Read The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit Online
Authors: Richard House
Anne closed the files and worried that she was recording a trail which could be similarly discovered, as if the room itself were suddenly public. She shut down the computer and hurried to the bathroom.
She washed her hands again and called the dog. The dog preferred to sleep on Eric’s bed but she didn’t like the idea now. She washed her hands a third time and dried them, tempted to search his room. They had talked many times, Eric stating that he did not know what he was, or worse, he didn’t know what he wanted, and she recalled with anger her assurance that he had plenty of time to figure everything out, remembering her own confusion at his age.
It takes time. It will get easier. Once you settle, make friends, it will be different. Easier. Give it time.
And when he complained that he was lonely she had asked if there was anyone he could talk with? Someone? Surely? But the only people he spoke with were his tutors. While the conversations had upset her, robbed her of one more certainty, hadn’t she supported him? Hadn’t she shown understanding? Her consideration, given his actions, appeared laughable.
Tell me anything. Anything at all. Talk to me
.
Anne paused at the threshold of her son’s room. There were no souvenirs of his holiday in Cuba with Mark. Not one photograph. Opposite the bed hung a poster of a man climbing bare-handed, bare-chested, inverted under a hood of rock, about and beneath him a limitless ice-blue sky. His fingertips and feet braced the rock, locked, upside-down in the position of an athlete at a starting block. Taped beside it were pictures of Eric climbing, pictures of free-runners, bodies arced, taut, tumbling across skylines, lodged with calligraphic elegance between concrete walls in city streets. In all of their moves, from Berkeley to Richmond to New York, Eric had laid out his room in the same way; having seen it so many times, its orderliness now disturbed her. What other twenty-two-year-old would live so tidily? Would alphabetize his books? Would do, exactly, to the word, everything he said he would do? What she had taken as evidence of sophistication, of sense and good manners, she now saw as symptoms of a disorder. Much like his father, she realized, he wasn’t the person she believed him to be. The idea struck her as deeply repugnant.
She resisted the desire to search his room, doubting that there would be more to discover. Its surface, in any case, was too clinical to penetrate.
Returning to her study, Anne hesitated before packing her computer. Enough, she told herself. Stop.
The clock ticked softly, and through the window she could see the traffic on Lexington, a tangential view through the sides of the building, a slice of a busy, wet road. On the mantel beside the clock was a photograph taken over the holidays. In the picture Fed forward, third in a group of five, smiling, the only person aware that the picture was being taken. His focus strayed just above the camera to the person behind it. Taken before he had his hair shorn in an attempt to look older, before he returned to Grenoble; she found it difficult to reconcile the image with the knowledge that during the same holiday he was soliciting strangers, men, for sex. His smile appeared duplicitous, reserved, removed,
much like his father
. Anne looked at her reflection and attempted to untangle how she felt.
Anne woke at four in the morning and could not return to sleep. Her husband slumbered without trouble, his body curled away, back turned. The older they became the less time they spent together, and the less time they spent together the less dissatisfaction they felt toward each other. It was only the points of departure, she thought, they couldn’t negotiate. Everything held the same sense of dysfunction: a son who sent messages, city to city, to people he didn’t know and didn’t intend to meet, an absent father, and a husband who was similarly remote. And how would she account for herself?
She slipped out of bed, chose a book from her shelf, and took it to the living room. The book: a favourite. Images from Correggio, Caravaggio, Titian, Tintoretto. In them she saw distance and cruelty. Bodies pierced, flayed, crucified. A parade of morbid flesh.
3.5
Ford rose first and after a quick shower sat in the courtyard sipping coffee. Nathalie’s soap on his hands, sweet and floral. He’d found her washbag on the lintel beside the shower and helped himself to the lotions, not out of perversity or need, but because the scent, jasmine, reminded him of his apartment in Bonn – two small rooms and a featureless kitchenette, nothing much to remember – except, on some nights the neighbour’s jasmine inflamed the air, and this scent, more than any other, emptied his head then and now. It surprised him, this nostalgia, for something so bland. How bored he was,
passed by, passed
over
, weren’t those the words he’d used? He’d bought the apartment on the promise of continued work with HOSCO, but HOSCO provided the meanest contracts, and when they came to an end Geezler had justified:
We can’t offer you anything new because you’ve already worked for us. It’s one of those things. Our hands are tied. We can’t keep hiring the same contractors for these kinds of contracts. It isn’t allowed. The only way I can offer you a new contract is if you open a new account under a new name. You have to register as a new contact. Entirely new: name, address, accounts.
Geezler assured him,
I wouldn’t worry, the fact is we do this all the time
.
He tried to remember how Sutler had evolved. Was he simply a way of manoeuvring about a tricky piece of policy? A shared idea developed through discussion? The truth was that Sutler was proposed by Geezler as fully realized idea. Geezler had decided everything. He’d set up the name, the contract. He’d organized the flights. All of it, right out of the blue.
I have something for you, but I need an answer now, yes or no? If you say yes you have to leave immediately
. This would be his one chance. There would be no other opportunity.
They want to build a new city, first as a military base, then as a civilian project. We’ve bid for the contract and while the announcement isn’t official there’s little doubt it’s ours. We’ve identified four potential sites. It’s safe
, he said,
you’ll be in the south, nowhere near Najaf, Nasiriyah, Basrah, or any of those places. In fact, you won’t see one Iraqi. No worries about that. We’re sending you to the desert. All you have to do is make an initial assessment. We need someone there now. Two hundred and fifty thousand, in and out.
All this under one provision:
You must become Sutler. We can’t give this contract to an existing provider.
Nathalie showered after him, tiptoed barefoot out of her room. Martin followed and stopped in the courtyard, a cigarette already lit, eyes squinched shut. Disturbed by the sunlight he stood and scratched his head. The food, cutlery, crockery left out with a note from Mehmet saying he would return with the hire-van by quarter to nine and that they should all be ready. Martin studied the breakfast and complained item by item. Dry bread, sweaty cheese, cold milk, no juice. What kind of torture was this?
As Nathalie came out of the shower, her hair bound in a towel, Martin poured her a coffee.
‘We’re late. It’s eight fifteen. We asked for breakfast at seven thirty.’ She added sugar to her cup and told Martin that they needed to hurry, and asked in French if Eric was awake yet. ‘Is that the last cigarette?’
Irritated, Martin pointed to their room. They had a whole pack of duty-free cigarettes, unopened, less than three metres away. He slumped back to the room to make a point. Ford offered Nathalie a cigarette.
‘Don’t tell me you speak French?’
‘No. You were looking at the packet.’
‘Am I really that obvious?’ Nathalie leaned forward for a light and held back the towel, revealing a shoulder. ‘How can you be amusing so early?’ She took a first deep draw. ‘What are you doing today?’
‘I don’t know. I might go to the hammam.’
‘No. The hammam is no good. Come with us. Martin is filming. Eric will help him. We’ve hired a car. It’s going to be boring for me and I want some company. You might even find it interesting.’ She turned her head to blow smoke past Martin who stood in front of her, a carton of cigarettes in his hands. ‘Why not? He can come? You and Eric are going to be busy. I will be bored.’
Mehmet drove with one arm out of the window, abstractly directing the traffic out of their way, while Ford, Nathalie, Martin, and Eric held tight to the seats and vinyl straps, too alarmed to complain. A necklace of fat ebony beads batted the windscreen. Ford spent the hour-long drive with one hand and shoulder keeping the sliding door shut. A sandy breeze buffeted unpleasantly against his face and he momentarily thought of himself as lost, faceless, worn down, his one goal – modest or monumental – to be in less of a fix with each passing day, to be less in flux. To his knowledge this day seemed as stable as the previous day, an improvement already with no visions in barber shops, no awkward introductions, and, so far, no surprises. Staying this comfortable, at least for a while, presented no risk, he could recoup, prepare, ready himself for the next step. The van clipped the verge. Eric tensed into the seat. He listened to headphones as he read the book he’d been reading in Kopeckale, looking up only at the most violent jolts. Newspaper cuttings slipped from the pages, so that he held the book in both hands. Preoccupied, Martin said nothing but appeared to be brewing a complaint.
When they arrived Nathalie took Ford by the arm and said that they would look at the churches. The boys could manage without them. She held her hands out flat. ‘Look. See. I’m shaking. I’ve never been so terrified.’ Was Mehmet trying to kill them or was this just something he did for the rush, because there’s nothing quite like zooming a group of tourists?
‘Zooming?’
‘Provoking. Eric’s word. Zoom-zoom. Everything becomes a verb.’ Nathalie paused to survey the rock face. As they headed to the closest bluff Martin warned them to stay out of shot, and Nathalie waved her hand over her shoulder.
‘One hour.’
‘I know.’ Nathalie pointed at the cliff pocked with holes, stabbed her finger in the air to show where they were heading, ‘I know, I know, I know.’ She talked as they walked. These churches were the reason she agreed to accompany Martin on this trip. ‘When he gets to this point I’m not so interested. I prefer all of the work beforehand – the preparation. At first it’s not so bad, but each time it becomes a little more difficult. More fuss. More trouble. I wanted to go to Malta with Eric. I wanted to leave Martin to it.’
Ford remembered the tickets folded inside Eric’s passport, a flight from Athens to Luqa. Nathalie continued to talk about the churches. Her university at Grenoble had developed a process to preserve the frescos. ‘They are layered one over another. The old painting. A new layer of plaster. A new painting. Whenever they feel like it.’ Her hands interwove, indicating layer upon layer. ‘They believed the devil would rise from here,’ she said. ‘I’m serious. They thought he would come up through the cracks in the ground, that there would be an earthquake and he would rise. Dust. Fire. The end of the world. They calculated the day and the hour and built churches to protect themselves. Of course nothing happened. But who knows,’ she laughed, ‘perhaps they were wrong?’
He liked how she spoke, how her accent re-tuned the words so that they sang a little off-scale. Not unfamiliar but refreshed.
They entered the first church through a short vertical shaft, the steps long since worn away. Nathalie crawled behind Ford and passed her camera ahead. Inside the chamber Ford found an opening and watched as Mehmet unloaded the equipment and Martin and Eric assembled the camera and tripod. The van, the three men, appeared small and inconsequential; the landscape surrounding them unearthly and barren. Ford had not paid attention on the drive and was surprised by the valley’s slow swoop and the salt-white peaks, the massive dunce caps worn out of the soft pumice, rising independent from the valley floor. From here he could see more windows and doorways puncturing the rock. Long-abandoned churches and animal pens. Nathalie idly took a photograph as he leaned into the view.
Martin and Eric worked quickly together.
‘What are they filming?’
‘A documentary. A project.
The Project.
’ Nathalie dusted her legs. ‘It’s a little complicated. Why, what is he doing?’
‘I can’t tell. How many films has he made?’
‘Five.’ Nathalie joined Ford to look out over the valley, her hand on his shoulder, her body close. ‘One is well known, not seriously well known, not what you would call famous, not really . . . but six years ago he won a big award and some prizes in France, I don’t know, maybe it was seven years ago now. Everyone wants him to make something new. It’s not so easy today. Six years ago it was easier. It’s tough. He’s competing with his students.’
‘So what is he doing?’
‘It’s an archive. The project is a collection of interviews. Right now he’s interviewing Kurdish leaders. Some are in hiding. Until recently most of them were out of the country in Paris and Berlin, some of them came from Iraq and Iran, but most of them come from the border with Iraq not so far from here. Not far from where you were. The government, the Turks, don’t recognize ethnic groups – Kurds, Armenian, Alevi – although this is beginning to change. But everything is unstable again. Everything has become much worse. It isn’t an easy project. Some of these people are classed as terrorists, so he has to be careful.’
Ford admitted that he was the wrong person to talk over such matters, he knew little about politics and nothing about documentary film.
Nathalie nodded, maybe it wasn’t so bad to know nothing about film, but did he really know nothing about politics?
‘How did you meet?’
Nathalie gave an involuntary smile. ‘How did we meet? Why do you want to know? We met in Grenoble, at the university. Then, after he met me, when he knew who I was he wanted to interview my father. After that I started to help with his project.’