Read The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit Online
Authors: Richard House
The brother of the bride, Finn thought. It had to be someone close who’d disappeared – and for this boy, as for many others, there was one day when he needed to be accounted for, included in some way in the family’s continuing life.
Carolyn repeated,
That’s sad. So sad
. He called her every time he saw someone paused in front of the doors. One man, old, knelt for an hour on the cobbles.
Sis, sis. Listen to this
.
Finn took his lunch at the
alimentari
, he sat with Salvatore and caught up on the news. In the evening he began to translate the start of
The Kill
, as it set a context for his book. What I’m writing isn’t about the crime so much, he explained, but the people in the palazzo. What he didn’t know he invented, and began to find a kind of veracity to this invention.
*
Finn didn’t tell his sister about the emails he’d received. The first came the day after an interview in the
Corriere
in which Finn requested new information on the killings. Information he promised to treat with discretion. I’m not the police, he’d said. I write. The email came from a commercial account:
If you want to know what happened
, it read,
we’ll be happy to show you.
More messages from other fake accounts. In each email the same message.
If you want to know.
This also, although he could not put his finger on it, appeared to be another echo. Another book, another film, a way of saying – if this was serious – that an idea once seeded has to yield fruit.
We will be happy to show you.
Future tense. Perfect.
Sections previously not published in English
(page 1)
‘First. I am not a cruel man. I am not stupid or vicious. You must not believe what you have read. There are many facts which you do not know and would not easily guess: I am a sentimental man, I help when I can help. I keep to myself and trouble no one. I am a private man, and perhaps this is a failing. In sum, I am no different than any other, excepting the reports in newspapers and those written by hired experts in which I am described as a maniac who does not have the temperament to stop or to quell an idea which could otherwise be expressed in violence: whatever boundary prevents you from undertaking an experience is no boundary to me. The accusation stands: that I have murdered my brother.
I do not intend to argue or rehearse my defence. Understand, I have no desire to lie – it is in my interest to lay everything out clearly and honestly, and this is my intention. Even so, the task is not easy as I have been confined for a considerable time and questioned on so many occasions that the most basic facts now seem either to be confused or to indicate some grossly wicked intention – so that I no longer know the truth myself, although I wish, sincerely, to tell the truth. Doctors assigned by the court regularly put questions to me, and these questions – which I am required to answer yes or no – imply readings and meanings beyond the range of a simple answer.’
(page 4)
‘. . . When asked if I have committed violence, I must answer ‘yes’, as there are many forms of violence which are casually enacted, day to day. Is it violence to deny food to a person?
Yes
. Is it violence to withhold employment?
Yes
. Violence to portion charity to one person and not another?
Yes
. Is it violence to display your wealth, or at the very least does the display of wealth justify violence?
Yes
. Is it violence to hold a conflicting opinion or position on any given subject?
Yes
. Is it wrong to set yourself above others to take advantage of them?
Yes
. Is it not also wrong to set yourself lower, in such a position that others must take advantage of you?
Yes. Yes
. Ask yourself: if you are weak, why have you not yet been taken?’
(page 5)
‘In examining my past experts have found and reported in depth and detail the root causes of my disturbance. If you believe what you have read there will be no convincing you otherwise, and you might ask instead what else has this man achieved?
What other crimes are we unaware of?
Let me explain myself.’
(page 5 cont.)
‘Much of this is nothing, half-remembered (rooms roughly laid out, tables and fireplaces; an afternoon sky edged by pine trees and rooftops. Certain smells which draw images of the city: a skinny dog running the length of a street; a doorstep opening to a courtyard with water dripping on flagstones from wet clothes). There is nothing specific or entire until I am six years old, and even this, I suspect, is borrowed from a newsreel, a history I have mistaken for my own. Although I have a full sense of the occasion I can’t claim it is authentic.’
‘( . . . ) what could be a carnival? Certainly, a celebration. A parade? A boulevard busy with people nudged shoulder-to-shoulder, immobile for a moment, expectant but sombre. A city canyon, the windows and doorways along a route marked with shoddy home-made bunting full on every floor: women, only women, leaning out, waiting, heads turned to the city gate. There are people along the rooftops also – still, poised, silent. These people are silent because they are defeated, and they have come out of cellars and holes and shelters which were intended only to be temporary but have become their homes. And from these hovels they have watched their neighbours and their families die, and many strangers also. Above anything else they are exhausted. Neither do they look like women: they have shaved their hair to rid themselves of lice, they have haggard faces and colourless skin, they wear unbecoming clothes and have long ago shed any kind of vanity in how they present themselves. They are nocturnal, bloodless and famished. This manly crowd is silent, there is no gossip or chit-chat, none of them are bearing a child (although this will shortly change), all softness has been scraped from them, scoured by days spent underground, and nights spent foraging. But still, they know to present themselves when the occasion requires. And then a sudden eruption, a cascade of paper, white and yellow, papers ripped from ration books, passes, identification papers, contracts with the living and the dead, and memberships of now, or soon to be, illegal organizations, all torn to tiny pieces and flung so that the air flickers. Among this paper snow fall petals and flowers – stemmed flowers in what might be my first memory of real flowers – and while I couldn’t have seen them before, I knew exactly what they were, and didn’t wonder where these would have come from, because this is the end of a war, and where would these flowers have grown? How could we have flowers but not food? With this, just as sudden, another burst, a mighty shout, unified, a roar of loving cheers, arms raised, hands waving and hands clasped, frantic and happy. Children, girls, are heaved to shoulders, held high. I remember being held aloft and seeing only heads, arms, upturned and expectant faces, many in tears, and there, at long last, making slow progress, the first in an interminable line of green-grey military vehicles, the jeeps the tanks the trucks, being struck with flowers and paper. I remember the men on these vehicles, and how they arrived unsmiling, jolting, unimpressed, sober men, statuesque and unmoved, bruised by war, who kicked the flowers from their vehicles, swept the paper away, looked on us, half-starved, with disgust. I remember the physique of these men, how they seemed bigger, broader – a different species – biggest among them, their fat and round commanders. The faces of these generals set with distaste. We welcomed you, we offered you open arms – the soldiers who’d fought in the marshes, the beaches, and lately to our disaster the mountain crests – the men who starved us (our memory is not so short), the army who stopped our water and poisoned the air, the men who nightly bombed our homes and churches, sucked oxygen from the houses with fire, shot us in our streets and squares, killed women and children like bored farm-boys hunting rats: for you we crawled from basements, crypts, and shelters, and stood on the ruins of our city to present to you the last of our politicians, the collaborators, their wives and their children. Under the brightest blue sky we gave you our city, and we gave it to you out of love.
1
The very next week we lined the streets and performed the exact same welcome for the British.
This was not the end of war. Although we believed that it was.’
(page 9)
‘I am allowed to read, and have been given histories and accounts both of the war and of the city prior to the war. And while these versions of what happened are not incorrect, they largely miss the point. Remember: your arrival was our defeat. For twenty-two years we happily supported the government and way of life knowing that hard choices needed to be made – unpopular decisions for the benefit of all. The government didn’t arrive by accident, and while they disappeared overnight, taken to courts and tribunals, some summarily shot, remember – this was our choice because it worked. Full employment. Acceptable housing. Food. And future hopes – not only for ourselves. And our inclination to that government, our allegiance to those ideas, did not disappear as quickly as their bodies.
( . . . )
The city thrived, ten years before my birth. Everything new: stations, trains, trainlines, trams, roads, the first motorways, an opera house, public gardens, cinemas, a grand post office, municipal buildings and swimming pools. We asked for homes and they built us homes. We lived on the edge of the city, in new houses. At that time ground hadn’t yet been broken and the city hadn’t overtaken the neighbouring villages, spread out to take over the farmland.
You can’t imagine the countryside and how it was. The wine and olives from this region were famous, as was the oil with its curative properties – all of which sounds like Spain, and while there is a strong Spanish community here, it is not Spain. It is, or was, handsome; we enjoy a fair climate and moderate weather. The countryside is, or was, pretty in every season: the vines held the winter mists, spring was brief, the sunflowers followed a full summer sun, and autumn, the longest, truest season, when the twilight is unnaturally long, was the time best spent here – the basic structures remain: there are rivers (now channelled), a close curve of mountains, a bed-like cultivated plain leaning into a broad-curved gulf where the city tumbles to the sea, and while it is not Spain, you might believe that you were in Spain. Now that the city has become so vast these seasonal subtleties pass unremarked: it either rains or suffers an oppressive heat. The winters are wet. The summers are hot. The periods of transition are almost unnoticeable. Outside the city, away from the concrete the climate is more temperate. All this is before the Americans. Before their tanks and progress, their factories, their processing plants, all, now, abandoned.’
(page 12)
‘Shortly after the relief of the city, I witnessed, close-hand, a death in the vineyards, a young workman, cut in the thigh with a pruning knife, bled into the dirt, arterial, beyond help. He knew this, self-wounded, and I felt the weakening pulse at his thigh; held my hand close above his mouth until his breath expired. I looked into his eyes for a long time and fancied that I witnessed something, although I am certain now that this was only a naive desire; in any case I found it hard to leave – more out of science than sentiment – and having witnessed the process of his expiration, having watched a great quantity of blood leave him and saturate the ground, I became curious about the other processes now riding his body and in learning what other kinds of collapse were happening inside him: I wanted to know what was occurring deep under his skin. I inspected the cut but left the body otherwise undisturbed, ( . . . ) there is little point withholding the fact that this man was my brother.
( . . . )
The three-room apartment in which we lived does not deserve attention, situated on the first floor in a building seven storeys high, it housed at any given time no fewer than four, and no more than six of us. We shared mismatched chairs, a table, and little else. Four children, we shared one room and two beds. The boys bundled chaotically into one bed, a habit so ingrained that I still dislike sleeping alone. One apartment among many, our home was no different and no more decrepit than our immediate neighbours on either side. One mystery occurs to me now, which has not occurred to me before. At the start of the war, upon its declaration, the city lost about one third of its inhabitants, who took with them what they could manage and headed for the mountains or the sea and abandoned their homes. We did not take over these empty properties, then or later. Even at the start of the bombardment, when war came to our doorstep, we remained, as did the others, in the places allotted to us. Even in their absence we afforded respect to people who had abandoned us.
It is possible that the building dictated this. There would have been little use us occupying the other apartments. The professors, lawyers, doctors, clerks, the city officials and shop owners had their own entrances, their own stairwells. The tradesmen and labourers, along with those who could not find work, entered through the stairwells opening onto the inner courtyards. So that the building, as with many of the buildings in the city – and I think, in other cities, although I have not travelled much – folded about a core courtyard and kept separate the wealthy and the poor. In other countries these palazzi are known by their more proper names as
tenements
or
slums
, although, I believe, in other countries, they do not house the same variety of people. Opposite these apartments, as I have said, on the other side of the road, and therefore in the country, lay a vineyard, and more immediately a line of stone sheds, a place first for animals or produce, for olives and walnuts, for the safe storage of harvest, some of which were later adapted into workshops in which the goods brought from the fields were prepared. During the worst of the bombardment we temporarily fled the palazzi – taller, and easier targets for the mortars and bombs – and hid in the farm sheds. Although I spent much of my childhood in these buildings, either hiding or playing, I remember very little about the place, except how the musk of animals permanently coloured the air. The city, at this time, took on its own smell, of cooked and rotten meat, of the flesh of the dead.