I Won't Bridge an Impossible Gap novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Initials in the Seam

I stood up so fast the bench rocked.

"You watched me."

"Yes."

"You stood there and watched me pick your pocket."

"I didn't stand there." He got up too, slowly, holding his sling. "I leaned on that wall for forty minutes, with my back to the street, until you were close enough."

The grove went very quiet.

"Explain," I said. "All of it. Slowly."

He drew a long breath, and he did not look away.

"A month before that night, one of my captains told me a girl in the Quartieri was lifting wallets off tourists. Never more than she needed, and never from anyone who looked poor. He wanted her stopped. I went to look at her myself."

"At me."

"At you. You were walking out of the pharmacy on the Vico Lungo with your fists in your pockets, and the man behind the counter told you, loud enough for the queue, that his rules were not his fault."

I remembered that man.

I remembered his rubber gloves.

"I stood across the street and watched you come out empty-handed," said Alessio. "Three days in a row. The price on the counter was four hundred euros."

I stared at him.

"Then you knew where I'd go."

"I knew you'd go to the festival. And I decided I'd rather you took it from me than from some tourist who'd call the police."

My mouth had gone dry.

"The wallet was mine," he said. "My father's, from his own saddler. I put four hundred in it, and I stood where you'd see it, and I let you."

I put my hand in my coat.

My fingers closed on the cracked brown leather.

I turned it over under the moon and held the faded lettering inside the seam up to the light.

I had looked at that mark a hundred times and never been able to read it.

Two letters, worn almost away.

*A.R.*

"Alessio Ruffo," I said.

"My initials. My father gave it to me at sixteen."

I should have known.

I had kept his name under my coats for five years, and I had not been able to read it.

"My cameras were running," he said, quieter. "I have a man in every street of the Quartieri. It's the footage Ilaria has. She found it in my father's archive, and she cut it where you took the wallet, and she'll end it there on Saturday."

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