The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (79 page)

Salvatore finally turned the key, unlocked the door, and beckoned them forward. Lila looked up a last time, and there, bumping down the wall, came a small object tied to a piece of string. Arianna fussed with her skirt, Salvatore and Rafí ducked through the doorway. Lila, captivated by the thread and the lowering object – a toy, a small plastic figure – walked to the wall and waited for the toy to reach her, watched it twirl as it came down. Salvatore, irritated at her dawdling, hissed at her to hurry.

She raised her hands, let the toy settle into them, looked up as she drew the thread away from the wall. In the open window four flights up, she could clearly see a boy leaning over the edge, holding the other end of the thread and a torch. The boy flashed the light, twice, and Lila signalled back with two blinks. She directed her beam at the window and was surprised to see how young the boy was, his face all moonish, round, a little startled. Torchlight from the window strafed the paving, settled on her face. Lila smiled up and raised her hands so he could see the toy.

Salvatore shoved her out of the light so hard that she fell backward, and without thinking she punched, open hand, heel first, and blunted the man in the face, struck his nose – then scuttled to the doorway, and further, to the street, so fast that she didn’t stop until Rafí and Arianna grabbed hold of her. What was she playing at? What was she doing? Arianna pulled her upright, drew her quickly into the streetlight toward the noise of the Fazzini while Rafí reasoned with Salvatore, salvaged what he could, saying: ‘Calm. Calm. Let’s all keep calm.’

Lila didn’t understand the problem. Arianna stroked her face and said she shouldn’t worry, ‘but these men, they don’t want to be seen. It’s not so good to draw attention to yourself. You shouldn’t have hit him.’

Arianna hectored Lila on the walk back.

‘He was laughing at us,’ she complained. ‘What was he saying? How much we weigh?’ She waited for Lila to catch up. ‘The price of what, of meat? Who were these brothers? Who talks like this?’

Lila wanted to find something to eat. Michele’s would be open, they could pick up pizza, Pepsi,
frittura
, but Arianna walked ahead without a word. She walked wide of the doorways and the shuttered booths, suspicious of every man they passed.

Back at the Hotel Stromboli, Lila settled against Arianna. Arianna complained about the dog, her long body stretched out, head turned to the window, straw-coloured hair loose about her face. Bark, bark, bark, she complained, every time they come back. No end of trouble. She spoke slowly, lazily, as if the words were too weighty to heft out, her arm hung over the side of the mattress. On the floor between them, mismatched shoes, a scrap of foil, three lighters – all spent – an envelope with two remaining pills, egg blue on one side and white on the other. Lila pressed her head back into Arianna’s thigh.

‘Did it hurt?’ Lila asked. She could feel her voice vibrate through her collarbone. There had to be some science behind this, the way that people intuit sound, how some people sense danger, or how animals, dogs for example, or birds, know that trouble is coming, or feel threat in their bones, a coming earthquake, a lightning strike, a wall of water. The dog’s barks also passed through her.

‘Did it what?’

‘Hurt. When you were in hospital?’

Another pulse ran through Lila’s shoulders. She could smell Rafí’s aftershave, a metal tang to it, old and sour.

Arianna crawled out from under her and sat upright. ‘We need to think. We need to plan what we’re going to do when he comes back. If he had to give back all that money . . .’ She rested her hand on Lila’s head and apologized. ‘I should have been watching you.’

✩

In the late afternoon Peña swept the courtyard and kept an eye open for Sami’s toys but found nothing. When Dr Lanzetti returned to the palazzo he passed by Peña and continued to the stairs without a word. A man who walks with his head down, his hands in his pockets, a man who used to show politeness, who passes now without the time of day, is a man in trouble.

That night Peña waited until Arturo Lanzetti and Anna Soccorsi were in bed. Neither of them had spoken much through the evening; Anna’s mood infected the air. Again the palazzo settled into its own subterranean sounds, the tiny clicks of cooling tiles, the snap of contracting wood, of pipes tightening.

Sami appeared at the window some time after midnight, awake and ready. With his shoes over his hands he slowly pushed open his shutters. The boy must be standing on a chair, or a box, something to raise him level to the window so that he didn’t need to scramble up.

This confidence made Peña anxious. The boy was becoming bolder and she worried that with any misstep he would fall, but he stood, framed by the window, the room a black hollow behind him. After half an hour she could not help herself and drifted into sleep.

The first disturbance of the night came as a scuffle, a woman’s shouts and a confusion of voices, how many men how many women she couldn’t tell, although one of the voices, she was certain, was Salvatore’s. By the time she made it to the window the fuss was over, the entrance door shut, the courtyard silent. The boy’s window and blinds now closed.

The second disturbance came several hours later when Peña was woken once again by a soft call, men’s voices rising though the hollow. She looked out and saw the boy standing on the window ledge, one hand timidly touching the shutter, his toes tipped to the lintel. Four floors up and the boy stood at the lip of his window, knees slightly bent, while from the courtyard voices seemed to coax him forward with a baritone coo. Unsure of what she should do Peña picked up her water glass. Terrified that she might startle him and cause him to fall. She thought to drop the glass, but instead simply struck it lightly, a spoon against a glass – a slight sound, clear and distinct. The boy looked up. He stepped back, and Peña moved forward so that he could see her. The boy slipped further back from the edge, clambered down, then closed the shutters. With the shutters closed, the voices stopped, and she thought that she had imagined this. A startling image, a boy in a window, so high above the courtyard.

The third disturbance came at four in the morning. A shout from the boy’s room, cries, the clatter of shutters thrown open: light cast directly across the courtyard to brighten her room.

A scene of unity, the three together in the boy’s room, Lanzetti holding the child, the mother bent beside him, insisting that she look at his hand, prising it open, and the boy twisted away, stuck to his father crying slow ow-ow-ow’s.

Anna came to the window, looked down into the courtyard and then shouted across to Peña. ‘Who did this? You saw. You must have seen.’

Peña shook her head.

‘It’s impossible. You must have seen who did this. You see everything.’ Anna leaned further over the ledge, fierce and unwavering.

Peña again shook her head.

Anna left the boy’s bedroom. Lanzetti followed after – the boy fast to his side – asking where she was going.

‘I’m going to talk to her,’ Peña heard her say. ‘I’ll make her tell me who did this,’ she said, ‘that shrunken little bitch.’

Peña stood at her door and opened it knowing that the woman would shout at her, that there would be no containment, no reserve. Anna Soccorsi came across the landing with a toy held in her hand, a small metal car, the front end blackened.

‘They heated this. Do you see? He burned his hand. It was deliberate. Do you understand? This is assault, and you saw who did it.’ Now warmed up, she looked over Peña’s shoulder and caught sight of Sami’s toys laid out across Peña’s kitchen table. Her voice immediately slipped gear, became incredulous, alarmed. ‘What is this?’ She turned to Peña. ‘Those are my son’s toys. Look,’ she shouted to Lanzetti and pointed, ‘look, she has his toys. It was you? It was you! I’m calling the police.’ One hand covering her mouth, Anna turned and ran back to her apartment.

Back in her apartment Anna vented her rage at her husband. In one long monologue she lay out her dissatisfactions, her outrage, her unhappiness, and this, this assault, was the natural result of how they lived. A burn on his hand today, and what tomorrow? Lanzetti could not soothe her and found no consolation for her outrage.

Lanzetti came to apologize. Peña stepped aside and allowed him into her apartment. His eyes settled first on the table. She had cleared the boy’s toys away, hidden them in a drawer. Uncomfortable, the doctor nodded at the windows – the closed shutters.

‘All these people,’ he said, ‘so close. The way we live now.’ Lanzetti meshed his hands together.

She asked if he would like a seat, but the man remained standing, the size of him, filling the room. ‘How is your son?’

‘It’s not so serious. He has a blister.’ Lanzetti forced his hands into his pocket. ‘He was fishing,’ he said, ‘playing a game with people he couldn’t see. He sent down a toy on a piece of string and they heated it up.’ He began to apologize. ‘She spends all of her time with him. She won’t let him go to school. It’s difficult for her. And Sami,’ he said, ‘believes all of these things, these ideas. He mixes them up.’ Lanzetti smiled and shook his head. He spoke slowly and chose his words with care.

‘He says that he can hold his breath for fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes. This is what he says. He believes that he has special powers, that he can control things. He believes that if he concentrates hard enough he can shatter glass, or start fires, or flood a room. He believes that he can make the building shake.’

Lanzetti cleared his throat. ‘He does not like to sleep, because he thinks that when he sleeps he cannot control these powers. He believes that when he is idle he makes bad things happen, that when he is asleep he is responsible for earthquakes and landslides. For accidents. I read the paper with him every day to teach him that these things are coincidental. That they have nothing to do with him, that the world works without him and he is not responsible. But unlike other children he isn’t able to let this go. He thinks that there are people hunting for him. I’m not sure what we will do.’

Sami: Sami Saves Another Life

thekills.co.uk/sami

Sami: Sami Lanzetti Is Not Alone

thekills.co.uk/sami

Mizuki told the story in class about the brothers at the station. An ordinary moment, easily told, about how, on three successive days, she had noticed one man on the platform, the other up on the concourse, and how on that first day she was confused to see a man she assumed to be behind her, suddenly, so quickly, ahead. Today she’d found the men waiting side by side at the top of the escalator: both men had watched her walk by, hands in pocket, one without much interest, the other with a certain intensity. This time she had her phone ready, but didn’t dare take a photograph, and didn’t pause to buy water. In crude and cumbersome Italian she explained her confusion and delight in seeing one man doubled. Today, the couple (could you even call brothers a couple?) followed her to the station exit – although she couldn’t be certain that this was deliberate. She used the words
attractive
,
handsome
, when what she wanted to say was brutish.
Bruto
in Italian meant ugly, and the word caused confusion.

The tutor nodded as Mizuki spoke: not in agreement, but collecting mistakes. The group discussed what the men could be waiting for – some crime no doubt, Mizuki should watch her bag. Those stations are dangerous.

The tutor shrugged. ‘It’s part of our culture to observe. It rarely means what you think.’

The women disagreed, and began speaking in English. It wasn’t the looks, so much, but the comments, or the tutting, what was that about? Men tutting at women? And wasn’t it worse in southern Italy than anywhere else?

Mizuki found nothing problematic in the men’s interest. Nothing troublesome. It wasn’t quite interest in any case. She knew the word in English, she knew it in Japanese: one of the men was
assessing
her. Collecting information. He’d looked at her, three times, with a kind of assessment that had little to do with catching her eye. When men look at you they usually expect a response. But this man didn’t appear to want anything.

Although her story had nothing to do with coincidence, the class became busy with stories of happenstance: a woman who missed a flight that crashed into the ocean off Brazil, only to be killed one year later in a car accident in Austria; a man who survived one bombing in London to die four years later in another. Mizuki could not follow the logic. Europeans, she thought, Americans, are like birds in the way they collect information: greedy and undisciplined. How foreign this all seemed in comparison to the look she’d received three times at the Circumvesuviana, a look of solid concentration, a look signifying intelligence, a focused assessment.

With some effort the tutor drew the conversation back to the previous night, to conversations the students might have attempted in Italian. But the discussion slipped into rumour and could not be retrieved.

‘I don’t like it here. It isn’t safe.’

The group nodded in agreement.

‘It’s no worse than anywhere else.’ Mizuki shrugged and added that the city was beautiful, knowing this would please the tutor.

‘It’s not the city. It’s the people.’

The other students keenly agreed. Something about the city just didn’t feel safe. Mizuki flushed with embarrassment.

One of the military wives spoke up. ‘They warn us not to go into the centre on our own. We aren’t allowed into the Spanish Quarter. Don’t even think about it.’

While Mizuki had spent time in Berkeley there were still some American accents she couldn’t follow.

The tutor clapped her hands, ‘Italian! We speak in Italian!’ This was not what she wanted to discuss.

A French student shifted her chair forward. ‘I couldn’t live here. It’s all the same. The restaurants serve Italian food and nothing else. There’s a Japanese restaurant in Vomero, and guess what? They sell pizza.’ She held up her hands, exasperated. ‘Seriously. This is old Europe. It’s important what village you come from, or street, or neighbourhood. It matters. People actually care about that kind of thing.’