The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (96 page)

Niccolò again reminded himself to sit upright. He said nothing. It was obvious that he was helping the police. She should understand this. Tomorrow they were to take him back to the warehouses in Ercolano again, and this would all be cleared away.

‘Niccolò?’ Livia shook her head, her hand now clapped to her mouth. ‘How have you become so lost when I have always been by your side? How did you manage these things?’

Niccolò folded his arms and closed his eyes.

Eyes swollen from crying, Livia slowly regained her composure.

The magistrate agreed to meet with Finn on the understanding that his name would not be mentioned and there would be no direct reproduction of any of the material he would present. Finn agreed without hesitation and arranged an earlier flight so he could make his way directly from the airport to via Crispi in Chiaia in good time to meet the magistrate at
Prima!
– a café he’d picked for such a purpose on his previous trip, the kind of venue that deserves a tracking shot, a slow reveal of the space and the few mindfully solitary characters in it; white tiles, a god-damned chandelier, smocked waiters, a canvas-covered patio (in a word: Europe).
Prima!
sat beside an intriguingly unnamed jewellery boutique just up from Ferragamo, Emilio Zegna, Armani, and further over – piazza del Martiri. Pleased about how his day would focus down from Paris to Naples, to Chiaia. He liked the economy of it – the first day of his second visit to Naples. He’d be working as soon as he set foot in the city. The very moment.

He wanted to use his time efficiently because he only had the summer. He needed to be
effective.
In less than eighty days he would be a student again, one of a number, pushing a student loan, a coffee habit and unsociable hours; but during the summer he was a writer with a project. A writer with a project and a publishing contract. A sophomore (soon to be final-year) student with an agent and a contract, about to hold a discussion about a notorious and unsolved murder with a respected anti-Mafia magistrate. Hard to believe how the year was working out. In travelling Finn had focused his luggage down to two items: a small backpack; a soft hold-all. Both could be slung over his shoulder, and he fostered this image of himself, as someone mobile, focused, unburdened but connected. The contents of his luggage reflected this ambition: in both bags he’d carefully wrapped a wealth of goods, a laptop (new), a portable hard-drive, two USB memory sticks, a DV camera (borrowed at the last minute from his sister), a phone, and less convenient, the assorted cables and plugs because they’ve yet to figure out the proper portability of these items. Along with this were his notebooks. These books were precious, seven already filled with his tiny writing, a compact concentration of notes from interviews, his own impressions, research from the sites, scraps of papers, tickets, receipts, things discovered while out and about, and he’d been smart enough to choose small books and marked each one with his mobile and home number, email addresses, and a note on the first page suggesting a reward might be paid if they were found and returned.

Finn wanted to test-drive a way of life – this is how he’d phrased it to his sister – see for himself if he was cut out for writing. While he loved college – what wasn’t there to like? – he was working it hard and didn’t see the point in waiting around, holding on for blind luck and good fortune while amounting debt. The whole point about ambition is making sure it happens (name one other sophomore to secure a publishing contract). Carolyn agreed, besides, he was older than the other students, and that five years made a difference. They talked this over, endlessly refining, because beyond choosing a smart college and a sensible course with professors whose references would really matter, nobody really considers the bigger picture, not really, and just because his family were loaded didn’t mean he could ignore these things. No one really figures this through. Most people just let things happen to them, like they’re lucky. Not that Finn wasn’t lucky. Moderately good-looking, modestly intelligent, white, and with parents who didn’t mind bankrolling the project while he waited for the advance, just so they could brag that their not-yet-graduated son had a publishing deal and was writing in Naples, Italy for the entire summer (and your kid has an internship, er, where exactly?). From Finn’s perspective everybody gains something this summer: the parents, the college, the publisher, and certainly (not least of all), Finn himself.

Finn ordered coffee, spoke Italian well enough to feel part of the general rush, although Spanish was the language he swam in. The value of the magistrate would come in the form of names, not anecdotes (which Finn already knew), and through inflection – the weight he placed on certain events, and the sequence in which he ordered them. Aside from this, a senior magistrate who wasn’t willing to go on public record but still had something to say (unofficially) would make an excellent introduction to his book, not to mention the boost it gave the project: people were still interested. Finn couldn’t imagine a better situation. He didn’t expect to uncover anything new, not after a year, but he did expect to find new people and new perspectives – much the better if they wanted to remain anonymous.

As a figure, the magistrate didn’t disappoint – reassuringly familiar (as if cast into the role) – tall and thin, slightly wild grey hair, a hint of stubble, a man both preoccupied and focused. Distinctive, Finn thought, an air of instinct about the man, an intelligence and concentration he’d like to describe. As expected the information was less than revelatory: the magistrate ran through what he knew to be happening.

1.  Since his release from custody, Niccolò Scafuti had returned to his apartment at the Rione Ini estate on the outskirts of Ercolano, where he now lived a solitary life. If the magistrate had any personal regrets, it was the involvement of Scafuti in the investigation and he wished that the man had not taken the walk that night and discovered the American’s clothes and brown bag. But he didn’t think, a) given the circumstances, b) Scafuti’s unwise decisions, and c) what they knew at the time, that anything could have played out any differently. Scafuti had destroyed evidence, it was unfortunate, a criminal offence which had caused great damage. Who knows what might have happened if they’d read the notebook?

2. Marek Krawiec. Now here was an entirely different situation, and the magistrate remained clear and absolute about the fact that Krawiec could not be interviewed, and neither would he be coaxed into any kind of acknowledgement of where Krawiec was being held (most likely Rome). The case was under judicial review. On this the magistrate remained firm. Marek Krawiec could not be interviewed. He could say, though, that investigators were hopeful about finding the missing bodies. Krawiec was still emphatic about his innocence.

3. The palazzo, of course, was indeed the palazzo at via Capasso 29 close to the Duomo and the tourist district – everybody knew this and it had featured in many news reports over the year. This didn’t stop a rumour that this palazzo was not the actual site of the murders – that there was some kind of cover-up because somebody important lived in the building where the killing had actually occurred. This was plainly untrue.

4. Evidence. There were many other rumours which were not true: the evidence taken from the basement room on via Capasso and discovered on the shoreline at Ercolano was not destroyed or lost, and was not mishandled or contaminated as many reports had speculated. Much of the blood evidence was destroyed by the sea, but even so, there was plenty of other evidence to confirm Krawiec’s presence in the room (which, interestingly enough, he never denied).

5. The missing student, otherwise known as ‘The American’, ‘The Student’, or less frequently as ‘The First Victim’, seen once and only once at the Circumvesuviana station dressed in the hunter-green T-shirt with the five-point star design, had not yet been identified, and no other remains had been discovered. The DNA from the shirt, shorts, undershorts, matched the blood evidence on the plastic taken from the room and recovered from the shoreline, and these were assumed, until new evidence or Krawiec told them otherwise, to belong to the American. The American was picked up probably before he had a chance to check into a hotel. The only blood evidence belonged to the American.

6.  The man known as ‘The Second Man’ (the body discovered in the abandoned paint factory in Ercolano) had never been mistaken for the missing student – ‘The American’, or ‘The Student’. This death, the autopsy demonstrated, could be attributed to a combination of factors: a blow to the head, the resulting haemorrhage, and drowning after he was dumped in the storage tank. Because of evidence found in the tank with the Second Man – the novel, a wallet, a digital player – assumed to be items taken from the student – this ‘victim’ had always been looked upon as a co-conspirator, although they were unable to establish his identity.

7.  The body of Mizuki Katsura, AKA the missing ‘Second Victim’, had also not been traced nor recovered. And here the magistrate wanted to talk about what he called the situational context. ‘Imagine,’ he calmly laid out the facts, ‘in a region of four and a half million people, how many more transient people come and go who are not accounted for?’ Some legitimate, but a good number without account. There is immense opportunity here for exploitation. Both victims were linked by one known circumstance; they were both known to have passed through the Circumvesuviana station in the early morning. A friend at the language school confirmed that Katsura saw two men, had noticed them at the station, and commented on it in her class. The magistrate believed she had seen both Krawiec and the Second Man hunting, as it were. Katsura’s belongings were found in the room she had rented in Portici. The name and address she’d given the language school were not genuine – who knows why?

8.  The star. Now here’s a coincidence – which might one day be explained by Krawiec when he finally talks. Fact 1: Mizuki Katsura went to school in a building on which there was a sign showing the outline of a five-point star held within a circle. Fact 2: The American, and this is still all they really know about him, wore a T-shirt with the same design. Again, there were theories about this, many wild and ambitious, semi-occult ideas. To the magistrate this spoke of something both deliberate and accidental. A coincidence, which, examined in the right light, would open up a methodology, systems of thinking, habits which could be key in definitively identifying Krawiec and the Second Man as the killers.

9.  The existence of the Brothers. From the start the killings were considered as crimes which had to be committed by more than one person. The logistics of erasing not one, but two people would require resources not open to a single individual. Krawiec’s story about brothers from France was exactly that, a story, a fancy, implausible at best – a ploy to get the system tied in knots while they chased down phantoms. The people who could supposedly confirm the existence of these brothers, other residents at the palazzo, had never in fact met or seen them. The building supervisor, Amelia Peña, was a fantasist.

Which brings us to, 10. the most contentious issue of all: the relationship between the murders and the book
The Kill
, published anonymously as a fanciful memoir by Editiones Mandatore, Madrid, in 1973, then by Universidad di Seville in 1997, where it was presented without the introduction as a work of fiction: one in a series of novels published as ‘crimes in the city’.

The magistrate regretted the coincidence very much, and wished that the link had never been drawn – another attempt by Krawiec to muddy the water, this one, wildly successful. True, a copy of the book (the ’97 edition) was discovered in Krawiec’s apartment. The magistrate had to be honest. ‘The book, this
Kill
, is not about Naples. It doesn’t mention the city, the region, the country. Not once. The city in the book bears no comparison to the city in reality. It is a work of imagination and a truly regrettable coincidence.’

‘So you’ve read it?’

‘It has been a while now, and I no longer recall the details.’

‘But the details are very similar.’

‘They appear similar.’

‘A room prepared with plastic. The body cut up and left in the palazzo. The blood.’

The magistrate shook his head.

‘In the novel, there are other items. What happens with the feet, if I remember correctly. The bones. The organs. An ear. Teeth. Some hair. A tongue. Evidence is deliberately scattered in places to incriminate people who live in the palazzo. There are elements that seem similar, but a number of important pieces aren’t there.’

When asked if he believed whether Marek Krawiec and the Second Man had collaborated precisely to realize the murder described in
The Kill
, the magistrate shrugged.

‘To what purpose would they do this? They abducted tourists. These were crimes of profit or opportunity. Pure and simple. To recreate a fictional event is something much more imaginative, even intellectual. Something well beyond their scope. And they would have to have read the book. Marek Krawiec does not read or speak Spanish. He has the book, but he can’t read it. Perhaps he knew something of the story, and perhaps this is part of his fiction, along with the brothers, another invention.’ The magistrate asked Finn to consider. ‘The practicalities are more convincing. You abduct someone from a train station. What are you going to do? You rob them, take from them whatever you want, or do with them whatever you want to do, and because you have already exposed yourself to certain unnecessary risks it becomes necessary for you to kill them. This is a city of four and a half million people who live on top of each other and who know each other’s business. So what are you to do? Such murders involve dismemberment because you cannot walk out of a palazzo with a whole body, not without being seen, but if you divide something into small enough parts, and if you are a little clever in how you dispose of these parts, it is possible that you will never be discovered.’