‘I lived on the streets for a while, sleeping in doorways by night and scavenging for food by day. But then it started getting colder. One night I broke into an empty building, only to discover that it wasn’t an empty building. It turned out to be the headquarters of I Picaresqui, which was then one of the most notorious street gangs in Veneto. They thought I might be a spy for the police.’
‘Oh, my God. What happened?’
‘You saw the scars,’ he said, remembering the way the fire had scorched his skin, the panic and the terror that had scythed through him.
A flush bloomed on her cheeks for a moment. ‘The two on your upper chest looked like cigarette burns,’ she said, her voice strangely husky and tight.
‘They are.’
‘And the others?’ she asked, her gaze lifting to the scar at his temple and the bump in his nose.
‘A fight with a rival gang member over territory a year or two later.’
Her eyes jerked back to his, the shock he saw in them sending a dart of what felt like shame shooting through him. ‘You joined them?’
‘Si,’ he said, stamping it out since he didn’t need judgement. From anyone, least of all her. He’d judged himself plenty.
‘Why?’
‘It felt like a good idea at the time.’
‘What sort of things did you have to do?’
‘I started off by fleecing unsuspecting tourists,’ he said, sticking to the facts and the facts alone. ‘Pickpocketing and coin tricks were my speciality, but anything really that made money quickly. You asked me why my English was so good.’
‘I remember.’
‘It is the language of business and I do have an ear for it, but I also spent a lot of time watching films and reading books in order to be able to scam tourists better.’
‘I bet you were good at it.’
‘I was. Very.’
‘And then?’
‘Once I’d earned the respect of the leaders, I moved into the accounting side of the business.’
There was no need to tell her some of the other more brutal things, more shameful things he’d had to do to prove himself loyal—the fighting, the righting of perceived wrongs, the collecting of debts. Or about the complex tangle of feelings he’d once had about it all.
‘Did you ever get caught?’
‘I spent more nights in the cells than I care to remember.’
‘No wonder you have a thing about police stations,’ she said, which proved once again how sharp she was. ‘You were tense,’ she said in response to the quizzical look he gave her. ‘I noticed.’
‘You fainted.’
‘It brought back painful memories for me too,’ she said, her eyes clouding for a moment, and he had to fight back an urge to demand more. He didn’t need more. He’d never need more.
‘So how did you get out?’ she asked, yanking his thoughts back on track. ‘How on earth did you go from being part of a gang to working at an investment bank in Milan?’
‘I was arrested on money-laundering charges and hauled in front of a judge. I confessed to nothing, but during the course of the trial my skill with money and numbers kept cropping up. It was never clear quite what the judge saw in me, but one morning she told me she had a contact here and gave me a choice. Jail or a job. I chose the latter and now I exploit the markets, which when I think about it is as ironic as you manipulating perception for your job. What?’ he finished with a frown, not liking the strange look that was appearing on her face one little bit.
‘We’re kindred spirits,’ she said with a softness that he hoped to God wasn’t pity. ‘Who knew?’
‘We’re nothing of the kind,’ he muttered with a sharp shudder as he glanced at the building in front of which they were pulling up and thought he’d never been so grateful to arrive at a destination. ‘What we are, is here.’
CHAPTER NINE