“Sure,” he calls back over his shoulder. “Some are just louder.”
In the mornings, I walk. Everybody has a ritual, and mine is legs, streets, coffee, in that order. The hotel espresso tastes like a machine crying, so I found a place a few blocks east on the second day, a narrow bar with one grinder and a barista who doesn’t want to talk. My kind of establishment.
I’m two people from the counter when I hear the order ahead of me.
Double, short, no sugar, and a glass of still water on the side, said in English wearing an Italian accent. I don’t need to look up. My body has already filed the report. Two years of that voice ordering that exact thing across dozens of evenings that officially never happened, and it turns out the recording is intact and the playback is instant.
Enzo turns from the counter with his cup and sees me. For one second I get the daylight version without warning: dark hair loose around his face, blue eyes still sleep-sharp, olive skin warm from the walk. A man ordering coffee should not look like a room I left badly.
“Kovár,” he says.
“Enzo.”
His name comes out on its own. In front of witnesses. There’s a barista and a man with a laptop and a woman with a dog. None of them know it is the first time I have said it out loud in a year. All of them could have heard it. The old system would have said Valenti in a room like this. The old system had rules.
He looks at me with no indication of what he’s thinking. “You’re drinking coffee?”
“I’m walking. The coffee is making its own choices.”
Something moves behind his eyes and doesn’t reach his mouth. Before, that would have been a laugh. I built entire drives around getting that laugh.
“The hotel eggs are still hiding something,” I say, because it almost worked on him the other day. Because it would have gotten the real smile, the sudden one, the one that lights his face before that night a year ago.
Instead, it gets a nod. A nod is what he’d give a linesman.
“Have a good day,” he says, and he steps around me, and the door does its little bell, and he’s gone, cup in hand, and into the street.
The barista looks at me. “What can I get you?”
“Double, short, no sugar.” I hear it as it leaves. “And the water.”
I didn’t decide that. I’d like the record to show that nobody in this body consulted me.
“Name for the cup?”
“Kovár.”
He writes something with a K and three wrong letters, and I don’t correct him because whoever that is can carry this one.
I walk back the long way with a drink I didn’t choose. The drawer that holds everything in Naples stands open the whole four blocks, and I finally look into it long enough to see the shape of it. That first night three years ago, then a few dozennights across two years. The nights getting more frequent, but the leaving never changing. Always before the sun broke over the horizon. Always a quiet escape back to Rome. Rare messages in between.
Then, that last night a year ago. The moment wasn’t the stairwell. The stairwell came after. Before the stairwell, there was me at the door with one shoe on, seeing his kitchen. There was a plate on the counter. Mine. He’d left it there, not washed yet, like the night wasn’t over, like mornings could exist for us. And I stood there with one shoe on for the length of an entire espresso, and a man who times his exits does not lose track of time.
That was the emergency. Not the neighbor, not the dog, not almost being seen. The dog was just the excuse arriving when I needed it. I ran because staying had started to feel like the reasonable option, and the whole system is built on staying never being an option at all.
The lie I have told best is that I was afraid of being caught. I was afraid of not wanting to leave even after the danger passed. Caught would have been survivable. Staying would have required an entirely different man.
So I went silent. No call, no message, no goodbye. I filed it under kindness, and the file held. This morning that man wished me luck, like the left winger I’d be marking soon. Polite, professional, and already sharpening the knife.
Back at the hotel, Damián appears in the doorway of our room while Novotný is in the shower, singing something off-key. Damián’s in team-issue everything. A recovery shake in one hand. He leans on the frame as if the corridor is also his living room now.
“Film this afternoon,” he says. “Tomáš says Tobík watched the last time we played Mexico and called your right side a wall. I’m quoting.”
“Tell him the wall says thank you.”
“Ready?” he asks, and lets it sit there.
“Yes, I’m ready.”
