Smart motherfucker!
It perfectly explained Luciano’s sweating, and it kept the guard from looking too closely inside the BMW.
“Why are you here if you’ve got Covid, sir?” the guard asked. “Don Amato’s not going to like that.”
“I’ll stay in a guest bedroom for the next few days,” Luciano said. “I didn’t want my wife and children to get sick.”
The guard frowned. “But… aren’t they already exposed?”
I wanted to shoot the guard for being fucking annoying –
But Luciano handled it perfectly.
“Imighthave it. I’m not sure,” he snarled. “But if I got it, it was from someone my wife doesn’t need to know about.”
“…ohhhhh,” the guard said, and I could almost hear thewink winkin his voice. “I understand, sir. I hope it’s nothing.”
“Same here.”
The guard nodded, then walked back to the guard shack.
Luciano rolled up the window as the iron gates opened up.
“Nice job,” I said approvingly.
Luciano didn’t say anything as he drove the car inside.
It was good he’d convinced the guy at the gate, because four other guards were hanging around just inside the stone walls.
They watched, unconcerned, as we drove past them and approached the main house.
We were in.
44
Don Amato’s place was a fucking castle. And since they call Naples the “City of Seven Castles,” that’s saying something.
There were a lot ofrealcastles scattered throughout Naples. Castel dell’Ovo, Castel Nuovo, and Castel Sant’Elmo were three names I knew off the top of my head.
They were all old as fuck – eight or nine hundred years old at the very least.
I didn’t know if Amato’s mansion was as old as the rest of them… but it sure as fuck looked like it was.
Lucrezia had found a bunch of photographs of it on the internet from some sort of architectural magazine, and Luciano had sketched out the floorplan back in his apartment – but it was something else to see it in person.
It was a humongous, grey stone fortress that stood four stories tall.
The front had massive marble steps leading up to the main entrance, which was really just an interior courtyard made of stone.
Past the courtyard was an arched hallway. Inside the hallway was a door where you could enter the house. Beyond the arched hallway was another, smaller courtyard filled with a bunch of trees and plants.
Getting in by force would’ve been next to impossible. The ground floor was a stone wall all the way around the house, and the only entrances were a couple of iron doors that were bolted on the inside.
The closest windows were ten feet off the ground on the second story. According to Luciano, they were bulletproof.
And there were massive iron-barred gates at the entrance to the stone courtyard. They weren’t just for show, either; there was a gigantic iron bar across them that could’ve stopped an SUV at full speed.
Out in front of the house was a weird kind of walkway – a giant circle, basically, made of columns and stone slabs for the ceiling. In between the columns were statues of Roman gods and shit.
