The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (90 page)

The phone rang a second time.

There was no need to answer, no need to know who was calling. She was on a train and would soon be gone.

Looking at the small screen Lila saw the two calls from Cecco’s mobile. She pressed her forehead against the cool window. The train on the opposite platform began to move, starting with a slow and smooth tug. Messina, she could have been heading to Sicily.

An announcement came with the small singsong of the station’s call. The next train to depart was the Eurostar to Rome. Caserta would be next. No mention of Milan. The station stops were read out and she listened to the list and decided that she would take the very next train that was leaving.

She recognized him immediately. Rafí. Running headlong up the platform beside the grey Caserta train. Unmistakable in his loose white shirt, his scruffy black hair, that sloppy mouth, open, fish-like. Lila tried to draw the curtain but found it fixed in place. Throughout the night with the two brothers, through all of the brutality, it had never occurred to her that she would die, but she understood as a cold and clear fact that if Rafí found her and the money she would die. Rafí would have sent Cecco along one platform to check one set of trains while he checked another. The two of them would be here. Rafí hurried along the carriages pushing through people, passing parallel to Lila but searching, for the moment, the wrong train.

The woman flying from Rome sat upright, alert, and passed a glance to the students.

The announcement came, the next train to leave would be the Eurostar to Milan from platform eleven.

Lila sat down and looked up at the toy. The women also looked up. Passengers on the platform gathered at the doors.

If she held her nerve she would soon be gone. She was unlucky, she knew this, but how unlucky?

Rafí returned down the platform looking, as he ran, toward her train. He was much too far down the platform to see her. The announcement came a second time. They would soon depart. He would not make it.

And there he was, suddenly, as swift as a devil, hands up to the glass, looking hard, staring into the compartment, his face red and tight. Lila fled the compartment. She stumbled over cases, she made her way down the narrow corridor busy and blocked with people finding their seats. At the door she stopped and thought to ask for help, but Rafí already stood before her. For four hours Lila had been lucky.

Rafí walked Lila off the platform with his arm locked about her shoulder. She looked down as she walked and watched herself return, the toy tucked under her arm. The train began to slide out of the station.

‘Where is Cecco?’ Rafí’s grip tightened, fingers digging. ‘Was he with you? Where – is – he?’

Two carabinieri loitered at the entrance and Rafí steered Lila through clustered groups of travellers and past the news kiosk to the food hall. Walking through the food hall they came out of the terminus to the corner of piazza Garibaldi, to banks of white taxis, loitering passengers, men smoking, and he pushed her along the side of the station. Seeing two more policemen, a van marked ‘carabinieri’, he tugged her back and they returned to the food hall. Lila cringed as she walked, the toy tight under her arm. The station tannoy echoed through the concourse. More departures, a second train to Roma Termini.

He made her sit then slid beside her to keep her at the table. What was she doing? Why was she leaving? Did she think she wasn’t being watched, that there weren’t people who would tell him what his women were doing? Did she think after Arianna’s little trick that she could slip away, just disappear, and do whatever she fancied? And where was Cecco? What did she know about Cecco? What had Cecco told her? Did she know where Cecco had gone?

Lila could not speak, and Rafí looked at her expecting information, his face red and his eyes small. What had Cecco told her? ‘Was he on the train? Did you meet him here? Was Cecco with you? Was this his idea?’

She knew nothing and shook her head. Cecco was not with her, she said, and she didn’t know anything. The men had frightened her this morning and she didn’t want to stay on her own. That was all she knew. Lila forced the panda into her lap, fists on its belly.

Rafí shook his head and scoffed. ‘You’re lying. Who found the money? Did you see anyone on the roof? Did Cecco take the money?’

‘What money?’ Lila looked up and met his eyes, surprised that her voice could be so small and so convincing. ‘You said Arianna took everything.’

Rafí rolled his fist across his forehead. A station guard hovered close to their table and they both became silent until he moved on.

Lila repeated blankly that Arianna had taken the money, hadn’t she? She wiped her nose, then her hand on her trousers. As soon as the men had come this morning she’d left. She was frightened. They told her to go. She didn’t understand what was happening. They told her to get out. Arianna had the money. Hadn’t he said so?

‘Where is it?’

Maybe the men who came this morning took the money. They let the dog free.

Rafí shook his head. ‘No. No.’ This didn’t make sense. ‘They’re still looking for me,’ he spelled out the situation. ‘Why would they still be looking for me if they’d found the money? That’s what they came for.’ And as for the dog, no stranger had let that dog free, no stranger could come anywhere close, he’d deliberately under-fed it, kept it mean, for this explicit purpose. Whoever let the dog free had to know the dog. Which meant one thing: Cecco had let the dog free. ‘Did Cecco come back to the Stromboli?’

Lila shook her head.

‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t shake your head, don’t cry, and don’t draw attention to yourself.’

Lila nodded and wiped her eyes.

Rafí leaned closer, wrapped his arm about her shoulder, the table cut into his gut, he wiped her tears from the tabletop. ‘I know what happened. I know that Cecco came back to the Stromboli. I know he found the money. He’s the only one.’

Lila’s hand closed over the scar on her wrist.

‘Now tell me where he is.’

She took Rafí’s phone from her pocket and slid it along the table.
Cecco – 3 Missed Calls
, registered dimly on the screen. She leaned forward and spoke clearly. ‘He hates you. Every time he talks about you he says how stupid you are. He can’t stand you.’

Rafí froze. So it was true. ‘Where is he? Where is my money?’

Lila sat back, drew the toy to her chest and hugged hard. Her expression set as if she didn’t know, as if she didn’t care.

Unwilling to return to the Stromboli, Rafí arranged to meet Cecco at the Montesanto station. Lila watched from the station steps as Rafí became increasingly anxious. The waiting crowd grew thicker and mixed with the more active crowd scouring the market, so that commuters stood static beside the busier shoppers.

She thought it impossible that so much could go wrong at such speed. She looked down upon the market hating the stink and bustle, and uncomfortable to be out in the open she held the panda tight to her stomach and let her fingers press into the rolls of cash, outlining their shape even as she looked at Rafí, and she wondered why she had ever thought of him as smart.

Rafí came back and called Cecco a second time. How long could this take? Why wasn’t he here already? As he listened to the reply he slowly straightened and looked up, patience draining out of him.

‘What do you mean you’re in Pozzuoli?’

Rafí listened, appeared to agree, then said he couldn’t stop at the Stromboli, the men who were after him would be back, and he wasn’t going back. He needed money and a place to stay. Lila noticed that he did not mention her. Rafí repeated: he had a handful of coins and that was it. He needed money.

‘No,’ Rafí disagreed. ‘It isn’t the same.’ He hawked phlegm to his mouth then spat on the pavement and looked to see if anyone would disagree with him. When he said he only had a couple of euros, that’s exactly what he meant. He needed money and he needed a place to stay. Lila watched Rafí cock his head, and for the first time look square at her. He held the phone up, his expression a mess of irritation and pure disbelief. Cecco had hung up. When he redialled the call would not go through. Rafí held the phone out and swore at it.

Cecco, Rafí said, the fat bastard, was dead to him, dead to the world.

He grabbed Lila’s arm and pulled her up the steps toward the station. The platform, busy with people returning home, made it easy to bypass the gates and the guards. Slipping onto the train they stood close to the doors in the thick of the crowd and Rafí looked among them for bags that were open, and people who were distracted. When the train doors closed with a final decompression, Lila realized that she would not escape and began to hope for some other intervention. A wreck. A flood. A fire. A derailment. Some terrible affliction.

Within an hour of arriving at Pozzuoli they found Cecco at one of the bars facing the small port. Keeping their distance they watched from the shelter of the small tourist shops; if Cecco intended to go to Proceda it would be difficult to follow, but even he had enough animal cunning not to trap himself on an island. Rafí had managed to steal a pack of cigarettes on the train, slipped from a woman’s open shoulder-bag, but for the moment was still without money. Lila smoked and found herself strangely unbothered, a little dizzy. How delicately Cecco held himself when he was alone. Two fingers pricked out as he held his beer.

‘Get rid of the bear.’

‘No.’

‘Get rid of it.’ Rafí raised his hand. ‘You look stupid. People are noticing you.’

Lila tucked the toy to her stomach, leaned over it and drew on her cigarette. She couldn’t help but shiver.

‘You look stupid.’

‘Stupid.’ Lila repeated, her voice flat and factual, her arms clamped about the bear, shivering. ‘Stupid me.’

Cecco stayed at the bar all evening and kept to himself, contented, perhaps even self-satisfied. Later, after talking on his mobile, he left the bar and began to walk away from the small marina. The road curled up the hillside and ran under the railway through a short steep tunnel carved into the tufa. Rafí stopped at the mouth of the tunnel and Lila followed after. They watched as Cecco entered an apartment block set on its own. Four storeys high, the building squatted into the hillside beside a small orchard raised from the road, paint peeling in soft folds on the undersides of the balconies. The street was open and Rafí decided to return when it was dark. Until then they would wait at the station and keep an eye on the road.

✩

Niccolò woke early. Livia could not sleep; uncomfortable and nauseous, she asked him to feel her brow. Brother and sister slept in T-shirts and shorts for decency, side by side, back to back, although this was becoming uncomfortable for her. Livia swore in her sleep, cursed and muttered so that she was always present in his thoughts. Sometimes the child stirred inside her and she would exclaim, often nothing more than a sharp intake of breath, but enough of a disturbance. The notion that something swam inside her turning, shifting, possibly even dreaming, made him uneasy.

‘Am I hot? I feel hot.’ She worried that something might be wrong but wouldn’t say so directly, and it was left to Niccolò to divine this information out of her. Having slept poorly / very little / not at all (her status changed with each mention of her night), Livia demanded attention. Niccolò sat with her, clumsy with sleep, and when he reached for her stomach, because this is what he thought she wanted, she flinched and told him not to touch her.

‘Why do men do that?’ she asked. Angry now, Livia told him to get up and prepare for work.

By the time Niccolò had dressed Livia was sitting at the table drinking hot water, calmer and less concerned, colour back in her face. ‘I’m OK.’ She gave a tight smile that said she was still not quite herself. It had been a hot night and the heat had made her uncomfortable. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Go. You’ll only make me more anxious.’

He said goodbye from the door and as she waved she told him to head directly to work.

Niccolò returned to the wasteland to find the cordon taken down from the field. After only one night the police and reporters were already gone. The wasteland was still sectioned with stakes and tape, but the vans and cars and massive steel stanchions that held the arc lamps were gone. With nothing left except a few posts and lengths of tape snagged in the flattened grass it was hard to believe that the wasteland had attracted any attention at all.

He drove his scooter by the abandoned factories on his way to work. You could walk to them quicker, straight down the hill toward the bay. After the crossroads the road led directly down to the shoreline, the factories, the railway, the water. He drove slower by the market gardens and the rows of covered greenhouses, the plastic sheeting fogged and tracked with condensation. To his right the factories now: most of the buildings were without roofs, many had their entrances and windows bricked up and sealed. Heat rose from the stony fields of sparse and scorched grass which, some summers, held a lone mule.

The scooter made a feeble warble as he passed the first buildings, a thin wail thrown off the concrete wall to the road and fields. He slowed as he came to the last building, an old paint factory, and stopped at the small alley that led down to the railway bridge and the shore. Discarded on the steep slope lay bags of trash, ripped open with papers and plastic. Bound, rotten and dried bouquets of flowers spilled out. Flies broke loose from the weeds as Niccolò hitched the scooter onto its stand. He shouldn’t be riding. He shouldn’t be lifting. The agreement was that he would walk to work. When you’ve come this far, remember, it doesn’t have to be everything at once. Niccolò checked to make sure he was not being watched or followed. A loose group of boys played football on the pumice road above the wasteland, and a white dust hung in the air.

The police had searched the paint factory the previous night and strings of black and yellow tape stretched across the doorway and lower windows.

As he approached the entrance Niccolò walked as if he intended to follow the alley down to the sea, but ducked quickly under the police tape and slipped inside, where he waited, head up, attentive, to ensure that the building was empty. Children often played in the building (possibly the same children who sometimes pelted him with stones when he rode to work). With its shattered walls daubed in graffiti the factory made an attractive haunt. Slogans and obscenities scrawled across the concrete named people he did not know.