Lanzetti folded the map in half.
You could reach the place by a church. ‘Here,’ Lanzetti pointed to the map. San Sepulcro, first an old path with proper steps to start, then a small rural path. ‘The association keep goats up there, a donkey.’ From what he could remember. ‘Wild cactus, olive trees, and yes, I suppose a vineyard, grass, not at all what you’d expect in the middle of the city, and it’s very steep. But why would they want to see this?’
Marek said he didn’t know. They were just interested, he said. But it didn’t seem so important.
So this is what they want? Not a driver at all, but someone who knows the city. Someone to confirm a few ideas taken from a book? ‘How well do you know the city?’
Marek shrugged and said he had a pretty good idea.
‘But you drive? For how long?’
‘Two years.’
‘In Naples?’
‘In Naples. Yes. To the airport. To the city.’ Marek wove his hand back and forward. Lanzetti laughed a little.
‘What do they want with the room?’
Marek looked up, blank. He hadn’t asked. At first, because they were businessmen, there was the idea that they needed the room for storage, but now, meeting them, they clearly weren’t here on business.
‘They are away for the weekend, and they’ve offered their room.’
‘At the Grand?’
‘At the Grand. Tonight and tomorrow night. They’ve already paid, but they have to be somewhere else, and they want the room when they get back.’
Lanzetti saluted him. ‘You must have made an impression.’ Marek smiled and said it seemed so. ‘You are a lucky man.’
* * *
He drove to Salerno and parked beside the docks under the overpass. It was a good place to smoke dope. Marek set the tobacco pouch on his lap and began to make himself a small joint. At midday the prostitutes came out to meet the long-haul drivers waiting for the ferries and deliveries, the men who slept in their cabs before the drive back north. The police drove regularly along the road beside the docks and parked between the bulky red containers off-loaded from the ships, so that it wasn’t always possible to see them. Marek watched the docks and the road, and made sure that all of the doors were locked. One prostitute wandered through the shade, made her way dolefully between the trucks and flat-bed lorries parked up alongside the pillars supporting the motorway. Leaning into the windows, or climbing up to the cabins and calling to the drivers, the woman solicited business. Marek smoked and watched, with his hands cupped over his crotch.
And this was the deaclass="underline" if he wanted the hotel for the weekend, if he wanted a little luxury, he had to find two women. One (and this was easy), an Asian woman, Japanese, who worked for or attended, or lived above a language school close to the palazzo. This was pure curiosity, someone they’d seen a number of times at the station and going into the school, and they wanted clarity, they wanted to know her name. The second woman (a little trickier) worked as a prostitute. A she-male, Paul had said, a very particular she-male. Looks just like a woman. Exactly, every part, with only the one small exception he supposed (ha-de-ha). Paul spoke with fascination and mock-horror, and wouldn’t let the subject go once it was raised. The task was simple. Marek didn’t have to find her, as in bring her back. They just wanted to know her location, where she was, because, as far as they understood, she wasn’t in Naples any more. They just wanted to know either way. Marek didn’t like Paul’s humour. He didn’t like the word she-male either, and if he thought about it, he didn’t like much of anything that came out of Paul’s mouth. He knew Paul’s type: the wiseacre loudmouth who became quieter and more unstable the more he drank. Marek asked for his money upfront, and wanted assurance that the arrangement with the hotel was legitimate.
Marek thought he knew who they were talking about, from watching the women outside the palazzo, he thought he knew. He concerned himself with this, the familiarity, not the issue of whether or not he should be helping them, because, in truth, he didn’t understand what this was, and yes, the offer of a luxury hotel for one entire weekend was worth a few hours of idle enquiry. They wanted to know where she was, this she-male, this star. Simple and straight.
The woman walked with her hand out to steady herself. Her hair, an acid yellow, long and crimped, tugged back from her face. She wore a silver jacket and a frayed denim skirt, short and too small to allow her to step easily onto the kerb. From the way that she walked, busy but unsteady, she veered toward the cars in thick-heeled sandals that slipped from her feet, it was clear that she wasn’t sober. When she approached Marek he wound up his window and looked blankly ahead, ignoring her. He needed to take a photograph and he didn’t have his phone ready. The woman waited at the window, and then knocked. Marek continued to ignore her. He watched her walk on and lean into another car, once he had his phone out of his pocket he flashed his lights. The woman drew out of the car, turned and paused, and Marek flashed the lights a second time.
When the woman returned Marek ignored her and re-lit the joint. The phone sat on his lap. He didn’t know why he was doing this, but he wanted to ignore her. The woman tried the doors, front and back, but found them locked. She knocked on the window again, but quickly tiring of him she slammed her hand against the glass and walked off. Marek waited until she was back at the car, and again flashed his lights. Leaning half-in half-out she shouted at him, and gestured that he should go fuck himself, but this time Marek held his wife’s small red leather purse up to the windscreen. The women squinted back. Marek continued to flash the car lights and the woman returned, a little unstable on thick heels, shouting, what, what, what did he want? Marek opened the window just wide enough to squeeze the purse through, and he held it there, undecided whether he would let it go or not. When the woman came to the window she curled her fingers over the glass, and asked what it was, what was in the purse. Her voice and hands unfeminine, her make-up crudely defined her lips and eyebrows. Close to the glass he was certain now that he recognized her but doubted that this was the one the brothers wanted. Her face, thickly powdered, eyes and lips drawn with delicate care, but her eyes were dark, a little red, and very distant. She took the purse, looked quickly inside, and tried again to open the door. Finding the door locked, she pulled down her top and pressed her breasts to the window. He took the photo and managed to catch her face before her breasts spread against the glass. A small necklace, the letter ‘A’ on a chain, trapped against the glass. Laughing, she backed away, then hitched up her skirt and waggled her ass.
Marek squinted into the sun as he drove away. Between the shipping containers he spied a man on a moped. He doubted that the prostitute would keep the purse. The money would go to the man on the scooter.
As he drove back he regretted that the lipstick, which had passed over Paola’s mouth, would now belong to a prostitute.
* * *
Marek came through the hotel to a terrace and a lawn prepared for another wedding banquet. The Grand Hotel sat on a wide plate high above the gulf; the walls and stuttered tiers of gardens could be seen from the city as a series of white slim-stepped blocks on the mountainside. As he followed after the waiter (a waiter, a clerk, who exactly were these people?) he made a note of the pool, the Jacuzzi, a sign for the spa, the viewing terrace called Napoli a Piedi. The man led Marek by tables laid out across a lawn to a lower terrace and a view of the city starting at Castellammare and ending only where the broad sweep of coast rubbed out at the horizon. Marek, as invited, sat at a table with his back to the cliff feeling the suck of all that space behind him, made worse by a swimming pool built right into the edge. He sat with his arms folded, thinking how odd it was to have so much water abutting so steep a drop when the whole point of water was to find the lowest point in any landscape.