The officers began to ask questions she couldn’t answer, and Lila began to tire. Perhaps she needed a moment to herself. Lila shrugged, she’d told them as much as she knew. Nothing further would occur to her.
* * *
When the door reopened Arianna leaned into the room. Her neck now purple, her face swollen and pulpy, her eyes panda-wide and bruised. Stopped at the door she leaned slightly in and whispered, ‘Lila. Lila? We can’t stay.’ Arianna looked back into the corridor then stepped into the room. Behind her, and this made no sense, stood Rafí. ‘We can’t stay. We have to go.’ Arianna held out her hand. ‘You understand? We can’t stay here.’
Lila called to Arianna, and a second, more formidable wave of nausea overcame her and she thought that she might faint.
‘I had to call him,’ Arianna whispered. ‘This is only for tonight. We take our money and we leave like we planned. Tomorrow. We go tomorrow.’
Rafí hovered at the door, anxious and uneasy, eyes on the corridor.
Arianna was right, they should leave, but Lila couldn’t rouse herself, all energy and self-determination gone. Arianna held out her hand, now impatient. ‘Now. We have to go now.’
Rafí supported Lila on his arm, one T-shirt held to her chest, the other across her shoulders. As soon as she stood a chill passed through her and she thought that she might collapse. Rafí lumbered her through the hospital corridors without a word, taking an emergency exit so that they came out onto a parking lot edged with trees that seemed to her to be another country perhaps. Not Italy but America. A flat periwinkle sky. A low-lying mall too wide to be part of the city she knew. Barefoot, Arianna walked ahead and scanned the lot for the car. A technician in blue overalls sat smoking in the shade, the ground soft with pine needles. He looked at the three and blew smoke into the branches, indifferent to their hurry and disorder.
* * *
Marek waited until the afternoon to call the brothers. He sent them photographs he’d taken of the Citroën, and asked if they still needed a driver. I know the city, he wrote, if there’s anything you need during your stay. Don’t hesitate. He tried to imagine what they might want, two men in Naples, and couldn’t picture taking a holiday with his own brother, who in any case would never know his own mind without his wife. A hot summer, almost too hot to move, and hadn’t Peña said the brothers didn’t know the city, and they barely spoke the language. He knew from military service the kind of trouble men could make for themselves, it wasn’t that they specifically sought it out, but given the opportunity, trouble would happen. If they wanted opportunity, as in company, he could help with that.
He waited in the cafe and stood at the window, an eye on his apartment and the magistrate’s driver, who lounged against his car, half-hopeful of a call from Tony. A call came mid-morning from the brothers. Did Marek know of a doctor? One of the brothers had been punched in a fight and he needed a doctor. Could Marek bring someone to the hotel? It wasn’t anything that needed any fuss. They would appreciate his discretion.
* * *
At first Lanzetti wasn’t interested.
‘I’m a pharmacist. Take them to the hospital. Take them to a clinic.’
‘They don’t want trouble,’ Marek reasoned. ‘They know how things work here, how simple things become complicated. They just want a doctor.’
‘They don’t want the police. This happens all the time.’
Marek shrugged. It was possible, a fight in a bar could lead to all kinds of problems, and no one would want to make a report, no one would want the police involved. He needed the work, but didn’t want to spell it out. ‘If I do this. If they trust me—’
Lanzetti turned his hands over, palms up as if to ask, And this should involve me? This should be my problem? ‘You drive them to a hospital. You take them to a clinic. You bring them to a farmacia.’ Out of politeness he asked where they were, and offered to find out the nearest clinic or pharmacy.
‘Hotel Grand, in the hills.’
‘Castellammare?’
‘On the mountain.’
Marek stepped back from the counter. Before leaving he thanked the doctor for his advice. Before he reached the door Lanzetti had changed his mind.
* * *
Marek followed two white vans along the escarpment’s terraced walls, vines and fig trees and creepers close on one side, a blue hole on the other. As he came up the hill, Lanzetti pointed out the view, and told him how the Americans at the end of the war had first seen Naples from the very same place. The view struck Marek as a piece of information: a set of facts. So this is where the Americans stood, Lanzetti explained. First they came over the top, then round the side through the valley, and others, even later, came by sea. In four days a mongrel group of partisans with a wise eye on the Americans’ progress had rid the city of the Germans. It wasn’t just a view about recent history, the capped top of the volcano, the thick plates of lava, and the dangerous proximity of the city spoke as a present reminder to an ancient event every boy knew by heart. Marek patted his pockets for cigarettes as the car crept upward and asked Lanzetti if he smoked.
Lanzetti said they could stop, if he wanted. They needn’t hurry? He asked this as a question, and Marek drew over and said no, there was no particular hurry. He stopped at the crown of the hill where the road levelled out to a viewing station.
‘I have decided to spend more time.’ Lanzetti paused and lit a cigarette and Marek rolled down the window and blew smoke out over the view. ‘More time being present. Does that make sense? To make sure I enjoy what is around me. My son. Good food. A beautiful view. I know how ridiculous it sounds.’
Marek looked past Lanzetti to the view, mindful of the edge, which fell at a discomfortingly sharp pitch. He saw the view as a phenomenon, a plate of land bounded by mountains and sea with an imperfect cone smack in the centre. If you drew up the centre of a tablecloth you would have yourself a model of the bay, the same flowing curves, the same dimensional scope.
‘Last year I lost my father. Now I am the adult. He brought me here a number of times. It is always a good view. Don’t you think? There are walks from here to Vico Equense, or over the top to Ravello.’
In front of them a man sat on his motorbike, head turned to the view.
‘My wife has taken my son to her brother’s.’ Lanzetti looked out at the view as he spoke. ‘There have been some disturbances at the palazzo. She’s unhappy. She’s always unhappy. She makes the boy unhappy.’
Marek remembered finding the purse on the coach. The accident wasn’t his first death, and certainly not his first accident. The summer before, driving on the Tagenziale, a motorcyclist, a man in black and red leathers, had inexplicably sprung from his bike and spun over the parapet, head over heels, gone. The bike toppled as soon as the man was loose, parts shattering and spinning across the lanes, and Paola shouting in pure disbelief. Did you see that? A cross-wind, the smallest of bumps, a curving bridge, elements long in place that predetermined the young man’s startling tumble and thump onto a roof, a balcony, a road. There were other deaths that summer, his father, Paola’s grandmother, relatives dressed and laid out in grey rooms in sombre calm, a little dignity returned to them, but these two incidents where men appeared to be snatched, grabbed and thrown, were the measure to him of how life, and the taking of it, was a matter of simple whimsy.