We stay there.
I leave at nine. The stairs down to the Quartieri, the city loud for a Monday evening, the specific texture of this neighborhood at this hour that I've stopped being surprised by how much it has become mine by extension.
In the car I call Enzo.
"Tomorrow morning," I say. "I want everything."
"I'll have it."
"The professional who did this left a category signature. I want to know what kind of operator fits it. I want to know who uses them, who has access to that type of work in this city." I look at the waterfront moving past the window. "And I want to know who had motive to use Salvatore against me."
Enzo is quiet for a moment. Then: "That's a broad search."
"Start broad. We narrow later."
We drive back along the waterfront. The bay is dark, the lights of the city fragmented in the small waves the wind is building. I watch the water instead of the city for a while, which I don't usually do, because Salvatore used to say the only way to see Naples clearly was from the water looking back at it.
He was thirty-sixyears old.
The chain connects the professional to whoever paid for them. The payment connects to a motive. The motive connects to a name. I will follow the chain. I will find the name.
I don't know yet what I'll find at the end of it.
The thought sits there, unfinished.
For now, that's where it stays.
Chapter 22
Intensity
Niccolo
I bury Salvatore the following Thursday.
The cemetery in Poggioreale, the old section, the one where my father is buried and his father before him. Marble tombs stacked four high in walls that look like filing cabinets for the dead. Salvatore's mother picked the spot. Third row, east-facing, so the morning sun hits the stone. She said he always liked mornings. I didn't know that about him. Thirty years of friendship. I didn't know he liked mornings.
The funeral is small. His wife. His daughters, thirteen and fifteen, both in black dresses, the younger one's hand knotted in her sister's. His mother, who doesn't speak, whostands at the wall with her hand on the marble and her lips moving in a prayer no one else can hear. A handful of his employees. A priest who didn't know him, who recites the liturgy with the mechanical warmth of a man performing his fourteenth funeral this month.
I stand at the back. No security detail. No underboss. No entourage. I came alone because Salvatore knew me alone. He knew Nico. Not the Don. Not the name that makes waiters scramble and politicians return calls. The boy who lost a fight over a football in a schoolyard and gained a friend who never once, in thirty years, asked for a favor.
The priest says the words. The family cries. The marble absorbs everything.
Afterward, I shake hands. The wife grabs my arm. Pulls me close. Her eyes are swollen shut from days of crying, the lids so inflamed they look bruised.
"Find who did this," she says. Her voice is dry. Scraped raw. "Please, Niccolo. Find them."
"I will."
She holds my arm for three more seconds. Then releases. Turns back to the wall where her husband's name is being carved into stone by a mason who charges by the letter.
I drive home. The Alfa Romeo through Naples traffic, the city indifferent to the fact that I just put my oldest friend into a marble slot in a wall. Naples buries its dead the way it does everything else. With noise, with ceremony, with a pragmatism that borders on cruelty. The dead go into the ground. The living go to lunch. The city continues.
The penthouse is empty and quiet. Only the echo of my shoes on the marble and the hum of the refrigerator can be heard. I can see the bay through the windows, sunlit, obscenely beautiful on a day when beauty feels like an insult.
I pour a whiskey. Don't drink it. Set it on the counter. Look at it.
Salvatore's death doesn't match any pattern my people can identify. The method was too personal, too precise, too theatrical. A professional, Enzo says. Someone hired. But by whom, and why, and what did Salvatore do that warranted having his body left in a vicolo like a message nobody can read.
