The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (29 page)

The group of women grew, split, spread to five tables, then six: women from different cultures, some Asian, most European-looking, and different age groups, but all of them paired. By eight o’clock Parson was beginning to sober up again. The day was working in waves, dry and wet. He moved tables to sit closer to the massed twins who now gathered around a stage – a platform with a small sequinned arch that famed a handsome view of the old city. The bold fortress walls, a stone ribbon outlining the bay. With no guarantee that the couple from
L’Olympia
would show up, he began to consider another plan.

Soon, with every table occupied, the room became loud. The twins largely kept in their pairs, American and English voices rising above the humdrum. Some of the women sang along with the music and the small glass-walled room took on the air of a private party.

‘What’s happening?’ he asked the couple closest to him. Sisters dressed in white blouses and ice-blue cardigans, their eyes the same intense blue. The women did not understand, could not hear him. One leaned closer with a smile, suddenly intimate.

‘Is this a conference?’

The woman nodded enthusiastically. Her sister sipped her beer, cool and untaken with him, looking at him as if measuring him up.

‘For how long. How many days?’

‘Today,’ the first sister answered and smiled. ‘Tomorrow we go.’

Parson also nodded. He couldn’t guess from her accent where they were from, but was happy that she could understand him, happy to keep the conversation small.

‘To Malta.’ He offered up his beer.

The women nodded politely, again with smiles, then understanding that he was proposing a toast they raised their glasses with him.

The first woman leaned forward and indicating the room with one finger she said something that he couldn’t hear, then sat back and nodded again as music began to play. The women turned to the stage.

On the stage two other twins, smart and severe in evening dress, began to sing. Microphone in hand, they leaned shyly forward to read from a monitor. The first few bars played too loud, soon quelled, so that their voices could be heard, sweet and fresh, and Parson thought that this was something of great beauty. Delicate and shy, their voices seeped across the room, singing easily of love and loss to the cheers of their friends and a synthetic beat – and while they looked similar, moved with the same gestures, sang with similar voices, it was the slight mismatches which kept his attention: one hand slightly out of time, one word sung a little faster, or clipped a little short.

The sentiment woke in him a longing. And where were his friends? A serious question: where was his room of people ready, rowdy, happy for him? Where were these people after all his years of labour, the constant moving, the broken associations, and the endless starts? Parson sang along, the table sang along, the women looking one to the other as if one common thought passed between them.

The couple from the boat sat at the bar. Heads turned to the small stage. The woman smiled, her hand to her chest, amused. She pointed to the group and leaned toward her husband, who turned and looked about the room, a realization coming slowly to him.

Parson asked if the table needed more beer. The women said no with generous smiles and Parson struck his heart in mock hurt.

‘It might be my birthday,’ he said. ‘I might be very insulted. I can’t celebrate alone.’

But the women still said no, no thank you.

He stepped up to the bar, and took a position beside the woman from the
L’Olympia
, and a smile passed between them at the strangeness of the circumstances. ‘Have you ever seen anything like this?’ he asked. ‘There’s a conference. Twins. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

The couple looked to each other before including Parson, a quick check between them.

‘I know you,’ he said. ‘I know your boat.’

The woman leaned back, her husband leaned forward, hands folded on the bar. Parson ordered drinks for the table.

‘You’re French?’ Parson offered his hand to the husband. ‘You have a beautiful boat. I was looking at her earlier. Did you sail from Bordeaux by yourself?’

With an element of pride the man admitted that they had.

They spoke for a brief while, the wife remaining silent, the husband reticent but polite, his English a little reserved. Parson learned that they had come from Sicily, and before that they’d hopped along the coast of Spain. In one month they would complete the loop and return to Gibraltar, unless they decided to go to Sardinia, where the boat would be handed to another crew to bring back to Bordeaux. ‘I don’t want this to be work. I work hard enough.’

Parson offered to shake the man’s hand. ‘I understand,’ he said almost with a wink. ‘Paul. Paul Geezler, and you?’

The man introduced his wife, Pamela, and himself, Paul.

‘Another Paul!’ Parson laughed. ‘What’s the chances? Sounds nicer in French, of course.’

They talked business. Paul about exporting, Parson about working as a manager for one of the world’s largest hospitality providers, although, he said, ‘it’s the worst kind of business right now.’

Parson ordered the couple another bottle of wine, mostly to bring himself back to the script he’d decided –
what he needed to say
. ‘This is good. I mean it’s good we’ve met,’ he said. ‘Because I’m thinking about making a similar journey myself. I’m serious.’ He started to laugh. ‘I’ve always wanted to sail, but I don’t have any experience. So what does a man need to do if he wants to go to Spain or Sicily . . .’ He allowed the idea to float as a possibility. ‘I was hoping someone would take me on as crew, train me, or let me just outright pay. I’m serious. This isn’t about money. Maybe you know someone who’d be interested? Maybe you should think about it yourselves? I’m completely serious. Take me to Spain. Why not? Or maybe you know someone? Let me tell you where I’m staying.’ He wrote the details down for Le Meridien, and noticed their expressions change from blank refusal to curiosity. ‘Think about it. See if you know anyone. I work hard. I’m like you. I want experience. I’ll give you my name again.’ He wrote out the name in capitals, P A U L G E E Z L E R. ‘Nobody ever spells that right. You should hear the names I’ve been called.’

Back on the promenade Parson sought out
L’Olympia
. Light shone from the lower cabin. A bottle with glasses stood on deck. A plan for the late evening. A small rope cordoned off the walkway and he felt the exclusion of that one thin line. He couldn’t judge if he’d done enough, or too much.

5.4

Anne waited for word from her husband. She calculated the time difference and counted the hours, working the shift between Malta and Turkey and New York. She thought to go to the airport but decided against this and felt herself constrained by the apartment, the view of the bay spoiled now, irrelevant. Eric wasn’t answering his calls,
couldn’t
or
wouldn’t
she had to ask herself; her husband also was playing shy, and she left messages for both of them, alternating calls; at turns angry, self-mocking, bemused, confounded. What does this mean, she asked herself, this disrespect from her husband and her son? What exactly was going on here?

She spoke with Mark in the afternoon and instantly forgot her irritation. ‘I thought this might happen,’ she said. ‘Didn’t I warn you? I had an idea. I knew. He didn’t call, and he usually calls. He calls me from the airport when he’s going somewhere.’ She closed her eyes for a fraction of a second, a tell-tale flutter. ‘
Usually
. He usually calls me when he is going somewhere.’

‘What are we supposed to do? How long are we supposed to wait? Do we report this? Is there a required period?’

His questions suggested that she would know the procedures and she waited for him to ask outright:
What did you do last time?

‘Why don’t you ask? Why don’t you ask me? Do you think this is deliberate?’

‘I think it’s a mistake. I think this can be explained. I don’t need to ask you that.’

‘But his father? What if this is deliberate?’

‘He’s never done anything like this before. There will be a simple explanation.’

Her husband’s attempt to soothe only increased her alarm. ‘You’re right,’ she said, ‘I’m being stupid. It’s just one day. One day. I think we can wait. Allow him to contact us before we jump to any conclusions. I called the airline and they said he hasn’t changed the ticket. But this isn’t unusual. Do you know how many people miss their flights each day? It’s in the thousands. They regularly over-sell because this is not unusual.’ Anne pressed the receiver hard to her ear. ‘He’ll like it when he gets here. And the view.’ She hesitated, not wanting to speak at all, but hating the silence. ‘This happens all of the time. There was someone else at the airport waiting for someone who wasn’t on the flight. This happens all the time.’

They agreed to wait one more day, and when she hung up Anne felt the weight of the next day already upon her and decided she could not sit in the apartment.

The phone rang as soon as she set it down. Her husband’s voice sounded unexpectedly close: ‘The university, they’ve tried to call me at work. I have a message asking me to call back at eleven, that’s four hours. I’ll contact you as soon as I know what this is about.’

The news had to be repeated. She couldn’t understand the logic: why would he receive a message about her son through her son’s university? When the core of the information struck her –
there is a problem
– she hung up.

Anne left the apartment knowing that if she hesitated she would change her mind, and the hours would pass at a painful drag and she would frustrate herself. She kept the phone in her hand, and checked that the signal was still active, and that the batteries were still charged. Immediately on the street she had no idea what to do with herself and thought that if she needed to return home to New York, or possibly someplace else, she should stay near the apartment. Stopped in the entrance, a small marble-faced hallway, she debated what to do and decided not to pack until she knew that she had to. Such a gesture would show a lack of faith and pre-empt any information the university had to tell them. She followed a path toward the village and the port, the church below strung with bare white bulbs that outlined the windows, the entrance, the single tower, and illuminated the square. But all this prettiness soured in her eye and she suddenly resented being alone. How perfect this could otherwise have been. Around her the fields were divided into small landholdings, too tiny to be of practical use. As she came to the portside she found a crowd gathered facing the darkening sea.

Firecrackers had sounded off all evening, giving the night an uneasy edge. Anne caught the first salvo as a reflection in the windows of the houses and bars along the front, a bright cascade, quickly fading to a supple reverberating pop. Again and again fireworks sparked across the harbour, skewing the sea and sky in a strange perspective. When one display ended another began further along the coast, and when that ended another started closer still behind them. Rockets fired over the church and spangled wide above their heads; the crowd leaned back to follow the sparks and showers above them, the light flattening the upturned faces.

She held the phone against her chest and felt it ringing.

‘He’s missing.’ Her husband’s voice came clear above the crackle of fireworks. ‘Eric hasn’t been seen for five days. His tutors called from Turkey. The last they saw of him he was at their hotel. This is five days ago. They’ve reported this to the police. At the moment they don’t know anything. There’s no reason to believe that anything bad has happened. It doesn’t look like he’s in trouble.’

‘Five days?’

‘He left his bags at the hotel but he has his mobile and his passport with him, and he has money. I think they thought he was going to come back.’

‘Why didn’t they contact the police immediately?’

‘I don’t know.’

She felt sick, she said, and sat with her back to the church. It was unlike Eric to do anything without telling anyone where he was going. It wasn’t like him to disappear. He knew better than that. He wouldn’t do this deliberately. He wouldn’t just disappear. He wouldn’t. It was too easy to imagine something going wrong. Some trouble. Some accident. The wrong place at the wrong time. Too easy to picture.

5.5

A long evening spent in Marsaskala. Ford avoided the small crowd of families, mostly villagers, people in any case who appeared to know each other. When the display began he found a bar beside the church and retreated to the counter, beer in hand. Unsettled by the noise – the gunshot clatter and sudden bangs and light firing through the square – he kept himself separate, irritated at his reaction, but the noise, each time, drove into him.

She almost saw him, would have seen him if she had looked up, but with a phone in her hand Anne Powell turned her back to the firework display, and kept her head down as if struggling to hear the person she was speaking with. Ford concentrated on the woman and thought she might be wearing the same clothes as the previous night, and looked, again, presentable, smart, cosmopolitan. This, in any case, was certainly how he saw her. Done talking, Anne Powell walked away, in the same manner as the previous night, focused, a little angry, he couldn’t tell, but she cut directly through the tail of the crowd and headed up the street away from the town.

He left his beer on the counter and followed after, cringing at the expectation of more noise; finding it less easy to push through the crowd he plugged his fingers into his ears and shoved his way through. Another display started up, rockets whistled over their heads, cut out, and exploded above the narrow street. The fireworks pulsed with a stuttered delay, the thump echoed off the walls and amplified in his chest. Away from the crowd it was just her and him, the rockets’ shrieks, and a steep climb. She walked without paying attention to anything around her, oblivious to the sound and the night sky burning about them. At the top of the steps she turned right, walked on, faster now, then began to run so that he thought that he had spooked her, that she had somehow sensed him behind her. Encouraged that she was heading away from the village Ford followed after. The villa would stand by itself, abandoned, a little decrepit. One floor or a suite would be in decent enough repair for occupation, but the remainder would be in ruins.