You don’t know me, but I know you.

Dear Charlie:

Hello there.

Dear Mark:

This might seem strange, but

Ambruzzo read them over and over. He crossed out the names and tried putting in his own. It looked odd, and his crippled handwriting next to her clean lines made him feel like a failure. He drew a list, cross-referenced it with the school roster. Joe and Mark transferred to other districts. Charlie dropped out and joined the Navy.

After high school, the Spordonza family sent Ambruzzo to Bologna for training. He wrote letters to Amy Stackenfrach to which she at first politely replied from her small private college on the East Coast. He talked about the weather and not about what he was learning: How to suffocate. How to follow people. How to shoot things from far away. How to blend into a passing crowd, the words on a billboard, a breeze moving slowly through the leaves of a tree.

Ambruzzo enjoyed rereading Amy’s letters. Sometimes she would pen her responses along the edges of the same pieces of paper he had so carefully chosen, folded, and sent to her. Amy wrote about her art teacher, about the smell from the river, about the Watusi and the boys she was dating. Ambruzzo asked their names, where they lived, if he could come to visit. She returned his next letter unopened with a note along the seal: Please don’t write anymore.

In some ways this made life easier. It was as if a small hole in the ice of him had suddenly closed up, and now he was a solid, blank surface. Ambruzzo rose to the top of his class. He was put in specialized training—electrocution to poison darts. Nonna mailed him a prayer card of Saint Anthony of Padua. I am fine, she wrote. The bread is fine too. When do you come home? Where is my family? Ambruzzo kept Saint Anthony on his bedside table and tried to think of things he wanted.

His first professional hit was a minor one: Louie Morona, a class-D welsher who’d turned state’s evidence and entered the witness protection program. Ambruzzo trailed him from New York to Hayward, Wisconsin. He found Louie on the Ojibwa Indian reservation, attempting to pass as a Native American.

Ambruzzo used his belt to strangle Louie in the cornfield behind the casino. The belt was new; Ambruzzo had bought it that day in downtown Hayward. It was a good length and fit nicely in the space between Louie Morona’s Adam’s apple and the base of his throat. Ambruzzo cut off Louie’s fingers and toes, shot him once in the face, and dumped his body in Lake Courte Oreilles. On his way out of town, he stopped by the post office and overnighted Louie’s digits to Martin Spordonza.