He pressed ahead, and hurried through the door, and by the time she joined him Salvatore said he’d spoken with the brothers, they’d looked at the photos and they were happy. They’d take the room for one month, but they’d pay for two to cover any inconvenience or deposit. He could pay her now, in advance.
* * *
With money in her fist Peña repeated the terms of the lease. This was for one month, renewable before the end of the month. The first key would open the small door at the main entrance and the door to the basement from the courtyard. The larger brass key was for the room itself. Salvatore and his associates could come and go as they pleased, but they should not disturb the residents. As an afterthought she asked for the brothers’ contact details, just in case, and he wrote a number on the back of a business card. The room would need painting, if she could arrange this, and the men would require a driver.
It was only later, once she was back in her apartment that she looked at the card and read: Room 312, Hotel Grand, CMdS.
MONDAY: DAY B
For six weeks Mizuki Katsura’s clothes, hands, and hair reeked of a sweet vanilla. During the summer the bakery three floors below the language school on via Capasso produced small star-shaped biscuits, dipped in syrup and covered with paper then plastic and left to drip and dry on trays on racks in the courtyard. Throughout the day the sugar attracted a good number of wasps and the perfume rose as a fume and seeped, thick and unwelcome, into the schoolrooms and offices above.
* * *
The train arrived late at the Circumvesuviana station and Mizuki, phone in hand, stood at the door halfway reminded of the scent of burnt sugar. The morning sun cooked sweetness from the furnishings, the rubber seals, and the sticky floor. Idly stubbing her mobile against her cheek she squinted at the docks and recalled details of a detective story in which a man paused to smell jasmine before he was shot, but couldn’t remember the title or the writer. She could chase this notion on her phone and hunt down the reference, but did not like the idea that she was leaving trackable data every time she switched it on. Even so, she quickly checked for messages, emails, SMS.
The train stopped with a gentle shove. On the platform, immediately in front of her door, stood a young and thin man with shorn hair and a drawn face: tall and puppet-like and handsome, as European men can be angular and handsome. A creaturely intelligence about him that held a kind of stillness. Sunlight, softened by the humid station air, cast a broad square over the man as he waited. Handsome, yes, and maybe even cunning.
Mizuki rode the escalator and the idea of this man stuck with her as she dug out two euro for a bottle of water. Once on the concourse she found, to her surprise, the same man already ahead of her, waiting. A little more alert now. The man stood with his arms folded, chin down, attentive to the steady line of commuters rising from the lower platforms.
The realization that there were two men, not one, came slowly, an idea she only properly understood after she’d paid for the bottle of water and turned to find both men waiting side by side under the station’s awning. Dressed alike (one in a powder-blue shirt, the other in seamless white), and surely brothers; the man in the powder-blue shirt looked directly at her: a simple turn of his head as if he knew precisely where to look and what he would find.
Out of the station the traffic was stopped bonnet to boot. Horns sounded above the market and rounded hard off the buildings on either side. Mizuki walked by the market stalls and between the round walls of Porta Nolana, alongside tables of shoes and purses and undershirts, and a stack of birdcages. Agitated by the traffic the finch and quail squalled against the bars. Looking, even briefly, at their skinny necks made her skin itch. On Corso Umberto she found the focus of the delay: a long, low-slung tow-truck with a crushed taxi loaded on the truck-bed. Other cars looked only like cars, but the battered taxi had the bruised, gummy face of a boxer, its side compacted, slumped, the roof cut off and strapped back upside-down. At the head of the intersection by the newspaper stands and cash machines and racks of clothing the police fussed over an orange city bus stopped sideways and within metres of a smaller coach. The coach like the taxi had a mashed hood and a shattered windscreen. An ambulance turned in the corso, and Mizuki pressed her fingers to her ears and wished that she had walked some other way. When there were sirens it meant that someone was hurt, but worse, no sirens, according to Lara, meant that someone had died.
She deliberately turned her thoughts back to the brothers and sketched the differences between them, but couldn’t measure the look the man had given her: clear and direct, an assessment. The man was taking weights and measures. Mizuki brought her phone from her pocket and regretted not taking a photograph. No messages. No email. In this way she avoided thinking about the accident.
* * *
Access to the school (on the third floor at the back of the building) was gained through a courtyard, and before that a set of massive carriage doors of solid black beams with a small inset port door, through which you had to be buzzed. Such buildings, a feature of the city, were referred to as palazzi. Palaces. The word lent a formal air and a sense of protection to the apartments and businesses inside, so that ducking through the smaller door was very much like escaping the ordinary world: except this ordinary world had narrow streets, black cobbles as big as shoe boxes, the constant buzz of Vespas. The hidden world housed wasps. Mizuki always paused at the door, tucked away her hair, drew her sleeves over her hands, and worried over the wasps and how she would cross the courtyard without being stung.
* * *
At seven o’clock on the first Monday in August, Marek Krawiec picked up the coach from its lock-up on via Carbonara. Marek drove a small eighteen-seat transit bus and shuttled American servicemen between the military base at Bagnoli and the airport at Capodichino. He took civilian aircrew between their hotels and the airport as and when required. English Tony arranged the work, provided the vehicle, and paid him cash in hand. The job ran scattered: two being the fewest, and eighteen the most runs he’d managed in a single day. Marek didn’t like flying and didn’t much care for the people he transported about the city. While he tolerated the servicemen, he disliked the aircrew. The men were effeminate, the women aloof, and once they settled onto the bus they ignored him and talked among themselves, unless there were complaints to be made about the traffic, the congestion at the airport, or the delays before the tollbooths.
While the work was light the morning was hot and Marek began to sweat. He’d gained two kilos since the beginning of the year and felt himself to be slowing down, although he could see no reason for it, no change in habit or diet. As he sat in the driver’s seat he avoided his reflection.
Tony waved him off with a floppy gesture, half-ironic and half not bothered.
At seven twenty, Marek returned to via Capasso to pick up his partner, Paola. Partner: her word. Marek waited outside the palazzo as Paola hurried about the bus, made no comment as she loaded the bags of shirts and struggled to close the door, then drove the short journey down via Duomo to take her to a machine-shop close by Porta Nolana that manufactured sports clothes. Paola worked at home, seldom less than a seven-hour stretch stitching sportswear logos onto pockets and collars for three cents an item. The house sang with the crank of the sewing machine and a kind of intense concentration she had with two hands down to the material, lips tight, willing the thread not to break, the material to hold. Most mornings Marek collected the shirts and vests and ran the loads back and forth, but on this day Paola wanted to negotiate the workload and the pay, and, he suspected, use this time to talk with him again about money, about why they never had enough. While Paola knew they were in debt, she didn’t know the full extent: the loan from his brother Lemi, the payments for his mother’s healthcare, a bank loan he could barely service, and back-standing rates and taxes on his mother’s apartment. Running between his mother in Poland, his brother in Germany, his partner in Italy, was costing Marek more than he was making. His mother’s unkempt slide into dementia hit his temperament and his pocket with equal force. To add to this Paola had decided that they would take a holiday this year. Somewhere nice. Not Poland. Not Germany. Maybe the Croatian coast? Like they were the kind of people who sat on beaches.