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CASTELLAMMARE DI STABIA, ItalyIt was a warm summer afternoon and Assunta Pupetta Maresca was tapping her manicured jet-black fingernails on a white marble tabletop that was stained with what looked like red wine or blood. We were sitting in the kitchen of her fluorescent-lit apartment in a coastal town of questionable character south of Naples where she was born into a crime family in 1935, and where she died December 29, 2021. The heavy wooden shutters were closed to keep out the heat, and a ceiling lamp swayed in the breeze created by a flimsy plastic fan perched on the counter.

It was months before the COVID pandemic changed the world, and Pupettas biggest health fear was suffering a stroke, despite doing nothing to prevent it. A pack of menthol cigarettes in a gilded case sat neatly next to an ornate ashtray and matching lighter in the center of the table. A bedazzled vape pen on what looked like a rosary hung on her chest like a necklace. She puffed on it between cigarettes and blew smoke directly into my face. More than once she told me she shouldnt smoke. These will kill me, she said between puffs. I should stop.

The crepey skin on the backs of her small hands was too smooth for a woman in her eighties and looked as if it had been surgically stretched around her swollen joints. Her age spots had been bleached and looked like fading bruises, as if someone had clutched her hand too hard. She briefly put her cigarette in the ashtray and picked up a strand of her crimson-dyed hair that had fallen onto the table and stretched it between her fingers, lifting her pinkies ever so slightly before brushing it off to the tile floor for her maid to eventually sweep up.

It was impossible to look at Pupettas hands without imagining them wrapped around the silver Smith & Wesson .38 pistol she once fired in the defining moment of her life. More than sixty years before I sat with her, she used that gun to take down the man who ordered the fatal hit on her husband. Surely her husbands rival was dead after her first blasts knocked him to the ground. But she still grabbed her thirteen-year-old brother Ciros revolver and sent another round of bulletstwenty-nine in allin the direction of the bleeding corpse. The killing took place outside a busy coffee bar in Naples in broad daylight. She was eighteen years old and six months pregnant at the time.

Pupetta claimed she still kept the pistol in the nightstand next to her bed. I once asked her if I could see it, but she insisted that she would only take it out to use it. I never asked again. Of the many things I grew to admire most about the woman nicknamed Lady Camorra was her dry sense of humor. She was a cunning liar and a cold-blooded killer, but if you could look beyond that, she was genuinely delightful.

The first time I sat in Pupettas kitchenafter stalking her at her usual coffee bar and vegetable market until she agreed to grant an interview without charging me for itshe offered me bitter espresso served in a chipped demitasse cup, clearly saving the fine china for better company. I stared into the dark, steaming liquid, hesitant to take a sip out of concern that she could have slipped something into it. In a brief bout of egotism, I envisioned that perhaps I could be a last-hurrah killing. No one even knew where I was, and for someone with her connections to the underworld it would be reasonably easy to get rid of my body. Covering crime and murder and deathessentially trafficking in tragedyfor the many years Ive been in Italy has jaded my perception of my own mortality. Over the years, I have evolved from thinking that nothing bad will ever happen to me to expecting it. I see the worst first, as I am often reminded by friends and family. I am generally a voice of doom.

In my defense, the paranoia was bolstered by the fact that Pupetta was not drinking any of the espresso herself. Too much caffeine in the afternoon made her nervous, she answered when I asked if she was joining me. I drank it in one gulp, as is the custom in Italy. She watched me closely, enjoying my fearor at least thats how I choose to remember it. Every time I saw her after that, she also drank coffee with me no matter what time of day.