The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (75 page)

A man in a doctor’s coat, skinny and bald, hurried to the taxi. He leaned deep into the cab and as he drew out he sorrowfully shook his head, nothing could be done – an intimate gesture, Marek thought, which implied kinship: as if they knew each other.

Traffic locked the length of Corso Garibaldi and Corso Umberto, and in a slow outward spread the smaller side streets began to seize up. Marek could smell oil and rubber and the sun’s heat rebounding on the smooth black cobbles. He looked hard at the taxi and the dead men and resisted the urge to lie across the seat and see how long it would take for someone to come to him. He didn’t know what to do with himself. His job, he knew, was over. Without the coach Tony would not be able to hire him. The vehicle, too damaged to repair, would not be replaced. Without a vehicle there would be no work. Paola would need to be told.

Security guards from the Banco di Napoli escorted passengers from the bus; as the bus driver passed by he looked hard at Marek, his expression still and blank, one of shock, and Marek felt pity for him. The man in the doctor’s coat helped passengers to the kerb and looked at Marek as if he knew him, and Marek realized the man was his neighbour, Lanzetti, Dr Arturo Lanzetti, the pharmacist who lived on the fifth floor with his wife and his son. He knew his son, knew of him, heard him almost every day.

The first police arrived on motorbikes and rode the pavement alongside the piazza. The corso sang with their alarm. Firemen trapped in the traffic abandoned their trucks and clambered between the cars to the intersection, and everyone stopped to look at the taxi, the two dead men, then Marek and the coach, and shook their heads at his undeserved good luck.

Lanzetti came to the coach and opened the passenger door. He brushed the glass from the seat with slow sweeps then sat down, uninvited.

‘This will take a while.’ He offered Marek a bottle of water and told him to drink. ‘Will you let me?’ He signalled Marek’s head by tapping his own. ‘You have a cut.’

‘It’s nothing.’ Marek leaned toward his neighbour. Lanzetti looked and nodded, it was nothing to worry over. The pharmacist could give no information; a passenger on the bus needed to be taken to the hospital and although they had managed to get an ambulance to the intersection, it would be another matter getting it out. The medics were already in control.

The police slowly re-established order: the gathering crowd kept to the pavement, and drivers ordered back to their cars.

Marek leaned away from the sun and waited for the police to come to him. He showed the purse to Lanzetti and explained how it had delayed him, how otherwise, without the purse, matters would be very different. Lanzetti nodded as he listened, a slow gesture, one of comfort, as if he understood how the smallest coincidences of place and time could be of such startling importance. The difference between what did happen and what had nearly happened – which didn’t particularly require discussion, but needed to be acknowledged.

The road was hosed down before the roof was cut from the car and both men watched, silent and respectful. A ring of firemen held up blankets to block the crowd’s view and to prevent the curious from taking photographs. As the bodies were lifted from the squat wreckage Marek finally gave his details to the police and Lanzetti slipped quietly out of the cab.

The sight of the young men being laid carefully on stretchers and then covered with blankets struck Marek deeply; he looked hard, expecting some break in their stillness.

And what was their argument about? Money, sure, because every argument is about money. But this one started with a discussion about children, about how they could not afford, as a couple, to have a child, when really, the simple fact was that Paola did not want his child, and he wanted her to admit this truth. We have enough to look after, she said, with me and you. We have enough. Their arguments concertinaed, one to another, and while Marek remembered the insult he lost the particular words and phrases; Paola, however, recalled intricate points and details so that nothing was properly resolved. They each had their triggers: the uselessness of their work, their mismatched schedules, how lonely it was to go to bed alone or wake alone, how weekends when they finally spent them together were listless, empty, and how they both felt unattractive. Beneath this ran their own dissatisfactions (for Marek: his recent weight gain, his thinning hair, how easily these days he started to sweat. For Paola: the veins thickening on the backs of her calves, how tired she was and lately forgetful). Some of their disagreements grew out of their daily routine. Paola resented cooking, and Marek resented the half-efforts she would make, and how much food was spoiled through lack of care. How could someone prepare so carefully for sex (the gel, the foam, the condom slick with spermicide), and not have the wherewithal to make a simple meal? How could an Italian woman not cook? How could this be possible? And then there was the issue they usually avoided, the heart of every disagreement: Paola did not want his children. Who would want the children of a man who had no work?

When Marek returned he found Paola in the kitchen, deliberately positioned at a bare table with nothing about her, no cigarettes, no drink, so that her waiting would be obvious.

Tony had called. She’d heard everything from him, about the accident, about the coach, about his job. She stood up and walked to Marek and held him tightly.

‘He’ll find something. I know it.’

Feeling ugly and argumentative Marek closed his eyes. There wasn’t any
something
out there for Tony to find. In his mind a sign in the building supervisor’s slanted script, pinned under the mailboxes, ‘Painter Wanted’.

Letting him go, the recriminations started. Why hadn’t he spoken with her? Not one call. Why? ‘I called. I sent messages. Why didn’t you respond?’ Wasn’t she his partner? Didn’t this mean anything to him? Didn’t he have any idea what she was going through? My God, did he do this to her deliberately? He could have been killed.

She would be glad, he said. Happy if something had happened to him.

Paola’s hand fluttered in front of her mouth, and then, inexplicably, she began to laugh. She waved a hand in defeat or exhaustion and surrendered, tonight she wouldn’t argue. Instead, Paola walked queenly to the bedroom.

Once alone Marek looked for something to justify his meanness, and found Paola’s keys and mobile phone beside the sink. He took the phone to the bathroom and checked through the log. The only number dialled that day was his. The incoming calls came from mutual friends. He recognized every number stored in the phone’s memory.

In the wastebasket lay the packets of condoms and the spermicide he’d brought to her the night before in his demand that they be thrown away, and here they were, thrown away. Marek searched through the basket to see what else she had discarded, and found among the foil packets a slender box of contraceptive pills and didn’t understand exactly what this meant, although he could see, right there, that this was exactly what he’d wanted.

That night he lay awake and fretted over his work.
Painter Wanted
. It wasn’t a simple matter, even if the coach was replaced, he still didn’t have the proper papers. The insurers, the police, would want details about the driver. When he finally managed to sleep he was woken by the sound of drilling, a sudden racket from the street.

He struggled to read the time on his watch. From the balcony he could see two workmen. Another man stood bare-bellied on an opposite balcony and shouted:
What are you doing?
The workmen ignored him, and the man shouted louder. A magistrate lived in the same building. If Marek leaned forward he could see the apartment on the top floor.

During the day via Capasso appeared respectable, students from the language school took coffee at the Bar Fazzini, but at night women worked the corner. They sat on mopeds, indifferent to business. Marek wasn’t certain they were all women.

Behind him Paola drew the sheet over her shoulder.

The noise didn’t matter. The sound of the men drilling gave him a reason to be awake, a reason not to be in bed, and another example of how this city drove him crazy. As he watched the workmen he again considered the accident and wondered if the police had yet identified the men and informed their families. He wanted to thank Lanzetti, he wanted to find the pharmacist and thank him, because the man’s calm had made an impression on him. As he stood on the balcony a message came on his mobile from his brother Lemi,
call me
, which would give news of his mother wandering unsupervised from the care home a second time. A search by the police, and a requirement from the home to find her somewhere new, somewhere that could manage.

✩

At midday, as Peña returned to her apartment, she decided she would ask Marek Krawiec if he knew of a driver for the men who had rented the basement room. She took the stairs one at a time, her head swam with the effort. On top of the Duomo, perched on the dome, a hawk bobbed against the wind, sometimes sleek and sometimes ruffled. Peña watched from the second landing and felt her pulse calm and her head clear. When the bird launched the wind held it in place. Wings out, the hawk tested the updraught before it tipped backward and away. She watched it eat on occasion, some small bird held down and plucked, elastic innards and meat. A strange thing, if you gave it thought, a little repugnant, a bird eating a bird.

Ten years before, when Peña first arrived in Naples, Dr Panutti’s apartment was halved by a flimsy dividing wall to make two apartments, one for Dr Panutti, Snr., the other for Dr Panutti, Jnr. The wall once had a door, so the younger Panutti could steer the older Panutti through his final illness. Peña, employed as a companion and respite nurse, made herself indispensable and invisible, and earned the right to stay in the apartment as specified in Panutti Snr.’s will, much against his family’s desire. In taking out that door and sealing the wall, they turned the room into a sound-box, so that Peña heard the intimate comings and goings of the family who now rented the apartment: the pharmacist Dr Arturo Lanzetti, the voice coach Dr Anna Soccorsi, and their son, Sami. She knew when they ate, bathed, fought, and reconciled. More than this, the room duplicated the movement of sound: if Sami ran in some hectic game, his escape mapped a similar higgledy path across Peña’s room.

They called the boy Sami although she knew his proper name to be Francesco. With his dark hair and olive skin the boy could be taken for a full-blooded Neapolitan. He mostly resembled his mother, a woman Peña believed to be ill-suited to city life: unable to shift and adapt she pressed too hard in one direction. Peña could read this stubbornness in the woman’s thin-lipped mouth, in the sessions with her clients: the repetitive ‘peh-peh-peh’, ‘zseh-zseh-zseh’, ‘tah-tah-tah’ exercises, the insistent singsong rhymes she gave to stutterers, language students, and lisping adolescent boys. Their boy, Sami, often alone and unsupervised, played with his toys at his bedroom window, and Peña sometimes found these toys scattered in the courtyard. Small plastic figurines of crusaders, Roman and American soldiers, robots, caped action characters, and other figures she couldn’t place. She would find them and she would pocket them, and she would take them to her room.

Most mornings before Arturo Lanzetti went to the pharmacy he sat with his son and read through the headlines from the previous day’s paper. The child’s voice, sweet and high, carried easily through the wall, and Peña, who spent her mornings cleaning the stairwell and courtyard, made sure she finished in time to enjoy the company of their voices. She began to associate the boy’s voice with the morning light that flooded her room.

At night he dropped tokens into the courtyard, sometimes lowered on string: small figurines, notes, coins, folded scraps of paper, wads of bread, pieces of his mother’s make-up. In the morning she would retrieve them.

Today, as on other days, Peña climbed into the armchair, restacked the cushions and scooted herself back so that her legs stuck out. Of the four places where she could listen to the family, three offered views into their apartment (the kitchen, the hallway, and the boy’s bedroom), which ran around the courtyard and mirrored her own apartment. When the shutters were open their lives were offered up one to the other in merciless detail.

Sami read out the world’s news with sticky precision. His ear was good and he repeated the phrases he couldn’t grasp, softly correcting himself.

‘Brasilia. A fire . . .’ he read.

‘Brasilia,’ Lanzetti repeated, ‘a fire . . . in the centre of the city.’

‘Brasilia . . .’ Peña softly whispered.

The older Panutti had taught her Italian in exactly the same way. Reading, repeating, reading, until her Portuguese bent to Italian. Later he helped in other ways, providing medication, then braces to help straighten her legs. The more you use them, he said, the easier this will become.

As she listened Peña took her medication. She laid the pills along the smooth walnut side-table and took a sip of water, a tablet, another sip.
The boy dropped toys into the courtyard and she retrieved them: the small soldiers, crayons, pens, a racing car, a diver with the yellow aqualung.
She listened to him read. The boy’s pronouncements outlined a chaotic world. The tumble of an aircraft into open water; a fire erasing an entire city block; a mudslide sweeping houses, cars, caravans into a widening canyon, events which described nothing godly or divine, but simple laws of opportunity, matters Peña understood to her core. There was nothing, she considered, not one thing, which could truly surprise her. After reading the headlines Sami turned to the local section to read stories of disagreements, strikes and train stoppages, contracts for uncollected trash. After this he read the sports, although this was news they already knew.

A sip of water. A tablet. A sip of water.

Propped forward with pillows, Peña sat upright and motionless, her eyes fixed on a length of sunlight vibrating into the room. Her medication amplified her waywardness, a potential to slip away. Tiny things tumbled down the side of the building. A steady rain of falling toys: a cowboy, a diver, a mule, a racing car, a lipstick, a robot that was also a car, a troll or what she took to be a troll, a key-ring, a mobile phone, a face cut out of a magazine flickering down, a hawk – wings open, a number of pigeon eggs, one by one, a series of keys, an open can of paint, a boy who could swim through air.