“Enough time for whispers to spread,” he growled. “Are you really so blind to the trouble you’ve caused?”
“It should be clear by now,” she said. “Neither Tito nor I have any desire to see one another. If anyone reallyiswatching, they’d notice this.”
He seemed surprised. “You haven’t seen Calandra since then?”
“Of course not!”
She’d tried to stay calm, but rage tightened her throat. She spat it out. “I never want to see Tito again. The only reason anyone could possibly believe Tito has a weakness for me is becauseyoukeep coming here. Leave me the hell alone, and maybe they’ll lose interest.”
As quickly as it had come, De Rosa’s anger seemed to depart, his attention turning suddenly inward. He scanned the room as if hunting for an answer.
Nikki watched and considered him, her own anger retreating.
Benedetto De Rosa was so unlike the coarse thugs she knew from Tito’s world. It was tempting to be lulled by the calm demeanor; the understated sophistication that belied the certain ruthlessness of the man. But he was Tito’s right hand, and Tito chose his lieutenants carefully. As children, and then teenagers, Nikki had watched the way he culled the herd to find the brightest and best. The most loyal. The most merciless.
It struck her as suddenly odd that De Rosa would spend any of his attention on her—not once, but twice this week. After such a long silence from Tito, why send his deputy now?
“What’s happened?” she asked.
De Rosa seemed not to hear.
“What?” he said, eyes flicking to her face.
“You said the situation’s changed,” Nikki said. “Why weren’t you worried about this before now? What’s happened?”
He began buttoning his overcoat.
“You’ve made your feelings clear,” he said.
Nikki felt a shimmer of dread, and that whisper in her memory:mio piccolo mostro.
“Has something happened to Tito?” she asked.
His body was rigid, expression hard. “I owe you nothing.”
He moved for the door, then stopped and glared at her.
“Change your patterns. Stop teaching. I won’t tell you again.”
—
Long after De Rosa was gone, Nikki stood frozen, crowded with the monsters he’d dragged in: their bullying weight and stinking breath, the catch of their claws. Some dark knowledge, which she’d long ago pressed into a cage, broke its bars.
Nikki had spent years removing every remnant of intimacy with Tito: a chaotic, anguished spasm followed by painstaking work to shield herself from his influence. It had once seemed impossible to separate who she was—who she really was—from him. They’d merged completely. Two sides of the same coin.
Now, alone in the studio, she seemed to feel him still, to hear his voice in her thoughts:Don’t do anything halfway, he used to say.Don’t carry a gun unless you’re prepared to pull the trigger.
This knowledge seemed instinctive in Tito, whose response to his father’s beatings had been to internalize the lessons of power. He had a profound capacity for observation, and tested what he learned methodically, with the patience of a laboratory scientist.
Perhaps she should have realized then what Tito was—guessed what he would become. Every child of Naples had some understanding of what il Sistema, the System, was. No doubt this was why her family had disapproved of her youthful affiliation with Tito’s gang. But on the streets of Naples, the boundary between crime and survival had eroded so completely—a low wall to step easily across. And inthose days, the police actions she learned about from her father and brother seemed disconnected from the petty crimes she witnessed—or the secret transgressions she committed daily with her friends.
Her brother Adriano, who’d worked in an elite carabinieri unit that dealt with organized crime and terrorism, had seemed to recognize the peculiar alchemy that brought boys like Tito inside, that fed off their desperation and ambition and ate them whole.
You must see—must understand the players and how they fit together, Adriano had told her.
He said that organized crime was like the mythical hydra, with new heads growing whenever one was chopped away.
It’s never enough to just take a head, he said.To kill the beast, you need to understand it completely…you must watch and learn…find its beating heart.
