The Italian Affair (20 page)

Naples
– 11.30 pm local time 26 September 1986

When the all food had been eaten and they’d taken their espresso and digestivo, they finally left the restaurant and poured themselves back into the Cinque Cento. Bruno lit another cigarette which seemed like an obligatory part of starting a car in Naples and asked. “You like Le Stelle delle Notte Dan? It eez better than the pizzeria?”

“It is a wonderful restaurant. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed myself. I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve ever eaten that well in my life or listened to such beautiful music. I should think we’ll all sleep well tonight. Are you dropping Issy off first?” Dan continued hopefully.

“No. We go to you first,” Bruno replied. “Tell me where you live and I will take you there?”

“Oh ok,” Dan said in a deflated kind of way given that he was supposed to be the chaperone for the full evening which in his book meant he needed to stay with them right until the end and be dropped off last. “I live just a few blocks down from Issy so you can drop us both off together to make things easier,” he added hopefully.

“Dan, it’s quite a long way at this time of night,” Issy interrupted “and you have to teach tomorrow. Look we’re practically outside your palazzo now. Bruno stop the car here please so Dan can get out.” As she said those words, she turned round in her seat and winked at Dan “I’ll be absolutely fine if you get out first. Bruno will drop me off and I’ll see you bright and early for breakfast under the school as usual.”

Bruno didn’t require any more persuading. He’d already stopped the car.

“Ok,”
Dan said understanding Issy’s code. “If that’s what you want I shall take leave of you both here. Take care and don’t be out till silly o’clock if you do decide to go on somewhere without me.”

Issy smiled at him as she waved him off. “I wouldn’t worry about me I’ll be just fine.” As she winked at him a second time he grimaced back at he. His plan to provide an end-end protection service for the night had failed at the final hurdle.

As Bruno drove off – unbeknown to both of them – Dan craftily waited behind the front door of his palazzo until the Cinque Cento disappeared from view before turning back on himself, walking out of his apartment block and towards Issy’s. He crept quietly down the street past the tobacco shop and Pasquale’s pant shop. Flattening his body against the side of the shop shutters to make himself as invisible as was physically possible he found the best vantage point he could given the circumstances to watch what happened next. And he arrived with perfect timing.

Bruno literally stopped his car outside Issy’s apartment block at the exact same moment and he didn’t lose any time in getting up close and personal. Turning to face Issy Bruno immediately reached out to hold her. As they sank deeper into each other’s arms the gear stick seemed to get in the way of the action but Bruno had obviously done this before and he skilfully manoeuvred Issy across to his side of the car and elongated the seat simultaneously so they disappeared from view. After a full ten minutes or more, they reappeared and smoothed down each other’s clothes and hair giggling like school children.

As Issy finally got out of the car and made her way to the front door of the palazzo, Bruno called out something in Italian that made Issy smile from ear to ear. Dan waited for the Cinque Cento to pull away from the kerb before running towards her shouting out her name.

“Issy,” he said “I desperately need to speak to you.”

“What the hell are you doing here?” Issy hissed back shocked at seeing him in such an agitated state and immediately losing any embarrassment at what he might have seen.

“I needed to see if you were ok and safe. Can we please get inside your apartment as soon as we can. There’s something you need to know” Dan said shakily. “I’m bloody petrified out here something extremely sinister has just happened and I’m afraid we are both now in danger.”

Naples
– 1.15am local time 27 September 1986

Despite those being some of the best moments of her life so far, Issy now tried to concentrate on what Dan was saying.

The tenderness and touch of THAT kiss and those first few minutes together in the Cinque Cento had been indescribable. She’d wanted it to go on forever. But the anticipation of a next time had been replaced by cold fear at the sight of Dan, ushering her into the lobby of her apartment block in sheer blind panic.

“What the hell is it?” asked Issy as she hurriedly put the key into the door less miffed that Dan had just turned up and increasingly worried by his state of mind.

But Dan wasn’t prepared to say anything just yet. He just wanted to get inside. Even the sound of a piece of litter blowing past the door seemed to totally unnerve him. As he pushed them both inside he whispered under his breath. “We’re not safe here anymore of that I am now absolutely certain.”

As the heavy door closed behind them Dan spoke about his fear in more detail without stopping to take a breath. “Issy. I CANNOT believe what I just saw. There is a single gunshot through the window of Pasquale’s pant shop window. It must have been done tonight after the shop closed. And even more scarily there is a note next to it which says in Italian “Next time you’ll be dead.” It’s a warning Issy to you to me, to Pasquale and most probably to all three of us that we’re not safe here anymore.”

Issy tried to re-orient herself. She’d gone from being kissed in the most beautiful way to talking to Dan about another single gunshot shot in their near vicinity – except this time it was through a shop window and to the best of their knowledge no-one had died.

“Ok. Ok Dan. You need you to calm down and I need to go out and take another look to be certain it is a gunshot and to check if anyone has been hurt. I also need to see for myself what the piece of paper actually said, you could have mis-read it. You will need to wait here for me in case anything untoward happens” said Issy suddenly transforming herself from love-struck heroine to a fearless feminist.

Dan hissed back. “I don’t want you to go back out there Issy. Someone is after us. Look it’s too much of a coincidence. Two gunshots in the space of a few days, someone is out to get us and I don’t mind admitting I am now frightened. In fact I’m bloody petrified. I won’t allow you to go back outside.”

As they remained huddled in conversation, they failed to notice the Concierge who had been talking to someone move into a side room when he’d seen them both come in.

“Well it doesn’t matter what you think,” Issy replied. “because I am going outside. I need to go and see it for myself. Watch out for me from here and let me back inside as soon as you see me approaching the door.”

Dan grabbed hold of her right arm and held it tight. “I said DON’T’ GO OUTSIDE Issy it’s not safe. What the hell are you going to achieve? I’ll stay here and we’ll look first thing tomorrow when at least there will be other people around” Dan snapped.

“I AM going outside,” Issy said shaking with fear but also with a frustrated desire to do something. “You seem to forget, I am used to death happening in the most unlikely places. Like it or not I need to see this for myself. All you need to do is to stay here and watch me from behind this door. If you see anything or anyone approaching raise the alarm. She then twisted her arm out of Dan’s grasp and opened the palazzo door before slipping out quietly into the street.

As Issy walked steadfastly towards Pasquale’s shop she immediately felt unsafe. “Dan was right,” she thought. “For some reason the street felt terrifying. Someone, somewhere who she couldn’t see was watching her.” Her skin crawled with goose bumps but she forced herself on inching her way forwards towards the shop window.

She walked past the first window with the beautiful but stony faced mannequins, with their long jet black hair and glittery eye shadows matching their underwear. “They looked too real for her liking in the artificial lighting” Issy thought shivering at the thought of what she would find next.

As she continued to inch her way along the shop frontage she suddenly noticed a small hole in the second window of the shop. A single bullet had passed straight through it shattering the glass around it into hundreds of small shattered pieces. As Issy got closer to the window she studied the bullet hole. Behind it stood a different looking mannequin with long curly blond hair and blue eyes. As the seconds turned into minutes, Issy’s eyes moved down the mannequin’s long white porcelain legs which were still covered in a pair of black lacy tights that had been laddered badly.

Issy held her breath as she tried to apply logic. “Presumably,” she thought “someone must have done this when the shop had closed and the street had emptied otherwise someone would have seen it.” By her quick calculations, this made it a relatively new gun shot. Silently she looked again at the hole in the window and started to read a little piece of white paper stuck next to it which just as Dan had said read “The next time you will be dead.”

“Maybe the shot was retribution for trying to help the dead journalist? Or, maybe it was meant for Pasquale?” Issy thought scared and suddenly very cold. The only thing she knew about Pasquale was that he sold posh pants and lusted at women, and whilst neither of these characteristics Issy cared for surely he didn’t need to pay for it with his life?

And then suddenly from nowhere came a noise that sounded like someone was about to pull a trigger. Issy froze to the spot and closed her eyes. White with fear Issy prepared herself to expect the worse. And yet despite the danger something extraordinary happened. Despite having wanted to die since the age of six she realised with a sudden and unexpected jolt that she no longer felt that way. She wanted to live more than she had ever felt like living before.

Her palms began to sweat not from fear of death but from the emotion of wanting to live more than she’d wanted anything before. Praying that she would be saved from the brutality of a gunshot she continued to stare straight ahead at the scantily clad mannequin which stood staring back at her with a shot through her right thigh.

As Issy looked up at the long blond curly hair, and the big blue eyes she saw herself reflected back in the window. This mannequin was the only one with blond hair and blue eyes. All the rest looked like NEAPOLITANS – she realized in that moment that the first gunshot had been meant for her and the second one could be on its way any minute.

“OH MY GOD,” Issy thought as she clasped at her mouth to stifle a silent scream before looking again at the shattered glass. The familiar taste of panic arrived in her mouth as she looked at the mannequin again and heard the gun being loaded. Someone was standing behind her about to shoot. She could feel him and could see a reflection of a man against the shattered glass. But at the final moment just as he was about to shoot her dead, his shadow had disappeared as if he had been disturbed.

Trying to pull herself together Issy looked at the window one final time until she was sure the man had gone and quiet had returned. She peered at the words on the white piece of paper straining to decipher the words. The first thing that struck here was that the hand-writing seemed very familiar. It reminded her of Giuseppe’s because he had an odd and quite annoying habit of underlining words that were important to him.

Normally, the words he underlined were my boat, love, my woman, Napoli football club anything with Napoli in it and Neapolitan pizzas and coffee but these words were about murder so could they still be his?

Issy had now seen enough to know she needed to run and to suspect it was her that they were after. Despite the risk she tore back down the street totally exposed to stray gun shots with fear propelling her along. As Issy got to her palazzo, she tried to put the key in the front door but it didn’t automatically open.

“It ALWAYS opens first time,” Issy panicked as she tried the key over and over again.

With her heart beating like a drum against her chest, Issy desperately looked for Dan through the glass in the door. “Where the HELL is he? And why hadn’t he opened the door for her? He was supposed to watching out,” she thought angrily as she fought with the key.

As Issy continued to fiddle manically the fear of being shot intensified. “If the door doesn’t open in thirty seconds,” she thought “I am going to have to run for my life.”

When the door didn’t move, she looked through it again playing back the words on the small piece of paper on the window outside and remembered how Giuseppe had reacted when she’d told him about the shooting near the school.

“Pay attention then,” he had told her. How right he’d been. “Is that why he’d said those words to her,” she thought. “Because he knew the dangers she now faced by having come too close to the Camorra? Had she asked the wrong question to the wrong man?”

Just as Issy was about to give up with the door all of a sudden it finally opened. But as she entered the building there was absolutely no sign of Dan or the sleeping Concierge. And that’s how the evening of seduction played out after the night that started at Le Stelle Delle Notte finally ended.

Naples
– 3am local time 27 September 1986

The Concierge, had suspiciously disappeared whilst on duty and so could offer no clues as to Dan’s whereabouts and everyone else in Naples Issy knew suddenly became irrelevant as she had no idea of how to go about finding any of them.