Bruno Melis was one hundred and three years old and still had most of his teeth, his eyesight, and a memory that stretched back to before his days as a pilot in World War II. His wife of eighty years, Maria, was fourteen months in her grave, bless the Virgin Mary. Angelo, Bruno’s youngest son, was seventy-seven and still walked with his father two miles every afternoon to split their daily bottle of wine in Enoteca Mirai, which had been in his wife’s family since the days when Catalan conquerors ruled the entire island of Sardinia. Bruno had seen a century’s worth of history.

But he had never seen anything like what happened at the house of the banker who lived on the hill overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. Bruno’s own house—much more modest than the banker’s, though large by the standards of Arbatax—was on a promontory and offered a view over a part of the southern wall into the banker’s rear garden. On many an evening, Bruno had seen the banker—a man known only by the surname of Otranto—receive guests after banking hours. He knew they were guests and not friends because there were handshakes but no embraces, no laughter, no bottles of wine drunk as the sun set and the stars above ignited like God’s party lights.

People spoke in whispers about those guests because they nearly always arrived by boat around twilight and left in the dead of night. Few ever stayed the night at Otranto’s house, and none ever stayed in the town. They came quietly and left quietly, and no one ever knew their names. They were unusual visitors. Most were clearly not Sardinian or even Italian. There were Asian and African visitors, and others dressed in clothes more like what people wore on TV shows from England or America. Or Russia.

To Bruno and his small circle of friends, it was clear these visitors were there to do business, and business of a kind not conducted at the bank offices or in bistros or enoteche like normal and respectable people did.

But Otranto never caused a problem, nor did his guests. They came, they did whatever business they did, and they left. Always quiet, always discreet. And life went on.