Juggling the Stars by Tim Parks Page A

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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