Chapter 4: The Market of Lies

The port of Cagliari stank of diesel, rotten salt and fried fish.

Chains struck the sides of ships. Truck engines idled on the pier while voices rose and disappeared among the warehouses. After the stone silence of Nivàra, the noise seemed to press against Leone from every direction.

He climbed down from the livestock truck before the driver could ask further questions. His injured arm burned beneath the torn jacket. The skin around the wound was hot and tight, and fever had begun to gather behind his eyes.

He headed toward the alleys of the Marina district with his hands buried in his pockets to hide their trembling. The buildings were tall and narrow, pressed against one another. Even beneath the afternoon sun, the streets between them remained in shadow.

Piece of meat, he thought, feeling his mother’s letter against his chest.

At the corner of Via Sardegna and a dead-end alley, Leone noticed a man leaning against an abandoned telephone booth. He wore a faded denim jacket and watched the docks. As Leone passed, the man turned sharply, spat on the ground and reached toward the back pocket of his trousers.

For an instant, Leone saw the black sedan, the man outside the church and the dark coat in Bachisio’s shop.

Perhaps they already knew he was there.

He quickened his pace and slipped through the first open doorway he found. Inside the damp corridor, he waited with his shoulder against the wall.

The man in denim walked past without looking in. A short time later, Leone saw him beside a white van, arguing with a fisherman over a crate of smuggled shrimp.

Leone pressed his left hand over his eyes.

He had seen a threat where there was only a petty trafficker watching the docks.

In Nivàra, he had known the faces and their habits. A door left open or a shutter closed too early meant something because he understood what usually happened around them. Here every gesture belonged to a stranger and could have ten different explanations.

“If you stand in the middle like that, someone’s going to step on you.” The voice came from the dark stairwell, thin and roughened by smoke.

Leone turned. Pain pulled through his wounded arm as a girl descended the slate steps. She appeared close to his age, perhaps a year younger. Her dark hair was short and uneven, as if cut with blunt scissors. Large eyes dominated her thin, pale face. She wore an oversized faded hoodie and muddy sneakers.

As she passed, her right hand moved near his jacket. Leone caught her wrist.

His grip was weak from the fever, but it stopped her. In her hand was his old faux-leather wallet. “Amateur stuff,” she said.

She did not struggle. The muscles beneath her thin wrist remained tense, ready for the moment his grip loosened.

Leone watched her throat and the angle of her neck. Her eyes stayed on him instead of searching for an escape route. None of the nervous signs he expected appeared.

“Give it back.”

“Take it. It’s got tobacconist receipts and a counterfeit five-euro note in it.” She dropped the wallet.

Leone bent to retrieve it while keeping his eyes on her.

The movement was enough. Her free hand darted into the inner pocket of his jacket and searched through the fabric where the ring was hidden.

Leone drove his uninjured shoulder into her, knocking her against the iron stair rail.

The girl rubbed her back. Anger did not reach her face. Her attention had shifted to Leone’s right hand, held close to his body. A dark indentation circled his middle finger where he had worn the ring during the truck ride.

“An outsider with an arm ready for the trash and a heavy piece of iron in his pocket,” she murmured. “People with that mark don’t usually make it to the station in one piece.”

Leone tightened his hand around the wallet.

She recognized either the mark or the object that had made it. “Who are you?”

He tried to imitate the low, measured tone Pietro had once used when he wanted someone to stop talking. The memory came without his father’s voice. Fever made the corridor tilt, and Leone steadied himself against the wall.

“Mira.”

She slipped both hands into the pockets of her hoodie.

“And I sell lies to people who can’t afford the truth. What’s your name, orphan?”

As she shifted her weight, a faint metallic sound came from her ankle. An old brass key, blackened by time, hung there on a length of dirty string.

“My name doesn’t matter. What do you know about this mark?” Mira smiled crookedly.

“I know the owner of this building would sell you to the first man who arrived in a dark sedan. And your arm is disgusting. Leave it like that and you won’t need anyone to kill you.”

She turned and began climbing the stairs. At the first landing, she glanced down.

“You want to stay there and cook in your own fever, or do you want to see where I hide the things I steal?”

Leone looked toward the open doorway. Sunlight was fading behind the roofs of the Marina, and the shadows between the buildings had begun to take on the same violet color he remembered from Nivàra.

He had no allies or weapon. The fever had already made him mistake a smuggler for a killer.

Mira had tried to steal the ring and had not explained how she recognized its mark. Her invitation could have been help, a trap or both.

Leone followed her upstairs.

For the moment, he had nowhere else to go.