7. The Pursuit Begins #2
"I said I'd send a car."
"I said I'd meet you here." I sit down across from him. The chair is close to the table, the room small enough that my knees are nearly touching the opposite chair leg. "If I wanted a car, I'd have said yes to the car."
He looks at me for a moment. "Fair enough."
He pours wine into my glass without asking, which would irritate me if he weren't already reading the table correctly: I don't want to be asked about wine. I want wine. There's a difference.
"Il mare non bagna Napoli," I say. "Where did you find it?"
"I know a dealer in Trastevere."
"In Rome."
"Books travel."
"A first edition Einaudi doesn't usually travel to someone who spent three sentences describing their dinner preferences."
He almost smiles.
"You mentioned Ortese in the restaurant. The second time I came in. You said she understood Naples the way Caravaggio understood shadow."
I said that. I remember saying it, but I didn’t think he would remember. "You wrote it down."
"I remembered it."
The waiter comes. We order. It's a short menu and both of us read it quickly. He orders the pasta with clams. I order the rabbit. He doesn't comment on the rabbit, which is the correct response.
After the waiter leaves the room settles. The table is small enough that we're closer than we'd be in most restaurants. He's not leaning forward. I'm not leaning forward. But the space is what it is.
"Tell me something about yourself that isn't in a file," he says.
I look at him.
"Something real," he says. "Not biography."
"You have a file on me."
"I have a basic security check." He picks up his wine glass. "It doesn't tell me what you're thinking."
The directness of this surprises me. Not what he said, but how. No pretense of casualness.
"I read to check out," I say. "Not to think. I think enough."
"What do you think about?"
Too many things to name. Candles. The weight of a knife in my hand. The specific physics of moving through a city at night without being seen. My uncle's voice reciting scripture over my head while I learned to hold a blade correctly.
"Work," I say. "What else."
He nods, like this is an answer he recognizes. "What did you want to do when you were young? Before work."
"I grew up in the church," I say. "I don't have a before."
He doesn't push it. He turns his glass slowly, thinking about something. "I wanted to be a restorer," he says. "Art restoration. I spent two summers in Florence, early twenties, in a workshop learning how to clean old panels." He looks at his hands. "My father found out and brought me home."
I look at his hands too. The scar on his left forearm. The ink at his wrists. Not the hands of a restorer.
"Do you miss it?"
"I miss the possibility of it." He sets the glass down. "There's a difference between missing a thing and missing who you were when you thought it was possible."
I understand this. I understand it more precisely than I can explain in a restaurant on a Saturday night.
The food comes. We eat. He's not performing enjoyment: he's eating the pasta because it's good, occasionally watching the room with the same quality of attention I use in rooms, the cataloguing that people who spend their lives in threat environments develop whether they want to or not. I notice him watching the exits.
We talk through the meal. He asks about Ortese.
I ask about Caravaggio, because he made a reference to the painter in my uncle's church on the first day and I've been waiting to see if it was casual or genuine.
It's genuine. He talks about the Calling of Saint Matthew in the Contarelli Chapel, the specific way Caravaggio painted the light as if it's a decision, not a phenomenon, and I listen to him talk about a painting with the same attention I'd give to anything I need to understand.
He's not performing this either.
I find this, specifically, the most difficult thing about him.
I've sat across the table from people who were performing.
Hiding behind a smile and polite topics.
Niccolo is doing neither. He's a man who had an opinion about a seventeenth-century painting and is sharing it, and the opinion is interesting, and I'm interested, and there's no tangle of strategy underneath it that I can find.
Which doesn't mean there isn't one. I know better than that.
"You said art history," I say. "At university."
"Naples, then Bologna."
"Why Bologna?"
"Because I needed to be somewhere my father's name meant nothing." He looks at me. "It didn't work. But I needed to try."
I understand needing to try things you already know won't work. I've done it every time I've opened the Ortese hoping the ending changes.
The candles on the table are small and half-burned. They don't move.
I'm aware of every inch of the space between us.
The specific combination of cologne and the evening and the wine that means his presence has a physical signature I could identify in a dark room, which is something I notice about everyone as a matter of survival and about him as a matter of something else entirely, something I'm not examining too closely on a Saturday night in Vomero.
After dinner he pays. I let him. This is not the restaurant, I'm not working, there's no principle at stake.
Outside the air is cool for October. The street is narrow, the kind of Naples side street that feels like it was built at a different scale, for smaller people or a different understanding of space. We stand on the steps a moment.
"I'll walk you to your bus," he says.
"It's two streets."
"I know."
We walk two streets. He doesn't take my arm or position himself close enough to require comment. He walks next to me, slightly wider than the street demands, at a pace that matches mine without effort.
At the bus stop he stands next to me looking as if he has something to say.
The bus is four minutes away. I know the schedule. I've timed buses in half the neighborhoods of this city, though not usually for the same reasons as tonight.
"Buonanotte, Valentina," he says.
That's it. That's what he decided.
Buonanotte. Just my name after it, the way you'd say it to someone you’re familiar with. Not signorina. Not a title that keeps distance in it. The way my uncle says it. The way Giulia says it when she's trying to get my attention from across the restaurant floor.
The way people say the name of someone they know.
"Buonanotte," I say.
He waits. The bus comes. I get on.
I find a seat near the back window and don't look out of it. I have four minutes of ride to sit with the sensation of the evening.
My uncle would say this is the exact shape that danger takes. That the most effective trap is the one you walk into wanting to. That understanding and manipulation are separated by motive, and motive is the one thing you can never verify from the inside of the situation.
My uncle is right about most things.
My hands are still.
They're always still. That's the training.
But I notice them, which is new.
I noticed his hands across the dinner table.
Not as an assessment. Not as the part of the exercise where I catalogue a person's tells and weight distributions and probable reach.
Just as hands, resting on linen, belonging to a man who once learned to clean old paintings in Florence before his father brought him home.
The bus stops on my street. I get off.
My apartment is dark when I unlock it. I don't turn on the overhead light. I stand in the kitchen for a moment with the city coming in through the window: the ordinary sounds of it, someone playing music two floors down, a dog, a conversation in the courtyard below.
The knife is where I always leave it. Inner thigh holster, empty now because I don't carry it on dates, which is a decision I made and am noting.
I didn't carry the knife tonight. To dinner with a man whose family runs most of the criminal enterprise in Naples.
I know what this means. It means I decided, before I got on the bus to Vomero, that I wasn't going to need it.
My body decided he wasn't a threat.
My body has excellent instincts and absolutely no authority over my choices.
But if I’m not careful, he may end up taking over that as well.