The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (102 page)

What to do? Tired and too sickened to eat, he walked through the platform, and found a bookstore. Feltrinelli. And there, facing the door, a small display of
The Kill
, a new Italian translation with the introduction restored, as per the ’73 Editiones Mandatore original. The cover: a blood-spattered picture of an Italian palazzo. Finn stood in front of the display completely forlorn. Here it was, a last piece of mockery to rub home his failure. Two days in Naples and he was through. He picked up a copy and walked out of the store without making any effort to disguise the book.

He sat for an hour on the concourse, faced the bookstore entrance, and read the introduction in one sitting.

Finn called his sister collect, could hear her laughing as she accepted the charges –
This is going to be good, bro.
He told her quickly about the theft, about the night with Rino and some skinny thug on a scooter, and how, everything done, Rino denied the whole thing.

Carolyn laughed. Couldn’t help herself. Thought this was funny, better than expected. But he was obviously OK, OK? because they were talking. So he’s been stung right? This is what it was. A sting. This Rino had orchestrated the whole thing. Obviously.

Finn couldn’t see the logic.

‘Where did you find him?’

‘Online. The university.’

‘And you know that he goes to the university? You’ve seen him there, met his friends, spoken with his professors?’

‘I’ve spent one day with him. His email address is through the university.’ And then he remembered, it wasn’t. Rino had given an excuse,
The university email is sometimes inaccessible. The server is slow and often fails. Use this address.

‘So he could be a student, but he could also not be a student. Doesn’t really matter.’

‘They kidnapped him. Someone kidnapped him and threatened to slit his throat.’

‘Someone
said
that they’d kidnapped him. Big difference. Do you know anything about him?’

Finn struggled for ideas, of course he knew things about Rino, they had spoken for two months, the man had completed research for him, sent photographs, sat outside the estate at Rione Ini for an entire week and watched Scafuti’s apartment. He knew all of the sites and all of the places relevant to the murders.

‘Sounds like he just got sick of you.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Seriously. You can be tiresome. Anyway, it’s not like anything bad has happened. You just got played.’

Finn didn’t like the term and wouldn’t answer.

‘So why have you called? Are you really broke? Have you called me to sulk? It’s just money. It’s just stuff, right? Money and some computers, which were probably holding you back. You’ve bruised your ass, that’s it. I wish my lessons came so easy. There isn’t anything permanent. There isn’t anything to really worry about. You’re OK, and you have yourself a story.’

‘I’m OK? I’ve lost all of my work. All of my equipment.’

‘You’re fine. It’s just some constraint someone’s given you. They’ve taken all of your toys. You just have to work with that. I love you, Finn, but you’re a pain in the ass, and someone has played you. Which, you know, you kind of earned. Now you have to work with that. I’ll get you money, but you can’t come back. You just can’t.’

Finn spent the day walking. He tucked
The Kill
into his back pocket and took the
funiculare
to Vomero, roamed through the grounds of the Villa Floridiana, then followed the roads along the steep scalloped flanks zigzagging down via Falcone, Francesco, Tasso, to Corso Emanuele – the bay, sharp silvers and sparkling blues, to his left then his right – all the time feeling the pressure of the book squeezed into his pocket. As the late morning sank into a placid afternoon he slowed his pace and realized that he’d stamped about the city without looking at what was around him. Coming down to the
lungomare
he found a place to sit on the seawall and watched joggers and couples pass by. The idea of coming to Naples wasn’t just to write the book, but to gain experience of the city, to prise under its surface and become, chameleon-like, part of the situation, someone tapped into the heat and the bustle, open, as only an outsider can be. How stupid was he? He’d come to Naples one time to test the water, and was startled on a walk to Capodimonte by his first view of the city where he couldn’t believe the sight of one unbroken mass of housing, so busy and detailed, so hectic and impenetrably thick, carpeting the hills and the swoop of the plain all the way to the volcano and further to the distant mountains, and he became certain that here among this fractured chaos something would speak to him. Now he had to admit that he’d penetrated nothing.

He pulled the book from his pocket. It wasn’t only the city he’d misread, he’d also been misled by the book. Without the introduction
The Kill
was little more than a story about a man who manufactures a crime scene with body parts stolen from a hospital so his neighbours are accused of murder and cannibalism, a strange story, bloody and blunt. But with the introduction it became a story of someone lost in a defeated city, whose actions were prompted by the occupation, a hatred of the occupiers, and a deeper hatred of people he saw as collaborators: his actions, in this context, were justifiably provoked. An entirely different story.

Finn returned to the station feeling less and less happy as he came up the corso. He had to walk by the Questura just to see in daylight the place where he was knocked down, and he began to wonder now how much it would cost him to stay in Europe for the rest of the summer. Six thousand euro? Would that see him clear for the month? He came up via Capasso, and as soon as he caught sight of the palazzo he decided to stay. Maybe losing everything wasn’t actually so bad? Carolyn had a point. He could strip everything down to pen and paper. He took a coffee in the café opposite the palazzo. Looked to the shops, the wedding boutique, the
alimentari
with Salvatore and his brother Massimiliano, the doorway with that weird imp of a woman, and thought the story here wasn’t the killing, he had this wrong, right from the start he’d had it wrong, the story wasn’t even the city, much like
The Kill
the story here was about the palazzo, about what was happening immediately around the crime.

*

By the evening he’d received the money wired by his sister and rented a room opposite the palazzo on via Capasso – procedures, both, which he expected to be much more laboured. Finn paid for one week and assured the landlord that payment for the month would come in two days, and found him not only amenable but sympathetic. By the time Finn returned to his room sweating and laden with supplies (six-packs of sparkling water, beer, long-life milk, biscuits, and chocolate), his head was busy with new plans.

His room faced the palazzo, and if he stood at his window he could see a broad wine-red wall with regular, deep-set, shuttered windows, on the lower floors the small Juliet balconies, the rooms inside black and unknowable. He divided the view into quadrants to guess occupant by occupant who might have lived there for more than a year (most, he assumed). At street level he could see the entrance, the vast black doors, the tops of heads, the fanned black cobbles of the street. Tucked beside the door a wrapped spray of flowers, dirty and bruised, and behind them other flowers, what might be a candle stub, and beside them a small upturned crate with a cushion.

The landlord came to ask if he was settled, and Finn looked about the room and realized that he was settled, and that, with little more than a writing desk, a handful of pens, some paper, he had everything he needed. He wouldn’t dwell on last night, because most things are replaceable, right? Everything depended on him, on what he wanted to achieve.

The landlord lingered and Finn realized he wasn’t in any hurry to start his work. Tonight, tomorrow. He could write any time, but the opportunity for a discussion would not always be available. So he offered the man a beer and invited him to sit at the window overlooking via Capasso, and gave himself the one constraint – he wouldn’t talk, he’d leave it to the landlord.

Window by window the landlord described the occupants of the building, their occupations first, then their foibles: pharmacist, speech therapist, accountant, the two brothers who ran the
alimentari
, a lawyer, at the door the supervisor, in the street the magistrate’s driver who seemed to be there at all hours. Outside the Fazzini there would be prostitutes, and while you can’t see the bar, you can see the women, loitering among the scooters, talking, loud, calling one to the other.

‘The two Frenchmen, the brothers – not Salvatore, not Massimiliano.’ The man pointed at the palazzo with his beer, he’d seen them himself. Only one time, but he’d seen them, they weren’t fiction. Few people believed that Krawiec was guilty, except the police. ‘There isn’t much,’ the man admitted, ‘that happens here that doesn’t get noticed.’

Finn asked him to be clear. ‘You saw them?’

‘I saw the brothers. Plenty of people saw them. They came at night, they never stayed long. Many people saw them, except the driver.’ The man nodded down to the street. ‘He’s there most days, but he says he never saw them. It might be a question of keeping his job.’

Finn took a long look and realized it would be hard for anything to happen here, night or day, without someone seeing or hearing. A figure in the palazzo, faced into the room unaware that he could be seen, practised voice exercises: ‘peh-peh-peh-peh’.

As soon as he was alone he set the table in front of the window. He tore pages from the notepad and labelled the days: A, B, C, D . . . wrote a list of the occupants as he could remember them: the doctor, the supervisor, then added the participants: Marek Krawiec and his wife/g-friend, the Second Man, the American Student, Mizuki Katsura, Niccolò Scafuti. Then a list of places: Ercolano, field and paint-factory. Via Capasso. The Language School. The Circumvesuviana station.

Finn called Carolyn and told her he was staying, not just for the summer, but for as long as it took, which might mean deferring his final year.
It’s different this time
, he explained. He was considering Krawiec’s story, and taking it seriously; no one had bothered to do this. For Finn this meant going right back to the root, which wasn’t, as you’d expect, the Spanish novel. He asked his sister if she knew how he’d first heard about the killing. Not the novel, but the
actual killing
? It happened through a chance meeting, in a hostel in Portland, Oregon, on a mid-term break, and in one long evening, after they’d exhausted the usual conversations about the weirdness of campgrounds, fears of bears and deer-ticks, the hassle of travelling by Greyhound, he was told a story by someone who’d spent the previous summer in Italy. Naples, Italy. This man – there’s no point even trying to remember his name – said he’d sat opposite two women on a train, and one of them had started talking about how she was the only witness in a murder case. There wasn’t much to it. She’d stepped off the train to see a boy at the station with two bags – a shoulder-bag and a duffel bag. Key to this was the fact that he was wearing a green T-shirt with the design of a star set in a circle on his back. There wasn’t anything else to it. She saw this boy at the station. Nothing more.

Then one day, on the train again, with everyone reading the newspaper with a picture of the dark T-shirt with the star design, she’d caught a headline saying that the person who was wearing the clothes had, more likely than not, been killed.

It took her a while to figure out what to do, but eventually, she decided to have a word with the police.

Next time she was in town she went to the Questura, and she spoke with the people at the front desk and was immediately taken to the top man. She told him what she knew, and he asked her to describe the clothes, and then he took her to a room where he showed her the actual clothes. At first she thought they couldn’t possibly be the same. They didn’t even look like clothes. The T-shirt was cut, stained, so wasn’t even the same colour. The shorts were rust-coloured, this weird brown, and she realized that this was blood. Except for the blood, the stains, the cuts, the clothes were exactly the same. She was positive. The only thing was, she couldn’t exactly remember what the boy looked like because it wasn’t like she’d really noticed him, she’d just walked past him. And this is where the police did something really smart. This investigator had the man who did the photo-fit pictures walk her through one of the offices and ask her to look at the men in the office. As they walked he asked her if the youth she’d seen looked anything like this man, or that man. And the woman, who’s really uncertain, started to give answers like: he wasn’t so tall, his hair was shorter, his nose was this way or that way, and this gave the photo-fit guy a really good idea of what they were looking for. Clever, no?

At the end, once she was done, they made up a picture of this guy composed from different faces, and with a little work they managed to figure out exactly what he looked like – not just his face, but they managed to get a good idea about his height and weight, just from walking through the offices and her answering questions. I mean, that’s really something. That’s clever.

Finn told his sister what he was writing, in great detail: three thousand words on Saturday, seven thousand words on Sunday, and today, a day of revision – and then a description of the content. He read passages to her, but nothing too involved. His desk overlooked the palazzo entrance, the doors were right in his eye-line, he could look sideways from his paper and see it, and had quickly learned about the habits of those who lived inside and those who visited. It wasn’t unusual for people to come to the entrance and just stand there. People came all the time to loiter in front of the doors, and it was hard to tell exactly what they were doing. Some took photos. But a good number just gawped in a way that could be boredom or grief and left flowers, candles, notes and tokens, and while the supervisor cleaned everything away almost immediately, she was too superstitious to remove the candles and tokens, and they become dustier and greyer by the day. It’s the kind of thing that causes more pain over time, he said. Sometimes the Italian sense of melodrama took over: on Saturday three black sedans pulled up just short of the entrance, highly polished and dressed with fine strings of white flowers, and in the middle car sat the bride, who would be married, he guessed, within the hour. The doors either side of the bride were open and a woman attended to her, arranged and fussed over her dress. Beside the car, smoking, the bride’s father in a new suit, visibly more anxious than his daughter. The girl’s mouth was drawn into a pout and what details Finn couldn’t see he imagined: the pearlescent lipstick, the nails impossibly long and polished the same colour as her lips, her black hair carried back in long ringlets and covered with a mass of toile, delicately edged with petals that needed to be plucked away from her face. The girl’s face was undeniably round, he could see this, hamster-like sulking jowls, and when she talked she tended to set her mouth in a broody scowl, her neck and arms also were plump, child-like – but when she smiled she became exceptionally pretty, in a girlish way that made Finn suddenly sentimental. It was lucky, he thought, to see a bride among all this bustle, poised before her wedding, it improved his mood to see her in her last independent moment, cosseted and fussed. But it wasn’t an accidental pause. The bride’s father threw away his cigarette, took the bouquet from behind the bride and laid it at the foot of the entrance. No prayers, no pause, which surprised Finn. The bouquet was placed with care, leant in the corner so that it would not get kicked and would not be in the way, another man handed him a football shirt, Napoli blue, with Maradona’s number, No. 10, which the man folded, number showing, and laid beside the flowers. Once the man had set the flowers and shirt in place he returned to the car and settled without a word beside his daughter, and within a moment the three cars continued slowly down the hill toward the bay.