The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (110 page)

Monica watches the image on her own, sits at the side of her bed, the remote in her hand to change to another channel. The image switches, a kind of flicker, as if something has been edited, and loses colour completely, shows the men as they push through, bodies angling sideways, shoulder first. In every example it’s almost the same, or a version of the same sets of information: two men, on either side of what you’d take to be a petite girl, Asian, who appears to be drunk or stunned or stoned. The two men look like boxers in the way they duck forward, although the association makes no sense to Monica, perhaps because of how lean they seem, and their clothes, the caps, the coats, an attitude to them of stern and focused business. And the girl – who she knows to be a boy because this has already been reported and discussed, and because the screen carries his name – Yee Jan Lee – although this could be the name of a girl as far as she can tell, because this is the face of a girl, deadpan white, and eyes so small, would it be wrong to call him pretty? And something wrong with him, seriously wrong because he isn’t walking properly, he’s being held up by these two men who bully him through, propped on either side, and move as one brusque unit, no gentility about the shove and shunt and push, and there, in the register of the boy’s mouth a turn, a down-turn, that might be pain. He’s being swept through. Monica thinks of him as a girl because this is how the boy is presented, a painted face, luminous white, delicate eyes drawn in, a painted face with a slender feminine mouth, so much about this boy is soft. The boy’s face sweeps by the camera, nothing more than a blur, his eyes are certainly looking into the camera, and there, a hand gripped on his upper arm. If he or she passed by you so close you could free him, hold him, keep him from harm. The videos insist that this is a present action, something happening continuously: the ongoing abduction of a boy in a crowded piazza. A counter beside the name marks the days he has been missing. 4.

She watches again.

A different view taken from the Duomo steps so that the field of people is specked with a pulsing light, the candles too many to account for, star points, a map of light, and she can see the disturbance, how the light appears to grow dense, block together as the three bodies push through, a small hole behind them which soon, water-like, refills itself. The buildings opposite glow with ominous long, hollow windows.

Again. Another view. Closer.

The crowd barely move, the threesome press directly toward the camera, shoulders first. No one steps aside to allow them through so they have to shove and lumber past the person taking the shot. The camera jolts, is held up to show a brighter set of lights, the film set beside the Duomo and the scaffold holding floodlights which turn night into day. Something about the crowd reminds her of an execution, a public trial. She’s old enough to remember Tiananmen Square.

Monica watches because she has promised to do this, and tries to concentrate on the men, the boxers, the brothers, as they bump deliberately, shoulders set to knock people out the way, some small cries of protest. But every time she can’t help but focus on the boy, it is impossible not to watch him, and she can’t imagine how this could happen – an abduction during a silent protest, one body selected and removed.

She has to understand how this could happen. How someone could be picked out when surely all attention would be on him, everyone would notice him. She cannot help but watch the boy. The boy appears drunk, ill, out of it. The men have purpose, threat in their speed, which dares to be challenged – and this, the greatest shock of all, almost unaccountable, is their pure nerve to show themselves, join the very crowd protesting their actions two years earlier. Everybody is here because of these two brothers.

The news today is worse, if this is even possible. There is footage from the police, not from the demonstration but images taken a week before of a man waiting in a small street. This image is almost black and white, and at one point, showed slowly, the man appears to leave a message, make a series of gestures, his hand up, a signal she cannot read. The same baseball cap, the same jacket. A one point a group of people come out from under the camera, and there, among them, the boy from the piazza. Yee Jan Lee.

Monica sits and watches, unsure of the limits of her body. She can’t feel her fingers, or sense anything other than her breath and chest, aware that it hurts to watch, but now, exhausted, she feels like she is starting to disappear. There is nothing about the brothers that she recognizes. Although they must have been there, two years ago, on the platform, in the station. They had to have been close, she must have walked right by them, there is no possible way she could not have passed them. She has taken the very same walk many times in the intervening years and looked at every detail and wondered, in a space so small, how could she not have seen them?

On his first visit the man made it from the door to the rack of magazines. On the second he managed a further two metres to the desk before changing his mind. On his third visit, which comes minutes after the second (they have all occurred in the space of one morning), Elisa, who always keeps an eye out for the weird ones, announces as the man steps in from the street that this is a travel agency for the purpose of booking flights and holidays. OK?

‘You come here when you want to go somewhere.’ She slides a brochure across her desk. ‘If you want anything that isn’t travel-related then you’re in the wrong place.’

Monica, being less confrontational, asks the man if she can help, and the man asks if there are any brochures for America or England. Monica points to the rack at the brochures facing out with pictures of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, searching herself, and then and along a lower shelf, aha, Las Vegas, San Francisco, New York, and there it is, London. ‘Where are you thinking in England,’ she asks, and realizes she can’t think of anywhere other than London. London, England, even though she has relatives who live in Manchester. She can’t remember booking anyone a trip to anywhere other than America, North and South, in a long time. She tries to chat but it isn’t easy this morning: to be honest everyone figures out their own arrangements these days (she’s talking nonsense because she just can’t focus). Everyone has a computer. She makes a grimace and the man smiles. After the smile he steps forward as if they are a little more intimate.

‘London? OK? That’s what you wanted?’

He gives a dismissive blink, a slight head shake, and asks if she speaks English. Monica answers in English.

‘I do. A little.’

‘You are Monica Cristobari?’

And here she realizes her mistake. There is no holiday. There are no plans. The man, like many others, has sought her out and now he will tell her why, they always do.

‘Did you recognize them? The brothers? Did you remember them?’

Monica raises her hand to her head, unconscious of the movement. Elisa flies at the man as he speaks.

‘My name is Doctor Arturo Lanzetti. I live at via Capasso 29. I have seen them before. I recognize them.’ The man, walking backwards now, is repelled from the shop by Elisa with a loud
Out, out, out.
Monica, stunned, moves as if she is swimming. Before Elisa has the man expelled, the door closed, the lock secured, the bolt drawn, Monica has her jacket over her arm and speaks as if this is rational – she thinks she should be getting home if that’s all right. And Elisa guides her to the back of the shop, insists that she sits down, swears at the man, tells Monica she should wait a moment, let him leave and she will call her a taxi.

‘You shouldn’t have come in today.’

Elisa returns to the window to check the street, but can’t see the man because the market is busy. Monica shakes her head. ‘It isn’t going to stop, is it? It’s never going to stop.’

The man stands on the opposite kerb until Elisa makes a show of calling the police, her phone held up dramatically, to demonstrate her intention. Once the police do arrive, purely coincidentally, the man disappears.

Elisa turns the blinds to direct the light from the street and close the view. A distraction? Is that what they need right now? Some noise? A distraction? The radio?

‘He won’t be back.’

Early afternoon, on a bright day, most days, the gold lettering on the opposite shop window shines across the floor, and slips slowly across the linoleum to the foot of Monica’s desk. Monica would slip off one shoe and slide her foot into the path. Today she stands at the edge, mind blanking on ideas on how she can excuse herself and leave.

Elisa bins the newspaper, unread. ‘I’m not in the mood for news.’ No interest today in reading about the film or the actors – which out of respect has stopped production, or at least filming in town.

‘It’s – honestly. I’m OK.’ Monica watches Elisa rearrange the drawstrings for the blinds: her blouse untucks from her skirt. ‘It’s just,’ she shakes her head, still can’t think of anything to say. ‘Rude. The point shouldn’t need making.’

This is how things are these days, the women agree, without any real thought, any conscience. Someone has an idea about something and they just go ahead and do exactly whatever they please.

Elisa always agrees with Monica, even when she disagrees, you’re right, she’ll say, then pick a word and stick with it. Most days Monica finds this funny, endearing even. Some days, though, it would be nice if this didn’t have to happen.

‘You’re right. There’s no respect for privacy. That’s really the problem. That’s honestly what this is about. If we’re being honest about this, they didn’t have to do it here at all. The film. And they’ve chosen the actual places. Honestly. The palazzo. Ercolano,’ she hesitates, manages not to say the station, the abduction and it is still only an abduction, because no body has been found, the boy, carted away from the piazza, has disappeared. ‘Can you imagine?’

Monica hums her disagreement. ‘Can we not do this today?’ Her computer fades into sleep mode. On screen a man swimming, a shot taken underwater looking up, spars of sunlight radiating about him.

That afternoon, while changing into her swimming costume, Monica feels a cold pulse pass across her lower back. She has stuck with her regular routine. Insisted upon it. She checks herself in the mirror and remembers a rash she discovered that morning. Not a rash, so much – nothing more in fact than a small area of dry skin, but it has now divided into two patches on either side of her spine. Monica prefers to keep out of the sun, and exercises in an enclosed pool. Her skin is snowy white. She seldom sits under direct sunlight.

Troubled by the rash she decides not to swim. There are chemicals in the water, she tells herself, which will aggravate the condition. Monica believes that this discomfort is caused by stress.
It would be strange if it didn’t happen
. It’s impossible to avoid the news about the film, or news about the boy, who was taken, they suggest, as a stand-in for the girl they didn’t take two years ago. A fascination now with Yee Jan Lee, a boy, who by rights should not have looked so pretty. It’s impossible to avoid the storm growing around the conviction of Marek Krawiec, who was right all along. It appears. An appeal is lodged. So who are these men, these brothers? And why would they come to the city to kill one boy then grab another? She isn’t sure she understands. Uneasy with her part in this, she finds herself featured in reports in the
Cronache
and the
Corriere
as ‘the witness’, or ‘the sole witness’ to the first killing, and while her name has not become generally known, it’s no secret that ‘the sole witness’ works for a travel agency located close by the Centro Direzionale. Her clients, her friends, her family all know the story and are all alarmed by the weekend’s developments.
People being picked off the streets.
Truth is she’s thoroughly sick of it.

By example: when Monica returns home her cousin Davide asks if it would make sense for her to take some kind of a holiday until everything blows over.

Monica, preparing the evening meal, her hands wet, pauses long enough to ask why she should have to stop her work and head off to some place – if it was even possible – where they hadn’t heard of this case?

‘Maybe China,’ she says, ‘or India? Or some place where people don’t read?’

Davide insists that he’s serious.

‘And I go, and then the film comes out and there’s a big fuss in the newspapers and all over the television. I leave again and then I come back. Then it’s released on DVD – there’s more fuss, I leave and I come back. And then it goes on cable, then RaiUno. And on and on.’ She draws her hands out of the bowl, wet ring-less fingers. ‘And then . . . perhaps someone will write a book about making a film about a story that is taken from this book which is taken from a real-life story that was copied from a story in a book. You know? Or maybe there will be a video game? Something they can play in the arcades? And then later they can remake the film, or make the film of the video game? Or maybe there will be some other imagined crime that these men can act on and make real?’

Davide visibly weakens under this reasoning – in his defence he’s trying to suggest something practical.

‘There isn’t any escape, Davide. There isn’t an ending. It doesn’t just stop because we are tired of it.’

Despite herself Monica is becoming increasingly preoccupied by the three minutes or less in which she witnessed the young man at the train station. And this is two years ago now, two whole years. The man had sorted through his bags with little hurry, unaware of the people about him, as if he had somewhere to go, somewhere to be. Two years ago she become frozen by the event, caught in endless possibilities, so that the event itself became completely unreal, a fiction. What if he had not paused? What if he had taken a moment longer? What if she had spoken to him? Would the sequence of events that brought him to the small basement room in a dirty palazzo on via Capasso have played out differently? To add to this she wrestles with the uncertainty of what has recently occurred. Like everyone else she entertains alternative possibilities: perhaps the boy isn’t dead, perhaps this is just like the book, an elaborate scam?