YEAR 3

 

 

WEDNESDAY

Yee Jan waited in the cubicle until he could be certain that the students were gone. Some stuck around for extra sessions, one-on-ones that lasted an hour at most. Others dawdled to chat and wrap up the day, and took too long to say goodbye. Tonight they were filming at the marina and Yee Jan didn’t have time to dawdle. They meaning a film crew, technicians, handlers, movers, a mix of lean and professional Americans and Italians (men) from Los Angeles and Rome: people (men) so serious and focused and so used to crowds they saw nothing but the job ahead of them. Yee Jan wanted to watch them for their industry alone. The crew wore military green T-shirts and vests with The Kill printed in white script on the front and the outline of a white star in a white circle on the back. He wanted one of the vests, although he was happy to settle for a photograph. Yee Jan leaned into the mirror and considered how this could be achieved. He pinched his eyelashes to tease out stray hairs. He’d come in early that morning specifically to watch the maintenance crew off-load lights from flat-bed trucks and prepare the cabins (technically trailers) and set them end on end on the broad sidewalk that ran alongside the port, and just as soon as he was ready he’d go back and find them.

Inside his satchel he’d packed another set of clothes and a small zippered make-up bag. He laid the clothes across the sink then picked carefully through the make-up and chose the lighter lipstick, flesh-pink, and a foundation which would erase the small open pores on either side of his nose and the oilier skin around his chin. He leaned toward the mirror, smoothed his hand across his jaw and satisfied himself that there was no sign of stubble. Certain now that no stray students roamed the corridors. he puckered his mouth, tested a line of lipstick, and thought it too much. The staff would stay until the evening and students would return for a film screening, a cooking class, a visit to the crypt or the roof of the Duomo, he couldn’t remember the programme, but it usually started two hours after the final class.

It was a mistake to open the week with the story about the wolf: Lara had made a point of showing her disappointment. No stories about Naples, right from the start. Meaning: no bad stories. No bullshitting the Italians. In fact if you’re going to say something that involves Italy or the Italians you better make it flattering: and best remember that as an American you know less than nothing about food, language, clothes, culture, politics, religion, especially religion, especially with Lara. No shit. Yee Jan practised his shtick in his head: remember, this is a country that voted a prostitute into government and a fat clown as Prime Minister, persistently, for like, eighteen years. Italians know every kind of shit about every kind of shit there is to know. They’ve heard it all. Italians are the Meistershitters. No kidding.

Personally, Yee Jan didn’t understand what was quite so bad about the wolf story. It certainly went down easier than the introductions two weeks earlier when he’d announced himself as Princessa Chiaia. He’d given the word a kick, a little hot sauce, a little yip: Key-yai-ya. Bad idea. But like most ideas it came to him in a moment – and you just never know if it’s going to work until it’s out of your mouth. The group after all were all women, worse, wives, worse, military wives, and they had no sense of style, not one drop, and probably shopped at Target and T.J. Maxx, no Filene’s Basement, not because they were poor but because they didn’t know any better and had No Idea about the pleasures of Chiaia and the boutiques at piazza del Martiri (was it any wonder that their husbands were so fruity?) – besides, they didn’t know him yet, hence, not one laugh. Instead they regarded him with the same kind of horror they might regard a falling phial of smallpox. But this time the tutor, Frau Lara, had taken umbrage, and she seriously couldn’t see that a story about a wolf loose in the city was simply a story about a wolf loose in the city, nothing more. He meant it as a fable, if anything. Nothing more to it than that. Wolves are cute, come on. Who doesn’t like wolves? Yee Jan pouted at the mirror, narrowed his eyes. Didn’t a story about a wild creature slinking through the alleys and piazzas make the city that much more interesting, that little bit sexier, and best of all, didn’t it seem ever so slightly possible? Besides, he’d yet to meet an Italian who didn’t love to bang on about Napoli’s special sense of mystery, a particular ancient unnameable beauty, a special something, a blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-di-blah, all in one breath and then slag it off as terzo mondo in the next? Bad logic, freakopaths. You can’t have it both ways: you’re either something of interest or you’re not.

Yee Jan inspected himself in profile. The light in the toilet wasn’t great but it gave him enough to work with. He squeezed the foundation into his palm first, presented his chin to the mirror and sneered at the sweet stink of the place, a sickly vanilla, somehow worse in the bathroom, which made little sense – the bakery in the front of the building, the toilet at the side, nowhere near the courtyard. What’s that film where the woman rubs her arms with lemons to rid herself of the stink of her job? And what’s her name? The man was Burt Lancaster. No forgetting Burt, who might have had an English name but surely, had to be, somewhere deep down, a pure genetic Italian.

In Yee Jan’s story the wolf made a habit of coming into the city: she hid in the underground caverns that ran under the old town, or sometimes those catacombs dug into the rock at Fontanella. She didn’t live here, no, instead she wandered in now and again, found her way from the mountains by tracking the scent of the city through waterways and irrigation ditches, all the way through those drab flat fields. She came in winter, in February with the denser snow, when the waterways were frozen, and when the meaty stink of the city clung to the earth and spread out for miles, scratch that, kilometres. She came here to give birth. This wolf, magnificent, canny, even wise, and had enough smarts to know when and how to hide herself and her pups in a city of nearly three million people – four point six if you include the entire metropolitan area – and she knew how to disappear, how to find food, taking cats, small dogs, maybe once or twice some impolite fat child (and so many of them good and porky). The people who spotted her (an old woman outside the Duomo, a trader on via Tribunali, the street walkers at piazza Garibaldi, a team of street cleaners on via Toledo / Roma, whatever you will) were luckier than they knew, because the wolf took a particular interest in the people who spied her – call it providence. If the wolf passed by you, if she saw you, if, for some small reason she paid you a little attention, allowed you to see her, you couldn’t come to harm, for a day, for a week, it just depended.

Yee Jan’s Italian wasn’t great, that’s for sure, but he could manage well enough to tell a plain story simply. A city. A wolf. The lucky few who stumbled across her. And he could tell these ideas as unadorned facts which provided a handsome certainty. Everybody knows it’s not the embellishment that makes the story: it’s the cold hard presence of possibility. This is why people play the lottery – because winning is always possible. Improbable. Really-fucking-remotely unlikely. But possible.

Yee Jan pouted at the mirror. A finger at the corner of his mouth. He held up the mascara brush but decided against it. The thing about make-up is making sure there’s just enough, too much is a problem, but finding that distinctive point where you both are and aren’t familiar is all about precision. More often than not it’s the mascara and lipstick combination that tips the balance. These military wives could do with some lessons. Seriously. Why would you leave the house looking like a monkey had a party on your face?

*   *   *

By the time he found the film crew they had progressed from the portside to where the road curled about the bay, right beside Castel dell’Ovo. A line of silver-white screens bounced light from the sea to form a bright path across the road. As far as Yee Jan could make out, the shot involved a woman scurrying along the promenade and a man following after. Time after time the woman walked in a quick romp, skirt tight between her legs, hand up to her shoulder to keep her bag in place. The man came after in a long stride, close enough, smoking, sunglasses and a pinched face. People only walked like this in movies. When they stopped both the man and the woman wiped their faces with towels in a gesture that reminded Yee Jan more of tennis than filmmaking. Tedious wasn’t the word. The woman walked, the man followed. Walked. Followed. Their movements matched by a camera running alongside, then everything stopped, tracked back to the start, and after long and digressive preparations (make-up, discussions, cables hauled back, the camera itself in one instance appeared to be dismantled, while screens were adjusted to accommodate for the changing pitch of sunlight, and plenty of pointing, everybody pointing) they began again. Tired of watching Yee Jan sat and finished a slice of pizza which he picked into pieces, this at least couldn’t be faulted, mozzarella so fresh it sat in a light sap, only just set. He took a photo of himself with the slice held up to his mouth and didn’t mind that people were watching. After eating he wanted to smoke, Bacall-style. It’s the head that moves, never the hand.

 

 

THURSDAY

Before the class could properly settle the secretary knocked on the door and asked the tutor if Yee Jan and Keiko could please come outside. As soon as they came out the secretary asked if they could sit in the hallway for a moment.

‘What do you think this is about?’ Keiko whispered to Yee Jan in English.

‘Fashion police.’ Yee Jan whispered back. ‘You’re wearing two kinds of stripes.’

Keiko gave a complicit shrug and said she didn’t think she’d done anything wrong. Not anything she could remember.

‘You think we’re in trouble? It feels like high school. Maybe it has something to do with money?’

Yee Jan thought it strange that they would be called out of class and then asked to wait. He was, after all, paying for the lesson he was missing. He listened to the tutor’s voice through the door and the measured laughter of their fellow students, all a bit predictable. People didn’t like Lara as much as they liked the other tutors, but he had to admit she got the job done. Yee Jan splayed his hands and inspected his nails. Today he wore mascara but no foundation.

When the office door opened, a student from Elementario Uno came out, book in hand, and returned to her class.

‘It looks like they’re speaking to the Asian students.’

Yee Jan strained forward. Printed on the back of the student’s T-shirt a picture of a smiling cat, the face not entirely unlike her own, broad, almost round. He had to admit she was pretty. Inside the office sat two police officers. ‘Why are the police here? Are we supposed to have our passports?’

Keiko took out her passport from a small wallet hung about her neck.

‘You’re such a victim,’ Yee Jan said. His statement of the week, which he applied with sincerity, insincerity, irony, love, or anger to any situation. Such a victim. ‘I told you about those stripes, didn’t I?’

As they both leaned forward the office door was carefully drawn shut.

After a few moments the secretary came out of the office and in a low voice she asked if Keiko would come with her – then seeing Yee Jan’s bag, she stopped cold. The secretary curled her hair behind her ear then pointed at Yee Jan’s bag. ‘Questa è la vostra borsa?’

‘Sorry? Am I going?’

‘Your bag,’ Keiko interrupted. ‘She’s asking about your bag.’

‘This is my bag.’ Yee Jan held up the bag so the secretary could see, then pronounced emphatically. ‘Mine.’ It was one thing learning Italian, quite another using that knowledge out of class.

The secretary looked seriously at the bag. Maybe the job didn’t pay that much. Maybe secretaries across the city had to snatch and grab whenever they could.

‘It’s from Macy’s.’ Yee Jan pointed in the direction he thought was west. ‘I know. Ironic. It looks like Ferragamo. You’ll have to go to New York yourself.’

Used to Yee Jan’s oblique ways the secretary straightened up then returned to the office.

Keiko looked at Yee Jan’s bag. ‘I don’t think this has anything to do with visas or money. I think it’s something to do with the bag?’

‘My bag, victim. My bag. I paid for it.’

*   *   *

The news that a man had followed him was nothing extraordinary. This is Italy, Yee Jan told himself. As far as he could tell everyone seemed to be watching everyone else, and apart from an obvious, often hostile, curiosity, Italian men liked to make their likes and attractions clear. It wasn’t much of a surprise that someone would take it further. Only this wasn’t a simple harassing call, a bothersome stare, a whistle or a gesture. This wasn’t a joking profession of love, a cock-grabbing insult, or a scout for a sexual service. This was a grown man waiting outside the school for him on three, certainly, possibly even five consecutive evenings.

When they showed him the footage the secretary Sandra burst into tears and had to leave the room. The police, uncomfortable with the procedure, continued, their faces red, flustered. Yee Jan wondered to whom they felt the most sympathetic, him, or the man who’d mistaken him for a woman – as this was the scenario from their perspective.

Everyone knew the story about the language school and the disappearance of the Japanese student (which explained Sandra’s tears), but none of the students were aware that this had any effect day to day on the school or had anything much to do with the slightly heightened security around the palazzo, because, let’s face it, this is Naples, so a camera above the intercom wasn’t odd. A camera above the courtyard doors wasn’t odd. A camera mounted in the window of the antiques store wasn’t odd. The police knew next to nothing and seemed genuinely bored. They couldn’t even be sure how many times the man had followed him. Three times captured on tape, but maybe four. Four or five, then.

In gritty black and white, from three separate vantage points, the image showed a man standing, and sometimes leaning, by the wall opposite the entrance. In the first tape the man stood with his arms at his side, he wore an unmarked baseball hat and a lightweight jacket despite the heat and humidity. Yee Jan thought he looked a little (and while he didn’t like the word, he couldn’t avoid it) retarded. No one stands that still for that long without having some kind of an issue going on. It didn’t help that the crudeness of the image flattened everything into tonal plains. The longer Yee Jan looked, the harder he concentrated, the more the grey plains appeared to vibrate. In two of the segments other students came out and the man showed no interest, but as soon as Yee Jan emerged with his bag tucked under his arm (that handsome ersatz-Ferragamo with a white and brown body and long double-stitched brown straps, a serious piece of equipment), the man turned his head, then, once Yee Jan walked away, he followed after, looking ever-so-slightly undead. It was the walk. Definitely the walk. Evidently, Yee Jan or his bag had some kind of zombie-magnetism going on.

In the set of images from the second day the man waited in almost the exact same spot. This time he leaned back, shoulders against the wall, and bowed forward as soon as Yee Jan came out of the doors and followed after, not quite so zombie-like (in fact pretty ordinary, though somewhat languid) one hand running along the brim of his cap, a ring on his finger. The ring passed too quickly for him to see which finger (he suspected it was a signet ring, it would be too much to hope that a married man with some secret vice was following him, smitten). On the third day the man waited, hands in pockets, a little more anxious perhaps and wary of the street. When Yee Jan came out, among a burst of other students, he waited, held back, his right hand wiped his face and he walked out of view, more zombie than not, again following Yee Jan.

The director of the language school cleared her throat throughout the viewing. She spoke softly with the two policemen, then directly addressed Yee Jan in English.

‘This isn’t the first time. I think the film, it’s possible, is making things worse.’

Yee Jan sucked the skin on his knuckles – which film? Did she mean the movie they were shooting on the seafront? The policemen didn’t appear to care and he wondered at how Italians seemed to love their uniforms, however stupid they appeared wearing them because they always looked a size too small and were over-dressed in ornament. Just dumb.

‘Do you know who he is?’

‘No. Most of the people who come, come only once. And sometimes, once they’re here, they wait for a while. It’s not clear why, exactly.’ But this time there was a complaint from one of the students about a man waiting outside, and when the secretary checked the tapes, she noticed it was the same man coming time after time. ‘We don’t know for how long.’

Yee Jan sat forward, and repeated his question. ‘Why is he here?’

The director shifted back in her seat. ‘There isn’t much we can do. It’s a public street. There is the sign outside. Every time something comes out in the newspapers or a book – and now this film – we have people who come to the school, they go to the palazzo on via Capasso, then they come here to look at the sign outside. I have asked them to take down the sign. But I don’t think it would make a difference.’

It sounded to Yee Jan like this would be the preferred option. Take down the sign, rename the school. Easy.

‘Why is he following me?’

‘Was. He was following you. This footage is from last week. He hasn’t come back this week.’

‘So why was he following me?’

At this the director looked deeply pained. ‘Because,’ she answered carefully, ‘one of the people who disappeared was one of our students. A Japanese student.’

Yee Jan nodded, he knew the story. ‘I’m American. The features are Korean.’

‘I don’t understand it either. But it’s always the same. People are curious. It’s an unfortunate mistake. I think this is what happens when an idea spreads. I think someone has seen you and just become fascinated with the idea.’

While the error was just about plausible – in a general sense – it was a simple fact that Yee Jan looked nothing like a Japanese housewife, not even close. In any case, Yee Jan had shown utmost sensitivity for the first couple of weeks at the school over the issue of his mannerisms and his clothes, and toned everything down. He’d kept to a simple wardrobe of dark T-shirts and black jeans. Although he sometimes changed after lessons, not one person from the school had seen him. Only slowly, over several weeks (and the difference becoming more noticeable this week), had he allowed himself to relax, to return to being human, feminine; his body becoming less constricted, his gestures broader, larger, and he’d started wearing a few more bangles, a little more make-up. He’d began to laugh again, that double laugh, the supple ripple that underscored and lit up conversations, and that coarse horny bellow that singled him out of any crowd. Yee Jan’s laughter was a gift given generously. He began to address himself in the third person when he was forgetful, or if he made a mistake. He began calling the boys girlfriend, girl, ragazza, or sometimes she, in a manner which suggested affection, and enjoyed making a mess of the genders in class to amuse himself, his tutors, the other students.

It was possible with his black hair, the occasional clasp, the eye-shadow, the hint of eye-liner (nothing even close to the amount of make-up he wore at home), the plucked eyebrows, his mannerisms (that lazy, sexy walk, those smooth gestures where his hands followed one beat behind every motion), his height, his skinniness, that he could be mistaken for a girl – a girl – but not, no way, a middle-aged Japanese housewife.

There were too many questions. Did this man follow him because he looked the type – Asian and petite? Did the man have some kind of problem with his sight, or was he crazy? Was he certain about his choice, or did he consider, vacillate, become certain then uncertain? How long did he follow? Did he come all the way to Vomero, door to door, or did he give up at the funiculare? Did he intend to harm him? Or was it something else? Yee Jan had seen in movies how a slight gesture made without deliberate intention could fashion a whole world of consequences, happenstances, and while he didn’t believe that this would occur in life, he wanted to know if the man believed that he had given him a signal, a please follow me? In any case: how curious was he, this man who wore jackets in the middle of the summer?

The police had a slightly different idea. Some of the people who came to the palazzo were from families with missing people. Since the disappearance of the first victim, and possibly because he wasn’t identified, the case had brought the attention of almost everyone who had lost someone. There were forty-five similar cases in the region, of people who had just gone missing without any indication or any obvious plan or prior warning. The case was a touchstone, and sometimes people came to the palazzo or the school in the faint hope that there would be some kind of discovery or realization. Yee Jan found this unbearable.

The director said she didn’t know what to do, because there wasn’t really much that could be done. They had debated whether they should let Yee Jan know, and thought it sensible to see if he recognized the man. ‘But really … other than that…’ She raised her hands in submission.

The police asked him to watch the images again, just to make sure, and this time, Yee Jan noticed some differences. The clothes were the same, the baseball cap, the jacket, the hand to his cap, the same hand to his face. Yee Jan asked for the images to be replayed. Now he was used to the idea, something didn’t quite fit. There was a something else, a piece they hadn’t shown him on the first viewing where the man had made some kind of gesture to the camera above the door. It looked like sign language, he couldn’t tell, being brief and perfunctory it passed almost without remark.

‘It’s a wasp.’ The director dismissed the gesture before Yee Jan could say anything.

‘That isn’t the same man.’ He cocked his head to think. ‘Look.’ He pointed at the monitor. ‘They aren’t the same. Their shoulders, this one is smaller, he’s a little shorter and he isn’t so broad.’

The policemen couldn’t see it.

‘His hand. He has a ring on the second day and not on the third.’

They all leaned toward the monitor. Yee Jan was right. On the second day the man was clearly wearing a wedding ring, on the third day he was not.

‘It isn’t the same man. I’m telling you.’

The police struggled to see the difference, but once the idea was suggested they couldn’t claim to be certain that it was the same figure on all three occasions.

‘It’s all right.’ Yee Jan gathered up his bag. ‘It’s happened before. I’m used to it, kind of. Seriously, I know what to do if there’s any trouble.’ Yee Jan pushed back the chair. The police shuffled to their feet but looked only at the director.

‘I – we – want you to know that you are safe.’

Yee Jan didn’t understand.

‘Nothing is going to happen to you.’

‘I don’t know what you mean? You said this was nothing.’

The director corrected herself. ‘The police have been keeping an eye on the school, and they –’ she indicated the police, ‘want you to know that you are safe.’

‘Do you mean I’m being followed?’

The director shifted her weight. ‘You were,’ she said, ‘but they don’t think there’s any need any more. It has been a week.’

*   *   *

Yee Jan’s friends waited at the alimentari. When he came out of the school he looked first to the wall knowing that this was where the men had waited, then crossed the alley to the broader piazza in a skittish hurry – and it was easy to allow the sunlight, the promise of waiting friends, their expectation of news, and such strange news also, to diffuse the threat he felt. He knew that if he could talk this through a good few times he would be able to wrap the event in a protective shell, reform it as a harmless anecdote. Stranger still was the idea that he had been monitored by the police but had no idea about it. Yee Jan looked about the palazzo, but could not see anyone in uniform, or anyone who looked like the police.

The news came out in a flood. A single explanation delivered standing at the head of the table. He held his hands up against the flurry of questions, ordered a beer, then sat down.

‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I’m losing my touch. He wasn’t interested in me. He didn’t want me. He wanted an ancient Japanese hausfrau.’ Yee Jan shuddered and whispered to Keiko. ‘It’s so insulting. Epic eyesight fail.’

No, he didn’t know what this man / these men, wanted, except to look, that it was probably some pathetic kind of curiosity that brought the lame and the inadequate to the language-school doors. They wanted to know about the Japanese student, the housewife, that’s why they were there. It wasn’t really much of a mystery, just people who had nothing better to do, and no other accident to gawp at. And it was all so last week.

‘Aren’t you frightened?’

‘No. I mean, maybe if I’d known about it, then yes, but I had no idea. And there’s nothing to be frightened of.’

The woman who asked the question was French, and she sat low in her seat with her arms folded, making herself as small as she possibly could. ‘I don’t like it,’ she said. ‘This place isn’t safe.’

Yee Jan saved the best piece of information till last. ‘I had an escort. All last week. And I didn’t even know it. I had police, secret police, following me just in case. Who knows, maybe they’re still here?’

*   *   *

On the funiculare back to Vomero, Yee Jan scanned the commuters, and wondered how many of these people, just out of curiosity, had walked by the language school at some point, just to place it, to know exactly where the school was located; to confirm for themselves that this was the very same sign they had seen a hundred thousand other times. He looked for a man with a baseball hat, a lightweight summer coat, but found no likely candidate. He looked among the passengers for someone who might be a policeman, and again found none, everyone looking so tired, so fed up and everyday he couldn’t imagine any one of them rushing to his aid if things got sticky. What worried him most wasn’t the current threat that some stalker might be after him – but that he hadn’t noticed. The whole event had come and gone and he’d known nothing about it.

 

 

FRIDAY

Yee Jan decided to overhaul his look. He rose early and made sure he was first into the bathroom, where he washed his hair, then spent an hour sitting at the end of his bed waiting for it to dry with his make-up laid out. It was time, he decided, to do the whole business. He wedged a small hand mirror between the slats of the window shutter, and as he prepared himself he occasionally paused and looked out at the city, at the backs of apartments and closed metal shutters, over rooftops busy with aerials and satellite dishes. He took out the clothes he’d thought too risky to wear, and thought that unworn, as loose items without specific shape, the blousy almost translucent shirt, the chequered neckerchief, the mini-skirt (tartan, naturally), the chain-link belt from which hung raccoon-like tails, the black herringbone stockings, the patent-leather black Mary Janes, were nothing, literally nothing, elements of something perhaps, but of little substance in themselves. He stood naked in front of the window, hands on hips, then posed in front of the mirror and thought he was tiny, without clothes he barely seemed physical: I dare. I don’t dare. I dare.

He wanted to see the video again, slowed down if possible, the man or men outside the language school, leaning against a wall, sullen plains of grey like this was early TV, Ernie Kovacs maybe, some kind of gag. He wanted to click through frame by frame, give the men the same attention they’d given him: only this time they wouldn’t know it. He wanted to see that gesture, to see if this movement was conscious (a deliberate sign, a series of calculated motions) or something automatic (a wasp in his face, a complicated nervous tic). The director’s answer had come too readily: it wasn’t enough any more to know if one or two men had followed him, no, he wanted to know if one of the men had left a message.

*   *   *

There was no reaction on the funiculare, but crossing piazza del Municipio two boys shouted at Yee Jan and ran ahead, finding themselves funny, and these shouts were reassurance that he’d established himself: if someone followed him now, police or maniac, there would be a reason for it, an explanation. With his white face, finely drawn eyes and eyebrows, with his hair pulled back over his scalp, a broad soft collar (he’d chosen a butch office number over the blouse – hints of Chanel), he walked with the manner of a courtier, with delicate but confident steps, not quite primping, but mannered, definitely mannered: each footfall an assured but subtle, me, me, me, me. The wide reach of the piazza, this volume of space about him open and hollow, the air close enough so that he could feel himself swim forward, and he felt honest and good and happy.

*   *   *

The students of Elementario Due returned with clippings from the week’s newspapers and chatter about the film, the visiting actors, and news of where they were staying. Everyone expressed amazement at Yee Jan’s transformation, how perfect, how delicate he appeared, and how he seemed to flutter in front of them as someone they knew and someone they did not know. He soon bored of the attention, and became exhausted by the constant struggle to pick the simplest phrases, he ached to get outside and find the film crew (although, even this could offer only a momentary interest). As a boy in Washington State he’d felt the same kind of boredom, days on end. A dry dissatisfaction. Something akin to taking a journey, the sedation of watching the world slide by a window and holding no influence over the persistent slide of it all, of being both inside and outside, a passenger who is never really present.

The newspapers revived the story of the clothes, the assault, the missing Japanese student, Mizuki Katsura, the missing American student, and it all began to assemble itself. At first, Lara refused to answer questions. Everyone had an idea about what had happened, and while the tutor would say nothing the students became busy with speculation.

With some effort she attempted to steer the conversation to easier subjects: toward whatever they might have attempted in Italian on the previous night – but the news of a killing made for a better discussion than food or culture or travel and these students, now roused, became inexplicably fluent and direct in their new language. This was no ordinary Friday. Lara wouldn’t just tell them directly to stop, to shut up, to do exactly what they were asked.

‘She was singled out at the train station. They were waiting for her.’

Then Lara, provoked: ‘There are people who have family – missing family. They come here to make a film, to tell the story about this, but they bring everything with them and have no interest in the city, and no interest in the people who have lost members of their family and who have no idea where they are.’

Tonight there was to be a demonstration. A silent protest, an hour-long vigil organized over mobile phones, devices seeking people from the region, calling them to a specific point at a specific time. They would find the location of the film crew and they would silently materialize and surround them in their hundreds. This, anyway, was the plan.

The second session did not improve. Having answered questions all week about why they’d come to Campania and what they liked best about Naples, students fixed on the subject. What they liked best about Naples today involved killing.

Yee Jan was surprised how uneasy the discussion made him: when he left the building for the coffee break he waited deliberately for a group and struck up a conversation so that someone would escort him across the courtyard and outside.

‘Did you see him?’

‘You know I can’t say I saw him. I mean, the police said he was right at the main door.’

The question was repeated, time and again through the break. Have you seen him? What do you think he wants? What are his intentions? What do you think he is going to do? It was only when they returned to class and came round the corner to see the thin dark alley, the glass of the antique shop window, wet-looking, eye-like, that Yee Jan understood – these people are no better than the people who came to the school and stood outside. Everybody wanted that thrill of proximity. There wasn’t one speck of difference.

Keiko met Yee Jan on the stairs and Yee Jan spelled it out. ‘I have a theory,’ he said, ‘about why people are so curious. There’s only one question, really. What’s it like to watch somebody die?’

*   *   *

He refreshed his face at the end of the day, and when he came out of the toilet he found Lara at the entrance, waiting, somewhat deliberate, he thought. He planned to find the film crew at the Duomo and did not want to be delayed.

Lara sat in a folding chair beside the door, an invigilator, hands clamped between her knees.

‘I thought you’d be here. If you have a moment.’

Lara had not spoken to him in English before and Yee Jan found this slightly alarming. ‘You want to speak?’

‘It’s about what happened last week.’

Yee Jan waited but Lara couldn’t formulate the question. Finally, she gave up and stood up and said it didn’t matter.

‘I know about the police,’ he said. ‘They told me I had my own secret security guard, or something like that. I had no idea. Did you know?’

Lara gave a small nod. ‘They told us last week.’

‘So everyone knew except me?’

‘The other instructors were told.’

‘Did you see them? The police?’

Lara shook her head.

‘I should have been told.’ Yee Jan smiled. ‘Someone should have told me.’ He let the statement stand. ‘Have you seen it?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Did you see the footage?’

Lara nodded. ‘They showed it to all of the instructors last week.’

‘It was two men, wasn’t it?’

‘I don’t know. It isn’t clear.’ Lara dismissed the question as she did in class when the answer wasn’t what she wanted.

‘Did you know her? The Japanese student. The woman who disappeared? Were you teaching then?’

Lara made a small gesture which Yee Jan took as a no.

‘Has to be weird. The whole thing. Is there anyone here who knew her?’

‘I was here. I was finishing my teaching placement.’

‘So she was in an advanced class. But you’d know about it.’

‘Everybody here knows about it.’

Yee Jan nodded and thought to leave. ‘It’s just, when something like that happens people treat you differently. If they know you were involved.’ He could sense Lara measuring him.

Yee Jan made one single nod. ‘And people don’t know how to talk to you. Like you’re sticky. A little toxic.’

‘Look.’ Lara dipped her head, eyes closing. ‘This has happens a lot. People come all the time. Even though nothing actually happened here.’

‘They said.’

Lara zipped up her bag. ‘You said this happened to you before?’

So this is what she wanted to know? ‘Not quite like this.’

‘Sorry?’

‘It wasn’t the same.’

Lara looked up and waited.

‘OK, the first time there was a guy in a car. He just drove up and told me to get in.’

‘And you got in?’

‘I recognized him. I knew who he was. I wasn’t sure there was much of a choice. Anyway, I always do what I’m told. After I got in the car I changed my mind and he wouldn’t let me out. I managed to get out, but for a moment I didn’t know what was going to happen.’ Yee Jan explained the situation directly and without fuss, his voice gently flattening as if what had happened was a little tedious or had happened to someone else, to a person perhaps that he didn’t like.

‘Did he threaten you?’

‘He didn’t need to.’

‘But he didn’t?’

‘I don’t know. I thought when I got out of the car – that was it. He’d – I don’t know.’ Yee Jan shrugged. ‘I was just scared.’

‘And nothing happened?’

But that wasn’t really nothing. Yee Jan gave a polite smile. ‘No. I saw him again. He tried the same thing. Told me to get into the car. This time he made threats, said he would tell my family things, make trouble for me at college, at work, and then he started making threats, just general threats. Stuff he’d do to the people I knew.’

‘He knew you?’

‘No. I found out later he didn’t. I’d seen him around. I’d noticed him. But I thought he knew me, or knew of me, and he might know where I lived – and I thought he might do something.’ Yee Jan looked up. ‘It was two men, wasn’t it? Last week. Outside. Not one.’

Again Yee Jan had the sense that he was asking the wrong question.

‘You sound certain?’

‘Do you think they thought I was her, this Mizuki?’

‘I don’t see how. She’s been gone for two years.’

‘Then why were they waiting for me?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It’s because of the way I look.’ A statement of fact.

‘I don’t think it’s that specific. Or clear. The police think you fit a general profile. Being Asian. Something more general.’

Yee Jan didn’t answer. ‘So this has happened to other Asian students?’

Lara shook her head. ‘We’ve had some trouble with younger women, girls – but I think that’s not so unusual. That’s an entirely different thing.’

‘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.

She watches again.

A different view taken from the Duomo steps so that the field of people is specked with a pulsing light, the candles too many to account for, star points, a map of light, and she can see the disturbance, how the light appears to grow dense, block together as the three bodies push through, a small hole behind them which soon, water-like, refills itself. The buildings opposite glow with ominous long, hollow windows.

Again. Another view. Closer.

The crowd barely move, the threesome press directly toward the camera, shoulders first. No one steps aside to allow them through so they have to shove and lumber past the person taking the shot. The camera jolts, is held up to show a brighter set of lights, the film set beside the Duomo and the scaffold holding floodlights which turn night into day. Something about the crowd reminds her of an execution, a public trial. She’s old enough to remember Tiananmen Square.

Monica watches because she has promised to do this, and tries to concentrate on the men, the boxers, the brothers, as they bump deliberately, shoulders set to knock people out the way, some small cries of protest. But every time she can’t help but focus on the boy, it is impossible not to watch him, and she can’t imagine how this could happen – an abduction during a silent protest, one body selected and removed.

She has to understand how this could happen. How someone could be picked out when surely all attention would be on him, everyone would notice him. She cannot help but watch the boy. The boy appears drunk, ill, out of it. The men have purpose, threat in their speed, which dares to be challenged – and this, the greatest shock of all, almost unaccountable, is their pure nerve to show themselves, join the very crowd protesting their actions two years earlier. Everybody is here because of these two brothers.

The news today is worse, if this is even possible. There is footage from the police, not from the demonstration but images taken a week before of a man waiting in a small street. This image is almost black and white, and at one point, showed slowly, the man appears to leave a message, make a series of gestures, his hand up, a signal she cannot read. The same baseball cap, the same jacket. A one point a group of people come out from under the camera, and there, among them, the boy from the piazza. Yee Jan Lee.

Monica sits and watches, unsure of the limits of her body. She can’t feel her fingers, or sense anything other than her breath and chest, aware that it hurts to watch, but now, exhausted, she feels like she is starting to disappear. There is nothing about the brothers that she recognizes. Although they must have been there, two years ago, on the platform, in the station. They had to have been close, she must have walked right by them, there is no possible way she could not have passed them. She has taken the very same walk many times in the intervening years and looked at every detail and wondered, in a space so small, how could she not have seen them?

*   *   *

On his first visit the man made it from the door to the rack of magazines. On the second he managed a further two metres to the desk before changing his mind. On his third visit, which comes minutes after the second (they have all occurred in the space of one morning), Elisa, who always keeps an eye out for the weird ones, announces as the man steps in from the street that this is a travel agency for the purpose of booking flights and holidays. OK?

‘You come here when you want to go somewhere.’ She slides a brochure across her desk. ‘If you want anything that isn’t travel-related then you’re in the wrong place.’

Monica, being less confrontational, asks the man if she can help, and the man asks if there are any brochures for America or England. Monica points to the rack at the brochures facing out with pictures of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, searching herself, and then and along a lower shelf, aha, Las Vegas, San Francisco, New York, and there it is, London. ‘Where are you thinking in England,’ she asks, and realizes she can’t think of anywhere other than London. London, England, even though she has relatives who live in Manchester. She can’t remember booking anyone a trip to anywhere other than America, North and South, in a long time. She tries to chat but it isn’t easy this morning: to be honest everyone figures out their own arrangements these days (she’s talking nonsense because she just can’t focus). Everyone has a computer. She makes a grimace and the man smiles. After the smile he steps forward as if they are a little more intimate.

‘London? OK? That’s what you wanted?’

He gives a dismissive blink, a slight head shake, and asks if she speaks English. Monica answers in English.

‘I do. A little.’

‘You are Monica Cristobari?’

And here she realizes her mistake. There is no holiday. There are no plans. The man, like many others, has sought her out and now he will tell her why, they always do.

‘Did you recognize them? The brothers? Did you remember them?’

Monica raises her hand to her head, unconscious of the movement. Elisa flies at the man as he speaks.

‘My name is Doctor Arturo Lanzetti. I live at via Capasso 29. I have seen them before. I recognize them.’ The man, walking backwards now, is repelled from the shop by Elisa with a loud Out, out, out. Monica, stunned, moves as if she is swimming. Before Elisa has the man expelled, the door closed, the lock secured, the bolt drawn, Monica has her jacket over her arm and speaks as if this is rational – she thinks she should be getting home if that’s all right. And Elisa guides her to the back of the shop, insists that she sits down, swears at the man, tells Monica she should wait a moment, let him leave and she will call her a taxi.

‘You shouldn’t have come in today.’

Elisa returns to the window to check the street, but can’t see the man because the market is busy. Monica shakes her head. ‘It isn’t going to stop, is it? It’s never going to stop.’

The man stands on the opposite kerb until Elisa makes a show of calling the police, her phone held up dramatically, to demonstrate her intention. Once the police do arrive, purely coincidentally, the man disappears.

Elisa turns the blinds to direct the light from the street and close the view. A distraction? Is that what they need right now? Some noise? A distraction? The radio?

‘He won’t be back.’

Early afternoon, on a bright day, most days, the gold lettering on the opposite shop window shines across the floor, and slips slowly across the linoleum to the foot of Monica’s desk. Monica would slip off one shoe and slide her foot into the path. Today she stands at the edge, mind blanking on ideas on how she can excuse herself and leave.

Elisa bins the newspaper, unread. ‘I’m not in the mood for news.’ No interest today in reading about the film or the actors – which out of respect has stopped production, or at least filming in town.

‘It’s – honestly. I’m OK.’ Monica watches Elisa rearrange the drawstrings for the blinds: her blouse untucks from her skirt. ‘It’s just,’ she shakes her head, still can’t think of anything to say. ‘Rude. The point shouldn’t need making.’

This is how things are these days, the women agree, without any real thought, any conscience. Someone has an idea about something and they just go ahead and do exactly whatever they please.

Elisa always agrees with Monica, even when she disagrees, you’re right, she’ll say, then pick a word and stick with it. Most days Monica finds this funny, endearing even. Some days, though, it would be nice if this didn’t have to happen.

‘You’re right. There’s no respect for privacy. That’s really the problem. That’s honestly what this is about. If we’re being honest about this, they didn’t have to do it here at all. The film. And they’ve chosen the actual places. Honestly. The palazzo. Ercolano,’ she hesitates, manages not to say the station, the abduction and it is still only an abduction, because no body has been found, the boy, carted away from the piazza, has disappeared. ‘Can you imagine?’

Monica hums her disagreement. ‘Can we not do this today?’ Her computer fades into sleep mode. On screen a man swimming, a shot taken underwater looking up, spars of sunlight radiating about him.

*   *   *

That afternoon, while changing into her swimming costume, Monica feels a cold pulse pass across her lower back. She has stuck with her regular routine. Insisted upon it. She checks herself in the mirror and remembers a rash she discovered that morning. Not a rash, so much – nothing more in fact than a small area of dry skin, but it has now divided into two patches on either side of her spine. Monica prefers to keep out of the sun, and exercises in an enclosed pool. Her skin is snowy white. She seldom sits under direct sunlight.

Troubled by the rash she decides not to swim. There are chemicals in the water, she tells herself, which will aggravate the condition. Monica believes that this discomfort is caused by stress. It would be strange if it didn’t happen. It’s impossible to avoid the news about the film, or news about the boy, who was taken, they suggest, as a stand-in for the girl they didn’t take two years ago. A fascination now with Yee Jan Lee, a boy, who by rights should not have looked so pretty. It’s impossible to avoid the storm growing around the conviction of Marek Krawiec, who was right all along. It appears. An appeal is lodged. So who are these men, these brothers? And why would they come to the city to kill one boy then grab another? She isn’t sure she understands. Uneasy with her part in this, she finds herself featured in reports in the Cronache and the Corriere as ‘the witness’, or ‘the sole witness’ to the first killing, and while her name has not become generally known, it’s no secret that ‘the sole witness’ works for a travel agency located close by the Centro Direzionale. Her clients, her friends, her family all know the story and are all alarmed by the weekend’s developments. People being picked off the streets. Truth is she’s thoroughly sick of it.

By example: when Monica returns home her cousin Davide asks if it would make sense for her to take some kind of a holiday until everything blows over.

Monica, preparing the evening meal, her hands wet, pauses long enough to ask why she should have to stop her work and head off to some place – if it was even possible – where they hadn’t heard of this case?

‘Maybe China,’ she says, ‘or India? Or some place where people don’t read?’

Davide insists that he’s serious.

‘And I go, and then the film comes out and there’s a big fuss in the newspapers and all over the television. I leave again and then I come back. Then it’s released on DVD – there’s more fuss, I leave and I come back. And then it goes on cable, then RaiUno. And on and on.’ She draws her hands out of the bowl, wet ring-less fingers. ‘And then … perhaps someone will write a book about making a film about a story that is taken from this book which is taken from a real-life story that was copied from a story in a book. You know? Or maybe there will be a video game? Something they can play in the arcades? And then later they can remake the film, or make the film of the video game? Or maybe there will be some other imagined crime that these men can act on and make real?’

Davide visibly weakens under this reasoning – in his defence he’s trying to suggest something practical.

‘There isn’t any escape, Davide. There isn’t an ending. It doesn’t just stop because we are tired of it.’

*   *   *

Despite herself Monica is becoming increasingly preoccupied by the three minutes or less in which she witnessed the young man at the train station. And this is two years ago now, two whole years. The man had sorted through his bags with little hurry, unaware of the people about him, as if he had somewhere to go, somewhere to be. Two years ago she become frozen by the event, caught in endless possibilities, so that the event itself became completely unreal, a fiction. What if he had not paused? What if he had taken a moment longer? What if she had spoken to him? Would the sequence of events that brought him to the small basement room in a dirty palazzo on via Capasso have played out differently? To add to this she wrestles with the uncertainty of what has recently occurred. Like everyone else she entertains alternative possibilities: perhaps the boy isn’t dead, perhaps this is just like the book, an elaborate scam?

These ideas set fire to her skin. The rash won’t quieten.

She calls a specialist recommended by her sister-in-law and makes an appointment.

 

 

THURSDAY

Monica takes the morning off work and turns up early at the specialist’s office in Portici. The rash hasn’t improved. Dr Novi carefully checks her back and asks after her diet and sleeping pattern. He washes his hands after the inspection and says that this is minor, although he is certain that it must irritate her, it’s unlikely to be caused by the chlorinated water. More likely than not the condition is caused by stress (and this is something she didn’t know?), although it was always possible that they were using different chemicals, or more chemicals than they should. He cannot be certain. He will provide a prescription for a salve, and suggests that if she wishes to continue her exercise that she swims instead in salt water where she will benefit from both the ions and the iodine, but failing that, there’s a mineral pool in Lucrino, a small distance from the city. It is, he said, a far second best, because it might be better if she does not swim at all.

Monica sits on the doctor’s raised bed, dissatisfied with the examination. She’d mentioned swimming only because this was easier than explaining about the cause of her stress. She can’t be certain about his recommendation either. Can she or can’t she swim? It isn’t clear. Swimming offers her the one pure moment when she does not have to answer to her family, or to work. While she swims, in that brief thirty-five minutes each day, she is completely alone, and the isolation that the activity brings is a welcome and rare pleasure.

*   *   *

Immediately out of the office Monica takes the metro to Cavalleggeri d’Aosta, and in the heat and bustle her clothes irritate the skin, and send a small charge, a pulse around her back. She tries to scratch her wrist instead of her back but finds this useless.

The pool is new, less than a year old, and managed by a university. Monica changes in a private booth, conscious that her costume is old, and that chlorine is beginning to rot the stitching. The pool itself is steel, of even depth, and encased in glass, one side looks out to a bright view of a honey-coloured cliff, the lip of a crater, the other to a parking lot, and in the distance, the other side of the crater.

Monica is joined at the poolside by a young man. Like Monica the man has with him a towel, which he sets on the slate side away from the pool, and goggles, the straps wrapped about his hand. She watches as the man walks to the head of the pool and chooses the centre lane, and she considers quickly who she would be able to keep pace with, and picks the lane beside the young man.

On her first few laps she finds herself swimming faster than her usual pace. Her stroke, although clean, is usually underpowered, but once she is comfortable she begins to move with economy and feels the motion to be smooth and direct, and for twenty minutes she swims without a break, aware of the young man in the lane beside her. As Monica swims freestyle, the young man swims breaststroke, and they fall into an easy rhythm, swimming at points side by side. When she stops, the man continues, and she watches him set the pace for the lane with a powerful, simple stroke – as his hands dive forward his head ducks down and his shoulders follow in a sequence that is direct and uncomplicated. Unlike the other swimmers he causes little disturbance in the water, no splashing, and no hurry, just a smooth and considered series of movements. When she starts again, she finds herself falling into the same rhythm and is mindful to contain her stroke and make the movement as direct and uncomplicated as she can. Hand slightly cupped, she breaks the water, thrusts her arm full length, then folds it under her in a long swift swipe, and finds with this simple adaptation that she moves quicker, further, faster.

At the end of his swim the young man stands at the end of the lane. Tall and gangly, he has none of the poise and grace out that he commands when he is in the water.

Monica returns to the changing rooms exhilarated, not only by the swim but by the coincidence of swimming beside the young man. It is only when she sits to take off her costume that her mood changes and she remembers the boy at the station, and an unreasonable notion strikes her that if one man she had noticed disappeared, it could possibly happen again. As soon as the thought occurs she dismisses it. There was no killing, she tells herself. No such thing.

 

 

FRIDAY

Monica returns to the pool at the same time. As she walks into the building she’s surprised to see the young man ahead of her, smartly dressed with a small backpack. He leans forward a little as he walks. She guesses that he has come directly from work, and wonders if the people he works with understand how exceptionally graceful he is in the water. Out of the water there’s nothing exceptional about him, but when he swims everything about him seems in tune and in place. She stands beside him to pay for her ticket, neither smiles nor acknowledges the other, and the previous day’s anxiety is remembered but not felt. The man has returned, of course he has returned. Nevertheless, if she hadn’t seen him, his absence would have troubled her.

And so she swims beside the man again, each keeping pace, that one or the other sometimes breaks, and she finds this silent company comforting and imagines that a familiarity is growing between them. While she fights to keep pace she begins to recognize when her own stroke becomes similarly economical and pure. In just two sessions her stroke is beginning to change, she is becoming long, more decisive with her reach, so that the motion is unconsciously fluid. Afterward, she wonders if the man deliberately keeps pace with her, he made no attempt to force any other kind of contact between them. Out of the water they are strangers, in the water they are companions, and their bodies move at the same pace. She can feel his company as soon as she slips into the water. She is familiar now with the set of his mouth as he comes up for air, his quick efficient gasp, the hunch of his shoulders as he lunges forward, and the speed with which he pulls deep into the water.

This is, she understands, a distraction. The more preoccupied she becomes with the swimmer, the less she needs to think about the student at the station, about the boy at the piazza.

 

 

SATURDAY

On the Saturday, the swimmer does not appear, it shouldn’t surprise her, but she finds it impossible to swim, and sits at the poolside waiting. That night her anxieties return in a full and wide-eyed sleepless distraction. She sits upright in bed, her back irritating, the nerve ends prickle, sharp and sensitive. The heat of the room and the oily stink of traffic catch in the night air, familiar to her as the station that morning two years ago. She sees it time and time again, the train door, the boy crouched beside his bags with his back to her, the shirt as it was on his back, and the shirt as it was, bloodied and cut. Why hadn’t she delayed him? Why hadn’t she spoken to him?

On the news the boy’s parents, Mr and Dr Lee, who move like people who do not trust themselves, whose bodies might at any point fail them, who look torn by grief and unknowing. They beg for the release of their son. Dr Lee speaks in Italian, explains how much her son loves the city. Speaks in the present tense to keep him alive.

Monica watches the news. The footage of the vigil. The candles as a map or a sea, all comfort taken from the image. They show the brothers, a still of their faces which gives nothing away. A politician explains that Krawiec is to be released but banned from the country. She does not know how they can do this. These brothers, the politician struggles for adequate words, come to our city to feed on us, not once, but twice, like wolves. There are calls again for information regarding Mizuki Katsura, the thinking now is that the killers have taken her absence, her disappearance, the belief that she was killed to be instruction and script on the abduction of the boy. She must come forward. How then did they find the first American? Was this an accident? Did they choose him the moment she passed by, or had the decision already been made, the boy as good as dead?

She sits at the edge of her bed, her back needling. The room is close, the air sticky, and she tries to calm herself by thinking of the swimmer instead of the student at the station. But the substitution of one man for another will not work. The man in the pool and the youth at the station, while not similar, were also too similar, and the sound of the traffic, the scooters, the taxis, the night bustle of the city, while not like the sounds of the station, were not unlike the sounds of the station. The familiarity, the associations were uncanny and close.

She thinks of opposites, of things that are not there and memories that will not trouble her. Instead of heat, she thinks of snow. Instead of the city, she imagines herself above it, safely distant, alone on the mountain. Her immediate memory is of her first close view of snow. She was five when her father drove her to the volcano and presented it to her as if it were of his own making. It was winter, the first day of the year, and she remembers the long and steep road along the flanks of the mountain, and her excitement at how strange it was to be looking back at the city rather than out at the mountain. The inner cone sheltered by the separate shattered ridge of Monte Somma, and between the two peaks ran a long and lower field of rucked and fluid lines of stone capped and softened with snow. The trees, so thin and precarious on the steep lip, appeared sparse and burned, black against a thin white drift, and it is with this thought, the notion of a field of blankness, of coldness, of everything alien to the physical heat currently pressing down upon her, that she is able to slowly shut the chatter out her mind. And to this place she brings the swimmer, and the two of them sit, silent, side by side, overlooking a plain snowbound void.

There was no killing. There were no brothers. The city does not exist.