White Shotgun

by April Smith

  “Where’re you going with that?”

  “I’m going to the laundry room to wash your stuff,” I reply patiently. “It’s in the family quarters, in the main building. Are you hungry?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I am hungry.”

  “I’ll bring you something. There’s soap and shampoo in the shower. Is it okay if I leave?”

  “Go on.”

  “You’ll be okay?”

  “I just said so, didn’t I?”

  In the night, cold wind rakes through my hair. I carry Sterling’s combat clothes in the poncho like contraband. I would rather burn them, but they are crucial to him, to his other self. As I cross the torchlit courtyard, goose bumps rise at the thought of the silent monks who would have been at prayers in a few hours, shuffling through the dark to kneel on the unforgiving floorboards. The workings of the human mind haven’t changed over the centuries: in the perilous hours just before dawn, everything our rational minds have been telling us flies up and away to the realm of the gargoyles.

  Shoving rancid woolen socks and bloodstained camos into the washer, and later, assembling a he-man sandwich out of a kilo’s worth of salami, mortadella, mozzarella, and roasted peppers on an entire loaf of bread, I try to draw the shredded realities of the present together. As relieved as I am to see him whole, I know something has happened to Sterling. I have no idea how deep it goes, or how he found me, why he came back, or how long he will stay. It could be overnight. He could have deserted and be on the run, or about to be reassigned. Putting all these unidentified conditions alongside my sister’s disappearance makes my knees go weak. I sit down on a kitchen chair, immobilized.

  I suppose it is something like panic. It makes no sense to start evaluating a relationship at four in the morning, when the man has shown up out of nowhere, hostile and disoriented and not himself, but that’s where my stubborn mind keeps going. True, I had become impatient with his comings and goings, but there was something comforting, even pleasurable, in the delayed satisfaction of his return. Until tonight, his reappearances had been smooth and hearty—he had been as happy as I was to recharge with some robust sex, bittersweet chocolate cake for breakfast, the afternoon in a hotel bed, sleeping, reading newspapers, watching movies, staring idly into each other’s eyes. From the glimpse of the bones poking through his back, it looks as if he has dropped ten pounds, which is a lot when you weigh one-fifty. From the deadness in his voice, it sounds as if he’s not feeling the deprivation in his body—or very much at all.

  I had a bad gut reaction when he took off the bandanna. He looked less like a warrior than a hardened killer. Security operatives are hired to protect, not fight—although it doesn’t always work that way. Some of my best friends at the Bureau are snipers, but lord knows, they don’t do it for the money. How well do I know Sterling McCord and what kind of assignments he will accept? How long and hard will I stand by? It is troubling to realize these are the same irksome questions I’ve been asking myself about Cecilia. She made a deal with the devil when she married Nicosa, and a deal with the mafias (same thing) to keep her clinics alive. Maybe she’s escaped to a safe and happy place in the arms of ’Ndrangheta. How well do I know her? What makes me qualified to save her from her own life?

  When I get back to the room with the food, Sterling is clean and showered and dead to the world, lying across the bed in the bathrobe as if he’d literally just dropped. Wedging into a valley at the edge of the mattress, I try to roll him over, but he kicks out, slashing my leg with a jagged toenail. I debark to the chaise. It isn’t much of a sleep, awakening with the roosters and the light and filled with a million questions.

  All of which will have to wait, because Sterling sleeps for the next sixteen hours. I dash to get his stuff out of the dryer before anyone else wakes up, and I keep the bedroom door locked. Finally, sometime around sunset, I return to find him fully dressed—and from the lavender vapor in the room, having showered again—wearing clean jeans that fit too loosely, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap, and buckling on his watch. The sandwich has evaporated. My laptop is open on the desk.

  “Don’t you get Internet in this hooch?”

  “Depends on the time of day.”

  “It just cut out on me,” he says sullenly. “We’ve gotta go.”

  “Where?”

  “Meeting a buddy.”

  He slips on a pair of blue Oakleys the color of the Florida gulf. We exit the room into the billowing evening.

  “Are you okay? Are you done with the mission?”

  “Yes to both.”

  “I won’t ask a lot of questions, but I’m curious to know how you found me,” I say, as we hurry down the marble stairs.

  “Word got through.”

  Instead of crossing the courtyard he grabs my arm, and we go the other way, ducking underneath the staircase and around the back of the family quarters where the pine forest comes down to the stone wall. Following in his careful footsteps over the scrub, it occurs to me that maybe Sterling believes we are on reconnaissance, that he has truly lost his mind. We pick up a deer trail that comes out into an olive grove on the neighboring farm. From here it is fifty meters to the road. This must be the way he gained entry in the middle of the night.

  A well-used black Fiat is waiting on the shoulder. Sterling opens the door, and we climb in.

  “You’re late, you cunt,” says the driver.

  “Ana, this is Chris.”

  Seeing Chris is a shocker.

  “I know Chris!”

  Chris is the English bartender from the Walkabout Pub.

  “And I know Ana!” he echoes mockingly as we take off.

  “How do you know Sterling?”

  “Never saw the lad before in me life,” says Chris. “He was out there on the road, trying to pick me up.”

  “Fuck off.”

  Chris pulls a serious face and seeks me out in the rearview mirror.

  “Everything green?” he asks Sterling.

  “Good to go.”

  “Well then, no worries.”

  “Chris is former SAS,” Sterling explains. “Now he’s also an operative for Oryx.”

  I see it. The buff body. The detached observer who stays out of the limelight, placed in a job that positions him to know every English-speaker in town.

  “Chris told you I was here?”

  “I saw you were having troubles,” the bartender says. “The missing sister and all.”

  “Thank you, sir. You could have also told me that you work with Sterling.”

  “Normally we’re mum around the girlfriend—but now I discover you’re not the girlfriend, you’re FBI.”

  “You’re the girlfriend,” Sterling intones, folding his arms and hunkering down under the Oakleys.

  This gets a tiny smile out of Chris.

  “Just think,” he says. “If an RPG hit this car right now with the three of us in it, what a total bummer for covert ops.”

  “Not for Oryx. We are a hundred percent deniable.”

  “The girlfriend isn’t.”

  “According to the FBI,” I say, “officially, I’m on vacation.”

  “Enough of that kind of talk,” Sterling mutters. “Bad juju.” We are down off the mountain and turning onto the main road to Siena.

  “Anyone care to say where we’re headed?” I wonder.

  “I’m going to my day job,” Chris says. “Pouring drinks for alcoholics.”

  “We’re going to the pub,” Sterling interrupts. “To try to get on the damn Internet.”

  “What for?”

  “There’s an e-mail from Glasgow, which I couldn’t open.”

  “About a job?”

  “About you.”

  In the back room of the Walkabout, under the crude map of Australia, Sterling’s gaunt face is lit by the glow of Chris’s laptop. He is accessing a secure site referred to as the Circuit, available only to private military contractors—a cyber version of the old soldier-for-hire magazines—where buddies are located and pr
ivate military companies are rated by operatives as places to work, the way consumers rank can openers on Amazon.

  No worries, as Chris would say, since nobody posts under their real name. They use handles, just like in the field. Sterling’s handle is Bullrider, but he’d kill me if I ever called him that, like the old superstition about never letting a woman board a sailing ship. Talk about bad juju.

  While Sterling works the Internet, I am banished to the bar, to stare at another motorcar race on the flat-screen, interrupted by a news update describing the disappearance and suspected kidnapping of medical doctor and socialite Cecilia Nicosa, wife of the well-known coffee king. I stare with fascination at the inner and outer confluence of events: at the moment her image appeared I was making a list of people who could tell me about Cecilia’s associates and routines. This is how we do it in the big leagues: interview everyone who might have been in contact with the subject twenty-four hours before the abduction. The hospital staff. Giovanni’s teachers. The parents of Giovanni’s friends. The ladies I met at the party. The ladies she cooks with at contrada headquarters. Donnato’s advice makes sense: skirting the authorities may be the most direct route to finding her.

  Sterling calls me over. I take my limonata. He is eating a chocolate bar and drinking water.

  “This is something you need to know,” he says, very serious. “It comes from a solid source, a Scotsman I knew in Fallujah. He quit the private contracting business and he’s back home, on an antiterrorist unit with the Glasgow police. He gave me a heads-up through the Circuit on the investigation into the attack in South Kensington. Being an honest cop, he first asked what in hell I was doing at a multiple homicide in London. When Oryx confirmed that I had been leaving on a mission, he e-mailed this photo. It was taken just before the shooters opened fire.”

  Sterling flips the computer around to display a blurry-but-discernable picture of me in front of the London restaurant, Baciare, staring at the camera and looking plenty annoyed for having been catcalled by a jerk in a Ford. You can see Sterling in the background, heading off, wearing the rucksack.

  “Where did this come from?”

  “The investigators got it off a cell phone belonging to one of the three men who were detained at the Glasgow airport, off an Interpol no-fly alert originating from the Met. Three Italian nationals, trying to get to Rome through Cairo.”

  “I’m aware of them. The FBI legat was here yesterday. He told me they had three suspects in custody.”

  “Did he say anything about the bad guys being in possession of a picture of you?”

  “No. Maybe he didn’t know,” I say. The failure of different agencies to talk to each other is a given these days.

  “Oh, honey. He knew.”

  To prove it, Sterling highlights the list of forwards on the screen. The Glasgow police had sent the photo to Inspector Reilly at the Metropolitan Police, who forwarded it to Dennis Rizzio. Sterling peers disconsolately over the bar of light rimming the laptop.

  “That honcho in Rome is holdin’ out on you. He’s playin’ you for something.”

  I do not reply.

  “Why do you suppose that is?”

  “It’s SOP at the Bureau,” I say bitterly. “Keep the field agent in the dark. Withhold information, so the Bureau maintains total control over everybody’s actions.”

  I can barely speak. Why didn’t Rizzio tell me about the photo? Or, earlier, that Cecilia was paying bribes?

  “Meanwhile,” Sterling says, “here’s the puke that shot up those kids.”

  Mug shots appear on the screen. Three awfully young and stupid-looking men in their twenties. The names mean nothing, but I do recognize a face: the scowling eyes, long face, heavy and ruler-straight eyebrows. He looks remarkably like the drawing made by the sketch artist in Scotland Yard. Amazing how they can do that.

  “That’s one of them,” I say. “The one I saw in the Ford.”

  Sterling leans back and pushes up his baseball cap.

  “We’re fucked.”

  “How so?”

  “What you just did.” He nods toward the screen. “Identified the bad guy.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Security contractors have their own networks; you have yours, the criminal clans have theirs. According to my Scots friend, this picture went out on multiple servers that feed the terrorist networks. That means your face is on all the mafia websites, which also reach into Bulgaria, Turkey—basically wherever they do business, which is all of eastern Europe and North Africa, for a start. My contact says the Met thinks the attack in London was a reprisal shooting. The target was someone in the restaurant.”

  “Someone at the birthday party?”

  “That’s their theory. But the point is, the bad guys have your picture. You are not only a witness who can ID them, but also I’m sure that by now they know you’re Bureau. They want you as a bargaining chip, or to take you out of the game. Which could explain the knife attack in the Campo.”

  He closes the laptop, leaving us in the ubiquitous red glow of the Walkabout Pub. We go out to the bar just as the TV news bulletin announcing the disappearance of Cecilia Nicosa comes up again.

  “They’ve replayed that thing five times in the past half hour,” I sigh. “Worse than a mattress commercial.”

  Sterling stares at Cecilia’s picture on the flat-screen. “You look a helluva lot like her.”

  Long curly hair. Flat high cheekbones. Almond eyes. She has darker skin and definitely a different style—in the TV photo she’s on a yacht, smiling and windblown, large black sunglasses on top of her head, wearing a multistrand gold choker woven with jewels, like Queen Nefertiti cruising the Nile.

  “There’s a resemblance,” I admit.

  “A strong resemblance.”

  “If you didn’t know us.”

  “I’m sorry to say this.”

  I know where he’s going. It’s the look in his eyes. A lump rises in my throat.

  “Say it.”

  “The mafia sees the cell phone picture. This lady could identify the shooter; she’s starin’ straight at him. So they put an APB out on their network. Every punk in Italy goes looking. And some lower-level dope says, Hey, I found her, smack-dab in the middle of Siena. They watch for a while. Yep, it sure looks like the lady in the photo. The bad guys, they’re not from around here; they’re from the south; they don’t know who Cecilia Nicosa is. They think they’ve got the witness in the photo, so they nab her in the church. But they took the wrong girl.”

  “I was wearing Cecilia’s clothes that day,” I say softly. “She was always trying to get me to dress better.” I wait. “What will happen when they figure out she isn’t me?”

  There is no need for him to answer.

  Then comes the long, slow sigh of defeat. “Most of the time,” I say, “the ‘disappeared’ are never found.”

  “Bad police work.”

  “No, it’s because the bodies are dissolved in lye.”

  Sterling’s eyes flare briefly. “Lye?”

  I nod. “Nothing left to find.”

  He slides his fingers over mine for just an instant. It’s the best he can do.

  TWENTY-THREE

  They blindfolded Cecilia and pushed her up a staircase. Thin metal stairs, leading up from the basement. She was between the two enormous men, a gun jammed into her ribs. They were moving fast, almost carrying her between them. Briefly outside, it smelled like night and hot winds. Hurrying up another staircase. Shouts, conversations, radios, the smells of coffee and spilled beer. As they turned abruptly she was able to put out one hand and feel a rough stucco corner—then she heard locks turning, murmuring voices, and she was pulled inside an apartment with a TV turned up, the scents of oilcloth and something in the oven—phyllo dough?—and shoved inside a room. The door was locked and immediately there was pounding on the other side by shrieking, taunting children.

  She took off the rag that covered her eyes. The first thing she saw was a piece of foam o
n the floor, two feet by six feet. Grimy balled-up sheets. Who knew who had been sleeping there? A window. She lifted the blind and saw another window of another apartment less than five feet away. The window was the sliding type, secured with a lock. She noticed she was standing on a filthy remnant of gold carpet. It curled up at the edges, revealing a concrete floor. There was a plastic basket filled with clean folded laundry, as if someone had forgotten about it. Copies of the magazine Oggi, months old.

  She sat on the foam pad and took off her heels. She was still wearing the shiny green suit she’d had on at the church in Piazza Provenzano where the Palio banner had been blessed. It was now so tight and uncomfortable she wanted to rip it to shreds. She peeked at the laundry. Kids’ clothes. Male sweats.

  She threw off the sheets, turned the foam pad over, and lay down. The vertebrae in her neck cracked, and she realized that her back was killing her. With the window closed, the room was stifling, like the room in El Salvador, in the outbuilding near the garden, where she sometimes hid to rest from the exhaustion of working while she was pregnant. There was no sleep. Roosters crowed and dogs barked all day long. Outside, her uncles and brothers lopped corn off the stalks with machetes. It was like an oven in that room. She felt the baby kick. She could only feel sorry for it, to be born to such a failure of a mother. Cecilia couldn’t move in that room because of the heat of the afternoon and the weight of sadness. It was during the time her own mother had exiled her to work in the garden and grind the corn for tortillas, giving her study room with its unfinished mural of Tweety Bird to a younger brother, as punishment.

  Now she was a lady of elegance, a doctor. What had those years of suffering come to? She saw her death outside the door. The fat man with the gun. She would be humiliated by these men, that was a given. They would take her dignity, but what did it matter? We are all naked in death. She could accept everything else, she thought, but not that she would never see her son again. Lying down, with tears running along her temples, she forced herself to prepare, to travel slowly through the tunnel of darkness, at the end of which, in a bright mist, was Giovanni.