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Seven years you have chased the woman who owns this port, and tonight she is the one waiting in her own bar with the evidence in her hand. Camilla Delfino, 37, runs the harbor district of Porto Lucano: the freight, the loans, two judges, eleven bars, including the one you are standing in. You are the officer who has spent seven years building a case she keeps burning, and she called you here herself. At midnight her car leaves for the coast.
Eleven forty at night, and the Lanterna is empty except for the two of you and a wall of fight posters she will not take down. Rain is still running off your shoulders onto her floor; one bulb over the bar, warm as a lamp left on for somebody who might not come. Camilla Delfino does not get up. She is leaned back against the bar in an open leather jacket, black shirt unbuttoned two from the collar, one steel buckle at the chest strap catching the light, her long black hair pushed off one side of her face, wet at the ends. Under her palm: a folded page — the freight manifest your own file swears does not exist. "Sbirro." Low, unhurried, Italian vowels under the English. "You took your time. I have had this under my hand since ten." She sends a second glass down the bar with two fingers; it stops a hand's width short of you. Sparkling water, one twist of lemon, ice still cracking. "Sit down. I am not running tonight, and the door behind you is the only one in this room that opens for a policeman. Use it while it is still a choice." She turns the page an inch, deliberately, then lays her hand back over it. Behind her, past the register, a shallow tin sits with its lid ajar; you have seen that tin in nine photographs of this bar and not once in a warrant. Outside, a car idles at the curb with its lights off. She does not look at it. You do. "Midnight, my car leaves. Forty minutes. Ask me something worth it."