Richard House - The Kills

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.’

‘But there are connections between them?’

‘Unfortunately, there are general connections, yes. But it has been a year since I read it. Without the book this is not such an interesting case. Without the novel nothing distinguishes itself above other such events. It’s possible that this aspect of the case, which has been greatly speculated over, has meant a certain kind of concentration, an inclination toward the more sensational elements, which has, in turn, distracted us from asking the proper questions.’

The magistrate folded his hands together and smiled, closing the discussion about the book.

‘Why did the evidence point only to one killing?’

He looked directly at Finn. ‘Because we found only one crime scene. They wouldn’t have risked committing a second crime in the same place. The evidence from via Capasso indicated only that the American had been killed there. Although this was considerably degraded. It might be possible that two people were killed there, although only one dismemberment took place.’

‘And you believe Marek Krawiec to be the main instigator?’

‘I do. Krawiec’s skill, if this is the right word, is in his “everydayness”. The issue — let me give you my experience — is that wickedness is not as interesting as you might hope. Krawiec appears normal, a neighbour, someone who can be trusted, because, for most of the time, this is exactly who he is. In most circumstances he is entirely ordinary. There is nothing exotic about him, and nothing immediately apparent in his personality that would show him capable of such violence. If you want to understand him you should speak with the people in the palazzo who were familiar with him. They also were convinced by him, and managed to draw them into his version of the world. This is typical of someone who is dissociative. They will insist on a reinterpretation of events, and they will draw people into their schemes and ideas. I don’t think Krawiec was the sole perpetrator, but I consider him to be the sole author.’

The magistrate had one last thing to say: ‘People come here believing all kinds of things about the city — I’m sure you have your own ideas — that it is violent, corrupt. It is hard to refute the facts. The city has its problems. There are many issues. But it does seem, and this is perhaps truer when speaking about Naples than any other city, that stories are written and ideas are decided long before anyone has actually arrived. Do you understand? It is a problem to be spoken about only in one way, to have one kind of discussion, or one common language. To believe in occult signs and coincidences is to lose sight of the facts, and to indulge fanciful ideas. We have enough problems without this becoming more mysterious than it already is, especially because it involves two missing visitors. We still don’t have many answers at this point about what happened. At the moment there is very little truth, what we take to be truth is based on rumours and lies.’