White Shotgun

TWENTY-ONE

Among the crowd of passengers getting off the morning train in Siena, FBI legat Dennis Rizzio is easy to spot. Wearing a boxy charcoal plaid suit, a light blue tie, and Ray-Bans, he’s a head taller and a hundred pounds heavier than the Europeans in summer clothes. The bulky, scarred-up briefcase is a hint that all he really cares about is the business it contains. And you can bet he’s carried the grim look on his face all the way from Rome.

As soon as he has folded himself into Giovanni’s mailbox car, he demands to know if I am certain of the way to the police station. He has to draw his knees up to his chin and rest the briefcase on top of them since there is no room at his feet.

“Our appointment with the Commissario is at ten,” he reminds me testily.

“Under control.”

“How’s the hand? Lemme see.”

I display the gauze bandage that was wrapped around my palm yesterday by the paramedic.

“You’ve had a tetanus shot, I hope?”

“Yep.”

“How bad is it?”

“Kind of like when you’re cutting an onion, and you look up to watch the game?” I indicate a slice through the base of the thumb.

“Lucky he didn’t cut your finger off.”

“Stupid move on my part, getting into the middle of that.”

“You’re gonna let him attack an American grandmother? So the idiot was what? A guy from Torre?”

“He was wearing a Torre scarf, but he could have bought it on the street.”

The mailbox car stalls as we are climbing the hill from the train station. The stick shift is tall and spindly, and I’ve been having trouble keeping the car in gear.

“Who taught you to drive?” Dennis asks.

“My sainted grandfather,” I reply between gritted teeth, as Poppy’s voice lashes out, You’re gonna kill us! What’s the matter with you?

“I hope you’re going to kick butt with the Commissario,” I say.

“When you saw him, what did he tell you?”

“He gave me his card and promised to be on the case.”

The engine stalls again. I stomp on the brake, jam it into park, and restart the car. Traffic is backed up and everyone is leaning on the horn. In the rearview mirror is a row of sun-blinding windshields. The pain pill I took is wearing off, and I’m dying of the heat in my black FBI suit.

“You’re doing great,” Dennis says dryly. “Just don’t crash into that van behind us.”

It’s a battered “airport van” driven by an unshaven, wild-haired psycho with a sweat rag around his gritty neck. What dummy would get off a plane and into that vehicle? Changing gears, I roll back and kiss his bumper, then we lurch forward. He leans out the window and yells, “Vaffanculo!”

“What does that mean?” I ask Dennis impatiently. “Everyone keeps saying it.”

“Yeah, like all the time in Brooklyn. ‘Fuck you.’ ”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s what it means.”

It is now five minutes before ten and my colleague’s fingers are drumming the briefcase. You couldn’t find the police station if you were looking for it, but it can see you. In an alley leading to the Piazza del Duomo, just wide enough for one small car to pass, a shaft is formed that is open to the sky. The walls are made of three-foot blocks of stone layered with ebony marble, like the gothic Cathedral of Santa Maria that dominates the plaza. Tourists in shorts and cowboy hats walk spellbound through this pocket of light. A few steps farther and they will emerge to a vista of the cathedral that will knock their socks off, but meanwhile the morning sun plays softly over the black-and-white stone, and they never see the surveillance cameras hidden in the corners.

Nor would they notice the nondescript questura, whose worn steps seem to lead to another of those tired postwar European buildings smelling of fresh paint and cooked cereal that have been converted to tiny condominiums at huge prices — which at one time it was. I park alongside a row of cruisers in the shade of a neighboring art museum. Sophisticated older couples with shorn silver hair and Swedish walking shoes are calmly buying tickets. Every day another gallery. Pastries in the afternoon.

Inside the vestibule of the questura, we are stopped by an officer who is embarrassingly deferential to Dennis, shaking hands with a flattering smile. Without a weapons check or even asking for ID, he leads us through an ordinary wooden door into the cop shop. Dennis and I exchange a look at the astonishing lack of security.

Palio is over, but the bullpen is still chaotic. It has the crammed-full industrial look of a carpeting wholesaler who expanded too quickly. Messy partitions and hulking old computers. There is a locked cage for stolen property and a vault for guns; good-looking male inspectors in natty shirts and ties, and polizia who carry 9mm Berettas and wear navy shirts with epaulets and military berets. The universal accessory, I notice, is the rubber stamp. There must be three dozen old-fashioned wood-handled rubber stamps in revolving holders on every desk, testament to a bureaucracy in which the right mark by the right hand still has more power than all the computers in the world.

Sitting in a row on a bench are the Bunyons. Mom, dad, brother, sister, and grandma.

“Who are they?” Dennis asks without moving his lips.

“That’s the family. The Americans in the dustup yesterday.”

The moment they see us, all five Bunyons get to their feet.

“Hello, Ana,” says the somber dad. He’s all showered up in a clean white polo shirt and travel shorts.

The mother stares at my bandage. “That looks awful. Are you okay?”

“Fine,” I say. “Was anybody else hurt?”

The children shake their heads.

“Then why are you here?” I wonder.

“My mother was pushed to the ground,” the dad says indignantly. “She’s eighty-three years old! She could have broken her hip!”

The grandma, thin and muscular, with rakish white hair and sharp blue eyes, looks more resilient than any of them.

“We’re gonna sue ’em!” she croaks.

“We’re filing a complaint,” says the dad. “We’ve never had such a terrible experience. Nobody told us they had riots in Italy.”

“Those young men were crazy. Out-and-out dangerous,” exclaims the wife.

The dad introduces himself to Dennis, taking in the suit and the briefcase.

“You must be Ana’s lawyer. I gotta say, she saved my mother’s life.”

“I believe it.” Dennis hands over his card. “Dennis Rizzio. I’m with the FBI.”

Mr. Bunyon stares at the golden seal with the eagle and his eyes pop. Then they fill with tears.

“God bless America,” he tells his wife with reverence. “They sent the FBI!”

Inspector Martini is coming. I make a break for it. She is in uniform, clutching her talismanic packs of cigarettes. I introduce Dennis and explain the plight of the Bunyons.

“Civilians,” I whisper, and she gets it immediately, handing them off to the obsequious officer, who leads them to a faraway corner, and, I’m sure, a morning of complete confusion on both sides.

We take off the opposite way, following Martini through the wooden door, across the vestibule, down a flight of steps, and through another door to a smaller secretarial office, which seems to have once been a barn. The old wooden gate, secured against a wall, has been replaced by a massive steel door that seals the entrance. There are remnants of a hayloft. Not exactly the boss’s office. Two or three female civilians sit at computers, working-class divas with dyed hair, wearing silky bosom-revealing blouses, tight slacks, and heels. Why not? Through that door there are a hundred horny men. Martini drags over some chairs and we squeeze around a desk.

“The Commissario sends his apologies. He cannot see you today.”

I am about to blow my stack, but Dennis handles it.

“We have an appointment. Ten o’clock.”

“I apologize for the Commissario. He is in a meeting.”

“We’ll wait.”

“The meeting is in Florence.”

“When will the Commissario be back?”

“He won’t be back today.”

Dennis is steamed now, too, and showing it. “He’s there now? And I just got off a train? You couldn’t call? You don’t have phones in the police department?”

The Commissario is not in Florence, and we both know it.

But Martini is a professional who has to answer for her boss. She sits up and tightens her shiny black ponytail. Crosses her legs and settles a legal pad on her blue lap. The skirt is taut as a drum.

“I am here to help you. I will do my best. Agent Grey, what goes on with your hand?”

“After the race, a man armed with a knife came running through the crowd. He tried to push past the Americans you met outside. I intervened, he took a swipe at me and ran. In the process, the grandmother took a pretty bad fall.”

“Can you describe this man?”

“Twenties, Italian, dark curly hair, Levi’s, running shoes, clean shaven, silver bracelets. And he was wearing a Torre scarf.”

Martini stops writing.

“Like the men who alledgedly attacked your nephew?”

Dennis nods. “Exactly right. We’re looking for a connection. This could have been your ordinary crazed Torre guy out to get Oca — Ana had on Oca colors — or a mob assailant with a deliberate target.”

Martini raises large, black-rimmed eyes. “Who is this target?”

“Probably not Grandma Bunyon,” Dennis suggests.

Martini waits, not understanding.

“We think it might be Agent Grey.”

“Ma, why Ana?”

“She must have something they want. Isn’t that the way it goes?”

Martini looks doubtful. “That makes no sense to me. He could find you out of so many people?”

“He could if he were following me.”

“No, no,” Martini says, shaking her head. “If we are to have an incident at Palio — and it’s very, very rare — it is a result of high emotion and too much wine and no sleeping. No one stops to think, to plan this out. You were unlucky and got in front of the train.”

Dennis sits forward in the plastic seat, elbows on knees, his face in hers.

“I am here to represent the United States government in an official capacity. We understand the FBI is in this country at the invitation of the Italian government, and we can’t do anything without your permission. That is why we must ask for the Commissario’s help. One of our federal agents has been attacked in your town. Maybe it was random. But her nephew was stabbed, and three days ago her sister was abducted right out of a church. That’s bold, don’t you think, Inspector Martini?”

“I agree, and I am sorry that it happened in the beautiful city of Siena.”

Dennis shrugs. “It happens in Milan, it happens in Calabria … We are disturbed about what happened to our agent, Inspector, just as you would be if a police officer from Siena was attacked in New York City. Listen, I myself am Italian American.”

He smacks himself in the chest and says something in their language that makes Martini relax a bit and nod.

“Family doesn’t stop at the ocean. Agent Grey, an American citizen, is worried about her family living in Italy, and rightfully so.” He inches closer to make a point: “Our concern is that Agent Grey could be the intended victim of a multiple kidnap scheme, in which her sister was the first to be taken.”

Martini considers this and makes a decision. “You should know the Commissario considers the abduction a priority. I am authorized to tell you that we have started an investigation to find Cecilia Nicosa.”

“Brava!” Dennis leans back. I can see that he’s sweating. “That’s great.”

She reads from the pad, translating unevenly from her notes: “ ‘The following effects will take place in the disappearance of Cecilia Nicosa. One. To check all video cameras in Siena, most important, near the church of Santa Maria di Provenzano especially. Two. To interview any people who see her in the church or afterward, especially the church officials and the police officers.’ ”

“What have you gotten so far?”

She folds her hands. “We start this afternoon.”

“You haven’t even begun? She’s been gone three days.”

“During Palio, we have no police to spare. But now we will put our full strength behind this.”

“Va bène,” says Dennis, suddenly cheerful. “I expect you’ll make good progress.” He looks at his watch. “I believe I can still catch the eleven-fifteen train back to Rome. Do I have your word you will tell the Commissario what I said, about our fears for our agent?”

“Yes, you have my word,” Inspector Martini answers solemnly, and they shake hands.

We are down the worn front steps and striding past the museum to the car. It is heading toward noon, and the heat is scorching. Disappointment sweeps over us like a hot wind off a garbage dump.

“Explain that to me,” I say.

We stand on opposite sides of the car. The roof is so low even I can look over it.

“They blew us off!” I go on. “First of all, the Commissario is not in Florence, he’s ducking us, and second, why did you run out of there?”

“The meeting was over,” Dennis says. “Do you want me to drive?”

“No!”

I have unlocked the car, but you can’t touch anything inside. We leave the doors open to let it air out. I have a pounding headache, and the wound in my hand is on fire. The pills are in my bag, but I don’t want to take one in front of Dennis. Three thousand miles away from Bureau headquarters, the rules are the same: Never show weakness.

“It’s how it works,” he says, as we each remove our suit jackets. “You’ve worked undercover; you’ve dealt with intrigue and deception. Well, in Italy you’ll get your master’s degree. Nothing is what you think it is, or are trained to perceive from an American analog. You think you have the point of view, but you end up a hundred and eighty degrees wrong. What people are saying is decided by a person behind them. Martini was the eyes and ears for the chief. When she opened up about the investigation, that was the give.” He snaps his fingers. “They’re on it.”

“A six-year-old could come up with a better plan.”

We get in the car.

“This morning’s exercise had nothing to do with finding Cecilia. We propose a meeting. The purpose is to get their cooperation. They agree. But it’s not the Commissario telling us what he thinks about finding Cecilia. It’s to see if he wants to sit down for a meeting. It’s high school politics.”

“We don’t have time for this. Seventy-two hours, Dennis. That’s the cutoff point, when the trail goes cold.”

“You can’t apply your normal experience over here. We just have to let it unwind. Are we going to make the train?”

“Yes, we will make the train.”

We are cruising downhill. It’s a lot easier, with all the traffic heading the other way. I want to unload the headache and everything else I’ve been keeping inside.

“Dennis, I have to tell you something. Cecilia and the Commissario had an affair. Apparently in retaliation for Nicosa’s fucking around.”

“Did she tell you this?”

“Town gossip.”

Dennis squints through the Ray-Bans. “What’s the source?”

“An expat British bartender. Does that change the picture?”

“The picture is the picture. She’s still gone.”

We pull up at the station with two minutes to spare. Dennis gets out of the car and lifts his briefcase.

“I believe the threat to you is real. Two to one the bad guys know you’re Bureau, which makes you valuable. You’d be a major chip.”

“Nicosa knows I’m Bureau.”

“He made you?” Dennis asks.

“He didn’t make me.”

“Then how did he find out?”

“Cecilia told him. They were having a fight about Giovanni, and she let it drop.”

Dennis stares at me through the aviator glasses. His entire face is red.

“Do you think the man who attacked you in the Campo might have been hired by your brother-in-law because you are FBI, and he would rather you didn’t find out what he’s up to?” Dennis says.

“I don’t know! How could I know?”

“Do you think you can continue in your present role?”

“Yes, I do. We play it openly, that’s all. I’m inside the house. I can still be valuable.”

“Turn around and drive to the abbey. Take all precautions with Nicosa. Do not leave again until I call you. Got it?”

He slams the door. The train is coming.

As soon as Dennis is gone I swallow two pain pills with water from a bottle that has been in the car an hour and is therefore hot enough to brew tea, and call Mike Donnato in Los Angeles. After one ring I remember it is three in the morning in Los Angeles, but he has already picked up.

“I’m sorry, Mike. Go back to sleep.”

“What’s up?”

“Are you awake?”

“Just tell me.”

“My sister disappeared. Vanished out of a church when she was standing right behind me. No leads, no witnesses, and I don’t believe she left of her own volition.”

“What’s her psychological state?”

“Not depressed, suicidal, or crazy. Busy. Coping, like anybody else. She’s been having problems with her husband, but her son just got out of the hospital and she adores him — she’d never just take off.”

“Why was your nephew in the hospital?”

“He was knifed and beaten over a drug deal. He denies he’s been using, but we know he’s in possession of cocaine.”

“Could Cecilia’s disappearance be related?”

“Here everything seems to be related. Scorpions in a bottle. The north is fighting an incursion from ’Ndrangheta — the Calabrian mafia — from the south. The Bureau believes my brother-in-law is lined up with the bad guys. The question is whether he would do harm to his own wife.”

“Sounds more like a kidnap for ransom.”

“But there’s been no demand for ransom. And there’s a complication: I recently learned from the legat, Dennis Rizzio, that my sister’s been paying protection money to keep her clinics open. If she somehow messed up with the clans, forget it.”

“How can I help?”

“I’m just so frustrated, Mike! The Italian police are responding, but slowly, and Rizzio goes along with their game.”

“He’s got a larger agenda.”

“Exactly.”

“Screw these people,” Mike Donnato says. “You and I can find her faster than they can, even from Los Angeles. Let’s do what we do. Start from square one. Make a timeline of her activities, find out who her enemies are — you know the drill. Anything you need, call me, and I’ll throw the resources of the Bureau behind it, officially or otherwise.”

“Thanks. I’ll keep you posted. Tell Rochelle I’m sorry to wake up the boys.”

He snorts. “Not a problem. They’re teenagers. It’s three in the morning, they’re not home, and we don’t have a clue where they are. Situation normal.”

•••

I follow Muriel’s truck route back to the abbey. At first there is nobody on the country road. It is lunchtime in the clusters of working-class apartments, and everyone is behind the beaded curtains of their open doors, eating nonna’s rice soup with bitter greens.

The turnoff is ahead when the white van shows up in the rearview mirror. Without hesitation he gets right on my tail. It could be the asshole with the dirty neck and wild hair I backed into, who has recognized the mailbox car or — and now alarms go off — it could be Chuck, the sleazoid photographer from Ohio, miffed because I didn’t respond to his come-on. For an FBI agent, it is not considered paranoid to assume, at any hour of the day or night, that someone is stalking you. The guy knows where the abbey is, having photographed it for a wedding. The last thing he hurled at me in the Campo was a string of curses. The van pulls up alongside and hangs in the opposite lane, playing chicken until another car appears coming toward us, then swerves in front of me at the last minute and takes off, middle finger wagging out the window. No good view of the driver and no license plate.

Nicosa and Giovanni are in the kitchen at either end of the counter, the air between them palpably roiling. Giovanni is in a wheelchair, leg elevated with an ice pack. His hair is unwashed, his sallow face turned toward his cell phone with an expression of deep concentration, as if he’s texting the Rosetta stone. Nicosa’s sleeves are rolled, and his shirt is half opened.

“What’s up?” I say, going for the refrigerator.

“He won’t talk.” Nicosa gestures toward his son with a glass of vodka. There’s a bottle on the counter and an attractive white dish of lemon wedges and olives. Style is the best revenge. “He sits there and doesn’t answer.”

I pour some cold wine. The pills are kicking in, and I’m feeling kindly toward my fellow man.

“Why are you giving your dad a hard time?”

“He’s giving me a hard time,” answers Giovanni.

“What about?”

Giovanni’s eyes rise toward his father. “Ask him.”

“He’s up all night on the computer,” Nicosa says. “And now he decides he’s not going back to school. All he wants is to play video games all day. He’s depressed, which is understandable—”

“He thinks I should be doing homework!” Giovanni cries incredulously.

“You’ll fall behind,” warns Nicosa.

“My father thinks everything is a race. Be first or die.”

I pour more wine. “I might have been followed here.”

Nicosa’s eyes widen. “When?”

“Just now.”

“Followed from where? By who?”

“From the police station, by a thug in a white van.”

I straddle a stool and toss back a few olives.

Nicosa frowns. “What does this mean, that you were followed?”

“Beats the hell out of me.”

“Did you call the police?”

“I told you. I was just at the police station. The Commissario refused to see us. He instructed the inspector to lie and say he was out of town. Maybe he’s the one who sent the guy in the van.”

“Are you drunk?”

“I’m taking pain pills. Knife wounds tend to sting.”

Nicosa puts down his glass. “I think it is best if you go back to the United States.”

“You’ve said that.”

“You make everything worse.”

“I’m trying my best to help. We can help each other, Nicoli, but we can’t be in denial about Cecilia.”

Giovanni looks up. “What are you saying about Mama?”

“Nothing,” says his father.

“Doesn’t he know?”

“Know what?” Giovanni asks.

“Your mother is missing,” Nicosa says at last.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It was Palio. You were sick—”

“Where is she?”

“We’re not sure what happened,” I say. “But she disappeared two days ago, during the blessing of the Palio. Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”

“No!” says Giovanni angrily. “Papa? What is going on?”

I want to confront my nephew. Right now. I want to thrust the bag of cocaine in his face and ask him what’s going on, but he is still too weak.

“Where’s Mama?” he cries.

“See what you have done?” Nicosa demands.

“I’m sorry. I promise we will find your mom.”

I take my wine and leave the kitchen. My eyes are drifting closed. By the time I’ve climbed the endless marble steps to my room, it seems to have become so late in the day that all the reptiles have come out, and the balcony is alive with snakes of sunlight and shadow, whipping across the tile and up the walls, and the only way to escape them is to quickly get inside and climb on board the bed, which is rocking like a raft in the ocean.

I wake up in the middle of the night with the heart-stopping knowledge that there is a man in my room. The shutters are open and cool air is pouring in, along with monochrome brightness that shows the shape of someone near the door. Seconds go by. I don’t move. I still don’t move. Can he see that my eyes are open? Sweat builds under my back. He has the advantage.

A silent contest of wills. He is lifeless. I am frozen. My eyes adjust to the half dark. No weapons. Attack first. Bad hand. Let him come to you. Grab his head, break his nose across your knee. I smell him before he gets close. Metal. Dirt. Heavy sweat. The sense of coarse fabric and leather. He steps from the shadows and the stench becomes awful. Excrement, earth, and decomposing bones. In the anti-light his face is stubbled and dark, his eyes colorless. The rucksack drops to the floor. It’s what we call in the Bureau a WTF moment.

“Sterling? Is that you?”

He sits heavily on the bed.

A hoarse whisper. “Hello, cupcake.”

TWENTY-TWO

Sterling unties the bandanna around his head.

“Don’t turn on the light.”

My heart skips. I don’t need light to see that the gorgeous blond hair has been shaved off, and the bare scalp is impacted with dirt. He unfastens the field jacket with trembling fingers. Dried flakes of mud that have been carried who knows how many miles, across how many time zones, scatter over the linen sheets. The smell of recent death is undeniable.

He unfolds a rain poncho, meticulously spreads it on the floor, then empties the contents of the rucksack.

“What are you doing?”

“Better wash this stuff out,” he says slowly, as if in a dream, taking off his shirt and Under Armour.

“I’ll take care of it.”

Heeding the silent message, Don’t touch me, I slip off the bed and retrieve a robe from the bathroom. He continues to face away, as if he doesn’t want me to see his body. He used to eat breakfast in the nude, not give it a thought. Has he been wounded, a ladder of sutures up his chest?

Gently I slip the robe over his shoulders. I bend down, draw up the sides of the poncho and shoulder it, maybe too fast, because suddenly he is suspicious.

“Where’re you going with that?”

“I’m going to the laundry room to wash your stuff,” I reply patiently. “It’s in the family quarters, in the main building. Are you hungry?”

“Yes, ma’am, I am hungry.”

“I’ll bring you something. There’s soap and shampoo in the shower. Is it okay if I leave?”

“Go on.”

“You’ll be okay?”

“I just said so, didn’t I?”

In the night, cold wind rakes through my hair. I carry Sterling’s combat clothes in the poncho like contraband. I would rather burn them, but they are crucial to him, to his other self. As I cross the torchlit courtyard, goose bumps rise at the thought of the silent monks who would have been at prayers in a few hours, shuffling through the dark to kneel on the unforgiving floorboards. The workings of the human mind haven’t changed over the centuries: in the perilous hours just before dawn, everything our rational minds have been telling us flies up and away to the realm of the gargoyles.

Shoving rancid woolen socks and bloodstained camos into the washer, and later, assembling a he-man sandwich out of a kilo’s worth of salami, mortadella, mozzarella, and roasted peppers on an entire loaf of bread, I try to draw the shredded realities of the present together. As relieved as I am to see him whole, I know something has happened to Sterling. I have no idea how deep it goes, or how he found me, why he came back, or how long he will stay. It could be overnight. He could have deserted and be on the run, or about to be reassigned. Putting all these unidentified conditions alongside my sister’s disappearance makes my knees go weak. I sit down on a kitchen chair, immobilized.

I suppose it is something like panic. It makes no sense to start evaluating a relationship at four in the morning, when the man has shown up out of nowhere, hostile and disoriented and not himself, but that’s where my stubborn mind keeps going. True, I had become impatient with his comings and goings, but there was something comforting, even pleasurable, in the delayed satisfaction of his return. Until tonight, his reappearances had been smooth and hearty — he had been as happy as I was to recharge with some robust sex, bittersweet chocolate cake for breakfast, the afternoon in a hotel bed, sleeping, reading newspapers, watching movies, staring idly into each other’s eyes. From the glimpse of the bones poking through his back, it looks as if he has dropped ten pounds, which is a lot when you weigh one-fifty. From the deadness in his voice, it sounds as if he’s not feeling the deprivation in his body — or very much at all.

I had a bad gut reaction when he took off the bandanna. He looked less like a warrior than a hardened killer. Security operatives are hired to protect, not fight — although it doesn’t always work that way. Some of my best friends at the Bureau are snipers, but lord knows, they don’t do it for the money. How well do I know Sterling McCord and what kind of assignments he will accept? How long and hard will I stand by? It is troubling to realize these are the same irksome questions I’ve been asking myself about Cecilia. She made a deal with the devil when she married Nicosa, and a deal with the mafias (same thing) to keep her clinics alive. Maybe she’s escaped to a safe and happy place in the arms of ’Ndrangheta. How well do I know her? What makes me qualified to save her from her own life?

When I get back to the room with the food, Sterling is clean and showered and dead to the world, lying across the bed in the bathrobe as if he’d literally just dropped. Wedging into a valley at the edge of the mattress, I try to roll him over, but he kicks out, slashing my leg with a jagged toenail. I debark to the chaise. It isn’t much of a sleep, awakening with the roosters and the light and filled with a million questions.

All of which will have to wait, because Sterling sleeps for the next sixteen hours. I dash to get his stuff out of the dryer before anyone else wakes up, and I keep the bedroom door locked. Finally, sometime around sunset, I return to find him fully dressed — and from the lavender vapor in the room, having showered again — wearing clean jeans that fit too loosely, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap, and buckling on his watch. The sandwich has evaporated. My laptop is open on the desk.

“Don’t you get Internet in this hooch?”

“Depends on the time of day.”

“It just cut out on me,” he says sullenly. “We’ve gotta go.”

“Where?”

“Meeting a buddy.”

He slips on a pair of blue Oakleys the color of the Florida gulf. We exit the room into the billowing evening.

“Are you okay? Are you done with the mission?”

“Yes to both.”

“I won’t ask a lot of questions, but I’m curious to know how you found me,” I say, as we hurry down the marble stairs.

“Word got through.”

Instead of crossing the courtyard he grabs my arm, and we go the other way, ducking underneath the staircase and around the back of the family quarters where the pine forest comes down to the stone wall. Following in his careful footsteps over the scrub, it occurs to me that maybe Sterling believes we are on reconnaissance, that he has truly lost his mind. We pick up a deer trail that comes out into an olive grove on the neighboring farm. From here it is fifty meters to the road. This must be the way he gained entry in the middle of the night.

A well-used black Fiat is waiting on the shoulder. Sterling opens the door, and we climb in.

“You’re late, you cunt,” says the driver.

“Ana, this is Chris.”

Seeing Chris is a shocker.

“I know Chris!”

Chris is the English bartender from the Walkabout Pub.

“And I know Ana!” he echoes mockingly as we take off.

“How do you know Sterling?”

“Never saw the lad before in me life,” says Chris. “He was out there on the road, trying to pick me up.”

“Fuck off.”

Chris pulls a serious face and seeks me out in the rearview mirror.

“Everything green?” he asks Sterling.

“Good to go.”

“Well then, no worries.”

“Chris is former SAS,” Sterling explains. “Now he’s also an operative for Oryx.”

I see it. The buff body. The detached observer who stays out of the limelight, placed in a job that positions him to know every English-speaker in town.

“Chris told you I was here?”

“I saw you were having troubles,” the bartender says. “The missing sister and all.”

“Thank you, sir. You could have also told me that you work with Sterling.”

“Normally we’re mum around the girlfriend — but now I discover you’re not the girlfriend, you’re FBI.”

“You’re the girlfriend,” Sterling intones, folding his arms and hunkering down under the Oakleys.

This gets a tiny smile out of Chris.

“Just think,” he says. “If an RPG hit this car right now with the three of us in it, what a total bummer for covert ops.”

“Not for Oryx. We are a hundred percent deniable.”

“The girlfriend isn’t.”

“According to the FBI,” I say, “officially, I’m on vacation.”

“Enough of that kind of talk,” Sterling mutters. “Bad juju.” We are down off the mountain and turning onto the main road to Siena.

“Anyone care to say where we’re headed?” I wonder.

“I’m going to my day job,” Chris says. “Pouring drinks for alcoholics.”

“We’re going to the pub,” Sterling interrupts. “To try to get on the damn Internet.”

“What for?”

“There’s an e-mail from Glasgow, which I couldn’t open.”

“About a job?”

“About you.”

In the back room of the Walkabout, under the crude map of Australia, Sterling’s gaunt face is lit by the glow of Chris’s laptop. He is accessing a secure site referred to as the Circuit, available only to private military contractors — a cyber version of the old soldier-for-hire magazines — where buddies are located and private military companies are rated by operatives as places to work, the way consumers rank can openers on Amazon.

No worries, as Chris would say, since nobody posts under their real name. They use handles, just like in the field. Sterling’s handle is Bullrider, but he’d kill me if I ever called him that, like the old superstition about never letting a woman board a sailing ship. Talk about bad juju.

While Sterling works the Internet, I am banished to the bar, to stare at another motorcar race on the flat-screen, interrupted by a news update describing the disappearance and suspected kidnapping of medical doctor and socialite Cecilia Nicosa, wife of the well-known coffee king. I stare with fascination at the inner and outer confluence of events: at the moment her image appeared I was making a list of people who could tell me about Cecilia’s associates and routines. This is how we do it in the big leagues: interview everyone who might have been in contact with the subject twenty-four hours before the abduction. The hospital staff. Giovanni’s teachers. The parents of Giovanni’s friends. The ladies I met at the party. The ladies she cooks with at contrada headquarters. Donnato’s advice makes sense: skirting the authorities may be the most direct route to finding her.

Sterling calls me over. I take my limonata. He is eating a chocolate bar and drinking water.

“This is something you need to know,” he says, very serious. “It comes from a solid source, a Scotsman I knew in Fallujah. He quit the private contracting business and he’s back home, on an antiterrorist unit with the Glasgow police. He gave me a heads-up through the Circuit on the investigation into the attack in South Kensington. Being an honest cop, he first asked what in hell I was doing at a multiple homicide in London. When Oryx confirmed that I had been leaving on a mission, he e-mailed this photo. It was taken just before the shooters opened fire.”

Sterling flips the computer around to display a blurry-but-discernable picture of me in front of the London restaurant, Baciare, staring at the camera and looking plenty annoyed for having been catcalled by a jerk in a Ford. You can see Sterling in the background, heading off, wearing the rucksack.

“Where did this come from?”

“The investigators got it off a cell phone belonging to one of the three men who were detained at the Glasgow airport, off an Interpol no-fly alert originating from the Met. Three Italian nationals, trying to get to Rome through Cairo.”

“I’m aware of them. The FBI legat was here yesterday. He told me they had three suspects in custody.”

“Did he say anything about the bad guys being in possession of a picture of you?”

“No. Maybe he didn’t know,” I say. The failure of different agencies to talk to each other is a given these days.

“Oh, honey. He knew.”

To prove it, Sterling highlights the list of forwards on the screen. The Glasgow police had sent the photo to Inspector Reilly at the Metropolitan Police, who forwarded it to Dennis Rizzio. Sterling peers disconsolately over the bar of light rimming the laptop.

“That honcho in Rome is holdin’ out on you. He’s playin’ you for something.”

I do not reply.

“Why do you suppose that is?”

“It’s SOP at the Bureau,” I say bitterly. “Keep the field agent in the dark. Withhold information, so the Bureau maintains total control over everybody’s actions.”

I can barely speak. Why didn’t Rizzio tell me about the photo? Or, earlier, that Cecilia was paying bribes?

“Meanwhile,” Sterling says, “here’s the puke that shot up those kids.”

Mug shots appear on the screen. Three awfully young and stupid-looking men in their twenties. The names mean nothing, but I do recognize a face: the scowling eyes, long face, heavy and ruler-straight eyebrows. He looks remarkably like the drawing made by the sketch artist in Scotland Yard. Amazing how they can do that.

“That’s one of them,” I say. “The one I saw in the Ford.”

Sterling leans back and pushes up his baseball cap.

“We’re fucked.”

“How so?”

“What you just did.” He nods toward the screen. “Identified the bad guy.”

“Why’s that?”

“Security contractors have their own networks; you have yours, the criminal clans have theirs. According to my Scots friend, this picture went out on multiple servers that feed the terrorist networks. That means your face is on all the mafia websites, which also reach into Bulgaria, Turkey — basically wherever they do business, which is all of eastern Europe and North Africa, for a start. My contact says the Met thinks the attack in London was a reprisal shooting. The target was someone in the restaurant.”

“Someone at the birthday party?”

“That’s their theory. But the point is, the bad guys have your picture. You are not only a witness who can ID them, but also I’m sure that by now they know you’re Bureau. They want you as a bargaining chip, or to take you out of the game. Which could explain the knife attack in the Campo.”

He closes the laptop, leaving us in the ubiquitous red glow of the Walkabout Pub. We go out to the bar just as the TV news bulletin announcing the disappearance of Cecilia Nicosa comes up again.

“They’ve replayed that thing five times in the past half hour,” I sigh. “Worse than a mattress commercial.”

Sterling stares at Cecilia’s picture on the flat-screen. “You look a helluva lot like her.”

Long curly hair. Flat high cheekbones. Almond eyes. She has darker skin and definitely a different style — in the TV photo she’s on a yacht, smiling and windblown, large black sunglasses on top of her head, wearing a multistrand gold choker woven with jewels, like Queen Nefertiti cruising the Nile.

“There’s a resemblance,” I admit.

“A strong resemblance.”

“If you didn’t know us.”

“I’m sorry to say this.”

I know where he’s going. It’s the look in his eyes. A lump rises in my throat.

“Say it.”

“The mafia sees the cell phone picture. This lady could identify the shooter; she’s starin’ straight at him. So they put an APB out on their network. Every punk in Italy goes looking. And some lower-level dope says, Hey, I found her, smack-dab in the middle of Siena. They watch for a while. Yep, it sure looks like the lady in the photo. The bad guys, they’re not from around here; they’re from the south; they don’t know who Cecilia Nicosa is. They think they’ve got the witness in the photo, so they nab her in the church. But they took the wrong girl.”

“I was wearing Cecilia’s clothes that day,” I say softly. “She was always trying to get me to dress better.” I wait. “What will happen when they figure out she isn’t me?”

There is no need for him to answer.

Then comes the long, slow sigh of defeat. “Most of the time,” I say, “the ‘disappeared’ are never found.”

“Bad police work.”

“No, it’s because the bodies are dissolved in lye.”

Sterling’s eyes flare briefly. “Lye?”

I nod. “Nothing left to find.”

He slides his fingers over mine for just an instant. It’s the best he can do.

TWENTY-THREE

They blindfolded Cecilia and pushed her up a staircase. Thin metal stairs, leading up from the basement. She was between the two enormous men, a gun jammed into her ribs. They were moving fast, almost carrying her between them. Briefly outside, it smelled like night and hot winds. Hurrying up another staircase. Shouts, conversations, radios, the smells of coffee and spilled beer. As they turned abruptly she was able to put out one hand and feel a rough stucco corner — then she heard locks turning, murmuring voices, and she was pulled inside an apartment with a TV turned up, the scents of oilcloth and something in the oven — phyllo dough? — and shoved inside a room. The door was locked and immediately there was pounding on the other side by shrieking, taunting children.

She took off the rag that covered her eyes. The first thing she saw was a piece of foam on the floor, two feet by six feet. Grimy balled-up sheets. Who knew who had been sleeping there? A window. She lifted the blind and saw another window of another apartment less than five feet away. The window was the sliding type, secured with a lock. She noticed she was standing on a filthy remnant of gold carpet. It curled up at the edges, revealing a concrete floor. There was a plastic basket filled with clean folded laundry, as if someone had forgotten about it. Copies of the magazine Oggi, months old.

She sat on the foam pad and took off her heels. She was still wearing the shiny green suit she’d had on at the church in Piazza Provenzano where the Palio banner had been blessed. It was now so tight and uncomfortable she wanted to rip it to shreds. She peeked at the laundry. Kids’ clothes. Male sweats.

She threw off the sheets, turned the foam pad over, and lay down. The vertebrae in her neck cracked, and she realized that her back was killing her. With the window closed, the room was stifling, like the room in El Salvador, in the outbuilding near the garden, where she sometimes hid to rest from the exhaustion of working while she was pregnant. There was no sleep. Roosters crowed and dogs barked all day long. Outside, her uncles and brothers lopped corn off the stalks with machetes. It was like an oven in that room. She felt the baby kick. She could only feel sorry for it, to be born to such a failure of a mother. Cecilia couldn’t move in that room because of the heat of the afternoon and the weight of sadness. It was during the time her own mother had exiled her to work in the garden and grind the corn for tortillas, giving her study room with its unfinished mural of Tweety Bird to a younger brother, as punishment.

Now she was a lady of elegance, a doctor. What had those years of suffering come to? She saw her death outside the door. The fat man with the gun. She would be humiliated by these men, that was a given. They would take her dignity, but what did it matter? We are all naked in death. She could accept everything else, she thought, but not that she would never see her son again. Lying down, with tears running along her temples, she forced herself to prepare, to travel slowly through the tunnel of darkness, at the end of which, in a bright mist, was Giovanni.

The lock slid open and a woman entered. The woman was ordinary. Middle-aged and silent. She had a mass of black hair and wore a cheap print dress. She brought a small bowl of garbanzo beans in olive oil and a piece of bread. She didn’t look at Cecilia but picked up the laundry basket and left. Cecilia knew better than to try to talk to her. Women can kill you, too.

TWENTY-FOUR

Exuberant shouts are coming from the courtyard — sounds I’ve never heard in the abbey before. Sterling had woken early, leaving the sweet-pea bed with quick and economical movements, so as not to wake me. He told me he’s been dreaming about airplanes falling out of the sky, and I’m afraid that’s what got him up — although maybe it was also to avoid the possibility of sex. He has been uncharacteristically indifferent. “I’m kinda all wore out,” he said. Alone, the former monk’s room seems even starker than before, somehow even threatening. Without the safe harbor of his warm, accepting body, I feel like I’m the one falling through space.

The morning sun lies in curtains across the inner space of the compound, warming the old stone. The electric torches are still burning, pale as the new day. Looking down from the second-story loggia, I see Sterling and Nicosa playing soccer, grunting and hooting. The taut leather ball sails off their feet with hard percussive pops. Giovanni, still on crutches, coaches from the sidelines. The sun plays golden notes in his dark curly hair, but his features are drawn.

Mom is gone, and the boys are out to play. Somehow they found each other this morning — Sterling, the uninvited guest, lean and buff, wearing camouflage shorts and a black T-shirt with a dragon, and Nicosa, the host, in pajama bottoms and an undershirt. He is unshaven with unkempt hair, throwing sweat, not moving as fluidly as when he played with the flag, but with red-faced determination to stay in the game.

Sterling and Nicosa go at it with competitive abandon. Nicosa has superior control, is good at disguising his moves, but Sterling stays on him, stealing the ball with a sharp inside curve. It rolls toward Giovanni, who gives a feeble swipe with a crutch. His shirt rides up, exposing a pale sunken belly and sharp hip bones.

“Be careful,” I murmur to myself.

Giovanni shouts at his father, “Vai così!”—Go this way! — but Sterling swings forward with a powerful strike squarely through the center of the ball and makes a goal between two potted palm trees. It’s a good shot, and everyone high-fives and cheers.

“È uno spettacolo!”

I clap also, yelling, “Bravi!”

The result is that while the two men tussle over the next point, Giovanni’s attention is drawn to the second floor, where I am standing; he looks up at the same moment his father boots the ball. It hits the boy in the chest, the crutches fly, and he collapses.

I run down the marble steps. Giovanni is lying on his back, gasping for air. Nicosa and Sterling squat beside him, talking rapidly and at cross-purposes in each other’s language.

“Posso aiutare!” says Sterling. “Sono addestrato come un paramedico.”

“My boy … he just had surgery, and he has a bad heart!”

I assure Nicosa we know what we’re doing, and he steps back as I take the boy’s pulse while Sterling checks the airways. We lift his shirt, inspect the surgical scars. Intact. No visible contusions from the soccer ball. A nod between us says, All clear. We count to three and gently roll my nephew onto his side. Soon his breathing returns to normal.

Nicosa has been watching with hands on hips, like the boss at a construction site. He smells of musty bedclothes and alcohol.

“How is he?”

“Had the wind knocked out of him is all,” says Sterling. “Like falling out of a tree, right, son?”

“He’s done that, too. Sono così spiacente, mio figlio,” he says, repentance in his voice.

“È giusto, Babbo,” Giovanni replies as we help him to his feet.

Nicosa hands his son a rucksack that has been lying in the grass, then slowly walks back into the abbey with his head down.

“Tu sarai giusto; giusto riposa il minuto,” Sterling tells Giovanni.

“I’m okay,” Giovanni assures him. “Your Italian is very good.”

“The army sent me to language school.”

“Are those real army shorts?”

“Nah. They look cool, but they’re not that cool. See this?” He pops a pocket in the waistband. “Yuppie iPod holder.”

“Were you in Special Ops?” Giovanni asks, carefully pronouncing the words. “Is that why you learned Italian?”

“Why not learn something on the government’s dime?” Sterling says genially. “I was just a ranch hand before,” he adds, leaving out a lifelong career in Delta Force.

“He’s a real cowboy,” I point out. “Can’t you tell by those bowed legs?”

Giovanni obediently looks at Sterling’s legs. “Do you have guns?”

“Several.”

“Is it true that everyone in America owns a gun?”

Sterling smiles easily. “Lots of people do have guns. Just like everyone in Italy grows olives; is that true?”

“Around here, yes.”

“Where can we get some really fine olives?”

“Anywhere.”

“I mean, not a store, but where they grow the fruit and cure it. We raise olives in Texas, just like you. My dad’s a rancher, but he’s got a good-sized olive grove.”

“You never told me that,” I say.

Sterling raises his eyebrows, mocking my surprise. “You never had a need to know.”

“Oh, you can see our friend,” Giovanni offers. “His name is Aleandro; he owns the farm next door. That’s where we get our olive oil.”

Honking the horn, a kid driving a small car like Giovanni’s pulls into the driveway.

“Are you sure you’re well enough to go to school?”

“I would rather be in school than here,” he replies bitterly.

Slowly, he makes it to the car, and it is amazing how his manner changes the moment he comes within range of his friend. Suddenly he’s a different person, all jokes and smiles, clownishly climbing inside, despite the weight of the pack pulling him backward, and the crutches awkwardly held in one hand.

“Giovanni,” I call, “you’re not ready.”

“You’re not my mother,” he says sharply.

“If your mother were here, she would say you need to rest.”

“You don’t understand. My father is crazy, and my mother ran away.”

“Is that what she did? She ran away?”

“Yes, of course, to get away from him. So why should I care what she thinks?”

They take off, spraying gravel.

Sterling is waiting alone in the courtyard.

“Giovanni has no idea what’s going on with his mother,” I tell him.

“Maybe it’s better that way,” he says as we head toward the front door. “Does Nicosa always look so wasted?”

“No, usually he’s the king of cool.”

“He still expects to get Cecilia back?”

“He believes he’ll get a ransom call, and he’s waiting. Just waiting.”

“When’re you gonna tell him the truth?”

“Which is?”

“If she was taken by the mob, they’ve most likely already killed her.”

I let that one go by, like a wasp hanging in the air. If you don’t move, it won’t sting you.

“We have no proof one way or another. We don’t have a big enough picture.”

“What are we missing?” Sterling asks, just to humor me.

“Here’s how I see it: there are three separate strands, one for each member of this messed-up family. The FBI believes Nicosa has ties to the mafias because he was sleeping with one of their players, who has disappeared and is believed to be dead. Mom pays bribes to the clans in order to keep her clinics open. And the son is caught receiving cocaine from a British expat who has since left the country. None of them has the slightest clue about what the others are up to — what makes them tick, or where they go at night.”

“The part that braids it all together is the boy,” Sterling muses. “Let’s see what comes loose when we pull that thread.”

We find Nicosa in the kitchen, pouring a long shot of grappa into a short cup of espresso.

“Forgive me,” he says. “I am an idiot.”

“For what happened out there? It was an accident,” Sterling tells him. “Could’ve been me, kicked that ball.”

“It is unbearable to hurt your own child.”

Nicosa’s mouth is set in self-reproach. On the table is the morning paper from Rome. The photo of Cecilia on the yacht is on the front page with the headline, IL MISTERO DI PERSONA MONDANA MANCANTE IN SIENA!

“What does that mean?”

“ ‘Mystery of missing socialite in Siena,’ ” Nicosa says, as if resigned to the media onslaught that has only begun.

I squeeze his arm in sympathy.

Sterling scans the story, translating as he goes: “ ‘People are speculating about what happened to Dr. Cecilia Nicosa, wife of the well-known coffee entrepreneur. Rumors are that Dr. Nicosa has disappeared, like Signore Nicosa’s mistress, Lucia Vincenzo, a mafia associate whose body was never found … People are afraid … Nobody feels safe … If Dr. Nicosa has been kidnapped, it will be a daring assault on the upper class—’ ”

“Enough,” says Nicosa. “I’ve read it.”

Sterling pushes the paper aside. “The family should issue a statement. Put a lid on information getting out.”

“I’ll see to it,” Nicosa says.

He brews us two espressos, and we gather at the counter, hacking off pieces of yesterday’s bread, spreading them with honey and slices of pecorino cheese.

“What do you do?” he asks Sterling, finally. “Are you also FBI?”

Sterling picks a pear from a ceramic bowl and quarters it with the blade of his Leatherman tool.

“I work for a security company called Oryx. I’m a private military contractor, Mr. Nicosa.”

Nicosa’s eyes refocus. Soldiering, the military hierarchy, is something he understands.

“I hired a company like yours in El Salvador to protect our coffee plantations.”

“Did they do the job?”

“Yes, they did.”

“Good.” Sterling offers a crisp wedge of pear.

“Why are you here?” Nicosa asks.

“We completed the mission. I knew Ana was in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d stop by.”

Nicosa eyes us back and forth, sniffing out the connection.

“Do you know what Ana does?”

“Yes, sir, I do. We’ve worked together before.”

“Well, she lied about it to me. My sister-in-law, she sits at my table and tells me with a smile that she sells home alarms.”

“I notice you still don’t have one,” I say pleasantly.

Sterling sighs. “That’s the way they do it in the Bureau. You’ll never meet such lying bastards.”

“Why did you hide it from me?” Nicosa asks.

“Cecilia begged me not to tell you.”

He is now pouring straight grappa. “Cecilia told you to lie? I find that hard to believe.”

“She said you were ‘under the thumb’ of the mafias,” I reply matter-of-factly. “She thought I could help you and the family to find a way out.”

“I don’t know where she got that idea.” Nicosa waves dismissively.

“Maybe because the Puppet was in your son’s room. Was he there to threaten you?”

“Not at all!”

My cover may be blown, but I’m still on assignment. Sterling senses I’m about to push it, and he steers us back to the line of inquiry most likely to engage Nicosa’s cooperation: his son.

“Sir, it’s Giovanni we’re most worried about. With all due respect, I just got here, but anyone can see there’re problems. Ana and I worked a case where young people came under bad influences, just like your son. I understand that you want to concentrate on your wife’s situation, so why not let us help untangle this mess with the boy? What do you know about his relationship with the woman who passed him cocaine?”

Nicosa shrugs with his eyebrows, his shoulders, his whole body.

“She’s just a local oddball. I don’t know what’s in Giovanni’s head.”

I ask if he knew how much the boy had been using at the time he was found passed out in the shower.

“He was buying painkillers from some little piece of trash who stole them from his grandparents.”

“Giovanni told you that?”

“Of course not. We hired a private investigator. The same private investigator my wife used when she was looking for you. Pain pills were nothing compared to what Giovanni was into. Our son was hanging out with heroin addicts. Nice kids. University students. The detective said it was a matter of days — hours — before we lost him forever. We got him away from his ‘friends,’ the hardest thing we’ve ever had to do. The rehab people came and took our boy in the middle of the night. There was no other way he would go. We had to tell everyone he was trying out another school. Cecilia was the strong one. She sees addicts every day; she knows what has to be done. I thought, you know, lock him in his room. Beat the crap out of him, like my father would have done to me. I didn’t know what we were up against. But three months later, they brought him back to us, and so far he’s been clean. Now we will always walk on eggshells. It’s my fault. You don’t have to say it.”

“I wasn’t going to say that, because it isn’t true. It’s the mafias who control your lives,” I tell him.

Nicosa shakes his head sadly. Hollow-eyed, he says, “The trouble is inside of us,” and bangs his own heart.

“Be fair,” Sterling advises. “You’re up against a well-armed criminal organization. You live in a castle, but you’re in the middle of a ground war.”

“What you keep calling a kidnap — it’s all for show, just a game,” Nicosa interrupts impatiently. “They ask for ransom, you pay, they give her back. It’s like a bank robbery. No one gets hurt.”

This has been Nicosa’s stance all along. Sterling remains silent, but his face conveys the message: Let him have his little fantasy.

Nicosa sees this, and it incites him to a fury.

“If I believed otherwise for one minute, I would be on the phone right now to the prime minister of Italy. You don’t think so?”

“I don’t doubt you, sir,” Sterling assures him.

“One phone call to Rome and the military police would take over my wife’s disappearance. But I agree to play their game, because unlike you, I have patience, and I do not like war.”

“I didn’t say I like it,” Sterling says quietly.

“I am sending the clans a message. We are businessmen; we work it out.” Nicosa wipes his forehead, adding, “The president of a company, who kicks a ball like an idiot and almost kills his son.”

His voice cracks and his eyes redden. Mine fill up just watching.

“Let us talk to the private investigator who followed Giovanni,” I suggest. “He can help us understand some things.”

“You can’t. The man is dead.”

“How did he die?”

“I believe it was a stroke. He had a terrible headache, his wife took him to the hospital, and he didn’t come out. He never finished the report,” Nicosa says. “I have what he left on the computer in my office. I’ll get it.”

He seems relieved to have an excuse to leave. As the day breaks open, the kitchen is feeling more and more like a slow-motion hydrogen explosion. Sterling places both elbows on the table and digs his knuckles into his bare scalp.

“Wishing you were back in the field?”

“Not in that field, ma’am, no way. Texas. I’m wishing I was back in Texas, where at least they flat-out shoot you and put you out of your misery.”

I laugh. “They’re pretty good at that in Italy.”

“Man, these folks are into the pain. Christ on a stick! All this bitchin’ and moanin’, until you can’t see straight. He doesn’t like war? Boo-hoo for him. I hate to tell him, but he’s walking a freakin’ minefield.” Sterling stands up from the table with disgust. “First day of deployment, we tell the newbies, ‘If you plan on coming home alive, remember this — there’s a difference between a hard-ass and a dumb ass.’ He truly believes he’s the Man of Steel, the only one who can negotiate with the mafias.”

“I believe Nicosa loves his son, and he’s desperate to get Cecilia back. He needs to be contained, that’s all.”

Sterling shakes his head. “I’ll say this, I’d hate for the guy to take a bullet the size of his ego.”

TWENTY-FIVE

The dead investigator was at least a good dead investigator. His report included phone records, photographs, lists of my nephew’s teachers, friends, and relations living in Siena. Family members alone took up two single-spaced pages. It could be days before we deciphered who was who, and we had no time for that. The surveillance section covered the boy’s activities during ten days over two weeks in January of last year, detailing to the minute when he left the abbey for school and returned through the gates at night.

We looked for patterns. Soccer, practicing the flag for Palio, chilling at the Fontebranda fountain in Oca territory — that was the norm. Then we looked for the exceptions, always more interesting. One jumped out at us: a cluster of encounters with a young Italian woman named Zabrina Tursi. Her photo showed a goth, raven-haired, undernourished university student who worked part-time as a waitress. A copy of a police report showed one arrest for the sale of marijuana, but she was placed on probation because she was a minor at the time.

The dead investigator hired by Giovanni’s parents had discovered his relationship with Zabrina after following him and two male friends to the wine bar where she worked, situated in the Medici fortress near the bus station on the outskirts of town. He observed the subject first being served by Zabrina Tursi and then engaging her in conversation on the patio after the place closed. Two nights later, the young woman appeared at the fountain in Oca territory and made contact with Giovanni. There is a photo of them with other students at a café in the square. At 1:05 a.m., Zabrina and Giovanni left the café and went to her residence, a ten-minute drive outside the walls, where he stayed until 3:45 a.m. Then he returned to the abbey.

The file details Giovanni visiting Zabrina’s residence five times. It bothered me until I realized the association — five was also the number of assignations the FBI recorded between Nicosa and Lucia Vincenzo, La Leonessa, the disappeared drug dealer. Numerology aside, I wondered if Giovanni was subconsciously imitating his father’s public transgressions by flaunting it with a woman who was also dangerous to his health.

Sterling and I drive to Zabrina’s address. It is a decent apartment building in a quiet neighborhood shaded by oak trees. Stacks of terraces with hanging laundry and potted plants face the west. The entrance is down a hill, past the usual fleet of parked motorbikes. Inside the building we get no farther than the vestibule. You have to be buzzed in. “Tursi” is listed on a mailbox with “Kosta” and “Lawrence,” but there is no answer to our ring. The vestibule smells of cigarette smoke and frying meatballs.

Sterling says, “Let’s go.”

“We should wait for the girl.”

“Best bet is to come back later, when she’s likely to be home.”

“You have another idea?”

“I would like to see how his neighbors make that olive oil Giovanni was talking about,” Sterling says.

“Why?”

“Brings me back to summers at home. When I was a kid, my job was snake wrangler. You want to cut the bottom branches of the olive trees to keep the ground clear of rattlesnakes, but they’re crafty. My all-time record was shooting six in one week. Now my folks give ranch tours to tourists, but when we first started planting, it was us, some clay hills, and a couple of Mexicans. Good times. I’m curious how they do it in the old country.”

It’s the blazing hot middle of the day, and most people will be going nowhere, hunkered down behind the shutters. The last place I want to be is sitting in the mailbox car.

“Okay.”

I agree to give it up for an hour. Climbing the hill from Zabrina’s apartment house back to the car, I slip my arm around Sterling’s waist, relieved that he’s able to connect to something besides bad wars and bad dreams.

The olive farm is just past the abbey, beyond a grape arbor and some chicken coops. The house, a two-story stucco building with a red tile roof, would not be out of place in a Los Angeles subdivision, except it is not likely you would find the wife eviscerating chickens, which is what Antonella Calabrese is doing when we show up. She and her husband do not speak English, but her reaction to uninvited guests is nothing but warmth.

She is over sixty, with dry reddish hair and a pleasant face filmed with sweat from hard work in the small alcove in the back of the house. Although scraping entrails into a bucket, she displays that Italian feminine self-respect by wearing pearl stud earrings, a black camisole that bares her arms underneath an apron, and a circular diamond pendant. Three chickens — supermarket clean — are folded up in a roasting pan with three full-feathered bodies to go. “Why would anybody,” she asks Sterling in Italian, “cook just one chicken at a time?”

Not wanting to leave the task unattended (flies are gathering), she calls for Aleandro and leads us to the basement, where he is plastering a wall. Her husband is hearty and weathered-looking, with dark skin and strong forearms, wearing a blue checked shirt splattered with white. His gray eyebrows peak like a horned owl’s. He’s got a broad fleshy nose and a wide smile. Side by side, he and Antonella look like brother and sister. Both radiate the grounded, earthbound simplicity we city folks associate with outdoor life.

But it wasn’t always so. Aleandro, we discover, is retired from a long career as an electrical inspector for a government agency, which explains the pleasant home and sense of tranquillity. He is done with it. He has always kept chickens and rabbits, always had olive trees, an organic vegetable garden and grapes, but now, he is proud to say, he and his wife are self-sustaining.

Their olive operation may not be as grand as what Sterling had in mind — it consists of a single windowless basement room, away from light and heat, with sacks full of chemical pellets, curing barrels, and a stainless-steel tank in which they store the oil, which is pressed at a community mill. All of this is fascinating — especially the discussion in Italian of how the Spaniards brought olives to Texas — and I am more than ready to leave, but somehow, by mental telepathy, before she went to finish the chickens, Aleandro and Antonella have agreed that we are not going anywhere until we’ve had something to eat.

We are shepherded upstairs and seated at a heavy dining room table with a white lace runner. Behind us is a dark wood cupboard jammed with glassware. Antonella comes through the brick archway of the kitchen, carrying a welcome carafe of water. The kitchen has a vaulted wooden ceiling that mocks older Tuscan architecture. I am antsy and uncomfortable. They are talking a blue streak that I can’t understand, and I am wondering if this will turn into a tedious lunch. I just want to get back to Zabrina, hoping she can shed light on Giovanni and his dealings, if she has anything to say that might factor into Nicosa’s alleged drug connection and Cecilia’s abduction.

No, it isn’t lunch. Antonella returns with the coffee and then bread and preserves made with fruit from their orchard — the most full-bodied, jewel-like jelly I have ever tasted. Unknown to me, the conversation around the dining room table has taken a much darker turn than Spanish olives. Sterling has been asking questions, that much I can tell. After a point, Aleandro’s powerful hand curls into a heavy fist. His wife’s eyes are downcast. They can only be talking about the mafias.

When we are shown to the door, we are given a gift — a recycled Sprite bottle containing their precious homemade olive oil, emerald as a mossy stream. Sterling and Aleandro shake hands and then embrace with such force it almost makes me cry. Something powerful has taken place between them.

When we are back on the road and walking toward the abbey, Sterling is hyper. He tells me that the Calabreses heard through town gossip that Cecilia is missing.

“He gave us a lead where she might be. First and foremost, you don’t have to come. I can handle it solo, spare you the upset.”

“Whatever in hell it is you’re talking about, I’m coming.”

Olives, as Sterling well knows, are cured in sodium hydroxide. It reduces the bitterness, and if you soak them long enough, it will turn green olives black. He had a hunch they might be doing it the same way in Italy, and he was right. Aleandro has the pellets in his basement; he knows all about the chemical and who supplies it and where it’s stored.

Another name for sodium hydroxide is lye.

At Sterling’s empathetic prodding, Aleandro had disclosed that he, too, has a relative who is one of the “disappeared”—an uncle who also worked as an electrical inspector for the government. The uncle submitted a poor report on a water plant and did not come home from work one night. The police did nothing. Aleandro’s family did nothing. They don’t speak of it; five years later, they are still afraid.

All over the world, from Mexico to Albania, criminal networks dispose of victims using lye. It is a caustic metallic base used in manufacturing all kinds of corrosive products, like paint strippers. When pure pellets of sodium hydroxide are combined with water and heat, a reaction occurs that chews up the chemical bonds that normally keep tissues intact. The corpse dissolves into a pinkish liquid, occasionally leaving bone husks that are as fragile as cicada shells.

Aleandro had given Sterling directions to his own supplier of fertilizer and chemicals, including industrial lye. The company is called Spectra and is headquartered in Milan, but the local distributor operates out of a town nearby called Monte San Stefano.