"You came by bus," he says.
"I came by bus."
"I said I'd send a car."
"I said I'd meet you here." I sit down across from him. The chair is close to the table, the room small enough that my knees are nearly touching the opposite chair leg. "If I wanted a car, I'd have said yes to the car."
He looks at me for a moment. "Fair enough."
He pours wine into my glass without asking, which would irritate me if he weren't already reading the table correctly: I don't want to be asked about wine. I want wine. There's a difference.
"Il mare non bagna Napoli," I say. "Where did you find it?"
"I know a dealer in Trastevere."
"In Rome."
"Books travel."
"A first edition Einaudi doesn't usually travel to someone who spent three sentences describing their dinner preferences."
He almost smiles.
"You mentioned Ortese in the restaurant. The second time I came in. You said she understood Naples the way Caravaggio understood shadow."
I said that. I remember saying it, but I didn’t think he would remember. "You wrote it down."
"I remembered it."
The waiter comes. We order. It's a short menu and both of us read it quickly. He orders the pasta with clams. I order the rabbit. He doesn't comment on the rabbit, which is the correct response.
After the waiter leaves the room settles. The table is small enough that we're closer than we'd be in most restaurants. He's not leaning forward. I'm not leaning forward. But the space is what it is.
"Tell me something about yourself that isn't in a file," he says.
I look at him.
"Something real," he says. "Not biography."
"You have a file on me."
"I have a basic security check." He picks up his wine glass. "It doesn't tell me what you're thinking."
The directness of this surprises me. Not what he said, but how. No pretense of casualness.
"I read to check out," I say. "Not to think. I think enough."
"What do youthink about?"
Too many things to name. Candles. The weight of a knife in my hand. The specific physics of moving through a city at night without being seen. My uncle's voice reciting scripture over my head while I learned to hold a blade correctly.
"Work," I say. "What else."
He nods, like this is an answer he recognizes. "What did you want to do when you were young? Before work."
"I grew up in the church," I say. "I don't have a before."
He doesn't push it. He turns his glass slowly, thinking about something. "I wanted to be a restorer," he says. "Art restoration. I spent two summers in Florence, early twenties, in a workshop learning how to clean old panels." He looks at his hands. "My father found out and brought me home."
