Read The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit Online
Authors: Richard House
Inside his satchel he’d packed another set of clothes and a small zippered make-up bag. He laid the clothes across the sink then picked carefully through the make-up and chose the lighter lipstick, flesh-pink, and a foundation which would erase the small open pores on either side of his nose and the oilier skin around his chin. He leaned toward the mirror, smoothed his hand across his jaw and satisfied himself that there was no sign of stubble. Certain now that no stray students roamed the corridors. he puckered his mouth, tested a line of lipstick, and thought it too much. The staff would stay until the evening and students would return for a film screening, a cooking class, a visit to the crypt or the roof of the Duomo, he couldn’t remember the programme, but it usually started two hours after the final class.
It was a mistake to open the week with the story about the wolf: Lara had made a point of showing her disappointment. No stories about Naples, right from the start. Meaning: no bad stories. No bullshitting the Italians. In fact if you’re going to say something that involves Italy or the Italians you better make it flattering: and best remember that as an American you know less than nothing about food, language, clothes, culture, politics, religion, especially religion, especially with Lara. No shit. Yee Jan practised his shtick in his head: remember, this is a country that voted a prostitute into government and a fat clown as Prime Minister, persistently, for like, eighteen years. Italians know every kind of shit about every kind of shit there is to know. They’ve heard it all. Italians are the Meistershitters. No kidding.
Personally, Yee Jan didn’t understand what was quite so bad about the wolf story. It certainly went down easier than the introductions two weeks earlier when he’d announced himself as Princessa Chiaia. He’d given the word a kick, a little hot sauce, a little yip: Key-yai-ya. Bad idea. But like most ideas it came to him in a moment – and you just never know if it’s going to work until it’s out of your mouth. The group after all were all women, worse, wives, worse, military wives, and they had no sense of style, not one drop, and probably shopped at Target and T.J. Maxx, no Filene’s Basement, not because they were poor but because they didn’t know any better and had No Idea about the pleasures of Chiaia and the boutiques at piazza del Martiri (was it any wonder that their husbands were so fruity?) – besides, they didn’t know him yet, hence, not one laugh. Instead they regarded him with the same kind of horror they might regard a falling phial of smallpox. But this time the tutor, Frau Lara, had taken umbrage, and she seriously couldn’t see that a story about a wolf loose in the city was simply a story about a wolf loose in the city, nothing more. He meant it as a fable, if anything. Nothing more to it than that. Wolves are cute, come on. Who doesn’t like wolves? Yee Jan pouted at the mirror, narrowed his eyes. Didn’t a story about a wild creature slinking through the alleys and piazzas make the city that much more interesting, that little bit sexier, and best of all, didn’t it seem ever so slightly possible? Besides, he’d yet to meet an Italian who didn’t love to bang on about Napoli’s special sense of mystery, a particular ancient unnameable beauty, a special something, a blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-di-blah, all in one breath and then slag it off as
terzo mondo
in the next? Bad logic, freakopaths. You can’t have it both ways: you’re either something of interest or you’re not.
Yee Jan inspected himself in profile. The light in the toilet wasn’t great but it gave him enough to work with. He squeezed the foundation into his palm first, presented his chin to the mirror and sneered at the sweet stink of the place, a sickly vanilla, somehow worse in the bathroom, which made little sense – the bakery in the front of the building, the toilet at the side, nowhere near the courtyard. What’s that film where the woman rubs her arms with lemons to rid herself of the stink of her job? And what’s her name? The man was Burt Lancaster. No forgetting Burt, who might have had an English name but surely, had to be, somewhere deep down, a pure genetic Italian.
In Yee Jan’s story the wolf made a habit of coming into the city: she hid in the underground caverns that ran under the old town, or sometimes those catacombs dug into the rock at Fontanella. She didn’t live here, no, instead she wandered in now and again, found her way from the mountains by tracking the scent of the city through waterways and irrigation ditches, all the way through those drab flat fields. She came in winter, in February with the denser snow, when the waterways were frozen, and when the meaty stink of the city clung to the earth and spread out for miles, scratch that, kilometres. She came here to give birth. This wolf, magnificent, canny, even wise, and had enough smarts to know when and how to hide herself and her pups in a city of nearly three million people – four point six if you include the entire metropolitan area – and she knew how to disappear, how to find food, taking cats, small dogs, maybe once or twice some impolite fat child (and so many of them good and porky). The people who spotted her (an old woman outside the Duomo, a trader on via Tribunali, the street walkers at piazza Garibaldi, a team of street cleaners on via Toledo / Roma, whatever you will) were luckier than they knew, because the wolf took a particular interest in the people who spied her – call it providence. If the wolf passed by you, if she saw you, if, for some small reason she paid you a little attention, allowed you to see her, you couldn’t come to harm, for a day, for a week, it just depended.
Yee Jan’s Italian wasn’t great, that’s for sure, but he could manage well enough to tell a plain story simply. A city. A wolf. The lucky few who stumbled across her. And he could tell these ideas as unadorned facts which provided a handsome certainty. Everybody knows it’s not the embellishment that makes the story: it’s the cold hard presence of possibility. This is why people play the lottery – because winning is always possible. Improbable. Really-fucking-remotely unlikely. But
possible
.
Yee Jan pouted at the mirror. A finger at the corner of his mouth. He held up the mascara brush but decided against it. The thing about make-up is making sure there’s just enough, too much is a problem, but finding that distinctive point where you both are and aren’t familiar is all about precision. More often than not it’s the mascara and lipstick combination that tips the balance. These military wives could do with some lessons. Seriously. Why would you leave the house looking like a monkey had a party on your face?
By the time he found the film crew they had progressed from the portside to where the road curled about the bay, right beside Castel dell’Ovo. A line of silver-white screens bounced light from the sea to form a bright path across the road. As far as Yee Jan could make out, the shot involved a woman scurrying along the promenade and a man following after. Time after time the woman walked in a quick romp, skirt tight between her legs, hand up to her shoulder to keep her bag in place. The man came after in a long stride, close enough, smoking, sunglasses and a pinched face. People only walked like this in movies. When they stopped both the man and the woman wiped their faces with towels in a gesture that reminded Yee Jan more of tennis than filmmaking. Tedious wasn’t the word. The woman walked, the man followed. Walked. Followed. Their movements matched by a camera running alongside, then everything stopped, tracked back to the start, and after long and digressive preparations (make-up, discussions, cables hauled back, the camera itself in one instance appeared to be dismantled, while screens were adjusted to accommodate for the changing pitch of sunlight, and plenty of pointing, everybody pointing) they began again. Tired of watching Yee Jan sat and finished a slice of pizza which he picked into pieces, this at least couldn’t be faulted, mozzarella so fresh it sat in a light sap, only just set. He took a photo of himself with the slice held up to his mouth and didn’t mind that people were watching. After eating he wanted to smoke, Bacall-style. It’s the head that moves, never the hand.
Before the class could properly settle the secretary knocked on the door and asked the tutor if Yee Jan and Keiko could please come outside. As soon as they came out the secretary asked if they could sit in the hallway for a moment.
‘What do you think this is about?’ Keiko whispered to Yee Jan in English.
‘Fashion police.’ Yee Jan whispered back. ‘You’re wearing two kinds of stripes.’
Keiko gave a complicit shrug and said she didn’t think she’d done anything wrong. Not anything she could remember.
‘You think we’re in trouble? It feels like high school. Maybe it has something to do with money?’
Yee Jan thought it strange that they would be called out of class and then asked to wait. He was, after all, paying for the lesson he was missing. He listened to the tutor’s voice through the door and the measured laughter of their fellow students, all a bit predictable. People didn’t like Lara as much as they liked the other tutors, but he had to admit she got the job done. Yee Jan splayed his hands and inspected his nails. Today he wore mascara but no foundation.
When the office door opened, a student from Elementario Uno came out, book in hand, and returned to her class.
‘It looks like they’re speaking to the Asian students.’
Yee Jan strained forward. Printed on the back of the student’s T-shirt a picture of a smiling cat, the face not entirely unlike her own, broad, almost round. He had to admit she was pretty. Inside the office sat two police officers. ‘Why are the police here? Are we supposed to have our passports?’
Keiko took out her passport from a small wallet hung about her neck.
‘You’re such a victim,’ Yee Jan said. His statement of the week, which he applied with sincerity, insincerity, irony, love, or anger to any situation.
Such a victim
. ‘I told you about those stripes, didn’t I?’
As they both leaned forward the office door was carefully drawn shut.
After a few moments the secretary came out of the office and in a low voice she asked if Keiko would come with her – then seeing Yee Jan’s bag, she stopped cold. The secretary curled her hair behind her ear then pointed at Yee Jan’s bag. ‘
Questa è la vostra borsa?
’
‘Sorry? Am I going?’
‘Your bag,’ Keiko interrupted. ‘She’s asking about your bag.’
‘This is
my
bag.’ Yee Jan held up the bag so the secretary could see, then pronounced emphatically. ‘Mine.’ It was one thing learning Italian, quite another using that knowledge out of class.
The secretary looked seriously at the bag. Maybe the job didn’t pay that much. Maybe secretaries across the city had to snatch and grab whenever they could.
‘It’s from Macy’s.’ Yee Jan pointed in the direction he thought was west. ‘I know. Ironic. It looks like Ferragamo. You’ll have to go to New York yourself.’
Used to Yee Jan’s oblique ways the secretary straightened up then returned to the office.
Keiko looked at Yee Jan’s bag. ‘I don’t think this has anything to do with visas or money. I think it’s something to do with the bag?’
‘
My
bag, victim.
My
bag.
I
paid for it.’
The news that a man had followed him was nothing extraordinary. This is Italy, Yee Jan told himself. As far as he could tell everyone seemed to be watching everyone else, and apart from an obvious, often hostile, curiosity, Italian men liked to make their likes and attractions clear. It wasn’t much of a surprise that someone would take it further. Only this wasn’t a simple harassing call, a bothersome stare, a whistle or a gesture. This wasn’t a joking profession of love, a cock-grabbing insult, or a scout for a sexual service. This was a grown man waiting outside the school for him on three, certainly, possibly even five consecutive evenings.
When they showed him the footage the secretary Sandra burst into tears and had to leave the room. The police, uncomfortable with the procedure, continued, their faces red, flustered. Yee Jan wondered to whom they felt the most sympathetic, him, or the man who’d mistaken him for a woman – as this was the scenario from their perspective.
Everyone knew the story about the language school and the disappearance of the Japanese student (which explained Sandra’s tears), but none of the students were aware that this had any effect day to day on the school or had anything much to do with the slightly heightened security around the palazzo, because, let’s face it, this is Naples, so a camera above the intercom wasn’t odd. A camera above the courtyard doors wasn’t odd. A camera mounted in the window of the antiques store wasn’t odd. The police knew next to nothing and seemed genuinely bored. They couldn’t even be sure how many times the man had followed him. Three times captured on tape, but maybe four. Four or five, then.
In gritty black and white, from three separate vantage points, the image showed a man standing, and sometimes leaning, by the wall opposite the entrance. In the first tape the man stood with his arms at his side, he wore an unmarked baseball hat and a lightweight jacket despite the heat and humidity. Yee Jan thought he looked a little (and while he didn’t like the word, he couldn’t avoid it)
retarded
. No one stands that still for that long without having some kind of an issue going on. It didn’t help that the crudeness of the image flattened everything into tonal plains. The longer Yee Jan looked, the harder he concentrated, the more the grey plains appeared to vibrate. In two of the segments other students came out and the man showed no interest, but as soon as Yee Jan emerged with his bag tucked under his arm (that handsome ersatz-Ferragamo with a white and brown body and long double-stitched brown straps, a serious piece of equipment), the man turned his head, then, once Yee Jan walked away, he followed after, looking ever-so-slightly undead. It was the walk. Definitely the walk. Evidently, Yee Jan or his bag had some kind of zombie-magnetism going on.
In the set of images from the second day the man waited in almost the exact same spot. This time he leaned back, shoulders against the wall, and bowed forward as soon as Yee Jan came out of the doors and followed after, not quite so zombie-like (in fact pretty ordinary, though somewhat languid) one hand running along the brim of his cap, a ring on his finger. The ring passed too quickly for him to see which finger (he suspected it was a signet ring, it would be too much to hope that a married man with some secret vice was following him, smitten). On the third day the man waited, hands in pockets, a little more anxious perhaps and wary of the street. When Yee Jan came out, among a burst of other students, he waited, held back, his right hand wiped his face and he walked out of view, more zombie than not, again following Yee Jan.