‘Sounds like he just got sick of you.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Seriously. You can be tiresome. Anyway, it’s not like anything bad has happened. You just got played.’
Finn didn’t like the term and wouldn’t answer.
‘So why have you called? Are you really broke? Have you called me to sulk? It’s just money. It’s just stuff, right? Money and some computers, which were probably holding you back. You’ve bruised your ass, that’s it. I wish my lessons came so easy. There isn’t anything permanent. There isn’t anything to really worry about. You’re OK, and you have yourself a story.’
‘I’m OK? I’ve lost all of my work. All of my equipment.’
‘You’re fine. It’s just some constraint someone’s given you. They’ve taken all of your toys. You just have to work with that. I love you, Finn, but you’re a pain in the ass, and someone has played you. Which, you know, you kind of earned. Now you have to work with that. I’ll get you money, but you can’t come back. You just can’t.’
* * *
Finn spent the day walking. He tucked The Kill into his back pocket and took the funiculare to Vomero, roamed through the grounds of the Villa Floridiana, then followed the roads along the steep scalloped flanks zigzagging down via Falcone, Francesco, Tasso, to Corso Emanuele — the bay, sharp silvers and sparkling blues, to his left then his right — all the time feeling the pressure of the book squeezed into his pocket. As the late morning sank into a placid afternoon he slowed his pace and realized that he’d stamped about the city without looking at what was around him. Coming down to the lungomare he found a place to sit on the seawall and watched joggers and couples pass by. The idea of coming to Naples wasn’t just to write the book, but to gain experience of the city, to prise under its surface and become, chameleon-like, part of the situation, someone tapped into the heat and the bustle, open, as only an outsider can be. How stupid was he? He’d come to Naples one time to test the water, and was startled on a walk to Capodimonte by his first view of the city where he couldn’t believe the sight of one unbroken mass of housing, so busy and detailed, so hectic and impenetrably thick, carpeting the hills and the swoop of the plain all the way to the volcano and further to the distant mountains, and he became certain that here among this fractured chaos something would speak to him. Now he had to admit that he’d penetrated nothing.
He pulled the book from his pocket. It wasn’t only the city he’d misread, he’d also been misled by the book. Without the introduction The Kill was little more than a story about a man who manufactures a crime scene with body parts stolen from a hospital so his neighbours are accused of murder and cannibalism, a strange story, bloody and blunt. But with the introduction it became a story of someone lost in a defeated city, whose actions were prompted by the occupation, a hatred of the occupiers, and a deeper hatred of people he saw as collaborators: his actions, in this context, were justifiably provoked. An entirely different story.
Finn returned to the station feeling less and less happy as he came up the corso. He had to walk by the Questura just to see in daylight the place where he was knocked down, and he began to wonder now how much it would cost him to stay in Europe for the rest of the summer. Six thousand euro? Would that see him clear for the month? He came up via Capasso, and as soon as he caught sight of the palazzo he decided to stay. Maybe losing everything wasn’t actually so bad? Carolyn had a point. He could strip everything down to pen and paper. He took a coffee in the café opposite the palazzo. Looked to the shops, the wedding boutique, the alimentari with Salvatore and his brother Massimiliano, the doorway with that weird imp of a woman, and thought the story here wasn’t the killing, he had this wrong, right from the start he’d had it wrong, the story wasn’t even the city, much like The Kill the story here was about the palazzo, about what was happening immediately around the crime.
* * *
By the evening he’d received the money wired by his sister and rented a room opposite the palazzo on via Capasso — procedures, both, which he expected to be much more laboured. Finn paid for one week and assured the landlord that payment for the month would come in two days, and found him not only amenable but sympathetic. By the time Finn returned to his room sweating and laden with supplies (six-packs of sparkling water, beer, long-life milk, biscuits, and chocolate), his head was busy with new plans.
His room faced the palazzo, and if he stood at his window he could see a broad wine-red wall with regular, deep-set, shuttered windows, on the lower floors the small Juliet balconies, the rooms inside black and unknowable. He divided the view into quadrants to guess occupant by occupant who might have lived there for more than a year (most, he assumed). At street level he could see the entrance, the vast black doors, the tops of heads, the fanned black cobbles of the street. Tucked beside the door a wrapped spray of flowers, dirty and bruised, and behind them other flowers, what might be a candle stub, and beside them a small upturned crate with a cushion.
The landlord came to ask if he was settled, and Finn looked about the room and realized that he was settled, and that, with little more than a writing desk, a handful of pens, some paper, he had everything he needed. He wouldn’t dwell on last night, because most things are replaceable, right? Everything depended on him, on what he wanted to achieve.
The landlord lingered and Finn realized he wasn’t in any hurry to start his work. Tonight, tomorrow. He could write any time, but the opportunity for a discussion would not always be available. So he offered the man a beer and invited him to sit at the window overlooking via Capasso, and gave himself the one constraint — he wouldn’t talk, he’d leave it to the landlord.
Window by window the landlord described the occupants of the building, their occupations first, then their foibles: pharmacist, speech therapist, accountant, the two brothers who ran the alimentari, a lawyer, at the door the supervisor, in the street the magistrate’s driver who seemed to be there at all hours. Outside the Fazzini there would be prostitutes, and while you can’t see the bar, you can see the women, loitering among the scooters, talking, loud, calling one to the other.
‘The two Frenchmen, the brothers — not Salvatore, not Massimiliano.’ The man pointed at the palazzo with his beer, he’d seen them himself. Only one time, but he’d seen them, they weren’t fiction. Few people believed that Krawiec was guilty, except the police. ‘There isn’t much,’ the man admitted, ‘that happens here that doesn’t get noticed.’
Finn asked him to be clear. ‘You saw them?’
‘I saw the brothers. Plenty of people saw them. They came at night, they never stayed long. Many people saw them, except the driver.’ The man nodded down to the street. ‘He’s there most days, but he says he never saw them. It might be a question of keeping his job.’
Finn took a long look and realized it would be hard for anything to happen here, night or day, without someone seeing or hearing. A figure in the palazzo, faced into the room unaware that he could be seen, practised voice exercises: ‘peh-peh-peh-peh’.
As soon as he was alone he set the table in front of the window. He tore pages from the notepad and labelled the days: A, B, C, D … wrote a list of the occupants as he could remember them: the doctor, the supervisor, then added the participants: Marek Krawiec and his wife/g-friend, the Second Man, the American Student, Mizuki Katsura, Niccolò Scafuti. Then a list of places: Ercolano, field and paint-factory. Via Capasso. The Language School. The Circumvesuviana station.