THURSDAY: DAY L
Eight days after the assault three men came to the Hotel Stromboli for Rafí. Warned by a telephone call, Rafí scrabbled for his clothes and told Lila to get downstairs and tell them he wasn’t about. The men, already inside the Stromboli, banged on doors and drew out residents to the landings. If she could delay them he could get out onto the roof where they wouldn’t find him. They were peddlers, kids, he said, petty dope dealers he owed money to, and while they didn’t pose much of a threat, he didn’t doubt that they could do some damage if they decided on it.
As Lila searched for something to wear Rafí shoved her to the door and told her to hurry.
She met the men on the stairs, already halfway up, halfway running. Behind them the traders who sold belts and purses shuffled at their doors. Lila flattened herself against the wall and allowed the men to pass without comment or resistance, and they looked, as Rafí had said, young, like people playing a role, nothing much to worry about.
The two rooms on the top floor led one to another in a simple inverted ‘L’ and offered no place to hide. Lila followed after, immediately behind, and watched them turn over the mattress, search through the bedclothes, and when they found Rafí crouched behind the kitchen door — eyes squeezed shut, hands clamped to his face, groaning child-like, volume rising, as if this game was being played to the wrong rules — they demanded money. She watched them wrestle Rafí out, and backed away bumping into the door, the doorway, the wall trying to keep out of their way. Rafí at first pliant, disbelieving, snapped to life and began to struggle. He twisted, thrashed, kicked, lunged at the door, grabbed the lintel. The three men stumbled over the mattress, dropped him, scooped him back up, each of them shouting instructions. Rafí writhed in fury, octopus-like, took over the room with a pure and vicious energy sucked right out of nowhere.
As the brawl shoved past her out onto the landing, Rafí, face up, back arched, flipped over and grabbed a fist-full of Lila’s hair. With Lila as an anchor the group collapsed to the floor. Too stunned to think, Lila punched out and hit Rafí in the crotch — at that moment the fight was lost and Rafí rolled into a ball, gawping, all of his fight gone.
Bowed forward, dizzy and wincing, Lila pressed her hands to her scalp, not quite sensible of the fact that she was the cause of this lulclass="underline" three grown men, each twice her size and strength, had failed to subdue Rafí, and with one nudge (it really wasn’t that much more), she had levelled him. One of the men helped her to her feet as the others took time to laugh and swear and rearrange their clothes, tuck in shirts and smooth their hair. For a moment they looked back at the room, taking account for the first time, and she felt in the way they looked from her to the hurly-burly of bed sheets and upturned chairs, that there was no difference to them between the battered room and the people who occupied it. As if she had no idea of the shabbiness of it all.
But she was all right? Right?
When the three men finally dragged Rafí down the stairs his expression, his final look before he was hoisted out of view was of surprise and betrayal, as if she should be running after him, shouting at least, putting up some kind of resistance. Instead, Lila listened to the men clomp and struggle down the stairs then returned to the room, stood tiptoe on the mattress to lean out the window and watch the sidewalk — but no one came out of the door. Hearing shouts downstairs, she hurried to the kitchenette to see Rafí sprinting full pace across the flat roof. Two men half out of Rafí’s window withdrew as the dog went crazy, spinning at the end of its chain, lunging for them. When she looked for Rafí he was gone.
Lila sat on the mattress and waited for the men to return. She heard them come up the stairs and stop on each landing to demand payment from the traders, who each, at first, feigned disbelief, unable to understand Italian, some spoke in French, some in English, and she slowly understood that the men had come for the rents, rents that Rafí had collected. Collected and kept.
They searched the entire building. Room by room. Insistent that there was money somewhere, that the boy had stowed away the rents. How frugally he lived. By the time the men came to Lila they were irritated and tired.
‘And you,’ one asked, ‘know nothing?’
Lila would not move, and the man drew up the blind to take a good look at her, to get light into the room for the search.
‘Did he do that to you?’
Lila drew her hair forward and shook her head. While the men searched the room she sat on the floor, and when they left the man who had spoken to her said that they would be back. ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘are you still here?’
* * *
Alone, Lila waited at the window, the day already a shape she did not recognize. She waited expecting Rafí to return or Cecco to appear, knowing it was unsafe to stay. Clearly, this would all be her fault. She counted the pins that fastened the hotel’s name to the wall, she noted how they were corroded through, and how people coming out of the station squinted up at the building as they came into the sunlight, and how, tethered to the flat roof two floors below, Rafí’s dog lunged at the length of its chain as if to choke itself.
It was impossible now to look at the room without seeing it for what it was, chaotic and dirty. She could smell Rafí on her hands, a stink of sour bedding and stale clothes and his sweet and peppery aftershave.
Rafí’s keys lay on the landing with his shirt. Further down, almost to the wall, she found his lighter and cigarettes and a silver mobile phone. Her scalp stung, and she carefully straightened her hair and drew out loose strands. It was shit that he was caught, shit that he was so stupid or unlucky or both, shit that she knew no one better to be with and no better way to live, shit that there was no food and only three cigarettes, shit that there was no money, shit that she would have to wait for him, and it was shit that she could not find his drugs. The pills, which should have been in a hole behind the light switch, were not there. The dog’s bark cut through to unsettle her; hard and loud, its whole body concentrated on the task.
She returned to the upper windows overlooking the piazza and watched the station. She stood with the sun in her face and made noises to the dog to gain its attention.
The dog sat down and looked up, suddenly placid.
Determined to do something about the dog, Lila made her way down to Rafí’s room.
* * *
An old wood-framed bed dominated the small room. The sheets rucked back. The pillows bunched together. Rafí’s clothes and shoes were scattered in loose heaps across the floor. His shirts hung on hangers on nails above the bed. Kicked from under the bed were cartons of cigarettes, contraband with Greek markings that he sold in clubs. The small sink was ringed with stains, above it a set of scents and colognes on a glass shelf. There were newspapers on the floor, kept as wrapping.
As Lila took stock, the dog tugged on his chain, followed as she moved through the room, paused when she paused, peered through the window as if intelligent. As she sat on the bed and summoned the courage to deal with the dog, it lunged forward, the chain snapped tight and slumped behind him, striking the roof with the sound of dropped coins.
Now the idea seemed foolish: it would be impossible to loosen the animal’s collar without being mauled.
Under the window she found a patterned blanket, little more than a rag. She’d watched Rafí thrash the dog, whip it with the blanket until it cowered, thin-ribbed and panting, as far as its chain would allow. Lila braced herself, stood up, and opened the window.