One of the Camorristi stood the girl's skull upright, as if it had something to say. The gangster extended his middle finger, a bit of visual smut, and propped the husk on its immature chin. A difficult thing to balance, a hollow inverted pear. A thing kept hidden, brought out from a burlap sack stowed beneath the cellar stairs. From the first glimpse, the first flash of bone, mud-and-silver under the crooked florescent, Fabbrizio suffered to see it. The skull set his sleep-deprived edginess spiking. It set clusters of hair spiking, arms and thighs, back of the neck. Yet he understood who this must be. Had to be the Greek girl, dead three thousand years. Fabbrizio had known from the first what she meant for him, or rather the pickings from her gravesite, part of a plundered necropolis on the city's southern periphery. An earthquake had tossed up fresh tomb jewelry.

But last night, during his first session in this Camorra shop beneath a coffee shop, his two new so-called friends hadn't shown him the skull. Last night, till he'd run up against the problem with the materials, mostly he'd felt glad for the work. Glad for the money (again tonight, one of the mobsters had flashed a billfold wide as the girl's head) and proud of what he could accomplish. Fabbro knew enough about his trade to understand that the original job would've taken a week or more. The men from the original shop would've needed to make visit after visit, their tunics stinking of burnt metal, to the Temple of Mother Hera. The girl's family would've been spending their days at the Temple, praying and weeping. The craftspeople, forever between trial and error, would've had questions, and besides that they could've used a touch of the divine themselves. But Fabbrizio, thirty centuries further along, required only a couple hard-focused overnight sessions. He might even have done it in one, stretching his energies twelve hours and then some, if he hadn't come up against the problem of materials.

Still, yesterday evening as he'd roared down to the Café Sempre, his Suzuki had felt to him like a neon slash out of a glowing future. No pokey old Vespa for this young fortunate. Then this evening first thing, he'd gotten this mud-and-silver reminder -- whenever the mob starts waving around cash, better keep your hands to yourself. This evening he'd had to confront what his own face would end up looking like, in a matter of days, if his new employers saw fit to plant him under a layer of lime.
The nearer bad guy hooked one elbow in Fabbrizio's, pinning him in place as firmly as his partner held the skull. This one, his mouth almost in the goldsmith's ear, made remarks he seemed to believe were funny.

"Sweet little thing, isn't she?"
...

Fabbrizio confined his expression to a limp smile. With his free arm he touched his pants pocket, his lucky corno, the twisted horn he'd cast for himself after his father died. He'd used the scraps that Papa had left in his kit. But second-hand gold wasn't much help, not even forged into a corno. The crook at his elbow had doused himself with musk. Buffalo oil, was it? If anything were going to start Fabbrizio screaming, here between his could-be murderers, it might well be the musk. Wasn't the local volcanic mulch, the sulfur that leaked from the unstable tectonics, oppressive enough?

At least there was a bit of sun. This late in June, even a basement window caught the slant rays of dinnertime. Not that the view offered much. Fabbrizio found himself thinking of the older Americans on their "art tours," the sixty-somethings with nothing better to do than prove how sensitive they were. One of those biddies, getting out her watercolors to capture the beauty of sundown -- boh, she wouldn't look out this window.