So I stop following the empire and start following the routine underneath it.
Every man has one fixed point. The thing he does himself, every week, the same way, because it's the thing that reminds him the empire is his. For Mancini it's the flagship. The Via Toledo shop, the original, the one his father opened. He closes it himself every Wednesday night. Not the others. This one.
I confirm it across two weeks of watching from the café opposite. The staff leave at 9:45. He stays. The lights in the front stay on another quarter hour while he counts the register and locks the display cases and sets the alarm, and then the front goes dark and he leaves through the back.
The back is the whole thing.
The service entrance opens onto a vicolo that runs behind the block, narrow, cobbled, the width of a delivery cart. It dead-ends at the wall where the old city gate once stood, which means one way in, one way out. No cameras. The restaurant two doors down closes at ten and puts nothing behind it after that but a dumpster that reeks of fish. After ten the vicolo carries Salvatore Mancini and stray cats and nothing else.
He walks forty meters through it to the side street where he leaves the Range Rover for the night. Forty meters of dark, alone, every Wednesday, at ten.
I note all of it. The camera over the front door that covers the pavement and not the vicolo. The angle of the streetlight that dies six meters short of the service entrance. The recycling collection that props the restaurant's back gate on Tuesday mornings and never on Wednesday nights.
I note the door marked PRIVATO at the back of the flagship, the one he unlocks and relocks in the dead quarter hour when the staff are gone and the front is still lit. I don't need to know what's behind it. The candles already told me. But I write down the times a child comes and goes from that shop with her mother on shift, because eight days of watching will tell me the rest, and eight days is what I'll give it.
I have the fixed point. Wednesday. The vicolo. Ten o'clock.
I have almost everything I need.
Thursday morning my phone buzzes while I'm on the motorino across from the flagship, watching the driver bring the Range Rover around for the lunchtime moveto the Vomero shop.
Come by tonight? I want to show you something.
Niccolo.
I'm sitting on a motorino in the cold with my helmet on and a target's shopfront in my sightline, and my chest does the thing it does when his name appears on my phone. I've categorized this as a physiological response and declined to examine it further.
I type back at the next red light:What kind of something.
A pause, then:Came across a signed Ortese in the secondhand market off the Via Chiaia. You'd want to see it before I decide whether to keep it.
I look at the message. The Via Chiaia. Fifteen minutes on foot from where I'm sitting right now, in a surveillance position on a motorino, watching the front of a shop I'll be behind on Wednesday night with a knifeon my thigh.
The world is a small city.
Tonight is difficult, I type.Thursday works better.
Thursday then.
I put the phone in my coat pocket. I watch the Range Rover pull out and turn north, and I let it go, because I know where he sleeps and where he counts his register and which forty meters of the city he walks alone, and none of that requires me to follow him to lunch.
There's no hesitation here. No complication, no charity board photograph that makes me sit longer than I should. The candles said three and four. I know what three and four mean together. I know exactly what those five children are living through and what they'll keep living through until someone stops it.
I will stop it.
I start the motorino. I pull out into traffic, south toward the Quartieri, toward home and the notebook and the eight days I still owe this before Wednesday.
Thursday I'll sit in a penthouse above the bay and hold a signed first-edition Ortese and keep my face composed. Wednesday after that I'll stand in a dark vicolo behind a gelato shop and end a man the whole city loves.
Candles lit. Target acquired.
Business as usual.
Chapter 20
Kill 3: Execution
Valentina
