you began to worry, why didn't you tell me? We could have worked out some story. I could have gone home and said I'd run off on my own accord, but now …'

‘I didn't want you to go home,' Morris said grimly, pushing out his jaw with an air of manly decision. ‘I love you.' (It was true. And he was almost beginning to enjoy himself. She was coming round.) ‘l wanted to hang on untill you reached your eighteenth birthday and we could get married. That way would have settled it. How could I know they were going to think you were kidnapped - and even less that some tricky bastard was going to start writing ransom letters for heaven's sake! It sounds like a film. I thought they'd imagine you'd just run away.'

‘But almost everybody who disappears in Italy is assumed kidnapped.'

‘Well, I'm not Italian,' Morris said bitterly. ‘l never dreamt it would come to this.' Should he tell her about the phone calls to the police, to her family? No, he'd have to get round that at a later date somehow. He'd think of something. ‘I didn't know your family
had
enough money for anybody to want to kidnap you,' he went on sullenly. ‘How much did they pay, anyway? I didn't hear when they were talking about that.'

‘Eight hundred million,' she said in a low whisper.

‘Not very much.'

‘Not very much! Eight hundred million! My God …' and her voice trailed off, genuinely overawed by the enormity of the sum, and the futility perhaps, Morris thought, of all her little economies. Well, serve her right.

‘I know,' he said, ‘It's terrible. But what can I say? We can't get the money back now, can we?'

‘l don't know, maybe the police … Oh God, I can't believe it,' and for a moment she lost her courage and wept again. 'When it comes home to you,' she sobbed. ‘And I was having such a marvellous time. I thought I was really happy at last, honestly. Oh, it's like a nightmare.'

Morris crossed from the armchair to the couch to hold her and noticed for a second how they were relected together in the bright black panes of the window. He should get the blinds down if it was going to come to anything.

‘Oh Morrees!' She buried her head in his shoulders.

‘Cara, look, the thing is we've got to decide what to do. If we go back and tell the truth, they'll probably go and put me in prison or something, I don't know, for perjury, and certainly they're never going to let us see each other again. Mimi' - his voice suddenly changed, softened, and not especially on purpose either - ‘you're the first girl I've ever had. Honestly. The very first I've felt,at home with. If I lose you I …'

She looked up, red-eyed. ‘So what do we do?'

‘You have to say you were kidnapped and they've just released you.'

‘What?'

‘Say you were kidnapped and make out they've just released you,' he repeated.

‘But Morrees, you're crazy, we can't do …'

‘Look, we go back to the mainland directly, tomorrow morning; and as soon as you're in Rome you go straight to a police station, or better still you go out to the outskirts of the city near the
autostrada
and you phone the police and tell them the kidnappers have just let you out of their car and dumped you there.'

She was silent for a minute. It really would be tremendous if they could do it, Morris was thinking, ‘You tell them you were kept blindfold the whole time in a cupboard or something and you never even heard them talk except when they brought you food and then you thought they had Neapolitan accents. You can do it. Then after a month or so, I come back to Verona just around your birthday and you'll be of age so we can marry without your mother's consent if necessary.'

‘And what happens then if they find this man who asked for the money?' she asked.

“They won't,' Morris said with conviction.

‘But …'

‘It's the only way that I can see. Otherwise I'm in it up to my neck, and most probably you too and we'll never be together.'

‘And the baby, Leonardo?'

He hadn't thought of that.

‘It'll be born six or seven months after we're married at maximum and everybody will know it must have been conceived in this period now.'

‘But you're not even sure you're pregnant yet, don't jump the gun for God's sake, it'd be pretty bad luck if you were and we've got enough problems on our hands for the moment.'

‘I
am
sure.'

‘How? You can't be.'

‘A woman knows,' she said.

‘Oh claptrap. You can't be sure untill …'

‘But I am sure.'

‘Well then you'll have to say you were raped, for Christ's sake,' he snapped. He was losing his patience now. She was pushing him to the limit. ‘You'll have to say that was what the delay was all about after the ransom was paid. They wouldn't let you go untill they'd had sex with you. You resisted for a couple of days and then gave in. That way
cara
 Mamma will even be happy I'm marrying you because she'll be thinking no one else ever would.'

‘Oh I hate you,' Massimina spat back at him, thrusting him away, eyes wild.

But Morris didn't touch her. He still stayed cool as cool: all aplomb, Morris Duckworth. He was sorry he had offended her, he said, his eyes finding hers, his voice straining for sincerity, intensity: honestly, it was just the desperation of the situation, she must see that. What they should do now was to go to bed and sleep on it, not do anything rash after all the wine they'd drunk, then decide in the morning. And he turned to draw the blinds.

They lay in bed, Massimina trying to whimper herself to sleep, Morris caressing her lightly. The sheets were hot and sticky and crickets trilled incessantly from the garden behind the house. He really did want to believe it could work, in spite of all the obstacles that would have to be overcome. She was a hell of a girl and she had a lot of courage and the idea was so clever. Then from the purely financial point of view, he had been thinking, it was by no means certain that 800 million was really going to be enough. A handsome sum, yes, but maybe not enough for a lifetime. Not the kind of life lived to the full that he intended to have. There was no doubt he would be much better off being married to the rest of her money. Of which there was a great deal more than a piddling 800 million when all was said and done.

There were drawbacks though. It meant a whole lifetime lived in the fear that something might come out. It meant continual dependence on the girl. She might even try a little emotional blackmail every now and then. ‘If you're not a nice Morris I'll tell.' Or she might blurt something out getting drunk at a party, because she was showing rather more of a propensity for getting drunk than he had at first imagined. But Morris felt he could handle all this. He had got so used to being near her. The only time in his life. And the thought of being without …

So he would risk it. They would be married and she would give him respectability and a family (the pregnancy test was all set up there in the lavatory with little bottles and chemicals that were supposed to form rings and things). They would have enough cash for a life of leisure with nurse and nanny and plenty of business and cultural interests. He watched her curved back.

‘Mimi, are you asleep?' Nothing. ‘Mimi?' Nothing.

He could let himself doze a little then. Not that he was likely actually to fall asleep in this oppressive thundery heat and for that he was thankful. He felt it could be important to stay awake tonight. He settled down to listen to whirring crickets and the distant thunder that rumbled on the very edge of the auditory horizon.

The next thing Morris knew he was waking in the black dark. Forcing himself awake, groping his way out of sleep with tremendous urgency. The bed beside him was empty. His hand, moving to touch her, grabbed at the empty sheets. He had bounced out of bed before his mind had even fought its way out of the dark cave of sleep. His fingers felt for the light. Where was it, God damn! His ears picked up the sound of dialling though. Morris's trusty ears. He blundered through to the corridor and then the living room where she was standing in the almost complete dark, so that it was only the white of her skin that led him to her.

‘Mamma, oh Mamma I'm safe, I…'

He had the phone out of her hands and slammed it down.

‘You promised, you promised not to phone her till you were back on the mainland.'

‘I didn't promise anything. I said I'd sleep on it.'

'But why this? Phone her now, they trace it and we're done. They may already have traced it. They find out we were here for the last week and we're done.'

‘You always have your little plan, don't you,' she said coldly. She was stark naked, the big breasts lifting and trembling in the dark in front of her. She was panting with anger. 'I've been thinking about it. Everything that happens. This, that, the other. You always have your devious little plan to sort things out.'

‘But Mimi …' God knew it was her life he was pleading for. He turned and switched on the light.

Those phone calls you pretended to make, the letters you had me write and then never sent, the address in the mountains. God! How can I …'

‘But
cara
, I did it for your …'

‘What you don't seem to realize is that my mother is suffering at the other end of that telephone and has been for some time and all I have to do to help her is to lift it and dial.'

.'But …'

‘You think too much of yourself,' she said determinedly and picked up the receiver. ‘You're selfish, egotistical and vain.'

‘So you're giving me up,' Morris said self-piteously and leaned back against the door. He was surprised to find how much he really did feel hurt. She wasn't willing to go through with this for him. Although in another way her words were just what he had been waiting for.

She held the receiver, pouting. ‘No, I'm not giving you up. I'm just saying, let's face the truth, tell the truth and get through it. They won't put you in prison. You haven't actually done anything. And then maybe they can set about finding the …'

‘But Mimi,' he was almost whining now and hating himself for it. ‘Mimi, they're bound to…'

‘I'm not having everybody thinking my child's father is some kind of awful kidnapper who raped me.' Her fingers were on the dial.

Morris was exasperated beyond patience. His body was trembling and prickling with heat. ‘But you don't even know you're damn well pregnant yet. Shit and fuck!' He paused, but she wouldn't even look at him now. ‘Don't dial, Mimi. If you love me, don't dial, for God's sake.'

She scratched a breast and turned a finger in the dial. ‘I don't love you. And I won't ever love you again if you go on shouting like that.'

She hadn't even looked at him. She didn't love him.

It was only three paces to Gregorio's room and there was the sitting room light to guide him now. He reached across the desk behind the door, found the paperweight, felt its heaviness in his hand and was already moving back through the passage while her fingers were still dialling.

‘Mimi,
please
don't, we'll never be able to be together ever again, I'm telling you.'

She glanced up, must have seen the paperweight with its twisted-pink bubble, but didn't connect.

‘Oh shutup.'

Her fingers went back to the dial for the last number, and so he hit her. He hit her just above and behind the left ear, raising his arm high above his head to get the full strength, (There was even a moment's huge shadow of that arm thrown up against the wall, but she didn't see.) He gritted his teeth and the glass ball came down with tremendous fury. She slumped backwards, naked on the tiled floor, banging her head hard. Not even a scream, though it wouldn't have mattered. And then it was the work of a moment to have her, over on her stomach and one of the Ferroni family's red silk cushions under her face. His fingers jammed in her hair and he pressed and pressed, knowing that really there was no need. The single blow had been more than enough.