Work Text:
1998-09-14T08:15:49
The first few minutes you spend as a cadet of the polizia locale. Its white walls are adorned with statutes and credos, and in the hallways are slick photographs of officers saluting, cocking their pistols, or enacting benign good deeds to the people.
Your first visit here left a lasting impression. And now brings the sum of your efforts to emulate the men in those photos: uniform clean and pressed, nameplate polished, hair and nails trimmed to perfection—the very image of discipline, order, and trustworthiness.
You’re congratulated for making the cut, and undoubtedly looking the part of a civil servant. But you can’t shake off the smirks of the senior cadets, who deride you for exceeding the bare minimum—what kind of officer glosses his lips, uses a fragrance as pleasant as a woman’s?
1999-01-21T16:19:03
The feeling of the gun recoiling in your hands. You spend a full minute aligning the sights in the very middle—though of no consequence to a paper target, much too long for a living, breathing, and sentient one. And then you manage to hit a bull’s-eye on your very first try.
Still, you know your method isn’t the right one. What help would your stance, as sure as a ballet dancer’s, be against the erratic knifing style of the mafiosi? Would a moment’s hesitation to pull the gun out of its holster kill a man faster than his own bullet?
They say you’ve got talent, but you dwell longer than it’s safe to. On things other than your standard-issue Beretta, you need a better grip. For example, your time. For example, your killer instincts.
1999-09-23T00:09:46
When dirty money is knocked into your palm.
Your feeling cheated upon hearing—at long last—a compliment for how you’ve done your job.
Shallow comfort in the knowledge that you’ve gained thus far: that the contradictions are part of this life’s truths, that no singular contradiction will overrule the others—that one way or another, it wouldn’t matter how, you’d see justice reign in the streets of Naples—
2000-10-13T01:47:13
Months now, having known no peace, save for when the cheap wine renders the memories murky. When they return, they are clear and they loop without mercy:
your mistake the dirty money the dirty man at the register once again having his fill,
your mistake, his arrival, your mistake, your guard down,
his warning his blood on the floor, his blood on you,
your mistake your mistake your mistake.
2000-10-18T11:29:04
Something has taken over you with regard to the petulant man in the white suit. Nothing in his pursuit of you at the fringes of your crime scene seem rational, save for one very rational treatise: he did not promise you Heaven, the way everyone in your old life would, but merely a reprieve of the past.
You feel naked in front of him without any traces of who you once were: in plainclothes, hair long like a hoodlum’s, and completely unarmed save for an empty bottle. And there is a way that he has when he opens his umbrella, extends a roughened hand, and proffers an invitation for a hot drink at his home—you want to prove something to him, but you don’t know what that is, exactly.
2000-11-15T15:30:00
It seems long in the making, but at some point his ways—their ways—have become clearer to you. Some days, gang justice seems like justice nonetheless: there is a necessary hierarchy for the balance of power, there are bylaws that govern all operations, and there is little tolerance for those who choose to act without conviction.
But there are glaring differences, too. For example, your new diet of rich, homey, and varied flavors, all at his insistence. For example, decent wine to wash down full plates of meat and vegetables, and then sweets to go with the afternoon coffee.
Police officers, like clergymen, practice austerity. Overindulgence clouds judgment, obstructs one from carrying out their duty. But to hear him say it—thanking dozens for their gifts with more grace than a politician—accepting such things meant nourishing, then strengthening oneself from within.
Thus, the budding catalogue you revisit of your favorite things: thick crema in your coffee, fragrant orange zest in the chocolate biscotti, and the homemade limoncello he shares with you, the liqueur an opaque quality—none leaving your mind in a particular hurry.
2000-12-31T23:28:08
Before the year ends, you’ve been ferried under his roof. He’d expressed worry about you being alone during the New Year; now the two of you have acted like old men together—that is, entirely comfortable with nary a word exchanged but for your consternation about the noise, and the thick smoke, that will crown the gulf in half an hour.
But for now, a moment of incredible amity. The opening bars of “Apri il cuore,” from last month’s bestselling pop album, float from the speakers of his kitchen radio.
Perché il dolore diventi nostalgia, he mouths when he looks at you in his own playful, preachy way; e dal dolore rinasca l'allegria. He clacks his shoes to the beat. You are safe, relaxed, and almost totally at peace; for once it is the right place, the right time, the right direction to be.
2001-03-30T13:17:30
He brings a stray pup to the table of the trattoria, somehow trusting it to settle with the big dogs. There is something unsettling about this teen stranger—his impetuous looks? his brash confidence? an air of striking and ageless innocence?—the kind of nonsense you thought you’d left behind you in the force.
2001-03-31T14:23:46
Few things matter more now than the end results: you’re all alive, you’d found the traitor, and the sea is calm for the remainder of the trip to Capri. You’ll find the gold, he’ll be a capo, and perhaps there will be more order and dignity to your soldierly duties.
It matters little to anyone that you’ve been praised; that even without violence, your outer self can solve such problems with a deadly, dismantling accuracy. You could loop back anytime he wished you to, to raise vigilance amongst the members of your team—and you could loop back anytime you wanted to, to when he said you did well and you could finally be at ease—
2001-04-02T05:56:03
What the sunrise looks like when you’re as good as dead, when you know they’ll come running for the bounty. Strangely, the same lively pinks, purples, scarlets that there would be on ordinary days.
You’ve borne the brunt of far worse betrayals—in a past life, Sicarius yourself. As a result, your heart does not skip like a young lover’s when you receive il baccio della morte, that one last fateful kiss.
You tell him you’ll go wherever he goes—even on a smooth and picturesque tour of hell.
2001-04-02T12:04:00
One of three visions you have before death: the time death seems the most logical consequence as the plane nosedives into the Mediterranean. At least before she turns the ceiling into an impossibly soft canopy, and your party is but a jellyfish caught in the throes of a flash storm.
This is the most abstract of the three. You see barely anything past the cliffs, the white froth, and the curtains of Sardinian forestry—but this is when you decide that she, he, they (and even the turtle) could have a fighting chance against impending evil, and that given the opportunity to live longer, you’d stop at nothing to shift the odds in your favor.
2001-04-04T21:49:06
Second of three visions you have before your death, taking place in a far-removed reality. In this one all the teen brats are completing their schooling, and your own special brat has close friends and is saving money to be a pilot. The team’s ace spends too much time flirting with girls, though he transports them safely in his sedan. Your superintendent’s badge gleams the way you want it to after a careful round of polishing. And he has chosen a fine name for a new boat that looks like the one once owned by his father.
There is always enough psychic energy to power your outer selves. There are spare batteries in the dresser drawer for the radio. There’s a routine for changing the water in the vases for the plants, and the aquarium for the family of pet turtles. There are empty cigar boxes where he stores his gold jewelry, and you, your specialty perfume. And there are framed photographs of the academy, the marina, a grand meal at the restaurant for a career milestone of the woman you all helped raise—
Clear, poignant images, even if they are not entirely, truly memories—
2001-04-05T10:36:59
My last act is to show you that scoundrel’s face. It would be difficult, even with my own background in criminology, to single him out in a catalogue of other wretched names—though you’ll know, and she’ll know, because of her likeness to her father.
And I could do this with my Stand because without knowing, I’d practiced. It had been my face I’d been chiseling onto the surface of the stone. I marked it with failures of my own making; I thought, it’s only the past where I have a place.
But thanks to you, things are different—for your world as well as mine. They say your entire life flashes before your eyes before you’re blinded by that inexplicable pure white, angelic light. Now that I’m there, it’s not like that, not exactly, but close enough that if you pressed play, you’d get the gist of my last will and testament, and that is:
Today, I no longer die with nothing on me but my sins.
The truth was there all along, in you who I met—who was, to me, flesh, blood, and spirit.
Seek me out, soon, at the end of our path.
You know—I am waiting.