by April Smith
“A car will take you back to your hotel,” he says, “and drop you off tomorrow at Stazione Termini. Look for Caffè Nicosa, smack in the middle of the station. Get the prosciutto, goat cheese, and arugula panino. Trust me.”
Despite the frigid air-conditioning, there are sweat stains under his arms. Had the interview been that stressful?
“I trust you,” I say with a hollow laugh.
“We should be in good shape in Siena. No worries; I work closely with the locals. I’ll be checking in.”
He hands over a bound report issued by the U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation. “For Trusted Agents Only. PROFILE: NICOLI NICOSA.”
“Reading material for the train.”
“How long have you been keeping files on my relatives?” I ask lightly.
Dennis lays a big hand on my shoulder. “The city never sleeps.”
FOUR
At Stazione Termini the next day, an impatient crowd is staring at a board where all the departure signs are rolling over to say, “Soppresso.” Nearby, a group of exhausted teenagers lies in a pile on top of their rucksacks in the middle of the floor. I ask what’s going on.
“It is a train strike,” replies a girl with a Persian accent. “We’ve been waiting all night.”
Everybody in Rome seems to know the trains aren’t running, except the FBI’s legal attaché. I wonder why this is. Has Dennis Rizzio been prisoner of the mock Bureau office so long he has forgotten that we are actually in Italy?
At least Caffè Nicosa is where he said it would be, a deftly lit island of elegance in the center of the hall. Brick dividers, aluminum moldings punched out with playful circles. Starbucks, it is not. Enviable customers are picking at tiny balls of mozzarella in nice white bowls. Floating like a golden leaf in a sea of sweaty, pissed-off commuters, Caffè Nicosa beckons you to come in and be civilized. I am dying to sit down with a cold glass of Pinot Grigio and bask in the irony of reading the FBI file on its owner, Mr. Nicosa, but every table is occupied and there’s a long line.
Slowly I come to understand that the only way to get to Siena in the foreseeable future is by bus. I text Cecilia the change in plans and haul my suitcase outside, where the devilish cobblestones break a wheel. The heat is laughable; the hot winds must blow directly from Algeria, because my face has dried out like a date. When I shout, “Stazione d’autobus?” over the car horns and swirling grit, a man in uniform directs me to a city bus, with instructions to get off at the last stop.
When I arrive at the bus terminal an hour later, there aren’t many passengers left. It is the last point before the freeway in a run-down section of bleak, graffiti-covered apartment buildings that look as if they’ve taken one too many power punches to the midsection. I squeeze myself and the rebellious roller bag into a tiny cafeteria the size of a gas station convenience store, where skinhead families and black-shrouded nonnas have taken refuge from the hundred-degree heat. The mood is tense and incendiary, as if a harsh word could cause the place to combust. There are round signs dangling from the ceiling with Coca-Cola bottles riding rocket ships. I stare at the floor, meditating on the black and green diamond pattern of purgatory.
Hell is waiting. Hell is being unable to go forward or back, when your boyfriend is in parts unknown and home is a stack of cartons in a storage locker. What am I doing in this remote Roman ghetto, so far off the track that my sense of self has dissolved like the puddle of melted Popsicle at my feet? The language, the foreignness, the uncertainty, the heat, are percussive beats like the blood pounding in my head, urging me to flee. The exhilaration of being plucked out of London for a whirlwind trip to Rome now seems hideously misplaced. It’s just another assignment. The arrows lined up and put me in the picture with Nicoli Nicosa, that’s all.
Like Sterling, I am a soldier for hire, part of whose job is to soldier on alone. Every time I catch a TV monitor showing encounters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Philippines, I wonder if he’s there, boosting my spirits by remembering that we both keep making the same choice. When I’m working, I don’t question things. I feel whole. I know my world, and I’m confident there. As long as I respect the coach, I can be a good team player, but in this job, the best work is often done off the grid, on your own terms. You deal with the blowback later. Sterling and I are the same—happiest when we’re acting solo. Or maybe it’s the American way to go it alone. Looking around, I seem to be the only non-Italian packed into the Roman bus station; certainly the only woman not in the company of a mother or a sister.
There’s no place like Italy to make you feel like an orphaned child.
I leave the cafeteria, dragging the suitcase toward an open lot backed by tenements that has been turned into a field of corn, a hopeful sign that somewhere in this degraded landscape the human spirit has prevailed. Ahead at the horizon is an elevated highway where cars are speeding out of the city.
Silhouetted against the setting sun is a woman, six feet tall with storklike legs, wearing nothing but a bikini and heels; obsidian-black skin, hair in a knot at the nape of her neck, languidly moving to a boom box playing African music. Curtains of laundry flutter from the windows above her. A car pulls off the ramp. A white businessman steps out. The woman extends her hand and leads him into the cornfield.
When the bus comes, it is new and air-conditioned. Despite the hordes at the station, there are not many going to Siena. The front seats are taken by two elderly nuns and a blind priest. When we pass the outer industrial rings of the city, the terrain becomes deeply green, broken by raked fields of mustard yellow, dappled with rolls of hay. As we enter the provinces of Umbria, and then Tuscany, there are no malls or subdivisions. The bus stops in few towns along the way. Soon the only sign of modernity is a power line going by in a hypnotic stripe.
I open the file Dennis gave me on Nicoli Nicosa. It describes a cagey player, adept at choosing the side in power, and apparently without political loyalty. He first came to the FBI’s attention when he was observed by a surveillance team that had been following Lucia Vincenzo, forty-two, the widow of a crime boss who was executed in classic manner while he drove to the sweatshop he owned outside Naples, where he employed master tailors and seamstresses to make high-quality copies of designer clothing. He got behind on his extortion payments to ’Ndrangheta; they threatened to seize the business. He resisted; they took him out before breakfast.
After her husband’s murder, ’Ndrangheta made Lucia a deal. She would continue to run the fake high-end clothing business, but now as a money-laundering scheme for their cocaine operation. Profitable for everyone. Her mistake was to hire Chinese immigrants, cheap labor, to work in the shop. It didn’t matter that drug money flowed in and out as usual. By hiring the Chinese she had crossed the crime families who control the counterfeit merchandise trade—an unforgivable slap in the face that could unbalance the delicate truce between the clans. She was a wild card. ’Ndrangheta had to cut her off.
They called her La Leonessa, the Lioness, because she was remorseless and arrogant as a cat, and she obliged the nickname by sporting skintight animal prints, furs, and ropes of gold. From the photos and news clippings reproduced in the file, the Lioness looked like the cliché of a mistress: full-busted, with thick black hair and the size-two body of a teenager. She vanished from a supermarket parking lot in January of this year—punishment for dealing with the Chinese without permission.
That was the theory. But if the husband is always the prime suspect, the lover must be second in line. While the file details five trysts in luxury hotels in Como and Milan between Nicoli Nicosa and Lucia Vincenzo over the past year, it contains no hard evidence that they were in the cocaine business together—but why not? Lucia was an overconfident amateur and Nicosa a street-smart opportunist who might have been looking for a partner. Maybe he saw a way to prove himself to the big boys by aiding in her death.
Like the princes of the Italian city-states, Nicosa seems to possess a natural understanding of allian
ces. The son of a Sienese coffee roaster, he graduated from the Università degli Studi di Roma and studied in the United States at Harvard Business School. There he connected with the son of a member of the ruling class of El Salvador. In that deeply troubled country it was open season for ruthless young men. His classmate’s father liked the charming, big-eyed Italian and treated him like another son; he gave him a postgraduate course in bribery and corruption that allowed Nicosa to buy out the indigenous farmers who were growing yucca, in order for him to plant coffee. The file notes that although the civil war had ended, “buy out” was often a euphemism for “disappeared.”
Nicosa continued to profit from a cordial relationship with the right-wing power brokers. After a major earthquake, he was awarded a contract to build a water treatment system. Although the water project is still touted on the official government website as having revitalized a devastated area, it was never built. Nicosa and his behind-the-scenes benefactors pocketed millions.
It was in the aftermath of this earthquake that he met Cecilia Sanchez, a young doctor working in an emergency clinic set up near his plantation. There is a gap of three years before Cecilia immigrated to Italy, and they were married in Nicosa’s hometown of Siena. It could not have been easy for a young woman to leave a poor extended Catholic family that depended on her income as a doctor. There isn’t much in the file on Cecilia’s side of the story, except copies of the letters she sent to FBI HQ in Washington, D.C., searching for an American relation named Ana Grey. She gives the reason as a small inheritance she is allegedly holding for me, but then the letters grow more desperate:
“… Since I was a little girl, I have held in my heart the name of Ana Grey, our relative who lived in America. I believe that we are meant to find each other. The discovery of her work for the American Federal Bureau of Investigation gives me hope. It is very important to my family that I can find her. Please reply as soon as possible …”
I can hear her voice as it was on the phone, with its unique blend of accents, like nutmeg and tamarind, speaking through the words on the dull photocopy. “Since I was a little girl, I have held in my heart the name of Ana Grey.” As Dennis Rizzio had wondered, why make contact now? What is going on inside that “little house on a hill” that would cause the wife of a wealthy man in Europe to reach out to a stranger in America?
Glancing out the bus window, I see the landscape has changed. The yellow fields are gone; instead there is a cheesy strip mall with a discount shoe pavilion and outlets for tires and wine. As I observe families at tables outside a pizzeria, the image of the two young brothers at the London restaurant comes into my head. I watched as the younger boy expired in his brother’s arms. I saw his body receive that decisive stillness. And Marco never once let go.
I hear the desperation in Cecilia’s voice on the page and wonder if this is ultimately what she asks of me—the unconditional devotion of family. My heart stirs, but I deny the feeling. My grandfather Poppy’s house, where I grew up, was a forbidding, unsafe place of locked-away love with no possibility of consolation. All my life I have held myself apart from family bonds because I never believed family could mean anything but cold disappointment. Yet now, under orders of my superiors at the FBI, I am speeding toward it.
SIENA, ITALY
FIVE
The commercial sprawl continues until the bus swings around a corner, heading straight for a huge stone wall. At the last minute we swerve through a narrow gate topped by a statue of a wolf. Once inside the walls, we halt at the Siena bus station, a concrete island in a small piazza.
The driver waits as I bump along the aisle, impatient eyes meeting mine in the mirror. Out on the street, the air is baking and the spare trees are heavy in the stillness. The air brakes whoosh, and the bus is gone. I look hopefully for Cecilia Nicosa, but nobody approaches. I wait in the shade. The suitcase and rumpled shorts must immediately make me for American. I can’t get a signal on my cell phone. After fifteen or twenty minutes, I set out to find a landline.
Straight ahead there is a fortress in a park. Turning the other way, you face a jumble of signs. Il Duomo, the main cathedral, is in that direction, which must lead to the city center. I seem to be near a school. College students are lounging on the steps of an apartment building, and there is a large outdoor café a few blocks farther on. I tick off the possibilities. Cecilia is late. Cecilia didn’t get my text message. Cecilia is mistakenly waiting at the train station. I am starting to feel panicky, although there is no danger.
As I near the café, someone calls my name.
“Signorina Grey!”
A young man comes sprinting up from behind, waving. He wears baggy camouflage shorts and a T-shirt that says “Università di Siena.” He has thick black curly hair and wraparound sunglasses on a loop, a beaded choker around his neck.
“I am very sorry. I apologize for being late. I am Giovanni. The son of Cecilia.”
“Ciao, Giovanni!”
I laugh with pleasure and relief. He is one handsome dude. Half Salvadoran and half Italian is a hot combo plate. For a moment he hesitates, bouncing on his toes like a basketball player, then swiftly kisses me on each cheek. We hug. He smells like a boy.
“Sorry for the confusion,” I say. “There was a train strike. I had to take a bus. I sent a text—”
“No, no, it is completely my fault. I was with a friend, studying for an exam.”
“I was expecting to see your mom.”
“My mother had to perform an emergency operation at the hospital. I am always late for everything.” He smiles engagingly. “The car is over there,” he says, taking the handle of the suitcase. “Your first time visiting? It is very amazing, you will see.”
“You sound proud of your home.”
“I love Siena. I would not live anywhere else.”
“Not even Rome?”
He snorts. “What’s great about Rome? They are covered by gypsies, like these. Look out.”
A clutch of young Romanian mothers and children is coming toward us. The women carry nursing babies wrapped in shawls, like walking Madonnas, except their eyes are smoldering with want and hate. The little kids are trained to swarm the victims and pickpocket while they are distracted.
“Watch your purse,” Giovanni warns loudly, all hyped up and seething with excitement.
“Not to worry. Got it covered.”
Giovanni and I sidestep the situation, but instead of letting it be, he goes on the attack.
“Vaffanculo!” he shouts, with an obscene gesture.
The gypsies gather their ranks and move on with downcast eyes. Giovanni continues to shout at their backs. Nobody on the street pays attention.
“They steal your underpants,” he says.
I just smile. “Giovanni, how old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“Sixteen, and you don’t want to leave home? See the world?” He fumbles. “What I’m saying, it comes from my heart. Forgive my English—”
“Your English is good.”
“In Siena, we believe in the old things. Our blood, our DNA”—he pinches the flesh on his arm—“is pure. It is the same as the ancient Etruscans’. Science proves that we have lived here two thousand years. Right now we are inside the walls of the old medieval city. When you are inside the walls, everything is”—he searches for the word—“beautiful. Inside is life. What we love. Our history. Our church. Our family. Our contrada, which is the neighborhood where you grow up. In America,” he adds self-assuredly, “you call it ‘the hood.’ Inside, we preserve the Republic of Siena. Don’t worry, it’s not like a museum; there are good shops and restaurants, and even an Australian bar where they speak English and have English beer!”
A Boddingtons right now would be awesome.
“Outside, there are only enemies. I know it sounds crazy.”
He unlocks the smallest car I have ever seen, the size of a corner mailbox.
“Outside everything is bad,” the boy continues, with compl
ete sincerity. “Outside is death.”
Giovanni takes a quick route out of Siena and the commercial zone, soon putting us on a deserted country road that undulates through dense forest before breaking out above scores of fields stitched with rows of green. He drives too fast, one hand on the wheel, windows down, constantly jabbering in cheerful tones on his cell phone.
It is hard to find anything remotely lethal in the verdant countryside of cadmium-yellow blocks of sunflowers, cultivated rows of grapes, the lofty Tuscan sky filled with pure white clouds. No wonder they paint clouds on church ceilings; they have unobstructed views of heaven. But for one so young and trendy, Giovanni’s view of things is surprisingly entwined with morbid folklore.
What Cecilia described as “our little house on a hill” is a thirteenth-century compound built by Benedictine monks that later became a residence for a succession of cardinals. It even has a name—Abbazia di Santa Chiara, the Abbey of Saint Chiara—and the hand of the saint is preserved to this day in the sacristy of the abbey church, which is on the other side of the courtyard from the current family wing. Giovanni assures me the relic is a powerful blessing and an object of incalculable value, although a severed hand floating around does not sound to me like very good feng shui.
The road is banked by flimsy wooden poles lashed together. As the lane narrows, the cliff falls away. A hairpin curve reveals a panoramic view of the valley, and you can see the abbey in its entirety—the romantic twelve-sided tower, the two-story residential quarters, and the remains of the original tenth-century church, brutally exposed as if it had been cut in half, leaving nothing but crumbling buttresses and an empty arch.
We drive between rows of dark green cylindrical cypress trees, tips bending in the wind so they uncannily resemble a procession of monks with bowed heads. We turn into a gravel driveway that opens into an empty square big enough to hold a farmers’ market. The engine stops. In the quiet, all you hear is birdsong. The abbey looms around us, rows of iron torches reaching out of sixty-foot pale stone walls that have been standing for over eight hundred years. The scents are pungent—oil of lavender, meat roasting over cedar chips. To the left is the entrance to the restored chapel, where the hand of the dead saint lies.