White Shotgun ag-4

by April Smith

  “How are you all doin’ today?” Sterling asks, setting the equipment down.

  “Adesso non lo so.” Sofri chuckles. Now I don’t know. “I think I felt better before you arrived.”

  On the other hand, I am feeling decidedly happier, now that Sterling’s here. His presence conveys confidence in the mission. We’re going to do this together. My mood of caution starts to lift, replaced by the adrenaline rush of engagement and the pleasure of knowing what needs to be done and finally getting down to it.

  “This’ll be good.” I’m clearing space on the desk for the yellow suitcase.

  “What is in there? A bomb?”

  “An electroshock machine,” Sofri quips. “In case we get a heart attack.”

  Sterling opens the case to reveal a mini switchboard with molded foam compartments for headsets and a tape recorder.

  “It’s to monitor the phone,” he explains. “From now on, nobody talks to the kidnappers unless Ana or I am listening.”

  “Nicoli will be the primary contact,” I say. “You’re the one who speaks to the bad guys. Do you think you can do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “We are going to insist they let you talk to Cecilia. Before any negotiation, before anything, you say, ‘I want to hear her voice.’ ”

  He snorts derisively. “You know how it is in the coffee business? Liars and thieves! The growers and the shippers and the kids who steal from the cash register. You don’t think someone who deals with these people every day is not capable of saying, ‘Let me talk to my wife’?”

  I explain gently that sometimes it isn’t words you hear. “Sometimes there are only screams. They could torture her to get to you.”

  Nicosa scratches at his head.

  “I can do it,” Sofri volunteers.

  “You?” says Nicosa. “You’re the one who will need the electroshock machine. No. It’s me.”

  Sterling resumes: “Ana is the negotiator. She sits right next to you and tells you what to say.”

  “Buona fortuna,” murmurs Sofri.

  “I’m writing you notes. You’re repeating exactly what I write. Sofri, can you simultaneously translate, so we can hear you in our headphones?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Sofri’s listening in and translating. Nicosa’s talking. Sterling’s providing tactical support for how to recover the victim.”

  Sofri pats his forehead with a silk handkerchief. “Mio Dio!”

  “Any other questions?”

  “How long will this take?”

  “No way to know,” Sterling says. “Could be hours, could be days.”

  Nicosa’s cell phone rings. We look up expectantly, but he waves us off — it’s Giovanni, reporting that he has arrived at the rectory of Padre Filippo.

  “You see? He is a good boy,” Nicosa says, opening the refrigerator to a row of glistening wine bottles. “How about a drink?”

  “We don’t advise it, sir,” Sterling says, expressionless.

  Nicosa glowers. “Nobody made you capo.” But he closes the door.

  By four in the afternoon, when the sun has probed each window on its way around the tower, we have turned on the TV and ended up watching Die Hard dubbed into Italian. Not really watching it, just someplace to put your eyeballs. There have been five other calls to the household throughout the day, all noted on the timeline, none relevant. The level of anxiety in the room is holding steady at 80 percent. The level of violence on the plasma screen is downright quaint. It is comforting to watch actors destroy large amounts of phony glass. I wonder what it means to die, hard.

  As much as I want to reclaim Sterling, even the slightest touch would be against the professional code of conduct we have tacitly agreed to follow as long as we are working the case. We make sure to sit apart; all of us are sprawled on the couches and leather chairs, with the paradoxical sense of a family held together by the suspension of time, like waiting for a baby to be born, or Thanksgiving dinner to be served.

  Yet even across the room I feel it when Sterling’s body stiffens. He jumps up, grabs the gun bag, and unzips a compartment that holds a Walther PPK/S 9mm and a cleaning kit. Sitting cross-legged on the rug in front of the TV, he fieldstrips the gun, removing the magazine and the front of the trigger guard.

  Sofri and Nicosa watch, fascinated.

  “What does a private security company do?” Sofri wonders.

  “Whatever the customer wants. Bodyguard. Protect assets. Fight a war.”

  “Have you ever been hired on a kidnapping?”

  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 jus
t 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?”