by April Smith
“Giovanni?”
Sofri picks up his napkin. “He will be fine,” he says.
EIGHT
Along the Via Salicotto the flags of Torre were still, their colors of brilliant burgundy and blue at rest in the night like folded wings of mythological beasts.
Giovanni was found in an anonymous tunnel that turns off the main street and opens into one of a thousand tiny courtyards in the medieval part of the city, where buildings meet at random angles. The arched passageway of chalky brick is primitive, just high enough for a man seated on a wagon to pass underneath. By day it is as dark as an Etruscan tomb. By night it is lit by one fluorescent fixture. A street cleaner discovered the boy half dead in the fluttering light, in the heart of enemy territory.
If Torre was out for blood, they got it. His stab wounds made a trail of blood down the sloping pavers. We might have been able to recover footprint evidence from the attackers if the street cleaner hadn’t sprayed the ground with water before—or possibly after—discovering the victim. The street cleaner’s contrada affiliation was unknown; by then I knew enough about the cultural weirdness of Siena that it was the first question I asked.
The course the investigation should take sped through my mind—seal the crime scene, canvass the neighborhood, interview witnesses. I was impatient to talk to the first responders. They had taken my nephew to Ospedale Santa Caterina, twenty kilometers north of the city, because it is one of Cecilia’s private clinics with a higher standard of care—a questionable decision that cost time. He was almost gone from loss of blood. A knife to the chest had collapsed a lung. Breathing must have been agony.
The priest of the Oratorio di Santa Caterina, the church of the Oca district, had been a guest at the party. In his forties, with thick black hair and gold-rimmed glasses, he wore the green and white scarf with the Goose over his cassock. He spoke at a gentle pace, a person of true contemplation—none of the greedy egotism I expected in a religious leader. As a hostess, Cecilia treated him with utmost respect, showing all her sides—competent, obedient, and seductive—deeply desiring to impress herself upon the quiet authority of this man.
So when Sofri and I saw that the priest had also gotten up from his table and was hurrying behind Cecilia and Nicosa to the red Ferrari, we left the party immediately, and drove thirty-five minutes on hair-raising jet-black roads to the hospital, which was located in an industrial park. Like my sister, it wasn’t large, but inspired confidence. It had the air of bold, forward-thinking modernity, with a waiting area like an upbeat take on a sixties motel—turquoise sofas and funky lamps like daisies that looked surreal in contrast to the torchlit grandeur of the abbey, and the life-and-death struggle of a kid who was into something way over his head.
When we arrive, the waiting area is empty. Sofri disappears down a hallway to locate the family while I attempt to engage the one police officer in sight—overweight, middle-aged, with a big, bald, indented head. His front teeth are yellow and pushed together as if he’d been attacked by a mad dentist with a vise. When I ask for information about Giovanni Nicosa, he shrugs as if he has never heard the name. I try again, explaining that I am the boy’s aunt from California, and I am very worried.
“California?” He understands “California” and slowly grins with recognition.
“TV?” says the officer.
“You watch TV?”
He nods.
“American TV?”
“Sì.”
“Really? What is your favorite TV show?”
He draws in the air. Tracing letters.
“CSI! You like CSI?”
He nods, pleased to have conveyed this important fact.
Once again, Sofri arrives to save the day. At his side is the woman police detective who appeared at the abbey, Inspector Francesca Martini, talking rapidly on a cell phone while clutching three unopened packs of cigarettes. Still talking, Inspector Martini manages to shake my hand.
“You are Giovanni’s aunt,” she says in English, then holds up a finger to signify the importance of her phone conversation, which is taking place with the head of the provincial police, her boss, “Il Commissario.”
I give a nod. Her bangs go straight across, and the rest of her long, shiny black hair is efficiently pulled into a clip. The short-sleeved uniform reveals a set of muscular, beautifully sculpted arms. You could work out for a hundred hours and never have those arms—they are genetically authentic to the Roman goddess of war.
I ask Sofri how Giovanni is doing.
“Come outside,” he says.
The red Ferrari is one of the few cars in the parking lot. The door is open and the interior lights are on so that Cecilia, bent over an appointment book, can read a number while punching it into her cell phone. She seems to be going down a list—the people you would trust in a crisis. Nicosa is also on the phone, pacing back and forth in the headlights. Sofri shrugs deeper inside his blazer. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees since the morning. The air is damp and there are halos around the streetlights.
“Giovanni will need emergency surgery,” Sofri says. “They are waiting for the doctor to arrive from Montepulciano. I can’t believe this.”
The door slams shut and the car goes dark. Cecilia walks over to where we are standing. The black dress seems the one thing physically holding her together. Her hair is falling loose and her hands are clenched. Her face is white. I draw her aside.
“I can help you with this,” I say gently.
“How?”
“Let me call the FBI in Rome. We can pressure them to kick-start the investigation.”
“Right now I cannot think about that.”
“I know. This is what I do. Let me take that burden off.”
“I don’t want you to call the FBI.”
“Because of Nicoli? Whatever’s going on with him, he’ll want his son’s attacker to be found—”
“Please, you don’t understand. Just leave it to the provincial police.”
Her eyes are glistening. She’s on the edge of frantic. She needs to know she’s still in charge of something.
“I’m here if you need me.”
“Thank you, Ana,” she murmurs, and my heart squeezes for her pain. “Sofri said you were inside, talking to the police officer. What did you find out?”
“His favorite TV show is CSI.”
“Don’t make a joke!”
“Forgive me; I’m not making a joke. The officer told me nothing.”
Sofri is there. His fingers close soothingly around Cecilia’s arm as Nicosa joins us.
“Che succede?” Nicosa asks.
Cecilia, tense, shakes Sofri off.
“I am telling Ana about Giovanni. He was stabbed several times.” Her fear gives way to fury. “In the leg, chest, and abdomen. He has right now bleeding into the abdomen, with laceration of the iliac and femoral arteries, which means he could lose his left leg.”
“Lose a leg?”
“The artery was severed; he lost the blood supply to the leg. There is the possibility of amputation.” Her medical authority has returned to steady her. “Also his lung is collapsed from the knife wound to the chest, and he has a broken arm, probably from defending himself.”
“What’s the plan?”
“To get the best vascular surgeon I know to repair the artery and save the leg. He is on the way.”
“What do they say about the assault?”
“Nothing,” Nicosa interrupts bitterly. “It happened in Torre.”
“Nothing? Because of a rivalry from the thirteenth century? No. I’m sorry, no. Modern police forces do not operate that way.”
“Your brother-in-law is suggesting that the police are maybe a little bit slow tonight because the Commissario—the chief of the provincial police in Siena—is from Torre,” Sofri explains.
I am astonished. “They’re not going to investigate?”
“They’ll investigate.” Cecilia pulls out the clips and shakes her hair. “But we will never really know who did
this. They’ll say, Cosa si può fare? It is Palio,” adding savagely, “when we all know it has nothing to do with Palio.”
“This is ridiculous.”
Sofri looks at his watch. “Where is the surgeon?”
I don’t like the way Cecilia is refixing her hair with eyes lowered in resentful silence.
“What do you mean, ‘Nothing to do with Palio?’ ”
“I can tell from the wounds it was not a random stabbing, okay? Someone knew exactly what they were doing,” she says. “If they wanted to kill him they would have cut his neck or shot him in the head. But no—they only come this close. Instead, they hurt him and leave him a cripple.”
Sofri winces. “Please!”
“Why? It is the truth. They do it to send a message. This kind of attack is something we see in the emergency room in Napoli, not in Siena, when two contrade get into a fistfight.”
“But it could happen,” Nicosa says. “Between contrade.”
“Why do you say that?” Cecilia snaps, venomous, as if the gold snakes on her dress have come to life. “If he went with friends, where are the friends? If they fought with Torre, why didn’t anybody see?”
I cut in. “Is Via Salicotto a busy street?”
“Yes.”
“Stores and cafés open?”
“Yes, of course. Summer is the busy season.”
“If there were any witnesses, and if they were from Torre, what is the likelihood they would come forward to help someone from Oca?”
There is a pause as the three exchange glances, as if to decide just how crazy the Sienese might be.
“You have to believe not even the people of Torre, sangue d’ebrei e Torraioli,” Sofri says, adding an ugly curse meaning that the enemy is as low as the Jews, “would be silent about something this serious.”
“Anybody could have seen!” Cecilia cries, exasperated. “Thousands of tourists in the city—someone walking on Via Salicotto had to notice if a boy was being stabbed almost to death.”
Nicosa cocks his fist. “He will not die!”
“Basta,” Sofri says. “We have to be together now.”
“He acts like he has nothing to do with it,” Cecilia murmurs.
“What is that tone in your voice?” her husband demands. “Are you saying this is my fault?”
“You have turned your head.”
“Let’s go inside.” Sofri takes her hand. “The doctor is here.”
As headlights swerve into the parking lot, Sofri steers Cecilia toward the hospital.
“I have turned my head?” Nicosa shouts. “You spoil him! You treat him like a baby! You don’t allow him to grow up!”
Cecilia twists from Sofri’s grasp. “He doesn’t want to grow up. He doesn’t want to be like his father—” But then she stops herself and her look becomes pleading. “Mi dispiace, Nicoli. Sono spaventata così.”
Nicosa relents and comes toward her. They embrace, long and hard and desperate; you can see in the fit of their bodies how the years have carved them together. They hold on until Sofri gently takes Cecilia’s arm. The surgeon from Montepulciano has gotten out of his car. Nicosa watches as the three meet and the automatic doors swing open and swallow them inside.
“Giovanni is going to make it,” I say.
Nicosa mutters, “Why don’t you go home?” and walks toward the emergency entrance.
The chill from standing out there in the middle of the night has seeped into my skin. My head is throbbing from having consumed nothing but a couple of mushroom ravioli and some “big red” wine, and I would do anything to get out of the brown wrap dress and put on a pair of jeans. How can I fix this? I have none of my usual props. No weapon, no creds, no Nextel, no connection to a busy investigative team in a warm office with global reach to every foreign agency—I don’t even have a sweater.
Out of the shadows a voice calls, “Signorina Grey?”
“Yes?”
“Over here.”
The orange tip of a lighted cigarette moves in the darkness. Inspector Martini is leaning against the hospital wall, with a cop’s instinct to stay out of the light.
NINE
Inspector Martini says, “Ciao,” and offers a cigarette.
“No, grazie.”
“You speak Italian?”
“Only enough to get on a train. Usually the wrong train.”
“Tell me,” she says, “how long have you worked for the FBI?”
“How do you know about that?”
“We know who you are. We were informed by your captain in Rome, Dennis Rizzio.”
“When did you talk to Dennis?”
“Two days ago, forse? He told our department to expect you here.”
“Why?”
She expels a funnel of smoke. “It is professional. We have a good relationship with the Americans.”
“Nice if he would let me know.”
She nods sympathetically. “I have the same problems with my boss.”
“Does Signore Rizzio always call you when an FBI agent is in town?” I ask lightly.
“Usually only for tickets to Palio.” She smiles and tosses her head and then fixes me with a steely stare. “What do you do in the FBI?”
“I’m a field agent. My visit here is almost like being undercover,” I say. “My sister has asked me not to tell her husband I am with the FBI. It’s strange, because that’s how she found me, through the Bureau. I wonder what else she’s keeping from him.”
Inspector Martini frowns. “I am of the same contrada as your family—Oca, the Goose. I know Cecilia well, but I don’t understand what is in her head, keeping this secret from her husband.”
“Could it have to do with Nicoli’s relationship with Lucia Vincenzo?”
“We don’t have the whole story there, except that she is most probably dead.”
“Is there a connection between Vincenzo, the southern mafias, and Nicoli Nicosa?”
“I can’t speak about that.”
“I understand.”
When you need to know.
“I could never go undercover like you,” she reflects. “I have my baby.”
“How are you able to make that work?”
“Around the time that she was born, a statue of Christ by a Renaissance master named Vecchietta was stolen from a church in Siena. A task force was formed to recover it. I have a degree in art history, and it was part-time, so I applied for a position. I went back full-time when she was one year old.”
“Did you recover the statue?”
She shakes her head. “It is somewhere in the hands of a private collector. Now I’m back on the street, and I like it much better.”
“Hard to go back to a desk job,” I agree.
She hesitates. “You have experience with homicide?”
“I make trips to the crime lab and testify in court, just like you.”
We give it a moment. Her arms are crossed. She grinds the concrete with a heel.
Finally she says, “I did not tell you this—”
“I never heard a thing.”
I am becoming attuned to these disclaimers—“This is not a problem,” Sofri said when the police car arrived at the party flashing emergency lights.
“It is about the police report. On your nephew, Giovanni.”
“What about it?”
Materializing as if from nowhere, the paparazzi appear out of the shadows of the parking lot—half a dozen athletic young men on the hunt, weaving and pointing the eyes of their cameras at everything in their path, like an assault unit of spiders.
“Cazzo!” grunts Inspector Martini, glancing at them, and then at her cell. “The boss must be here.”
They had gotten here before the Commissario, grabbing whatever shots they could to feed the universal craving to see rich people suffer—no matter how pathetic the crumbs, like shots of Nicosa’s Ferrari and the exterior of the hospital. They ferret out the two of us near the entrance, but Inspector Martini speaks sharply in Italian, and they back of
f with apologetic waves, signifying to me the ultimate control of the government over the press. Instinctively, she and I separate without a word as TV news vans swarm the parking lot.
A white car pulls up, doors open, and two plainclothes detectives spring out, positioning themselves for the exit of the chief. The Commissario is taller than everyone else, and extremely thin. Wisps of white hair flying in the backlight of the TV cameras show that he’s balding. He walks like a marionette, lower legs extending stiffly on their own, as if badly in need of a double knee replacement. But the odd gait only adds to a kind of worldly elegance; at this late hour, wearing a well-tailored dark suit, he looks as if he has been called away from a state department dinner party behind locked gates.
Nobody stops anyone from entering the hospital, and I’m thinking the whole entourage is going to march right into the operating room, but in a country where politics is theater, Nicoli Nicosa recognizes the opportunity for an entrance and is waiting, with the priest in the background, for Il Commissario in the reception area, where they confer privately before facing the cameras. In the crowded space and overly bright lights, the Commissario speaks closely into the lens, and the speech looks smoky and intimate. On the flat-screens at home it will seem huge and crisp.
I imagine he is saying how shocked he is that an innocent boy was brutally attacked on the eve of Palio, promising the Nicosa family that the provincial police will bring these thugs to justice.
A grief-stricken embrace between the two men, and then they disappear down the hall together and the TV lights go out.
“Il bastone ricco insieme,” mutters a reporter.
The rich stick together.
For the next two hours I pace the visitors’ lounge, picking up magazines I can’t read, trying to get e-mail where there is no service. Finally Nicosa appears, exhausted from a long interview with the police while his son was in the operating room. He is still wearing evening clothes, but the tie is gone, and gray stubble shows on his hollow cheeks. He reports in a flat voice that Giovanni made it through the surgery and there is nothing for us to do but go home. Cecilia will stay at the hospital. The police will arrange for us to leave quietly through a back exit. As he is telling me this, Inspector Martini passes and catches my eye. I ask Nicosa to give me a minute, so I can surreptitiously join her in the ladies’ room.
