I frowned. “What happened?”
“I left Milan for a reason.”
“You had a run-in with someone in the mafia, right?”
She looked at me in surprise.
“You said you left Milan to ‘get away from that sort of thing,’” I reminded her.
“I did?”
“The second time I saw you, when you said that men didn’t take ‘no’ from women, only from other men.”
“Oh,” she said, and winced. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I said lightly. “You kind of had a point.”
I was joking aboutme –
But she didn’t laugh.
Instead, she looked worried.
“What happened in Milan?” I asked seriously.
“I had a stalker. A guy in the mafia.”
“How do you know he was in the mafia?”
“For one, the way he dressed. Like you – all-black suit, really expensive. He also said just about everythingexceptthat he worked for the mafia. ‘I’ve got powerful friends’… ‘My boss runs the entire city’… stuff like that.”
I frowned.What a fucking idiot…
“He came into the coffee shop where I worked. As soon as he saw me, he started flirting with me. He said his name was Maurizio. He wasn’t my type, so I just smiled politely and didn’t say anything to encourage him.
“But he stayedforever.It got so bad that he was interfering with me taking orders from other customers, and I had to say, ‘I’m at work.’ He said something like, ‘You go out with me, you’ll never have to work again.’ The other customers were too afraid of him to say anything, but he finally took the hint and left.
“But he kept coming back. Every time he showed up, he asked me out. He told me he would take me to the best restaurants, buy me whatever I wanted, set me up in a fancy apartment…
“I told him I had a boyfriend, even though I didn’t. He said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of him’ in a sinister way and laughed like it was funny.
“I finally told him point-blank I wasn’t interested. That’s when he flipped out on me. He told me I was a stuck-up bitch and that I’d be lucky to be with him. He cursed me out and called me a whore until my manager came over and told him to leave. Maurizio yelled at him, ‘Keep your nose out of this, or they’llnever find your fucking body.’ My boss immediately called the cops. That must’ve scared him off, because he left.
“I didn’t go to the café for an entire week. I was too afraid. My boss told me Maurizio hadn’t come back in, so I finally went back to work.
“I didn’t see him at the café again… but I got this feeling like I was beingfollowed.
“A couple of days later, I started catching little glimpses of him. Near the corner market where I bought my groceries… in the park where I took walks… everywhere.
“At first he would duck out of sight, but after a while, he got bolder. He wouldn’t even hide. He’d just leer at me like there was nothing I could do.
“I went to the cops, but I only knew his first name, so they couldn’t look him up. They told me that until they knew who he was, or until he actuallydidsomething, there was nothing they could do.”
My blood was boiling by this point.
I was pretty sure the cops could have figured out who he was. If Maurizio was one of Don Camerota’s men, and he shot off at the mouth as much as Emilia said, he’d probably fucked up somewhere along the way and was on the cops’ radar.
My guess was that whoever took Emilia’s complaint was bought and paid for by the Camerotas.
