by April Smith
Sterling works a soft brass brush over the residue on the outside of the barrel. “All the time.”
“How do they usually end?”
“It all depends on patience, sir. Patience and negotiation. Mind if I have one of those?”
Sterling reaches for a bowl of chocolates.
“Sure, of course,” says Nicosa, handing it over. “Can I get you something else? You didn’t care for my food?”
“It looked great, but I’m not much hungry these days.”
“He just came back from a mission,” I explain. “Still adjusting to the concept of lunch.”
“Really?” says Sofri, leaning forward, elbows on knees. “Can you tell us what the mission was?”
“All I can say is, I quit.”
This is news to me. Anything he says would be news.
“Was it difficult?” Sofri asks.
Sterling doesn’t answer. He’s reassembling the Walther, pulling the slide back onto the barrel and checking the alignment.
Sofri and Nicosa watch every move.
“On this mission,” Sofri continues, “was it too much fighting, people getting killed?”
“Is that why I quit, you mean?”
Sofri nods. “If I may ask.”
Sterling finishes off with gun oil and a cloth. “We quit because they wouldn’t give us holiday pay.”
“Holiday pay?”
“That’s right. Promised, wouldn’t deliver, so we walked.”
Nicosa laughs. “It’s the same in every business!”
But I know that’s not all. That’s not why he showed up in my bedroom in the middle of the night, looking like a refugee, looking like something happened that was powerful enough to permanently take away his appetite.
The phone rings.
Everyone scurries into position. Sofri stumbles over a wire. We put on headphones and move to the desk, where four chairs are waiting. Sterling checks the tape recorder and gives the nod. Nicosa hits the phone.
“Prègo.”
The conversation takes place in Italian, with Sofri softly speaking English into our ears.
“Who are you?”
“We have your wife.”
“I want to hear her voice,” says Nicosa.
“Not possible.”
“Why not? If she’s alive, put her on the phone.”
“We want the money.”
“I have the money. But first I hear her speak.”
“We want two million euros.”
“I have it, believe me.”
I write him a note. He hesitates, but I urge him on.
“Tell me where to meet,” he reads.
They hang up. Nicosa rips off the headphones and kicks away from the desk.
“Could you get a trace?” I ask Sterling.
“Disposable cell phone.”
“Don’t worry,” I tell Nicosa. “You did great.”
“This is not going to work,” he says angrily. “You, telling me what to say—they know something is wrong. It doesn’t sound right.”
Sofri intercedes. “You see, first you must talk to the right person. In Italy, the boss never speaks for himself. He is always one or two steps behind the one who is speaking”—which is exactly what Dennis Rizzio told me.
I nod. “I’m sure that with his connections, Nicoli could speak to whomever he pleases. Do you want to make a call?”
Nicosa shakes his head. “You must wait for the courtesy of their call.”
We agree that next time Nicosa will ask for the boss, as well as insist that he hear Cecilia’s voice. He jerks the refrigerator open and defiantly pours a long shot of vodka.
Night passes in fits and starts. Some hours go quickly; sometimes the clock doesn’t move. The TV stays on until Nicosa falls asleep on the couch with his mouth open, and then Sofri clicks it off and settles in one of the corn chip chairs, tipping it up like a recliner. The lights are low. Sounds are not lost way up here; crickets and the rustling of treetops blow in with the cold air. Sitting on the floor in an arc of moonlight, Sterling is fieldstripping and cleaning the Walther for the third or fourth time.
I settle beside him. “You’re not eating, and you’re not sleeping.”
He doesn’t answer.
“That’s a very clean weapon. Cleanest I’ve ever seen.”
He raises a warning finger. “Don’t nag.”
I watch him cleaning the gun. Meticulous. Obsessive.
“I’ve been there. That’s all.”
I went through it after the shooting incident—uncontrollable thoughts and some really bad insomnia. Like a vicious case of poison oak, it won’t go away, and everything you do to calm it only makes it worse. Especially touching it.
Sterling’s face is tight with concentration as his fingers rub the soft cloth back and forth. It seems as though he isn’t going to answer, but then—
“Nobody knows what I see through those sights.”
I put my arm around his shoulders. Massage the rigid muscles of his neck.
“It was a situation that gave us no way out,” he says.
“I understand.”
“No point in discussing it.”
“Okay.” I look over at the windows of black sky. “It’s just that I miss you, baby. Sometimes it doesn’t even seem like we’re a couple anymore. I feel like you keep shutting me down. On the other hand, you came back from the mission to be with me. I guess. I’m confused. Why did you come back?”
“Chris said you were in trouble.”
“Is that all?”
“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t care.”
His tone is flat.
“You’ll neither confirm nor deny?” I say, playfully.
“Pitiful,” he says of his own malfunctioning. “I know.”
“No,” I say. “It’s just hard right now, for both of us.”
“I hear you.”
“Be in touch,” I say.
He nods. I get up and lie on the other chair, adjusting it so my feet are in the air, like Sofri’s, as if we are on an airplane flying over a blacked-out continent. Sterling continues to clean his gun. My mind drifts toward sleep, lulled by the sound of Nicosa’s rhythmic breathing. A million images rush my mind at warp speed, and then I’m floating in a memory of being with Cecilia.
It was when I first arrived, and she had wished in some way to reveal herself to me, craving understanding beyond the wealthy circumstances of her life; she wanted me to know she was not happy in the austere halls of the abbey. So we went to the place in Siena that she said most moves her heart—and perhaps her husband’s, too—a medieval hospital and orphanage called Santa Maria della Scala. In Los Angeles you take a person to Dodger Stadium; here you wind up staring at a 1440 fresco called The Care and Healing of the Sick.
“Contained in this picture are the reasons I wanted to become a doctor,” she said. “But I am not that kind of doctor.”
“Why not?”
“I became a doctor to serve,” she said. “Like them.”
“But you are. You’re helping people.”
“Not the way I want to be.”
She held a yellow patent leather bag to the bosom of her black knit dress, clutching tightly, gazing with hunger at the painting that showed the huge vaulted room in which we were standing as it had been in the fifteenth century, when sick pilgrims and abandoned children were received by hospital friars, who had renounced the world and devoted themselves to service.
“Those were wealthy people, like us,” Cecilia said, pointing to an attendant in a hospital tunic, washing the feet of a terrified young man with a grievous wound to the thigh. “But they became oblates, those who give everything they own to the hospital, including their labor, for life.”
“What did they get in return?”
She smiled grimly. “Freedom?”
Now I know that she had been talking about the awful contradictions of her life: a rich, attractive husband who has other women; a murderous organization to which she is forced to pay money
for the privilege of saving lives. The air in the empty ancient ward was still and smelled of polished wood. Quiet voices of tour guides speaking other languages could be heard from the galleries.
“Children were left here with notes that told their names, and who their parents were,” Cecilia said. “So when times were better, they could be reunited with their families. They weren’t just abandoned.”
We stood together in front of the painting.
“When Papa used to talk about my relative, Ana, in America, I pictured you wearing a ruffled dress and patent leather shoes. I don’t know where I got that, probably from a movie.”
“I hated dresses until I was sixteen,” I told her. “That was me, in shorts and flip-flops. I had to hose off the sand before they let me in the house.”
“ ‘California’ always sounded magical,” Cecilia said. “When I was in medical school, I tried to do my residency in California. The best facilities. The most exciting cities. It was an impossible dream. We are put in our lives and that’s it.”
When we could find no more messages in the mauve and ochre pigments, we were drawn to a tall grated window at the end of the hall, where a breeze coming in from the mountains brought with it the sound of birdsong and church bells, stirring the pigeon feathers caught outside in the terra-cotta brick.
“We used to have a beautiful bronze statue here, Risen Christ by Lorenzo Vecchietta, a Renaissance masterpiece, one of the great treasures of Siena. It looked so contemporary and alive. The expression of suffering was so aching, and the hand reaching out so soft and real—but it was stolen right out of the chapel of this hospital. Why do we agree to live like this?” Cecilia exclaimed in frustration.
Through the grated window was the city, colorless in the pressing heat of noon.
When I awake in the chair, something is scrabbling around the edges of the tower. A blackbird has flown through an open window. We catch it in a wastebasket and let it go.
THIRTY-TWO
Powered by multiple shots of Nicosa Family espresso, we are at our stations by first light, but the next call doesn’t come until three long hours later, at 9:10 a.m.
“Do you have the money?” asks the voice.
“I told you. Yes.”
“Okay.”
Silence.
“Okay what?” Our fearless leader cannot hide his impatience. “Do you realize you are speaking with Nicoli Nicosa?”
“Yes.”
I pass a note. Ask his name.
“What is your name, signore?”
No answer.
“I need to know who I am talking to. It’s only polite, wouldn’t you agree?”
The man hangs up.
“Sounds nervous,” Sterling says.
“Is that good?” asks Sofri.
In truth it’s neither good nor bad, but worth noting on the timeline, which now shows two pieces of intel from the kidnappers in the last twenty-four hours. I am not surprised the night has passed unbroken by a call. Often the lowlifes are too drunk or stoned during those hours to do business.
We eat. We read the news online. Sterling, wearing just the camos, does his wake-up routine: one hundred crunches, one hundred push-ups, three minutes of shadow boxing. The next call comes within the hour.
“Imagine yourself in my position,” Nicosa tells the kidnapper. “I am her husband. I want to know how my wife is. I want to hear her voice. Can’t you put her on for just a minute?”
He is not used to commoners slamming the phone down.
“What the hell is going on? What kind of game do they think they are trying to play?”
“They don’t even know,” I tell him. “They’re flying by the seat of their pants.”
In the afternoon, because I am the girl, I go back to the main house for supplies. After the constant breezes through the tower, the courtyard feels like a suffocating sauna. I’m thinking we are in for a siege, and some food prep in the tower kitchen might be required. Stepping back out of the elevator, arms full of towels and toilet paper and carrying a bag of fruit, cans of tuna in olive oil, instant bean soup, and cold leftover pasta, I find the team in the middle of another call. Slipping on the headphones, I hear a different voice. This one is older, with nothing to prove.
“I have instructions,” says the new voice.
Nicosa answers, “Tell me, please.”
“We will return Signora Nicosa to you after you give us the money.”
The mention of her name makes me hopeful. Not “the crazy bitch,” not even “your wife.” She is still a person to them.
“No police.”
Nicosa agrees. “Absolutely not. You have my word.”
There is the sound of whispered conversations on the kidnapper’s side.
“The cash must be in euros.”
“Agreed. Where do we meet?”
“We will tell you shortly. Take the Ferrari. Drive with Signorina Grey.”
“Cecilia’s sister?”
“Yes, her sister.”
I bite my thumb.
You’re doing great, Nicoli. Please don’t blow it; just agree.
“Why Signorina Grey?”
“The American sister will bring the money. If not, no agreement.”
I nod vigorously.
“Okay.”
“You will listen on the cell phone for instructions where to meet. If we see that you are followed, we will kill Signora Nicosa immediately.”
Nicosa swallows. “Understood. And we will meet my wife there? Where we bring the money?”
“She will be in another place. She will be unharmed. When we have the money, we will tell you where she is. We will call you in the car in five minutes.”
“Now, please, can I hear her voice?”
Scuffling, soft breathing.
“Cecilia?”
“It’s me.”
The voice is timid and weak. But it is Cecilia.
The line goes dead, but I am fired up. We’re closer than we’ve ever been. Sterling joins Nicosa where he’s standing at a window, looking completely drained.
“I know you know that dude on the phone,” Sterling says. “You were using the Italian informal form of address. Who is he?”
“Cosimo Umberto.”
“The Puppet?”
Nicosa turns from the window and raises an ironic eyebrow. “You know him, too?”
“He is known to the Bureau,” I say. “He’s a powerful man, the head of a district of mafia families. Can we trust his promises?”
Sofri and Nicosa exchange glances. Sofri, stroking his mustache uneasily, finally gives the nod.
“Yes.”
“He wants the money. And to prove to me he is the big guy, the capomandamento,” explains Nicosa.
“You two have a history. We saw him outside Giovanni’s hospital room.”
Nicosa goes tight. “I told you before. He was paying his respects.”
“And threatening you?”
“That’s not important now.”
Sterling pulls on the gulf-blue Oakleys and picks up the sniper bag. I’m opening the duffel and checking the cash.
Sterling’s face bends close, and his voice is quiet. “Sure you want to do this?”
“Absolutely.”
“You understand that you are possibly the target.”
“I know. We should have a tac team, but there’s no time to involve Rizzio.”
“They figured out they’ve got your sister, but they still want you. They want it both ways—the money and you. Feels like a setup.” Sterling shakes his head. “I don’t like it.”
“It depends on the drop,” I tell him. “If it’s a public place, and we think it’s secure, we’ll go with it. If not, we abort.”
“Fair enough. I’ll take Chris. We’ll be in contact via cell phone hookup and visuals.” Sterling’s deep green eyes hold mine. “You won’t see me, but I’ll be there.”
“Got it,” I affirm, a host of implications squeezed into two quick words. Every time we part,
it’s an unknown.
Sofri and Nicosa, meanwhile, seem frozen in place. All of a sudden, the posturing has turned real. Sterling strides past them, smacking each one on the back, hard.
“Are we playing this?” he wants to know.
Buckled into the Ferrari and hurtling downhill, Nicosa says, “Tell me what bullshit is this, two different locations? You give them the money, but she’s somewhere else?”
“It’s not uncommon—it’s called the double-drop. They think they can protect themselves that way, but once we make the exchange, Sterling and Chris will be on their tail, and then it’s over. We’ll get them.
And Cecilia.”
For the next forty-five minutes we follow orders on the cell phone that have us driving loops around Siena. It is a charade without logic, meant to ensure that we’re not being followed, no doubt with mafia homies looking out along the way. The old woman with her feet up on a box, crocheting with a tiny needle. The waiter in an outdoor café, shredding cheese. The candle maker in the tourist shop window, folding curls of wax into a rose. Snitches, druggies, businesspeople, wannabes, killers—the whole network of cowed citizenry, keeping track of the red Ferrari. Inside the walls. Outside the walls. Sterling and Sofri are with Chris in the nondescript Fiat, listening to the instructions we are receiving, holding back at varying distances.
Daylight is still bright and scorching when the Puppet instructs us to park the car on Via di Pantaneto. Then I am to continue alone on foot.
“How will Signora Grey know your man?” Nicosa asks through the earpiece.
“By his colors,” the creep replies.
Now we are back on familiar ground. The coded Sienese response. The maddening symbolism. By this time I realize, with some relief, that the ultimate destination, to which they have been steering us all along, is Il Campo, the huge crowded plaza where the Palio was held. They plan to pull off the exchange and blend into the crowd, while limiting our opportunities for pursuit. All right by me. The public venue is safer than an isolated meet.
I tell the team: “It’s a go.”
When we have parked the Ferrari, and I am buckling on the bulletproof vest that came out of Chris’s trunk, Nicosa removes his sunglasses. His eyes are softened with emotion.
“Please, let me do this.”
“Sorry. It’s in my job description.”
