by April Smith
“It feels like nothing on.”
She laughs. “That’s what you pay for. A lot of money to walk around naked.”
Cecilia is wearing another shimmery million-dollar Oca-green suit, low-cut, with multiple strands of solid gold necklaces. She has positioned her feet carefully on a paving stone so as not to ruin her hot-pink heels. Picking up a basket of roses, she pivots carefully on the stone.
“These are for Giovanni, because he must miss the blessing of the Palio. What do you have there?” she asks of the canvas in my hand.
“It’s a painting by the English lady, Muriel Barrett. She left it for Giovanni on her way out of town.”
“She is going for good?” Cecilia asks, in a tone that suggests she wouldn’t mind.
“Unclear. Her partner in London is sick.”
Cecilia examines the work. “Che bella,” she says admiringly. “But why is the back ripped off?”
“I wasn’t looking for it, but this is what I found.”
I open the grocery bag. Inside is the broken sack of cocaine.
“It was hidden inside the painting. This woman is passing drugs to your son.”
Cecilia twists her lips together. “What do you mean? Passing drugs?”
“They’re both dealing, or she’s selling and Giovanni is using. Either way, the load was meant for him.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“She left it for Giovanni at the Walkabout Pub. I was there.”
Cecilia stares off, trying to get her bearings. The morning sun has grown exponentially hotter; if we stay out here a moment longer, the two of us in our phantasmagorical dresses will air-dry like beef jerky.
“I’d like to talk to him,” I say.
“He’s just had a sedative.”
“When we get back?”
Cecilia nods, striding ahead. “Without a doubt.”
“And you’ll tell me about your husband’s business?”
I follow her into the cool of the kitchen, where she angrily fills a bucket and throws the roses in. Her rage is about to explode—at me, at everything.
“Don’t worry, Ana; I am not going through this again.”
“Going through what?”
Nicosa comes into the kitchen. He’s wearing a finely sculpted dark suit, his hair still wet and tousled from the shower.
“Ready, ladies?”
Cecilia thrusts the plastic bag at her husband. “Cocaine.”
He peers inside with the revulsion of a man looking at a dead animal.
“Giovanni is selling drugs. That Englishwoman hooked him back into it.”
“Tenerlo! Fermata! Di chi parli?”
Cecilia explains, half-shouting in high-pitched Italian that the drugs were found in a painting given to their son by Muriel Barrett.
“Where is Muriel Barrett now?” Nicosa demands. “I will break her neck.”
“Where is she, Ana?”
“Somewhere in the U.K.”
“But the FBI can find her and have her arrested, right?” Cecilia says.
I’m stammering. “I don’t know—”
Does she realize what she’s saying?
Cecilia cries, “I want her to pay!”
“We can call the authorities in London,” I say mollifyingly.
Cecilia’s gold-laden chest is heaving with emotion. I am watching the epitome of the Italian ruling class becoming undone.
“I insist that you arrest her!” she says.
“Arrest her?” Nicosa says.
“Yes, Ana can arrest her! Ana works for the FBI.”
Nicosa regards me with astonishment. “You are with the FBI?”
There it goes. My cover. The case. One thing I learned in undercover school: it’s a game that changes by the minute.
Make an adjustment.
I affect neutrality, as if there is nothing to hide. “It’s true.”
Nicosa rubs his temples. “I think I am still sleeping. I have not woken up to the new world order. Explain this to me.”
“When we hired the investigator to find my sister, he found her in the Los Angeles FBI,” Cecilia says.
“It doesn’t mean anything over here. I can’t arrest Muriel Barrett,” I interject quickly. “But I can call Scotland Yard.”
“Why did I never know this?”
Cecilia says, “I didn’t think you would like my sister if you knew.”
We exchange looks. She knows that she has blown it, and she doesn’t care.
Nicosa shakes his head and laughs. “I am spinning!”
“Never mind about Muriel Barrett,” I say. “The point is that whatever your son is into has to be stopped. Now.”
He turns on me. “You have no place in this.”
“I’m trying to help.”
“I don’t see how that is possible,” he says dismissively.
“You didn’t object when I showed up at the pool and saved you from a possible beating.”
“What are you talking about?” Cecilia wants to know.
“When I first got here. Now I understand why the contrada members who confronted you at the pool were upset. They did not want Giovanni to be alfiere because he was selling drugs to their kids. Does that make sense to you?”
Nicosa coolly lights a cigarette.
“You didn’t understand the Italian.”
“Translate for me.”
Nicosa shrugs and smoothes his wet hair. “They’re jealous. Who is alfiere is an important thing.”
“Can we stop playing games?”
Cecilia breaks allegiance with her husband by making a confession: “Giovanni did at one time have a problem with marijuana.”
“Welcome to the world,” I say. “But now he’s involved with hard drugs.”
“Not at all,” scoffs Nicosa. “He was smoking a little weed, but not anymore.”
“Kids lie, I am sorry to say.”
“Tests don’t lie,” Cecilia says. “We test his urine randomly, here at home. He made a contract with his drug counselor, and he’s kept it. He’s been through a program, Ana. He’s clean.”
I hold up the bag. “What about this?”
Cecilia slips on her sunglasses. “I don’t know about that. We will ask Giovanni when we get back from church.”
“I mean, this is evidence. Do you have a safe?”
Nicosa opens the bottom cabinet where the prosciutto is stored. “Put it here,” he says.
I believe he is 100 percent serious.
Instead, we lock the bag of cocaine in the trunk of Cecilia’s car, and after checking again on the sleeping boy, and the policeman reading a newspaper outside his door, the three of us jam into the Ferrari.
“I’m glad you will see the blessing,” my sister says stiffly. “The ceremony is very beautiful.”
Winding down the mountain in the open car, Nicosa in glamorous Prada sunglasses and Cecilia and I with Oca scarves tied over our hair, we look like we should be in an Audrey Hepburn movie, but the tension is far from romantic.
“So now we have a spy in our house,” Nicosa says.
“I’m sorry if it looks that way.”
“Things went bad the minute you arrived,” he decides, and then, essentially, invites me to leave. “Vatene!” is the command.
Cecilia snaps, “Non parlare a mia sorella in quella maniera.” Don’t talk to my sister that way!
“I’m curious about tua sorella.” Nicosa’s voice becomes louder as he goes on. “Is she here to report on us? Does she carry some kind of list in her pocket, and when she sees someone America doesn’t like she calls the FBI? Because I don’t understand. Explain to me.” He catches my eyes in the mirror. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m trying to protect your family from people like the mafia boss I saw in the hospital. It did not start out that way. I was invited by my sister,” I say, and the taste of the lie is sour on my tongue.
“How do you know this man you saw in the hospital?” Nicosa asks.
Cecilia cuts i
n quickly, “I never spoke his name.”
“He had a bodyguard, and he looked like a crook,” I say, covering. “I’m trained to know.”
Nicosa bears down on the accelerator.
“He looks at you crooked so you make a terrible and false accusation?” The anxiety in the car ratchets up with the rpms. The curves come and vanish. We are rigid in our seats.
“Can you tell me what this man was doing there?” I say.
“I am delighted to tell you. He is a friend of the family,” Nicosa replies. “He came to express his concern for our boy.”
I imagine Cecilia rolling her eyes behind the dark glasses.
“How do you know him? What does he do?”
“He is a businessman,” Nicosa says.
“Fine.” I’m getting used to the Italian game of deny-what-we-both-know. “The important one here is Giovanni. As I told Cecilia, your son is in danger.”
“Leave it to us to protect our son.”
He hits the gas and we suck in the silence until we screech up outside the walls and stride without speaking to Oca headquarters, where the procession to bless the banner is about to begin. Nicosa gets out, lobbing something in Italian that makes Cecilia flinch, and joins a group of men. She and I are left standing in the sun, filled with malevolent adrenaline.
“What did Nicoli say just now?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Did he threaten you?”
She doesn’t answer. I try to read her face, but all I get are fireballs reflected in the dark glasses. She glimmers and glitters with evasion. What is she still protecting?
“Don’t worry about us,” she says finally. “We will be okay. It is like the civil war in my country. You get used to it. You learn how to survive.”
The tamburino drowns her out, banging a commanding pulse. People are chanting a poem about it—“In vivo porta il morto / E ’l morto suona”—how the living drum brings the dead to life. The cycle of Palio goes on. Lines of men and women are forming. And now, this is it. We truly are going to war, marching with an animated throng of Oca contradaioli through the sinuous streets, behind the drummer and alfieri carrying the flags of the crowned white Noble Goose. The boy substituting for Giovanni must have been practicing all year as well, because the two flag bearers are perfectly matched.
The soldiers at arms are dressed in pewter helmets and shoulder armor, leather tunics with mail skirts, carrying spears. The costumes are impeccable, down to the embroidery and finely turned swords. There are more men in tights than a Russian ballet, and it’s no joke. Their faces are dead serious—no smirking or waving back at tourists, no awareness of them—as if the authentic Sienese among us have truly been transported back to the fifteenth century.
“Come with me and walk with Oca,” says Cecilia.
“Am I allowed to?”
“You’re wearing the colors; it is fine.”
We are part of a long procession that includes all seventeen contrade. I feel like an imposter, walking with the Oca women—young girls, arm in arm, singing boastful victory songs, then mamas and nonnas in sleeveless dresses with pocketbooks hanging over their flaccid wrists. Ahead of us are teenage boys in baggy shorts, and men in business suits, including Nicosa and Sofri, way up front.
“What happens if you marry someone from a different contrada?”
“You will not see him. During Palio he will go back to his parents’ house.”
“Is that true?”
“Wives and husbands often separate for the week of the feast.” Cecilia gives a rueful laugh, still smarting from Nicosa’s parting shot. “Sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it?” she says.
It is disorienting to be inside a parade instead of protecting it, to be the focus of dazed tourists backed into doorways, nobody understanding what in hell is going on. It’s the folks in modern dress who look out of place, because the contrada procession dominates the streets, sweeping forward with the force of absolute commitment that carries the tall, elongated Palio banner through history to the church. A new one is commissioned each year from a local artist. This one is a bright abstract of the virgin, with multicolored garlands trailing like the tails of fanciful horses.
There are a couple of relaxed-looking provincial cops in light blue shirts with epaulets—and, if worst came to worst, those guys with the spears. Is it possible there is one spot on earth where there is no need for security or suspicion of petty thievery, kidnapping, or terrorist attack? If so it must be here and now, at eleven in the morning, along this sun-kissed stone passageway thronged with believers, where the smells of deeply cooked complex sauces for the celebration lunch are beginning to drift through the aqua shutters of kitchen windows, where ghosts of ancient arches are still visible in the brickwork, and where plants grow arrogantly out of the walls.
Finally, giving in to the spirit, I march downhill to the rhythm of the drums, ending up in Piazza Provenzano, a small square facing the white façade of Santa Maria church. The doors are wide open and the procession keeps pushing inside, a giant traffic jam, as the parishes of each contrada enter behind their alfieri and tamburinos.
The church has simple smooth white walls and is filled with light. In the apse, a golden altar is topped with mosaics and covered with flowers. The moment we enter, a change comes over Cecilia. Never mind that the pews are overflowing, and the atmosphere is as rowdy as a ball game—this is a sacred space that is obviously a deep comfort. It seems natural for her to make the transition from the outside world, murmuring prayers without the slightest self-consciousness.
Sensing my curiosity, she tries to explain. “I am asking for help. I believe it will come.”
“Me, too,” I say, although I have no idea what I’m talking about. Help? From where? To do what? Make all of it just go away?
Cecilia and I stay close, but we have lost sight of Nicosa and Sofri in the multitude. I can’t help snapping pictures on my phone. It’s like being inside a wedding cake—round pillars of butterscotch marble topped with creamy rosettes, framing giant oil paintings of lessons and miracles. As more and more people crowd in, Cecilia and I are crushed beside a rack of gowns where altar boys are suiting up. It is touching to see their young faces full of self-importance, but my eye is caught by a single nun in white—older, head bowed, a point of stillness in the pressing crowd.
At last the Palio banner enters and the church erupts with shouts and drums.
Cecilia cries, “Touch it for luck. Go! Go!”
Pushing toward the center aisle as the banner is slogged through, reaching with mad ardor like everybody else—shouldering past gray-haired ladies and wide-eyed children, all of us greedy for a touch of magic—I cannot stretch my fingers far enough to reach the cloth, but then I am an outsider; why should I share in their good fortune? The banner continues toward the altar, where it will be blessed by an archbishop dressed in red and white lace. I snap a photo of the nun, a quiet eddy in the current, fingers curled against her fuzzy chin, eyes peering through smudged glasses. I envy her tranquillity.
“Is it too late to become a nun?” I whisper to Cecilia. But Cecilia doesn’t answer, because she is no longer there.
SIXTEEN
Expelled from the church into the steamy square, the crush disperses slowly, contradaioli gathering in knots of animated conversation. It is easy to spot Sofri standing with a group of older men, also wearing Oca scarves, all of them smoking and talking at once.
Sofri says something that causes the others to nod with approving smiles.
“I told them you are my niece from America,” he says.
I feel a blush of pleasure. “I’m touched. Do I call you zio?” I say, dragging up the word for “uncle.”
“Zio, sure.” Sofri grins. “Molto bène!”
“Where is Cecilia?”
“I don’t know. You don’t see her?”
We gaze over the crowd fanning out along the many streets leading out of the piazza. Tourists are still gathered, watching th
e spectacle of citizens in soft velvet hats and suede tunics chatting in front of motorbikes and smart cars.
“She was standing right next to me in church.”
“Maybe she got a call and went outside to hear better,” Sofri says, pointing helpfully to his ear.
Looking more closely at the clusters of ladies (the men and women have separated themselves like iron filings on a magnet) I see nobody in an emerald suit with a mountain of auburn hair.
“Maybe the call was about Giovanni? Maybe something happened.”
Sofri speed-dials the abbey and speaks to the nurse.
“The nurse says they did not call her. It is still possible Cecilia went home.”
“Is Giovanni all right?”
“He has a slight fever. The nurse is not concerned.”
“How could Cecilia go home?” I wonder. “We have the car.”
Nicosa, looking confident and at ease, is shaking hands with the archbishop, whose vibrant crimson and lace just knock you out in the sunshine. When His Excellency moves away, Sofri calls Nicosa over, asking questions in Italian, to which Nicosa shakes his head and shows his car keys, indicating that his wife could not have driven away. The square outside Santa Maria church is now empty. The tide has gone out, and there is no trace of Cecilia. Scanning the roofs and windows, I see only a Jack Russell terrier on a balcony, lustily pulling the leaves off a potted basil plant.
Squinting through the smoke of a cigarette, Nicosa tries her cell. No answer. He looks at his watch.
I ask, “What was the plan?”
“Meet outside the church,” he replies impatiently. “Have lunch at the café. They are expecting us.”
“She must already be there,” Sofri decides. “Or at the contrada headquarters, cooking up a masterpiece for tomorrow night. Wait until you see the food these women put out.”
She wouldn’t be cooking, not in that suit.
“She’s punishing me for the unpleasantness in the car,” Nicosa says. “It’s all Ana’s fault.” He smiles and squeezes my shoulder. “I am kidding. We are friends, right?”
“Of course.”
“Mangiamo! Let’s eat!”
I go with the men of Nicosa’s circle, trooping back to Oca territory, where all the stores are bustling. Frequently they stop en masse to shake hands and kiss their brethren, everyone reciting hopes for a good outcome in Monday’s race.
