Rome is the city he visited with his wife for three, or was it four trips. Each unassociated with business. The first a kind of honeymoon, six months or so after their marriage when they could get away: the city still holds the same sense of possibility for him. A notion that something could start here, and whatever it was, that something would be good. Even on their final visit, not quite their last attempt to reconcile, but certainly late in their decline, the city still managed to offer some freshness, a hint of their first visit. And he had felt grateful for this reprieve.
The driver offers his condolences and asks if Parson was a friend. Gibson looks at the city as they drive and realizes he knows nothing about the neighbourhoods, couldn’t even name them, that all he knows of Rome is perhaps a few streets based around the centre. He watches the bustle of scooters and cars, how they stop and start, and the sky slipping into twilight as the buildings on either side light up, their tops in silhouette and a sense that they are stacked, strata after strata. It’s easier to say employee. He would not have called Parson a friend although he knew him for seven years. This number is a weight.
There’s a witness who says he saw him being chased. Another who can place him at the station. Dental records and details from Parson’s wife confirm a positive identification.
* * *
He stands in his room bereft. His luggage beside the bed. Everything in order. There is a private garden behind the hotel, he remembers there was once a tennis court and a bar. Imagining himself in Rome he’d pictured himself doing business, holding necessary conversations and making arrangements, a calm centre in this small, shaded garden: the busier streets within earshot, the pips and shouts and holler of traffic. The reality doesn’t have such polish, a sign in the lobby announces that the garden is closed, and while the room is comfortable, it is also precisely how he remembers it. There’s nothing new, and while this familiarity should be comforting, he feels only exhausted. It’s possibly a mistake coming here. He has to speak with Laura, find out her arrangements, her wishes, and ensure that he does, absolutely, everything he can for her. He thinks he should exhaust himself, and when they meet he will be able to remain composed. He isn’t sure that she likes him, an issue he has never worried over before. Isn’t he the person who sent Parson away? Didn’t he insist he take the work? And doesn’t that make him responsible?
* * *
He wakes in the night, the covers a little heavy on his legs, which means that he wakes lying in the same position with the idea that he hasn’t slept at all. The television is on, the sound muted, tuned to a news channel, an image of an earthquake. It takes a moment to register that this is Syria, a city razed. This is no earthquake.
The driver, he can’t remember his name or rank, had asked how long he’d known Parson, and this question strikes Gibson as meaningful. Did Parson know the person who chased him? Imagine that you have this answer first. He knew him well. He did not know him. He met him that morning. The man (it has to be a man) was casually familiar. Then you would learn a great deal about the incident, its motives, its commission.
On the television people stand beside the rubble of houses and shops, as if this is ordinary. When people protest and cry to camera there is a theatre about it, a language which looks assumed, as if, moments before, moments after, they might be holding ordinary arguments and conversations, but the camera demands they strike themselves, they weep, they raise their hands skyward. Grief, he thinks, makes for an intolerably amateur display, crude and dulling. Foreign.
He misses Parson. Misses knowing the man is out there. Believes that something is wrong now with the shape of the world.
THE SECOND LESSON
3.1
The next morning Rike returns to Tomas’s apartment. In the hallway she finds four large rolls of white insulation, taller than her, wrapped in plastic with labels in Greek. On her way to Tomas’s apartment she again notices Christos’s name on the list of occupants at the main entrance, then at his door, in English first, then Greek, both crossed through. The scratches aren’t recent. She’s deliberately thinking about details, like the sign, to distance herself from the dream.
It’s possible, this scratching out, that Christos has annoyed someone.
The previous evening she spoke with Henning and attempted to pry a little more from him about the man in hospitaclass="underline" Sutler Number Three. Henning, having fended off Isa’s questions about Parson, refused to give details, but did admit to a small triumph. Udo has conceded. Sutler Number Three, Mr Crispy, will be brought to Cyprus. She is not to talk about this, understand? And neither is Isa. The decision, he thinks, has more to do with expense than security.
The sisters feed their curiosity through internet searches: Sutler, HOSCO, Iraq Conspiracy, Sutler One, Two, Three, tapped in to furnish the smallest details, and finally, Parson, who they feel some connection to because Henning has met the man, interviewed him, discussed details about Sutler which he will not divulge. Speculation on Parson’s death includes the involvement of the Neapolitan Camorra. Isa prefers this theory, and pictures the man’s chaotic run from a band of armed thugs. His stumbling across railroad ties. She loves the idea that the Mafia might be involved, however improbable.
Rike takes the steps to Tomas’s apartment preoccupied. What they do know: Sutler is British, he worked in Iraq as a contractor with an American company called HOSCO, he has absconded with anything between forty-five and fifty-three million dollars. No small change. She thinks of him trudging through the desert with sacks of cash, and losing, on each day, one sack after another. The man is like a bug, a tiny thing wheeling massive balls of cash across the desert. The man sheds money as he walks, it flies from him, stripped by the wind.
A million dollars in twenty-dollar notes weighs about twenty kilos.
* * *
Tomas’s door stands open in anticipation. Tomas, in the kitchen, answers her knock with a greeting and a question — would she like coffee or water? He has cold still water but no ice. He hasn’t eaten; he’s running late himself. He bends over in the kitchen so she can see only his haunch through the doorway as he searches through his fridge. It’s like he knows. For a forty-year-old he’s in very good shape. When he straightens, he stretches. This is her weakness: necks, backs, shoulders, forearms. The equine shapes these muscles define. She prefers lean to strong: a racehorse rather than a bear.
Rike waits at the door, makes small talk about the packets left out in the hall (insulation, no?) and for the first time she takes a proper account of the room; the loose water-stained parquet floor which makes the whole room feel unsteady; bare white walls bruised with grey scuffs. A window overlooks a small playground, and opposite, behind her, double doors lead to a balcony which overlooks the street. A sad room, if rooms can be sad, weighted by the absence of furniture and the fact that month after month new people live here.
Set ready by Tomas’s chair: a notebook, a newspaper, a dictionary.
‘No birds today?’
‘Yesterday,’ he says in German. ‘Today we have snow in the hall. Snow, in bags, fake snow, polystyrene, in bags as big as this.’ He gestures up to his chest, then shrugs. ‘I have my homework. Here.’ He points to the window overlooking the back of the apartments, and they stand side by side and look out.