7. The Pursuit Begins
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 under things 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 he couldn't find 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's Il 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.
He found the book I've been looking for.
He found the book I've been looking for, which means someone told him I was looking for it, which means he asked someone what I read, which means he asked about me. A man like Niccolo Sorrentino does not stumble across information. He pursues it.
I stay on the kitchen floor.
You don't have to make this into something, I tell myself. It's a pastry and a book. It's two gestures from a wealthy man who is accustomed to getting what he wants. This is what that looks like. You know what that looks like.
I do know what it looks like.
It doesn't feel like that.
I put the book on the shelf. I make coffee. I read sixteen pages of the paperback reprint because the first edition is too valuable to read on a Tuesday night in a kitchen where I am sitting on the floor.
Then I take the first edition back down and read it instead.
He calls the restaurant Thursday morning, during the lunch prep shift, and asks to speak with me. Giulia brings me the phone with an expression she is working very hard to make neutral.
I take it into the corridor near the kitchen.
"Don Sorrentino."
"Niccolo." A pause. "You received the book."
"I did."
"Was it the right edition?"
"You know it was."
A small silence. I can hear Naples through his end of the line: traffic, something distant, the specific texture of the city in the morning. "I'd like to take you to dinner," he says. "Not the restaurant. Somewhere else."
I look at the wall. White tile, a crack running from the baseboard up toward the ceiling that nobody has ever fixed. "Why?"
"Because I'd like to sit across a table from you somewhere you're not working."
It's a simple answer. Straighter than I expected.
"When?" I ask.
"Saturday evening. I'll send a car at eight."
I think about the candles that didn't move when he walked out of the confessional. All four dark. The steady ordinary nothing of them. I think about my uncle's voice: This is the only thing that matters, cucciola. The candles tell you everything you need to know.
The candles told me nothing was wrong with Niccolo Sorrentino.
They didn't tell me to say yes to dinner.
"I'll meet you there," I say. "Send me the address."
A beat. He's surprised, I think. Not unpleasantly. "All right."
"Eight-thirty."
"Eight-thirty," he agrees.
I hand the phone back to Giulia without looking at her face.
My uncle calls that evening.
He calls every Thursday, which is a habit from when I was a girl, when he'd check in on my schoolwork and my training in a single conversation that managed to feel like neither.
How are your studies, cucciola? How are your hands?
The hands question meant the blades, not my skin.
I understood this by the time I was fourteen.
By sixteen I'd stopped finding it strange.
"You seem distracted," he says.
We've been talking for nine minutes. I've been sitting at my kitchen table with the Ortese in front of me, not reading it. "I'm tired. Long week."
"The restaurant keeps you busy."
"It's fine."
A pause, the particular pause my uncle uses when he's waiting to see if I'll fill it. I've learned not to. "Father Benedetto mentioned seeing you near the Vomero last Saturday," he says finally. "He thought perhaps you were visiting someone."
Father Benedetto is seventy-three and has cataracts. "I was walking."
"Of course." Another pause. "I only ask because you seem less present than usual, when you come to the church. Less focused."
I look at the ceiling. One water stain above the window, roughly the shape of Sardinia. "I'm focused."
"You're very good, cucciola. You always have been. The best I've trained." His voice is warm when he says this, the uncomplicated warmth of a man expressing a fact he's proud of. "But the work requires everything. A distraction at the wrong moment, and the work suffers. You understand this."
"I understand it."
"Good." He shifts to other things: a parishioner who's been difficult, a structural issue with the sacristy roof that the diocese is slow to address.
He tells me about a confession he found interesting, in the abstract way he does, not breaking the seal but noting the moral texture.
An old woman who stole from her employer thirty years ago and cannot stop confessing it, as if repetition might finally produce absolution.
My uncle found it moving. He tells me why.
I listen. I say the right things. By the end of the call my voice sounds the way it always sounds, which is calm, which is what he needs to hear.
After I hang up I sit with the phone on the table for a moment.
He doesn't know. He can't know. I haven't said Niccolo's name to him, haven't mentioned the dinners, haven't mentioned anything beyond the ordinary report of a working week.
And my uncle is careful about the people who enter my life, but like a priest, meaning he relies on information voluntarily offered.
He doesn't surveil me. He trusts the architecture he built: the training, the ritual, the system, fourteen years of shaping the way I see the world. He trusts that it holds.
It holds.
I know what Niccolo Sorrentino is. I knew it before the candles confirmed it.
I know the weight of what his family carries, the blood in the soil of it, the particular way men in his position move through Naples.
I've been watching those men since I was old enough to understand what my uncle was asking me to do.
Niccolo is not like those men. He is exactly like those men. These two things are both true and they don't resolve.
The candles were dark.
That's what I have. The candles were dark, the same four candles that lit for the man in chapter one who murdered his wife and child, the same system that has never made a mistake in fourteen years of my watching it. The candles read the confession. The confession is the man.
Niccolo Sorrentino walked out of that confessional and the candles didn't move.
So I said yes to dinner. So I'm going.
I open the Ortese to the chapter I was reading. I read four pages. I read them again. I put the book down.
Saturday, I think. Eight-thirty.
I spend Saturday afternoon not preparing.
I do my laundry. I clean the kitchen. I reread the chapter of the Ortese I read Thursday night, the one about the blind girl, the one that always makes me feel like the city is watching me from a great height.
I eat something at six that I won't remember eating.
I change my clothes twice, settle on what I would have worn first, and take the bus to Vomero because I told him I'd meet him there and I meant it.
The restaurant is small. Off the main street, down a set of worn stone steps, the sign hand lettered. The kind of place that doesn't need anyone to know about it.
He's already inside.
He's sitting at a corner table with a glass of white wine and a focused expression, reading something on his phone, and he's wearing a different kind of stillness than the one I've seen in the restaurant and the church.
More at ease. His collar is open. The jacket is there but the formality is off it, the way a man looks when he's somewhere he chose rather than somewhere he's required to be.
He looks up when I come in and something shifts in his expression. Quick. Controlled immediately after.
"You came by bus," he says.
"I came by bus."