Chapter 43: Continental Drift — Part 3
[Fiumicino Airport, Rome — February 12, 2011, 11:00 AM]
The airport customs officer studied the Richter passport with the particular suspicion that Italian bureaucracy reserved for all human beings equally, then stamped it and waved James through with a gesture that managed to convey both permission and disapproval.
Rome was different from Paris and Berlin in ways that began at the terminal exit and didn't stop. The light was harder—Mediterranean winter light, bright and angled, cutting through the haze with a specificity that London's diffused grey had never achieved. The air smelled of diesel and coffee and something herbal that James couldn't identify. The drivers outside the terminal communicated through a system of horn blasts that appeared to operate on rules known only to themselves.
Moran drove the rental—a Fiat, because Audis attracted attention in Rome and Moran had adapted his vehicular preferences with the pragmatism that characterised everything he did. They crossed the Tiber at twelve-thirty, passed the Vatican at twelve-forty-five, and arrived at a trattoria in Trastevere at one—the meeting point Luca Ferretti had specified through two intermediaries and a coded phone message, because Italian criminals treated operational security as a cultural practice rather than a professional requirement.
Ferretti was already eating when they arrived.
This, James would learn, was characteristic. Luca Ferretti was forty-seven, Roman by six generations, and operated on the principle that food should never wait for business because business was temporary and food was civilisation. He was compact, dark-haired, wearing a linen shirt that cost more than it looked like it cost, and eating cacio e pepe with the focused attention of a man engaged in a sacred act.
"Sit," Ferretti said, without looking up. "Order. Then we talk."
James sat. Ordered the same—when in Rome, the cliché was also the correct strategy. The pasta arrived in four minutes. The first bite stopped all other cognitive processes for approximately three seconds.
Pecorino and black pepper and pasta cooked with the kind of precision that treated each strand as an individual requiring personal attention. The cheese had melted into the starch water to create a sauce that was simultaneously simple and profound—two ingredients, infinite complexity. James ate with the genuine appreciation of someone who'd learned in this second life that food was not fuel but experience.
"Good?" Ferretti asked.
"Better than good."
"Everything in Rome is better than good. This is our problem and our gift." Ferretti set down his fork. Aligned his napkin. Made eye contact for the first time. "Now. You want to work in Italy."
"I want to provide services to Italian clients. There's a difference."
"There is. But the men you want as clients don't recognise it. To them, a foreign operator in Italian territory is a foreign operator in Italian territory, regardless of what services he offers."
James had expected this. Priya's briefing on the Italian criminal landscape had been thorough—the 'Ndrangheta, Camorra, Cosa Nostra, each one a structure so deeply rooted in regional identity and generational loyalty that outside interference wasn't just unwelcome but conceptually incomprehensible. These organisations had been operating since before the Unification. They didn't need a British consultant any more than the Vatican needed a management review.
"The local market is served," James said. "Brilliantly. I'm not competing with it. What I'm offering is the international component—the work that crosses borders, that requires coordination across jurisdictions, that involves EU regulatory frameworks and transnational financial systems. Your organisations do local work better than anyone on earth. But when a Camorra underboss needs an EU subsidy fraud structured across four member states, or a 'Ndrangheta logistics chain needs rerouting through British ports, the local expertise hits a wall."
"And you stand on the other side of that wall."
"With a door."
Ferretti ate a piece of bread. Chewed thoughtfully. The trattoria was small—ten tables, family portraits on the walls, a kitchen visible through a serving hatch where a woman who was probably someone's grandmother was making pasta with the urgent efficiency of someone who'd been doing it for fifty years and would do it for fifty more.
"I know a man," Ferretti said. "Camorra. Second tier—not leadership, but operational. He has a problem. EU agricultural subsidies—his people have been claiming payments for olive groves that don't exist. Simple fraud, profitable for years. But the EU anti-fraud office has been tightening inspections. He needs the paper trail restructured across three countries to survive an audit."
"Timeline?"
"Two months before the next inspection cycle."
"I can have a plan in two weeks and implementation in six."
Ferretti studied him. The assessment was Italian—not French aesthetics or German precision but something warmer, more intuitive, the evaluation of a man by the way he ate and spoke and held himself at a table where food and business occupied equal status.
"Two weeks," Ferretti repeated. "I'll arrange the introduction. But understand: if this goes wrong, the Camorra won't send a warning. They'll send a funeral."
"I understand."
"Good. Now eat. The pasta is getting cold, and cold cacio e pepe is a sin that even Rome cannot forgive."
---
The subsidy fraud restructuring took eleven days. James designed it from the hotel in Trastevere—mapping the paper trail across Italy, France, and Spain, creating a layered documentation system that would survive EU audit scrutiny while maintaining the illusion of legitimate agricultural operations. Priya's Bucharest hacker fabricated digital records. Marsh's journalist contacts provided intelligence on the audit office's methodology. The plan was elegant—the kind of work his MBA training had been designed for, applied to a subject matter that Wharton would rather not acknowledge.
The Camorra underboss paid through Ferretti. Word spread—through the particular channels of Italian criminal communication, which operated less like intelligence networks and more like family dinners, information passing from cousin to uncle to associate in expanding circles of conversational proximity. A British specialist existed who handled international complexity. Not a competitor. A tool. The distinction mattered.
Rome was operational. Three cities, three models, one web.
James flew home on February 25th. The pasta at Heathrow was, predictably, an insult to everything Rome had taught him.
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