Another almost-smile. She tucks the receipt into her apron.
I leave. The Naples evening wraps around me. Motorini, voices, heat. The Ferrante problem waiting in my head like a file left openon a desk.
But for two hours, sitting in a restaurant eating branzino while a girl with glasses told me the city listens when it's quiet, I forgot that my empire is bleeding.
I forgot because of a girl who pours wine for a living. A girl who reads Ferrante for the third time. Who pushes her glasses up with one finger. Who held a half-second too long when she poured my wine, close enough that I could smell soap.
Cazzo.
I get in the car. Start the engine. Pull into traffic.
Tomorrow. The audit. The leak. The Ferrantes. The problem of a family that doesn't trust itself.
Tonight, the only thing in my head is soap.
Chapter 7
The Pursuit Begins
Valentina
The pastry arrives on a Tuesday.
Not to my apartment. To the restaurant, which is more elegant than it sounds. He found out my shift schedule somehow, which I file underthings I already expected him to be able to do, and had it delivered before I arrived. The box is from Scaturchio. Not the tourist counter at the front, where they sell the chocolate-covered figs wrapped in paper. The real counter, the one that requires knowing to ask.
Inside: a sfogliatella, still warm. A card in Italian, his handwriting compressed and precise.
Buongiorno, Valentina. Because you recommended the Falanghina, and I believe in reciprocity.
I read it twice. Set it down on the prep table.
My coworker Giulia picks it up without asking. She reads it, looks at the box, looks at me. "From a customer?"
"Yes."
"That customer." She has seen him. Everyone in the restaurant has seen him. The kind of man who makes the room adjust when he walks in, not because he does anything to cause it, but because the room simply does.
"Yes."
She puts the card down with the specific care of someone who has decided not to say anything. I appreciate this about Giulia.
I eat the sfogliatella during my break. It's perfect. Riccia, the layered kind, the pastry shattering into fine flakes when I bite into it, the sweet ricotta filling dense against my tongue. He didn't pick it at random. Someone told him or he researched it, which amounts to the same thing: he paid attention to something and then acted on it.
I don't think about this for the rest of the shift.
I think about it the entire rest of the shift.
The book arrives three days later.
This one comes to my apartment, which means he asked someone who knew my address, which means someone gave it to him. I'm not alarmed by this. I'd be alarmed if hecouldn'tfind my address. He's the head of the Sorrentino family. He could find my blood type if he wanted it.
The delivery man hands me a flat package wrapped in brown paper and twine. No branding. Inside: a first edition of Anna Maria Ortese'sIl mare non bagna Napoli, the 1953 Einaudi printing, which I have been trying to find at a reasonable price for three years.
It is not at a reasonable price.
There's no card this time. Just the book, its spine intact, the pages slightly yellowed, meaning it's real, old and was kept somewhere dry. I sit on my kitchen floor with it in my hands for longer than I mean to, turning it over, reading the copyright page.
My copy of the same book, the paperback reprint I've read four times, is on the shelf above my head. I look at it. I look at the first edition in my hands.