The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (82 page)

With the examination complete Lila was left alone with the promise that someone would return with clothes. She waited, stared at the door until her eyes watered and wished herself, uselessly, elsewhere. The woman returned, apologizing, with two T-shirts held to her chest. A charitable order provided the clothes and this was all they had at the moment. The clothes were new, both with designs, smiling cartoon characters Lila did not recognize. She sounded apologetic. It was OK; no one else had worn them.

When the police returned she’d changed her mind, come around to the idea that it didn’t much matter if she did or did not speak, and that the effort not to speak would require resources that she knew she didn’t have. The choice was a simple economy.

They met the men at the station, she said. If they wanted to know exact details they could speak with Rafí at the Hotel Stromboli. They’d raided the hotel a number of times and they would know him.

The brothers were tall, slender, active, with sporting bodies, trimmer and fitter than the men she was used to. Their hair was cropped military-style. They had clipped their body hair, and one of them, the younger brother, had waxed his arms. Except for a thumbprint mole under the older brother’s right nipple there were no tattoos, no distinguishing marks. She couldn’t guess their ages, but they appeared younger than the officers now questioning her. They almost certainly weren’t Italian, and weren’t familiar with the city nor the autostrada: when they were driving they took a number of wrong turns. She couldn’t swear to it but there were times when they spoke to each other in pidgin French, or slang, or in a private invented language.

After the first punch, when the passenger, the younger man, hit Arianna, the brothers had joked with each other. The older man was persuasive, and he kept talking about a party in Livorno, and that other women were being brought there. Rafí had promised this earlier, maybe the day before, and Lila in particular liked the promise that they would be introduced to influential men; judges, lawyers, businessmen, but knew that this was unlikely. In their long slow afternoons Lila and Arianna had concocted a loose plan where they would move to America, to Los Angeles, or stay in Europe and work together in Milan, Paris, or maybe even return to Barcelona. They wanted to be kept by one man, why not, or better still, to be able to afford an apartment of their own where they would establish themselves with a select and limited number of clients, men that they would choose, and their working lives would run to a timetable of regulated and well-paid fucks. This hope had underscored every discussion, and the brothers’ hint that they understood this was one of the night’s enduring cruelties.

The second officer asked for other details, he could tell from her accent that she wasn’t Italian. Lila nodded, yes, she’d come to Naples and worked for a while in a shop on via Duomo. Her family needed money. She often used this story, and Rafí laughed at it, because, let’s face it, she’d never worked upright in her entire life, and, best of all, even if in some crazy alternate universe she did find herself a job men would always smell her out, because first and foremost she was a whore: where would she be without those American servicemen she was so fond of, and those good clean Scandinavian boys from NATO who were always so generous with their drugs? Lila also cringed at the idea, but it made a better story than the way she passed her days. For Lila time divided between doing something and doing nothing, and she dreaded time spent on her own. Alone at the Stromboli she felt like baggage, like substance without worth.

The officers began to ask questions she couldn’t answer, and Lila began to tire. Perhaps she needed a moment to herself. Lila shrugged, she’d told them as much as she knew. Nothing further would occur to her.

When the door reopened Arianna leaned into the room. Her neck now purple, her face swollen and pulpy, her eyes panda-wide and bruised. Stopped at the door she leaned slightly in and whispered, ‘Lila. Lila? We can’t stay.’ Arianna looked back into the corridor then stepped into the room. Behind her, and this made no sense, stood Rafí. ‘We can’t stay. We have to go.’ Arianna held out her hand. ‘You understand? We can’t stay here.’

Lila called to Arianna, and a second, more formidable wave of nausea overcame her and she thought that she might faint.

‘I had to call him,’ Arianna whispered. ‘This is only for tonight. We take our money and we leave like we planned. Tomorrow. We go tomorrow.’

Rafí hovered at the door, anxious and uneasy, eyes on the corridor.

Arianna was right, they should leave, but Lila couldn’t rouse herself, all energy and self-determination gone. Arianna held out her hand, now impatient. ‘Now. We have to go now.’

Rafí supported Lila on his arm, one T-shirt held to her chest, the other across her shoulders. As soon as she stood a chill passed through her and she thought that she might collapse. Rafí lumbered her through the hospital corridors without a word, taking an emergency exit so that they came out onto a parking lot edged with trees that seemed to her to be another country perhaps. Not Italy but America. A flat periwinkle sky. A low-lying mall too wide to be part of the city she knew. Barefoot, Arianna walked ahead and scanned the lot for the car. A technician in blue overalls sat smoking in the shade, the ground soft with pine needles. He looked at the three and blew smoke into the branches, indifferent to their hurry and disorder.

✩

Marek waited until the afternoon to call the brothers. He sent them photographs he’d taken of the Citroën, and asked if they still needed a driver.
I know the city
, he wrote,
if there’s anything you need during your stay. Don’t hesitate.
He tried to imagine what they might want, two men in Naples, and couldn’t picture taking a holiday with his own brother, who in any case would never know his own mind without his wife. A hot summer, almost too hot to move, and hadn’t Peña said the brothers didn’t know the city, and they barely spoke the language. He knew from military service the kind of trouble men could make for themselves, it wasn’t that they specifically sought it out, but given the opportunity, trouble would happen. If they wanted opportunity, as in
company
, he could help with that.

He waited in the cafe and stood at the window, an eye on his apartment and the magistrate’s driver, who lounged against his car, half-hopeful of a call from Tony. A call came mid-morning from the brothers. Did Marek know of a doctor? One of the brothers had been punched in a fight and he needed a doctor. Could Marek bring someone to the hotel? It wasn’t anything that needed any fuss. They would appreciate his discretion.

At first Lanzetti wasn’t interested.

‘I’m a pharmacist. Take them to the hospital. Take them to a clinic.’

‘They don’t want trouble,’ Marek reasoned. ‘They know how things work here, how simple things become complicated. They just want a doctor.’

‘They don’t want the police. This happens all the time.’

Marek shrugged. It was possible, a fight in a bar could lead to all kinds of problems, and no one would want to make a report, no one would want the police involved. He needed the work, but didn’t want to spell it out. ‘If I do this. If they trust me—’

Lanzetti turned his hands over, palms up as if to ask,
And this should involve me? This should be my problem?
‘You drive them to a hospital. You take them to a clinic. You bring them to a
farmacia
.’ Out of politeness he asked where they were, and offered to find out the nearest clinic or pharmacy.

‘Hotel Grand, in the hills.’

‘Castellammare?’

‘On the mountain.’

Marek stepped back from the counter. Before leaving he thanked the doctor for his advice. Before he reached the door Lanzetti had changed his mind.

Marek followed two white vans along the escarpment’s terraced walls, vines and fig trees and creepers close on one side, a blue hole on the other. As he came up the hill, Lanzetti pointed out the view, and told him how the Americans at the end of the war had first seen Naples from the very same place. The view struck Marek as a piece of information: a set of facts. So this is where the Americans stood, Lanzetti explained. First they came over the top, then round the side through the valley, and others, even later, came by sea. In four days a mongrel group of partisans with a wise eye on the Americans’ progress had rid the city of the Germans. It wasn’t just a view about recent history, the capped top of the volcano, the thick plates of lava, and the dangerous proximity of the city spoke as a present reminder to an ancient event every boy knew by heart. Marek patted his pockets for cigarettes as the car crept upward and asked Lanzetti if he smoked.

Lanzetti said they could stop, if he wanted. They needn’t hurry? He asked this as a question, and Marek drew over and said no, there was no particular hurry. He stopped at the crown of the hill where the road levelled out to a viewing station.

‘I have decided to spend more time.’ Lanzetti paused and lit a cigarette and Marek rolled down the window and blew smoke out over the view. ‘More time
being present
. Does that make sense? To make sure I enjoy what is around me. My son. Good food. A beautiful view. I know how ridiculous it sounds.’

Marek looked past Lanzetti to the view, mindful of the edge, which fell at a discomfortingly sharp pitch. He saw the view as a phenomenon, a plate of land bounded by mountains and sea with an imperfect cone smack in the centre. If you drew up the centre of a tablecloth you would have yourself a model of the bay, the same flowing curves, the same dimensional scope.

‘Last year I lost my father. Now I am the adult. He brought me here a number of times. It is always a good view. Don’t you think? There are walks from here to Vico Equense, or over the top to Ravello.’

In front of them a man sat on his motorbike, head turned to the view.

‘My wife has taken my son to her brother’s.’ Lanzetti looked out at the view as he spoke. ‘There have been some disturbances at the palazzo. She’s unhappy. She’s always unhappy. She makes the boy unhappy.’

Marek remembered finding the purse on the coach. The accident wasn’t his first death, and certainly not his first accident. The summer before, driving on the Tagenziale, a motorcyclist, a man in black and red leathers, had inexplicably sprung from his bike and spun over the parapet, head over heels, gone. The bike toppled as soon as the man was loose, parts shattering and spinning across the lanes, and Paola shouting in pure disbelief. Did you see that? A cross-wind, the smallest of bumps, a curving bridge, elements long in place that predetermined the young man’s startling tumble and thump onto a roof, a balcony, a road. There were other deaths that summer, his father, Paola’s grandmother, relatives dressed and laid out in grey rooms in sombre calm, a little dignity returned to them, but these two incidents where men appeared to be snatched, grabbed and thrown, were the measure to him of how life, and the taking of it, was a matter of simple whimsy.

Marek parked between the same two white vans, now being unloaded of decorations and tableware. They followed a man bearing flowers into the hotel lobby. The bouquet, a generous spread of cream-coloured lilies and green ferns, swayed a little obscenely as the man scampered up the steps. Marek, out of place in combat shorts, waited at the entrance and phoned the brothers. All about the lobby and the entrance staff prepped tables, windows, carpets, cleaned and arranged with practised focus. A wedding, without doubt.

A man came out of the hotel, brisk and direct, hand extended and asked Marek if he was the driver from Naples and was this the doctor. Marek shook the man’s hand and the man indicated that he should come with him.

They drove in silence down the mountain. Once they joined the autostrada Lanzetti began to ask questions.

‘Did he say how this happened?’

‘His nose? A fight.’

‘A fight?’

‘In a bar. I think he said.’

‘Did he say where?’

Marek said no. ‘It was broken?’

‘Yes, but not so bad. There is a bruise, a small swelling.’ Lanzetti unfolded his arms. ‘And how do you know these men?’

‘I don’t. They’ve asked me to drive them.’

‘You work for them?’

‘I will. They need a driver while they’re here.’

‘And you know what they do?’

‘I only met them today.’

‘So you know nothing about the fight? Because there were scratches. It would unusual for a man to scratch.’

‘He said it was a man.’

‘Perhaps he didn’t want to admit.’

Perhaps, they agreed, perhaps. Marek dropped Lanzetti at the palazzo then returned the car to English Tony. He walked back along via Tribunali, a small and indirect detour, but he wanted to think. It wasn’t his business what the brothers were doing, now they had guaranteed a steady two weeks of work.

✩

When Lila woke she found herself at the Stromboli lying on her side on the mattress, the T-shirt twisted about her midriff, a clear enough memory of the journey back but nothing after they arrived. An argument swelled about her. Arianna’s voice rose hard above Rafí’s, insistent on one question. ‘My money. Where is the money? My money. I want my money. Where is my money?’

Rafí shouted back, face to face. ‘You think you can work now? You think anyone wants you?’

Why had they gone to the hospital without coming first to him? It was the wrong day for this. The men he owed money to would not be happy to know that he wasn’t in control of his women. ‘Do you have any idea what this means? How this makes me look?’ The difference between having something or nothing now depended on them.

Arianna settled on the bed, one argument streamed from her. Wasn’t he supposed to watch out for them? Wasn’t that the one small thing he was supposed to do?

Hands dug deep into his pockets, Rafí slipped back to the doorway.

Lila couldn’t work after the beating. Arianna insisted. ‘She can’t. It isn’t possible.’

Slumped back on the mattress Lila let the argument fly and felt the small room collapse about her.