I start with Via dei Mille at opening. Dark jeans, white blouse, my hair down for once. Glasses on. I browse the women's section for twenty minutes, touching leather I can't afford on a waitress salary, smiling at the saleswoman whoasks if I need help. I tell her I'm looking for a gift for my father. She shows me men's loafers. I say he prefers the buckle style, the older one, the Tramezza line they stopped making.
She says they still have clients who order custom.
I say my father's friend recommended this store. Older gentleman, silver hair at the temples, dark on top. Wears a charcoal suit. She'd know him if she saw him.
Her face changes. Recognition, then a practiced blankness. Client confidentiality, she says. She can't share information about other customers.
I don't need her to share. The recognition was enough. He shops here. This store, not the one on Via Calabritto.
I thank her. Leave. Walk three blocks to a café with a clear sightline to the boutique entrance. Order an espresso. Sit with my crime novel. Wait.
He doesn't come that day. I didn't expect him to.
I return the next morning. Different outfit. Hair pulled back. Different café, this one across the street with outdoor seating. Another espresso. Another book. I read forty pages of a Ferrante novel while my peripheral vision tracks every man who enters the boutique.
At 11:16 AM, a black Mercedes S-Class pulls to the curb. Driver stays in the car. The rear passenger door opens.
Charcoal suit. Silver temples. Gold Rolex. The slight hitch in his stride, favoring the right hip.
He enters the boutique. I don't move. I read. I sip. My pulse holds at sixty-four.
Twelve minutes later he exits with a bag. The driver opens his door. The Mercedes pulls into traffic heading south toward Posillipo.
I photograph the license plate with my phone resting on the café table, angled like I'm checking a message. The shutter sound is off. It always is.
The plate gives me the car. The car gives me the registration. The registration gives me a name. The name gives me an address in Posillipo, a villa behind stone walls on Via Petrarca with a view of Capri that probably cost more than every apartment on my street combined.
By evening, I have his routine.
He leaves the villa at 8:30 AM. The driver takes him to an office building in the Centro DireFathernale, where he runs an import company that I suspect imports more thanwhat's listed on the customs forms. He lunches at the same restaurant in Chiaia every day at 1 PM. Back to the office by 2:30. Home by 7. The driver parks the Mercedes in the villa's gated courtyard.
On Wednesdays, he deviates.
Wednesday afternoons, the Mercedes drops him at the Porto di Mergellina. He walks to the far end of the marina, past the fishing boats, to a private yacht moored at the last slip. He boards alone. The driver leaves. He spends three hours on the yacht. No visitors. No crew. Alone on a fifty-foot boat drinking scotch on a Wednesday afternoon while the police file on his murdered wife and daughter gathers dust in a drawer somewhere.
Today is Tuesday.
Tomorrow is Wednesday.
The marina at night is different. During the day, it's tourists eating fried seafood at waterfront restaurants, old men mending nets, kids diving off the seawall into water the color of diesel and jade. Couples walking. Dogs pulling at leashes. The whole postcard performance of coastal Naples.
At 2 AM, it's mine.
I approach from the eastern breakwater. Black clothes. Black trainers with rubber soles that grip wet concrete without sound. My hair is braided tight against my skull. Glasses off, stored in my pocket, because I don't need them for this distance and the frames catch light. My vision at close range is perfect.
The knife is on my thigh. A second blade is in my waistband at the small of my back. I carry no phone. No ID. Nothing that connects the girl walking through the dark marina to the girl who pours wine at La Terrazza di Napoli.
I reach his yacht at 2:11 AM. TheBella Fortuna, white hull, teak deck, the name painted in gold script across the stern. The boarding ladder is retracted but the stern platform sits eighteen inches above the waterline. I grip the swim platform, pull myself up without splash, without sound, without the shift in weight that would rock the hull.
I wait on the platform. Listening. The harbor water slaps against fiberglass. A halyard clinks somewhere three slips down. No voices. No engines. No footsteps.
I step onto the deck.
The main cabin is accessed through a sliding door, locked from the inside. I pull the pick set from a braid in my hair. The lock is a standard marine tumbler. Six seconds.
The door slides open. I step inside.
Below deck, the salon is dark. Leather upholstery. Teak paneling. A bar cart with three bottles of scotch, two of them empty. Crystal glasses in a rack above the sink, one still dirty, a residue of amber liquid at the bottom. The air is stale. Closed up. No air conditioning running.