The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (93 page)

Rafí rushed upon Cecco in the stairwell and stabbed him in the gut. As Cecco tumbled back Rafí criss-crossed the knife over his face, then fell upon him.

‘Where – is – my – money?’

Rafí stuck Cecco until the blade became slippy. Lila hurried partway down the stairs, the bear in her arms, and stopped when she saw the fray, the mortal horror on Cecco’s face, how Rafí pinned him down so he could not protect himself, and how Rafí could not hold the knife without also cutting his own hand.

Cecco babbled, and Rafí let him talk. He knew nothing about the money, nothing. He’d come to the Pozzuoli because Rafí wanted him to do things with those two men. Rafí, his one true friend, had asked him to do things he did not want to do and he had come to Stefania confused and troubled and Stefania had taken him in without question. She was his friend like Rafí was his friend. He’d done nothing, nothing. He swore. What had he done? Rafí was like his brother. Whatever he had done he was sorry.

Rafí fastened his hands about Cecco’s throat.

Lila flinched away as Stefania passed her, swift and ghost-like. She saw the woman, saw the hammer, but did not properly figure what was about to happen until the act was done. Stefania stood over Rafí and without pause or haste swiped him on the temple with one hefty clout.

Rafí fell sideways, turned, rose on his hands and knees so that he straddled Cecco, then stopped and hung his head. The four of them stuck in place: Rafí on his hands and knees, Cecco under him, Stefania poised with the hammer ready to strike again, and Lila, witness to it all, on the stairs.

Rafí squatted like a dog. Cecco, bloody chest, stomach, and nose split open, cheek gashed, slid from under him, mouth open. Lila could not calculate how long they waited, attention fixed on Rafí, who slowly leaked – blood dripping from his nose – but otherwise remained completely still. Finally, Stefania turned to Lila and offered the hammer and Lila came slowly forward, the toy clutched to her chest. She took the hammer, stood over Rafí, but could not strike. Instead she sunk to her haunches and looked closely at Rafí’s face. Wall-eyed, he stared both at the floor and through it, and remained fixed in place.

Cecco raised his shirt in disbelief. The wounds, four small and bloody mouths, puckered his stomach. He looked to Stefania and asked why, and she said she didn’t know. Cecco shook his head in a small shiver and asked again, ‘Why?’ Why had she hit Rafí? He didn’t understand.

Stefania brought towels and a bucket of water. She locked the door, pushed the bolt to secure it, then threw the towels across the floor, gave Cecco her apron and helped him tenderly to his feet. With Cecco on the stairs she took a plastic bag out of her pocket and drew it over Rafí’s head, when Cecco began to sob she stopped and explained that he was bleeding everywhere.

They laid Rafí across the back seat of Stefania’s car then covered him with wet towels. On Stefania’s instruction Cecco and Lila were to take Rafí and leave him, she didn’t care where, but not the police, and not a hospital.

Cecco, wrapped in bandages, sat at the wheel, sweating, mouth drawn, his breath compressed, his face swollen, already black and plum-like, pulpy at the cuts. He drove carelessly, indecisive, as if driving some route from memory. Lila peeled the towels back from Rafí’s face – also swollen now but bloodless, eyes black and blown, eyelids fat and slug-like, his hair matted flat. Not dead, certainly, but not fully alive. She held her hand, then the bear over his face and wondered what he could see, if anything registered. There was a warehouse, Cecco said, an old paint factory. They’d take him to Ercolano, call the police, tell them where they could find him, and then, as Stefania had instructed, he would return to Pozzuoli where she would again check his wounds. Lila wondered if she had any part in these plans.

They followed the bay, houses and developments on either side, until the bay-side, gorgeous with sunlight, swung close to the road, leaving room for abandoned factories, train tracks, a few open fields of scrub, then row after row of long plastic sheds running down the slope, greenhouses, the plastic sweated and tight. Cecco, bleeding from the cuts to his nose and face and the deeper wounds in his side and back, said he was beginning to feel sick and weak. He pointed out the road to the station and said, not unkindly, that they were here, and she should go. It was better if she looked after herself now. He was sorry that he didn’t have any money. His voice came faint and exhausted, and he shook his head. She should hurry. She should go.

Rafí’s eyes were dry and fixed. His breathing now shallow and brief pulls, too brief to be of use. Cecco wept with his head down, his hands on the wheel. When Lila closed the door he drove away. In the end it was that simple. She opened the car door, slipped out, then watched it drive toward the bay.

Lila waited on a bare platform with the sun full on her shoulders. From the stairwell she could hear voices, a couple arguing in Spanish, and their words rose sweetly recognizable, a sound intermittently lost to passing traffic on the nearby autostrada. She read the sign,
ERCOLANO SCAVI
, and spoke the words out loud, repeated them until they fell into a rhythm. She looked left to right, then approached the rail and looked down the road at a campervan, rust running along the roof. She would speak with these people, or she could wait. Or she would sneak into their vehicle. Or she would walk to the service station she could see beside the motorway and clean herself up. Or she could find himself a car parked outside the services. Or she would wait in the shelter on the platform and tell someone how she had been mugged. Or, she would call the police and describe to them how Cecco could be found in an abandoned factory hugging the body of his friend who was not dead but almost dead. Or?

As she stood in the sunlight, dizzy and sticky, the toy in her arms, possibilities opened one by one by one.

Mizuki sat looking at herself. Her hair freshly cut and treated, heavy, black, so that it curled just under her ears. She’d never worn it short before. With the right glasses she would look boyish. No disguising her features, but an extreme enough change to mark a distinction between the woman who had come with such disorganization to Naples. It irritated her to have her nails manicured, and she did little to disguise her impatience with the woman – who asked, in any case, too many questions.

Her mouth, small but full, took on a slight shell-shaped plumpness, and the plum colour took attention away from what she considered now were heavy jowls and the distinct flatness of her eyes.

When the dress arrived she left it on the bed and waited for the woman to leave.

Mizuki took the box out of the bag, slipped off the lid and parted the tissue. Her hand ran over the material, a warm grey flecked with gold, wool threaded with silk so that the dress found its own weight and smoothed itself to her hands – and she could see, just in the whiteness of her hands against the colour and heft of the cloth, how well this would suit her.

Once dressed, she opened up the jeweller’s box, set square on the table. She leaned forward to buckle the chain about her neck. Her eyes small and black. She was again a woman not out of place, a handsome woman, lucky enough to afford her tastes.

Lara’s Saturday class would be over in ten minutes. Mizuki watched the clock. She could invite her to the hotel and they could speak one last time before she left for the airport. There would be time.

As the car pulled out, the grand facade of the opera, the Castel Nuovo, the fountains and piazzas reflected across the window. But she sat looking forward, scanning for men on the street, her mind elsewhere, her hand resting delicately at her throat. Keiko, she said to herself. Keiko. Possibilities. Always. Possibilities and happenstance.

Mizuki: Something I Have Not Told You

thekills.co.uk/mizuki

He woke certain that what he wanted would be found in Naples.

Niccolò rose quickly, closed the door between the bedroom and the kitchen and called Fede to explain that the police wanted to speak with him. He needed to go into the city. It would take all day.

Niccolò was careful to sound perfunctory.

Fede agreed to cover the first two hours of his shift, after that he would tie the barrier back and they could manage without a guard. If it couldn’t be helped, it couldn’t be helped, but couldn’t the police give them more advanced warning? Uninterested in debate Niccolò said that he had to go.

Niccolò dropped his keys. As he stooped to pick them up he caught his reflection in the frosted glass of the bedroom door. Behind the glass, in the dark, Livia slept. Fearful of spiders, wasps, mosquitoes and blood-borne diseases she preferred the shutters closed. ‘I’m a magnet for disaster,’ she claimed, ‘any kind of trouble,’ although this was simply not true. The air from the room was still and warm and baby-sweet. He reached for the keys and caught his face half-lit, and believed for a moment that the reflection was someone else’s. He waited expecting the reflection to move independent of him, to pick up the keys before he picked up the keys.

He prepared breakfast knowing that Livia needed to be away early. He took his time showering and dressing. He dressed as usual in his uniform, but once Livia had left he changed into casual clothes and laid his uniform out across the bed ready for the end of the day.

Checking his watch he made sure he had plenty of time. Niccolò stood in front of the mirror and took measure of himself. Uncomfortable, he undressed, folded away the clothes, took a second shower, selected new clothes and re-dressed.

He rubbed oil into his hands and tousled his hair, then combed it, then gave himself a parting, a clean straight cut, so that his hair no longer fell forward to disguise the edge of the plate. He studied himself in the mirror and began to feel satisfied. While he found it difficult to associate with this face, he understood that it was his and how it felt, increasingly, less like a mask. The student’s notebook wrapped in plastic safe in his pocket. As he came across articles about the case he clipped them from Fede’s newspaper and folded them between the empty pages in chronological order.

At the station Niccolò bought a ticket from the tobacconists’. After franking the ticket he walked up to the platform and stood where he could watch the other passengers.

The train was not crowded. He stood with his back to the door so that he could see about the carriage without having to move. People read newspapers or sat looking out of the window, there were few discussions. At Torre del Greco passengers began to move toward Niccolò’s end of the train. At the far set of doors he could see two men in carabinieri uniforms. While most people avoided looking at him, the officers caught his eye, and Niccolò nodded back, and couldn’t help but smile at the idea that they were probably on the train for the same reason.

Niccolò studied the passengers and considered that none of them looked strong enough to abduct and stab a young man. He knew that it was a mistake to assume that the person who committed the assault would stand out in some way or even look interesting. He knew that once some discovery was made, the assailant would, in many ways, be a disappointment. But still, the possibility remained that the man responsible for the stabbing would be on the train.

The station in Naples was busy with police and carabinieri. Up on the concourse, the police watched people coming out of the station and up onto the street. Uniformed men stood in threes and fours, armed and prepared, and immediately outside the station, under the shade of the concrete awning, carabinieri waited beside black vans marked with official insignia, and Niccolò guessed that there was to be a parade or demonstration.

Niccolò came slowly through the market stalls at piazza Nolana, his hands in his pockets, hoping to see why there were so many police, for some kind of reason to materialize. But no demonstration emerged. Disappointed to have discovered nothing Niccolò walked through piazza Garibaldi and further, along via Carbonara, hoping that something would occur to him now that he was in the city. As he hadn’t read the paper that morning, he bought
Il Mezzogiorno
, and decided to take a coffee and see if there had been any developments overnight.

The front page carried an image of the star: a simple black square with the white outline of a star set in a circle. Inside, on page seven, he found an article about the graphic and how it was used in the city by a publisher, a printer, a chain of bakeries, and as a logo for a biscuit produced by the bakery. He read slowly, took breaks so that he would not become addled, so that he would not lose himself. This is what he needed to focus on. The star. This was the reason for his journey. Niccolò remembered the biscuits. Surely everyone knew of them. The tins were stacked in every shop and market for weeks before and after Ferragosto. It wasn’t a tradition, as such, but this is when he always remembered seeing them. He also had an idea where the bakery was located – although the newspaper had indicated that a number of bakeries produced the star-brand biscuits.

Uncertain of the neighbourhoods Niccolò walked first through I Miracoli and found the roads forced him up the hill; the streets became steeper and narrower and took him away from where he sensed he should be heading. At first, catching his reflection in shop windows, he did not recognize himself. But this was no confusion, instead he saw himself as someone who lived in the city, someone who belonged on the streets, a man with authority. The almond sellers, the gypsies asking for money, the shoe salesmen, the women at the markets, they all knew him, or knew his type: an independent man going about his independent business.

The further he walked the quieter the streets became, until he was surrounded by buildings five or six storeys high, their fronts rose directly from the black-cobbled road and their backs stumped into the hillsides. One row of houses topped another, butting higher at each level, so that the road appeared to rise through a canyon of dank grey rock. Turning back, he returned through the market on via Vergini, then seeing a street sign, via Arena di Sanità, he followed the street through to a long curved piazza and regretted that he had no address and no map. Even so, he couldn’t find the bakery.