Mimi's Ghost Read Online Free PDF Page A

green letters, the irritating wink of the cursor that seemed to mesmerise thought rather than encourage it. Suppliers?
    â€œCiao, said a voice.
    Morris swung round on the rotating chair. The pale young man stood in the doorway.
    â€˜Ciao,’ Morris said warmly. ‘Benvenuto. How are you?’
    It’s a holiday,’ Polio Bobo said. ‘And this is not your office.’
    â€˜Just doing a little homework,’ Morris said. ‘It’s difficult selling a company when you don’t know enough about it. I got wind of a big order this week and I wanted to know if you could meet it.’
    â€˜Ask me,’ Bobo said. He came and sat on the edge of the desk, reached over and switched off the computer. Morris was surprised to see that the boy was tense, if not actually trembling. This somehow made Morris feel more friendly.
    â€˜I didn’t want to appear stupid,’ he said. ‘You know, always having to run to ask you. You’ve got enough on your plate.’ Then briefly he said what he had said before: how impressed he was by Bobo’s grasp of the business, and how growing up in a business family had no doubt helped him a great deal, whereas Morris was still very much learning the ropes.
    Bobo appeared to relax a little. ‘How much was the order for?’
    â€˜Four thousand cases,’ Morris told him coolly. ‘Doorways, an English chainstore.’
    â€˜Four thousand. We can’t possibly do that.’
    â€˜I know,’ Morris agreed, ‘but what if we buy out?’
    â€˜We have a policy of never buying out.’
    Morris gave his colleague a sunny, just faintly inquisitive stare, allowing the boy a full thirty seconds to change his tack.
    â€˜Ah,’ he sighed. But then overcome by a sudden desire to be friendly, to gain confidence by giving it (why shouldn’t they be friends - were they so unalike in the end?), he rather ingenuously (but there were these moments when he liked to think of himself as ingenuous, innocently generous) began to explain his plan. Listen, he said, did Bobo realise how full the city was of illegal immigrants? Of labour of the cheapest possible kind? Yes? And far from being uncultured or anything like that they were all, and especially the Senegalese, quite well behaved, probably from the upper middle classes in their own country, honest, hard-working, not unintelligent. Now if Trevisan Wines were to take on some of these people on the most casual, under-the-table basis to bottle and package the sort of plonk they could buy out almost anywhere - God knows the country was swimming in wine no one wanted to drink -then Morris was pretty sure he could place most of it on the British market, where frankly they wouldn’t know the difference between the rubbish they had been drinking to date and the rubbish they would be drinking from now on, if Bobo saw what he meant. And if things went wrong, well, they wouldn’t have any serious overheads, the immigrants would melt away as rapidly as they had materialised.
    About halfway through this spiel Morris realised that Polio Bobo thought he was joking. Or lying. There was an expression on his waxy boy’s face in which incredulity and suspicion were mixed in more or less equal proportions.
    Morris asked: ‘But you have seen them on the streets?’
    â€˜Certo. Bothering me to buy cigarette lighters and pirated cassettes and the like.’
    â€˜I just felt I wanted to help them,’ Morris said candidly. Then with a brutally deliberate allusion to their first meeting, when Mimi had brought Morris to the Trevisans’ house as a prospective fi danzato, he added: ‘I mean, I’ve been an outsider myself. I know what it’s like to have people always suspecting you.’
    He looked this rich sibling straight in the fishy eyes. A look, as Bobo obviously registered, of naked challenge.

3
    Signora Trevisan was in her wheelchair, with that unpleasant tic she