I need to stop counting. Valente told me to stop counting on day twelve, when I started doing it out loud without realizing. I can't stop. The number is the only honest thing left in my head, the one fact that doesn't shift or soften or offer itself up as something I can work with. Twenty-eight days. Twenty-eight nights. A month of my life spent taking this operation apart name by name while she's somewhere I can't reach, and the trail that should have taken a week has taken three, and every hour of the difference is a debt I'm still calculating how to pay.
Two names in three weeks. Lombardi first, then a transit point in Catania that cost us a firefight and seventeen days of silence before a frightened man finally gave up Bianchi. It shouldn't have taken this long. I should have been faster. I've told myself every variation of that sentence available to a man running on three hours of sleep and the desperation of someonewho knows exactly what happens to women inside systems like the one I'm dismantling. The telling hasn't helped.
I close my eyes. The bare bulb in the ceiling throws orange through my eyelids, and the first face I see isn't Bianchi's.
It's Lombardi's.
Three weeks ago in Messina, at a bar near the port that served cheap grappa and reeked of fish guts and motor oil, where Lombardi ran his paperwork out of a back office no bigger than a closet. We picked him up at closing time, Valente and I, and brought him to a rented warehouse south of the city where the nearest neighbors were freight containers and feral cats.
I didn't touch him. At that point, I still believed in the architecture of patience, that a man like Lombardi would dissolve faster in silence than under pressure, that the controlled approach was faster. I was right about Lombardi and wrong about what came after him, and I've been revising my methods ever since.
Lombardi was a soft man, middle-aged, going thick around the middle with the physiology of someone who pushed paper, pulled levers, and never had to see the product move. Thinning hair combed across a pale scalp. Sweat stains on the collar of a shirt that used to be white. He sat across from me at a folding table with his wrists bound in front of him, and I let the silence do the work.
I asked him about his business. His client list. His family. And between every question I left a gap, ten seconds, twenty, sometimes a full minute of nothing but the hum of the overhead light and his own breathing getting louder and faster in the quiet. His hands shook. At first it was a tremor in the fingers, and then it moved into his wrists, his forearms, until the zip ties rattled against the table like loose change in a dryer.
I asked about the transit routes he managed, the women moved through his logistics network. Club girls, tourists,students, all of them filtered through a system as clean and organized as any shipping operation I've ever seen. Lombardi didn't design the system, but he kept it running, filed the manifests, coordinated the pickups, and made sure the cargo arrived on schedule.Cargo. That's the word he used, and he used it without flinching, the way a man uses the language of his profession because the alternative is thinking about what it means.
His phone sat on the table between us. I'd taken it when we grabbed him. Standard procedure. The case was scuffed and cracked at one corner, and taped to the back of it was a child's drawing, crayon on lined paper, a stick figure with wild yellow hair holding hands with a smaller stick figure in a triangle dress. Papa written across the top in wobbly letters, the P backwards.
For one moment, one fractured, unguarded moment, all I could think about was what drawingsshemight have made as a girl. Whether she drew churches even then, small fingers pressing too hard on cheap crayons, the same precision she brings to everything, the same stubbornness in every line. Whether someone put those drawings on a refrigerator or taped them to a phone case or tucked them in a drawer where they yellowed and curled and were forgotten.
Then the moment passed and Lombardi was still shaking across from me.
"There's an American," he said, when the silence became more than he could carry. "I've never met him. No one meets him directly. He runs the operation through intermediaries, layers. I only know what comes through the system."
"And what comes through the system."
"Women. Same as always. Different origins. The American has been expanding. Eastern Europe, North Africa, and now..." He swallowed. "Local acquisitions. Specific requests."
"Specific how."
"He had someone contact him about an American girl, which was unusual. He stays away from American tourists. "
American girl.
"Where."
"Dario Sala. Transit point in Catania. Everything passes through there before it moves south. If she was in the system, she went through Dario Sala."
I thanked him. I actually said the words, "Thank you, Tommaso," and I meant them the way you mean thank you when someone hands you a glass of water after three days in the desert, with the full understanding that gratitude and mercy are separate currencies.
The knife went in below the ear and across. Fast and clean. One motion, the same one my father taught me when I was fifteen on a side of beef hanging in the cold room behind the kitchen at the estate, because Cicero Marchetti believed a man should understand the mechanics of death before he was asked to practice them on anything that could scream.
Lombardi didn't scream. He didn't have time.
Valente stood in the doorway watching me wipe the blade on Lombardi's shirt, his expression the flat neutrality he wears when he's choosing not to say what he's thinking.
"You didn't have to be gentle."
"I wasn't gentle. I was efficient. There's a difference."
He gave me that look, the one I've known since we were thirteen and I came back from one of Cicero's lessons with my arm hanging wrong and swore it was fine. The look that says I don't believe you, but I'll follow you anyway.
I didn't tell him that my hands had been shaking under the table the entire time I was questioning Lombardi. That I'd locked them around my own knees to keep them still. That the patience I was performing was exactly that, a performance, built on top of something much less controlled that I couldn't affordto let Lombardi see, or it would have told him he had more leverage than he did.
Dario Sala was four days later. An industrial park off the E45, just outside Catania, where shipping containers sat in rows like the teeth of a machine, enormous and patient. Valente brought twelve men despite me insisting we should bring more. But he was right, twelve was what we could move without attracting the wrong kind of attention in Ferrante territory. Neither one of us wanted another war on our hands, we don't have time to fight.
The warehouse was the third one in from the eastern fence; corrugated steel, no windows, two doors. We breached at three in the morning. Valente took the south entrance with six men and I took the north with six more, and what came next was not an interrogation or a strategy. Not even a chess game played in silence across a folding table.
