Richard House - The Kills

‘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.