White Shotgun

TWENTY-EIGHT

Zabrina Tursi did the math. They had to get to Calabria before dark. The word was out; people would already be showing up. They had to leave right now.

Her current boyfriend, Yuri Kosta, was in the shower. There was no tub in the bathroom, just a showerhead and a drain. The tiny curtain was useless. The tile floor would flood, but nobody used the sponge mop Zabrina had stolen from the janitor to push the dirty water into the drain. She had obsessed about confronting her two roommates, but in the end she just gave up. The place smelled like a sewer. The toilet and sink were always damp with mildew. If you left something in there, like a towel, it would never dry. That’s why they had clothes racks on the balcony, next to the rosemary plants, which were a gift from someone’s deluded parents.

It was a nice building in a calm neighborhood outside the walls, as Sterling and I had discovered that blazing day when we attempted to find her, so nice that you had to be buzzed in. It rented monthly, mostly to students at the Università di Siena, but also to musicians who came for the jazz festival and even a few professors. It was a middle-class paradise. They had two bedrooms and only one other roommate, a thirty-two-year-old American named Simon Lawrence, who came from a wealthy family in Chicago and claimed to be studying to become the conductor of a symphony orchestra. He would walk around singing scores. Instead of a newspaper, he read music, and he was good on the guitar. They were all addicts. The place was dirty and the furniture dilapidated, but you would not have guessed it was a shooting gallery, where partygoers and white-collar professionals showed up for ten-euro hits, unless you caught sight, in the one-couch living room, of the odd metal cap containing remnants of blood, cocaine, and heroin.

The kitchen, though, was always tidy. If they got it together to prepare a meal, it would be the traditional pasta, secondi, and dessert, even though someone had to wash their meager collection of melamine dishes between each course, and they’d be crawling over each other in the hot, narrow space. The pale green tile wall was decorated with a calendar of naked women. Simon would tune the television on top of the refrigerator to the BBC. The sliding door to the balcony was an invitation to step outside and enjoy a smoke. The kitchen was the only sane room in the house.

Zabrina wiped the oilcloth on the kitchen table and checked the clock again. It was three minutes later. The shower was still going — just like their money, down the drain. They were two months behind on the rent and mooching off Simon’s personal food cabinet. He was a nice guy, but he had a habit to support, and living in paradise isn’t free. They were going to get kicked out, she knew it, but she couldn’t deal with that right now. Right now they were broke and crashing.

Zabrina went into their bedroom, sat on the mattress on the floor, and fished a lipstick mirror from her bag. She was twenty, from Calabria — the child of an upholsterer and a seamstress — with a pug nose, light freckles, and dynamic black eyebrows. She’d come to Siena to get as far away as possible from the crime-ridden slums, but there was a weak place inside her that couldn’t support the weight of freedom. She was a part-time student and waited tables at the Tuscan wine bar inside the fifteenth-century Medici fortress on the edge of town. She had chopped two-inch bangs across her forehead and put red streaks in her hair because, she said, her alter ego was the devil.

The girl lay on her stomach on the mattress and found her face in the tiny mirror, angling it to look at the good parts: the full lips and great eyebrows. With a little makeup, she could pass. The symptoms didn’t show. Her skin wasn’t even yellow. A couple of Valium would take care of the headache and the fiery abdominal pain until they got there.

Her cousin, Fat Pasquale, who ran things back home in Calabria, didn’t like unhealthy pòrci—pigs. Human guinea pigs, that’s what they called the addicts who showed up for free hits when raw powder came in and they were testing the cut. Not everybody was desperate enough to spring for the Russian roulette of trying out a new mix. Only the most extreme cases showed up, often from far distances. By the time they got there, they’d be so strung out all they could do was lie on the floor. Then the guy with the hands would make Fat Pasquale find a vein in their feet and do it, which could be dangerous. Even the big shot mafiosi were afraid of AIDS. You could accidently prick your finger and be dead. Also, pòrci didn’t make great subjects if they were sick to begin with. The cut had to be good enough to beat the competition, but not so strong that it killed the buyer.

Yuri came into the bedroom — dark-skinned, emaciated, with dreadlocks caught up in a rubber band. He slipped on jeans and sat on the mattress beside Zabrina and lit a cigarette. They spoke in Italian although Yuri was half African, half Albanian, and had only been in Italy a year.

“I received a text from Fat Pasquale,” Zabrina said. “He’ll hook us up if we can get to Calabria tonight.”

“Sto da favola!” said Yuri. “How? We don’t have money.”

Zabrina, lying prone, took a hit off the cigarette and demurely crossed her ankles in the air.

“Simon will lend us some for gas.”

“He will want to go, too.”

“Is he here?”

“No.”

“Then too bad for him.”

“If we take his money, he should get some.”

“He’s not here!” Zabrina yelled. “I’m not waiting for that bitch.”

Yuri nodded, said, “Yeah, okay,” and left the room.

Now that she had convinced him to go, Zabrina felt dragged-down and tired. She always came up with ideas — like the sponge mop in the bathroom — but as soon as she thought of something good, it seemed to disappear and ceased to matter. She felt scooped out and empty. That feeling that nobody cared. Calabria was far away. She blinked at her cell phone. It was eight minutes later than when she had checked the kitchen clock. Yuri came back with the keys and all the cash he could find in Simon’s stash in the back of a drawer.

Zabrina hauled herself up and by sheer force of will against an unfathomable weight of sadness, buckled on the sandals with the silver death heads. You could only think six hours ahead.

TWENTY-NINE

Later that afternoon, after the Commissario has left the abbey, Chris’s black Fiat pulls up outside the gates, covered with dust from the surveillance of Marcello Falassi, aka Il Capocuòco, the Chef. Sterling, looking even thinner and scruffier with a day’s growth of beard, gets out and crosses the courtyard, boot heels chipping at the gravel. I am still wearing my sister’s linen skirt. The sensuous feel of it against my bare legs as I walk toward him makes me hope this unexpected shot of femininity will strike up the old spark in his eyes. He gives me an appreciative hug.

“How’d it go? What happened to Falassi?”

“Can’t tell you.”

“What do you mean, you can’t tell me?”

“The Italian police got ahold of him. We were in position in the hide site, back up in the woods off the turnoff. At first light an unmarked car shows up, two plainclothes detectives get out. They busted through the iron fence and went on down the road that leads to the campsite. We figured our job was done. They were onto our man.”

“They got there fast. I’m impressed. It was one in the morning by the time I spoke to the FBI legat in Rome. He must have gotten right to the Commissario. How did they get through the fence?”

“Bolt cutters.”

I nod approvingly. “They came prepared. Did they take Falassi into custody?”

“Must have, because there’s only one way in and one way out.”

“You didn’t stay to make sure? You didn’t wait until you saw them bring him out in handcuffs and put him in the car?”

“Why risk getting made? By then it was full daylight.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“No. No, ma’am.” He takes my hand and kneads my knuckles, an overly bright expression in his eyes. “What’s wrong?”

“You were supposed to stake out the witness.”

“Babe, we did. We were there all night. You said we’d have to turn the evidence over to the Italian cops eventually. They were on it, so we took the opportunity to jack it out of there.”

I relent. “Okay.” My fingers yield in his. “Well, we had a hell of a morning.” I detail the confrontation between Nicosa and the Commissario. “He was about to arrest Nicosa for murder right there.”

“On what evidence?”

“Blood rivalry?”

“That ain’t gonna fly.”

“I guess the police are counting on what they find,” I say. “In the vat.”

My voice falters at the memory, and then it is as if I am right back on the platform, staring down at the unbearable pink human stew. Sterling feels it and his grip tightens. He pulls me toward his chest, a disquieting tremble in his arms. We cling together, my silent tears staining his shirt, but somehow it isn’t me he’s holding on to; his face is turned away, as if he’s listening to something I can’t hear.

“God have mercy,” he whispers.

We step apart. I brush at my eyes. “Until proven otherwise, we have to keep going. We need to talk to that girl, Zabrina. See what she knows about Giovanni’s drug contacts.”

“Screw that,” Sterling says. “It’s not about Zabrina, it’s the fact that nobody in your family knows what the other one’s up to. Time to clue them in.”

“Meaning what?”

“Where is Giovanni?”

“In church with his dad.” I indicate the chapel on the property.

“Perfect.”

I hurry after him. “Shouldn’t we wait until he’s stronger?”

“If he can go to school with his friends, he can answer a goddamn question.”

The doors to the small abbey church are open. Peering inside is like looking at the world through a candle flame. The interior is suffused with a sensuous orange glow, warming the walls of pockmarked stone, laying a gloss over a floor of centuries-old aqua tile. Above the altar there is nothing but a simple wooden crucifix. Cecilia’s touch is evident: the pews have been replaced by chairs slipcovered in peach damask and tied in back with bows, like dresses on rows of obedient churchwomen.

When we step inside, Nicosa and Giovanni are receiving communion from the Oca priest with the wire-rimmed glasses and dark hair. Otherwise the small space is empty. Afterward, the priest gathers father and son together and speaks earnestly. I wait uncomfortably, listening to the murmur of their voices, looking around and trying to spot the hand of the dead saint, but they must have it under lock and key. Growing up in Long Beach, California, I lived not far from a Catholic school, and once my friend Arlene and I dared to rap the golden knocker on the looming black-painted convent door. A nun opened it, with a stale white face and swirling batlike robes. Floating in the darkness high above was a round stained-glass window like the eye of God. Now, as then, I have the urge to flee. I tug at Sterling’s belt, and we remove ourselves to a bench outside.

They emerge all together, Giovanni still leaning on a crutch, texting on his cell phone even before they are through the door. When everyone’s hands have been solemnly shaken and the priest has gone, we come forward.

Nicosa eyes us warily. By now he knows we are not usually the bearers of good news.

I try to soften it. “Was it good to talk to the priest?”

“Where else can we turn? People are whispering about the awful thing in the woods. Giovanni keeps getting text messages and calls. Is that your mom in there? Disgusting.”

Giovanni jerks his head away as Nicosa touches the boy on the chin.

“There is evil, but I want him to know there is also grace. There is hope. What did you think of what Padre Filippo said?”

Giovanni shrugs, and goes back to the screen.

“What did the Padre talk about?” Sterling asks.

Nicosa swipes at the cell phone. “Giovanni! Are you listening? Forget those people; they’re only trying to make you feel bad.”

“No, they’re not. They’re trying to help, and yes, I am listening.”

“Answer him. What did Padre Filippo say?”

Giovanni recites in mocking singsong: “He talks about the Gospel of Luke. He tells us the parable of the shepherd who lost his sheep — as if I haven’t heard it a million times — that the shepherd will go looking for ‘the one’ even if he has to leave ‘the ninety-nine.’ ”

“What was his point?” Nicosa prods impatiently.

“That God will look for us if we’re lost. Like right now, Mama is lost, but God will find her. And we are supposed to pray the rosary. It makes no sense.”

Nicosa rolls his eyes.

The phone in the house is ringing. Giovanni volunteers to answer, but Nicosa tells him to let it go. He is sick of gossipy contrada members and newspaper reporters begging for news of the kidnapping.

Sterling says, “Giovanni, we have to talk.”

“I can’t,” says the boy. “I am meeting my friends.”

The ringing inside the house stops.

“It’s important.”

“Your friends can wait. What is it?” asks Nicosa.

“There’s a grocery bag in Cecilia’s trunk,” I say. “Would you mind getting it?”

Nicosa looks at Sterling and me, and there is acceptance in his eyes. We have peered into the simmering, pink pit of hell and now have reached the Day of Reckoning, the end of lies. He walks back toward her car as we three sit on a bench beneath the pines in an eddy of coolness and shade, watching Nicosa go to the green Alfa Romeo, disable the alarm, and open the trunk.

“What’s he doing with my mother’s car?” Giovanni asks.

I don’t answer. Let him worry. Nicosa returns with the half-wrapped painting and the small bag of cocaine inside the grocery sack. He squeezes onto the bench and asks his son what he knows about this.

“What is it?”

“A painting by your English friend, Muriel Barrett. She left it for you at the Walkabout Pub.”

Giovanni’s eyes shift toward the canvas and away. “She did? Why?”

Nicosa looks at me. “You tell him.”

“She had to make an emergency trip to London,” I say flatly.

“This was inside the painting.” Nicosa shows him the bag of cocaine.

The boy does not respond.

“What about it, kid?” Sterling asks.

“Non lo so.”

“She left it for you.”

“It has nothing to do with me. I don’t know where that came from.”

“I was there when Muriel Barrett gave it to the bartender,” I say evenly. “She was all dressed up on her way to London. She gets out of the taxi and comes into the pub carrying this package. She makes a point of it, of delivering this before she leaves the country. Do you know what I’m saying? She says to Chris, ‘It’s a painting for Giovanni.’ I say I’ll give it to you. She’s not happy, but the cab is waiting.”

“She left you holding a bag of shit,” Sterling tells the boy. “Any guesses why?”

Giovanni shrugs — an unconscious, on-the-spot admission of guilt.

“Here’s what I think,” Sterling says. “You, your mom, your dad — you don’t know it, but you’re all fighting the same enemy. Everything goes back to the mafias. That’s why Ana and I think this”—he shakes the bag—“connects to why your mom disappeared.”

Giovanni is jolted awake, cheeks red as a four-year-old’s. “Where is Mama? What happened to her?”

“We can find your mom, if you tell us the truth.”

“I thought you didn’t know where she is.”

“We have an idea. We need your help. Do you want to find your mom?”

“Okay. It’s mine,” the boy admits. “The shit is mine.”

Nicosa runs his fingers over his eyes, picks up the tears that have gathered there, and seems to rub them into his face.

“Thank you,” he says hoarsely. “Now you kill me. You put the nail right here.”

Giovanni ignores the display. “You should talk. You are the biggest hypocrite,” he murmurs. “Why should I tell the truth when all you do is lie?”

“I am the liar?” Nicosa cries. “You are the one we paid for to go to a psychiatrist and a drug counselor, who said you were clean.”

“I don’t use drugs, but nobody believes me,” Giovanni says. “So I stopped trying to explain.”

“We’re listening,” I say patiently. “This is your chance. Why did Muriel hide cocaine meant for you in a painting?”

“She was holding it for me.”

“So you are selling?” Nicosa says.

“No, Papa. I do not sell; I do not use. I am a bank. I am a businessman, like you.”

Nicosa growls, “Is that right?”

Sterling puts his hand out. “Let him speak.”

“Everybody uses. It’s not even about getting high anymore, it’s just to do your stupid boring job and get through the day. The whole world is making money selling drugs, so why not Muriel, and other old people living on a pension?”

“Mama mia, you take their pension?”

“I make a smart investment for them. If you give me five hundred euros, I will invest it in the next drug lot and double your money in a month. The bank of cocaine,” he adds with authority, “is a much better deal than a regular bank.”

“You are the middleman,” I say.

“Cèrto.”

“Who are your contacts?”

“They come up from the south.”

“ ’Ndrangheta?” Nicosa flinches.

“What about the risk to the person who gives money?” I ask.

“No risk. Their hand is not dirty, and the profit is good. Sometimes the investors are asked to do a small favor, like hold the drugs, that’s all.”

It is now clear why Muriel left town. She knew the attack on Giovanni would lead the police toward mafia activity in Siena, possibly including the local branch of the bank of cocaine. I doubt very much that her partner had a recurrence of cancer. I expect Muriel and Sheila to be on the next plane to the Azores.

“Why did they beat you up, Giovanni?”

He clears his throat. “I am supposed to bring an amount every month, and I was behind. Muriel was my main customer, but she was drinking like a fish. She had no money to invest.”

“You took the hit for her.”

“I promise my customers to keep them out of it.”

“Not only are you in danger of getting killed, but you are helping the mafias!” Nicosa cries. “You are giving them more money to buy more cocaine.”

“That’s the idea, Papa.”

The phone inside the abbey starts to ring again.

Nicosa smashes the canvas across the bench, splintering glass and the wooden frame.

“Bitch! Fucking English bitch!”

“Hypocrite!” Giovanni shouts in return. “I only do exactly what you do! I learned from you!”

“This is not what I do!”

Giovanni screams at me. “Why did you tell him?”

“Because they tried to kill you, for God’s sake! That’s why Muriel split. She was afraid it would come back to her.”

“You are not my aunt! If you were my real aunt, you would be on my side!”

“I am on your side.”

“You’re FBI, that’s all you are!”

“Giovanni—”

“You and him together! Both liars and hypocrites!”

Grimacing with pain, he lopes across the courtyard on the crutch, slamming the kitchen door.

Nicosa is heaving. “That English bitch dragged him into it, you know that.”

“I will make sure Muriel Barrett is picked up in London and interrogated.”

Nicosa drops the wrecked painting at my feet. “Give her this.”

The door opens and Giovanni appears, holding the phone.

“For Signorina Grey!” he sings out contemptuously.

Sterling says, “I need a drink.”

When we get to the kitchen, whoever it was has already hung up. I ask if there’s a way to see who called. Giovanni grabs the receiver and punches two digits. The screen says Proibito.

“What does that mean?”

“ ‘Prohibited.’ You can’t.”

He turns away and opens the refrigerator and just stares into it. I’m thinking it was a blocked call from the American embassy about the recovered evidence from the vat. Nicosa enters the kitchen, turns on the taps, and sticks his head in the sink.

“There’s nothing to eat,” Giovanni observes.

Sterling ferrets out two beers. The phone rings again.

“Probably for me.” I reach for it, but Nicosa, shaking water off his head like a lion, snatches it away.

“Che vuole lei?” he shouts angrily.

He listens. The person on the other end speaks swiftly and ends the call. Nicosa lowers the phone, strangely triumphant.

“You see? This is what I have been waiting for! What I have said all along. She’s alive. These people have Cecilia.”

“Mama is okay?”

“What did they say?” I urge. “Exactly?”

“ ‘We have your wife.’ ”

“Did they put her on the phone?” demands Sterling.

“No.”

“Who are they?” Giovanni asks.

“Don’t worry!” cries Nicosa, in a delirium. “They will call again.”

“What do they want?”

“Two million euros.”

Giovanni is wide-eyed. “Do we have that much money, Papa?”

Nicosa laughs exuberantly, drumming the boy’s shoulders. “You see? Listen to the priest! God went looking. Your mother is alive!”

THIRTY

Just after dark, Zabrina and Yuri pass beneath the stone arch in the center of a dying coastal town in the province of Calabria — another set of stoplights in miles of unfinished shopping centers and buildings. Between getting lost, and pit stops due to stomach cramps, it has taken longer than they planned — almost nine hours on the motorbike — but by maintaining on Valium and caffeine, they keep pushing through the sweltering urban sprawl. The green hills of Tuscany don’t even exist.

By the time they enter the narrow streets of the husk that is left of the old town center, Zabrina has collapsed against Yuri’s back, crying softly from excruciating aches in her bones. She’s crashing and can’t hold on anymore. All he can do is shrug her off and keep going. He has the shakes too, and it’s hard to follow her mumbled instructions to the massive public housing project called la piccola città, Little City. Because ’Ndrangheta is demanding higher fees for its contract to collect the garbage, household waste has been left in mountainous piles that block the streets, forcing them to keep making unexpected turns, getting more and more lost. Evening traffic comes to a standstill. Frustrated commuters are simply locking their cars, leaving them in the middle of the street, and going home. While they are stopped in a traffic jam, some skinny little jerk tries to rip Zabrina’s bag right off the rack, but Yuri hits the gas, hops the curb, and drives thirty kilometers per hour on the sidewalk.

They find the road into the hills. When the anonymous concrete roofs of the housing project rise like a multistoried fortress, Zabrina remembers the crack house is in the middle sector, second floor, the corner apartment way at the end. The Little City is as spread out as a good-sized American shopping mall, over a thousand units in all. The sectors are connected by courtyards within courtyards, odd bridges and narrow walkways. Projecting from every wall is a slovenly jumble of tiny balconies, satellite dishes, networks of exposed electrical cables. The temperature is a hundred and eight degrees. There is not a breath of air, as if the entire community is being smothered under glass. Only the smallest children are wound up enough to play in this heat, kicking soccer balls in their underpants, or splashing in rubber pools while unemployed onlookers smoke cigarettes and soak their feet.

Neither the colliding tracks of blaring pop music nor the jarring reek of marijuana and roasting fish has any effect on the ragged, glassy-eyed junkies lounging on the peeling stairs below the corner apartment.

Fat Pasquale, Zabrina’s cousin, is sitting on a chair, feet up on a cooler, listening to an iPod.

“Who’s this guy?” he says by way of greeting, jerking a thumb at Yuri.

They are speaking in the dialect specific to Calabria.

“He’s my boyfriend,” Zabrina answers.

“You vouch for him?”

“I vouch for him.”

Fat Pasquale opens the screen door. The kitchen is even hotter. The middle-aged woman with the black hair, now wearing an apron, sweat running down her temples, chops tomatoes at the sink.

“Maria Luisa gets a bigger allowance than me,” she is saying.

“I know.”

“Her husband was unlucky, that’s all. He got in the way of a bullet. But my Peppino is a capo, who is in jail today because he is protecting all of you.”

“I know.”

The Puppet, wearing white trousers, a lizard belt, and an expensive linen shirt, is sitting at the kitchen table, legs crossed, relaxed. Before him is an array of bags of white powder, a digital scale, vials, and small spatulas used for paint, neatly lined up on butcher paper laid over the oilcloth. Disregarding the woman and her complaints, he gives instructions to his bodyguard, who is mixing the cut. That same guy was here last time; Zabrina recognizes the jade disk around his neck. She avoids looking at the boss’s strange black wooden fingers, staring instead at the pattern of tulip tiles on the wall. One tulip up. One tulip down. The pain in her abdomen is unbearable.

“Three years in prison and sixteen months to go!” the woman goes on, shaking the knife at the Puppet. “You tell Don Toti I deserve a bigger allowance than Maria Luisa!”

The Puppet ignores this, peering closely at the powder dissolving in a small glass dish. He raises his prosthesis and motions to Yuri.

“You! Sit here.”

Yuri slips into the chair, homing in on the ritual as the bodyguard loads the syringe.

“Who vouches for you?”

“Zabrina.”

The Puppet’s eyes rise to the girl waiting impatiently. Silently he nods, bestowing his approval on her guest.

“Where you from?” he asks the boy kindly.

Yuri stares hungrily, tightening a bandanna around his arm. “Albania,” he replies.

The bodyguard passes the syringe to Yuri, who slips the needle into his vein.

“Are you listening to me?” demands the woman at the sink. “Will you talk to Don Toti?”

“Talk to him about what?”

The woman stares at the Puppet with stymied hate.

“Next,” he says. “You, signorina. Che bella! I have seen you before. I would not forget such a beautiful face.”

“Thank you,” says Zabrina, but Yuri isn’t standing up. She needs her turn. His torso contracts, like he’s taking a very deep breath, then his eyes roll up, and he slumps sideways and falls out of the chair.

“Yuri!”

“What is this?” the Puppet inquires.

“I changed the cut,” says the bodyguard. “Like you said.”

“Too strong. Make it weaker.”

The bodyguard goes back to the powder, ignoring the young man on the floor, who has gone into full-body convulsions.

Zabrina is on her knees, screaming, “Oh shit, oh shit, he’s overdosing!”

“Get your boyfriend out of here.”

“Help me. Do something! He’s going to die.”

“There is nothing I can do.”

“Yes! Call a doctor. Get him to a hospital!”

She tries to drag Yuri’s heavy body toward the door.

The woman, who has been watching all this with disgust, shakes her head and leaves the kitchen.

The Puppet looks at the watch strapped around the prosthesis. “Get them out of here.”

The bodyguard sighs and calls, “Pasquale!” No answer. He gets up and opens the door.

“Pasquale isn’t here. I don’t know where he is.”

“You’re supposed to know!”

By opening the door, the bodyguard has allowed a score of skinny children in wet bathing suits to pour inside and rush to the refrigerator to shout for Kool-Aid. Seeing Yuri writhing on the floor causes them to stare, and then to all start shrieking at once — a chorus of high-pitched shrieking — some laughing, some shrieking just to shriek. Deep inside the apartment, there is banging.

“This place is a filthy zoo,” says the Puppet. “Where is that witch? Where is the coffee?”

“What about him?” asks the bodyguard, pointing at Yuri.

“In five minutes he’ll be dead,” says the Puppet, and instructs the bodyguard to mix up another batch.

Zabrina is sobbing, trying to stop the convulsions by massaging Yuri’s arms and legs. Meanwhile, looking as if she is doing nothing at all, the woman has meandered down the hall and unlocked the door to the bedroom.

“We need a doctor,” she says. “A boy is overdosing.”

Cecilia Maria Nicosa stumbles out, dressed in oversized men’s sweatpants in the furnacelike heat, two thin ratty undershirts one over the other, to avoid indignity. Her auburn hair is piled up haphazardly. Once upon a time she had a pedicure. There are purple bruises down her arms and across the side of her face like the shadow of a hand.

“Where?” she croaks. She hasn’t spoken out loud in days.

The woman points to the kitchen.

Cecilia moves unsteadily down the hall, enters the kitchen, and kneels by the boy.

“What is she doing here?” the Puppet demands. “She belongs inside!”

“You don’t listen to me; I don’t listen to you!” says the woman, and folds her fleshy arms.

Yuri is unresponsive. His breathing is rapid and he’s sweating. Cecilia feels the pulse at his neck. His skin is burning hot.

“He’s going into hyperthermia.”

Zabrina raises wild eyes.

“What does that mean?”

“We have to lower his temperature, fast,” says Cecilia. “We need to stop the spasms or he will have a heart attack. Get him in the bathtub and pour cold water over him and fill the tub with ice, if you have it.” With their faces almost touching, Cecilia asks, “Do you have any Tylenol?”

“I have Valium,” Zabrina says.

But Zabrina is not hearing the words, and Cecilia is barely aware of saying them, both shocked by recognition. Zabrina sees the lady’s lip is swollen and a tooth is chipped. In the fever of withdrawal, she looks so deeply into the fierce eyes of the captive that she believes she can see the crystalline cells. The lady stares back intently. Detached from the cacophony of shrieking children and back-and-forth shouts between the woman and the Puppet, Cecilia and Zabrina realize that they know each other; they have met before, but where?

“Who are you?” whispers Zabrina.

Before Cecilia can answer, they are roughly jerked apart by the bodyguard and Fat Pasquale.

“Give him Valium!” Cecilia manages, before she is pushed back into the bedroom and the door is locked.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” the Puppet is shouting at the woman. “You listen in on every phone call; you know exactly what is going on with Nicoli Nicosa’s wife. We are doing business here! I’m warning you, don’t fuck with me!”

The woman turns her back.

“You!” she says to the children. “All of you! Help with this boy.”

The kids and the woman drag Yuri’s inert body to the bathroom and heave him into the tub, flooding it with cold water until his shorts float. One of them empties a tray of ice cubes.

“Isn’t he going to take his clothes off?” asks a little child.

Inside the bedroom prison cell, Cecilia sinks onto the foam mattress, recalling where she saw the girl. She was a patient at the clinic. An intravenous drug abuser diagnosed with hepatitis C, an advanced disease that can be fatal. She tried to get her into treatment, but the girl never came back. And here she is, still shooting. At the thought of this, Cecilia springs up and pounds her fists against the wall. Of all the people in the world who might have recognized Cecilia, might have notified the police — who shows up to save the day but an addict. An ignorant, damaged, self-destructive, diseased addict.

In the bathroom, Yuri shivers violently as his eyes slowly open.

In the kitchen, Zabrina doesn’t hesitate to sit in the chair. She gets her turn. The new cut has been adjusted by adding talcum powder. One tulip up, one tulip down.

THIRTY-ONE

I won’t believe she is alive until I hear Cecilia’s voice. While Nicosa goes off on a manic call to Sofri, instructing him to get the cash to pay the ransom subito, I am compartmentalizing the information we have, refusing to get keyed up. Somebody has to keep a clear head.

We can’t miss the next opportunity to trace the calls.

“Nicoli? Can we use your office?”

“For what?”

“In the FBI, we have what we call a command post, the nerve center of a major case. I want to set one up in the bell tower. You already have the technology.”

“Can I be there, too?” asks Giovanni.

“Come with me,” I say, leading him from the kitchen to the entry-way, where we can be alone. “Why should I trust you?”

He doesn’t understand the question. “I’m worried about my mother.”

“I hear that. It’s a crisis now, but what about last week? Last year? All the time you’ve been running cocaine, putting your parents at risk?”

“I’m sorry. It’s over.”

“Just like that? Giovanni, you’re a good kid, but you’re all over the map. Smart in school, on the soccer team — but you still get sucked in. You don’t like the way your father does business, do it differently. You’re not him. You are not obligated to shoulder his mistakes. Make a statement — about who you are, not how pissed off you are at him. You need to figure out how you want to be in the world. I’m here if you want to talk.”

“That’s cool. Meanwhile, can I be in the command post?”

“No, you can’t. I’m sorry, no minors.”

“I’m sixteen!”

“In America, you’d be locked in a hotel room with a couple of agents, and the abbey would be under surveillance 24/7. If we had more manpower, that’s exactly what we’d do.”

“Why don’t we?”

“Have the manpower? Because your father doesn’t want to go to the police.”

“Why can’t I stay? What’s safer than here?”

“You need looking after, and we have work to do.”

“ ‘Looking after’? Are you serious?”

“Until you prove otherwise, yes.”

We go back into the kitchen.

“Is there a responsible adult Giovanni can stay with?” I ask.

Nicosa says, “Padre Filippo.”

Giovanni protests in rapid Italian.

“You have to be protected. That’s the protocol,” I say flatly.

Giovanni makes a face, grabs his keys and cell phone.

“You’re not ready to drive.”

“Are you serious?”

“Have a friend take you. Call when you get to the rectory.”

“Thanks for trusting me,” Giovanni replies sardonically, hopping out of the kitchen on his crutch.

The front door heaves shut. Nicosa smiles briefly with something like gratitude. He believes that now he is in control: his wife has been kidnapped for ransom, a common crime he has the power to resolve, as long as we heed the kidnappers’ warning and do not involve the police — and his rival, the chief.

“He accuses me of an act against God, against my wife?” Nicosa says of the Commissario as we ascend in the elevator. “He threatens to arrest me? Why? To prove Torre is great? I should have strangled him right there!” He points dramatically to the courtyard, a tiny puzzle piece below. “The police are lower than swine. They will never — never — come into this house.”

I have to agree that right now it is better to leave them out of it. A kidnapping is unpredictable enough without an overlay of byzantine grudges and backstabbing disloyalties. I’d much rather deal with normal criminals. As the darkened floors of Renaissance art slip by, I tick off the tasks ahead: install phone taps to record and monitor calls. Establish communication with the kidnappers. Assign roles of negotiator and coach. Sterling has already been dispatched to Chris for the necessary equipment.

Trickier is Nicosa’s insistence that we also do not inform Dennis Rizzio in Rome that contact has been made with the alleged kidnappers. He believes the situation is too porous. If they get a whiff of the authorities, they will kill her. I am not willing to take that risk. This is no time to get all bollixed up in Bureau procedure. When we have something solid, I will inform my boss.

We arrive at the top of the tower. Nicosa hops off the elevator, strutting around like a rooster in his airborne office, while I wonder what crazy arrogance had convinced me that we could pull this off on our own — and at what risk to my career at the Bureau?

The real command post in Los Angeles, created for response to terrorist attacks and natural disasters, is stocked with food and water. Okay, got that. There are dozens of TV monitors and laptops, to say nothing of hundreds of agents. I angle the flat-screen so it faces the empty leather couches, and make sure Nicosa’s computer is online. Nice. Just like home. As for a timeline to keep track of unfolding events, instead of the familiar, low-tech roll of brown paper usually tacked across the wall, I lay pieces of printer pages edge to edge and secure them with cellophane tape, leaning back with a sigh. It’s amazing what you can make out of desperation and a few ordinary household items.

The intercom buzzes and Sofri appears minutes later, carrying a small duffel. He gives Nicosa a strong embrace, patting him on the back.

“Did they call again?” Sofri asks.

“Not yet.”

“Right now they’re playing cat and mouse,” I say.

“I have the money.” Sofri takes off his blazer. Folding the sleeves precisely as a haberdasher, he lays it across the back of a chair. “What do we do, topolina?”

“We have to wait,” Nicosa interrupts, before I can answer. “Exactly what I said in the beginning.”

The intercom buzzes. They both jump.

It is Sterling.

When the glass elevator surfaces, it is filled with the alarming shape of a man dressed for war. Sterling, wearing boots, camos, and the black dragon T-shirt, brings soldierly weightiness into the room — the real possibility of someone getting killed. He shoulders the rucksack while carrying a sniper bag in one hand, a scuffed suitcase made of yellow plastic in the other. Nicosa and Sofri step away. This is not their movie.

“How are you all doin’ today?” Sterling asks, setting the equipment down.

“Adesso non lo so.” Sofri chuckles. Now I don’t know. “I think I felt better before you arrived.”

On the other hand, I am feeling decidedly happier, now that Sterling’s here. His presence conveys confidence in the mission. We’re going to do this together. My mood of caution starts to lift, replaced by the adrenaline rush of engagement and the pleasure of knowing what needs to be done and finally getting down to it.

“This’ll be good.” I’m clearing space on the desk for the yellow suitcase.

“What is in there? A bomb?”

“An electroshock machine,” Sofri quips. “In case we get a heart attack.”

Sterling opens the case to reveal a mini switchboard with molded foam compartments for headsets and a tape recorder.

“It’s to monitor the phone,” he explains. “From now on, nobody talks to the kidnappers unless Ana or I am listening.”

“Nicoli will be the primary contact,” I say. “You’re the one who speaks to the bad guys. Do you think you can do that?”

“Yes.”

“We are going to insist they let you talk to Cecilia. Before any negotiation, before anything, you say, ‘I want to hear her voice.’ ”

He snorts derisively. “You know how it is in the coffee business? Liars and thieves! The growers and the shippers and the kids who steal from the cash register. You don’t think someone who deals with these people every day is not capable of saying, ‘Let me talk to my wife’?”

I explain gently that sometimes it isn’t words you hear. “Sometimes there are only screams. They could torture her to get to you.”

Nicosa scratches at his head.

“I can do it,” Sofri volunteers.

“You?” says Nicosa. “You’re the one who will need the electroshock machine. No. It’s me.”

Sterling resumes: “Ana is the negotiator. She sits right next to you and tells you what to say.”

“Buona fortuna,” murmurs Sofri.

“I’m writing you notes. You’re repeating exactly what I write. Sofri, can you simultaneously translate, so we can hear you in our headphones?”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Sofri’s listening in and translating. Nicosa’s talking. Sterling’s providing tactical support for how to recover the victim.”

Sofri pats his forehead with a silk handkerchief. “Mio Dio!”

“Any other questions?”

“How long will this take?”

“No way to know,” Sterling says. “Could be hours, could be days.”

Nicosa’s cell phone rings. We look up expectantly, but he waves us off — it’s Giovanni, reporting that he has arrived at the rectory of Padre Filippo.

“You see? He is a good boy,” Nicosa says, opening the refrigerator to a row of glistening wine bottles. “How about a drink?”

“We don’t advise it, sir,” Sterling says, expressionless.

Nicosa glowers. “Nobody made you capo.” But he closes the door.

By four in the afternoon, when the sun has probed each window on its way around the tower, we have turned on the TV and ended up watching Die Hard dubbed into Italian. Not really watching it, just someplace to put your eyeballs. There have been five other calls to the household throughout the day, all noted on the timeline, none relevant. The level of anxiety in the room is holding steady at 80 percent. The level of violence on the plasma screen is downright quaint. It is comforting to watch actors destroy large amounts of phony glass. I wonder what it means to die, hard.

As much as I want to reclaim Sterling, even the slightest touch would be against the professional code of conduct we have tacitly agreed to follow as long as we are working the case. We make sure to sit apart; all of us are sprawled on the couches and leather chairs, with the paradoxical sense of a family held together by the suspension of time, like waiting for a baby to be born, or Thanksgiving dinner to be served.

Yet even across the room I feel it when Sterling’s body stiffens. He jumps up, grabs the gun bag, and unzips a compartment that holds a Walther PPK/S 9mm and a cleaning kit. Sitting cross-legged on the rug in front of the TV, he fieldstrips the gun, removing the magazine and the front of the trigger guard.

Sofri and Nicosa watch, fascinated.

“What does a private security company do?” Sofri wonders.

“Whatever the customer wants. Bodyguard. Protect assets. Fight a war.”

“Have you ever been hired on a kidnapping?”

Sterling works a soft brass brush over the residue on the outside of the barrel. “All the time.”

“How do they usually end?”

“It all depends on patience, sir. Patience and negotiation. Mind if I have one of those?”

Sterling reaches for a bowl of chocolates.

“Sure, of course,” says Nicosa, handing it over. “Can I get you something else? You didn’t care for my food?”

“It looked great, but I’m not much hungry these days.”

“He just came back from a mission,” I explain. “Still adjusting to the concept of lunch.”

“Really?” says Sofri, leaning forward, elbows on knees. “Can you tell us what the mission was?”

“All I can say is, I quit.”

This is news to me. Anything he says would be news.

“Was it difficult?” Sofri asks.

Sterling doesn’t answer. He’s reassembling the Walther, pulling the slide back onto the barrel and checking the alignment.

Sofri and Nicosa watch every move.

“On this mission,” Sofri continues, “was it too much fighting, people getting killed?”

“Is that why I quit, you mean?”

Sofri nods. “If I may ask.”

Sterling finishes off with gun oil and a cloth. “We quit because they wouldn’t give us holiday pay.”

“Holiday pay?”

“That’s right. Promised, wouldn’t deliver, so we walked.”

Nicosa laughs. “It’s the same in every business!”

But I know that’s not all. That’s not why he showed up in my bedroom in the middle of the night, looking like a refugee, looking like something happened that was powerful enough to permanently take away his appetite.

The phone rings.

Everyone scurries into position. Sofri stumbles over a wire. We put on headphones and move to the desk, where four chairs are waiting. Sterling checks the tape recorder and gives the nod. Nicosa hits the phone.

“Prègo.”

The conversation takes place in Italian, with Sofri softly speaking English into our ears.

“Who are you?”

“We have your wife.”

“I want to hear her voice,” says Nicosa.

“Not possible.”

“Why not? If she’s alive, put her on the phone.”

“We want the money.”

“I have the money. But first I hear her speak.”

“We want two million euros.”

“I have it, believe me.”

I write him a note. He hesitates, but I urge him on.

“Tell me where to meet,” he reads.

They hang up. Nicosa rips off the headphones and kicks away from the desk.

“Could you get a trace?” I ask Sterling.

“Disposable cell phone.”

“Don’t worry,” I tell Nicosa. “You did great.”

“This is not going to work,” he says angrily. “You, telling me what to say — they know something is wrong. It doesn’t sound right.”

Sofri intercedes. “You see, first you must talk to the right person. In Italy, the boss never speaks for himself. He is always one or two steps behind the one who is speaking”—which is exactly what Dennis Rizzio told me.

I nod. “I’m sure that with his connections, Nicoli could speak to whomever he pleases. Do you want to make a call?”

Nicosa shakes his head. “You must wait for the courtesy of their call.”

We agree that next time Nicosa will ask for the boss, as well as insist that he hear Cecilia’s voice. He jerks the refrigerator open and defiantly pours a long shot of vodka.

Night passes in fits and starts. Some hours go quickly; sometimes the clock doesn’t move. The TV stays on until Nicosa falls asleep on the couch with his mouth open, and then Sofri clicks it off and settles in one of the corn chip chairs, tipping it up like a recliner. The lights are low. Sounds are not lost way up here; crickets and the rustling of treetops blow in with the cold air. Sitting on the floor in an arc of moonlight, Sterling is fieldstripping and cleaning the Walther for the third or fourth time.

I settle beside him. “You’re not eating, and you’re not sleeping.”

He doesn’t answer.

“That’s a very clean weapon. Cleanest I’ve ever seen.”

He raises a warning finger. “Don’t nag.”

I watch him cleaning the gun. Meticulous. Obsessive.

“I’ve been there. That’s all.”

I went through it after the shooting incident — uncontrollable thoughts and some really bad insomnia. Like a vicious case of poison oak, it won’t go away, and everything you do to calm it only makes it worse. Especially touching it.

Sterling’s face is tight with concentration as his fingers rub the soft cloth back and forth. It seems as though he isn’t going to answer, but then—

“Nobody knows what I see through those sights.”

I put my arm around his shoulders. Massage the rigid muscles of his neck.

“It was a situation that gave us no way out,” he says.

“I understand.”

“No point in discussing it.”

“Okay.” I look over at the windows of black sky. “It’s just that I miss you, baby. Sometimes it doesn’t even seem like we’re a couple anymore. I feel like you keep shutting me down. On the other hand, you came back from the mission to be with me. I guess. I’m confused. Why did you come back?”

“Chris said you were in trouble.”

“Is that all?”

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t care.”

His tone is flat.

“You’ll neither confirm nor deny?” I say, playfully.

“Pitiful,” he says of his own malfunctioning. “I know.”

“No,” I say. “It’s just hard right now, for both of us.”

“I hear you.”

“Be in touch,” I say.

He nods. I get up and lie on the other chair, adjusting it so my feet are in the air, like Sofri’s, as if we are on an airplane flying over a blacked-out continent. Sterling continues to clean his gun. My mind drifts toward sleep, lulled by the sound of Nicosa’s rhythmic breathing. A million images rush my mind at warp speed, and then I’m floating in a memory of being with Cecilia.

It was when I first arrived, and she had wished in some way to reveal herself to me, craving understanding beyond the wealthy circumstances of her life; she wanted me to know she was not happy in the austere halls of the abbey. So we went to the place in Siena that she said most moves her heart — and perhaps her husband’s, too — a medieval hospital and orphanage called Santa Maria della Scala. In Los Angeles you take a person to Dodger Stadium; here you wind up staring at a 1440 fresco called The Care and Healing of the Sick.

“Contained in this picture are the reasons I wanted to become a doctor,” she said. “But I am not that kind of doctor.”

“Why not?”

“I became a doctor to serve,” she said. “Like them.”

“But you are. You’re helping people.”

“Not the way I want to be.”

She held a yellow patent leather bag to the bosom of her black knit dress, clutching tightly, gazing with hunger at the painting that showed the huge vaulted room in which we were standing as it had been in the fifteenth century, when sick pilgrims and abandoned children were received by hospital friars, who had renounced the world and devoted themselves to service.

“Those were wealthy people, like us,” Cecilia said, pointing to an attendant in a hospital tunic, washing the feet of a terrified young man with a grievous wound to the thigh. “But they became oblates, those who give everything they own to the hospital, including their labor, for life.”

“What did they get in return?”

She smiled grimly. “Freedom?”

Now I know that she had been talking about the awful contradictions of her life: a rich, attractive husband who has other women; a murderous organization to which she is forced to pay money for the privilege of saving lives. The air in the empty ancient ward was still and smelled of polished wood. Quiet voices of tour guides speaking other languages could be heard from the galleries.

“Children were left here with notes that told their names, and who their parents were,” Cecilia said. “So when times were better, they could be reunited with their families. They weren’t just abandoned.”

We stood together in front of the painting.

“When Papa used to talk about my relative, Ana, in America, I pictured you wearing a ruffled dress and patent leather shoes. I don’t know where I got that, probably from a movie.”

“I hated dresses until I was sixteen,” I told her. “That was me, in shorts and flip-flops. I had to hose off the sand before they let me in the house.”

“ ‘California’ always sounded magical,” Cecilia said. “When I was in medical school, I tried to do my residency in California. The best facilities. The most exciting cities. It was an impossible dream. We are put in our lives and that’s it.”

When we could find no more messages in the mauve and ochre pigments, we were drawn to a tall grated window at the end of the hall, where a breeze coming in from the mountains brought with it the sound of birdsong and church bells, stirring the pigeon feathers caught outside in the terra-cotta brick.

“We used to have a beautiful bronze statue here, Risen Christ by Lorenzo Vecchietta, a Renaissance masterpiece, one of the great treasures of Siena. It looked so contemporary and alive. The expression of suffering was so aching, and the hand reaching out so soft and real — but it was stolen right out of the chapel of this hospital. Why do we agree to live like this?” Cecilia exclaimed in frustration.

Through the grated window was the city, colorless in the pressing heat of noon.

When I awake in the chair, something is scrabbling around the edges of the tower. A blackbird has flown through an open window. We catch it in a wastebasket and let it go.

THIRTY-TWO

Powered by multiple shots of Nicosa Family espresso, we are at our stations by first light, but the next call doesn’t come until three long hours later, at 9:10 a.m.

“Do you have the money?” asks the voice.

“I told you. Yes.”

“Okay.”

Silence.

“Okay what?” Our fearless leader cannot hide his impatience. “Do you realize you are speaking with Nicoli Nicosa?”

“Yes.”

I pass a note. Ask his name.

“What is your name, signore?”

No answer.

“I need to know who I am talking to. It’s only polite, wouldn’t you agree?”

The man hangs up.

“Sounds nervous,” Sterling says.

“Is that good?” asks Sofri.

In truth it’s neither good nor bad, but worth noting on the timeline, which now shows two pieces of intel from the kidnappers in the last twenty-four hours. I am not surprised the night has passed unbroken by a call. Often the lowlifes are too drunk or stoned during those hours to do business.

We eat. We read the news online. Sterling, wearing just the camos, does his wake-up routine: one hundred crunches, one hundred push-ups, three minutes of shadow boxing. The next call comes within the hour.

“Imagine yourself in my position,” Nicosa tells the kidnapper. “I am her husband. I want to know how my wife is. I want to hear her voice. Can’t you put her on for just a minute?”

He is not used to commoners slamming the phone down.

“What the hell is going on? What kind of game do they think they are trying to play?”

“They don’t even know,” I tell him. “They’re flying by the seat of their pants.”

In the afternoon, because I am the girl, I go back to the main house for supplies. After the constant breezes through the tower, the courtyard feels like a suffocating sauna. I’m thinking we are in for a siege, and some food prep in the tower kitchen might be required. Stepping back out of the elevator, arms full of towels and toilet paper and carrying a bag of fruit, cans of tuna in olive oil, instant bean soup, and cold leftover pasta, I find the team in the middle of another call. Slipping on the headphones, I hear a different voice. This one is older, with nothing to prove.

“I have instructions,” says the new voice.

Nicosa answers, “Tell me, please.”

“We will return Signora Nicosa to you after you give us the money.”

The mention of her name makes me hopeful. Not “the crazy bitch,” not even “your wife.” She is still a person to them.

“No police.”

Nicosa agrees. “Absolutely not. You have my word.”

There is the sound of whispered conversations on the kidnapper’s side.

“The cash must be in euros.”

“Agreed. Where do we meet?”

“We will tell you shortly. Take the Ferrari. Drive with Signorina Grey.”

“Cecilia’s sister?”

“Yes, her sister.”

I bite my thumb.

You’re doing great, Nicoli. Please don’t blow it; just agree.

“Why Signorina Grey?”

“The American sister will bring the money. If not, no agreement.”

I nod vigorously.

“Okay.”

“You will listen on the cell phone for instructions where to meet. If we see that you are followed, we will kill Signora Nicosa immediately.”

Nicosa swallows. “Understood. And we will meet my wife there? Where we bring the money?”

“She will be in another place. She will be unharmed. When we have the money, we will tell you where she is. We will call you in the car in five minutes.”

“Now, please, can I hear her voice?”

Scuffling, soft breathing.

“Cecilia?”

“It’s me.”

The voice is timid and weak. But it is Cecilia.

The line goes dead, but I am fired up. We’re closer than we’ve ever been. Sterling joins Nicosa where he’s standing at a window, looking completely drained.

“I know you know that dude on the phone,” Sterling says. “You were using the Italian informal form of address. Who is he?”

“Cosimo Umberto.”

“The Puppet?”

Nicosa turns from the window and raises an ironic eyebrow. “You know him, too?”

“He is known to the Bureau,” I say. “He’s a powerful man, the head of a district of mafia families. Can we trust his promises?”

Sofri and Nicosa exchange glances. Sofri, stroking his mustache uneasily, finally gives the nod.

“Yes.”

“He wants the money. And to prove to me he is the big guy, the capomandamento,” explains Nicosa.

“You two have a history. We saw him outside Giovanni’s hospital room.”

Nicosa goes tight. “I told you before. He was paying his respects.”

“And threatening you?”

“That’s not important now.”

Sterling pulls on the gulf-blue Oakleys and picks up the sniper bag. I’m opening the duffel and checking the cash.

Sterling’s face bends close, and his voice is quiet. “Sure you want to do this?”

“Absolutely.”

“You understand that you are possibly the target.”

“I know. We should have a tac team, but there’s no time to involve Rizzio.”

“They figured out they’ve got your sister, but they still want you. They want it both ways — the money and you. Feels like a setup.” Sterling shakes his head. “I don’t like it.”

“It depends on the drop,” I tell him. “If it’s a public place, and we think it’s secure, we’ll go with it. If not, we abort.”

“Fair enough. I’ll take Chris. We’ll be in contact via cell phone hookup and visuals.” Sterling’s deep green eyes hold mine. “You won’t see me, but I’ll be there.”

“Got it,” I affirm, a host of implications squeezed into two quick words. Every time we part, it’s an unknown.

Sofri and Nicosa, meanwhile, seem frozen in place. All of a sudden, the posturing has turned real. Sterling strides past them, smacking each one on the back, hard.

“Are we playing this?” he wants to know.

Buckled into the Ferrari and hurtling downhill, Nicosa says, “Tell me what bullshit is this, two different locations? You give them the money, but she’s somewhere else?”

“It’s not uncommon — it’s called the double-drop. They think they can protect themselves that way, but once we make the exchange, Sterling and Chris will be on their tail, and then it’s over. We’ll get them.

And Cecilia.”

For the next forty-five minutes we follow orders on the cell phone that have us driving loops around Siena. It is a charade without logic, meant to ensure that we’re not being followed, no doubt with mafia homies looking out along the way. The old woman with her feet up on a box, crocheting with a tiny needle. The waiter in an outdoor café, shredding cheese. The candle maker in the tourist shop window, folding curls of wax into a rose. Snitches, druggies, businesspeople, wannabes, killers — the whole network of cowed citizenry, keeping track of the red Ferrari. Inside the walls. Outside the walls. Sterling and Sofri are with Chris in the nondescript Fiat, listening to the instructions we are receiving, holding back at varying distances.

Daylight is still bright and scorching when the Puppet instructs us to park the car on Via di Pantaneto. Then I am to continue alone on foot.

“How will Signora Grey know your man?” Nicosa asks through the earpiece.

“By his colors,” the creep replies.

Now we are back on familiar ground. The coded Sienese response. The maddening symbolism. By this time I realize, with some relief, that the ultimate destination, to which they have been steering us all along, is Il Campo, the huge crowded plaza where the Palio was held. They plan to pull off the exchange and blend into the crowd, while limiting our opportunities for pursuit. All right by me. The public venue is safer than an isolated meet.

I tell the team: “It’s a go.”

When we have parked the Ferrari, and I am buckling on the bulletproof vest that came out of Chris’s trunk, Nicosa removes his sunglasses. His eyes are softened with emotion.

“Please, let me do this.”

“Sorry. It’s in my job description.”

“It’s my fault; I let Cecilia go—”

“You didn’t. She was taken.”

He stares, at a loss. “God protect you.”

He kisses me rapidly on each cheek. I hoist the duffel with the money and the tracking device inside and get out of the car. I could not have been an FBI agent all these years without also asking the question that if Nicosa’s ties to the mob are as real as Dennis Rizzio thinks they are, could he not, right now, be setting me up? And what if Sterling, for all his assurances of covering my back, is still not totally in his right mind? Trust whom? Where? Only the clear bright image of the victim’s face before me keeps me walking straight ahead.

“I’m on Banchi di Sotto,” I say into the microphone hidden in my hair. “Going into the Campo.”

“Which entrance?” comes Sofri’s voice.

Of course! There are eleven!

“Jesus, I don’t know!”

“Which side of the Mangia Tower?”

“East. I think it’s east.”

“Is there a café that says Pizzicheria?” Sterling asks.

“Pizzi — what?”

“Tell us what you see.”

“Okay, here’s a street sign. I can’t pronounce it — Mezzolom—?”

“Mezzolombardi-Rinaldi,” Sofri says, and then he and Nicosa overlap. “She’s at Palazzo Ragnoni.”

“Gotcha!” Sterling says. He’s in position somewhere, looking through the sniper rifle, and I am in his sights.

“Going to the fountain.”

“Copy that.”

Although it is barely five days since the Palio, you would never know the square had recently been filled to capacity with life-and-death drama, spectators clinging to every ledge. The track of special yellow earth has vanished without a trace. Where there had been horses crazy to run, jockeys beating one another, mad ecstasy, and underhanded deals on which the fate of the universe seemed to turn, now there are placid globs of tourists checking out café menus, and international students playing Frisbee. Only the contrada banners remain hanging from the palazzos for the second Palio race in August.

I sit on the edge of the Fonte Gaia, the Fountain of Joy, which was totally obscured by human bodies during Palio. How little I understood about Cecilia then, and about the entanglements of this family with the mafia beast, which has infiltrated this proud city through the sewers, despite contrada members patrolling every corner. Without moving my head, I scan for potential traps.

“All clear?” asks Sterling.

“So far.”

I breathe the funky mist coming off the fountain. The she-wolf statue spits a docile stream as on this balmy evening the drama becomes much smaller than the grand pageantry of Palio, down to a subtle eye movement between an American woman perched on the stone and a balding Italian man wearing a white polo shirt and an Oca scarf coming toward her, who stops in the middle of the piazza, turns his back, and lights a cigarette.

“That’s the contact, wearing green and white. The Oca colors.”

Nicosa says something urgently into the earpiece, maybe Sofri does, too, but I don’t hear them. I am in vapor lock, floating in a pool of now. I hoist the duffel and walk toward the man, who is standing alone, larger and more distinct than anything in the square. Objects become magnified and time slows down. I see the sunlight on the bald spot of his skull, reflecting hot as tin. I see the brown uniforms of a Boy Scout troop, and an orange Frisbee slicing by. The multicolored contrada scarves flying from the tourist shack snap in a silent wind.

I hear the first rifle shot. You wouldn’t hear it unless you were listening with extraordinary care. Not even the pigeons move. I don’t stop walking. As far as I know, the gunfire does not concern me. Ten meters from the contact, though, there is a second blast. This one is heard by everybody. It echoes off the palazzos like the mortaretto cannon at the start of the race, sending tourists diving under tables and birds into the air. The balding man lighting the cigarette drops to the ground with sudden impact, as if he fell from the sky. A red micro-cloud of atomized blood and brain appears and vanishes.

I swerve slightly and keep on going, still carrying the duffel, through the first and second waves of panicked bystanders — not like during the riot after Palio, careening into one another’s arms, laughing and crying, but a one-way, horror-driven stampede for all eleven exits, leaving the sprawling corpse in the Oca scarf in the center of the piazza, bleeding out on the sloping brick.

THIRTY-THREE

Back in the car, we are instantly surrounded by the clanging blare of ambulances and police.

“My God, what happened?” Nicosa says.

“Sterling took out the contact.”

“Why?”

“I can’t tell you right now, but I promise you, he had a reason.”

“He’s crazy! I knew it!”

“We’re okay,” I tell Nicosa soothingly. “Stay calm and just drive normally.”

I have no idea what went down, except that I am still gripping the bag with two million euros, and the chance to recover Cecilia has vanished.

Everything was set. Why is Sterling taking shots at a kidnap exchange?

It takes thirty agonizing minutes to drive just a few blocks and make it outside the walls, during which there is no communication through the earpiece from anyone. My growing fear is that Sterling went on a rampage caused by post-traumatic combat stress. His behavior over the last few days could add up to that; with a loaded weapon in his hand, he might have snapped.

“We killed their man,” Nicosa says. “They’ll murder her. They’ll murder all of us. My son, the whole family.” He looks into the rearview mirror, swerving crazily across the highway. “They could be following us now.”

“Nobody is following us.”

“What went wrong?”

“We’ll find out. Take a breath; you’re doing great. Just get us to the abbey without running into a tree.”

He is taking the hills at seventy kilometers per hour, churning up gravel like sparks. Still, by the time we roar through the gates, Chris’s Fiat is already parked, and Sterling is in the kitchen, downing glasses of water, the sniper bag slung over a chair.

Barely through the door, Nicosa gasps, “What happened?”

“Took the shot,” Sterling says. “Had to be done.”

“You murder a man in the middle of Il Campo? We had an agreement with Cosimo Umberto! They promised to return my wife. Now there will be a massacre.”

“They were lying. The plan was to draw Ana out. Get her out there in plain view. They had a sniper set up in a third-story window.”

“How do you know?” Nicosa demands.

Sterling reiterates what he said to me: “Nobody sees what I see in that gun sight.”

His face is tight; he’s full of adrenaline after the kill.

“And what was that?” asks Nicosa, barely restrained.

Sterling crooks two fingers and jabs at his own eyes, indicating that this is what he saw:

“The eyes.”

Nicosa doesn’t understand. “Whose eyes?”

“The bald man in the Oca scarf. He should have had more faith in his own guy,” Sterling says. “Instead, he looks up at the last minute, wanting to be sure everything’s going according to plan. Big mistake. Because when you’re looking through the magnifying scope of a Winchester 70, you can see something as small as the movement of an eye. I follow the eyes to where the subject’s looking — a third-floor window, where a shooter is set up with a sniper rifle, tracking Ana across the piazza. In half a second, I’m on target and the threat is eliminated. Half a second later, the contact is down, too. The contact looked up at his own sniper,” Sterling explains. “He was a trained assassin, aiming an incapacitation weapon at Ana. There was no other choice.”

Nicosa slams a palm against the wall.

“Why is all this necessary?” he cries in anguish, while I picture a swarm of complications when the police examine the bodies — not the least of which will be the failure to inform my superior that I was involved in a ransom negotiation that went south. I’m feeling lightheaded, not only because of recriminations at the Bureau, but because the hope of recovering the victim made me expose myself to the mafia’s double cross.

“How is Sofri?” I ask hoarsely.

“When I left his apartment he was still pretty shaken up. Told him to go out and get a cup of coffee and make sure he’s seen around the neighborhood.”

“Mother of God,” says Nicosa. “Were you inside Sofri’s apartment?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you shoot that gun out of his window?”

“It provided the clearest view of the piazza.”

Nicosa smacks his own head. “Are you crazy?”

“Nobody saw, Nicoli. It’s not like I was hangin’ out the window like Billy the Kid.”

“The only way to know where the shot came from would be sophisticated gunshot analysis,” I say.

“You realize the Puppet will immediately murder Cecilia in retaliation,” Nicosa says. “It’s over. Everything is lost.”

“I sincerely trust that is not the case. All I can tell you is they were prevented from killing Ana. That was my objective.”

Nicosa has no idea how breathtaking that is, and what clear-sighted concentration is required. Half a second and on target — twice — at four hundred yards. Through all of this, Sterling has been watching me intently. It’s like the light has come back to his eyes. He saved my life. Inside I’m crumbling, but—code of conduct—all I do is put my arm around his shoulders as he sits in the chair; he puts an arm around my waist. We pull each other close and tight. Nothing has ever felt so good. He’s here. He’s sane.

“Ah,” says Nicosa, scrutinizing. “What is this?” He smiles. “Lei due sono insieme.”

“What did he say?”

Sterling duly translates: “That the two of us are together.” Screw the code of conduct. I kiss the top of his sweaty, buzz-cut head.

But Nicosa has another question.

“Where is Giovanni?”

The last time Giovanni was in our hands was way back yesterday, when he said he had arrived at the priest’s. Since then, we haven’t heard a word. A call to Giovanni’s cell goes to voice mail. A call to the rectory catches Padre Filippo by surprise. He never saw the kid. Never knew he was supposed to have arrived. Not for the first time, Giovanni flat-out lied to his dad. Now it is dark, the suspects know that two of their guys have been taken out, and Giovanni’s absence seems a lot more worrisome than a rebellious sixteen-year-old out making trouble.

Nicosa’s eyes are wide as he considers these alternatives. It must be like the primal terror of realizing you have lost your child in the supermarket aisle. He could be anywhere in the wide world.

“When your son’s in trouble, where does he go?” Sterling asks calmly. “Who does he turn to? A girlfriend? A buddy?”

“The territory,” says Nicosa.

He means the Oca district, specifically the Fontebranda fountain, around which information pivots like the wheeling doves. Of course Giovanni would go back to his childhood neighborhood, where the contrada protects its members. Where there are plenty of the bank of cocaine customers to drop in on, or drug contacts if reality gets too tough. On the other hand, anyone looking for the boy would go there, too.

Sterling says, “I’ll find him.”

“You’ll never find him,” Nicosa says. “Nobody of Oca will talk to you. I’d better go.”

“Better if you and I stay here,” I say. “In case the kidnappers call.”

We agree Nicosa will alert the contrada members that Sterling will be pounding the streets. But none of us can go any farther without food. While juggling calls, Nicosa mixes up a quick omelet with potatoes, sausage, and basil while we put together bread, fresh hard goat cheese, prosciutto, and slices of melon. A double shot of the house espresso, and Sterling is fortified and out the door. I follow to the mailbox car, and we kiss in the balmy night. Up on my toes, I reach around his neck for more.

“Come back soon.”

“I will.”

And then he’s gone. Nicosa appears in the kitchen doorway, looking in the frank courtyard light like he’s aged twenty years since I first met him. He holds out his hand.

“Would you mind waiting with me?” he asks.

We choose the small room where the hospital bed used to be, since returned to normal, a landline phone in place, connected to the tape recorder in the tower. I’ve got a legal pad and the remote receiver from the kitchen. As soon as we settle onto the white couches, fatigue hits like an iron gong. Nicosa flicks on the TV, but within minutes we are both plummeting into deep unconsciousness.

In the dream, I am in a car driving at night. The headlights reveal empty fields. In the distance, there is a palazzo on a mountain — like the one we always pass on the way into Siena — a resort, with lighted umbrellas and molten golden light dripping down the furrows of the hill. The headlights illuminate the fields of sunflower faces weirdly, like inmates on stalks. On the horizon there is a fire.

The phone is ringing — not the landline, but my cell — buzzing in my breast pocket like a device to jump-start the heart. Jerking awake, I realize that in my sleep, I have been smelling smoke. At the same time, someone is pounding on the front door.

“I have Giovanni, but we can’t get through,” Sterling says over the cell. “He was in Oca, like we thought.”

“Where are you now?”

“Bottom of the mountain.”

“What time is it?”

“Two in the morning.”

“What’s going on?”

“The road up to the abbey is blocked.”

Nicosa is snoring away. With the phone to my ear, I open the door and stand on the threshold. The neighbor, Aleandro, has run over from the olive farm, carrying a flashlight and shouting, “C’è un fuoco!”

“Aleandro is trying to say something,” I tell Sterling. “What is fuoco?”

“Fire. There’s been an accident,” Sterling says. “Can’t see it from here. There’s an ambulance and a couple of fire trucks. Looks like a car caught on fire.”

“I can see it from the house,” I say, looking where Aleandro is pointing.

The sky is lit by flames, banging orange light off the low cloud cover, under which you can see black smoke boiling up. I’m shivering in the chill as I recall images of California wildfires feeding on dry brush. Explosive fireballs that jump the road. Firefighters trapped with no way out.

“Are you in danger?” I ask Sterling.

“No; they’ve contained the fire around the car. Put Aleandro on. I’ll tell him it’s okay.”

I hand the cell to the older man. He speaks in Italian to Sterling while nodding grimly. A fire let loose in these hills would be catastrophic. He gives me back the phone. I repeat “Grazie!” until our worthy neighbor waves good-bye and retreats into the night.

“How is it down there?” I ask Sterling.

“We’ll just have to wait it out.”

“How’s Giovanni?”

“Just about like you’d expect. Aw, hell!” Sterling exclaims. “Here comes the coroner. Looks like there were fatalities. Go back to sleep, darlin’. This is going to take a while.”

Two hours later, Sterling and Giovanni are permitted to drive past the site. Under lights set up by crime scene specialists, the smoking, blackened skeleton of Sofri’s black Renault can be seen. As they pass, Sterling gently draws Giovanni close and turns the boy’s head so he is prevented from viewing the corpse. They arrive at the abbey at the same time as the Oca priest, who had followed them up the hill. I open the door and stare at their bleak, heartbroken faces.

Sterling takes me in his arms. “They killed Sofri.”

We all gather close, wondering what might be the kindest way to wake Nicosa from his sleep.

THIRTY-FOUR

When we push through the wooden doors of the questura, every detective and file clerk looks up, as if they had been waiting for us to appear. Even spookier is the universal expression of pity in their eyes, tracking as we follow Inspector Martini through the bullpen. Not sympathy. Pity. The odd looks cause my skin to prickle; once again, I’m a clueless outsider. Nicosa, wearing a coal-black suit, skin as transparent as skim milk, is stopped at every desk for a handshake or a glancing hug. Deferentially, I wait a pace or two behind, feet planted and hands clasped in the rest position, as if I were a Secret Service agent protecting the president.

Inspector Martini guides us up a marble staircase with a peculiar bad smell that leads to the executive offices on the second floor, steering us through a jumble of cubbyholes with scummy windows that obscure what could be a spectacular view of the main cathedral in the Piazza del Duomo. Instead, everybody’s face is turned toward a computer screen. At the far end of the room, a pair of mahogany doors with brass knobs opens to the private office of Commissario Dottore Enrico Salvi.

Once more I am impressed with how thin he is for a man with such a heavy-duty job: how narrow the shoulders, how feminine the waist becomes when you have to cinch a belt that tightly. The white collar of an impeccably pressed blue-striped shirt frames a bony face that is shaped like a violin, all cheekbones and hollow eyes. The man is underweight, possibly ill, but remarkably lithe as he slips out from behind the desk, extending a manicured hand.

“My deepest sympathies. This is a terrible situation.”

“We are grateful for your attention,” Nicosa replies.

Inspector Martini slides two packs of cigarettes across the varnished surface of the desk, and the Commissario accepts them off her fingertips without a glance. She excuses herself and backs out, closing the double doors like an obedient servant.

“Sofri was an exceptional man. He will be missed. How well did you get to know him, Agent Grey?”

“Unfortunately, I didn’t know him very long, but in the time that I did he became like an uncle to me. That’s why I’m here. It’s not just official business.”

The chief gives a little shrug. Official. Unofficial. Depends which side of the page is up.

“How can I help?”

Nicosa and I exchange a look. By prearrangement, he nods at me to go ahead.

“Commissario, with respect, when my sister, Cecilia Nicosa, went missing, we were told there weren’t enough police officers in Siena to investigate because of Palio. You promised to help, but we have seen nothing, except some unfounded threats by you against my brother-in-law. We presented you with evidence of human remains in a vat of lye. Have they been analyzed?”

“A team from Rome is working on it.”

“Cecilia is still missing, and you have another Palio coming up in August. Last night a man very close to the Nicosas was killed. The violence here is out of control.”

“I am sorry you have that impression, Agent Grey. This kind of atrocity does not happen in Siena. This is a calm city. We do not even allow cars in the heart of the downtown. In ten years of working here, I have had twelve bank robberies and six murders — three of them in the last twenty-four hours, coincidentally since you arrived. You have heard that two men were shot to death in Il Campo?”

“Yes,” answers Nicosa.

“How do you plan to investigate these murders?” I continue briskly. “As well as the kidnapping of my sister and the attack on her son?”

The Commissario’s slender shoulders seem to sink even farther under such heavy burdens.

“I am nothing but a high civil servant,” he apologizes. “I am in charge of immigration, passports, and weapons licenses — which is all that is generally called for. But as I said, the police in Rome are of the top-notch.”

“Then let me suggest that we bring in Rome right now, with the assistance of the FBI. We have the expertise and the manpower. Why not?”

“I am sorry, signorina. That is impossible.” He raises his eyebrows for emphasis. “It would not help to get your sister back.”

He reclines in the chair. The chair is blue. The carpet is blue, just like in the Bureau. I guess blue is the international color of law enforcement and its consequent evasions. Beside me, Nicosa is tense and staring straight ahead. I can feel the storm gathering and try to head it off.

“You work immigration. Does that mean terrorism?” The chief does not reply. “I’m trying to get a picture of what happened to Sofri. Cars don’t just spontaneously catch on fire.”

The long fingers in the white cuffs come together, signaling that we are about to be granted crucial, top secret information.

“There is a mosque in a neighboring city that is receiving high attention,” he allows.

“Is that relevant to this investigation?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then you’re saying the fire bombing of Sofri’s car was not an act of terrorism meant to destabilize the city before the next Palio, or something like that?”

“Unlikely.”

“Do you have any suspects at all?”

“Nothing I can discuss.”

“Please. We are both professionals.”

The Commissario briefly shuts his eyes as if avoiding a painful thought.

Like a thunderclap, Nicosa shouts, “Al diavolo questo!”

“We don’t know,” the Commissario says calmingly. “But we will find out.”

“When? How? What is your plan?”

He leans forward, bringing his skull face toward us. On the wall behind him are photographs of his children, and the usual certificates in gilded frames. His tone takes on elegiac solemnity.

“Signore Nicosa, I must tell you, the coroner’s report is grim.”

“A man of seventy-one is burned to death in his car. How much worse can it be?”

“The fire didn’t kill him, signore. First, he was beheaded.”

The pitiful looks we received from the cops downstairs are now understandable. They already knew what we were about to hear.

I briefly touch Nicosa’s hand. He is wordlessly gripping the chair.

“Then it’s clear. Sofri was killed by the mafia.”

The Commissario nods. “It is a mafia-style killing, meant to convey a message.” His flat brown eyes slide toward Nicosa. “As to the meaning of that message, we should properly ask the victim’s business partner.”

“Sofri was never involved in anything illegal,” Nicosa replies, tight-lipped.

“… Although,” the Commissario continues as if Nicosa hadn’t spoken, “given the timing, it may have had something to do with the killings in the Piazza del Campo.”

I force myself to exhale and relax, hoping Nicosa gets the cue and doesn’t broadcast with telltale body language that we were right in the middle of it. The Commissario may be a high bureaucrat, but he has no doubt been trained to recognize the stiff posture and rapid blinking of a guilty man.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“There were two male victims. One was shot in the middle of the square, right in front of a group of Boy Scouts, the other through the window of a third-story apartment.”

“What is the connection between the victims?”

He doesn’t bite. “We are investigating.”

As if the body in the apartment wasn’t found beside a sniper rifle. As if the bald one lighting a cigarette wasn’t instantly identified by police sources as a mafia operative.

“I mean,” I say naïvely, “what is the connection of these victims to Sofri?”

“In both homicides, the bullets were fired from Sofri’s apartment.

And he was killed hours later.”

Nicosa manages to ask, “How do you know where the bullets were fired?”

“The ballistics report. We have reconstructed the path and speed of the bullets. In fact, we have the bullets. You see, we are just as good as the Americans.”

He smiles smugly, and I realize he’s been playing us all along, only to get to this point.

I return the smile and ask, “Are you seriously suggesting that Sofri, a seventy-one-year-old scientist with no history of violence, was capable of firing a high-powered weapon from his own window in broad daylight, with a hundred percent accuracy?”

“We don’t know who fired the gun, but we are certain as to where the shots came from. Our theory is that the mafia murdered Sofri and set fire to his car in retaliation for the deaths of those two men. That’s all I can say at this time, and I have probably said too much.”

“Have you given this to the press?”

“Not everything. I reserved it for your ears only.”

“We appreciate your candor,” I assure him.

He nods curtly. Nicosa stands.

“What about my wife?”

“I have pulled in extra officers and assigned every available detective to the case. Our department is under a microscope — the case is all over the Internet, those sick websites that love the misfortunes of famous people.”

“And what progress have you made, with all this police work?”

A pause. “We’re doing the best we can.”

“Non fare sopra te stesso,” Nicosa says.

The Commissario fixes him with an impassive stare.

“Again, my sympathies for the tragic loss of your friend.”

Going down the marble staircase with the bad smell, I ask Nicosa what he said to the chief of police.

“I suggested that he not get above himself. People who get above themselves are generally brought down.”

“Damn right. Talk about arrogant. You were good,” I tell my brother-in-law. “Didn’t let on, didn’t give an inch.”

We scramble down a few more steps and then Nicosa stops. Taking hold of the flaking metal banister, he bends his head, and weeps. Watching from the bottom of the stairs, Inspector Martini waits respectfully.

When we return to the abbey, Nicosa goes straight up to his tower. Giovanni is once again gone. He slept past noon, Sterling says, and then the same kid who took him to school showed up and they left.

“How was he about Sofri?”

“Badly shaken. But he won’t talk about it. When we rolled past the roadblock, he put his hood over his head and just kind of zipped up.”

“Did he say anything at all?”

“He said, ‘This is crazy.’ ”

“What was he doing when you found him yesterday?”

“Like his dad said, he went back to the old neighborhood. He was in the contrada headquarters, eating soup.”

“Eating soup?”

“They have a kitchen set up. I guess there’s always a mama or two around.”

“Well that’s okay, then,” I say.

“Wish I could say that’s true. When I found him, he was high as a kite.”

“That’s disappointing. My talk with him had no effect.”

“When you were sixteen, did you have a clue?”

I take off the worn-out courthouse heels I wore to see the Commissario, letting them drop one by one to the floor.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here. We might as well go home.”

Sterling looks at me with clear eyes. “You understand there’s not a real good chance of rescuing Giovanni from himself.”

“I’m not going to let him just go down.”

“Poor ole Ana. The Invasion of Normandy, all by her own self.”

“Leave me alone.”

“Aw, come on.”

Sterling is lying across the sweet-pea bed with his hands behind his head, wearing nothing but undershorts. The heat of the afternoon funnels through the small arched window like a flamethrower.

“Come on, now.” He pats the sheets. “Come on over here.”

This is a welcome change. I take off my skirt and flop beside him in just my camisole and bikini. Sterling slips an arm under my neck, and I roll against his shoulder, finally safe in protected territory. We are quiet. I breathe the living smell of his body.

“Sterling, the Commissario is dirty.”

“All right.”

“You knew that?”

He shrugs. “What’d he do?”

“He gave himself away. In the meeting with Nicosa. He’s telling us Sofri was killed in retaliation for the mafia bozos being shot from his window. But the only way you could know that is from the ballistics report. And the ballistics report hasn’t been released. Not even internally.”

“Are you sure?”

“Inspector Martini told me. I saw her in the police station on the way out. I asked if she’d seen the ballistics report on the shootings in the Campo, and she was surprised, said nobody has, the lab is days away from even letting the detectives know the results. The only one with access to a preliminary finding is the Commissario.”

Sterling thinks about it. “He saw the report that said the shots came from Sofri’s apartment, makes a call, and sets him up for a retaliation kill. Because the Commissario is a cominato. A made man.”

“That’s why he won’t involve the FBI or Rome,” I say.

“He’s trying to contain it.”

“Two mafia guys are killed in his piazza. On his watch. He’s responsible. They own him. Everybody is owned by somebody around here. Half the time they themselves don’t even know who. Look at it! Giovanni’s a soldier in the bank of cocaine. Cecilia pays bribes. Everyone in this family is owned. And here I come, like you say, the Normandy invasion, waving the flag of liberation. What a joke.”

“Let’s go after the bastard,” Sterling says. “Let’s take him down.”

“With what proof? We have no evidence to tie him to the mafias.”

We stare up at the beamed ceiling.

Sterling says, “I really miss baseball. I bet it’s the All-Star Game.”

I laugh out loud and snuggle close. His fingers begin tracing circles on my back and are just finding their way under the silk strap of the camisole when my U.S. cell phone goes off. The screen says Los Angeles.

“It’s Mike Donnato.”

“What is it with that guy?” Sterling mutters.

“Mike? You’re on speaker.”

“Hi, guys. I thought you’d want to know.”

“We always want to know.” I smile over at Sterling, who rolls his eyes.

“I’ve got something on Spectra.”

“The chemical company?”

“Yes,” says Donnato. “Where Nicosa’s company has an account. I’ve been looking for a common denominator between Nicosa, sodium hydroxide, and your sister.”

“We know Cecilia’s remains aren’t in the tank of lye,” I say. “She’s been kidnapped, and we have proof of life.” I fill him in on the ransom call, and Sofri’s murder in retribution for the shootings in the piazza.

When I am finished, Donnato tells us what he’s got.

“Remember I said to follow the lye? I put Spectra into my computer,” he says. “I typed in ‘Spectra Chemical Company,’ and ‘under surveillance’ comes up, entered by an agent in Pittsburgh, meaning the Bureau is already onto them. I pull up what the case agent wrote. He’s been monitoring a ’Ndrangheta connection that moves cocaine concealed in bulk cargo on container ships from Colombia through Naples to Pittsburgh — then from Kentucky to Ohio and on to Chicago.”

“Is this container ship connected to anything else?”

“That’s what I’m onto,” Donnato says. “I’m going to our Field Intelligence Group and checking with other agency partners in the intelligence community.”

“Good to spread the net.”

“I’m hoping that DEA or ATF has more information on Spectra, how it connects to the drug route to Chicago, and if Nicosa is somewhere in the mix. I’ll see what I can weave together.”

By the time we hang up, Sterling has left the bed and pulled on jeans.

“Let’s go find your nephew,” he says. “I don’t like leaving an open fire unattended.”

We find Giovanni in plain sight, sitting on the steps of the Fontebranda fountain in the Oca district. Silken green and white crowned goose banners still festoon the alleyways, perennially jammed with a slow-moving river of tourists. A duo of street guitarists competes with radios and the waves of sound pouring into the heads of every teenager through an ear bud of some kind. They all have something in their mouths as well — baby pacifiers from the Palio, a cigarette, or someone else’s tongue. Giovanni is sitting thigh to thigh with a slightly older girl who sports choppy bangs and streaks of crimson in her black hair. She is inordinately thin, with a devil tattoo crawling up one leg toward the crotch of a torn miniskirt. I recognize her as the waitress from the photos taken by the detective who trailed Giovanni to her apartment.

“I want you to meet Zabrina,” Giovanni says. “She has something to say.” He nudges her. “È giusto. Andare avanti.”

The girl raises heavy-lidded eyes. Her movements are dreamy to the point of narcolepsy. We wait until even Sterling can’t wait anymore.

“You have something to tell us, darlin’?”

“I know where Giovanni’s mother is. I saw her.”

THIRTY-FIVE

For fifty euros and a gelato she agrees to come with us, moving out of the range of eyes and ears in the Oca district, staying with the crowds, through the clogged commercial center, past McDonald’s and the post office, to the flat residential neighborhoods as they steadily grow darker, streetlights dimmer and more sparse. The closer we get to the edge of the city, the quicker we pick up the pace, Giovanni keeping up with the crutch.

Explaining that her boyfriend, Yuri, has just moved out, Zabrina nestles seductively between Giovanni and Sterling, filling out the image of the vamp she cultivates — ripped leggings under the miniskirt, big gold-tone earrings, and multiple strands of plastic beads. Her lips are matte red, her eyes rimmed with black, the pupils enlarged. She tramples along in silver heels like some kind of gypsy rock star.

Sterling steers us toward the bus station. The kiosk is closed, but one bus is lighted and idling near a concrete island, exactly where I had landed from Rome. In the distance the wine bar in the Medici fortress where Zabrina and Giovanni met is still lighted and alive. Sterling and I don’t have to speak to confirm the intuition both of us have had since leaving Oca: that we are being followed.

Sterling orders the kids to get on the bus.

Giovanni objects. “You have to buy a ticket.”

“Then buy the tickets.”

“To where?”

“Doesn’t matter where. Just do it, fast.”

And Giovanni does. When we first met, at this spot, he was late. Irresponsible, even spoiled. The difference is that at that time he had still been whole — he could take for granted his mother’s steady presence, that his parents would be the center of his world forever. Picking up his American aunt had been just one of his many important obligations, including a flurry of calls to his customers in the bank of cocaine, the moment we got into the car. He bounded like a retriever then, never out of breath. Now he is willing to take orders, careful not to twist the leg or tweak the arm as he turns from an automated ticket machine. There is no way back to being that uninjured sixteen-year-old.

“Where do we go?” Zabrina asks as we hustle up the groaning steps of the bus.

“Just for a ride,” I assure her.

“Where?”

“Monteriggioni,” Giovanni answers. “Not far.”

“Why?” she asks, showing a suspicious streak that we will have to negotiate.

“Do you have other plans?” Sterling wonders, keeping her moving toward the rear.

She blinks at him with her kohl-rimmed eyes. “What kind of plans?”

Although we are the only passengers, the four of us have squeezed into the very last row, where we can see anyone who comes on board. The doors close and the bus moves out. You can feel the heat of the engine through the seats. Already Zabrina has a crush on Sterling, and it is easy to see why. He is the type of man who looks great even in yellow LED transit lighting, while everyone else appears tubercular. At ten-thirty p.m., on a local bus to nowhere, he is alert and protective, his eyes ceaselessly scanning the darkened countryside — which must appear to a young excitable girl as sexy indifference.

Mind you, if she were an asset we were working through the Bureau, things would be entirely different. We would still be back at the field office, filling out permission forms, and no encounter would have taken place without a remote team recording every word. But here in the back of the bus, there are no rules. We can get information out of Zabrina by any means.

“Why you kidnap me? I think maybe I should be scared.”

“You are free to go, any time.”

“In the nowhere? In the night?” she says haughtily. “What is that?”

“We need for you to tell us exactly where you saw Signora Nicosa,” Sterling says nicely. “And we don’t want anyone else to hear.”

“Oh, sure.”

Giovanni assures her this is true.

“I want a cigarette.”

“You can’t smoke on the bus.”

“Who cares?”

“It will draw attention.”

She stands, swaying with the movement. “I get off.”

“Why are you such a bitch all of a sudden?” Giovanni snaps. “You’re the one who came looking for me.”

Hanging on to a strap, Zabrina bends over in pain. A tremor passes through her body.

“I am scared.” She catches her breath. “I am looking for Giovanni and everyone knows I am—una straniera.”

“A stranger,” Giovanni explains. “When she entered the Oca district and was asking for me, naturally people are suspicious.”

This is a surprise. “I thought he was looking for you.”

“No, no,” says Zabrina. “We don’t really know each other. I search to speak to Giovanni, to tell him where his mother is. Because I hear his name from …”

“Around,” Giovanni interjects, as if we couldn’t guess it was through other druggies in the contrada.

“You went looking for him?”

“That’s a dangerous game so close to Palio,” Sterling drawls. “Is why I scared.”

She fidgets with her earrings. Sterling eases her into a seat and she sits with obvious relief. But the effort to speak English is too hard, and she begs Giovanni to translate.

“I am from Calabria,” she continues emotionally in Italian. “The poorest place in Italy. It is not like the north. The countryside is not like here. There it is very rocky and hard to grow things. The mafias — Camorra and ’Ndrangheta — they are a way of life. No family is untouched, and don’t get me wrong, the women are just as bad. They will be on the cell phone warning their sons what’s going on in the village or if someone has a grudge against them — because they are proud of their sons, they help them climb the ladder. Everyone sees people murdered in the streets, even little children. You can’t get out.

“It sucks for everyone. But if you’re poor, what do you do? My mother used to sew. She made lace and towels and things like that. It brought in a little money. In Calabria, the way to make money is drugs. You sell a little, you do a little. Then you become a courier. My mother was a courier. Yes, of course I am angry. She was a middle-aged woman taking drugs into the United States. I wish she’d been caught because now she is dead — one of those murdered in the street. A guy goes by on a motorbike and poom poom poom, at the market, in front of everyone. There were protests at the funeral and everyone got upset. A mother! It was in the news.

“I know I’m addicted. We’re all addicts — my friends, my old boyfriend, Yuri. We know we’re all going to die. I knew from the time I was born I was going to suffer. I tried to leave and come to a beautiful place like Siena, but it is my fate to suffer, like the women in Calabria. Sometimes they marry you off, and then the husbands leave. My father drove a truck all over Europe. He was never home. My mother raised six children alone. When I saw that lady … Giovanni’s mother … I recognized her. She was the doctor in Siena who said I have to stop taking drugs because already, at this moment, I have hepatitis.”

“You have hepatitis?” Surprised, Giovanni asks in English.

She pats his hand. “Don’t worry, I am fine.” Continuing in Italian, she says, “I went to Calabria to get high. Big deal. If you get there right after a new shipment comes in, the stuff is good, and my cousin, Fat Pasquale, takes care of me. This time, we went there to get high and Yuri almost died. Because that sick freak with the hands like Frankenstein made it too strong. He couldn’t give a shit. You are just a sack of weeds to them. And I saw this poor lady — I am sorry to tell you because she is your sister and Giovanni’s mother — well, she looked very bad.”

I press my lips and turn to Giovanni.

“The man she describes is called the Puppet. His real name is Cosimo Umberto, and he’s a well-known mafioso. He lost his hands in a bomb explosion and now he wears prostheses. Ring a bell?”

Giovanni shakes his head.

“He’s pretty hard to miss. When you were in the hospital, your mother and I saw this creep, right outside your room.”

“Why would he be outside my room?”

“You tell me.”

“I don’t know anything that happened in the hospital. I was in a coma, remember?”

The bus is slowing down. A shuttered convenience store swings into view.

“This is Monteriggioni,” Giovanni says with more enthusiasm than you’d expect for a deserted bus stop. “From here it goes straight to Poggibonsi. Do you want to go there?”

Satisfied that if someone was following us they aren’t anymore, Sterling says we don’t need to go any farther. Monteriggioni is another, smaller walled fortress town, a mini-satellite built for the defense of medieval Siena. We get off the bus outside the gates and see that in the piazza they are having a festival. A kiddie carnival has been set up in front of the old stone church. Although it is close to midnight, the rides are still going. Giovanni says the bus back to Siena won’t come for an hour, so we buy sodas and tufts of fried dough and sit on a wall.

The wind is humid and cold. The misty lights against the flat storefronts remind me of the outdoor dinner party in the ruins of the church at the abbey when I first arrived — white tables, white roses, the Nicosas’ flashy friends. All of that has vanished with Cecilia. Under tender little strings of lights, sleeping children are carried by their young fathers, leaves blow across the piazza, and the black sky presses in. The moment is surreal.

“Will you help us?” Sterling asks the girl.

“Yes; I’ll do anything. I don’t care what happens. I hate that man with the terrible hands. He didn’t care if Yuri died on the kitchen floor. I’ll shoot him myself.”

“We don’t want you to do that,” Sterling says. “But can you draw a picture of the apartment complex?”

“I’m a bad artist.”

“Just a sketch.”

Sterling takes out a memo pad and pen he keeps in the pocket of his cargo pants. Zabrina puts down the tiny mirror she is using to reapply the bloodred lipstick. Beneath the studded jacket she wears a black shirt with extra-long sleeves that have holes for the thumbs, like leggings for your hands. The sleeves make it awkward to hold the pen; childlike, she clutches it and scratches out the rectangles of the Little City.

“Now show me the apartment.”

She makes an X.

“You’re doin’ real good.” He flips the page. “Give me a layout inside the apartment. Every window and door you remember.”

A picture emerges of Cecilia’s prison.

“Here is where you come in. This is the kitchen,” Zabrina says.

“Where does that hallway go?”

“Sinistra. Going left. Next to it, the bathroom.”

“Where do they keep Dr. Nicosa?”

“It must be here, in the back.”

I get up and pace, while Sterling runs the interrogation and Giovanni throws in a few words of translation. The three of them huddled on the wall in the foggy nighttime chill, creating the outlines of a hostage rescue plan, could almost look like an investigative team.

“A shipment comes in, and the druggies show up for a free fix. How do they know?”

“They receive a text message,” Zabrina says.

“Who sends it?”

“For me, it is my cousin, Fat Pasquale.”

“You’re from Calabria, so you have cousins there. Family.”

“That is correct.”

“They know you.”

“They don’t live there. In Little City. But Fat Pasquale knows me.”

“What happens when you bring your boyfriend, Yuri?”

“Yuri comes with me, so it is fine.”

“You vouch for him and it’s okay?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever brought anyone else?”

“Once, a girl. She paid for the gas.”

“And Fat Pasquale had no problem with that? If you vouch for someone, in they go. No questions asked.” She shrugs. “Why not?”

We see the lights of the oncoming bus split horizontally in the mist.

“Do they check for weapons?” I ask. “Before you go inside?”

“Not me,” says Zabrina. “Because I am family.”

We are not the only ones on the ride back to Siena. It turns out a group of English tourists has come over to Monteriggioni for the little festival. They ask how we liked it, and we say fine. Zabrina falls asleep next to Sterling with his arm around her shoulders.

THIRTY-SIX

We intercept Nicosa at his morning swim. Despite the alluring nothingness of sunlight on clear water, the pool holds no appeal. Sterling and I are ready to engage; our minds are working twenty-four, forty-eight hours ahead.

“We know where your wife is and how to get her out. But you need to hire professionals,” Sterling says. “You need us.” “Who?” asks Nicosa, toweling off. “You and the bartender?” “No, sir. Oryx, the security outfit we work for. Chris and I could not execute an operation this size alone.” “What size operation are you talking about?” “There are a couple of ways to go, but each one involves manpower and hardware. It’ll be expensive.” “I’ve been there before, in El Salvador.” “This will be kinda different from protecting coffee beans.” Nicosa, wary of a sell job, lights a cigarette and moves toward the pool house — more like a CEO considering coffee futures than a desperate husband.

“Why can’t you just go in and get her out?” “Think of it this way,” Sterling explains. “You know the Taliban?” “Not personally.” “You know how they operate in Afghanistan. Without mercy, trust me. Rescuing your wife being held captive in Little City by ’Ndrangheta is like trying to spring someone from a Taliban prison compound.” “Sorry, I don’t see the connection.” “You have to get inside an armed fortress protected by a close-knit, fanatical local population,” I explain. “And then you have to get her and your operatives safely out.” “Sir?” Sterling looks straight into Nicosa’s eyes. “Please believe me — this is not the time to fuck around.” “Just because you tell me you can do it, why should I put my faith in you?” I am losing patience. “We got a lucky break with Zabrina. We knew Cecilia is alive, but now we know exactly where she is being held.” “As of the time Zabrina saw her in Calabria,” Sterling reminds us. “This thing is like rotten meat. Each day that goes by, it becomes more spoiled. You keep letting time run on, and we can’t guarantee you’ll even recognize your wife when we bring her back. That’s the truth as I’ve seen it.” Sterling’s candid delivery finally gets to Nicosa. He slips on a white terry robe, takes a quick hit off the cigarette, and decides.

“Let’s go upstairs,” he says.

The deep voice coming from the speakers in the twelve-sided tower belongs to “Atlas,” the handle for the crafty boss at Oryx whom I have never met. I picture him in a fake wood-paneled office in their covert warehouse outside Heathrow Airport, but he could be anywhere in the world. The theatrical Welsh accent is the same as when he called to offer Sterling the mission that took him out of London — although, come to think of it, Atlas could be putting on the persona to disguise his identity. They love pulling that crap. It doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, Nicosa is buying the services of a private army that will materialize at the right time and in the right place, with extreme prejudice.

“Not only does ’Ndrangheta have an infinite number of boy lookouts, but also, quite frankly, their best defense is the fact that they have your wife entombed inside a living maze of a thousand civilian apartments,” Atlas intones. “Negotiation has failed. Despite all this endless macho posturing, there is a point when the bad guys actually do become fatigued, and then the application of force is a reasonable alternative.” “That’s what I have been saying.” Nicosa, still wearing the robe, says in the direction of the speakerphone. “Go in and get her out.” “We could go full-on tactical,” Atlas agrees. “Would you like to know what that would look like?” “I’d like to know what I’m buying, yes.” “Understood. We would execute before first light, when the suspects are asleep or drugged out, or at best, generally unfocused. Using the advantage of surprise, we quickly defeat their lookouts, move in fast and locate the victim. In and out in less than two minutes.” “Killing everyone who gets in your way?” “There will be casualties. Not ours.” “You sound very certain.” “I am certain, Mr. Nicosa.” “How do you know Cecilia won’t be — Come si dice? — ” “Collateral damage? Has Sterling told you about his experience and training?” “No, sir,” Sterling answers.

He is sitting ramrod straight beside me on the leather couch, both of us looking FBI-ish and military in boots and jeans. Outside it is another summer day in Tuscany.

Atlas invites him to explain.

“In Delta Force,” Sterling says, “we have a training exercise they call the shoot house. The walls are made of ballistic material that will stop bullets, and they can be moved around so the configuration changes every time out. On initiation there would be a flash-bang — that’s a little bomb that gives off noise and smoke to distract the suspects. Then a team of three or four will enter, and it’s their job to take out the targets. The targets are paper cutouts of men, like shooting targets, okay? So they rush the door and take up positions, making sure they’re not crossing fields of fire. The first guy in is always right. You follow his lead — go where he’s not. There can be no missed shots,” Sterling adds. “All bullets accounted for.” Nicosa is unimpressed. “So? Target practice with paper dummies.” “There is a bit of a complication. There’s always one living body in the shoot house, and you never know where he will be. Maybe sitting there on the couch. That’s your victim, the one you’re not supposed to kill. First out, it’s the unit commander, then we all trade off with our teammates — being the one sitting on the couch, live ammunition whizzing past your head. It’s like if Ana and I burst in here and you’re at that desk, and we let loose busting out those windows with real bullets. And you just sit there. That’s how much you have to trust your buddies. It’s the point of the exercise, really.” For the first time since I’ve known him, Nicosa is struck silent.

After a moment Atlas says, “All right?” Nicosa shakes his head and shouts at the speakerphone. “No! It’s not all right! Shooting crazy guns with my wife on the couch!” Atlas’s voice is bemused. “I thought not. Would you care to hear another alternative?” He waits and continues. “The most reliable way to rescue your wife would be to use human intel.” “No guns?”

“Yes, guns.”

“They still ain’t gonna just hand her over,” Sterling says.

“It means getting tactical assets inside the apartment,” I explain. “Without using deadly force. We enter the apartment, locate the room where Cecilia is being held, and use force if necessary to get her out.” “How do you get those soldiers, fighters, whatever they are, inside the apartment with nobody seeing?” “Because they don’t look like soldiers,” Sterling says. “They look a hundred percent like drug addicts. They’ll be posing as friends of the little girl, Zabrina — the one who came lookin’ for Giovanni. She vouches for them. They get in.” “Will she do this?” Nicosa wonders.

“Zabrina has something special we can use to our advantage — a deep abiding hatred toward the Puppet for using her boyfriend as a test dummy. He gave the kid a high dose of heroin that almost killed him,” I say. “Cecilia saved her boyfriend’s life.” “You’re willing to use this girl, just like that?” “She knows the risks. She’s from the south, she understands revenge, and she wants it. My company believes infiltration by our operatives with her help is the best course,” Atlas says.

“Do it.”

“Good. The mission must be completed within the next thirty hours,” Atlas adds. “Before your wife is moved to another location.” “Just one question,” Nicosa says. “How do you plan to get Cecilia out?” “No worries. That’s why you hire Oryx,” Atlas tells him. “Peace of mind.” The Oryx team assembled outside London, secreted in a nondescript industrial building near the airport. Because they are often hired to get people out of impossible situations — reporters held by North Korea, or a Red Cross ship hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia — there are many hostage rescue scenarios in the Oryx playbook to which they can quickly turn.

The accuracy of Zabrina’s drawing could not be trusted; they needed to update schematics of Little City, particularly the roofs. For this, they used Google Earth, and from there worked with an engineer, using the overhead views to computer-generate three-dimensional drawings of the buildings.

The housing project had been built according to low-cost government standards, each pod exactly alike. They first considered the vast underground basement as an escape route for Cecilia and their operatives, but Sterling, who would be the strategic commander, did not like the possibility of being trapped. The answer to Nicosa’s question — once we were in, how would we get Cecilia out? — became a point of heated argument until a compromise was reached. There would be a diversion, and the victim would be removed to a point of safety hundreds of miles away.

Inside the hangar, the layout of the apartment had been hastily constructed. They rehearsed the breech. They knew where the front door was, how it opened to the kitchen, and the hallway that led to the back bedrooms. If they determined that Cecilia was not on the premises, they would abort. Atlas called the abbey early on the morning the team was to leave for Italy. All that remained was for Nicosa to wire the money, and we were good to go.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Moments after getting the green light, I hurry from the sweet-pea bedroom, down the marble steps, and run smack into Dennis Rizzio.

He eyes the rucksack and field boots. “Slow down, Ana. Where’re you off to?”

“Dennis! What are you doing here?”

We face each other in a cube of morning light between the stairs and the main quarters. Dennis, large enough to block the sun, is wearing a somber blue suit and not about to give way. Behind him lies the steamy flower garden, and farther back, in the hot gravel courtyard, four American FBI agents standing at the ready beside two idling black sedans.

“I’m looking for your brother-in-law. Is he on the property?”

“What’s going on?”

“I have a warrant for his arrest.”

“What for?”

“We’ve obtained new evidence — enough to charge him with smuggling cocaine into the United States.”

“How did this happen?”

“Well, we had a little excitement in the port of Pittsburgh. The Bureau’s had a vessel owned by the Spectra Chemical Company under surveillance for some time. Spectra, we discovered, is part of a layered business syndicate going back to ’Ndrangheta, which uses the vessel to conceal drugs in bulk cargo. But it didn’t come together until Special Agent Mike Donnato in the L.A. field office put the cargo in the ship next to your brother-in-law. Based on that, he initiated a joint task force request by DEA and the FBI for Customs to do a red alert inspection.

“A Coast Guard cutter went out to escort the Spectra ship, but it ignored repeated orders to stop. The Guard sent a helicopter. The Spectra ship reversed direction. The chopper followed in pursuit, and the bozos started throwing stuff overboard. Ultimately the Coast Guard removed eight people off the ship and seized 4,558 pounds of cocaine with a street value of $61 million. The cocaine was tucked away inside sacks of coffee. It’s Nicosa’s coffee.”

Nicoli Nicosa will be arrested, today or tomorrow; it hardly matters when. Foremost on my mind right now is that every minute going by is making me later to meet Sterling and Chris at the Walkabout Pub. The strategic clock to recover Cecilia is ticking. We can’t afford a celebrity takedown right now, involving lawyers and the press.

“Can you delay the warrant?”

“Gee, honey, I don’t think so. There’s a steady stream of coke flowing from Colombia to Naples to the Midwest — and we’d kind of like it to stop.”

I keep striding toward Giovanni’s car, fast-forwarding every angle I can think of to deflect this now, and coming up blank.

“Good morning,” I say to the American agents.

“Good morning, ma’am,” one answers, politely blocking the path. “Do you mind holding up a minute?”

“Sure. Not at all.”

I turn back. Dennis is waiting in a patch of shade with a disapproving look.

“Who are you trying to kid?” he says.

Unshouldering the rucksack, I let it drop to the ground.

“I’ve been briefed by Mike Donnato on the task force with DEA concerning smuggling routes through the port of Pittsburgh,” I say. “I didn’t think it would unwind this quickly.”

“It’s not a good play for you to try to protect Nicosa,” Dennis advises.

“That’s not it. We found his wife. She’s alive.”

“Thank God!” Dennis says with genuine relief. “That’s great! Really good news. Where?”

“Captive in a ’Ndrangheta stronghold in Calabria.”

“That’s where you’re going — with the unauthorized use of force?”

“This operation has nothing to do with us. Nicosa hired Oryx, the private military company, to get her out.”

“Well, he can afford it.”

“We have good intel. We’ve got a source who—” Dennis holds up a palm. “Don’t say another word.”

“We’ve exhausted every resource. Negotiation failed. We can’t go to the police. The Bureau’s hands are tied—”

Dennis displays two palms. “I can’t hear this, please!”

“Sorry.”

“The timing is rotten,” he says, removing folded documents from a coat pocket. “But the evidence is solid. The cocaine was buried inside bulk quantities of raw coffee beans with the generic label Bravo Beans, traveling on board a container ship owned by the Spectra Chemical Company. Special Agent Mike Donnato requested that the DNA of Bravo Beans be tested by Quantico, and they found a match to an arabica variety only grown by Nicosa’s company. Bravo Beans is a front, but a sophisticated one. They had all the right bills of lading, invoices, layers of falsification, everything.”

“And the scientific evidence is conclusive?”

“You’re asking the right person,” he says self-mockingly. “In seventh-grade science we had to make DNA out of Life Savers. My mom did it for me.” He glances at the documents. “There’s something called ‘class III chitinase LR-7, signal peptidase complex subunit SPD35.’ I believe it’s a gene that makes it possible for the coffee plant to pollinate a couple of times a year, so that it produces more coffee. It’s a biologically engineered gene unique to this particular brand. They created a new plant. Nicoli Nicosa was responsible.”

Nicosa has appeared in the doorway. Despite the pressed white shirt and tailored trousers, he looks like hell, deprived of sleep and racked with anxiety.

“That’s a lie. I had nothing to do with it.”

“Let’s just take it easy, Mr. Nicosa,” Dennis advises.

“My late partner, Sofri, is the one who created that gene. He was the first to crack the genome of the coffee plant. He deserves the credit.”

“He can have all the credit in the world,” Dennis says.

“Are you here, like Il Commissario, to accuse me of murdering my wife? If so, I can assure you, because I heard her voice on the phone, you will not find her in a barrel full of lye.”

“Glad to hear it,” says Dennis. “But the lab in Rome hasn’t gotten started on that yet. They’re not even in possession of the evidence.”

“Why not? The provincial police secured the site.”

“Between Siena and Rome there are a million footsteps. My name is Dennis Rizzio, FBI legal attaché,” he goes on, crisply offering Nicosa the papers. “Sir, on behalf of the U.S. government, I have a warrant for your arrest. As a federal officer, I have jurisdiction when it comes to crimes committed in the United States, and in this case the charge is smuggling cocaine into the cities of Pittsburgh, Columbus, and Chicago.”

Nicosa glances at the papers. “Come in from the sun,” he suggests.

Dennis needs to pat Nicosa down, and I advise my brother-in-law to accede. This accomplished, we follow him into the kitchen. In synch with Dennis now, I place myself between the suspect and any potential weapons of heavy pots or knives. Glancing at the clock, I see that I am now seventeen minutes behind schedule.

Nicosa offers a cold drink.

Dennis isn’t playing. “Thank you, no. Best you should call your lawyer and get your affairs together here, in case things are delayed while you’re in custody in Rome, as they surely will be.”

Giovanni comes into the kitchen, free of the crutch, walking just on the soft cast.

“Why are you going to Rome, Papa?”

“This man is from the FBI. He needs to talk to me.”

“About what? Why did he say you are in custody?”

I warn him, “Giovanni, this is not for you.”

“He’s innocent,” cries the boy.

“Go upstairs. Go see your friends,” Nicosa says tiredly.

“He doesn’t do anything bad!”

Dennis says, “You’re a good kid, standing up for your dad. But this is out of your arena. Partirlo solo e lasciarlo va.”

“I know he doesn’t. I saw.”

“You saw what?”

My cell phone is vibrating. “That’s Sterling. He’s waiting in Siena. Nicoli, please, just go with Agent Rizzio now.”

“When the man they call the Puppet came into my room,” Giovanni says.

Nicosa gives a cry of pain. “Basta! Chiudere tu ora!”

“In the hospital,” Giovanni insists. “I heard everything.”

“How is that possible? You were in a coma.”

“I was coming out of it. I could see and hear. I saw what happened, Papa.”

Looking back, I realize he is talking about the twenty minutes or so when Cecilia and I were in the basement, eating potato chips and garlic mayonnaise. The nurse saw the first signs of returning consciousness and tried to call, but there was no cell reception in the basement.

“Tell them what kind of man you are,” Giovanni says to his father in English.

Nicosa begs, “Please!” and gropes for a jacket lying across a chair. “I am ready to go.”

“No! Don’t arrest him! Listen. This freak came into my room. I could see him. I could smell him. My father was there. He told my father that if he did not cooperate, even worse things would happen. My father said, Non lo farò! Non mai di nuovo!”

“Why did he say that? What did he promise never to do again, Giovanni?” Dennis asks.

“Because they beat me up and he didn’t want it to happen again. Because of drugs I fall down in the shower … I am almost killed in the street … I almost die from drugs, and so he refused.” He looks at his father, tears streaming freely down reddened cheeks. “He refused! I never told anyone what I heard,” he whispers. “I swear.”

“That’s enough,” Nicosa says quietly.

“No, Papa. Tell them what happened.”

“Right in my own kitchen, I am crucified. My blood is on the walls!”

“Tell them.”

“It is revolting.”

Dennis says, “There’s nothing you can say we haven’t heard before.”

“I apologize to this man,” Nicosa admits through gritted teeth. “I show respect. But still I say that I want nothing more to do with this business of cocaine because I see what it has done to my son. For his sake, I have to stop the whole thing. All of it. Cosimo Umberto accepts this. He understands a father protects his son. And then he asks that I show proper repentance. To ’Ndrangheta, you see. For this, he urinates into a plastic cup and tells me to get on my knees and drink.”

Giovanni clenches his fists. “But he refuses! My father refuses!”

“If I drank, it would mean nothing. If I didn’t drink, it would be the same result. There was no way out. They were never going to let me or my family go. Things were good for them, using my coffee shipments. I had agreed to that under force of threat. And on top of it, I paid pizzo for the privilege! They wanted everything to stay the same. When I refused, Cosimo Umberto left the hospital room. I thought I had prevailed. But then they took Cecilia. Still, I was arrogant. I believed we could get her back by the usual means … until they murdered Sofri. Then I saw that I had lost everything. Things will go on as they are. I am sorry, Giovanni. Sorry you have me as your father.”

Nicosa takes the boy into his arms. Giovanni sobs against his shoulder.

“I thought you didn’t love me.”

Nicosa’s fingers grip his son’s hair. “What insanity is that?”

Ruthless and lawless as the mafias are, in a weird way, they are the only ones to depend on in a world of betrayals. I am sorry — sorrier and sadder than I can express at that moment in the abbey kitchen — that Cecilia, her husband, and their son became so isolated and distrustful, they turned to the enemy instead of to each other. That’s the insanity.

“I thought they took Mama for a hostage because if they took me, you would not pay the ransom.”

“I love you.” Nicosa rocks him. “Ti voglio bène, ti voglio bène, non era mai qualunque domanda.” He looks over the boy’s head at Dennis. “Now you see my humiliation.”

“Dennis?” I say. “Can we talk?”

We walk outside to the courtyard.

“We need time. We’re on the verge of getting Cecilia back. Can you keep Nicosa under house arrest? Thirty-six hours is all I ask.”

Rizzio scans the open gate and unprotected boundaries of the abbey.

“Security will be a bitch.”

“Put him in the tower.”

Dennis smiles at the thought. “You know this whole thing started because of an egg fight?”

“You lost me.”

“The massacre in London. Your photo popping up on the bad guys’ network. Even your sister’s abduction. I’m serious, there was an egg fight in Calabria between two clans of ’Ndrangheta — the Ippolitos and the Barbettis — that has resulted in over a dozen murders that we know of.”

“How does it tie in to London?”

“It was a birthday party for the Ippolito family. That’s why they targeted the restaurant. We traced the cell phone calls to the shooters from Calabria. The calls originated from leaders of the Barbetti clan in a town called San Luca, where family feuds go on for decades. This one started out at one of these little carnivals, with kids throwing eggs. The enemy comes back throwing fireworks. Now two young men are dead, and the revenge killings commence — over twenty years and three countries, including a shoot-out in Germany where four people are killed. The Ippolitos left to escape the warfare, but it followed them to London.”

“Who tipped off the Barbettis?”

“We think it was Martin Barbetti, the owner of the restaurant,” Dennis says, a pained expression crossing his face.

“But?”

“But we can’t find him. He disappeared.”

Poor fawning, obedient Martin. He will never be found, unless someone initiates a sweep of the English countryside for tanks of lye. I pick up my rucksack with a questioning look at the FBI legat.

“Tell me when it’s over,” Dennis says. “Just don’t get caught.”

THIRTY-EIGHT

Somewhere on the southern coast of France, a Volkswagen hatchback is stolen. Later that night it will arrive in Siena, driven by a young Serbian woman operative whose combat name is Delilah.

Over the next few hours, the Oryx team will continue to infiltrate Italy, entering the country by different routes. This is to avoid being tagged by the mafia rats who have day jobs as customs agents. As a further precaution, the team will never be together at the same time and place. Being former military, they are trained in exactitude; once the whistle blows, it is as if their body clocks are locked into synch. At 11:48 p.m., when Delilah makes initial contact with Zabrina at the wine bar, the former Special Forces explosives expert, combat name Ripper, who lent us the flat in London, is touching down at Reggio di Calabria airport, at the very tip of the mainland.

The trickiest part was finding an operative who could pose as a drug addict friend of Zabrina’s. Atlas decided she should be young and female, and came up with the Serbian woman who stole the Volkswagen, who has been through so many wars she can sleep during a gun battle. Her task is to have Zabrina vouch for her so that she can gain entry to the apartment. Once inside, she will locate Cecilia and transmit that information to Sterling, who will oversee the operation from a mobile command center.

Zabrina is the wild card, as Delilah discovered the first time they met, at the wine bar in the Medici fortress. We needed them to be seen together by witnesses who could verify that the two are tight. When Delilah showed up she said in English, “I just got in from Florence,” and Zabrina responded correctly: “I love Florence.” While she poured wine, Delilah chilled at the bar. Later, they danced with some Brits who were high on amphetamines, boasting about having dropped “the world’s strongest legal party pill.” The club lights flashed, music pounded, and Zabrina disappeared with the English boys. Delilah spent the night in the Volkswagen, searching for her new best friend, who had ended up in Quinciano, eighteen kilometers away. The pills were legal in England — if you happened to be a veterinarian. They contained an anti-worming drug used on animals. “Blew my head off,” Zabrina explained.

We wanted to believe Zabrina was trainable. She seemed to enjoy playacting; it appealed to her exaggerated sense of self. We ran through techniques I learned at the FBI Academy — role-plays, in which Sterling was the Puppet. When he grabbed her forcefully, shouting, “Who is this new little piggy, and why should I let her in?” Zabrina forgot it was an exercise and started to cry. Another time she wanted to know when we would give her a gun. Wasn’t she supposed to shoot the Puppet?

Sterling reported to Atlas that the girl was too unstable to carry a mission in which the lives of both the victim and Oryx employees were at risk. We considered ditching the entire approach and going back to all-out tactical, but then her cousin, Fat Pasquale, texted to say a new shipment of cocaine was in. The timing was right. Atlas decided we were “green to go,” but insisted that we stick to the plan and play it inside the apartment. If we tried an assault in the tightly packed complex, we could not contain the danger to civilians. He assigned Chris as backup firepower. Working with a stopwatch, we calculated that all we needed from Zabrina was thirty seconds of rationality.

From that time on, Delilah stuck close — did not even allow Zabrina to go to the bathroom alone — and kept her clean and sober, except for a couple of Percodan for abdominal pain, until they got into the Volkswagen for the drive to Calabria. I hopped a commercial flight to Reggio di Calabria. Sterling and Chris had already left Siena in the mobile command unit — a van outfitted with tactical video allowing them to see several actions taking place at once; a Cougarnet communication system working on an encrypted FM signal; weapons; cash; phony passports; changes of clothes; ammunition; medical pack.

• • •

Immediately on arrival there is an obstacle. When Zabrina and Delilah, covertly trailed by Chris, reach Little City and cross the bridge to the far sector, they are stopped by a rambunctious block party taking place in the courtyard between two divisions of the housing unit. Several hundred people in undershirts, shorts, housedresses, and bathing suits are carrying on — grilling food, drinking, dancing, and fighting. Children are running wild. When Zabrina and Deliah appear, a silent alarm seems to ripple through the population; heads turn and eyes slide their way as they continue to the apartment.

Little kids scramble over junkies stoned out on the steps; an encouraging sign that it is business as usual, until they discover that Fat Pasquale isn’t there. At the store? Out murdering someone? Who knows? Lounging on the folding chair, keeping watch over who is permitted to enter the pharmaceutical lab, is a different obese guy, wearing a bandanna around his head and slicing a cantaloupe into quarters on top of a cooler with a very big knife. Zabrina explains in southern dialect that she is Fat Pasquale’s cousin. He looks at Delilah — big-boned, big-chested. Sunglasses perched on a baseball cap; bushy black ponytail. Fake plastic Louis Vuitton rucksack. Almond eyes. Inviting smile. Skintight jeans.

“Who is this?”

“A friend from the university.”

“You vouch for her?”

“I vouch for her.”

Without getting up, a wedge of cantaloupe stuck in his mouth like an obscene grin, he sticks a foot out and pries the door open with dirty toes.

“Bullrider, we’re at yellow,” Delilah murmurs into the transmitter under the cap, meaning they’re at the last position of cover and concealment. The last point at which they could still turn around and nobody would know they were here.

The kitchen may be exactly as Zabrina described it — the tulip tiles, the sink where the woman chopped tomatoes — but the Puppet is not at the table. Instead there is another joker fooling with the white powder and syringes, and a terrified porcino who gets up and runs. The dealer reaches for a shotgun propped against a chair. Delilah assassinates him with a single shot from a silencer-equipped Beretta. She draws a weapon from a hidden compartment in the rucksack, pulling on infrared goggles, moving down the hall, trusting that Chris, thirty seconds behind them, has taken out the guy with the cantaloupe.

Just like in the shoot house, the first one in is always right. Delilah, in the lead, saves the porcino’s life by shoving him into the bathroom and shouting for him to get down and shut up. Then she is at the locked bedroom door, behind which the infrared image shows a human figure.

“Bullrider, I see the hostage!” Delilah says. “What is the order?”

“Move to green and execute,” Sterling answers from the command unit in the van.

Chris sets a charge and they blow the door to Cecilia’s room.

Sterling, parked a block from Little City, copies Delilah’s report that they have breeched, and conveys the order to execute to two other operatives who are stationed in a warehouse several miles away, where a light helicopter has been standing off — the team having agreed at the training run in England that airlifting the victim to safety was the best way to get her out. The warehouse doors open, and the little bird rolls out on skids, rotors already turning. Within fifteen seconds it is airborne.

At the same time, Ripper, who has been enjoying a panino in a café across from the van, leaves the table and ambles toward an alley, where he punches a number on a cell phone. As he passes, a small box clamped to a gas line fizzles and explodes with an unremarkable pop.

Delilah and Chris rush the bedroom, finding Cecilia curled up in a corner, shivering like a dog, her arms covering her head. They pull her to her feet and say the prearranged words:

“Nicoli Nicosa sent us. We’re going to get you out.”

Cecilia’s face screws up and she makes sounds. She is trying to cooperate but can hardly walk. Chris lifts her onto his shoulder.

“We’re in control of the hostage and coming out,” Delilah reports as they exit the front door of the apartment.

Here there was always a problem. We could figure no way out of the apartment except the way they came in—but there would be no time to check whether the planned escape route was clear. Despite our misgivings, that job had to be done by Zabrina. As soon as Chris defeated the lookouts, she was to exit the apartment, turn right, enter a dead-end hallway, and open the door to the roof.

Chris and Delilah get through the front door of the apartment with twenty seconds to make it to the point of contact with the helicopter — past tenants and junkies potentially clogging the second-floor walkway. But these people have witnessed too many mafia shootings to hang around and gawk. When they see the man with the bloody melon rind smile slumped in the chair, and hear sirens from the gas explosion, they scatter.

Farther down, Zabrina is faithfully at her post, holding the door to the roof. Chris lopes up the steps with Cecilia draped around his neck in a fireman’s carry. All three break out of the stairwell to the roof and open sky as the helicopter appears and stabilizes.

Chris lowers Cecilia to her feet. In the whirlwind of debris she sees the figure of Zabrina in the midst of the pandemonium — a hopeless drug addict, who somehow, impossibly, miraculously, came back to this hellhole to save her.

An operative is lowered on a rope. There is a harness at the end. Cecilia sags against Delilah as they force her legs into the straps.

“Her too!” she murmurs.

Zabrina, stunned by the noise and impact, tries to hold her long hair back from whipping painfully across her eyes. Voiceless in the earsplitting drone, Cecilia struggles and reaches toward the girl.

“Take her! She’s coming, too!”

Chris shouts, “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of her.”

They muscle Cecilia into the harness and buckle it. The operative places his body over hers.

“No! Wait!”

“You’re safe! I’ve got you!” he shouts as the chopper lifts and banks away with the two of them still dangling.

Zabrina watches as they’re dragged across the sky. Delilah remembers her wide-eyed stare of awe, met by Cecilia’s downward look of anguish. Without hesitating, the two Oryx operatives were already securing a rope to an iron stanchion they’d identified on Google Earth, and tossed it over the side of the roof. It will be easy to rappel down and become lost in the confusion created by the gas line explosion. Delilah is already over the top. Chris is calling to Zabrina to get her ass over there, when the roof door bangs open and Fat Pasquale lumbers out, followed by a dozen half-grown boys who spring ahead like wolves.

“Vieni qui!” Chris yells at Zabrina. “Now!”

Slowly Zabrina hooks her hair behind her ears with a dreamy gaze, as if it were a summer night and she was standing at a fountain with her friends.

“Now, you stupid bitch!”

“I will be okay,” she says with a soft wave of the hand. “I am family.”

One quiver of hesitation and Chris would have gone back, but she emphatically turns from the route of escape. She makes her choice. He disappears over the edge. One jerk from below and the rope is unloosed and drops to the street.

The helicopter is gone, and with it, the wind, the whole episode. Heat rises off the tarred rooftop. The sky is bleached white, empty. Fat Pasquale keeps coming, weapon sighted. Zabrina fingers the plastic bags of powder she snatched off the kitchen table, safe inside her pockets. She gives an innocent shrug, as if she, too, is a victim in this, but he keeps on coming, up to point-blank range, until he is close enough for her to see the ripples in his sweat-soaked forehead, and look into the cold eyes of her cousin.

Zabrina smiles and says, “It’s me.”

THIRTY-NINE

When I arrive at the airport in Reggio di Calabria, the last stop on the mainland of Italy, I am met by a barrel-chested, forty-year-old Englishman wearing sailor’s whites. He has a wind-burned face and sun-bleached red hair going up his arms. We drive urgently, almost wordlessly, to the harbor. Once we had identified ourselves as Oryx, there was little interest on either side in getting-to-know-you. The only thing that matters is the clock.

There is plenty of action at the terminal where hydrofoils and ferries make the twenty-minute crossing to the island of Sicily. It being the high season, the ferries run 24/7. This is good, as the plan is to blend in with the boat traffic. At a private marina farther up the seaside promenade, we board the Miramare, a seventy-foot megayacht chosen by Atlas for its speed and large rear deck — a good target for a helicopter put-down. There are two other Oryx people as crew, a full-scale operating room with an Italian surgeon and a nurse, a one-hundred-horsepower tender in case of the need for evasive action, and a cache of arms. It takes forty minutes to clear the harbor and another hour to reach cruising distance from the coast. Once the navigation system confirms that we are at the coordinates, the skipper cuts the engines and we put out fishing lines, like any well-heeled party on holiday. Moments later, we receive the radio message from Sterling that the helicopter is on its way.

Later, from the vantage point of a weathered redwood deck on the California coast, it will strike me that these events could never have taken place on our side of the world, not in the easygoing Pacific Ocean — lazy, and flat as a sheet. Not in America, where everything is known. I was something of a baffled passenger on that mystery cruise, just as I had often been mystified by the secrets of Siena. Now, standing on the rear deck of the Miramare, feeling the vibration of the motors and staring at the foamy wake as it fans out and is lost, I try to make the pieces of this voyage fit, but ultimately, there is no rational explanation for why, at any minute, a woman who was a stranger, and is now my sister, will come out of the sky at the end of a rope.

But rational things are not what make you cry, and I begin to cry even before the helicopter appears; in fact, as soon as Sterling radios that Cecilia is on the way. Not from the release of emotion even hardened agents feel when a victim is returned to safety — the abducted child back in the arms of the mom — but a calm, almost imperceptible letting go.

When I left my grandfather Poppy’s house to go to college, I had been conditioned to expect that being cared for would always come with a side dish of punishment. One day a pair of new sneakers would appear under the bed, and the next day he would open the door and hit me across the face because I had kissed a boy. Forever after, I wrapped myself in isolation to avoid being smacked. I didn’t know the sentence was of my own making, and that it could be absolved as quietly as a bird flying off a branch.

On the yacht there is nothing but action and noise — slicing rotors, whipping water, angling for position, and radio squawks — but inside me a tranquil space has opened. The side doors of the chopper slide apart and human faces peer out: Cecilia and the other operative, whose body protects hers as they are lowered to the deck. She is hanging limp, and for a gut-squeezing second I think she is dead, but when the crew unbuckles the harness she stands on her own. The operative is winched back up, the helicopter angles away, and Cecilia and I are safe in each other’s arms. The wind mixes our tears and tangles up our hair. I allow my sister into my heart.

The engines catch and the huge vessel kicks up speed, rock-solid and comforting. The nurse and doctor help Cecilia slowly down a flight of polished teakwood steps to a living room suite with enormous windows looking out at the bright green ocean, and a white sectional couch thirty feet long.

Stripped of the helmet and rescue gear, she is almost unrecognizable, as if she’s been in a horrendous car accident. Her face is swollen in uneven contusions. She is filthy, emaciated, with an ugly gap in her front teeth, her lips caked and peeling. The muscles in her arms have atrophied, and everywhere her skin is splotched and bruised. They take her vital signs and say her blood pressure is high and she is dehydrated.

“We’ve got her! She’s here!” I tell Nicosa, and put Cecilia on the phone.

“Sto bène. Ti amo. Com’è Giovanni?”

She speaks in hushed Italian. Nicosa is confined to the abbey under house arrest, but Giovanni is waiting in the small coastal town of Agropoli, where a launch will take him out to the yacht. Cecilia is only able to speak to her husband in two-word sentences. She has no tears, maybe none left.

I sit beside her on the couch while the nurse administers an IV.

Cecilia puts a hand on mine. It sits there, light as a sparrow.

“They left the girl behind.”

“Zabrina?”

“Is that her name?” she murmurs tiredly.

The doctor prepares a syringe and injects it into the IV line. Clear liquid moves through the tube into her bloodstream.

“She’s my patient, and she’s very ill,” Cecilia says, before the dark.

Chris repeated the code words to Atlas in London: “It’s been sorted. We’ve given them the good news.” After setting off the diversionary explosion on the gas line, Ripper, in cleanup position, moving in the opposite direction of the confused crowds, gained entry to the rearmost courtyard of the Little City, where the crack house was situated, and climbed the steps to the roof. There he saw the body of Zabrina Tursi, shot in the chest at close range. Fat Pasquale, balancing heavily on one knee, was attempting to recover the bags of cocaine from her pockets when Ripper took him out with an easy head shot. He lined the pack of boy-criminals who were loyal to Fat Pasquale up against a wall, and made them wait there in the sun while he disappeared down the steps and locked the door to the roof, abandoning them to the buzzing corpses.

FORTY

At first the families come respectfully to the questura. In the cool of the morning, the olive farmer Aleandro, whose uncle had also vanished, meets with thirty others on the steps of the shambling building. Middle-aged, dressed in casual summer clothes, they might have been mistaken for a neighborhood coalition lobbying for more streetlights, except there is something profoundly cohesive about that group — solemn determination on their faces, as opposed to the mixed bag of international tourists mindlessly wandering the sunlit passage between the modern world and the commanding black-and-white medieval cathedral looming in the Piazza del Duomo ahead. The tourists are expecting to be entertained by whatever tale history wants to tell. The families of the “disappeared,” who have come to see the Commissario, have abandoned their illusions.

Rumors of human remains found in a tank of lye in the woods have been around for days, but Sofri’s grotesque murder, which carries the stamp of the mafias, stirs fear and disgust in a town where, despite the divisions of the contrade, much of the population still believed they were free of the influence of criminal networks. Maybe it’s also the nature of a fortress town, where, as Giovanni said, anyone outside the walls is viewed as an enemy, but these few dozen citizens have taken an unprecedented step: to come forward after years of silence to look for answers to the whereabouts of missing loved ones who have gone white shotgun as a result of mafia incursion into the north.

The Commissario receives the families with cordiality. They crowd into his private office and stand humbly on the clean blue carpeting before the authority of flags and certificates. The slim, superior chief of police expresses empathy for their suffering, and then shares some vital information not yet available to the public. The forensic laboratory in Rome, he reports, has determined that the contents in the tank were not human after all, but rather the remains of cows, like the white Chianina cows we had seen on the road to Falassi’s dump site. Disappointed, they have to acknowledge it is common practice for farmers to dispose of the bodies of animals by dissolving them in lye. They accept the Commissario’s condolences for their collective losses, and his wish that they might find some comfort in this news.

Cecilia tells the press that during the ordeal it was her Catholic faith that kept her alive. She now counts eating good food and sleeping in a bed as great blessings. She talks about the power of God’s grace to restore her to her family, and how the upcoming August Palio will bring renewal to the troubled people of Siena.

But after the euphoria comes depression. She is confused about hours and dates. She has an overwhelming fear of going into the city, specifically to the church of Santa Maria di Provenzano where she was snatched — chloroformed, in the traditional way of kidnappings — and quickly carried out, like another fainting victim, to the ambulance that abducted her to Calabria. The offer of a visit to the Oca district, once a haven of security, triggers a panic attack because she insists, irrationally, that we will have to pass that church.

Imprisonment in Calabria has made her panicky inside rooms. Either she shuts down or paces, repeating, “I have to take a walk. I have to get out of here.” She only feels good when she can see the horizon. She takes long walks, past ordinary households and blazing fields of broom and red poppies, observing like a visitor the way people in this part of the world spend their time — tending to aviaries, constructing stone walls. Often I am with her. Sometimes we sleep outside on the chaises by the pool, like schoolgirls on a sleepover. Our pace is gentle; our talk is about small things: chores that need to be done to keep the abbey running and supplied with food and clean laundry. We assume the comfortable roles of providing for men, as if they need more care in the aftermath than we do. But always, underneath, is the deep tone of parting — just when we have begun.

Dennis Rizzio rolls in like a tank, using every threat of prosecution in the legal arsenal to put the squeeze play on Nicosa. He finally agrees to provide information on ’Ndrangheta’s drug routes into the United States in exchange for immunity on the cocaine smuggling charges. In the court of Rizzio, Nicosa’s defiance of the Puppet in Giovanni’s hospital room on behalf of his son was an act of renunciation that absolved him of moral sin. It is win-win for Rizzio. Tasked to infiltrate the mafias, he busted their trade network and came up with a four-star informant. To his credit, the big guy made a big point with SAC Robert Galloway of my role. By the time I receive the call from Donnato that they need my deposition in the conspiracy trial of former FBI deputy director Peter Abbott, I am ready to go home.

Sterling and I say our good-byes to Chris at the Walkabout, with a toast to Muriel Barrett in absentia. Metropolitan Police Inspector Reilly picked her up at her partner Sheila’s cottage in Surrey, and mediated a deal between the British anti-mafia task force and the Italian authorities in which the “sodden old cow,” as Chris put it, would cooperate in providing information on ’Ndrangheta’s bank of cocaine. Muriel will not be prosecuted in Italy as long as she never returns to that country. Banishment somehow seems an appropriate punishment for a crime that happened in a medieval town. The worst part is that her cloud paintings will most likely end up for sale beside the stale cakes in the deranged landlady’s half-dark mercato.

When the bar is littered with empty shot glasses and drained pints, a text comes in on my cell with a link to photographs. The source is Proibito. Untraceable. The photographs show Falassi’s dump site, where we discovered the vat of lye. Instead of an orderly crime scene, marked with tape, tents set up to protect the evidence, and someone standing guard, everything has been torched. Nothing is left of the water tower, the shack, and the half-burned house but piles of charred timber and curled metal. A deliberately set circle of fire has reduced every bit of organic matter to charcoal.

The human remains are lost, never to be identified. Whatever evidence the Chef might have left that could lead to his bosses — records of payment, bank statements or weapons — is gone. Every trace of Falassi’s crimes has been systematically eradicated.

Chris, Sterling, and I huddle around the tiny screen.

“Who did this? The police or the mafias?” “Flip a coin.”

“How long ago?”

“Hard to tell. We could go down there …” “Something still might be recoverable.” “I’m gonna bet,” Sterling says, “that no bone fragments, nothing from the vat, ever made it to the lab in Rome. The story that it was animal remains is a flat-out lie.” Chris leans on the bar. “Whoever did this had knowledge, access, and means. So did whoever sent Ana the pictures. Who do you think that could be?” I have been balancing the cell phone in my palm as if the weight of it could give me the answer. “Let me take a shot.” I punch in a number. Inspector Martini answers. Her voice is noncommittal.

“Are you at work?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Just wanted you to know I’m going home soon.” “Oh,” she says. “That’s too bad. I hope you enjoyed your time in Italy.” “It’s hard to leave such a beautiful country. But luckily I have pictures to remind me.” “I’m glad you will go with good memories,” she replies. “Thanks for all your help. Kisses to your daughter.” “Prègo.”

The two men are watching as I click off the phone.

“It was her. Martini sent the photos. She must have been at the site with the police when they ‘found out’ it was torched.” Chris and Sterling nod, not at all surprised.

“I knew the Commissario was dirty,” I say. “Now he’s succeeded in obliterating the entire investigation. Not only has he wiped out the evidence, but also he’s got Falassi, the only witness, and he could be dead by now, who knows?” “He doesn’t have Falassi, love,” says Chris. “We do.” • •

Instead of heading through the gates of the abbey, we continue a hundred yards up the road and turn into Aleandro and Antonella’s driveway.

“What are we doing here?” I ask.

“The witness is inside,” Sterling says.

“Falassi?”

“Uh-huh.”

“The whole time? After you told me he was taken into custody by the provincial police?” “Yup.”

“Why didn’t you tell me the truth?” “You had no need to know.” “No need to know?”

I stifle the exasperation as Sterling removes three handguns from the trunk of Chris’s Fiat and hands one to me. We go up to the front door of the red-tile-roofed house. It is late and we awaken Aleandro, who appears wearing pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. They exchange words in Italian, and we go down to the basement.

The room has a shiny new deadlock. Aleandro opens the door and turns on the light. We enter with weapons drawn. Inside it is stifling. There are no windows and nothing in the room but the canister where the olive oil is stored, a chair, and a cot, where Marcello Falassi is sleeping naked.

He does not offer any resistance.

“Che ora è?” he asks.

Aleandro tells him it is time. When he puts on jeans and a maroon rayon shirt, he no longer looks like a brute who drives a truck and disposes of bodies, who turns his house into a toxic dump where his wife and mother limp around in the chemical waste of his crimes. All cleaned up — shaved, hair cut short — he looks like a witness, and that is what he will be.

When we had returned to Siena after discovering the vat of lye, between the time I made contact with Dennis Rizzio and when he notified the provincial police, Sterling and Chris had gone back to the campsite to stake out Falassi. Not trusting anyone, even me, they had taken Falassi prisoner for his own protection. While I was slavishly operating within protocol, Sterling was executing the independent covert action necessary to prevent the one link we had to the mafias’ chain of command from escaping, or being compromised by corrupt authorities.

Sterling and Chris had brought Falassi to Aleandro, whose anger at the disappearance of his uncle had been so palpable when we sat at the dining room table. For many years, Aleandro had been waiting for a better day, when the politics were right, to expose the lot of them. He promised Sterling he would hide the witness until the time came to present him to the world. Falassi agreed to become pentito — a penitent who confesses and is therefore forgiven by the Catholic state. For this he would recount everything he had witnessed. The bodies that were brought to be disintegrated. The ones who brought them. And those in charge.

“You were playing me,” I tell Sterling as we handcuff the witness and march him to the car.

“Protecting assets.”

“Chris knew.”

“Course he knew. He was there.” “You trust him, but not me?” “This ain’t about that,” Sterling says.

“What’d you think? I’d leak it to the FBI?” Sterling stops and turns toward me in the chilly night.

“I was protecting you from being put in a compromising position.” “I would not have told Rizzio if it compromised the mission.

There’s a lot of things I don’t tell him, but I tell you everything.” “Okay!” says Sterling, raising his hands in defense.

We put Falassi in the backseat with Chris. We get into the car.

“You know exactly what I’m saying.” I slam the door.

“Kittens!” scolds Chris. “Play nicely. There’s a witness here.” I doubt Falassi is interested in anything except hiding from the mafias for the rest of his life. He agreed to testify that he had taken care of Aleandro’s uncle’s body, and to state that it was the Commissario who gave the order for arrest and disposal. I am hopeful that the momentum of his confessions will encourage Inspector Martini to come forward and identify the Commissario as the one who ordered his police goons to torch the campsite.

I noticed that the only other object in Falassi’s basement room was a Bible.

A few days later Sterling gets the call from Oryx. A Russian billionaire is arriving in London and needs body-guarding for his family. I am surprised when he asks me to partner up.

“It’s an easy gig,” Sterling promises. “We pose as a couple of American tourists. Follow the Russian’s wife and kidniks to Harrods. Keep an eye out while they’re having tea. No worries, Atlas will hire you on a freelance basis. Make some bucks before heading back to L.A. How about it?” If Sterling is trying to make it right after hiding Falassi from me, this isn’t cutting it. I want no part of the old lady hooch, nor am I up for wrangling over the same old issues. After being immersed in the mysteries of Siena, I want something shiny and concrete, like a brand-new apartment that smells of fresh paint, with appliances wrapped in plastic and pristine walls in which nobody has set a nail.

“Appreciate the offer, but I need to get home,” I tell him.

“Sure thing,” he says. “I’ll call when I’m back in the States.” But when we kiss good-bye in the courtyard, with Chris waiting to drive him to the airport in Rome, I honestly don’t know if we will see each other again. Cecilia is waiting sympathetically in the doorway when I hurriedly turn back to the abbey. I don’t want to see Sterling walk away, carrying the black rucksack, once again.

Just before the August Palio, Siena is swollen with visitors, and the sound of the tamburino mixes with human voices — not singing songs, but shouting for justice. When the story breaks that anti-mafia prosecutors have a witness willing to admit that he has been responsible for the disposal of hundreds of bodies killed by the mafias, the thirty or so polite citizens who had turned up in the Commissario’s office and were offered the opportunity to drink his piss, swell to a huge crowd of families and anti-mafia reformers demanding answers.

Siena becomes the scene of a parade considerably less charming than drummers in medieval costumes. Angry marchers pack the narrow streets — many of them young people, as well as relatives carrying snapshots of those who have been taken. They line up outside the questura in the sad hope that Falassi can identify the faces of the loved ones he cremated in acid. Their signs read, ANTI-RACKET and ADDIO, PIZZO (GOOD-BYE, PIZZO), and REFUSO! International TV crews follow. One of the speakers is Nicoli Nicosa: “The government can no longer silence what cannot be silenced,” he says into the cameras. “We have a witness to these diabolical acts. They cannot be hidden any longer.” The marchers pour into Il Campo, where the police have mobilized. I stay on the periphery, a bystander, nothing more. Now it is up to the Italian prosecutors. I do not envy the job of diffusing the turbulent emotions of the marchers — thousands of them, from all over Italy. If the Commissario were not already in custody, the mob would tear him limb from limb. An older woman, well-dressed, wearing a suit and large sunglasses, passes close enough for me to see the photo she is carrying of a smiling young man wearing an earring. Over the picture she wrote in English, “Please help me find him.” On my last night at the abbey, we make El Salvadoran pupusas. It is the kind of time-consuming dish for which you need the hands-on help of a sister. You have to make cornmeal dough from scratch, pork and potato filling, and a topping of marinated carrots and cabbage. I know I will never make it again, unless I make it with Cecilia.

“Nicoli cooked for us while you were gone.” “He’s a good cook.”

We are both wearing aprons, flattening balls of dough into circles with our palms.

“I think you’re wrong about Nicoli,” I tell Cecilia. “He was desperate when you went missing.” “I know.”

“I don’t think you do.”

“And I think you’re wrong about Sterling.” “That’s another case entirely,” I say lightly. “Nicoli was lost without you.” “He spent a lot of money and went through a lot of stress,” she acknowledges.

“Jesus, Cecilia, it’s not like he was buying a car! I can tell you, he was tortured to his soul.” She just laughs.

“You don’t believe he’s capable of really loving you?” “What did he say?” she asks curiously.

“He said, ‘I love my wife.’ He would have done anything to get you back. He would have walked into the line of fire.” “I’m glad,” she intones like a sleepwalker. “Don’t put too much filling in.” My yellow stuffed half moons looked like Play-Doh time in kindergarten.

“Cecilia!” I want to shake her. “Your husband loves you! You have to believe me.” “Like you believe me when I say our father loved you?” “It’s hard when there’s no empirical evidence.” “There is evidence.” She points with a wooden spoon. “In your heart.” “Really? Our father was murdered. I’ll never know how he felt about me. But your husband is here, every day.” She sighs. “Something like this goes so deep, it changes the way you look at life. You never feel right. It never goes away.” “Are you still talking about the other woman?” “Not only her. I have lost my belief,” she says.

We grill the pupusas. The cabbage goes on top. Giovanni and Nicosa come into the kitchen and we eat the pupusas hot with glasses of Pinot Bianco. Giovanni tells me he has decided to put off going to the university for another year.

“Are you sure?” I ask. We are driving back from Siena in the mailbox car, dispatched by Cecilia to get honey and pears for dessert.

“I don’t want to leave my mom.” “That’s very thoughtful, but I don’t think she would want you to miss out on a whole year of school.” “It’s okay; I don’t really know what I want to do.” “What are you thinking about doing?” “You’re going to laugh.”

“Make me.”

“FBI. You’re laughing.”

“It’s a good laugh,” I say. “But in order to apply, you have to be a naturalized citizen.” “I’ll move to America.”

“The FBI requires you to have a college degree.” He thinks about it.

“I can do that,” he says.

Already I am missing the combative teenager; it is bittersweet to see that he is growing up, deferential to his mom and peaceable with his dad. I don’t tell Giovanni about the sacrifice Zabrina Tursi made. At least I can preserve that much of his innocence.

Nicosa still refuses Rizzio’s insistence that the family relocate in exchange for his testimony.

“You can’t stay here,” I tell Cecilia after the honey and pears, when we take our evening walk. “The family is marked.” “As I said, it’s a war. You adjust.” “You people are targets! They’ll get you at a traffic light, Cecilia! They killed seven people in England over an egg fight in Calabria! Why are you so stubborn?” “My husband will never leave Siena. His blood is here. His work is here. He won’t give in. For better or worse, I am with him. Isn’t that what you wanted?” “Your husband is behaving like a horse’s ass.” I stop and grip her shoulders. I look into her troubled eyes. “You’re my sister. I love you. I can’t just leave you in harm’s way.” “I love you, too,” she answers with resignation, and kisses me tenderly on both cheeks.

The following day I fly back to Los Angeles. Cecilia and I do not speak of her marriage again. Nor do I bring up her affair with the Commissario. There are some things even sisters shouldn’t ask.