Okay, confession time. Given that Connor basically spilled the beans back there, I might as well fill you in.89
I mean, you’ve probably already guessed it, right? The real reason Connor has such a hold over me? No? Well, that crime I helped him solve? The robberies that were shaking up Rome? The murder?
Connor planned it.
Hold up, hold up, hold up.
I thought he solved the robberies, you say?
Yeah, me too.
But after we’d gone to the police with our evidence and the remainder of the Giuseppe crew was arrested in the act, Connor and I had gone out to celebrate, and we’d gotten sloppy drunk. We went back to his room and you can imagine what happened next.90
It was wonderful. He was wonderful, we were wonderful together, and I was exhilarated, thrilled, on cloud nine. Every cliché you can think of, and probably some you can’t.
Then I woke up.
A couple of hours after we fell asleep, my eyes popped awake. I felt restless and undone. Unfinished. That must’ve been the reason I started searching through our stack of evidence in the living room of our suite while Connor slept in the bedroom. The surveillance photos and maps and things we’d accumulated over the previous weeks.
Something was bugging me.
Something wouldn’t leave me alone.
And then it hit me.
How did he know to stake out the building where they’d caught the robbers? And why was he so sure that particular bank was the next one on the list? There were dozens of banks in Rome. Probably hundreds. It’s a close-packed city. Every bank is surrounded by buildings that could be purchased and used to tunnel underground. But Connor had zeroed in on this one. He’d had some explanation about how it was the most likely target, that there was a pattern to the heists, and to be honest, I hadn’t asked too many questions.
But during that middle of the night, as I stood over a map with the robberies marked on it with little colored pushpins, I could see that there was no pattern at all.
What did that mean? If there wasn’t a pattern, how did Connor know where the next robbery was going to take place? There was only one explanation.
He had to have something to do with it.
But what?
I tried to puzzle that out for hours, thinking back through our conversations, what he’d told me about himself. He was a private detective, he’d said, for expats and people who got into trouble on vacation, but mostly he worked as a consultant.
I’d assumed for the police and insurance companies, but had he said that?
He was working with an insurance company on this case. I’d been in one of the meetings with men in tight, tailored suits and sophisticated accents in a glass-walled conference room. And when we’d gone to the carabinieri, he’d known the chief inspector, but their relationship hadn’t been warm. Instead, Inspector Tucci had been suspicious, it seemed, wary. It had taken some convincing for him to look at our evidence, and then, until the criminals were in custody and more evidence was found connecting them to the murder, he didn’t believe it was true.
Why?
Consultant of what?
Oh, shit. What if he was a consulting criminal?
What if he was the one who’d planned the robberies, and that’s how he knew where the next one would be?
But no. That couldn’t be. It was late and I was making things up. I was asking questions when I didn’t have to. The mystery had been solved, the bad guys were going to jail, and that was that. This would all seem ridiculous in the morning.
I was sure of it.
I was about to crawl back into bed when a notification flashed on Connor’s phone.
I don’t know what it was that made me look. I wasn’t someone who read my boyfriend’s messages—not until then, anyway. But that night I did. Because it wasn’t a text; it was a Signal message.
I’d always felt weird about Signal. Connor had suggested we use it when we met, and I didn’t question it at first, but eventually, it started to make me uneasy, like a hangnail I couldn’t get rid of. Why were we using a communication method favored by cheaters and politicians who didn’t want their official communications to show up on government servers?
What did we have to hide?
He’d smoothed that concern away like he’d ironed out so many things since we met.
—How he became a detective and what he’d done before that.
—Where he’d grown up.
—Where he lived when he wasn’t being put up in a hotel.
—What he saw in me.
I’d believed all his vague answers and had tried to live in the moment like he’d suggested. But that night, with too many questions swirling in my head, the doubts came rushing back.
Most of all, I wanted to know: Who was Signaling him in the middle of the night?
I checked the bedroom. He was still sleeping. I knew the code to his phone because he’d been casual about using it in front of me. Trusting. He never thought I’d look through his phone. Why would he?
But I did. And there it was, all laid out in his Signal messages. The man who was writing him—someone named Gianelli, a minor figure in the Giuseppe family—wanted his cut of the finder’s fee. He was insisting they meet in the morning. And the more I read, the more I saw that I was right. Connor had planned the whole thing. It was his idea to rob the banks, and he’d decided which banks to hit, and how. He’d worked it all out for them. And as far as I could tell, the surveillance we’d done was to make sure they were following his plan.
I sat there in shock for an hour, my robe cinched tight.
What I couldn’t figure out was why he’d turned on them. Why he’d involved me. Or what I was going to do about it.
But that shouldn’t have been a mystery to me, or to you either at this point.
I sat there afraid in the hotel room for hours, waiting for dawn to come, trying to decide if I should confront him or just leave without looking back, but I couldn’t make myself go to the door. Connor found me asleep in a chair, his phone clutched in my hand, and knew that I’d discovered his plan.
He had an explanation for everything. He’d turned on them after a member of the team had murdered Gianni because they thought his loyalty was in question. That had never been part of the plan. They were bad people and had to be stopped, and if he got the police off his own back, built up some goodwill, and got a finder’s fee out of it, well, then that was just his good fortune, wasn’t it?
Our good fortune.
Robbing a bank was a “victimless crime,” he said. The insurance companies came in and made it all better, and no real person lost their money.
It all sounds like bullshit now, but then?
It made sense to me.
I mean, had he done anything that wrong?
Okay, yes, he had, but he wasn’t a murderer. He hadn’t robbed the banks, exactly, just given the robbers a good idea of how to do it. Was that so different from someone who wrote a heist movie for Hollywood that inspired a real robbery?
This is an actual example he used as he talked me out of going to the police.
He had others. I don’t remember them now.
I just remember the feeling of his lips against my ear, the way he made me feel inside.
A victimless crime, he said.
Only that wasn’t true. There was a victim. Someone had lost his life.
He brushed that away, too. Gianni Giuseppe was a violent member of a criminal family. His life expectancy wasn’t anything to write home about. He’d been the author of his own demise.
Does it even matter what Connor said?
It only matters what I did.
I didn’t turn him in.
And then, despite everything, despite all of it, I’d written When in Rome.
It started as a way for me to try to make sense of what happened. To get my story straight. Not just with myself, but if the police ever came knocking. I didn’t need Connor to tell me that I was now an accessory after the fact to those crimes. Maybe I’d even helped facilitate them.
So I wrote and wrote and wrote. I shaped the narrative in a way that made it possible to live with. I left out the real solution, the Connor of it all, and made him the hero. I did such a good job of convincing myself of our innocence that I forgot our guilt.
Which Connor made clear to me in New York when he learned about the book.
He stayed up all night reading the manuscript, and then he came to me with a proposal. I’d give him the cut he wanted. And if I didn’t? Well, then he’d let the carabinieri know that I was an accessory. That I’d hidden material evidence.
“And don’t think you can turn me in and get away scot-free,” he’d said. “I’ve planned for that.” I couldn’t take him down without taking myself down, too.
Mutually assured destruction, he’d called it.
Or maybe only I’d be destroyed because Connor wasn’t stupid. He’d manipulate the evidence, he assured me, to make it seem like I was the one who had planned the heists, not him. So, I was going to comply, wasn’t I? I was going to do what he asked. Because if I didn’t, there’d be consequences.
And how did I know that he wasn’t the one who’d killed Gianni?
That was the part I couldn’t forget. The coldness in his eyes when he suggested that he might’ve taken Gianni’s life.
I believed him.
I agreed to his terms.
I was scared and foolish and vain and stupid. I paid and I wrote and I smiled for the cameras. I kept my nose to the grindstone for ten years because I was afraid of what I’d find if I looked up.
But then I did. And here’s the thing Connor hasn’t figured out yet.
There’s a statute of limitations for robbery and obstruction of justice in Italy.91 I discovered it when I was doing research for Amalfi Made Me Do It.92 What that means is, even if Connor tells the carabinieri what I did, they can’t prosecute me.
So I’m free to get rid of him.
There’s nothing he can do about it.93