Calvino for four euros. There it is. Thank you.
I put the phone back in my pocket.
The building entrance opens. Not Russo: a woman with a pushchair, navigating the steps. I note the pushchair, the steps, the time it takes to clear them, and file all of it under the category of information I have now and can use later.
Across the city Niccolo is having a terrible day for reasons I don't know and probably won't ask about, because askingwould mean being the kind of person who is keeping track of his days. I haven't decided yet whether I'm that person.
The thought surfaces before I can stop it: I want to know what made it terrible.
Stop.
I'm standing on the Via Toledo in the cold running surveillance on a man who beats his elderly mother, and the thing that makes me want to smile is a text message.
The two lives are running parallel. They have always run parallel. Before, the second track held nothing. I went home to a quiet apartment and read and slept and woke up and did it again. Clean. Uncontested.
The second track isn't empty anymore.
I check the time. 3:40pm. Russo will be in until six.
I walk to the café, take the outdoor table with the right sightline, and order a coffee I won't finish. The waiter brings it. I wrap both hands around the cup.
I wrap both hands around the cup and watch the building entrance across the street.
Forty-eight hours.
Chapter 10
Kill 2: Execution
Valentina
Councillor Agostino Ferrara beats his eighty-three-year-old mother every Sunday after Mass.
I know this because I've watched him for six days. I know his schedule the way I know the layout of Santa Maria della Sanità. By repetition. By patience. By sitting in parked cars and café corners and park benches until his life became a blueprint I could walk through blindfolded.
He arrives at her apartment in Vomero every Sunday at 12:15 PM, fifteen minutes after she returns from the eleven o'clock service at San Gennaro. He brings flowers. Lilies, always lilies. He kisses her on both cheeks. The neighbors see adevoted son. A city councillor who makes time for his aging mother despite his busy schedule. They see lilies.
He stays for ninety minutes. He leaves at 1:45 PM. His mother does not walk him to the door. She doesn't come to the window. The curtains remain drawn until Monday morning, when the home aide arrives at 8 AM and helps her bathe. The aide has seen the bruises. I watched her face one Monday through binoculars from the building across the street. The way she went still when she lifted the old woman's nightgown. The way she kept working without saying a word.
People know. People always know. They just decide it's not their problem.
I've decided it's mine.
Wednesday evening. He has a standing dinner reservation at a restaurant in Chiaia, a place with white tablecloths and a terrace overlooking the Lungomare. He dines alone on Wednesdays. His wife stays home. The dinner runs from 8 to 9:30 PM. He parks in the underground garage beneath the restaurant, third level down, the far corner where the security camera has been broken for two months. I checked. The restaurant hasn't fixed it because the restaurant doesn'tcare about the third sublevel of a parking garage where only six cars fit and the lights flicker.
He drives a grey Audi A6. License plate I memorized on day two. He parks nose-in against the concrete wall, driver's side facing the ramp. When he returns from dinner, he walks from the elevator to his car, a distance of forty-seven meters. The lighting is poor. The nearest occupied vehicle is typically on sublevel two. The elevator has no camera.
I'm already here.
I've been in the garage since 6 PM. Two hours of stillness behind a concrete support column, crouched on the balls of my feet in a position Father Domenico trained into me when I was thirteen. He called itla preghiera del cacciatore. The hunter's prayer. Knees bent, weight forward, spine straight. I can hold it for four hours without cramping. I've done it before. The trick is to think about nothing. To empty your head the way you empty a glass. Pour everything out. Thought, feeling, opinion, memory. Pour it all onto the floor and let it drain.
What's left is purpose.
At 8:07 PM I heard his Audi descend the ramp. Watched the headlights sweep across the concrete walls. Watched himpark, check his reflection in the rearview, adjust his tie. He got out. Locked the car with the fob, two chirps. Walked to the elevator. The doors opened. He stepped in. Gone.
Now I wait.
The garage smells like oil and damp concrete. Water stains streak the walls in patterns that look like nothing. A pipe somewhere above me drips at irregular intervals. I count the drips to keep my pulse steady. Fourteen in the last minute. My heart rate is sixty.
