and Maugham and Hemingway. Then a light meal followed by a sparring session at a boxing gym on the south side where everyone paid cash and nobody asked questions. Dinner was at home and I usually watched the news. Then bed. Every day the same. Comfort in rigidity. And I didn’t have to think about Jake. I did not want to think about Jake.
Pooley handed me a brown manila envelope, our hellos and how-ya-beens out of the way.
“How was it?”
Pooley shrugged. “They got a fucked-up way of doin’ things over there. They don’t like strangers unless they’re throwing money around. And even then, they pretty much don’t like ’em. But the food was good.”
“You get what you need?”
“It’s all there. Our client had some pull.”
“You have any suspicions?”
Pooley shook his head. “Naah . . . it’s no walk in the park because of the specific time she wants it done, but it’s nothing you can’t handle.”
“I’m going to be in the visitor’s dugout.”
“That’s true. No home-field advantage.”
“All right, then. Thanks, Pooley. It’s good to see you.”
“Good to see you, too, Columbus.”
THE name at the top of the page was Gianni Cortino. He was fifty-two years old and currently splitting time between Rome and a coastal town named Positano. He was in the real estate business, but it appeared he had his thumb in a lot of pies: utilities, hotels, restaurants. He was a wealthy man; his net worth was counted in hundreds of millions.
Pooley had done his homework. Like many rich men, Cortino was tight-fisted with his wallet, like he had such a devilish time acquiring the money, it pained him to let any of it escape. His vice was cigars: Cuban Cohibas. He was devoted to his wife, his two sons, and his first grandchild, a boy, Bruno, born just eleven months previous. There had been whiffs of a scandal involving Cortino and a socialist politician in Florence, but the rumors turned out to be planted by an investment rival. As far as Pooley could tell, Cortino was free from graft. No whores, no gambling, no illicit goods, just a successful man in a country that is leery of success.
He also had a bodyguard.
The guard’s name was Stephano Gorgio. Gorgio had spent thirteen years in the Italian special forces, mountain division, and had subsequently hired out as a mercenary in the Serbian war in Yugoslavia. His uncle was an early business partner to Cortino, and the two met after Gorgio returned to Italy. He made a proposal to Cortino to come on as his private bodyguard, and Cortino fired the security company he had been using and shook hands with Stephano. They had been together seven years.
Gorgio had two bullets in his shoulder, taken when the same investment rival who tried to smear Cortino also tried to kill him. Instead, the rival was choked to death bare-handed by Gorgio, bullets in the shoulder notwithstanding.
In the file were pages and pages of details, attempts at finding patterns in Cortino’s life. Did he eat at the same restaurant every day? Did he use the same route to get to work? Did he travel from Rome to Positano at a certain time each month? Use the same roads? Take the same car? The train? There is comfort in rigidity. But there is also death in it.
I arrived in Rome at 3 P.M. and took a taxi to my hotel, a small one in the middle of the city, the Hotel Mascagni. It was owned by Cortino, one of the first he acquired after he came to Rome with a bit of an inheritance. While he had bought and sold and traded many properties in the twenty years he had been acquiring his fortune, he kept this one throughout. I wasn’t sure what clue it would give me about the man, what it would do to help me realize the connection so I could sever the connection, but it was my first tangible piece of the man I came to kill.
The hotel contained only fourteen rooms on six floors and an old two-person elevator built into the tiny lobby. It had a bar and a restaurant—together the size of an American living room—and a small staff who nodded and bowed and gesticulated regularly. The building resonated warmth, the same warmth I got from reading Cortino’s file, and I wondered if it was a mistake staying here. I was searching for evil to exploit in the man, and so far I found only charity and kindness.
I took the first two weeks to familiarize myself with the city, not as a tourist would, but as a rich businessman might. I avoided the ancients: the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Vatican, instead concentrating on the busy commercial streets named after months: Settembre, Novembre. I ate at restaurants I knew Cortino haunted, places specializing in seafood and pasta, but managed to avoid seeing him until I set my foundation, until I began to think like a local, establish my roots.
The third week I took a train from Rome to Naples and then hired a car to take me from Naples to Positano. I traveled the way Cortino did—although it was rare and inconvenient for such a wealthy man to travel by rail and car between the cities, Cortino lived as he did when he had no money. I imagine it was a way for him to remind himself of the struggle, that if he lost touch with his rise, he’d give way to his fall. It was a trait I admired.
The train was clean and comfortable and not at all unpleasant, a mixture of tourists and natives on their way to the coast. The station in Naples was the opposite, a dirty latrine in a bathroom town. Dark-faced con men looked for gullible tourists, but they only glanced my way before homing in on easier prey.
A driver took me to Positano in a white Mercedes van, following the winding, narrow road down the coast- line. His English was limited and I was glad; I didn’t feel like chatting. I knew Cortino lived high up on the hill overlooking the city, and with a population of less than 4,000, he would be a well-known figure in the town. I had read in the file that Positano was built into the side of a hill feeding down to the sea, but I wasn’t prepared for the reality. Positano is a vertical city; the buildings seem to sit one on top of another as they move straight up a steep gradient, like a grocer’s shelf that allows you to see the front of everything you’re buying. Red and pink and yellow and white and peach and tan, the buildings cut into the green foliage like they are part of the mountain, only stopping when they reach the sky or the sea.
Tourists were everywhere. Fat Germans with fanny packs jostled each other as they cruised from shop to shop while Vespas plunged down the streets like a swarm of gnats, everyone and everything heading in one direction . . . down to the ocean. I loved the place. I loved the order of it and the simplicity of it and the singular logic of it; the church bells and the black sand and the quaint shops and the narrow alleys and the coffee makers and the gelato makers and the pasta makers and I was pleased I would kill Cortino here. Not in the bustle of Rome, where it would be infinitely easier to get away, not on the train or the station in Naples where the grime and the desperation were palpable. No, I was glad to be a part of this place, to create a new legend for a town that looked old and felt older. I don’t know why I was happy, except to say for the first time, I had a strong feeling about a
I checked into a hotel positioned about halfway up the hill. My suite offered a deck overlooking the cliff and the sea and if I sat in the darkness inside my room, all I needed to do was lift my eyes to the top of the window to see Cortino’s house, a salmon-colored mansion with high arched windows at the hill’s summit. According to Pooley’s file, he would be coming to town one week before I was to kill him.
I took the time to adjust to the place and have it adjust to me. I was just another
