The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (130 page)

Rike struggles to her feet. How typical is this? Mattaus, determined to insert himself where he isn’t wanted, has dug out one book, out of millions of books, with a familiar sounding plot. It’s pathetic. That’s what it is. Pathetic. Flustered, she goes through her pockets, then stops to look at the boy. ‘Did he tell you to say this?’

‘I don’t know your brother. He comes to the club, but I don’t know him.’

‘Liar.’

Her exit is messy. She bumps into a chair, walking, blind almost, extra-clumsy, humiliated. It doesn’t make sense that Mattaus would work so hard at this, unless, of course, he blames Rike for the farce on Saturday night.

Rike returns to the apartment and finds the book on the hallway table, with a note in Isa’s handwriting. ‘You have a fan! This was delivered for you today.’

She walks to the kitchen, opens the trash and is ready to drop the book without a thought, but decides against it. Fine. This is now evidence. Maybe Isa will see just how much of a bully her brother is, how pathetic and petty.

Even so. It’s hard not to be a little curious.

Wolf & Rabbit: Everything Comes to an End

thekills.co.uk/wolfandrabbit

He doesn’t know what’s happening, the road stretches ahead of him, grey and rubbery: the desert on either side a flat stony pitch, with heat rising in waves so the land appears furred. Whitby loves this, thinks of it as a TV landscape, something known, pre-encountered. The Americans he hires work in chinos and brown boots, white or blue shirts, regardless of their status or duty. Whitby, nicknamed
English
, has his own style: a lightweight suit, which he sweats through. He spends his life in an office or a 4x4, subject to air-conditioning.

The problem is this: he needs core samples for a road project financed three years ago. The road doesn’t exist, but the samples should already be in boxes, logged and housed in the company stores, proof of work done. And now he’s having to collect these samples himself, three years after the fact because people are getting sticky about these details. Once he has the samples he’ll have to drive back and make sure they are stored where they would have been stored, should the project actually have gone ahead. He calls these projects
gophers
, as in, go-for-the-money (don’t-deliver-the-project).

He’s on the phone as he drives. ‘My concern,’ he says, ‘is that we undertook the work we were required to undertake but this appears not to have been logged.’ Silence. ‘I was looking at them this morning. Those samples are in the store.’ The person he is speaking with contradicts him, and goes against the grain of the conversation. Whitby invites him to check tomorrow morning.

‘The road? I wouldn’t know about the road. That’s out of my
scope
. It’s not my problem. I was contracted to undertake a geological assessment, and I’ve completed the work that was requested.’ It’s a bald-faced lie. He knows it, the person he’s speaking with knows it. HOSCO published the pre-solicitation (PS), then the specific General Procurement Notice (GPN). MasterWork-Roadways (MW-R) submitted the successful Statement of Work (SOW), and subcontracted Whitby Earth Science Services (WESS) to undertake the surveys. That’s fact. After this the whole idea becomes
abstract
. WESS didn’t complete the survey, because MW-R didn’t intend to build the highway, because not one person in Iraq would actually ever need to drive along the entire border with Saudi and Syria. ‘Let’s make that clear,’ he says. ‘Not. One. Person.’

Whitby catches his in-caution. You can’t speak like this on a satphone. It’s not wise. Signals bounce off the ether, travel for millennia. NASA will capture it in echoes, crawlers on Mars will forward the information to god knows who, because who knows when this is coming back at you? You have to shut your mouth these days.

Against his better judgement he has to spell it out. ‘I know how this works. OK? I know. When I worked for you we built bypasses around towns that weren’t much more than encampments, bridges over dry wadis, turns in roads that didn’t need turns.’ He needs to be emphatic. ‘You’re forgetting. I. Know.’

He decides he can’t hear the caller, the signal, he says, it’s just not there. Nope, can’t hear you. Then cancels the call. It’s a small joy to imagine that frustration. The situation doesn’t need managing, not in its entirety. He just needs to look after his own part.

Whitby drives with the satisfaction of another man’s frustration chasing after him. He likes the idea that the burn of this conversation is making someone ache. He’s had the last word. As if to confirm this finality the signal for the satphone properly dies.

And the road. On the surface it looks the same now as it did when he started. Yellow to white plates of broken stone. Something that looks like a raw landscaped lot. Running under the surface it’s a whole other story. He can take core samples here, where the schist breaks through. In one or two miles the road curls as close as it’s going to get to the Syrian border. You could take samples at any point along here because there’s just the right concentration of fossil matter and silicates and gypsum, and say they came from anywhere along the entire length.

He has to get out of his car. He has a core-sampler with him. Needs to pick a spot that’s going to provide him with enough material. He slams the door and hears it automatically lock. Which isn’t right.

This is the first thing that goes wrong.

The keys won’t work. That’s great. The key is a hard plastic button. Something about it makes him think of Sweden. The pure design of it. A black button the size of a thumb print. A man’s thumb print. You press this button and the car unlocks, the engine starts, the vehicle adjusts to the driver, seats move, lower, lengthen. Air flows and temperatures alter. You can set the audio for your listening pleasure. He likes Caruso to greet him. ‘Una Furtiva Lagrima’. He hears the music and he’s in the movie. The keys won’t work and the door won’t open.

Fantastic.

He’s in the desert, thirty-something miles from the Syrian border. His vehicle has locked him out, and it’s playing Caruso. He has to listen to it, because you have to. The way the music steps, a little up, a little down. You know exactly where it’s heading. That tender baritone and the knowledge that singing this, his final aria, caused his throat to bleed. Caruso dead at forty-eight at the Hotel Vesuvio, beloved Naples. And here, in the desert, with the ground undulating in the white heat, it just makes perfect sense. His car has locked him out, and now it’s humming to itself.

He stands in the desert. Gives the car a look of hate, turns a whole 360, and lets out a sigh as the aria starts up a third time. No choice but to smash a window.

The thing is, and now he remembers, any damage and the vehicle goes into ‘alert’. The system locks down, the alarm sounds, a signal is sent across the world, supposing a signal can be sent. Only, wasn’t that removed? The man he bought the vehicle from had made some adjustments because he didn’t want to be tracked by some CIA car dealership.

It comes to him piece by piece. Locked out. Car in lockdown. No power to the phone. By his calculation he’s sixty miles from the nearest garage. From what he remembers the closest village is actually across the border in Syria. It won’t come to that. Not yet. All you do is wait. The goddamned thing will reset itself. The alarm will have to stop sometime soon. Just leave it alone and the codes automatically reset.

He waits an hour. Sits on the road with his knees up, and his suit jacket hitched over his head. With his fingers in his ears. It’s unnerving just how bleak it is, and how can there be flies out here when there is no other living creature? He sits on the tarmac with his back against the car and hides from the sun. The car, while it provides shade, becomes much too hot. For all of the expense, those self-adjusting seats, the assisted steering, the brakes, the interface between computer and vehicle – it’s nothing more than a heat-attracting can.

While in Naples Berens tells this story about William Tecumseh Sherman to Paul Geezler as distraction and example: the great general, in an early posting, was sent to Florida, and for almost a year he spent much of his time fishing in the company of a Sergeant Ashlock. This sergeant was sent to accompany a man on a court martial, and when he returned he brought with him a young wife. The breakers that day were rougher than usual, and while the first boat crossed the bar without trouble, the others, including Ashlock’s, were overturned. Ashlock’s wife had made the first safe trip, and stood on the shoreline with her sister and watched as the other boats fell into trouble. A nice day but a rough sea. The boats, caught in the surf, were quickly swamped and broken, and the men set upon by sharks. The next morning Sherman had the unpleasant task of walking the surf-line to identify the washed-up pieces of bodies, and the later duty of confirming the sergeant’s death to his young wife. It’s a small event in a larger life, but in writing it, Sherman expresses regret. As if this need not have happened.

Berens likes to imagine what it would be like to meet the general, say before the Civil War, on his way to an earlier campaign, travelling around Cape Horn, on the long voyage from East to West America prior to the Panama Canal. It would be interesting to meet the man, before he knew himself who he was. He’d like to meet Grant as well. Although he’d choose a later period, days before his death, when he’d given up eating, and worked to complete his manuscript for no less a publisher than Mark Twain. Berens would sit on the porch and watch the great man labour over words during his final days. This is what he’d like to see. Sherman before the conflict, and Grant long after.

Aside from this desire, Berens finds Sherman’s Ashlock tale instructive: at any given time you don’t know what’s coming at you. You really don’t. Ashlock single. Ashlock married. Ashlock in pieces along the shore. After the fact there is a certainty to this progression. Before, there’s only unknowing. Berens uses this story as a stall when he doesn’t want to give an immediate response, when he wants an idea to penetrate.

The entire endeavour is compromised right at the start. Berens sees the woman raise her hand, and only as she is lowering her hand does he notice that she is holding a mobile phone, and understand that she has probably taken a photograph of him. He gives no reaction, but passes through the hallway back into the museum. He deliberately does not turn about to watch Laura Parson and her husband as they come back down the stairs and make their way to the entrance to leave.

10.2

Berens waits on Piazza Municipio for Parson to come out of his hotel. When he does, he immediately calls Geezler. It’s just as he thought, he says, Parson has been booking into hotels under Geezler’s name, which means, in all likelihood, after all these months, Parson has been stringing them along: Sutler isn’t in Italy. Probably never was.

The next evening Paul Geezler calls with a new instruction. He’s had a discussion with Parson, and Parson is convinced that Stephen Sutler is now heading to Rome. The discussion, he says, wasn’t entirely agreeable. Parson is attached to the hunt in a way Geezler doesn’t like. Berens needs to re-check the hotel bookings. According to Parson, Sutler is still making hotel bookings in Geezler’s name. It’s confusing.

Geezler calls Tomas in the morning to discuss his concerns about the man in Grenoble. The man the newspapers are calling
Sutler Number Two
. He isn’t comfortable with the silence surrounding this story, which gives this version some credibility.

Tomas, who has already spent the better half of a week in Grenoble, is less convinced, and he persuades Geezler not to send him back. Berens’s bed is little more than a thin mat. As he talks he sits half up on his elbows and changes the phone from hand to hand – then finally sits upright, resenting that he is more awake than he cares to be.

‘It’s a whole other matter,’ he says, ‘with its own complications.’ A missing boy, a frantic mother, a pair of incompetent New York PIs who believe their own small drama intersects something more dynamic. ‘I found nothing. They’re using this story to make their own newsworthy.’

Tomas talks Geezler down.

‘These new Sutlers aren’t a problem. We need more than three. Let them proliferate. This is about density. Three Sutlers keep the attention on you. Thirty Sutlers is the start of a craze. It’s something else completely, and everyone will forget about the first Sutler. Right?’

Geezler isn’t buying the idea. It’s nearly April, he says. He wants them gone before the hearing.

Berens walks to the port. After waiting the day in his hotel for Geezler’s call it’s his first opportunity to see the city. He stands on the pier and watches the ferries turn at the mouth of the harbour, and something about their motion, which at first seems random, begins to make sense. Each of these boats is either departing or arriving, which means there’s a hierarchy and an order to who can dock first and where. By watching you can figure this out. Behind him the hills of the old city are crowned with forts and palaces, all handsomely familiar. But it’s the ferries for Procida, Ischia, Capri, and the brightening shoreline that hold his attention.

There’s less logic in his movement. Geezler wants something done about Parson. Parson seems always to be at Sutler’s heels, but never in step.

Tomas Berens watches Parson with his wife. The man assists the woman out of the taxi, leads her off the road to the sidewalk and kisses her goodbye at the concourse fronting the Stazione Centrale. She doesn’t see her husband to the platform – she has other business in town – and walks away, a rooted walk in flip-flops, her thoughts on the crowd, her path a slight curve toward the doors, passing the ticket machines to avoid the beggars, to the glass front, the broad plaza, into the day.

In the week Berens has spent in Naples he’s come to admire Parson, although he doesn’t fully understand – nor in fact does he need to – the reason why the man has been booking hotel rooms under the name ‘Paul Geezler’.