‘So, I don’t understand. Why are the police interested if this happens all of the time? They have someone don’t they. Isn’t he in prison?’
‘Everybody thinks he’s the wrong man.’
Yee Jan nodded. ‘Even the police?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did they say anything else?’ Yee Jan was surprised when Lara paused. ‘They did? They said something else?’
‘Not about you. There’s a type of person who gets obsessed with this kind of thing, and there have been lots of people coming by because of what had happened. It’s a problem the school have to do something about. They understand it’s a problem, but they haven’t done anything about it.’
‘I know. They said. But did they say something else?’
‘Not about you.’
A siren careened from the corso behind the school. Yee Jan cleared his throat. ‘I’d like to see the tapes again. One of the men made a gesture.’
‘It’s an ambulance, that’s all.’ Lara stood up.
‘So what else did they say if it wasn’t about me?’
‘It wasn’t about you.’
‘So it was about the men, then?’
‘It was nothing.’
‘They think it was two men, don’t they?’
‘Nobody knows. It’s not so clear. And maybe not so important.’
‘But they have been speaking with people here, so you know what they think. I mean people must have some idea?’ Yee Jan stopped and became more direct. ‘I think you know something.’
‘I don’t. There are so many rumours. Where are you staying?’
‘In Vomero. It’s OK. An apartment. You know. Why?’
‘Are there other people with you?’
‘Why are you asking where I’m staying? Is there something else going on?’
Lara folded the straps of her bag around her arms. ‘There is a rumour,’ she looked directly at Yee Jan, ‘about the tapes. It isn’t anything the police have said directly. But after they spoke with you they were interested in the tapes again and they spent some time looking at them.’
‘So they do think it’s two people.’
Lara shook her head. ‘There’s something else, and I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, because it is a rumour, and it’s only a rumour. But the gesture the man made, they think that he’s saying something.’
Yee Jan waited. Lara slowly ran her tongue over her lips.
‘I did know her. Mizuki. I thought I knew her. She came here to get away from her husband. She told me this. Before. Mizuki wasn’t her real name. She paid for everything in cash, she gave many explanations, to me and to her class, about who she was, and she didn’t seem to be someone who would not be telling the truth. Anyway. She stopped coming.’ Lara’s voice became quiet, the words less than vapour. ‘She was here at the school and then she wasn’t. We don’t know what happened to her.’ Lara cleared her throat and spoke louder, her voice caught in the room. ‘I’ve watched the tapes. I watched them with the police. They think he’s saying something to the camera. The man who followed you is saying something to the camera in the video. There are some gestures, but they think that he is saying something to the camera about a woman. They think this is a reference to Mizuki. They think he is saying that they did not touch her. They didn’t touch the woman. They think the person who was waiting outside was involved, and they think he is saying that there was only one person who was killed and that they did not touch the woman, but it isn’t clear.’
Yee Jan stepped back to the counter. ‘Why were they following me?’
Lara reached forward to calm him. ‘It’s over. The police were watching you. Just in case.’
* * *
The film crew took up most of via Duomo in a one-block radius of via Capasso with their vans, stalls, and equipment. Lights raised on stanchions and scaffolding burned sharp into the street, silver caught in the shop windows and along the cornices and ledges. Yee Jan tried to push ahead to see what was happening and found his way blocked by a line of security guards and behind them a row of boards. He caught glimpses of the crew, but had arrived too late to find a good position — and what he could see didn’t interest him. They were filming the murder in the place where the murder occurred: a little bankrupt, he thought, a little unprincipled.
Yee Jan came out of the small street, walked by the palazzo onto via Duomo and found papers taped and pinned to the door — photographs and photocopies — on each sheet a face or a figure in a scratched monotone, and beneath each a date. A familiar kind of memorial. At the bare piazza in front of the Duomo he found a disconsolate group of six or seven protesters each holding a placard with one of the same images from the doors of the palazzo. The protesters, a shabby group, had dressed in black and wore black armbands, and looked, being such a small number, foolish. One of the group approached Yee Jan and offered him a handful of flyers believing him to be one of them. The man’s expression was stern, possibly disappointed, so Yee Jan accepted without saying anything.
DOVE SONO I 41? / Chi sarà il prossimo?
Yee Jan took a piece of paper, on one side a list of names: Pascal Entuarde. Johannes Blume. Emilio Santos. Mizuki Katsura. In two years there were forty-one unaccounted people, forty-one missing.
The film crew divided into two groups. A group busy with the production, and a looser group at the margin, who waited, arms folded, some smoking, a little edgy at what was beginning to develop: as if a group of ten people was something to worry about. Yee Jan also felt that energy, as people began to gather in twos and threes at the Duomo steps. Eight people to start. Thirty people within ten minutes, and in twenty that number had tripled: the day, the fading light, began to hold an expectation.
Yee Jan picked up the flyers scattered across the piazza and added them to his own. And as the Duomo’s bells began to ring a charge ran through the air. From the side streets, via Tribunali, along via Duomo more people arrived, many dressed in black, many with posters and all with unlit candles, the groups gathered without sound, all facing via Capasso and the film crew, so the noise of the gathering became a hustle of bodies and feet. Yee Jan stood in the centre and handed out the sheets. For Pascal. For Johannes. For Emilio. For Michele. For Mizuki. The vigil formed about as the small open square in front of the Duomo stopped with people — when the bells struck midnight the candles were lit and all conversation stopped without any instruction to do so. And there, brightening the darkness, a sea of light.
TUESDAY
The men wear baseball hats, one grey the other blue with a black visor. Both men wear lightweight summer jackets, windbreakers, similar to the film crew. Both men wear sunglasses in what seems at first to be an affectation, because approaching midnight on the piazza the only light comes from candles and the floodlights brightening the front of the church and the blank ends of the buildings either side — so in analysis there’s little to distinguish them apart, regardless of how many cameras, how many phones catch them as they push through a crowd too dense to make room. The image loses focus with the candles, the fuzz and blow of light, as an undulating plain speckled soft and obscure, a sudden brightness dazing the image as the two men lug the boy through. The blackness — night sky, gaps between figures, hair — appears liquid.
Monica watches the image on her own, sits at the side of her bed, the remote in her hand to change to another channel. The image switches, a kind of flicker, as if something has been edited, and loses colour completely, shows the men as they push through, bodies angling sideways, shoulder first. In every example it’s almost the same, or a version of the same sets of information: two men, on either side of what you’d take to be a petite girl, Asian, who appears to be drunk or stunned or stoned. The two men look like boxers in the way they duck forward, although the association makes no sense to Monica, perhaps because of how lean they seem, and their clothes, the caps, the coats, an attitude to them of stern and focused business. And the girl — who she knows to be a boy because this has already been reported and discussed, and because the screen carries his name — Yee Jan Lee — although this could be the name of a girl as far as she can tell, because this is the face of a girl, deadpan white, and eyes so small, would it be wrong to call him pretty? And something wrong with him, seriously wrong because he isn’t walking properly, he’s being held up by these two men who bully him through, propped on either side, and move as one brusque unit, no gentility about the shove and shunt and push, and there, in the register of the boy’s mouth a turn, a down-turn, that might be pain. He’s being swept through. Monica thinks of him as a girl because this is how the boy is presented, a painted face, luminous white, delicate eyes drawn in, a painted face with a slender feminine mouth, so much about this boy is soft. The boy’s face sweeps by the camera, nothing more than a blur, his eyes are certainly looking into the camera, and there, a hand gripped on his upper arm. If he or she passed by you so close you could free him, hold him, keep him from harm. The videos insist that this is a present action, something happening continuously: the ongoing abduction of a boy in a crowded piazza. A counter beside the name marks the days he has been missing. 4.