by April Smith
“There’s nothing to eat,” Giovanni observes.
Sterling ferrets out two beers. The phone rings again.
“Probably for me.” I reach for it, but Nicosa, shaking water off his head like a lion, snatches it away.
“Che vuole lei?” he shouts angrily.
He listens. The person on the other end speaks swiftly and ends the call. Nicosa lowers the phone, strangely triumphant.
“You see? This is what I have been waiting for! What I have said all along. She’s alive. These people have Cecilia.”
“Mama is okay?”
“What did they say?” I urge. “Exactly?”
“ ‘We have your wife.’ ”
“Did they put her on the phone?” demands Sterling.
“No.”
“Who are they?” Giovanni asks.
“Don’t worry!” cries Nicosa, in a delirium. “They will call again.”
“What do they want?”
“Two million euros.”
Giovanni is wide-eyed. “Do we have that much money, Papa?”
Nicosa laughs exuberantly, drumming the boy’s shoulders. “You see? Listen to the priest! God went looking. Your mother is alive!”
THIRTY
Just after dark, Zabrina and Yuri pass beneath the stone arch in the center of a dying coastal town in the province of Calabria — another set of stoplights in miles of unfinished shopping centers and buildings. Between getting lost, and pit stops due to stomach cramps, it has taken longer than they planned — almost nine hours on the motorbike — but by maintaining on Valium and caffeine, they keep pushing through the sweltering urban sprawl. The green hills of Tuscany don’t even exist.
By the time they enter the narrow streets of the husk that is left of the old town center, Zabrina has collapsed against Yuri’s back, crying softly from excruciating aches in her bones. She’s crashing and can’t hold on anymore. All he can do is shrug her off and keep going. He has the shakes too, and it’s hard to follow her mumbled instructions to the massive public housing project called la piccola città, Little City. Because ’Ndrangheta is demanding higher fees for its contract to collect the garbage, household waste has been left in mountainous piles that block the streets, forcing them to keep making unexpected turns, getting more and more lost. Evening traffic comes to a standstill. Frustrated commuters are simply locking their cars, leaving them in the middle of the street, and going home. While they are stopped in a traffic jam, some skinny little jerk tries to rip Zabrina’s bag right off the rack, but Yuri hits the gas, hops the curb, and drives thirty kilometers per hour on the sidewalk.
They find the road into the hills. When the anonymous concrete roofs of the housing project rise like a multistoried fortress, Zabrina remembers the crack house is in the middle sector, second floor, the corner apartment way at the end. The Little City is as spread out as a good-sized American shopping mall, over a thousand units in all. The sectors are connected by courtyards within courtyards, odd bridges and narrow walkways. Projecting from every wall is a slovenly jumble of tiny balconies, satellite dishes, networks of exposed electrical cables. The temperature is a hundred and eight degrees. There is not a breath of air, as if the entire community is being smothered under glass. Only the smallest children are wound up enough to play in this heat, kicking soccer balls in their underpants, or splashing in rubber pools while unemployed onlookers smoke cigarettes and soak their feet.
Neither the colliding tracks of blaring pop music nor the jarring reek of marijuana and roasting fish has any effect on the ragged, glassy-eyed junkies lounging on the peeling stairs below the corner apartment.
Fat Pasquale, Zabrina’s cousin, is sitting on a chair, feet up on a cooler, listening to an iPod.
“Who’s this guy?” he says by way of greeting, jerking a thumb at Yuri.
They are speaking in the dialect specific to Calabria.
“He’s my boyfriend,” Zabrina answers.
“You vouch for him?”
“I vouch for him.”
Fat Pasquale opens the screen door. The kitchen is even hotter. The middle-aged woman with the black hair, now wearing an apron, sweat running down her temples, chops tomatoes at the sink.
“Maria Luisa gets a bigger allowance than me,” she is saying.
“I know.”
“Her husband was unlucky, that’s all. He got in the way of a bullet. But my Peppino is a capo, who is in jail today because he is protecting all of you.”
“I know.”
The Puppet, wearing white trousers, a lizard belt, and an expensive linen shirt, is sitting at the kitchen table, legs crossed, relaxed. Before him is an array of bags of white powder, a digital scale, vials, and small spatulas used for paint, neatly lined up on butcher paper laid over the oilcloth. Disregarding the woman and her complaints, he gives instructions to his bodyguard, who is mixing the cut. That same guy was here last time; Zabrina recognizes the jade disk around his neck. She avoids looking at the boss’s strange black wooden fingers, staring instead at the pattern of tulip tiles on the wall. One tulip up. One tulip down. The pain in her abdomen is unbearable.
“Three years in prison and sixteen months to go!” the woman goes on, shaking the knife at the Puppet. “You tell Don Toti I deserve a bigger allowance than Maria Luisa!”
The Puppet ignores this, peering closely at the powder dissolving in a small glass dish. He raises his prosthesis and motions to Yuri.
“You! Sit here.”
Yuri slips into the chair, homing in on the ritual as the bodyguard loads the syringe.
“Who vouches for you?”
“Zabrina.”
The Puppet’s eyes rise to the girl waiting impatiently. Silently he nods, bestowing his approval on her guest.
“Where you from?” he asks the boy kindly.
Yuri stares hungrily, tightening a bandanna around his arm. “Albania,” he replies.
The bodyguard passes the syringe to Yuri, who slips the needle into his vein.
“Are you listening to me?” demands the woman at the sink. “Will you talk to Don Toti?”
“Talk to him about what?”
The woman stares at the Puppet with stymied hate.
“Next,” he says. “You, signorina. Che bella! I have seen you before. I would not forget such a beautiful face.”
“Thank you,” says Zabrina, but Yuri isn’t standing up. She needs her turn. His torso contracts, like he’s taking a very deep breath, then his eyes roll up, and he slumps sideways and falls out of the chair.
“Yuri!”
“What is this?” the Puppet inquires.
“I changed the cut,” says the bodyguard. “Like you said.”
“Too strong. Make it weaker.”
The bodyguard goes back to the powder, ignoring the young man on the floor, who has gone into full-body convulsions.
Zabrina is on her knees, screaming, “Oh shit, oh shit, he’s overdosing!”
“Get your boyfriend out of here.”
“Help me. Do something! He’s going to die.”
“There is nothing I can do.”
“Yes! Call a doctor. Get him to a hospital!”
She tries to drag Yuri’s heavy body toward the door.
The woman, who has been watching all this with disgust, shakes her head and leaves the kitchen.
The Puppet looks at the watch strapped around the prosthesis. “Get them out of here.”
The bodyguard sighs and calls, “Pasquale!” No answer. He gets up and opens the door.
“Pasquale isn’t here. I don’t know where he is.”
“You’re supposed to know!”
By opening the door, the bodyguard has allowed a score of skinny children in wet bathing suits to pour inside and rush to the refrigerator to shout for Kool-Aid. Seeing Yuri writhing on the floor causes them to stare, and then to all start shrieking at once — a chorus of high-pitched shrieking — some laughing, some shrieking just to shriek. Deep inside the apartment, there is banging.
“This place is a filthy zoo,” says the Puppet. “Where is that witch? Where is the coffee?”
“What about him?” asks the bodyguard, pointing at Yuri.
“In five minutes he’ll be dead,” says the Puppet, and instructs the bodyguard to mix up another batch.
Zabrina is sobbing, trying to stop the convulsions by massaging Yuri’s arms and legs. Meanwhile, looking as if she is doing nothing at all, the woman has meandered down the hall and unlocked the door to the bedroom.
“We need a doctor,” she says. “A boy is overdosing.”
Cecilia Maria Nicosa stumbles out, dressed in oversized men’s sweatpants in the furnacelike heat, two thin ratty undershirts one over the other, to avoid indignity. Her auburn hair is piled up haphazardly. Once upon a time she had a pedicure. There are purple bruises down her arms and across the side of her face like the shadow of a hand.
“Where?” she croaks. She hasn’t spoken out loud in days.
The woman points to the kitchen.
Cecilia moves unsteadily down the hall, enters the kitchen, and kneels by the boy.
“What is she doing here?” the Puppet demands. “She belongs inside!”
“You don’t listen to me; I don’t listen to you!” says the woman, and folds her fleshy arms.
Yuri is unresponsive. His breathing is rapid and he’s sweating. Cecilia feels the pulse at his neck. His skin is burning hot.
“He’s going into hyperthermia.”
Zabrina raises wild eyes.
“What does that mean?”
“We have to lower his temperature, fast,” says Cecilia. “We need to stop the spasms or he will have a heart attack. Get him in the bathtub and pour cold water over him and fill the tub with ice, if you have it.” With their faces almost touching, Cecilia asks, “Do you have any Tylenol?”
“I have Valium,” Zabrina says.
But Zabrina is not hearing the words, and Cecilia is barely aware of saying them, both shocked by recognition. Zabrina sees the lady’s lip is swollen and a tooth is chipped. In the fever of withdrawal, she looks so deeply into the fierce eyes of the captive that she believes she can see the crystalline cells. The lady stares back intently. Detached from the cacophony of shrieking children and back-and-forth shouts between the woman and the Puppet, Cecilia and Zabrina realize that they know each other; they have met before, but where?
“Who are you?” whispers Zabrina.
Before Cecilia can answer, they are roughly jerked apart by the bodyguard and Fat Pasquale.
“Give him Valium!” Cecilia manages, before she is pushed back into the bedroom and the door is locked.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” the Puppet is shouting at the woman. “You listen in on every phone call; you know exactly what is going on with Nicoli Nicosa’s wife. We are doing business here! I’m warning you, don’t fuck with me!”
The woman turns her back.
“You!” she says to the children. “All of you! Help with this boy.”
The kids and the woman drag Yuri’s inert body to the bathroom and heave him into the tub, flooding it with cold water until his shorts float. One of them empties a tray of ice cubes.
“Isn’t he going to take his clothes off?” asks a little child.
Inside the bedroom prison cell, Cecilia sinks onto the foam mattress, recalling where she saw the girl. She was a patient at the clinic. An intravenous drug abuser diagnosed with hepatitis C, an advanced disease that can be fatal. She tried to get her into treatment, but the girl never came back. And here she is, still shooting. At the thought of this, Cecilia springs up and pounds her fists against the wall. Of all the people in the world who might have recognized Cecilia, might have notified the police — who shows up to save the day but an addict. An ignorant, damaged, self-destructive, diseased addict.
In the bathroom, Yuri shivers violently as his eyes slowly open.
In the kitchen, Zabrina doesn’t hesitate to sit in the chair. She gets her turn. The new cut has been adjusted by adding talcum powder. One tulip up, one tulip down.
THIRTY-ONE
I won’t believe she is alive until I hear Cecilia’s voice. While Nicosa goes off on a manic call to Sofri, instructing him to get the cash to pay the ransom subito, I am compartmentalizing the information we have, refusing to get keyed up. Somebody has to keep a clear head.
We can’t miss the next opportunity to trace the calls.
“Nicoli? Can we use your office?”
“For what?”
“In the FBI, we have what we call a command post, the nerve center of a major case. I want to set one up in the bell tower. You already have the technology.”
“Can I be there, too?” asks Giovanni.
“Come with me,” I say, leading him from the kitchen to the entry-way, where we can be alone. “Why should I trust you?”
He doesn’t understand the question. “I’m worried about my mother.”
“I hear that. It’s a crisis now, but what about last week? Last year? All the time you’ve been running cocaine, putting your parents at risk?”
“I’m sorry. It’s over.”
“Just like that? Giovanni, you’re a good kid, but you’re all over the map. Smart in school, on the soccer team — but you still get sucked in. You don’t like the way your father does business, do it differently. You’re not him. You are not obligated to shoulder his mistakes. Make a statement — about who you are, not how pissed off you are at him. You need to figure out how you want to be in the world. I’m here if you want to talk.”
“That’s cool. Meanwhile, can I be in the command post?”
“No, you can’t. I’m sorry, no minors.”
“I’m sixteen!”
“In America, you’d be locked in a hotel room with a couple of agents, and the abbey would be under surveillance 24/7. If we had more manpower, that’s exactly what we’d do.”
“Why don’t we?”
“Have the manpower? Because your father doesn’t want to go to the police.”
“Why can’t I stay? What’s safer than here?”
“You need looking after, and we have work to do.”
“ ‘Looking after’? Are you serious?”
“Until you prove otherwise, yes.”
We go back into the kitchen.
“Is there a responsible adult Giovanni can stay with?” I ask.
Nicosa says, “Padre Filippo.”
Giovanni protests in rapid Italian.
“You have to be protected. That’s the protocol,” I say flatly.
Giovanni makes a face, grabs his keys and cell phone.
“You’re not ready to drive.”
“Are you serious?”
“Have a friend take you. Call when you get to the rectory.”
“Thanks for trusting me,” Giovanni replies sardonically, hopping out of the kitchen on his crutch.
The front door heaves shut. Nicosa smiles briefly with something like gratitude. He believes that now he is in control: his wife has been kidnapped for ransom, a common crime he has the power to resolve, as long as we heed the kidnappers’ warning and do not involve the police — and his rival, the chief.
“He accuses me of an act against God, against my wife?” Nicosa says of the Commissario as we ascend in the elevator. “He threatens to arrest me? Why? To prove Torre is great? I should have strangled him right there!” He points dramatically to the courtyard, a tiny puzzle piece below. “The police are lower than swine. They will never — never — come into this house.”
I have to agree that right now it is better to leave them out of it. A kidnapping is unpredictable enough without an overlay of byzantine grudges and backstabbing disloyalties. I’d much rather deal with normal criminals. As the darkened floors of Renaissance art slip by, I tick off the tasks ahead: install phone taps to record and monitor calls. Establish communication with the kidnappers. Assign roles of negotiator and coach. Sterling has already been dispatched to Chris for the necessary equipm
ent.
Trickier is Nicosa’s insistence that we also do not inform Dennis Rizzio in Rome that contact has been made with the alleged kidnappers. He believes the situation is too porous. If they get a whiff of the authorities, they will kill her. I am not willing to take that risk. This is no time to get all bollixed up in Bureau procedure. When we have something solid, I will inform my boss.
We arrive at the top of the tower. Nicosa hops off the elevator, strutting around like a rooster in his airborne office, while I wonder what crazy arrogance had convinced me that we could pull this off on our own — and at what risk to my career at the Bureau?
The real command post in Los Angeles, created for response to terrorist attacks and natural disasters, is stocked with food and water. Okay, got that. There are dozens of TV monitors and laptops, to say nothing of hundreds of agents. I angle the flat-screen so it faces the empty leather couches, and make sure Nicosa’s computer is online. Nice. Just like home. As for a timeline to keep track of unfolding events, instead of the familiar, low-tech roll of brown paper usually tacked across the wall, I lay pieces of printer pages edge to edge and secure them with cellophane tape, leaning back with a sigh. It’s amazing what you can make out of desperation and a few ordinary household items.
The intercom buzzes and Sofri appears minutes later, carrying a small duffel. He gives Nicosa a strong embrace, patting him on the back.
“Did they call again?” Sofri asks.
“Not yet.”
“Right now they’re playing cat and mouse,” I say.
“I have the money.” Sofri takes off his blazer. Folding the sleeves precisely as a haberdasher, he lays it across the back of a chair. “What do we do, topolina?”
“We have to wait,” Nicosa interrupts, before I can answer. “Exactly what I said in the beginning.”
The intercom buzzes. They both jump.
It is Sterling.
When the glass elevator surfaces, it is filled with the alarming shape of a man dressed for war. Sterling, wearing boots, camos, and the black dragon T-shirt, brings soldierly weightiness into the room — the real possibility of someone getting killed. He shoulders the rucksack while carrying a sniper bag in one hand, a scuffed suitcase made of yellow plastic in the other. Nicosa and Sofri step away. This is not their movie.