The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (111 page)

These ideas set fire to her skin. The rash won’t quieten.

She calls a specialist recommended by her sister-in-law and makes an appointment.

Monica takes the morning off work and turns up early at the specialist’s office in Portici. The rash hasn’t improved. Dr Novi carefully checks her back and asks after her diet and sleeping pattern. He washes his hands after the inspection and says that this is minor, although he is certain that it must irritate her, it’s unlikely to be caused by the chlorinated water. More likely than not the condition is caused by stress (and this is something she didn’t know?), although it was always possible that they were using different chemicals, or more chemicals than they should. He cannot be certain. He will provide a prescription for a salve, and suggests that if she wishes to continue her exercise that she swims instead in salt water where she will benefit from both the ions and the iodine, but failing that, there’s a mineral pool in Lucrino, a small distance from the city. It is, he said, a far second best, because it might be better if she does not swim at all.

Monica sits on the doctor’s raised bed, dissatisfied with the examination. She’d mentioned swimming only because this was easier than explaining about the cause of her stress. She can’t be certain about his recommendation either. Can she or can’t she swim? It isn’t clear. Swimming offers her the one pure moment when she does not have to answer to her family, or to work. While she swims, in that brief thirty-five minutes each day, she is completely alone, and the isolation that the activity brings is a welcome and rare pleasure.

Immediately out of the office Monica takes the metro to Cavalleggeri d’Aosta, and in the heat and bustle her clothes irritate the skin, and send a small charge, a pulse around her back. She tries to scratch her wrist instead of her back but finds this useless.

The pool is new, less than a year old, and managed by a university. Monica changes in a private booth, conscious that her costume is old, and that chlorine is beginning to rot the stitching. The pool itself is steel, of even depth, and encased in glass, one side looks out to a bright view of a honey-coloured cliff, the lip of a crater, the other to a parking lot, and in the distance, the other side of the crater.

Monica is joined at the poolside by a young man. Like Monica the man has with him a towel, which he sets on the slate side away from the pool, and goggles, the straps wrapped about his hand. She watches as the man walks to the head of the pool and chooses the centre lane, and she considers quickly who she would be able to keep pace with, and picks the lane beside the young man.

On her first few laps she finds herself swimming faster than her usual pace. Her stroke, although clean, is usually underpowered, but once she is comfortable she begins to move with economy and feels the motion to be smooth and direct, and for twenty minutes she swims without a break, aware of the young man in the lane beside her. As Monica swims freestyle, the young man swims breaststroke, and they fall into an easy rhythm, swimming at points side by side. When she stops, the man continues, and she watches him set the pace for the lane with a powerful, simple stroke – as his hands dive forward his head ducks down and his shoulders follow in a sequence that is direct and uncomplicated. Unlike the other swimmers he causes little disturbance in the water, no splashing, and no hurry, just a smooth and considered series of movements. When she starts again, she finds herself falling into the same rhythm and is mindful to contain her stroke and make the movement as direct and uncomplicated as she can. Hand slightly cupped, she breaks the water, thrusts her arm full length, then folds it under her in a long swift swipe, and finds with this simple adaptation that she moves quicker, further, faster.

At the end of his swim the young man stands at the end of the lane. Tall and gangly, he has none of the poise and grace out that he commands when he is in the water.

Monica returns to the changing rooms exhilarated, not only by the swim but by the coincidence of swimming beside the young man. It is only when she sits to take off her costume that her mood changes and she remembers the boy at the station, and an unreasonable notion strikes her that if one man she had noticed disappeared, it could possibly happen again. As soon as the thought occurs she dismisses it. There was no killing, she tells herself. No such thing.

Monica returns to the pool at the same time. As she walks into the building she’s surprised to see the young man ahead of her, smartly dressed with a small backpack. He leans forward a little as he walks. She guesses that he has come directly from work, and wonders if the people he works with understand how exceptionally graceful he is in the water. Out of the water there’s nothing exceptional about him, but when he swims everything about him seems in tune and in place. She stands beside him to pay for her ticket, neither smiles nor acknowledges the other, and the previous day’s anxiety is remembered but not felt. The man has returned, of course he has returned. Nevertheless, if she hadn’t seen him, his absence would have troubled her.

And so she swims beside the man again, each keeping pace, that one or the other sometimes breaks, and she finds this silent company comforting and imagines that a familiarity is growing between them. While she fights to keep pace she begins to recognize when her own stroke becomes similarly economical and pure. In just two sessions her stroke is beginning to change, she is becoming long, more decisive with her reach, so that the motion is unconsciously fluid. Afterward, she wonders if the man deliberately keeps pace with her, he made no attempt to force any other kind of contact between them. Out of the water they are strangers, in the water they are companions, and their bodies move at the same pace. She can feel his company as soon as she slips into the water. She is familiar now with the set of his mouth as he comes up for air, his quick efficient gasp, the hunch of his shoulders as he lunges forward, and the speed with which he pulls deep into the water.

This is, she understands, a distraction. The more preoccupied she becomes with the swimmer, the less she needs to think about the student at the station, about the boy at the piazza.

On the Saturday, the swimmer does not appear, it shouldn’t surprise her, but she finds it impossible to swim, and sits at the poolside waiting. That night her anxieties return in a full and wide-eyed sleepless distraction. She sits upright in bed, her back irritating, the nerve ends prickle, sharp and sensitive. The heat of the room and the oily stink of traffic catch in the night air, familiar to her as the station that morning two years ago. She sees it time and time again, the train door, the boy crouched beside his bags with his back to her, the shirt as it was on his back, and the shirt as it was, bloodied and cut. Why hadn’t she delayed him? Why hadn’t she spoken to him?

On the news the boy’s parents, Mr and Dr Lee, who move like people who do not trust themselves, whose bodies might at any point fail them, who look torn by grief and unknowing. They beg for the release of their son. Dr Lee speaks in Italian, explains how much her son loves the city. Speaks in the present tense to keep him alive.

Monica watches the news. The footage of the vigil. The candles as a map or a sea, all comfort taken from the image. They show the brothers, a still of their faces which gives nothing away. A politician explains that Krawiec is to be released but banned from the country. She does not know how they can do this. These brothers, the politician struggles for adequate words, come to our city to feed on us, not once, but twice, like wolves. There are calls again for information regarding Mizuki Katsura, the thinking now is that the killers have taken her absence, her disappearance, the belief that she was killed to be instruction and script on the abduction of the boy. She must come forward. How then did they find the first American? Was this an accident? Did they choose him the moment she passed by, or had the decision already been made, the boy as good as dead?

She sits at the edge of her bed, her back needling. The room is close, the air sticky, and she tries to calm herself by thinking of the swimmer instead of the student at the station. But the substitution of one man for another will not work. The man in the pool and the youth at the station, while not similar, were also too similar, and the sound of the traffic, the scooters, the taxis, the night bustle of the city, while not like the sounds of the station, were not unlike the sounds of the station. The familiarity, the associations were uncanny and close.

She thinks of opposites, of things that are not there and memories that will not trouble her. Instead of heat, she thinks of snow. Instead of the city, she imagines herself above it, safely distant, alone on the mountain. Her immediate memory is of her first close view of snow. She was five when her father drove her to the volcano and presented it to her as if it were of his own making. It was winter, the first day of the year, and she remembers the long and steep road along the flanks of the mountain, and her excitement at how strange it was to be looking back at the city rather than out at the mountain. The inner cone sheltered by the separate shattered ridge of Monte Somma, and between the two peaks ran a long and lower field of rucked and fluid lines of stone capped and softened with snow. The trees, so thin and precarious on the steep lip, appeared sparse and burned, black against a thin white drift, and it is with this thought, the notion of a field of blankness, of coldness, of everything alien to the physical heat currently pressing down upon her, that she is able to slowly shut the chatter out her mind. And to this place she brings the swimmer, and the two of them sit, silent, side by side, overlooking a plain snowbound void.

There was no killing. There were no brothers. The city does not exist.

The trouble starts as soon as they arrive. The flight to Damascus is delayed for an unspecified reason, which means another three hours with Udo.

Rike thinks they should leave him at the airport but doubts that Henning would approve. It doesn’t help that they are early. Udo wants to know if the trouble with the flight is a regular problem, or something more ominous.
Damascus
, he says, fretting the word.
Damascus
. He suggests a drive around the salt flats or into Larnaca, when Henning receives a call.

Henning dips his head to listen, one hand at his hip he strikes a pose of concentrated irritation. The call is bad news, and he looks to Udo. ‘We have identification,’ he says. ‘Papers on the train.’

Henning wants Udo to explain how an intelligent man can somehow disappear from inside a sealed train, moving at, what, sixty, seventy, eighty kilometres an hour, with doors which do not open, with windows which do not lower, to be found in pieces on the tracks? How is this possible? How does a man who has evaded capture for so long find himself caught between the Napoli–Roma Express and the Milano Eurostar? How?

In any case, he doesn’t believe that this is Stephen Sutler on the train tracks in Rome, any more than he believes Sutler was sighted in Grenoble, or that the man currently in hospital in Damascus is Sutler. Whatever identification they’ve found on the train will prove false.

Udo isn’t happy to be challenged. He isn’t happy to be talking about this in Rike’s presence. He begins to explain they don’t yet know what happened in Rome, and anyway, this isn’t their business. If he’s honest he doesn’t see why they should be responsible for the man in Damascus. He’s serious. ‘This isn’t our concern.’ Leave it to the Americans. Leave it to the British.

Henning holds out his hands, insulted.

‘This is your best advice?’

‘The police. The appropriate
British
authorities. Let them work this out.’

*

They view the salt lake from the car. The land slopes toward the sea then flattens in a perfect line to a field of white. Rike squints to take it in. There are stories of resurrections, visions, transpositions. Cities have been seen in the shimmering light, ships traversing or hovering above the plain. The salt is blindingly bright and moisture rises from the bed in waves which obliterate the horizon. While they have time, Udo doesn’t want to visit the shrine.

Henning asks Rike where else she wanted to go. Some mosque, right, a sepulchre or mausoleum? Could Rike explain to Udo about the sepulchre? Udo says he’s heard about it. Umm Haram? Hala Tekke? That building across the salt flat surrounded by palms. The only feature in an otherwise blank terrain.

None of them know for certain.

There’s some other place she’s thinking of in town.

‘I know,’ Udo says. ‘I know. I know what you’re going to say.’

Henning wants to make a point and won’t be robbed of the opportunity.

In town Rike visits the tomb on her own. Henning and Udo stay with the car and talk business. It’s exactly what you’d hope for. Something and nothing. Steps down to a chamber and an open tomb. A ceiling so low you have to bow. A row of censers. Stone and dust. The absent body of a saint. She isn’t sure how to behave in such a place, even on her own.

When she returns to the street Henning and Udo are leaning against the car, smoking and sulking.

‘Tell him,’ he says, ‘who was buried here.’

‘I know.’

Rike opens the car door, sits inside, winds down the window and tells Udo that this is Lazarus’s tomb, although the lid is shattered and the tomb is empty.

Udo holds up his hands, it’s the same gesture Henning uses. He rolls his eyes. ‘I know.’

Henning stands upright and the car adjusts.

‘We bring him here.’

‘We don’t bring him here.’

Henning turns to Rike. ‘Tell him why he’s here. Tell him about Lazarus.’

‘He isn’t here. It’s empty.’

‘But tell him. And tell him why he came here.’