White Shotgun

by April Smith

  Finally we come to a small square with a church and a fountain—the fountain where Cecilia was baptized into the contrada for life. Unlike the flashy store in the Rome train station, the original Caffè Nicosa, where Nicosa’s father started out as a coffee roaster, is a hole-in-the-wall—chipped plaster peeling away from the brick, a potted tree by the entrance, no sign, no menu, just a framed picture from Italian Vogue showing Nicosa and Cecilia looking very glam in the courtyard of the abbey. I picture her inside with her jacket off, wearing just the sexy chemise she had on under the suit, chatting and holding a glass of wine, a shrewd look aimed at the beaded curtain at the door, sights fixed and ready for her husband’s entrance.

  But the crowd has overflowed the street, and we can barely get inside. It is impossible to hear in the din of talk and laughter, or to move in any direction without the herculean effort of asking people to suck it in and step aside. “Mi scusi,” I keep breathing, wedging sideways, looking for Cecilia by randomly working my way in and out of the pack, blind as a worm. The place has that deep divine coffee smell, not just the brew of it, but the layered heart and soul of it, blackberry and chocolate. In view is the original roaster, an iron contraption of drums, ovens, pipes, and gauges painted bright red. They still roast here, every day, and the concentrated aroma rising off the tarry mountains of beans is as cool and seductive as tones off Coltrane’s sax.

  Pinned against the bar, where oval platters of antipasto seem to appear and disappear every few seconds, I figure what the hell, I’m famished, and start loading up on bruschetta and crostini with porcini mushrooms or fresh mozzarella. A glass of vino rosso restores my equilibrium and good spirits, which are impossible to resist in this tiny room jammed with people high in a communal delirium, on the crest of what promises to be a long party.

  Besides, nobody else is concerned about Cecilia’s absence. “I saw her a minute ago” or “Did you ask Nicoli?” are typical responses, when I can get the attention of someone I recognize. Then a quick smile and a back turned. Stymied and needing air, I push outside.

  The afternoon sun is kinder, although the temperature is still sultry. The Fontebranda fountain is swarming with Oca teenagers. Some are singing rousing hymns like high school fight songs; many suck on baby pacifiers—a symbol that if Oca wins, everyone in the contrada will be considered to have been reborn, pure as a newborn baby.

  Nicosa comes outside with a group of waiters who have been hired for the occasion, older men in black aprons, directing them to pick up the glasses and trash left in the street.

  “We should call the hospital about Cecilia,” I say.

  “Why?”

  “Maybe she’s there, on an emergency.”

  “Don’t worry about Cecilia; she takes care of herself,” he says with irritation.

  “Has she ever disappeared without telling anyone?”

  Nicosa gives me a look from the corner of his eye. “You don’t know everything about your sister. There are two sides to the story. Or maybe in the FBI, you don’t think so.”

  “We keep an open mind.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes, but why would she go anywhere—willingly—when she’s frantic about her son?”

  He takes a step backward and lights a cigarette, attempting a softer tone.

  “You must understand, this business with Giovanni is not new. I once found him passed out in the shower from taking pills.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “The reason I may appear calm is that the drugs are locked up in his mother’s car, the bitch Englishwoman has left the country, and he is sick in bed—guarded by a policeman!” He gives a bitter laugh. “As safe as he’ll ever be. We’ll all sit down and discuss this … whenever your sister decides it is time to come home.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Palio, Day 3—SUNDAY, JULY 1, 12:00 P.M. When there is still no sign of Cecilia by noon the following day, I call Dennis Rizzio in Rome.

  “Do me favor? Check and see if Cecilia Nicosa left the country in the last twenty-four hours.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Domestic dispute.”

  “Where would she be likely to go?”

  “El Salvador.”

  “She had a fight with her husband, so she goes to El Salvador?” Dennis asks rhetorically.

  “She’s feeling a lot of pressure.” I explain the illicit delivery of drugs in the painting. “She also confessed that Nicosa is ‘under the thumb’ of the mafias.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “In her mind he’s paying bribes, and she wants it to stop. It’s why she reached out to me. Nicosa exploded at her yesterday in the car, just before she disappeared.”

  “Women have been known to abandon their families when they can’t cope, although El Salvador is kind of far to go. And during Palio?” He thinks some more. “You really believe she’d leave her kid, who just got out of the hospital?”

  “Honestly, Dennis … no. I don’t believe that for a second.”

  “This worries me. It follows the recent pattern of the ‘disappeared’ in Italy. You have a high-profile lady married to someone with whom, let’s say, the mafias have a beef. They take the wife.”

  “For money?”

  “Could be for money. Kidnaps for money are a national sport. You can usually negotiate your way out, but if it’s personal with Nicosa—if he got crossed-up with the clans—in that case, she never comes back.”

  I swallow hard. “What’s the plan?”

  “Sit tight. We don’t know enough. Don’t let it distract you; we still have a mission. I’ll make some calls.”

  “You promised to protect the family—”

  “I will. Trust me. Like I said, I’m as concerned as you are.”

  At sunset, the contrada dinners begin. Long tables snake down the street, end to end, like a river of gold. Candlelight plays over the joyful faces of the people of Oca. Loud talk and spontaneous singing echo through the canyons of the old city, where each territory has become a raucous block party. Just before darkness, bamboo barriers ten feet high were unrolled across the streets, sealing off the ancient boundaries of each neighborhood, keeping enemies and tourists out.

  Inside the barricade, the light is rosy and emotions are high. Tomorrow is the race, and anything can happen. Today we are with friends, floating in a bubble of hope. Nicosa and Sofri are radiant, exchanging toasts and laughter with everyone around them. Cecilia’s place is empty, but Nicosa brushes inquiries aside; she will be here any moment.

  At the far end, all the kids are swooning over the fantino—the jockey hired to ride Oca’s horse. He’s a swarthy thug from Sardinia, festooned with gold chains, with the long-legged body you need to race bareback and a conceited grin, making the most of his celebrity moment, as well he should. If he loses, he will be dragged off the horse and beaten by the very contradaioli who are feverishly toasting him tonight.

  I cannot follow the Italian zinging around me, so I isolate myself in a safe cocoon of paranoia, surreptitiously holding my cell phone beneath the table and replaying again the images I had taken yesterday, looking for the moment Cecilia vanished.

  The shots in the church are random. Mostly I was holding the cell phone up over the crowd; there are a lot of backs of heads, and shoulders with purse straps. Everyone is turned toward the silver helmets and spears just visible in the honor guard that accompanies the Palio banner down the aisle. Cecilia is out of range, behind me, but there are no suspicious faces in view. A couple of cops, unconcerned, are going the opposite way. There’s the solo nun in white.

  Afterward, in Piazza Provenzano, I took a picture of the banner being carried up the street, past a dark indistinguishable array of spectators. Two fellows in black tunics with gold trim are chatting in front of an ambulance at a paramedic station.

  I feel Cecilia’s absence in my body, which would be a ridiculous thing to say to Nicosa or Sofri, who seem to be putting on a show of nonchalance about the nonattendance of
a major socialite at the biggest party of the year. Nicosa has a big responsibility tonight. It is his job to meet with the directors of the other contrade to negotiate partiti, a complicated system of bets that results in big payouts. Another Sienese contradiction: the night before Palio, blood enemies sit down and negotiate.

  At the moment, Nicosa is conferring in whispers with two middle-aged balding men squatting by his chair—spies, Sofri explains—who report on the other jockeys and horses, factors that could change the odds. He also says that at the starting line, up until the shot from the mortaretto that begins the race, the jockeys will be making deals among themselves.

  “You mean the whole thing is fixed?”

  “Let’s just say there are two kinds of fate,” Sofri says. “Chance, and money.”

  Is Cecilia angry enough to humiliate Nicosa by staying away at this crtitical event? Is Nicosa angry enough to have done her harm? Someone appears to be waving at me. Down at the curve in the street, where the tables turn and disappear from sight like a glittering toy Christmas train, a woman I don’t recognize seems to be trying to get my attention.

  Edging along the sidewalk, past the endless chain of tables, is like being inside one of those unbroken three-minute tracking shots in an epic movie, where they pan along a battlefield, ending at the eyes of an innocent child, a waif held by its mother, staring at the carnage of war with huge questioning eyes.

  Inspector Martini and her baby.

  Martini looks totally different all dressed up, smoking a cigarette, hair loose, wearing makeup and a low-cut, sensuous dress. Yes, she had been waving. We shake hands firmly, then relent and kiss on both cheeks. We are Oca sisters, not at the police station now. She pivots the child on her lap—a wispy-haired, tiny thing—eager to show off her daughter’s English.

  “Tell Ana your name.”

  “Sylvana,” says the girl.

  “Tell her how old you are.”

  She holds up two delicate fingers.

  “Do you like Oca?”

  Sylvana nods solemnly.

  Martini asks, “What about Torre?”

  The little girl sticks out her tongue and blows a raspberry.

  The mother laughs with pride, exhaling smoke, and rewarding the girl with biscotti dipped in coffee.

  I smile at the child. “Brava!”

  In America we call it brainwashing.

  “Have you seen Cecilia?”

  “No,” says Martini, looking around. “Isn’t she here?”

  “She disappeared yesterday in church. There’s been no communication.”

  “Did she and Nicoli have an argument?”

  “Yes, but this feels different. After what happened to Giovanni—and Lucia Vincenzo—we have to consider that she has come into harm’s way.”

  Martini presses the baby’s head against her chest, as if to shield her from the very possibility.

  “You are saying someone took Cecilia?” she asks softly. “Kidnapped her?”

  “That’s Dennis Rizzio’s feeling.”

  She crushes the cigarette, her expression serious. “It’s common now, and on the rise. We have hundreds of incidents each year. Sometimes it’s for money, but in that case they usually take a child. The mafias will also take someone to humiliate an enemy.”

  “What’s the rate of safe return of the hostages?”

  She twists her lips. “Not good. Less than half? I’m guessing.”

  “You can’t know because you don’t have the bodies.”

  “Esattamente. In this game of disappearances, they are winning. They deprive us of two weapons—evidence of the murder, and witnesses to the crime. Nobody will talk.”

  A man’s hand closes around my wrist. Nicosa was quick to follow me along the tables. Inspector Martini’s eyes rise inquisitively above my head.

  “Ana,” says Nicosa. “We are missing you!”

  “I was just talking to—”

  He cuts me off. “Come back. You must taste the pasta; tonight it is very special. Ravioli stuffed with squash and Gorgonzola cheese.”

  You could make him for unconcerned, holding a glass of wine and a cigarette, but his grip on my wrist is tightening, hard. I choose not to flinch. Remaining silent, accepting the pain, communicates my resistance.

  “Come, be with the family.”

  “See you later,” I manage.

  Martini nods, but her large eyes take everything in.

  My fingers are swollen and numb. I fear they will burst, like water balloons, until Nicosa releases my wrist. We walk back up the street, past hundreds of animated contrada members in folding chairs.

  “Why are you talking to the police?”

  “I was just saying hello.” I stop the march to face him. “Where is Cecilia?”

  “Always the same question. What do you think?” he says with anguish. “I took her? I kidnapped my own wife and hid her in the woods?”

  I wish he hadn’t said that. The husband is always the prime suspect, especially when he makes statements before he has been accused.

  “I’m worried that she was taken.”

  “You may be right,” he says grimly. “It wouldn’t be surprising. But now is not the time. It is too soon to involve the police; that is not how the system works here. If someone does have my wife, I will handle it.”

  “How?”

  “If it’s ransom, pay the money.”

  “They haven’t asked for money.”

  “Whatever it is, I will get her back.”

  “Really?” I say skeptically.

  “I love her. What do you think?”

  “I think you’re up against a pack of ruthless criminals. Forgive me if I don’t stay for dessert.”

  Eventually I find my way out of Oca territory, through darkened streets throbbing with laughter behind lighted bamboo walls, arriving at the Walkabout to find it empty. Chris, the Englishman, is actually sitting down and reading a book. He seems surprised to see me.

  “Why aren’t you in Oca?”

  “It was time to go.”

  “Another outcast at life’s feast,” he says, automatically drawing a Foster’s. “Frankly, I’d rather be in a civilized pub.”

  “I’m looking for Cecilia.”

  “Why? Where is she?”

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t ask. She wasn’t at the contrada dinner.”

  Chris raises his eyebrows with mock concern. “Ooooh,” he says. “Juicy! I’ll bet she and the hubby are having issues again.”

  “Again?”

  “Well, she had that revenge fuck with the Commissario, the old fascist. How could she?”

  “Cecilia and the Commissario? From Torre?”

  Is this what Nicosa meant by “Whenever your sister decides it is time to come home”? Does he seriously suspect that at this moment she is having an assignation with his enemy, the chief of police?

  “You could have heard your sister and her husband screaming at each other all the way from the abbey. She even went back to wherever it is she came from.”

  “El Salvador?”

  “For a while, yeah. Can’t hardly blame her in a way. All the dirty stuff with the mistress all over the press.”

  “The one who went white shotgun?”

  “Best not to say that too loudly,” Chris advises, taking an order from some drunks who have just come in, wearing the colors of Leocorno, the Unicorn, orange and white.

  EIGHTEEN

  There is nothing to do but stare at the fat man with the gun. Uno graso que repugna puerco, Cecilia thinks hatefully, retreating to the comfort of her native Spanish. She has been reduced to a shivering column of fear, while he is enormous. A brute wearing a U.S. basketball tunic. Deltoids matted with hair. Nothing in his pea brain except what he is going to eat next. The soldiers in El Salvador were the same. Hungry peasants—except this Italian thug is citified, swollen up with bad food and disease. The pistol all but disappears inside his fat mitt.

  He loves that pistol. He never lets it go, sticking it wi
th bravdo into the waistband of the ludicrous shiny red shorts, not at all worried about blowing off his balls—just one in a cascade of violent fantasies that obscure Cecilia’s thinking as she watches him chew through a PowerBar while lounging on an old desk chair set in the cavernous basement of the massive apartment building squatting over them.

  Stinking water collects in a black lake that seems to go on to infinite darkness, stretching beneath blocks of slum housing called the Little City, somewhere in Calabria. She knows they are in the south because of the incomprehensible dialect they speak, hard for even the Italian-born to understand. Also, she knows that they are far away from the long drive in the ambulance in which she was abducted from Siena, after being chloroformed and carried from the church by the two combinatos like another fainting victim overcome by the heat.

  Occasionally little boys will scamper past, eager to perform errands delegated by the guy in charge, whose nickname is “Fat Pasquale”—he’s just as fat as the gunman, but differentiated by a curly head of hair, bracelets, and tattoos. The boys, many under the age of eight, deliver drugs and act as lookouts. A literal underground crime network. They don’t seem to care what Cecilia sees, nor do they restrain her. The first endless block of time is passed on a plastic chair fifteen feet away from the goon in the red shorts, who occasionally tosses a bag of potato chips or a half-used bottle of water her way. She tries to keep her feet up on the chair because of the spiders.

  Everyone understands how kidnappings work. They are in the news every day, like soccer scores. The mafias have two objectives: get the money and move on to the next victim. Getting the money is easy. Everybody knows the drill and everybody pays. It is simply a form of human pizzo. But the next one—and the next—are dependent on maintaining a level of intimidation that will encourage immediate payment by terrified relatives, with a detour around the police. So before they return the merchandise, to show that they are serious, they cut off a finger or an ear.

  Cecilia spends a lot of time in the basement trying to remember what she knows about otoplasty. She has absurd conversations in her head, instructing the goon, when the time comes, how to cut off her ear. “Please swab three times with alcohol, and leave enough tissue for reconstructive surgery.” It is not easy to build a human ear from scratch, because it is such a complex three-dimensional form. Often cartilage is taken from a rib, but you need to be a craftsman. Luckily, because of the increase in kidnappings, both in Italy and Latin America, there are now world-class specialists in the field of ear replacement.