Chapter 0 - Hidden in Plain Sight
Nobody remembered Nicola. Professionally speaking, that was exactly the point.
He was twenty-six, though he carried himself with the age of a man who had grown old in a hurry. His hair was a disordered thicket of dark brown that could never quite decide which way to grow. His eyes, the colour of rusted iron, were sunk into shadows so weary they looked like bruises — the eyes of a man who had spent three nights trying to get a company’s server back online, only to discover that no one, in three nights, had bothered to check whether it was switched on. He looked less like an assassin and more like an exhausted IT technician at two in the morning.
He always wore a trench coat the way other men wore a wedding ring, out of habit and because taking it off seemed almost like admitting something. Nicola did not have a face people remembered. He had a posture people recognised: the posture of a man who, obviously, worked there, wherever “there” happened to be that week.
He worked for an agency called La Correzione, which existed in no registry, in no piece of office gossip, nor in the minds of the hundreds of people who had unknowingly funded its budget through various slush funds. The office sat above a coin laundromat, in a part of Milan where the streetlamps buzzed like dying insects — not the postcard Navigli, but the back of the Navigli, the part the tourists never reach. Inside: a rotary telephone that seemed it hadn’t rung since before the fall of the Craxi government, a desk that looked like a shipwreck, and a persistent smell of synthetic lavender waging perpetual war against the mould.
It was il Regista who ran things, a man made entirely of sharp edges and bespoke tailoring, the sort of man who irons even his pyjamas. He never raised his voice. He simply said things like “erase it,” and somewhere in the city a decade of corporate crime quietly ceased to exist.
Nicola’s job title, had La Correzione believed in job titles, would have beenGhost. Not the kind that haunts, but the kind who points you to the toilet and whom you then forget.
“You’re not a fixer,” il Regista had told him once, back when Nicola still asked too many questions. “A fixer makes himself remembered. You, on the other hand, are a correction. Corrections don’t make themselves remembered. They simply... happen, in silence. And then everyone agrees it was always this way.”
Nicola liked that definition more than he would ever admit. It matched the most honest truth about himself, the one no one ever sees in daylight: a man capable of walking into the most heavily guarded building in the city, borrowing its trust for six hours, and handing it back before anyone noticed.
In his pocket he always kept a packet of Diana Blu, more for the dramatic effect than for the nicotine. A man smoking outside a building looks like a man who works there. A mannotsmoking outside a building looks like a man studying it.
He never carried anything with him. That was the part people always got wrong when they imagined men like him: they pictured a bag full of disguises or a briefcase crammed with tools for every eventuality. Nicola carried a coat with a single large inner pocket and a packet of cigarettes; that was his entire inventory. Everything he needed he had already left there himself, weeks earlier, during the part of the job no one ever thinks to ask about.
Every infiltration began the same way: Nicola became someone so far beneath everyone else’s attention that a building would let him wander through its bones for days without ever wondering why. Most of the time, that meant a broom and a name tag. Doormen and cleaning women, he had learned early, were the most invisible people in the modern world. People hold the door for whoever is cleaning and never look at their face. People discuss crimes in front of a man mopping the floor two metres away.
So, weeks before a job even had a date, Nicola would become a doorman or a stand-in delivery boy. He learned a building’s shift changes, its blind spots, which badge readers jammed most often and where, exactly, a man might hide a vest and everything he needed. When the real day came, all he needed was the coat, his logic, a decent knowledge of other people’s habits, and, every now and then, a frankly indecent amount of luck.
No job ever went exactly the same way. Some nights everything clicked like a well-oiled lock and Nicola walked out wondering what they were paying him for. Other nights, everything that could go wrong went wrong, in ways no planning could have foreseen — and those, though he would never have admitted it out loud, were the nights he actually enjoyed.
This is the story of those years and of everything that would come after: an apprentice no one had asked him to want, and a name no one expected they would have to learn to fear.
