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was
re
—king—of the Forcella district, and his mother its
madrina
, the godmother and brains behind the Camorra’s operation. She ruled from a rickety wooden stool beside the cash register in the Pasticceria Ruttollo. Over the years she’d rung up sugar cakes and cannoli and ledgered untold millions from heroin. Her other son, however, hadn’t made it past messenger jobs. Bad blood between the brothers, according to the neighborhood gossips. Her daughter, Suzanna, Natalia’s classmate in school, had emigrated to England after a divorce.
    Lucia had received the bakery from her parents’ second cousins, a wedding present from the childless couple. Hers was an arranged crime-clan marriage between trusted children of the ’Nrangheta. The bakery and its hidden side enterprises remained massively lucrative. So she could well afford large-size couture, as well as a personal hairdresser, yet she stood at the teller’s window looking frumpy and disheveled, her hair mussed, bathrobe tattered. She could have flaunted diamond rings on all her arthritic fingers, but Lucia Ruttollo’s idea of self-indulgent pleasure was banking her money, year in, year out.
    According to her Carabinieri file, she had accounts from Naples to Geneva. And piled high in a warehouse somewhere were large burlap coffee-bean bags filled with cash money in dollars, euros, Swiss marks. Twice a year she went around to check the cache and update her cryptic records.
    Bank chores done, Lucia tottered out.
    By the time Natalia stepped outside, clouds had overtaken the sun. She passed along Via Tribunali, the narrow, thousand-year-old, east-west main street of Neapolis in the time of the Greeks—not much wider than a chariot—and turned onto Porta Alba. A man selling lottery tickets greeted her, a blue canary perched on the edge of his box.
    “Please, so we can eat!”
    Natalia handed him a couple of euros and refused the ticket. She crossed the street to Libreria Arco, her friend’s bookshop. Mariel dealt in art books mostly, also literary fiction, and stocked a small section devoted to foreign titles. Natalia, as always, perused the art books on display.
Napoli tra Barocco e Neoclassico
caught her eye: Naples between the Baroque and Neoclassic Era. Though she had not concentrated on architecture during her art history studies at university, Natalia basked in the magnificence of the historic buildings that made her city such a treasure, even the slummy and cramped ancient area at its center.
    Natalia watched Mariel through the window shelving books, her friend looking elegant and demure in a grey cashmere sweater and forest green scarf, perfectly knotted, her sleek black hair pulled into a chignon. Natalia momentarily envied Mariel’s tranquil nature, so unlike Lola’s or hers. How had their friend come by this grace? Certainly being raised with privilege helped, though Mariel had suffered misfortune as well in the early loss of both her parents. Mariel didn’t have to work, though. She’d inherited her parents’ wealth and the luxurious
palazzo
where they’d lived and run their art business. Dating from the Renaissance, each of her flat’s ten rooms had marble floors and carved ceilings thirteen feet high. Yet Mariel worked diligently, books and the bookshop her joy.
    What was her own, Natalia wondered? She didn’t possess her friend’s tranquil soul, that she knew. Her job required logic and toughness, and she called on both in herself. In only one way was she like Mariel. Both were solitary at heart. But Natalia wasn’t at all at peace or even content.
    Entering university, her goals had been clear: to have a career as an art historian. That life upended early on. What did she seek now? Rough justice in her work? A kind of truth? Both were outnumbered and in short supply of late. Crime seemed so senior to the law. Maybe Pino was right to bow out, to concentrate on his inner self and the Buddhist’s path he’d chosen. According to Pino,