by April Smith
In the mirror over the sinks our reflections show a tall, olive-skinned police officer in a sexy blue uniform, and a shorter American in a brown party dress—two cops from opposite sides of the world who speak the same language. After making sure we are alone, Inspector Martini picks up where we left off when the paparazzi arrived.
“The police report,” she says quietly, “will state that your nephew was attacked in the territory of Torre—you understand about the contrade, okay? He is of Oca, and he was found in Torre, and naturally there must have been a fight.”
“But you don’t think that’s the way it happened?”
“His body was—changed places?”
“Moved?”
“Sorry for my English—yes,” she continues urgently. “His car was found by the police outside the walls of the city.”
“How far away from the district of Torre?”
“Two kilometers. There were bloodstains around his car. Not so many. I believe the worst took place in the tunnel at Via Salicotto.”
“He was taken to the tunnel to make it look like he was attacked by Torre?”
She nods. “A nurse tells me she smelled ether on his clothes. It is commonly used in Italy for kidnappings, to subdue the victim. Probably they jumped him, he defended himself”—she raises a forearm to demonstrate—“they put a cloth over his face.”
This is when I awaken from my romantic dream of Italy. My sister’s analysis of the stab wounds was accurate. Giovanni was targeted by professionals who tracked him outside the walls, and dumped him in Torre—for a reason.
“But it wasn’t a kidnapping, or a murder, although they could have killed him at any time. It was a warning. To whom?” I ask the inspector.
“Often it is to make an example for others. Witnesses. Informants. Anyone who resists.”
“We are talking about the mafias?”
“I am afraid that is a foregone conclusion,” she says soberly.
“Not necessarily,” I say, and tell her about the confrontation that I witnessed by the pool with members of Oca.
“Why would they be angry with Nicosa?”
Inspector Martini shrugs. “I don’t know. He is well respected. Director of the contrada. His son is alfiere, the flag bearer—”
“Yes, that’s the word they were shouting. They seemed to be upset for some reason about Giovanni carrying the flag. Could they have been angry enough to teach him a lesson?”
“No. Never. No way. The contrada protects its own children. Everyone looks out for everyone else; that’s why in general we don’t have crime in Siena.”
Still, how humiliating it must have been for Nicosa—the coffee king, whose son was alfiere—to be called into account on his own property by his own contrada.
I check the door. We are still alone.
“Is it possible Giovanni brought this on himself? Is he the type who gets into fights in school?”
“He is liked by everyone.”
“Does he do drugs?”
“I would be surprised if he’s never tried them. Marijuana and cocaine are everywhere. But he is not an addict, no.”
She brushes aside her bangs, damp from the night. “I am of Oca. I want to know who did this to Giovanni, and then I will hang that person by his balls from a tree. But I have to be careful. It is possible that the bloodstains near the car will never be on the report. My boss, Il Commissario, may not allow it.”
“Because he is of your enemy, Torre?” I ask incredulously.
“He doesn’t want a crime investigation. It is Palio. The city is filled with tourists—you can see how the press is stalking him—and so at this time, simple answers are best. A fight occurred between the young men of two traditional rivals. Perfetto.”
The door swings open and I almost have a heart attack. It is Nicosa! What the hell is he doing in the ladies’ room?
“Ana, we have to go,” he says, matter-of-fact.
In the Bureau, the sanctum sanctorum for female agents, the only place where two women can talk in privacy, is the ladies’ room. If two females close the office door they are accused of having a “knitting party.” Men, of course, have “meetings.” Italians don’t make that distinction, at least when it comes to personal hygiene. Their public bathrooms are gender-neutral, where men and women share the sinks.
Nicoli Nicosa has every right to be staring at us impatiently with the door wide open.
“I am afraid I have no more information,” Inspector Martini says, covering briskly. “Best wishes to your family.” She offers a comradely handshake. In her palm is a scrap of paper, upon which is written an address.
On the ride back to the abbey Nicosa says little, but I can see his fingers tight on the wheel, and I imagine he must be scared to death—not only about Giovanni’s survival, but also about the motive for the attack. He must understand that since two people close to him have been targeted so far, nobody in his family is safe.
“What do you think they want?” I ask.
“Who?”
“The people who attacked Giovanni.”
“I couldn’t possibly answer that question.”
“Do you think they are the same criminals who took your friend Lucia Vincenzo?”
He gives me an accusatory stare.
“Why do you bring that up?”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s all over the Internet.”
“They are not the same. One is a fight between boys. The other—we may never know.”
We drive in silence, then finally he asks, “Do you pray?”
“No. Do you?”
“Of course. I will open up the chapel later.”
If he meant that as an invitation, it is declined. That night, unable to sleep, I walk out to the corridor, breathing in the scents of pine and cold. The chapel is dark, but by the light of the electric torches in the courtyard below I see Nicosa, alone, playing with the flag, a square of silk about a meter wide attached to a pole: white and green with bands of red, emblazoned with the symbol of Oca, a crowned white goose with the Cross of Savoy flying from a blue ribbon around its neck.
His starched shirt is open, his chest shining with sweat. His moves are worthy of an acrobat. Like a flag attached to a fencing foil, the banner of Oca follows a split-second pattern, first clockwise at Nicosa’s waist, then tightly furled and thrown straight up, high enough to float by me on the second-story balcony, and then caught on one knee, behind his back. Unbound, it makes a figure eight, a butterfly of silk opening to glory—and then, unbelievably, it becomes a flashing green-and-white knot in the air, passes close to earth, and Nicosa leaps right over it, tossing it straight up again like a thunderbolt.
What is this? A private meditation? The rite of a man preparing for combat? Is he doing this practice for himself? For his youth? For his grievously wounded son? Does he see the visitor above the torchlight, watching breathlessly?
TEN
The following day, thunderstorms are expected. The hammocks and laundry have to be taken in. There are predictions of powerful lightning strikes. In the morning the wind bucks and swirls, the unstable atmosphere trying to rid itself of electric charge. Then it rains, hard, like winter rain in Los Angeles. Alone in the abbey, the kitchen feels cavernous and damp.
Someone made coffee and left the espresso pot on the stove. Someone cut bread and left the crumbs on the board. Pieces of a meal have been left for me to put together: plums in a bowl, muesli in a cupboard, a wedge of local pecorino cheese wrapped in white paper in the refrigerator. Irish tea in a canister. I put on a kettle of water.
I zip my sweatshirt over my pj’s and put up the hood—not so much from cold as unease. Cecilia came home at four o’clock that morning and said Giovanni’s condition had become critical. They fixed the artery and gave him transfusions, but the blood pressure in the leg had not come up, and they couldn’t figure out why. Today they will decide if it is necessary to amputate.
We spoke in the frank way of professionals, skipping the
soft touch you’d use with a civilian, minimizing nothing.
“Is the medical information accurate?”
“You mean, do I want another opinion? It is straightforward, my colleagues agree. If the circulation in the leg is insufficient, the tissue dies, gangrene sets in, and you risk an overwhelming bacterial infection. I would rather have him alive in a wheelchair than dead of sepsis.”
We were in her bedroom. She had torn off her dress and thrown it on the bed, done an efficient thirty-second sweep with a washcloth that covered all the bases.
“This is how we did it in medical school. Never enough time.”
She disappeared into the cavernous closet. A moment later she was wearing a navy blue chemise.
I zipped it up for her. “They have good prosthetics now, don’t they?”
“Yes, they do,” she answered shortly.
She adjusted the straps on her black sling-backs, remembered earrings, grabbed the stethoscope, black doctor’s bag, and purse off the bed, and then I followed down the stairs. Rain was already resounding loudly when she pulled the double-thick wooden door open. Outside it was cold and still dark. I held her stuff as she struggled into a raincoat. At the very last minute she spun around and gave me a quick hug.
“I am glad you’re here,” she said, and her heels dug into the gravel Soon I could hear the engine catch.
But the professional talk is a ruse, just like my reason for being here in the first place. The moment Cecilia leaves I feel that I am losing traction, on the case as well as on my feelings. I can’t let the attack on his son color the search for Nicosa’s alleged connection with the mafias.
Sitting still at the long kitchen table, I let the cup of tea warm my hands. It reminds me of being stuck waiting for Sterling in Dublin for eight straight days of rain, in what I thought was a hotel, but which turned out to be a boardinghouse. Going crazy alone in the room one night, I went down to the parlor, a barren space with a linoleum floor and a heatless electric fireplace. Straight-backed chairs had been pushed against the walls and were occupied by dark-suited, middle-aged men drinking whiskey. Someone who lived in the boardinghouse had died, and they had gathered there. Nobody spoke to anyone else. The rain hammered. Then, as now, I was a foreign traveler wrapped up in someone else’s crisis, with no place else to go.
In the kitchen I feel imprisoned by insurmountable great stone walls. I miss Sterling with a feeling of futility. How will we ever get from here to there? His absence has become an almost palpable thing, like the cold humidity in the kitchen. We haven’t spoken since we said good-bye on the street in London, and the separation is becoming cruel. I could use his wisdom on the impossible position of being an agent of the law with no way to enforce it.
When I called Dennis Rizzio in Rome to tell him about the attack on Giovanni, as well as to chide him for alerting the provincial police of my presence without telling me, that’s exactly what he said: “It’s Italian on Italian. We have no jurisdiction; it’s up to the local authorities,” even if the local authority—Il Commissario—has conflicting loyalties, thanks to the gangland culture of Siena. And thanks to the convoluted double-talk of the Italian system, I’m beginning to wonder if I can trust the legat, either.
As if actually arguing with Dennis, alone in the kitchen I pose the question out loud: “What was Giovanni up to?” Why was he outside the walls? What made him a target? Was it his famous family, or was he up to shenanigans of his own?
On a table near the front entrance of the abbey there is a pile of guidebooks for the use of the guests. I search for a schedule of bus service to Siena, but then can’t make heads or tails of it. Inside a binder of restaurant recommendations is a card for a taxi company. An hour later, when the driver arrives—receding hair, blue sunglasses despite the rain—we can’t seem to understand each other, but that is not a problem. I show him the paper Inspector Martini passed me in the ladies’ room, and we drive to that address, outside the walls of the city, where, she was covertly telling me, Giovanni’s vehicle was found by the police.
The little blue mailbox car is still in the same spot. It is a bad parking job, as if he stopped in a hurry and didn’t plan to stay long. The two-story stucco apartment buildings in this low-rent suburb are painted in reckless colors of turquoise and tangerine. Sliding glass doors open to narrow balconies that seem about to slide off the walls, like tiers of a badly made cake. Huddling beneath a golf umbrella from the abbey, I take out a notebook and sketch a map of the crime scene. An old habit, it helps me to think.
The glossy wet street is deserted, bloodstains washed away by the rain. Whom did Giovanni come to see? I’m guessing it was a teenage friend. In America you can tell student apartments by the beer cans and Tibetan flags, but here there is nothing to indicate any kind of tenants other than working families. People are waiting for a bus; behind them is a sliver of stores, including an Internet spot that also sells Indian jewelry, a Laundromat with bright red washing machines, a grocery, and a store with a window full of nothing but espresso pots.
The Muslim guy in the Internet spot speaks English but has nothing to tell me, there’s nobody in the Laundromat (who does laundry in the rain?), the coffeepot store is closed, and the grocery lady appears to have some form of dementia, but she’s interested in having company, so I take what I can get.
She’s wearing a dark flowered dress and a raggedy sweater, stamping around the wooden floors with fiercely scattered energy. Her hair is white and her eyes are mad, unnatural blue—bright lights in the musty dark. The electricity is off except in the deli case containing cheeses and prosciutto, cartons of eggs, and antipasti materials such as roasted peppers and calamari salad. Behind the counter are shelves of yellowing school supplies. When I point to Giovanni’s car across the street and display a photo of him that I lifted from Cecilia’s bedroom, she bursts into smiles and grabs my hands, wringing the life out of them, urging over and over, in a bizarre segue, that I must have torta di Pasqua, a desiccated Easter cake lying in a chewed-up box, that by my calculations must be three months old.
Finally I buy the thing for a euro. Delighted to be rid of what the rats won’t eat, she pulls a set of keys from the pocket of her apron and waves me through the back door. I have to laugh at myself: There’s always a deal. Now she is happy to lead the way beneath a grape arbor that provides a pleasant shelter from the rain, to a staircase that goes up to an apartment over the grocery store. “Fa presto!” she keeps saying, and unlocks the door to what I believe must be her home, where her husband is no doubt sitting mummified in an armchair holding a piece of Easter cake, but no, we are in an artist’s studio. An artist who, by the canvases stacked up against the walls, paints only clouds.
But they are wonderful, expressive clouds I recognize from the skies of Tuscany, captured in the midst of many ephemeral moods. This is a working painter whose mind is organized around neat rows of pigments in wire baskets, sketches pinned to walls, brushes in size order in clean tin cans, revolving sculptures of stones and twigs, shelves of art books and animal skulls. There is just a narrow cot for sleeping. This place is about disciplined work. A half-painted square of canvas, still showing ruled lines of perspective, is clipped to a large easel. The way it is positioned in the center of the room, underneath the skylight rattling with rain, makes you think of a big personality, always in the light.
Using hand gestures and my limited Italian, I manage to ask if the person who lives here is a friend of Giovanni.
“Sì, sì,” says the landlady. “Visita sempre.”
“He always comes here?”
“Sì!” Frowning, she mimes knocking on the door and walking in. Giovanni visits this place all the time, she seems to say. She knows because she sees him. He was here last night.
The old woman marches through the apartment, calling, “Mural?” and I expect to be presented with a wall-sized piece of art and bullied into buying it, but instead we enter the kitchen. Judging from the cot in the studio and the mess in he
re, Giovanni’s friend does not care very much about sleeping or eating. The counter is nothing but a plank of wood lying across a pile of cinder blocks. The paint-splattered sink is jammed with dishes and teacups, a rusted water heater suspended above. The landlady doesn’t react; she must snoop around up here all the time. Back in the room with the easel, I notice a pile of mail addressed to Muriel Barrett. Not “Mural,” but “Muriel.” The letters are postmarked London. The books around the house are in English.
“Where is Muriel?” I ask. “Dov’è?”
“La sbarra Australiana,” the landlady says.
I ask where Muriel is and she says Australia? I give her my notebook. Would she please write down the words? Australiana. Is she saying the painter is from Australia? With shaky fingers, the landlady draws a diagram with a crucifix in the middle, pointing emphatically—“Il Duomo”—and I understand she means the central cathedral in the old part of Siena, and there, where she makes a square and blackens it, is the location of the Australian bar that Giovanni told me about when we drove in from the bus station. “They speak English and have English beer!”
A special kind of excitement rises, as when pieces of an investigation start to fit. Hot damn. Six thousand miles away and I am back on home ground.
With a little push in the right direction from a bearded fellow at the English-language bookshop, I trot downhill on Via di Pantaneto until stopped by the words Happy Hour! chalked on a blackboard before a narrow doorway set into the stone-gray blocks of a nondescript building. A sign above says, WALKABOUT—AN AUSTRALIAN PUB. If you still had doubts such a thing could exist in the middle of Siena, Italy, the vestibule is stacked with placards for “Dundee Cocktail Hour.”
The absolute darkness inside is like walking into a movie theater. A few groping steps, and then a gilded bar comes out of the gloom like a vision, a sparkling trove of golden beer taps and glistening glasses. There are strings of Foster’s beer flags, and toward the back, a tattered map of Australia. All the lights in the Walkabout are crimson, the way a bar should be; the stools are hard; the booths are hung with drawings of kangaroos.
