The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (74 page)

The basement, Peña explained, was what remained of an earlier building: small square rooms carved into the tufa with barrel vaults that might have been used as storage for food, oil, wine, nobody really knew, as nobody knew how old they were. Every building abutting the Duomo had similar rooms dug at different levels, each sunk deeper than an ordinary basement. Their layout didn’t conform to the layout of the buildings above and there were signs that they were once linked. Peña took the steps one by one, her hand fast on the side rail, and hoped that this effort wouldn’t be wasted. The temperature dropped as soon as they stepped out of the sun. The walls, rough as pumice, shed a white grit, a kind of static.

The previous tenant had left the room in a poor state: flattened boxes scattered across the slab floor, a stained mattress tied into a roll and tipped against the wall, a stove stripped of fittings turned into the room out of square. A window slit let in a little dull natural light through a shaft carved up to street level.
And was that via Tribunali or via Capasso seven or eight metres above them?
Salvatore couldn’t quite tell.

Salvatore stood under the window, cocked his head and appeared to listen. In all these years, he admitted, he’d assumed the door led to another apartment, or street-level rooms. Although he knew the city had subterranean vaults and passages, he’d never given it much serious thought.
In the war,
he said, and nodded.
Yes, in the war,
Peña supposed,
they would have been used for shelter.
Salvatore measured the room with strides. No one comes down here? he asked. It’s secure? Peña showed him the key-ring and chain. If he was worried about security, there were only two keys, he would have one and she would have the other. The last time these were used – she had to think back – would be seven or eight years ago. Whatever he wanted to store down here would be safe. Nobody knows about the place to steal from it, she said. Pay the rent in full and on time, and everything will remain secure.

Salvatore took two or three photographs with his mobile phone, although, in truth, there was nothing to show, and he didn’t seem to know what he was looking for. When he was done he snapped the phone shut and said he needed to return to the courtyard to get a signal.

Peña locked the door and laboured back up the steps. Not even halfway she paused for breath and asked if he was or wasn’t interested and the man became flustered. It wasn’t for him, he said. Hadn’t he explained? He was working as an agent, a go-between for his associates. They were brothers, businessmen, French, they didn’t speak Italian, and they were busy, so he’d agreed to check the room for them. Just as soon as he could send the images they would get right back to him.

He pressed ahead, and hurried through the door, and by the time she joined him Salvatore said he’d spoken with the brothers, they’d looked at the photos and they were happy. They’d take the room for one month, but they’d pay for two to cover any inconvenience or deposit. He could pay her now, in advance.

With money in her fist Peña repeated the terms of the lease. This was for one month, renewable before the end of the month. The first key would open the small door at the main entrance and the door to the basement from the courtyard. The larger brass key was for the room itself. Salvatore and his associates could come and go as they pleased, but they should not disturb the residents. As an afterthought she asked for the brothers’ contact details, just in case, and he wrote a number on the back of a business card. The room would need painting, if she could arrange this, and the men would require a driver.

It was only later, once she was back in her apartment that she looked at the card and read:
Room 312, Hotel Grand, CMdS.

For six weeks Mizuki Katsura’s clothes, hands, and hair reeked of a sweet vanilla. During the summer the bakery three floors below the language school on via Capasso produced small star-shaped biscuits, dipped in syrup and covered with paper then plastic and left to drip and dry on trays on racks in the courtyard. Throughout the day the sugar attracted a good number of wasps and the perfume rose as a fume and seeped, thick and unwelcome, into the schoolrooms and offices above.

The train arrived late at the Circumvesuviana station and Mizuki, phone in hand, stood at the door halfway reminded of the scent of burnt sugar. The morning sun cooked sweetness from the furnishings, the rubber seals, and the sticky floor. Idly stubbing her mobile against her cheek she squinted at the docks and recalled details of a detective story in which a man paused to smell jasmine before he was shot, but couldn’t remember the title or the writer. She could chase this notion on her phone and hunt down the reference, but did not like the idea that she was leaving trackable data every time she switched it on. Even so, she quickly checked for messages, emails, SMS.

The train stopped with a gentle shove. On the platform, immediately in front of her door, stood a young and thin man with shorn hair and a drawn face: tall and puppet-like and handsome, as European men can be angular and handsome. A creaturely intelligence about him that held a kind of stillness. Sunlight, softened by the humid station air, cast a broad square over the man as he waited. Handsome, yes, and maybe even cunning.

Mizuki rode the escalator and the idea of this man stuck with her as she dug out two euro for a bottle of water. Once on the concourse she found, to her surprise, the same man already ahead of her, waiting. A little more alert now. The man stood with his arms folded, chin down, attentive to the steady line of commuters rising from the lower platforms.

The realization that there were two men, not one, came slowly, an idea she only properly understood after she’d paid for the bottle of water and turned to find both men waiting side by side under the station’s awning. Dressed alike (one in a powder-blue shirt, the other in seamless white), and surely brothers; the man in the powder-blue shirt looked directly at her: a simple turn of his head as if he knew precisely where to look and what he would find.

Out of the station the traffic was stopped bonnet to boot. Horns sounded above the market and rounded hard off the buildings on either side. Mizuki walked by the market stalls and between the round walls of Porta Nolana, alongside tables of shoes and purses and undershirts, and a stack of birdcages. Agitated by the traffic the finch and quail squalled against the bars. Looking, even briefly, at their skinny necks made her skin itch. On Corso Umberto she found the focus of the delay: a long, low-slung tow-truck with a crushed taxi loaded on the truck-bed. Other cars looked only like cars, but the battered taxi had the bruised, gummy face of a boxer, its side compacted, slumped, the roof cut off and strapped back upside-down. At the head of the intersection by the newspaper stands and cash machines and racks of clothing the police fussed over an orange city bus stopped sideways and within metres of a smaller coach. The coach like the taxi had a mashed hood and a shattered windscreen. An ambulance turned in the corso, and Mizuki pressed her fingers to her ears and wished that she had walked some other way. When there were sirens it meant that someone was hurt, but worse, no sirens, according to Lara, meant that someone had died.

She deliberately turned her thoughts back to the brothers and sketched the differences between them, but couldn’t measure the look the man had given her: clear and direct, an assessment. The man was taking weights and measures. Mizuki brought her phone from her pocket and regretted not taking a photograph. No messages. No email. In this way she avoided thinking about the accident.

Access to the school (on the third floor at the back of the building) was gained through a courtyard, and before that a set of massive carriage doors of solid black beams with a small inset port door, through which you had to be buzzed. Such buildings, a feature of the city, were referred to as
palazzi
. Palaces. The word lent a formal air and a sense of protection to the apartments and businesses inside, so that ducking through the smaller door was very much like escaping the ordinary world: except this ordinary world had narrow streets, black cobbles as big as shoe boxes, the constant buzz of Vespas. The hidden world housed wasps. Mizuki always paused at the door, tucked away her hair, drew her sleeves over her hands, and worried over the wasps and how she would cross the courtyard without being stung.

✩

At seven o’clock on the first Monday in August, Marek Krawiec picked up the coach from its lock-up on via Carbonara. Marek drove a small eighteen-seat transit bus and shuttled American servicemen between the military base at Bagnoli and the airport at Capodichino. He took civilian aircrew between their hotels and the airport as and when required. English Tony arranged the work, provided the vehicle, and paid him cash in hand. The job ran scattered: two being the fewest, and eighteen the most runs he’d managed in a single day. Marek didn’t like flying and didn’t much care for the people he transported about the city. While he tolerated the servicemen, he disliked the aircrew. The men were effeminate, the women aloof, and once they settled onto the bus they ignored him and talked among themselves, unless there were complaints to be made about the traffic, the congestion at the airport, or the delays before the tollbooths.

While the work was light the morning was hot and Marek began to sweat. He’d gained two kilos since the beginning of the year and felt himself to be slowing down, although he could see no reason for it, no change in habit or diet. As he sat in the driver’s seat he avoided his reflection.

Tony waved him off with a floppy gesture, half-ironic and half not bothered.

At seven twenty, Marek returned to via Capasso to pick up his partner, Paola.
Partner
: her word. Marek waited outside the palazzo as Paola hurried about the bus, made no comment as she loaded the bags of shirts and struggled to close the door, then drove the short journey down via Duomo to take her to a machine-shop close by Porta Nolana that manufactured sports clothes. Paola worked at home, seldom less than a seven-hour stretch stitching sportswear logos onto pockets and collars for three cents an item. The house sang with the crank of the sewing machine and a kind of intense concentration she had with two hands down to the material, lips tight, willing the thread not to break, the material to hold. Most mornings Marek collected the shirts and vests and ran the loads back and forth, but on this day Paola wanted to negotiate the workload and the pay, and, he suspected, use this time to talk with him again about money, about why they never had enough. While Paola knew they were in debt, she didn’t know the full extent: the loan from his brother Lemi, the payments for his mother’s healthcare, a bank loan he could barely service, and back-standing rates and taxes on his mother’s apartment. Running between his mother in Poland, his brother in Germany, his
partner
in Italy, was costing Marek more than he was making. His mother’s unkempt slide into dementia hit his temperament and his pocket with equal force. To add to this Paola had decided that they would take a holiday this year. Somewhere nice. Not Poland. Not Germany. Maybe the Croatian coast? Like they were the kind of people who sat on beaches.

Paola remained testy from the previous night’s argument and it became clear that she didn’t want to talk. Where their disagreements had once refreshed them, they now brought drought. Delivered to her work in silence, she opened the door, tugged out the shirts, and muttered that she did not want him to wait.

Marek drove up Corso Garibaldi with a burn of irritation. At the corner of piazza Garibaldi he noticed a small red patent-leather purse in the passenger footwell, the kind of purse sold by African traders at the Stazione Centrale and along via Toledo. While he hadn’t seen it before he guessed it was Paola’s. Inside the purse he found a single twenty-euro note, a lipstick, and a small roll of receipts. She would be inconvenienced without the money and sorry to lose the purse. Without the money she’d have to walk home with the shirts.

With the purse in hand Marek missed the lights and failed to pull into the intersection. Horns sounded behind him, a taxi cut directly across his path – so close he automatically braced – the shock of this barely registered when the cab was struck by a city bus, punched sideways and shunted into Marek’s coach.

Marek dropped to his side as the airbags pillowed over him, as the windscreen blew out, and found himself straddling the gearbox on his hands and knees. The impact itself seemed to come later, after its effect, as a mighty shove, something divine, out of scale.

The accident left a buzz in Marek’s ears and dampened all other noise. He’d hit his head, not hard, but a knock nevertheless. Scattered birds came soundlessly down, and a kind of wonderment spread through him: if he hadn’t been preoccupied with the red purse he would be dead, he would have driven directly into the path of the taxi, of this he was certain; being caught on the rebound was nothing, nothing at all. Glass in his hair, a shirt ripped in the seam, but no real damage, except to the coach.

Passengers stepped off the city bus and walked in a disconnected stumble to the kerb. To Marek’s right a woman with bags tipped at her feet, groceries spilling into the road, pointed at the traffic lights and shouted,
red red
, in disbelief.

The instant it was over a bevy of car horns sounded along Corso Garibaldi and Corso Umberto. The first pneumatic punch brought people onto the balconies overlooking the intersection. Others hurried from the market stalls to catch sight of a crushed car and coach, a city bus stopped at an acute angle to the sidewalk. From under the cab rose a thin, violet quiff of smoke.

Marek studied the car in front of him, astonished that this – how many tonnes of steel? – had spun out of nowhere, as if the car had landed smack-bang out of the sky, as if the people stumbling from the bus were drunk. As if the men – the passenger slumped across the seat, his head resting on the driver’s haunch, the driver lolling over a battered door, shirt rucked to his shoulders, arms flung out so he appeared to be reaching or pointing – were some soft part of the car.