Chapter 7 - The Dawn over Salerno
The Piazza del Plebiscito in Salerno was paved in gray basalt that looked like grease under the morning drizzle.
At seven-forty-five on a Tuesday morning, the square should have been waking up: the iron shutters of the espresso bars rattling open, the delivery vans from the wholesale fish market on the Lungomare double-parking outside the trattorias, the street sweepers in their fluorescent vests pushing orange plastic bins through the cigarette butts.
Instead, the square was empty.
Three municipal police cruisers sat angled across the mouth of Via Mercanti, their blue roof lights flashing silently against the wet Renaissance facades, but no officers stood beside them. The drivers remained inside the cabs, their engines idling, their faces hidden behind the frosted, rain-streaked glass. They knew the schedule. When the black Levante and two gray Mercedes vans with tinted windows turned off the coast road and mounted the curb in front of the Palazzo di Città, the cruisers simply cut their strobes, shifted into reverse, and backed thirty meters into the side alleys, leaving the field clear.
Gio stepped out of the front passenger seat.
He had changed in the back of the car outside Vietri. He wore a fresh charcoal suit—not Brioni this time, but a heavy, four-ply English flannel that had belonged to his father, cut loose through the chest to clear the shoulder holster that carried his customized Beretta 92. The cuffs were turned back half an inch, showing the dark, coiled ink of the Rossi serpent on his right wrist.
He walked around the hood, opened the passenger door, and held out his hand.
Isadora did not take it.
She stepped down onto the wet basalt on her own feet. She was still wearing the black uniform dress from La Corona, but the apron was gone, replaced by a dark cashmere overcoat that Luca had stolen from De Luca’s luggage in the trunk of the Alfa. The hem was too long, trailing an inch above her flats, but the coat was warm, smelling of cedar and expensive dry cleaning.
Under her right arm, pressed tight against her ribs like a ledger clerk arriving for an audit, sat Don Salvatore’s sheepskin book.
Behind them, the side door of the lead Mercedes slid back with a dull, pneumatic hiss.
Two of Gio’s men—veterans from the port terminal who had spent the last five years running the crane crews—dragged Roberto De Luca out onto the stones.
The councilor was barely recognizable as the statesman who had smiled on television forty-eight hours ago. His Loro Piana coat was torn at the shoulder, stiff with dried mud and the blood from his split lip. His spectacles were gone, his eyes squinting against the gray daylight like an owl pulled from a hollow tree, his breath coming in wheezing, shallow gasps through the purple bruises that ringed his throat like a collar.
“Gio,” De Luca croaked, his knees buckling as the two crane men held him upright by his armpits. “The prefect... the prefect is already in the building. You can't do this on the floor. It’s... it’s suicide.”
“The prefect is a cousin of the Bishop of Nocera, Roberto,” Gio said, not looking back as he climbed the wide limestone steps toward the bronze entrance doors of the city hall. “And the Bishop has an uncle who owns six lemon groves in Ravello that haven't paid water taxes since 1994. Go tell him I’m here to audit the irrigation accounts.”
The heavy bronze doors were unlocked.
Inside, the grand entrance hall smelled of floor wax, damp marble, and that stale, sour bureaucratic chill that settles into public buildings when the employees know an investigation is pending.
A dozen municipal clerks stood behind the carved walnut counters of the civil registry, their pens frozen over their rubber stamps, their faces pale as lard as Gio walked past them. Nobody reached for a telephone. Nobody asked for an identity card.
The name Rossi was not a name you questioned in Salerno; it was a weather system you waited out under an umbrella.
The doors to the council chamber on the second floor were eight feet high, carved from solid walnut, with the gilded arms of the Republic set into the pediment.
Gio didn't knock.
He didn't use the brass handles. He simply planted his right boot against the center seam and kicked.
The heavy leaves flew backward on their bronze hinges, slamming against the plaster walls with a sound like two rifle shots that set the crystal chandeliers shivering fifty feet above the floor.
Inside, twenty-four men were seated around the horseshoed mahogany table.
At the center, behind the elevated podium of the presidency, sat Salvatore Greco.
The boss of the Bari cartels was sixty-eight years old, with the square, thick-necked build of an old pugilist and hair dyed the color of boot polish. He wore a three-piece suit of blue silk that looked ridiculous in the morning light, his stubby fingers covered in gold signet rings that clinked against the crystal water pitcher before him.
Beside him sat three lawyers from Naples with leather briefcases open on the baize, their pens unscrewed, ready to witness the final signature on the Salerno port concession.
When the doors slammed open, the room didn't erupt in shouting.
The twenty-four men went rigid in unison, their bodies pressing back against the high leather seats like boys caught with stolen tobacco in an orphanage dorm.
Greco didn't stand up. His small, wet black eyes moved from Gio’s face down to the Beretta holster visible under the open flannel coat, then to Isadora, and finally to the bruised, shivering wreck of De Luca being dragged across the parquet by two dockworkers.
“You’re late for the public comment period, Giovanni,” Greco said, his voice carrying the flat, sing-song cadence of the Pugliese coast.
Gio walked down the center aisle of the chamber, his boots making a slow, steady, rhythmic clack... clack... clack against the polished wood.
He didn't stop until he reached the foot of the presidential podium, four feet from Greco’s belly.
“The comment period is extended, Salvatore,” Gio said.
He reached behind him, took the heavy sheepskin ledger from Isadora’s hands, and brought it down across the center of the mahogany table with the kinetic violence of an iron anvil falling from a crane.
The crack echoed off the vaulted ceiling like a mortar strike.
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A crystal water glass jumped, toppled, and spilled its contents across the uncompleted concession contracts that lay before the Neapolitan lawyers.
“Page forty-eight, Greco,” Gio said, his voice dropping into that low, rasping register that filled every corner of the room without rising to a shout. “Read it aloud for the councilors. Or do I have to ask the girl from the kitchen to explain how your father bought his first three fishing boats with my grandfather’s salt?”
