22. Intensity
Intensity
Niccolo
I bury Salvatore the following Thursday.
The cemetery in Poggioreale, the old section, the one where my father is buried and his father before him.
Marble tombs stacked four high in walls that look like filing cabinets for the dead.
Salvatore's mother picked the spot. Third row, east-facing, so the morning sun hits the stone.
She said he always liked mornings. I didn't know that about him.
Thirty years of friendship. I didn't know he liked mornings.
The funeral is small. His wife. His daughters, thirteen and fifteen, both in black dresses, the younger one's hand knotted in her sister's.
His mother, who doesn't speak, who stands at the wall with her hand on the marble and her lips moving in a prayer no one else can hear.
A handful of his employees. A priest who didn't know him, who recites the liturgy with the mechanical warmth of a man performing his fourteenth funeral this month.
I stand at the back. No security detail.
No underboss. No entourage. I came alone because Salvatore knew me alone.
He knew Nico. Not the Don. Not the name that makes waiters scramble and politicians return calls.
The boy who lost a fight over a football in a schoolyard and gained a friend who never once, in thirty years, asked for a favor.
The priest says the words. The family cries. The marble absorbs everything.
Afterward, I shake hands. The wife grabs my arm. Pulls me close. Her eyes are swollen shut from days of crying, the lids so inflamed they look bruised.
"Find who did this," she says. Her voice is dry. Scraped raw. "Please, Niccolo. Find them."
"I will."
She holds my arm for three more seconds. Then releases. Turns back to the wall where her husband's name is being carved into stone by a mason who charges by the letter.
I drive home. The Alfa Romeo through Naples traffic, the city indifferent to the fact that I just put my oldest friend into a marble slot in a wall.
Naples buries its dead the way it does everything else.
With noise, with ceremony, with a pragmatism that borders on cruelty.
The dead go into the ground. The living go to lunch. The city continues.
The penthouse is empty and quiet. Only the echo of my shoes on the marble and the hum of the refrigerator can be heard. I can see the bay through the windows, sunlit, obscenely beautiful on a day when beauty feels like an insult.
I pour a whiskey. Don't drink it. Set it on the counter. Look at it.
Salvatore's death doesn't match any pattern my people can identify. The method was too personal, too precise, too theatrical. A professional, Enzo says. Someone hired. But by whom, and why, and what did Salvatore do that warranted having his body left in a vicolo like a message nobody can read.
My people are working. I have four men tracing his last weeks. His business contacts. His personal associations. His finances. Everything clean so far. Everything gelato.
I pick up the whiskey. Put it down again.
I need her.
Not want. Need. The distinction matters.
Want is appetite. Need is structural. Want is the whiskey on the counter.
Need is the oxygen in the room. I need Valentina the way I need the architecture of my ribcage to stay intact.
Without her, the contents shift. The organs press against walls that weren't built to hold them alone.
I call her.
"Come over," I say.
"I'm off at seven."
"I'll be here."
She arrives at 7:40. She's still in her work clothes.
White blouse. Black skirt. Hair pulled back.
Glasses. She smells like the restaurant.
Olive oil, garlic, the warm bread smell that clings to the staff long after the ovens cool.
She walks in carrying a bag from La Terrazza.
Food. She always brings food, as if feeding me is a responsibility she assumed without being asked.
She sets the bag on the counter. Sees the untouched whiskey. Sees my face.
"When did you eat last?" she asks.
"I don't remember."
"Niccolo."
"I'm not hungry."
She unpacks the bag anyway. Some kind of pasta. A container of soup. Bread. She sets the food with a plate, fork and a glass of water in front of me the way she sets plates in front of her customers.
"Eat," she says.
"I buried him today."
She stops. Her hands go still on the counter. She looks at me. The glasses catch the overhead light.
"I know," she says.
"I held his mother's hand. She's eighty pounds. She felt like paper."
"Eat something. Then talk."
"I don't want to eat."
"I don't care."
I eat. Not because I'm hungry. Because she told me to and the telling carries an authority I don't resist. Three bites of pasta.
A piece of bread. The soup stays untouched.
She watches me eat the way I used to watch my mother count pills during chemo.
With the attention of someone tracking vital signs.
I push the plate away.
"He had daughters," I say. "Thirteen and fifteen. They wore dresses that were too small. Nobody bought them new dresses for their father's funeral."
"Stop."
"The fifteen-year-old shook my hand. His grip was strong. He's trying to be the man of the house. Fifteen years old."
"Niccolo. Stop."
She's in front of me. Her hands on my face.
Both of them. Palms on my jaw. Fingers on my cheekbones.
My eyes are level with her collarbones. The hollow of her throat where her pulse beats.
I can see it from here. Steady. Sixty-something beats per minute.
A pulse rate that never seems to change regardless of the circumstance.
"Look at me," she says.
I look at her.
"You don't have to carry all of it tonight."
"I carry all of it every night."
"Not here. Not with me."
Her thumb traces my cheekbone. The gesture she's learned from me or I've learned from her. I don't remember who started it. It belongs to both of us now.
I pull her closer. My forehead against her stomach.
Her hands in my hair. The blouse smells like the restaurant.
Like her. The scent of soap underneath everything.
The baseline of her body, the one smell that is hers and hers alone, clean and uncomplicated in a life where everything else carries residue.
Something cracks.
Not tears. I don't cry. I stopped crying when my father died because my father never cried and the transition of power requires a seamless performance.
What cracks is the containment. The vault where I store the things I can't afford to feel while running an organization that depends on my capacity to feel nothing.
The vault opens. Not all the way. Enough.
"I need you," I say into her stomach. The words come out low, muffled by fabric, by her body, by the specific humiliation of a man who leads a Camorra clan admitting that he cannot get through this night without a waitress holding his head.
She doesn't say anything. Her fingers tighten in my hair. She pulls my head back. Looks down at me.
Then she kisses me.
Not gentle. Not the tender, careful kiss of a woman comforting a grieving man.
She kisses me hard. Her mouth on mine, her hands gripping my jaw, her teeth catching my lower lip hard enough that I taste copper.
The pain registers. Small, bright, specific.
A signal that cuts through the fog of the day, through the marble cemetery and the paper-weight mother and the fifteen-year-old's handshake.
I feel it.
I stand. The stool scrapes behind me. My hands go to her waist, grip, lift.
She wraps her legs around me. I carry her out of the kitchen.
Down the hallway. Her mouth on my neck, biting.
Not kissing. Biting. Her teeth on the tendon below my ear, hard enough to leave marks I'll see tomorrow.
I don't care. I want the marks. I want evidence that something happened tonight that wasn't grief.
In the bedroom I don't set her down, I throw her onto the bed.
She hits the mattress, bounces, her hair coming loose from the tie, spreading across the white sheets.
Her glasses are crooked on her face. Her blouse has pulled free from her skirt.
She looks up at me with an expression I haven't catalogued.
Not desire. Not sympathy. Something feral.
Something that matches the thing breaking open inside my chest.
I pull my shirt off. Over my head. Drop it. My belt. My pants. I don't fold them. I don't drape them. They hit the floor and I am on her before they settle.
Her blouse. I tear it. The buttons scatter across the sheets with the sound of small stones hitting fabric.
She doesn't flinch. She reaches for my neck, pulls me down, kisses me with her mouth open, her tongue finding mine, her hands raking down my back hard enough that I feel her nails draw lines from my shoulders to my waist.
I hiss. The scratches burn. Good. The pain is a frequency that tunes everything else to static.
I bite her shoulder. She gasps. Not pain.
Something beyond pain, something on the other side of it, where the nerve endings stop distinguishing between damage and pleasure and the body stops caring about the difference.
I yank her skirt up. Don't remove it. There's no time for removal.
No patience for the careful undressing of other nights, the glasses-first tenderness.
I pull her panties to the side. She reaches between us, grabs my dick, positions me right between her pussy lip and I thrust into her in a single motion.
She cries out. Loud. Her back arches off the mattress. Her hands slam against my chest, not pushing away, bracing. Finding purchase.
I don't start slow.