The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (42 page)

‘That it was low. High or low, that’s all anyone ever says about blood pressure.’

Maggie rolled her eyes, folded her arms to mimic Cathy. ‘How do you know this isn’t the same thing?’

Cathy turned back, defiant, walked to the kitchen. ‘Because that was my thyroid. It’s not the same thing.’

‘Tell her,’ Maggie nudged Rem. ‘She has to get this checked out.’

Cathy answered so quietly she had to repeat herself. ‘Enough. All right? Enough.’

Maggie began to ask more questions, and Cathy returned to the bathroom and locked the door.

Once Maggie was gone, Cathy came out of the bathroom and told Rem to sit down.

‘I checked the messages from work. Seven messages from Andrew Coleman. What’s going on? Have you heard them?’

Rem automatically answered no.

‘Is he asking for money? Why is he calling, Rem? He doesn’t even make sense. Listen to it.’

‘No.’

‘Are you paying the Colemans?’

Rem wouldn’t answer.

‘Jesus Christ, Rem. Why? They’ll all want money. Who won’t you pay?’

‘There won’t be any more.’

‘Rem, you haven’t done anything for the Colemans in, what, two years? At least? Why?’

‘They’re missing a ring.’

‘Since when?’ She rubbed her forehead to tease out an idea. ‘He works for the police.’

‘He’s not in the police. He works for the office for the Chief of Police.’

Cathy found herself a seat.

‘I haven’t given them the money yet.’

‘But you’ve arranged it. You’ve agreed it. Why is he calling?’

‘I was late paying him. I still have the money. I’ll call him. I’ll settle this.’

Before she walked to the bedroom he thought she paused, something too small to properly register as a pause, but a tiny measurement of doubt, and he realized that she hadn’t asked how much he was paying Coleman.

Flush with Geezler’s money, Rem took Cathy to the movies. This being their habit, at least once a month, to agree on a movie, Cathy’s preference being the Music Box, or at a push the Art Institute or MCA. For Rem, any Cineplex would do, with comfortable seats, surround sound, and a responsive crowd.

The film was Cathy’s choice, but more to Rem’s taste. She sat stiff throughout, resistant to the violence, didn’t see how it was possible, the entire plot.

The movie was
fact
, Rem pointed out, based in an honest actual event, a piece of uncontested history.

‘It’s not the facts, Rem. It’s the whole flavour of the thing. OK, so it happened. But how did it happen?’ It wasn’t the event she doubted, but how the event was demonstrated. They – the screenwriters, the actors, the director, whoever – had taken something real and made it implausible.

‘People don’t disappear like that.’ Cathy wouldn’t let this go. How could a young American, worldly, white, male, be abducted from a train station
in broad daylight
? This was Italy, supposedly, where everyone makes it their business to know everyone else’s business. How could this be possible? Come on, not without
one single person
noticing. At the very least? The whole thing struck her as highly improbable. It wasn’t the film, so much, as the idea that people could disappear. It didn’t matter how loved they were, how vital, how dynamic. They could just vanish.

‘And why? Was that ever explained?’

‘The book.’

‘I don’t buy it. Imagine, you’re given a job stapling plastic to a wall in a basement room, and you never ask yourself why? What might this room be used for? Come on? You never ask? It just wouldn’t happen like that. And the names? Please.
Mr Wolf.
’

Rem only knew things in retrospect. Only in hindsight when motives and meanings became apparent. In this regard film was the perfect media: with the answer laid out at the end.

✩

Rem took it as his responsibility to clear out Fatboy’s room. Following Rem’s example Fatboy had moved from his assigned quarters and taken residence in a store closet in the corridor between the commissary and the PX. Rem didn’t like the idea of anyone messing with Fatboy’s possessions, and decided it was his duty to box everything up, ready to ship back to his family. The boy had mentioned a mother in Michigan, but no one else, although Rem had fashioned the idea that Fatboy came from a large family and couldn’t shake the notion. He saw Fatboy as the runt among many brothers and sisters and imagined that there were other versions, none of them quite so skinny or fragile.

The clean-out started one evening when other options were exhausted: he couldn’t face another game of poker with Santo, and didn’t want to watch another DVD, where the disc more likely than not would be corrupted. To avoid the other men in his unit he quietly roamed the PX, did the rounds of the food stalls, the vending machines, but couldn’t occupy himself. As he came out of the commissary and headed toward the showers he had to pass Fatboy’s closet.

The room: windowless and strewn with trash, the heat compacted the stench (Fatboy’s stink of sweat and sweet nutmeg). Shelving units on three of the four walls were stacked with boxes, TV monitors, radios, wholesale packages of candy, out-of-date chips, jars of chip-dip in flats of twenty-four. Fatboy lived like a shut-in; everything within reach of a makeshift bed, a modest single black mat laid across the floor with barely enough room to stretch out, a radio kept inches from his ear. How could he stand the heat? Under the bottom shelf Rem found clothes, laundry, stiff and stuffed away with things he didn’t want to see, some magazines and balled-up socks. The boy’s taste ran scattershot: small Asian girls, breasty hipster blondes in cowgirl outfits. Rem couldn’t imagine Fatboy with a woman, partly because he was so young, but mostly because Fatboy appeared innocent. He could be coy when the other men spoke of sex.

He worked with the door closed. Head throbbing when he stood up. He drank a warm Red Bull, the fizz hurt his throat, leaked through him, and he immediately began to sweat. He recognized this sweetness as the cause of the stink in the room: what he’d assumed to be the smell of the boy was only the smell of the drink.

On the bottom shelf Rem found a black folder with a notebook and a collection of loose paper. At first he thought that Fatboy had kept a diary and determined to burn this, because it was hard enough thinking about him, wondering if he had or had not ever loved anyone – and knowing, if he survived, that these injuries would blight his life.

Rem settled with his back to the door and began to leaf through the notebook. It looked like junk, just lists and scribbles, many of the pages swollen as if once wet. Fatboy had scrawled crosses on page after page; some plain, some three-dimensional with ornamentation as if wrought from iron. The notebook reminded Rem of a book of tattoo designs, demonstrating different varieties of the same thing. Loose rows and columns of crosses. On other sheets he found lists of names, possibly three to four hundred with a good number of repetitions, some from the military, but most of them contractors listed by their units. While he recognized some of the names, he couldn’t figure out what linked them. He found Santo, alongside Clark and Samuels, two other men working with Unit 409. Next to these names were the same simple crosses. Others – Watts, Pakosta, Chimeno – were annotated with a cross in a circle, others with an ornate cross with spiral arms. One, drawn in negative, in a black circle, appeared against names which had been crossed out:
Forester
,
Marks
,
Bell
.

For no good reason he’d thought of Fatboy as a Quaker. Rem liked to think of him equal to his peers, dressed in plain clothes, humble, sat alongside his brethren, waiting until the spirit singled him out. Instead the boy appeared a more common-or-garden evangelical Christian, born again, though that didn’t tally with what he knew. Didn’t those born-agains proselytize? Didn’t they hunt people, hound after their souls? Didn’t they pester God into every corner, bend every conversation? If Fatboy was a born-again he’d kept his counsel: Rem couldn’t see God in any kind of detail here, not the faintest trace, and thought the idea laughable. So what kind of God-fearer was Fatboy? Some youth holed up in a storage room who saved souls by writing names and scrawling crosses? Fatboy collected names not souls.

Rem took over the room. He packed Fatboy’s belongings and made sure they were returned to his mother. Night after night when he could not sleep he read repeatedly through Fatboy’s lists, but knew that he would never understand why the boy had collected them.

His missed Fatboy’s banter.

‘If you had a special power,’ Fatboy had asked, ‘what would it be?’ The power of flight, or X-ray vision, the ability to transform into a wolf, to swim like a dolphin?

Santo huffed. He already had a special power. ‘Invisible.’ He looked for a place to spit. ‘True. I’m invisible. The only time people see me is when they want something. Blame. I exist to shoulder other people’s shit.’

Rem said he wouldn’t want anything special. No. According to his wife, he needed the simple gift of instant hindsight, so it wouldn’t be hindsight at all. There probably wasn’t even a word for what he needed, but he knew there wasn’t one single day he didn’t need to go back and fix something.

‘I’m off-pitch,’ he said, ‘that’s what she calls it.’

‘Not a problem, bro.’ Santo leaned forward, let out a fine stream of spit. ‘I blow my nose, I get blood. The air. It’s
dry
.’

Fatboy wanted everything. Let’s face it. What’s the point of just one thing? You’d need super-strength, super-speed, heightened senses, the whole bag of superpowers – and flight. One lone power wouldn’t cut it.

‘And what would you do with all that?’ The idea vexed Santo. He looked up, took in the hot white sky. ‘I mean, what’s the point? You get to do all this shit, but what for? There’s always stuff you can’t do. My sister, she sees angels. All over the place. Angels with wings. Everywhere. Her cat died and she still sees it. Follows her around. Why? She thinks she’s gifted. What use is this to her?’ He shook his head. ‘Nothing. She still works minimum wage. Still married to a creep. Still unhappy.’

Fatboy said he’d been reading, and found some differences. ‘We have people who do things. Fly, climb buildings, all that. Here they have
things
that do stuff. Carpets. Lamps. Bottles. Magic
stuff.
’

‘The Arab is superstitious.’ Santo shook his head. ‘They ever cut my head off, they even try, I’m telling them they’re cursed. Their family, their neighbours, everything they touch. Fucked up for ten thousand years. Their sperm will have no tails, their children will be retards, their women frigid. Their water poisoned. The wheat will die in the field. Locusts. Fat-assed locusts in their millions. That’s my superpower. Fear and doubt. They even touch my head I’ll curse them, and everything that happens, everything bad, big and small, is down to me. I’m giving them
doubt.
That’s my superpower.
Doubt.
’

Fatboy liked the idea. In all those stories, the ones where you get three wishes, they never work out. Not even once. There’s always some trick. Better to do it like Santo, and live for ever because they can’t
fix
you, can’t get you straight. Even when you’re gone they don’t know who you are so they have to keep rolling the idea over and over. He liked it. Santo was on to something.

‘Just claim something you haven’t done. Famine. War. Disease. Say it’s yours and they’ll make you a saint.’ Santo pointed at the ovens, he’d promised them rum, proper Cuban rum. No joke. Security from Anaconda could bring you anything. Only if they even got caught
thinking
about alcohol they’d lose their jobs and entitlements. Better to drink it in his hut.

✩

The package from Geezler arrived on a Friday. Rem hid it from Cathy and took it with him to the library. He sat at the back by the magazine stacks with a view of the door and the computers beside him.

Geezler had filled in much of the form, and with it came a simple note asking Rem to complete the sections he’d marked and make sure he signed in three places, and to call once it was in the mail. As far as Rem could see it wasn’t much of anything. Geezler had him marked down for manual work in Region 3: Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi, Syria, Turkey, UAE, Yemen. He did exactly as he was asked, dropped the package in the mail on his way home, and called Geezler.

‘So you’ll do this?’

‘It’s on its way.’

‘I need one favour. I need what we’re doing to remain between us. Just us. No one else. If other people find out it won’t work.’

Rem couldn’t see any problem with this.

‘So, we’re agreed. Complete deniability. No one else knows. Not anyone you meet in the interview, none of the candidates, no relatives, no family, not even your wife.’

‘I have to tell my wife.’

‘You can’t. As part of the clearance procedure they’ll want to confirm details, they’ll call you at home – what if she answers?’

‘I’ll tell her.’

‘It’s a risk.’

‘She’ll understand.’

Geezler paused. ‘It’s too much of a risk. If they have any idea we’re sending people to check on them it isn’t going to work. To be honest, you’re no use to me otherwise.’

Rem considered hanging up. He could tell Cathy and not tell Geezler that she knew. ‘OK.’

‘OK?’

‘OK.’

‘Don’t tell her and think it will work out. She can’t know. Are we agreed?’

Rem hesitated and then agreed.

He wanted to know when he would hear, and Geezler assured him that they turned these things around quickly.

After the call, Rem began to wonder what he’d agreed to, and what difference it would make if Cathy did or didn’t know.

Rem walked up Clark and was struck by how solid the street appeared, how this was, he couldn’t think of any other word, except,
natural
. As if today was how the neighbourhood should always be seen, that every other season the street would be out of perspective. For example: walking now, the budding afternoon, the late-spring air, the buses, the fried meat scent from the taquerias, the split cartons and crates beside the supermercado. All of this seemed right, in place. Ordinary. He couldn’t imagine the same street three months earlier, grey with old snow, rutted with ice, cars shifting forward and sideways, the sidewalk limited to one narrow path, figures disguised under jackets and coats, and hunched under the assault of a brutal wind, the windows at the eateries greased with condensation. He couldn’t imagine himself either with his dog, because this was the route they took from the lake, each morning, each night. He couldn’t picture the dog, and had to work hard to resurrect him. Rem looked about as if to fix the street, the corner, Clark and Lunt, in memory.
One day I won’t live here. This will all be lost.