The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (81 page)

In the hour before bed Mizuki set her books aside and took a long shower. She bathed the stings with antiseptic. She double-checked her tongue and throat. She turned the sheets, opened the shutters to refresh the room, laid out her clothes for the next day, so that even the smallest decision would not trouble her, and she knew, even as she did this, that she should call Lara and attempt to undo what she had said.

The call came after Mizuki had gone to bed. The line fizzed and a voice, immediately familiar, crackled out, saying nothing except an inquisitive, ‘Hello, hello?’ in Japanese.

‘Hiroki.’ She said her husband’s name without inflection then cancelled the call. She checked the screen to make sure that the connection was cut.

The phone rang again, two bursts, and stopped.

Mizuki sat up, turned on the lights, assured herself that she was far away, that it was only her husband’s voice which could carry to the room. How had he found her? Less than five hours after she’d spoken with Lara. How could this happen so quickly? Mizuki set the phone on the pillow and lay beside it so that her ear was close. She watched it ring and stop. Ring and stop. A counter clocked the number of incoming calls.

Lara answered on the first ring and asked Mizuki if she was all right. ‘I was worried,’ she said. ‘You didn’t answer.’

Mizuki wasn’t sure where to start. ‘What if everything I told you wasn’t true?’ she asked.

Lara said she didn’t understand.

‘What if everything I’ve told you came from another person? All of the details. What if I’d taken everything from somewhere else?’

Silent for a moment, Lara said she didn’t understand. ‘Why would anyone do that?’

A silence grew between them. Mizuki wanted to know details, she wanted to understand how Lara had found him so quickly, how she could have come to such a decision with so little thought. Not five hours even. Not even one night. But all she could ask was why.

‘Are you in trouble?’ she asked. ‘Because if you needed money, I could have given you money. You could have asked me.’

Lara said she didn’t understand.

Mizuki turned onto her side and changed her mind about talking. ‘It’s not important.’

Mizuki cancelled the call, rolled onto her back and looked up. The ceiling fan stirred hot air to no result. The phone rang and she looked at the small screen and decided that she wouldn’t speak to Lara again.

Despite her best efforts Mizuki lay awake, aware of the passing minutes, the tread of traffic, the supple chuff of voices outside the all-night
farmacia
, and later, much later, the sharp and mournful caw of gulls – sounds so ordinary that ordinarily they would cause her no trouble. She wouldn’t return to the language school. Naples had not provided what she wanted after all, or rather, if she was honest, she didn’t have the courage to follow opportunity when it occurred. The brothers provided a perfect example: supposing these men were interested in her, she doubted she could follow through. She began to consider other cities. Milan, perhaps. Rome. Palermo. Genoa.

When she finally did sleep, in the moment she succumbed, Mizuki felt a weight descend upon her, a rolling tide that brought anxious but unspecific dreams.

✩

The sun crossed obliquely over the building and spilled through the window, drawing with it the noise of traffic, buses idling outside the station, car horns, the hiss and snort of hydraulic brakes, shouts from the market stalls. Lila woke to the dog’s barks, which sounded less alarmed than usual, a colour to them, frisky, expectant. Today she felt soft, gummy, not one hard bone in her body, not one joint. She liked how Arianna inclined toward her, leaned on her, almost nestling, how their skin brushed lightly when she breathed in.

Rafí returned in the early evening and said nothing at first about the previous night but kept himself busy fetching water for the dog.

‘So I’ll make the arrangements, then?’ His foot nudged Lila’s thigh. ‘What do you think? I’ll get everything organized.’

Arianna turned over. ‘Organize what?’

‘With the brothers.’

Arianna cleared her throat and began to cough.

‘Tonight. I’ll set something up. They’ll come and pick you up.’

Arianna rose herself onto her elbows and frowned at Lila, her face red. ‘What’s he talking about?’

Lila shrugged.

‘I’m talking about the two men from last night,’ he said, ‘they’ll pick you up in front of the station.’

Arianna shook her head. She blinked into the sunlight. ‘You told them where we live?’

‘I told them to meet you at the station.’

Rafí stood over Lila, raised his foot and pressed it onto her stomach. ‘You’re going to be nice tonight,’ he warned.

They waited under the station hood, anxious about the police, the carabinieri, the station security, the taxi drivers. This surely wasn’t a smart idea. In front of the entire square, fenced off and dug up, cranes reaching over, the belly of the piazza dug out to a vast black pit. A white car drew up to the kerb and the headlights flickered. Two men sat inside and watched the women approach. As they came alongside the passenger opened his door and stepped out. Lila looked across the piazza to the Hotel Stromboli and picked out the windows on the upper floor, imagining herself already in bed, and thought, How is it that this building always appears to be wet? Arianna began to heckle: who did these people think they were? I mean seriously, to pick them up at the station like common whores?

The passenger leaned on the car roof, smug, hands clasped, smiling. They only wanted to be nice, he said. Nice. Nothing more than that. Behind him, from a ring-fenced lot, steam rose from the building work, a new line for the metro, a pipe impossibly crusted with ice.

Arianna gave a huff. ‘Nice. What is this nice?’ She settled her hands on her hips and leaned forward, neck stuck out. With slender shoulders and waist, large hands, the passenger looked out of proportion, a long body of mismatched parts. Not a boxer, Lila decided, but a swimmer.

Now the driver stepped out of the car and Lila could see that the men, unaccountably tall and trim with similarly shorn hair, were undoubtedly brothers. The same features – noses, brow line, small inset eyes like field mice – the same swagger. Men who considered themselves handsome. The driver pointed to Lila and indicated that she should get in.

The driver approached, slid his arm about her waist and brought Lila to the car and opened the door, something gracious about the gesture, his hand in the small of her back. When Lila sat down she thought to open the opposite door and slide out but did nothing. On the pavement Arianna stood with her arms out wide, palms up, face set with disapproval. Ignoring her, the younger brother and the driver returned to the car, leaving Arianna alone on the pavement, behind her the long swoop of the station front, black windows of empty restaurants, chairs on tables, the certain presence of security guards. When the car started Arianna reached for the door handle.

With Arianna in the car the younger brother locked the passenger doors. Lila sat with her arms crossed and looked up at the Stromboli, a thought came to her,
wasn’t this what they had talked about
, but she kept the thought to herself.

The passenger set his hand on Arianna’s knee and shoved clumsily under Arianna’s skirt. ‘Now you are the one with the cock? Yes? Show me,’ he grinned.

Arianna stopped the man’s advances in a small gesture, a hesitation rather than a refusal. In response the man twisted completely about – and with a swift and sudden jab punched Arianna in the face. The sound of it, a snap, then Arianna’s howl accompanied their acceleration about the piazza.

When they arrived at the farmhouse Arianna bolted from the car, hurtling into darkness, leaving one sandal in the footwell, another tipped on its side in the gravel, pointing to an orchard, a long wall, dimly lit by the car’s red tail-light. Lila sat with the door open, the night air a soft drift across her shoulders, the realization slowly occurring to her that they would not escape this trouble. The passenger shot swift as a rat after Arianna and leapt on her with poisonous certainty. The driver pulled Lila out of the car, hefting her forward by her hair and dropping her at the threshold so that her elbows struck the flagstone. While Arianna fought and struggled, Lila shut down and made no attempt to protect herself. She focused hard on the details before her, the uneven floor, the tiles, broken but still in place; the peaty stink of rotten furnishings. She knew these smells. She knew this air, how the wind picks salt from the sea so that it can be tasted many miles inland.

Lila and Arianna were abandoned twelve miles outside the city on a slip road off the Domiziana. Hired pickers and farmhands working in the lower fields watched the women struggle out of the car naked and shoeless – and for one bad moment the vehicle jolted backward threatening to reverse and run them down but drew instead hastily off the side road. They had seen women squabbling in awkward brawls, hair-pulling, kicking, ugly slap fights at the roadside, or more usually cars pulling slowly into the tree-line and dropping some girl off, often as abrupt, but never with such threat. Later, confirming the story among themselves, the workmen easily described the women but disagreed on the model of the car, mistaking its dusty coat for grey or tan or silver. The men had barely started work, and the last thin breath of mist clung stubbornly to the irrigation ditches, and there, right before them, two naked women scurried chaotically, chicken-like, across the fields.

First out of the car, Arianna zigzagged across the mud then clambered back up the embankment and stumbled alongside the road, falling more than walking, cars veered wide, her focus set on the distant lilac mountains, her hands covering her crotch. When the labourers caught up they beat their sticks and tools on the road and whooped to drive her down to an irrigation ditch. Trapped in the shallow black water Arianna began to bellow in a language they couldn’t understand, and they could see for the first time cuts and bruises, soiled red skin and fatty white grazes, evidence that she had been brutalized – and they could also see, despite her skinny figure, her long hair and hard breasts, that she was a man.

Deaf to the labourers’ hoots and jeers Lila tottered through the mud and slippy rotten sops of cut greens, her underarms, buttocks, stomach, legs, caked with dirt. She fled diagonally across the field, and ran with quick picky steps, but when she heard Arianna’s shouts she simply stopped, sat in the mud, hung her head and covered her ears, waiting for whatever would catch up with her. Startled, the men also stopped. Keeping their distance they waited for the police.

In the ambulance the women faced each other, eyes wide at the strangeness of being brought from an open ploughed field into a box where they could hear themselves breathe. Wrapped in a rough red blanket Arianna shivered violently and would not look up, her ankles and forearms crossed with deep bramble scratches, her neck scored purple, swollen to show the clear imprint of a belt. Lila refused to be touched and sat forward, head down, hands tucked under her thighs. This was her fault. Clearly all her fault. As she slowly warmed, the punctures on her back began to suppurate. She fought against sleep, fearing the sensation that she was evaporating, becoming lighter than air; but sleep, or something like it, brought on by a mess of drugs came in soft buckling waves, impossible to resist. The accompanying officer, dressed in a smart and faultless uniform, looked out of the back of the vehicle and watched the road and fields recede. In full daylight the mountains took on the soft contours of a strong man’s arm.

They were separated at the hospital and taken to small bright booths set side by side. Alone, Lila slipped off the high examination table and hid under it with the thin tunic drawn over her head. She squeezed hard against the wall. The pressure and the cool tiles soothed the sores on her back and the penetrating ache in her shoulders. Crouched under the bed she could smell cigar smoke in her sweat, and the sweet, cold stink made her retch. She did not want to sleep and she did not want to be awake, neither did she want to be alone. She called for Arianna. Her voice sounded separate, not of her making, so that the sound itself became something to fasten on to.

Almost two hours after they had arrived at the hospital a second woman officer returned with a photographer, a doctor, and two uniformed police. The woman spoke to Lila in a whispered singsong, supposing that Lila was as degraded as she appeared.

‘Can you come out? Can you stand? Can you sit?’

Lila allowed the woman to coax her out. She sat where she was told and did not flinch as the doctor opened the back of her tunic and unpicked the temporary dressing.

The man spoke in a flat and practised tone, almost a private whisper as he described his actions. ‘I’m going to lift and extend your arm. Let me know if this is too painful.’

Lila allowed the man to hold out her arm and softly turn her head, and made no complaint when he compressed the skin either side of the wounds. The dry sound of dressings being unsnapped from their packets identical to the sound of that first punch – a sharp crack.

‘These are cigar burns.’ The doctor began to count the blisters across her neck, shoulders, back, behind her knees, and on the soft underside of her arms. ‘And these,’ he said, ‘are bites. Here, and here. Here. These marks are older.’

She said nothing.

The brothers, trading places, warned that if either of them spoke they would return to finish what they’d started. Lila didn’t doubt their threats, she wasn’t lucky, a simple fact, and she knew when to take advice.

The photographer took pictures of her back and shoulders. He took photographs of the nape of her neck, showing where her hair had been tugged out. Coming round to face her he photographed the bruises and lacerations to her thighs, wrists, and breasts, then took a single photograph of her face. The men who touched her now wore gloves. Lila waited for them to be done.

After searching for traces of fluids, the doctor began to inspect for matter, dirt captured on the rough skin on her feet and in the grazes on her knees, traces of ash and tobacco swabbed from the wounds. He measured the bruise about her neck, then one by one the bites, burns, the lacerations were swabbed, cleaned and finally dressed. The sounds of utensils set in their trays, of metal against metal, and metal against glass, sang unnaturally sharp in the small booth, sharp sounds tightened by the hard walls, unabsorbed and brittle, unexpectedly invasive.