by April Smith
“Be fair,” Sterling advises. “You’re up against a well-armed criminal organization. You live in a castle, but you’re in the middle of a ground war.”
“What you keep calling a kidnap — it’s all for show, just a game,” Nicosa interrupts impatiently. “They ask for ransom, you pay, they give her back. It’s like a bank robbery. No one gets hurt.”
This has been Nicosa’s stance all along. Sterling remains silent, but his face conveys the message: Let him have his little fantasy.
Nicosa sees this, and it incites him to a fury.
“If I believed otherwise for one minute, I would be on the phone right now to the prime minister of Italy. You don’t think so?”
“I don’t doubt you, sir,” Sterling assures him.
“One phone call to Rome and the military police would take over my wife’s disappearance. But I agree to play their game, because unlike you, I have patience, and I do not like war.”
“I didn’t say I like it,” Sterling says quietly.
“I am sending the clans a message. We are businessmen; we work it out.” Nicosa wipes his forehead, adding, “The president of a company, who kicks a ball like an idiot and almost kills his son.”
His voice cracks and his eyes redden. Mine fill up just watching.
“Let us talk to the private investigator who followed Giovanni,” I suggest. “He can help us understand some things.”
“You can’t. The man is dead.”
“How did he die?”
“I believe it was a stroke. He had a terrible headache, his wife took him to the hospital, and he didn’t come out. He never finished the report,” Nicosa says. “I have what he left on the computer in my office. I’ll get it.”
He seems relieved to have an excuse to leave. As the day breaks open, the kitchen is feeling more and more like a slow-motion hydrogen explosion. Sterling places both elbows on the table and digs his knuckles into his bare scalp.
“Wishing you were back in the field?”
“Not in that field, ma’am, no way. Texas. I’m wishing I was back in Texas, where at least they flat-out shoot you and put you out of your misery.”
I laugh. “They’re pretty good at that in Italy.”
“Man, these folks are into the pain. Christ on a stick! All this bitchin’ and moanin’, until you can’t see straight. He doesn’t like war? Boo-hoo for him. I hate to tell him, but he’s walking a freakin’ minefield.” Sterling stands up from the table with disgust. “First day of deployment, we tell the newbies, ‘If you plan on coming home alive, remember this — there’s a difference between a hard-ass and a dumb ass.’ He truly believes he’s the Man of Steel, the only one who can negotiate with the mafias.”
“I believe Nicosa loves his son, and he’s desperate to get Cecilia back. He needs to be contained, that’s all.”
Sterling shakes his head. “I’ll say this, I’d hate for the guy to take a bullet the size of his ego.”
TWENTY-FIVE
The dead investigator was at least a good dead investigator. His report included phone records, photographs, lists of my nephew’s teachers, friends, and relations living in Siena. Family members alone took up two single-spaced pages. It could be days before we deciphered who was who, and we had no time for that. The surveillance section covered the boy’s activities during ten days over two weeks in January of last year, detailing to the minute when he left the abbey for school and returned through the gates at night.
We looked for patterns. Soccer, practicing the flag for Palio, chilling at the Fontebranda fountain in Oca territory — that was the norm. Then we looked for the exceptions, always more interesting. One jumped out at us: a cluster of encounters with a young Italian woman named Zabrina Tursi. Her photo showed a goth, raven-haired, undernourished university student who worked part-time as a waitress. A copy of a police report showed one arrest for the sale of marijuana, but she was placed on probation because she was a minor at the time.
The dead investigator hired by Giovanni’s parents had discovered his relationship with Zabrina after following him and two male friends to the wine bar where she worked, situated in the Medici fortress near the bus station on the outskirts of town. He observed the subject first being served by Zabrina Tursi and then engaging her in conversation on the patio after the place closed. Two nights later, the young woman appeared at the fountain in Oca territory and made contact with Giovanni. There is a photo of them with other students at a café in the square. At 1:05 a.m., Zabrina and Giovanni left the café and went to her residence, a ten-minute drive outside the walls, where he stayed until 3:45 a.m. Then he returned to the abbey.
The file details Giovanni visiting Zabrina’s residence five times. It bothered me until I realized the association — five was also the number of assignations the FBI recorded between Nicosa and Lucia Vincenzo, La Leonessa, the disappeared drug dealer. Numerology aside, I wondered if Giovanni was subconsciously imitating his father’s public transgressions by flaunting it with a woman who was also dangerous to his health.
Sterling and I drive to Zabrina’s address. It is a decent apartment building in a quiet neighborhood shaded by oak trees. Stacks of terraces with hanging laundry and potted plants face the west. The entrance is down a hill, past the usual fleet of parked motorbikes. Inside the building we get no farther than the vestibule. You have to be buzzed in. “Tursi” is listed on a mailbox with “Kosta” and “Lawrence,” but there is no answer to our ring. The vestibule smells of cigarette smoke and frying meatballs.
Sterling says, “Let’s go.”
“We should wait for the girl.”
“Best bet is to come back later, when she’s likely to be home.”
“You have another idea?”
“I would like to see how his neighbors make that olive oil Giovanni was talking about,” Sterling says.
“Why?”
“Brings me back to summers at home. When I was a kid, my job was snake wrangler. You want to cut the bottom branches of the olive trees to keep the ground clear of rattlesnakes, but they’re crafty. My all-time record was shooting six in one week. Now my folks give ranch tours to tourists, but when we first started planting, it was us, some clay hills, and a couple of Mexicans. Good times. I’m curious how they do it in the old country.”
It’s the blazing hot middle of the day, and most people will be going nowhere, hunkered down behind the shutters. The last place I want to be is sitting in the mailbox car.
“Okay.”
I agree to give it up for an hour. Climbing the hill from Zabrina’s apartment house back to the car, I slip my arm around Sterling’s waist, relieved that he’s able to connect to something besides bad wars and bad dreams.
The olive farm is just past the abbey, beyond a grape arbor and some chicken coops. The house, a two-story stucco building with a red tile roof, would not be out of place in a Los Angeles subdivision, except it is not likely you would find the wife eviscerating chickens, which is what Antonella Calabrese is doing when we show up. She and her husband do not speak English, but her reaction to uninvited guests is nothing but warmth.
She is over sixty, with dry reddish hair and a pleasant face filmed with sweat from hard work in the small alcove in the back of the house. Although scraping entrails into a bucket, she displays that Italian feminine self-respect by wearing pearl stud earrings, a black camisole that bares her arms underneath an apron, and a circular diamond pendant. Three chickens — supermarket clean — are folded up in a roasting pan with three full-feathered bodies to go. “Why would anybody,” she asks Sterling in Italian, “cook just one chicken at a time?”
Not wanting to leave the task unattended (flies are gathering), she calls for Aleandro and leads us to the basement, where he is plastering a wall. Her husband is hearty and weathered-looking, with dark skin and strong forearms, wearing a blue checked shirt splattered with white. His gray eyebrows peak like a horned owl’s. He’s got a broad fleshy nose and a wide smile. Side by side, he and Anto
nella look like brother and sister. Both radiate the grounded, earthbound simplicity we city folks associate with outdoor life.
But it wasn’t always so. Aleandro, we discover, is retired from a long career as an electrical inspector for a government agency, which explains the pleasant home and sense of tranquillity. He is done with it. He has always kept chickens and rabbits, always had olive trees, an organic vegetable garden and grapes, but now, he is proud to say, he and his wife are self-sustaining.
Their olive operation may not be as grand as what Sterling had in mind — it consists of a single windowless basement room, away from light and heat, with sacks full of chemical pellets, curing barrels, and a stainless-steel tank in which they store the oil, which is pressed at a community mill. All of this is fascinating — especially the discussion in Italian of how the Spaniards brought olives to Texas — and I am more than ready to leave, but somehow, by mental telepathy, before she went to finish the chickens, Aleandro and Antonella have agreed that we are not going anywhere until we’ve had something to eat.
We are shepherded upstairs and seated at a heavy dining room table with a white lace runner. Behind us is a dark wood cupboard jammed with glassware. Antonella comes through the brick archway of the kitchen, carrying a welcome carafe of water. The kitchen has a vaulted wooden ceiling that mocks older Tuscan architecture. I am antsy and uncomfortable. They are talking a blue streak that I can’t understand, and I am wondering if this will turn into a tedious lunch. I just want to get back to Zabrina, hoping she can shed light on Giovanni and his dealings, if she has anything to say that might factor into Nicosa’s alleged drug connection and Cecilia’s abduction.
No, it isn’t lunch. Antonella returns with the coffee and then bread and preserves made with fruit from their orchard — the most full-bodied, jewel-like jelly I have ever tasted. Unknown to me, the conversation around the dining room table has taken a much darker turn than Spanish olives. Sterling has been asking questions, that much I can tell. After a point, Aleandro’s powerful hand curls into a heavy fist. His wife’s eyes are downcast. They can only be talking about the mafias.
When we are shown to the door, we are given a gift — a recycled Sprite bottle containing their precious homemade olive oil, emerald as a mossy stream. Sterling and Aleandro shake hands and then embrace with such force it almost makes me cry. Something powerful has taken place between them.
When we are back on the road and walking toward the abbey, Sterling is hyper. He tells me that the Calabreses heard through town gossip that Cecilia is missing.
“He gave us a lead where she might be. First and foremost, you don’t have to come. I can handle it solo, spare you the upset.”
“Whatever in hell it is you’re talking about, I’m coming.”
Olives, as Sterling well knows, are cured in sodium hydroxide. It reduces the bitterness, and if you soak them long enough, it will turn green olives black. He had a hunch they might be doing it the same way in Italy, and he was right. Aleandro has the pellets in his basement; he knows all about the chemical and who supplies it and where it’s stored.
Another name for sodium hydroxide is lye.
At Sterling’s empathetic prodding, Aleandro had disclosed that he, too, has a relative who is one of the “disappeared”—an uncle who also worked as an electrical inspector for the government. The uncle submitted a poor report on a water plant and did not come home from work one night. The police did nothing. Aleandro’s family did nothing. They don’t speak of it; five years later, they are still afraid.
All over the world, from Mexico to Albania, criminal networks dispose of victims using lye. It is a caustic metallic base used in manufacturing all kinds of corrosive products, like paint strippers. When pure pellets of sodium hydroxide are combined with water and heat, a reaction occurs that chews up the chemical bonds that normally keep tissues intact. The corpse dissolves into a pinkish liquid, occasionally leaving bone husks that are as fragile as cicada shells.
Aleandro had given Sterling directions to his own supplier of fertilizer and chemicals, including industrial lye. The company is called Spectra and is headquartered in Milan, but the local distributor operates out of a town nearby called Monte San Stefano.
MONTE SAN STEFANO, ITALY
TWENTY-SIX
Monte San Stefano is an hour to the south — halfway to Rome. From the turnoff it is slow going on a two-lane road that coils through clay hills, only to discover that Monte San Stefano barely exists. There is a shoe outlet and a truffle museum, both closed for lunch. Inquiries at a gas station five kilometers past yield zero results, until the nice lady behind the counter asks to see the grimy paper on which Aleandro carefully printed the address, and recognizes the name of Marcello Falassi — a truck driver who makes deliveries for Spectra.
“She said he lives a couple of kilometers back that way,” Sterling explains as we exit the store. “When we see a big white house, we turn left and keep going east.”
“How far?”
“Until we come to an old barn. The turnout is across the road. We drive until we see a red fence, and there’s the house.”
I realize that Sterling had orchestrated the outing to Aleandro’s farm not to indulge in nostalgia for growing olives in Texas, but because he believes Cecilia is already dead. That she was taken by the mob, shot within a couple of days, and her body has already been reduced to God knows what. The quicker we find the remains, the quicker we can track the bad guys.
Sterling insists it’s a simple idea — deduction 101—to trace the supply route of the lye back to the mafiosi. Plausible, maybe; a long shot, definitely. In my opinion, we don’t know enough to commit to chasing some delivery man all over Tuscany. As we get into the car, it is hard to stifle my impatience. I want to go back to Siena and investigate properly. Why am I listening to him? I am the trained Bureau specialist. If I don’t actually say it, that is what I’m thinking, and at this moment I would be just as glad to drop the burden of Sterling’s shell-shocked emotions, get back on the phone with my coolheaded FBI partner, Mike Donnato, and find Cecilia, unencumbered.
“Do you really think this is worth it?” I ask. “We’re spending an entire day on a very shaky lead. The guy who drives a chemical truck? He’s going to know where the bodies are buried? We should go back to Siena and nail that girl, Zabrina.”
“The guy who drives a truck gets orders from somewhere.” Sterling climbs behind the wheel.
“Yes, a manifest from an office in Milan—”
Sterling slams the door. “Stop nagging.”
It stops me, all right. Like a bucket of ice water.
“We’re arguing an investigative approach,” I say unsteadily. “Back and forth. Your ideas, my ideas.”
“I know what an argument is, honey.”
“It’s how we do it in the Bureau. Maximize the options.”
“We do it the same way in my shop.”
“Where? In a bunker in Iraq?”
I regret it immediately.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “That was stupid. I didn’t mean it.” He pulls over and stops.
“Up ahead, that’s the big white house. That’s the road where we turn. If you want to go back to Siena, we keep on going straight.”
“I don’t like the word nagging,” I say quietly.
He exhales with exasperation. “What do you want me to do?”
“Talk to me like a professional. I’m talking to you like a professional—”
“You’re gonna tell me how to talk, now?”
“I’m not taking orders from you.”
“Nobody’s giving orders. The FBI is playing you. Can’t you see that? And meanwhile, the mafia has Cecilia.”
“I see that.”
“Seems to me, professionally speaking, whatever drug business your nephew or his father have been into is a sidebar. It might connect, might not. We tried following the investigator’s report and ended up at an apartment with nobody home. With the kidnap, our objective has
changed. First and foremost, we need to find Cecilia, dead or alive. This Marcello Falassi, who delivers the chemicals, he might know something about that, or lead us to someone who does.”
Sterling is watching my face. He wants to know if I can really hear it. Dead or alive. Alive or dead.
“Make the turn to Falassi’s place,” I say.
He hesitates.
“I mean it. Go.”
The road is a whispering tunnel of green. There are no other cars. We arrive at a crossroads, make a guess, and keep heading east, coming out to ripe farmland dotted with rolls of hay, and the low-pitched clanging of hundreds of tin bells. A herd of sheep is crossing, guided only by a white dog. Two by two, docile as a class of kindergartners, they go out one gate, across the asphalt, and into the neighboring field. The dog stands on a rise and barks, the sheep stream past, and the bells are like a living wall of sound. There are no humans in sight. Even when the herd has disappeared, the dog continues to bark at our car. As soon as we creep past, he goes.
It sobers me. Simple equations that I never really understood. Dogs and sheep. Farmland and sun. Build your fortress on the highest ground. Not for the first time since I’ve been in Italy, the external world — the wild-eyed horses in the Palio, this troubled man beside me in the car — seems extraordinarily vivid, while my own self feels distant from the experience, more and more transparent. Is that what a career in the black box of the Bureau does to you? Numbs the senses, as well as the soul?
Marcello Falassi lives in a powder-blue trailer on the dark side of the road, the only structure for several kilometers. We have seen many low-income houses cheerfully surrounded by sunflowers and artichoke plants, but this one has nothing to say for itself, except bales of wire in the front yard. I suppose nothing grows because of the damp, sunless location. But when we pass a dead dove splayed out on the walkway, I wonder if something else is at play.
