Mimi's Ghost Read Free Page A

of their own historical art and heritage. It was a shame, Morris thought, a real shame, and he turned off the road along a gravel track that after a couple of turns brought him to the three long, low, breeze-block constructions that made up the vinification, bottling and storage facilities of Trevisan Wines.
    He fiddled in his glove compartment for the right remote control and a long, low gate began to rattle and whine. The new dog barked wildly, as it always would at Morris, as dogs always had with him since as early as he could remember. He must talk to Bobo about it, try to get through to him that it was completely pointless keeping such a beast, since if somebody did want to break in they would surely have no difficulty shooting the thing. No one was around to hear a gunshot in these low-key industrial areas outside working hours. You had to think of such things.
    Unless Bobo had been meaning to prevent precisely visits of this variety, Morris wondered. His own. But that was paranoia. He was a member of the family now. And once you were family, you were family.
    He pulled up and turned off the engine. The big Dobermann or whatever it was (for Morris had not the slightest interest in animals) snarled and leapt around the car. Uncannily, it seemed to be aware of the door he would have to get out of. Oh, for Christ’s sake! This was a problem he hadn’t considered at all. But far too silly to make him change his mind, surely.
    He started up again and drove through shale and puddles to the door of the office located in a kind of annexe at the end of the long building that housed the bottling plant. He managed to negotiate the car into a position only six inches or so from the door, and while the dog was squeezing, panting and yelping to get into the narrow space, Morris buzzed down the window, slipped his key into the lock and turned it twice. He then drove away, heading around the building at little more than walking pace, thus luring the stupid animal into a following trot through parked trucks and stacks of bottles. Then, turning the last corner, he accelerated hard to arrive back at the door with just the few seconds’ grace he needed to be out of the car and into the building. He slammed the door behind him. The dog was furious. Likewise Morris. And he decided on the spot he would poison the thing.

2
    There are three major wine-producing areas around Verona: the Valpolicella to the north and west; Soave twenty kilometres to the east; and, between them, the Valpantena, stretching north from the eastern suburbs of the city. The first two need no advertising anywhere in the world. Indeed Morris even remembered his father picking up the occasional ‘Suave’ to impress one of his tarts after Mother’s death, while Morris himself had drunk many a glass of ‘Valpolicelly’ at artsy-fartsy Cambridge parties without having the slightest idea where the place really was. Had the Trevisans, then, had their vineyards in either of these two areas, there would have been no obstacles to the grandiose plans of expansion Morris liked to conjure (the principle being, surely, that if one deigned to do something, and above all something commercial, then one should do it in grand style).
    But the Valpantena . . . the Valpantena was decidedly second rate. It was difficult to get DOC certification. The soil was too clayey. The alcohol rating was low. The wine had no body and less flavour. Worse still, it simply had a name for being plonk. With the result that sales were falling sharply as the population moved up-market in the wake of snobbery and brand-name advertising, while the dour hard-drinking peasantry succumbed to cirrhosis and the miserliness (since Thatcher) of those European subsidies aimed at keeping them on the land and inside the thousands of smoky rural dives where Valpantena was drunk over interminable games of briscola,
    What, Morris often dreamed, if it had been one of the Bolla family’s