The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (88 page)

Early on Wednesday evening Niccolò Scafuti, a security guard for the Persano-Mecuri chemical dye plant in Ercolano, reported the discovery of bloodstained clothes and a small black cloth shoulder-bag a few metres from the road on scrubland behind his apartment.

Built in the early nineteen-seventies, the Rione Ini estate dominated the south-eastern boundary of Ercolano. Poorly constructed of pre-cast concrete sections, the buildings overshadowed the surrounding wasteland. Only four of the planned twelve high-rise apartments were completed, although the foundations, drains and sewers were laid for the entire complex. The land about the estate remained tracked and broken, levelled in the spring and summer by a sloped field of grasses busy with red, papery poppies.

Niccolò sat out on the balcony and waited for his sister to return. At five o’clock the incinerator on via Tre Marzo burnt paper waste and sent up a plume of white, feathery ash. In the late afternoon a cool breeze blew in from the sea, and the heat rose off the concrete and caused the falling ash to momentarily pause, hover, then rise.

At six o’clock Niccolò took a plastic sack and slingshot and headed directly for the wasteland. As he walked through the scrub he followed a path running parallel to the road, his eye open for small pea-sized stones. The day had been frustrating, much of it spent manually raising and lowering a barrier as the new security passes would not work. The drivers coming into the compound waited for his service but did not acknowledge him. When they did talk they’d look at him, take a moment, then deliberately slow down.

Beside the track, partly hidden by the tall grasses, lay a brown shoulder-bag. Further to his left, in a one-metre-wide clearing, he discovered a small rubbery hump of clothes, as brown as the bag, which appeared to be dug out of the ground from a small scratched hole. He cautiously inspected the clothes, busy with ants, set hard and coated in sandy dirt. It was only when he opened out the T-shirt, saw the cuts, a series of small slashes, and noticed how the heavy stains stiffened the cloth that he realized they were stained with blood.

Niccolò looked back along the path to see what else he had walked by. Close to the road the grass was scorched in a wide path, and he guessed that an attempt had been made to burn the clothes and the bag. Alarmed at what else he might find, he checked carefully to see if there were other areas burned or flattened in the field – then he returned to the bag when he was sure that he was alone.

He waited a long time before deciding to open the clasp.

There needed to be a certain kind of hush before it would happen. A kind of white noise filling the background and him focusing down, concentrating on the one thing – and then without any kind of prelude or announcement he would disappear inside himself. Just vanish.

There were triggers. Flickering or flashing lights, almost any tight pattern; reading – the simple action of casually passing his eye along a line of printed words was often enough to snag him. A length of sunlight slatted through a blind, or light cutting into a room catching dust and vibrating, and he would lose focus and become fixed in a kind of endlessness, a loop. In such moments the world flew away from him, a kind of flutter, and gone. Words within a moment of being spoken became lost. His sister would coo to him, singsong, ‘Hey, hey, Niccolò? Where are you?’ sometimes kindly, sometimes impatient, as if there was a destination, a place he retreated to, but these events were nothing but absence, the moment of leaving knitted to the moment of returning, and while they were brief, he had no notion of their length. These weren’t jumps forward, sudden segues, but steps out, lapses. He’d worked in security for two years, or nine, depending on how good his memory was that morning.

Bent over the brown hump of clothes with a breeze running through the grass, Niccolò couldn’t be sure how much time had slipped by, if those were the same dusty clouds burning off in a late-afternoon sun, the same flies rising, so dizzy and fired they batted into each other and into his face. His thighs ached and he settled onto his knees. He couldn’t figure out how long he’d waited, just as he couldn’t be sure, exactly, what he was doing. His hand settled on the clothes and information began to return: the sack, the slingshot, the heat, the ants, the flies, the clothes, the field, the reason for walking through the field, the time of day, the scents of scorched earth and something less pleasant. He couldn’t stand cats, never could, he remembered now.

The material, crusted with dirt, unfolded to a T-shirt, a pair of shorts, and a fat wad of rags. The T-shirt slit with two parallel cuts at the navel – one long, one short – and slashed on either side at the lower stomach and just below the armpits. Ants ran up his hands and he shook them off. Done with the clothes, Niccolò carefully opened the shoulder-bag. He pinched the clips to release the buckles then cautiously opened the flap. A natural thing to do. You find something so you check inside just to see who it might belong to, naturally.

Niccolò returned to the estate with the contents of the bag tucked inside his sack and then he decided to contact the police.

Within an hour of Niccolò’s discovery the police had cordoned off a small area of the field, and the clothes – a pair of corduroy shorts, boxer shorts, a T-shirt with a five-point star design – were photographed on site and carefully packaged. A preliminary search was made of the area but nothing of interest was immediately discovered.

Against all logic the evening wind brought heat. Reporters began to assemble at the perimeter of the wasteland. People hurried from the estate toward him to be stopped by the police. A slight haze wrapped about the figures. Still dressed in his uniform, Niccolò stood beside the police vehicles and folded his arms high over his chest so that the company insignia could not be seen; but the police had gathered the information they needed and asked him, not unkindly, to return home with the assurance that they knew what they were doing now, and thank you. You’ve done a good job. You’ve done all you can. We know where you are if we need you. Certain they would want to speak with him further, Niccolò took a new position outside the taped perimeter. With the sun low over the bay, light began to strafe between the buildings and their shadows reached almost to his feet – for one moment every detail held his attention. The gathering crowd, the police unpacking their equipment, the waiting huddle of reporters, the sun and the shadows and a light wind raising dust between the buildings, grey in the street and white in the sky.

Niccolò returned to his apartment and waited for the police to seek him out. Even without him the event drew interest. More people idled in the street than usual, and they stood in small groups, the men with their shirts open or rolled over their stomachs, an expectation that a body might be discovered. He practised his explanation about how he’d come across the clothes so that he would not sound confused. On the table he laid out two books on forensic science, course textbooks bought secondhand at Porta Alba. He waited, but the police did not come.

Frustrated, Niccolò returned to the balcony and waited for his sister, mindful of the street outside and the television inside playing an American detective show, dubbed well enough for the mouths to almost match the sounds. Away on the wasteland, under bright arc lights, the police walked in a line across the scrub. A second team combed the edge of the floodlit field, and he felt a slight anxiety and exhilaration as the line progressed through the field – but none of them, not one, looked like they would come to speak to him any time soon. Inside the apartment the sack with the contents from the shoulder-bag lay on the floor. If he wanted, he could simply walk out there and tell them what else he’d found, then they might speak to him, only he wasn’t even sure what he’d taken and he knew that this might not be a sensible idea.

When he decided the police weren’t coming, he put everything back in the sack, and tucked the sack where Livia wouldn’t move it. He looked through drawers, and found in the kitchen where Livia had stacked photographs of his wife and daughter, removed them from their frames, although he could not see why. Tomorrow he’d take the sack to the paint factory, sort through what he’d found and dump what he didn’t want to keep.

Niccolò stood on the balcony with his hands on his hips. He could feel the attention of his neighbours, and knew that he was being watched with small quantities of something that resembled respect. Police vehicles remained parked alongside the wasteland, and the press and crews assembled a temporary camp at the head of the field. The bright lights, the gathering crowd gave the evening the appearance of a festival. Two police teams worked their way toward the shoreline, one passing through the abandoned paintworks, the other passing through the rows of greenhouses, uncertainty in their staggered movement. Niccolò watched the white vehicles crawl along the road while the men walked ahead.

When Livia came home, he insisted that she watch the news with him. Niccolò described his discovery and his discussion with the police, and just as he began to work himself up a little (
they told me to come back. I waited, I was here. I did exactly what they asked
) a report from the Rione Ini estate came live on the television. It was a jolt at first to recognize the estate and they both pointed at the screen with surprise. The item was presented once in the main news and again on the summary fifteen minutes after, and later still on the local bulletin. Each time the segment appeared it came as a small shock, and he watched the wasteland on both the television and in reflection in the glass in the balcony door, satisfied that he, Niccolò Scafuti, security guard for Persano-Mecuri Ercolano, was the root cause of this. As soon as the clip was over, Niccolò scanned through the stations to see what coverage they were giving the event. He described the discovery to his sister again to fix the moment he came across the clothes.

Livia sat with him, occasionally dozing, legs stretched across the floor, her back to the wall, because these days this was the only way to remain comfortable. It was sad about the clothes, she said. It was the saddest thing.

Eight days after the assault three men came to the Hotel Stromboli for Rafí. Warned by a telephone call, Rafí scrabbled for his clothes and told Lila to get downstairs and tell them he wasn’t about. The men, already inside the Stromboli, banged on doors and drew out residents to the landings. If she could delay them he could get out onto the roof where they wouldn’t find him. They were peddlers, kids, he said, petty dope dealers he owed money to, and while they didn’t pose much of a threat, he didn’t doubt that they could do some damage if they decided on it.

As Lila searched for something to wear Rafí shoved her to the door and told her to hurry.

She met the men on the stairs, already halfway up, halfway running. Behind them the traders who sold belts and purses shuffled at their doors. Lila flattened herself against the wall and allowed the men to pass without comment or resistance, and they looked, as Rafí had said, young, like people playing a role, nothing much to worry about.

The two rooms on the top floor led one to another in a simple inverted ‘L’ and offered no place to hide. Lila followed after, immediately behind, and watched them turn over the mattress, search through the bedclothes, and when they found Rafí crouched behind the kitchen door – eyes squeezed shut, hands clamped to his face, groaning child-like, volume rising, as if this game was being played to the wrong rules – they demanded money. She watched them wrestle Rafí out, and backed away bumping into the door, the doorway, the wall trying to keep out of their way. Rafí at first pliant, disbelieving, snapped to life and began to struggle. He twisted, thrashed, kicked, lunged at the door, grabbed the lintel. The three men stumbled over the mattress, dropped him, scooped him back up, each of them shouting instructions. Rafí writhed in fury, octopus-like, took over the room with a pure and vicious energy sucked right out of nowhere.

As the brawl shoved past her out onto the landing, Rafí, face up, back arched, flipped over and grabbed a fist-full of Lila’s hair. With Lila as an anchor the group collapsed to the floor. Too stunned to think, Lila punched out and hit Rafí in the crotch – at that moment the fight was lost and Rafí rolled into a ball, gawping, all of his fight gone.

Bowed forward, dizzy and wincing, Lila pressed her hands to her scalp, not quite sensible of the fact that she was the cause of this lull: three grown men, each twice her size and strength, had failed to subdue Rafí, and with one nudge (it really wasn’t that much more), she had levelled him. One of the men helped her to her feet as the others took time to laugh and swear and rearrange their clothes, tuck in shirts and smooth their hair. For a moment they looked back at the room, taking account for the first time, and she felt in the way they looked from her to the hurly-burly of bed sheets and upturned chairs, that there was no difference to them between the battered room and the people who occupied it. As if she had no idea of the shabbiness of it all.

But she was all right? Right?

When the three men finally dragged Rafí down the stairs his expression, his final look before he was hoisted out of view was of surprise and betrayal, as if she should be running after him, shouting at least, putting up some kind of resistance. Instead, Lila listened to the men clomp and struggle down the stairs then returned to the room, stood tiptoe on the mattress to lean out the window and watch the sidewalk – but no one came out of the door. Hearing shouts downstairs, she hurried to the kitchenette to see Rafí sprinting full pace across the flat roof. Two men half out of Rafí’s window withdrew as the dog went crazy, spinning at the end of its chain, lunging for them. When she looked for Rafí he was gone.

Lila sat on the mattress and waited for the men to return. She heard them come up the stairs and stop on each landing to demand payment from the traders, who each, at first, feigned disbelief, unable to understand Italian, some spoke in French, some in English, and she slowly understood that the men had come for the rents, rents that Rafí had collected. Collected and kept.