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No matter how many times I called Gunnar, there was still no sign of Rachel. He assured me he was doing everything he could to find her and promised to keep trying.
It was cold consolation.
Every day increased the risk of her writing me off completely – if she hadn’t done so already.
And every day brought me one step closer to losing her forever… if she wasn’t already gone.
I thought of her every night when I went to bed, and it took me hours to fall asleep.
When I finally did, I usually had the same recurring dream.
We were arguing, and I turned away in anger. When I looked back, she was gone. And no matter how hard I looked, there was no trace of her. I searched everywhere in a panic, but I could never find her.
Day and night, waking or sleeping, it hurt when I thought of her – because all I could feel was her absence.
And the only thing I could do was pray that Gunnar came through for me.
At least other parts of my time in prison had a silver lining.
My Italian was becoming quite good – and Dario was turning into a master of hand-to-hand combat.
Our friendship was quite strong but not as deep as it could have been. There was still an element of distrust between us… or at least a lack of total and complete trust, anyway.
I continued to hold back on my past with MI6, and he remained vague about his connections to organized crime.
We had told each other as much as we were willing, and neither of us wanted to take the next step.
All of that changed after the riot.
San Vittore had a sinister past. I found out from Dario that the prison was originally built for political prisoners under Mussolini’s regime, then was used by the Nazis during WWII. Sometimes it felt like the evil from 80 years ago still infected the walls.
It didn’t help that the inmates were all dangerous criminals – and that there were far too many of them shoved into one place. The prison’s original capacity was meant to be 750 men, but it was well over a thousand when I got there.
There were cycles to prison life. Sometimes things would be relatively peaceful – or as peaceful as you could get in a place where attempted murder was a regular occurrence.
And then the mood would turn ugly. Usually it was because the guards were overly sadistic towards an inmate, putting him in the infirmary for a minor transgression.
The guards didn’t fuck with inmates who belonged to the Cosa Nostra, the Camorra, and the ‘Ndrangheta, but it was open season on the smaller gangs without any real power.
I was just thankful that whatever connections Dario had to the Cosa Nostra, those protections seemed to extend to both of us – like an invisible shield against the guards’ brutality.
The more powerful criminals would chalk up the guards’ actions to At least it wasn’t me or my men.
But when shepherds kill a wild dog, the wolves take notice and resent them for it. After all, the wolves have far more in common with the dogs than they do with the shepherds.
And eventually, those resentments festered and boiled over.
A strange pall had settled over the prison in the last few days. Things were seemingly calm, but there was a tension beneath the surface.
Summer had just started, and a heat wave had made San Vittore more unbearable than usual. Dario had ice delivered and kept it in a cooler in our cell so we could dip rags in the water and wrap them around our necks – but the vast majority of other prisoners were living in sweaty discomfort.
Then the prison’s air conditioning system broke completely. The temperatures inside the prison went from 85 degrees Fahrenheit to the high 90s, and the inmates’ tempers soared accordingly. Everything reeked of sewage and body odor, and the air was so stifling you could hardly breathe.
“We’re sitting on a powder keg,” Dario said grimly. “All it will take is one spark to ignite it.”
The spark came in the form of another beating by the guards.
It was something stupid. The guards – who were as on edge as the inmates – apparently yelled at a prisoner. He told them to fuck off, and the guards decided to make an example out of him.
