Mimi's Ghost (41 page)

‘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.

Then quite suddenly she was sitting beside him. He knew she was, Mimi's ghost, even though he couldn't see her. Her perfume filled the car. She was pulling up her dress. On those same stitched and patched pants Morris kept under his pillow. He felt his hand as if guided to his zip.

She began to quote: ‘My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him. I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock.'

Morris closed his eyes. At the same time, a voice said drily:
‘Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ah omnibus.
. . .' Forbes was standing by the car, hand in hand with the young Ramiz, a benevolent smile on his face.

How cleverly Mimi had planned this little introduction to what Morris now accepted must inevitably happen later.

That evening he dined with Antonella at Casa Trevisan. It was a deliciously formal occasion, with the Signora's old
donna di servizio
cooking
costole di manzo
and an excellent side-plate of steamed
finocchio.
Antonella was wearing a simple black dress, but belted to bring out the extravagant hourglass of her shape. She moved gracefully against a backdrop of antique furniture, sombre houseplants. Her face had that depth of awful experience, a lesser beauty suffused and enhanced by terrible wisdom, Bobo's betrayal, her sister's unmentionable crime and fate. As if like some Greek widow, she'd lived through the whole Trojan War and worse, and now wanted only to forget.

With the maid sliding silently back and forth, they talked business: the larger and larger orders from Doorways, first interest shown by an American liquor-store chain. There would have to be some expansion of the bottling facilities, which might be difficult with interest rates back at fifteen per cent again, though Morris was willing to sell the flat in Via dei Gelsomini to raise part of the money. He'd had another excellent offer from the builder.

Then Antonella said that she herself had been thinking of selling her flat.

‘Which means you'd expect me to move out of here?' Morris asked.

But she said not at all. Not at all. Casa Trevisan was big enough for both of them, wasn't it? They could economise. ‘Anyway there are no unhappy memories here,' she added, ‘for either of us.' She dipped her eyes into a plate of cooked plums and cream.

They talked about politics. The local politicians Bobo had always relied on for cover from tax inspections were all under investigation in the wave of bribe scandals. The government was tottering, the electoral law had been revolutionised. Italy was changing. They would have to run the company in a different way now: openly, honestly, but without losing sight, Morris insisted, of this policy of employing people who needed help.

Antonella agreed a hundred per cent. She made notes on a piece of paper, discussed quotations for new plant, the possibility of grants. An architect was drawing up a design for that chapel they were to build. Morris lapped it up. When had he ever met a woman you could really discuss things with before? When had he ever felt so free, from all his anxieties, his prejudices, that constant collision of exaltation and angst that had characterised these last sad years?

Wiping her mouth, she said: ‘By the way, Fendtsteig came to talk to me again today.'

Immediately every blood-vessel hardened. If the alarm didn't immediately show on his face, it was only thanks, once again, to Bobo's old guard dog. A plum stuck, unsavoured, in his gullet.

‘No, he just pointed out all the contradictions in the case, all the loose ends.'

Morris almost choked into his napkin, but then managed to get out: ‘Such as?'

Obviously she was determined to arrive at a point where they could talk about the thing straightforwardly and without emotion. ‘He was concerned about Kwame's motive for, for killing Bobo. He was concerned about your wife's motive for covering for him. He was concerned about who made that anonymous phone call the night after his disappearance. He was concerned as to the identity of Bobo's,' she hesitated, ‘woman.' She stopped, then very matter-of-factly added: ‘He obviously still believes that you were involved in one way or another.'

Morris stared at her across a table whence the maid was clearing plates now. Antonella smiled rather sadly at him over an elaborately embroidered lace tablecloth above which the cruet was two tiny silver wine vats supported by a gnarled trunk of vine, cast by expert artisans for
Non-fortuna-sed-labor
himself.

‘He says one disappearance and two corpses and nobody in gaol is too much for him to consider the case closed.'

Morris sighed. He decided, and told her so, that he would go and see the man tomorrow. He would go and see the man and hammer the whole thing out with him and insist that he consider it over, closed, finished, otherwise it was just too humiliating.

Later they adjourned to a straight-backed sofa and read a passage from Revelation together, closing the evening towards ten-thirty with a chaste kiss at the door. ‘Your poor cheek,' she said, lifting a gentle finger to the many scars. ‘You must think you were terribly unlucky running into our family, with all the awful things that have happened.'

‘Not at all,' Morris replied, and his soft blue eyes must have told her: not so long as I have you.

He lay in his bed and gazed at Mimi. He liked to light the room with a candle these days. The flickering flame brougtmhe painting alive, shifting shadows over her face, drawing out glints of colour from her eyes. When the phone rang he dealt quite quickly with a sickeningly grateful Forbes. Apparently the man had already been in touch with Stan to tell him there was no place for him at Villa Catullus. Good. Then, sitting up, propped upon the bolster and staring at her for inspiration, he once again brought all the facts together, listed them one by one, this extraordinary series of distasteful events, betrayals, blackmails, idiocies, spitefulness, lust, excellent intentions, listed them all to then toss them into the kaleidoscope of his imagination, where they might be shaken this way and that in the hope that at the end some coherent and suddenly obvious pattern might emerge which he could then memorise and take to Fendtsteig like some theory of relativity that finally explained everything.