by April Smith
The bartender is on a cell phone.
“It’s been sorted,” he says in a monotone. “I’ve given them the good news.”
The bartender is English, stern, in his late forties, with buzz-cut hair, hefty, wearing a white T-shirt and burnt-orange jeans. He closes the phone and in the same clipped accent asks what he can get me.
I ask if Muriel Barrett is around.
“That’s her,” he says, indicating an empty stool and two full shot glasses.
“What is she drinking?”
“Rum e pera. Rum and pear juice.”
“Oh my Lord.”
“Special of the house.”
“Go for it,” I say.
“You’re American.”
“I’m from L.A., and please don’t tell me your favorite TV show.”
“I don’t watch TV,” the bartender growls, putting two glasses before me. “First shoot the rum, then the pear.”
I do it, and a few moments later, from approximately the third chakra, the Tuscan sun bursts forth.
The bartender goes back to washing glasses. In the rear, some guys are throwing darts. The stool beside me remains empty. I stare at an endless motorcar race on the flat-screen. Who is this doll, Muriel, alone at a bar doing shots in the afternoon? I’m imagining she’s a solitary painter with a history of failed relationships, so she moves to Siena, a place so beautiful just walking out the door can give you an eye orgasm. She’s rail-thin, worn-looking, a couple of years older—way too fast for a sixteen-year-old, but what does Giovanni know? The race cars go around another dozen laps, along with the rum in my brain.
A high-pitched female voice shrills at us: “Saved my spot?”
A short aging Englishwoman with kinky gray hair hauls herself up onto the stool. She is in her sixties, round like a barrel and eager as a toddler.
“Good man!” she cries, downing the rum and pear, one two.
The bartender says, “We thought you were a goner.”
“I was in the loo,” declares Muriel Barrett theatrically. “Having a nice bowel movement.”
The bartender cracks a smile and offers another round. I am thinking it might be a good time to switch to Foster’s.
“This lady has been waiting for you,” he explains to Muriel.
Muriel, apparently playing the Queen of Rum, inquires imperiously, “Who is she?”
I introduce myself as Giovanni Nicosa’s aunt and ask if she knows him.
“Yes, of course I know Giovanni. You’re his aunt?”
And that kicks off the whole saga of how I came to be in Siena. I leave out the part about being an FBI agent.
Muriel Barrett has the face of a beagle, complete with errant whiskers, but she is not stupid. Her large brown eyes take in everything and hold it for future use. I ask how she knows Giovanni.
“Everybody knows everybody in Siena. Especially the English-speakers.”
“Knows them, how?”
“Oh, the occasional game of darts.”
“In a pub? He’s sixteen years old. What’s the drinking age in Italy?”
“I don’t think there is one, is there, Chris?” the cloud-painter asks the bartender.
“The drinking age in Italy is when you’re old enough to see over the counter,” Chris replies.
“I’m his aunt.”
Muriel watches with watery eyes. “You’ve explained the family history with stunning clarity. I do understand that you are his aunt.”
“I’m concerned about Giovanni.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
Muriel’s voice has dropped a key. Gone is the imperious bullshit. The eyes have adjusted to the line of questioning: cautious and indignant.
“He came to see you last night.”
“Really? When was this?”
“Around ten-thirty. Were you home?”
“No, as a matter of fact, I was here. Wasn’t I, Chris?”
Chris raises an eyebrow.
“His car is still outside your apartment.”
Genuine surprise: “It is? I didn’t notice.” Then, “How do you know where I live?”
“Giovanni was attacked last night.”
“Attacked!”
“He’s in the hospital.”
Muriel stares.
“What happened to him?”
“Tower on Goose,” Chris pronounces flatly.
“Not necessarily.”
“Really?” he mimics, sarcastic now. “Like the Sienese aren’t all fucking nuts?”
“But—why did you come to my studio?”
“I wasn’t looking for you, Muriel. I was looking for Giovanni’s car. I asked around and met your landlady. She said he was there last night. He knocked on your door.”
“I had no idea.”
“His parents are at the hospital. I’m trying to help them understand what happened.”
“Will he be all right?”
“We don’t know. He was hurt pretty badly.”
Chris is paying attention now. “This doesn’t happen in Siena.”
I look at my watch. “I should call the hospital.”
“No worries; I’ll take care of it,” he says. “You don’t want to deal with Italian phones.”
Muriel uses a cocktail napkin to blot her tears. We wait in silence as Chris engages with someone at the hospital. He thrusts the phone at me. “Tell them you’re a relative.”
My mind stalls. I can’t think of one word in Italian.
“How do you say it?”
“Sono la zia di Giovanni.”
I repeat the phrase like a dummy. Chris takes the phone and listens deeply. Now he’s thanking them. His tone has become polite. Muriel and I wait uneasily. He clicks off and speaks in that calm, eerie monotone.
“The boy is being taken to the operating room.”
“For the leg?”
“Nothing regarding a leg. His heart is failing.”
“Did he have a cardiac arrest?”
“Might have. She said it’s critical.”
“I’ll drive. I’m perfectly able,” Muriel announces crisply, and slips her purse beneath her arm.
ELEVEN
Even before I get to Giovanni’s room, there is a jam-up of nurses and technicians in the hall. As I peer at the huddle of green scrubs, listening to instructions ordered back and forth in Italian, the truth of being a foreigner has never been clearer. The huddle starts to move as one, and then the gurney shoots out the door, trailing IV stands and monitors. They veer left, and Giovanni passes right beneath my eyes. It is almost indecent to look at him, helpless and exposed, unconscious, pure white skin, his beautiful head in a blue paper cap lolling as they turn a corner. My jaw aches. I have been clenching my teeth.
Muriel, who has been arguing with someone at the nursing station, wobbles toward me looking flushed and unsteady.
“He has to have an operation on his heart. It’s all I could get out of her, the cheeky little snit. And why does she insist on wearing that God-awful smock?”
Muriel sways on her feet. I grab her fleshy biceps and ease her into a chair, wondering if the rum e peras have finally hit.
“Are you okay?”
“I’ve been through several bouts of cancer with my partner, Sheila. As a result, I tend to have a hard time in hospitals.”
In the car I learned that Sheila works for a bank in Piccadilly, and only comes to Italy for three weeks in spring. Nevertheless, their ten-year relationship has endured across the channel. Winters in Siena, Muriel is happy to roost like a hen among her cloud paintings. “It works out,” Muriel assured me, while speeding to the hospital along a commercial shortcut through the sunflower fields, past storage silos and water treatment plants.
“How are you feeling?” I ask.
“Like what the bloody cat dragged in. Look, I’m sorry, but it’s just too many bad memories. I’ve got to get out of here.” She gets to her feet and totters toward the nearest exit, adding incongruously, “Give my best to Giovanni.”
<
br /> Crowded with immigrants from defunct communist nations, the hallway resembles a Balkan bazaar. Tough, shaven-headed Albanian janitors are pushing mops. A Yugoslav family argues over the slumped head of a matriarch in a wheelchair. Somehow I convince the cheeky little snit in the God-awful smock (dinosaurs) to page Dr. Cecilia Nicosa, and moments later she appears in a crisp white lab coat with a stethoscope in the pocket. Her eyes are shrunken and exhausted. We kiss each other’s cheeks and sit side by side on a couch that matches the royal blue of the walls.
“Giovanni developed an irregular heartbeat,” she reports. “He was going into hypotensive shock. Nobody could understand it. I told you Dr. Ciardi fixed the artery in the leg, but the blood pressure kept going down and the danger is that if the new blood supply continues to drop, he could lose the leg. We did two tests—an angiogram and echocardiogram—and they both showed that blood was extravasating from the heart.”
“What does that mean?”
“There is a hole in the heart, and it is leaking blood.”
“Was the hole there all along?”
“No,” she snaps. “He was stabbed.”
“I know that, but—”
“When we first examined the stab wounds, we did not realize that the tip of the knife had lacerated the pericardium. The sack around the heart. So now he will need a second surgery to sew up the tear.”
“You were right. This is not about some boys fighting over a flag.”
“All I care about now is that we have the best thoracic surgeon working on my son.”
Despite fatigue, her eyes are defiant. Her composure is a skill that results from learning how to judge the degree of danger—not unlike our shoot/don’t shoot scenario in the Bureau, where you have a split second to decide whether to fire at a figure on a video screen. In these moments you can only trust your training. Cecilia has no choice but to rely on the technology now in play beneath the surgical lights.
I ask if she knows the English painter, Muriel Barrett. She replies that you can hardly miss her.
“Muriel gave me a ride to the hospital, but then she felt squeamish and had to leave.”
“Muriel? Squeamish?” Cecilia says skeptically. “She’s a war hammer.”
“Battle-ax?”
“Sì.”
“Why is she so upset about Giovanni? What is their relationship?”
“Relationship? She could be his grandmother, and besides, she’s gay!”
“Then why does he hang out with her?”
“He doesn’t. Why would he?”
“Last night Giovanni went to see Muriel Barrett. He was attacked in front of her apartment.”
“How do you know?”
“The landlady saw him go up to Muriel’s apartment. And the police found his car, along with bloodstains on the sidewalk.”
“But he was found in the tunnel on Via Salicotto.”
“The idea was to make it look like a war between the contrade. You were right—Giovanni was attacked as a warning. The police think it was a mob hit, Cecilia. They wanted to send a special message. The question is, to whom?”
Cecilia crosses her arms and her stare grows dark with suspicion.
“Ana, have you been talking to the provincial police?”
“Some.”
“Stay out of it. You can’t understand Italy.”
“I understand that you’re afraid—”
“I’m afraid of you. That you will step all over things with your FBI boots.”
“I’ll try not to do that.”
Cecilia stands, eyes wet with rage. “My son is on the operating table, but I still have patients.”
All I can do is watch her go.
After the second surgery, to sew up his heart, Giovanni slipped into a coma. They put him on a ventilator with a tube down his throat, taped to a bandage around his head. His face was pale from loss of blood. When I touched his hand, his skin felt clammy and cold.
Despite assurances from the doctors, after forty-eight hours Giovanni still had not woken up. Waiting became a vigil. The priest came every day, along with Sofri, who arrived precisely at ten a.m. and left at noon, as well as the extended Nicosa family, a flock of solemn-faced members of the contrada, and employees of the coffee company, all ritually paying their respects.
Day one of Palio was two days away, on Friday, June 29, and visitors to the hospital talked compulsively about the uptick in retail sales, the full hotels, which horses looked fast, who had been chosen to bodyguard the jockeys, the health of the judges, and the direction of the wind. They spoke robustly, as if news of the outside world would distract the anguished parents. Not only would Giovanni not be alfiere, but also he might never walk again. They had not ruled out brain damage, and the doctors were saying he could still lose several toes from lack of blood to the leg. The prince was deathly ill and fighting for his life.
Around seven on the Thursday night before Palio, Nicosa, Cecilia, and I simultaneously get the urge for soda and chips, available from machines in the basement lounge. We are in the elevator when she says casually, without shifting her eyes from the lighted floor numbers, “When Giovanni is well enough, I will take him to El Salvador.”
“I suppose it is a good enough place to recover,” Nicosa says.
“No, he will stay.”
“Stay?” asks her husband. “For how long?”
“Until he is married,” she answers grimly.
The elevator doors open. You could smell linty hot exhaust from the giant clothes dryers turning towels. We follow Cecilia’s squared shoulders down a dim corridor. She is still wearing the white lab coat and heels. She opens the lock on a door with a security card.
“He will stay with my family, and he will be safe.”
She turns on the lights. There are a few round tables and a microwave above an empty counter. Nicosa checks his cell, but there is no service in the basement.
“That will never happen,” he says, addressing the cigarette machine.
“Are you going to stop me?”
“I don’t have to. He will never choose to leave Siena.”
“He will have no choice. I’m taking him. That’s all.”
“If you are trying to punish me by taking Giovanni away,” Nicosa says slowly, “there is no need. I blame myself for what happened. I should have kept a closer eye. Not let him stay out all hours with people we don’t know, like that boy he met on the Campo, the African punk who gave him his first joint—it was all downhill from there.”
I recall Inspector Martini speculating that Giovanni most likely had tried drugs, and wondered how far down was “downhill.”
“Does he still get high?” I ask.
“No,” Cecilia answers. “Not anymore.”
“It’s in the past,” Nicosa says irritably. “Right now he is very sick. He needs our prayers.”
“I’m wondering if Giovanni’s involvement with drugs has anything to do with the attack,” I said.
“Giovanni is not involved with drugs!” Nicosa says. “Did you not hear me? I said I take the blame. Sometimes I am not as good a father as I should be or want to be, but right now I am going upstairs to be with my son. Don’t even think about taking him to El Salvador,” he tells his wife. “Now or ever.”
“Infuriating man,” Cecilia says when he’s left.
The basement lounge is like a bunker, soundproofed from activity in the hospital above. With no cell service, we have no way of knowing that at that moment, Giovanni’s condition has drastically changed. Instead, we slump in plastic chairs, mindlessly eating potato chips with packets of garlic mayonnaise Cecilia found in a drawer.
“I hid my pregnancy for seven months,” she is saying. “At the beginning, Nicoli didn’t know. We met in the aftermath of an earthquake on top of a civil war—everything was in confusion. You are young, you want to affirm life, you go to bed with a handsome stranger. We were madly in love, but we did not expect to be together again; it was too far-fetched. He went back to Italy.
I studied for my medical degree. I felt the pregnancy was my responsibility. I was afraid to ask this man I hardly knew for help, so I went against everything and decided to have Giovanni on my own.”
“Did your family support you?”
Cecilia snorts. “My mother said she wanted to die. I ruined all her hopes that I would be a doctor, and she had sacrificed so much for my education. After the birth I was very unhappy and in a deep depression, but all I could do was struggle and manage to work and do good in school. My aunts had to talk to my mother and say, ‘You need to be stronger, and hold her, and don’t let her sink, because if you let her go, what’s going to happen to all these years of working so hard? Why give up now? For what people will say?’ How can I put this to you? In the Latin culture it is not even your choice to have an abortion, because the idea is that to have this baby will be your punishment. You did it, and that will be the consequences. Of course, the moment he was born, Giovanni became my mother’s joy.
“She urged me to contact Nicoli. I was terrified he would refuse to answer, but it was just the opposite. He cared more than I knew, and he was so proud to have a son. He was just starting out in the coffee business, but he did manage to send money. He insisted that we wait to get married in Italy, in the contrada, in the proper way. It took three years for him to make his way back to El Salvador. In the meantime I was a single mother.
“Giovanni was born before Christmas. In the New Year, when the next term started, I had to take this little tiny bundle to school. I fed him at midnight. I would come home so tired. I worked sometimes three days straight in the hospital. When he was older, I would come home half dead, and Giovanni would say, ‘Let’s go paint!’ and I would fall asleep on the table and Giovanni would say, ‘Mama, wake up, you’re not playing with me!’ and sometimes I would cry because I felt I was not giving my baby enough. It was a rough and hard time in my life. It was like everything was crumbling. The only thing I held on to was the belief that Nicoli was coming back.
“He didn’t see Giovanni until Giovanni was three. We left for Italy, and Nicoli and I were married immediately. Of course, I had to be baptized into Oca first, so Giovanni would be of Oca. I embraced everything my husband put before me. I learned to cook Italian food. I took care of Nicoli’s mother, even though my heart was breaking because I had left my own mother behind. It was known that Nicoli had other women, and I was supposed to accept that as a way of life. He once had a mistress who disappeared in a supermarket parking lot; probably she’s dead. It was a scandal. They said she was part of the mafias.”
