by April Smith
“How long have you been here?”
“Since eight this morning,” he replies. “Hope you like the heat. This is going to take a while. You know what that scarf you’re wearing means?” he asks.
“It’s Oca, the Goose,” I answer wearily. “I like the colors.”
We wait. Mountain ranges are formed and destroyed. There is no wind. The claws of the sun flash out from its striking place behind the clouds. I distract myself by observing the paramedic station. Every few minutes someone with heatstroke is brought in on a stretcher. Now there seems to be an asthma attack. I feel like I’ve known our boring neighbors all my life: an American family—Dave and Heather Bunyon, two kids, and a grandma playing cards—and the Japanese family with a fat toddler in a striped shirt who looks dazed with heat. Pairs of lovers are the only ones who seem to be having a good time.
Chuck offers his copy of the International Herald Tribune. We have already had the stranger-on-a-train conversation—that weird intimacy that springs up on a long journey, which this afternoon promises to be. He asks where I am staying, and I tell him about the abbey and the reliquary of the sainted hand. He knows the property well; he shot a wedding there, before Nicosa bought it, when it was briefly a hotel. He has lived in Milan eight years, and this is the second Palio he has covered for AP. He staked out this spot because it is at San Martino, the most hazardous curve in the track, where jockeys are thrown and horses crash. Padding has been placed against the walls. The pads look homemade and thin.
“How can those work?” I wonder.
“They don’t. They want to see blood. Italy is a brutal society.” He points to the paper. “See that?”
“What happened?”
“The Rome police found a girl who was murdered. African immigrant, sixteen years old. The lips of her vagina were sewn together.”
“Why?”
“She was a prostitute. Turf war,” the photographer explains. “Albanians and the Italian mafias, fighting over the sex trade.”
I remember the willowy African woman wearing nothing but a bikini in the cornfield near the bus station. And the white man getting out of the car. No doubt she answered to the same type of criminal sociopaths who are holding Cecilia.
Seeing my reaction, Chuck says, “What’s the matter? Do you find the word vagina embarrassing? Some women say it’s a turn-on.”
“What?”
His cell phone rings. I try to move away, but it is impossible. People who had claimed a space with blankets on the brick are now forced to stand. The Japanese toddler is picked up and placed over his father’s shoulder. The Bunyons pack up the card game and squeeze into a nervous cluster. My abdomen is being pushed up against the rail, as the remaining space is squeezed out by the pressure of spectators continuing to push inside. People are literally hanging from the palazzos on overloaded balconies and stone outcrops. When everyone is finally jammed together it will be impossible to even turn around. A bunch of humanity the size of a small city—upright as asparagus, packed together, and tied with a bow—for anyone intent on doing harm.
Chuck jumps up on the milk crate, swinging an enormous telephoto lens over my head. I duck as the motor drive fires.
Stepping down, he grins, very pleased with himself.
“I just got a tip worth five grand. My buddy called me to say there’s a famous actor in the VIP lounge.”
“Where?”
“Up there, in the temporary police headquarters.”
He points toward the palazzo to our left. We can see figures in the windows.
“Take a look,” the photographer offers, holding up the viewfinder.
I see the actor and the Commissario. Clear as day.
“I can introduce you later,” Chuck whispers moistly in my ear.
“Good-bye, Chuck.”
“Did I offend you?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll never find a better spot!” he warns, cursing after me in Italian. Associated Press, my ass. I should have recognized a lowlife paparazzo.
The folks nearby are thrilled to step aside in order to suck up my space, not so the walls of anxious onlookers. Head down, shoulder in, there’s nothing for it but to charge, holding my position by the black and white flag of Istrice, the Porcupine, flying from the VIP palazzo.
The commanding officer of the military police is a hunk in his sixties, with broad shoulders and a thick gray mustache standing out against dark skin; with medals on his chest and on his beret, he looks like he just invaded Greece. He flicks me off like a fly, and none of the grim carabinieri, whose cold eyes sweep the crowd, pay attention to my garbled entreaties in Italian, so I sneak inside by following in the slipstream of a French TV crew, through heavy brass doors to a cavernous lobby bustling with cops and members of the press. We go up the staircase, where I recognize the light blue uniforms of Inspector Martini’s provincial police, who have taken over an apartment on the second story.
Paintings are still on the walls and vases on the mantel, but folding tables and chairs have replaced the furniture along with a minefield of wires supporting laptops. Everyone’s wearing ID tags and radios. I feel like the old guy in the park with his fingers curled around the chain link, watching the hot high school pitcher, longing to get back in the game that used to be his.
I’d better make a move before someone throws me out. The lumpy-bodied, melon-headed officer I met when Giovanni was in the hospital is sitting at a nearby terminal.
“Ciao,” I say heartily, like we’re old friends. He looks puzzled until I give the universal password: “CSI!”
He breaks into a grin with those twisted teeth. “CSI!”
“Dov’è Inspector Martini?” I ask, but before he can answer, she’s right there: a Madonna in a tight blue uniform with a white gun belt, cradling a carton of cigarettes.
“What are you doing here?” she asks.
I take her aside and lower my voice.
“I have to see the Commissario.”
“You can’t. The race is about to start.”
“I need his help. My sister is still missing. There’s been no note. No demands. What you said last night is true. She’s been taken. I know Cecilia was once a special friend of the police—”
Inspector Martini doesn’t flinch. Oh, God, is she sleeping with him, too?
“I’m hoping the Commissario will start an investigation—”
A polished wooden door opens and the Commissario steps out of an adjoining room, along with two senior commanders with creased faces and crisp suits. The slender chief of police has flat brown eyes and hollow cheeks, like a cipher. Inspector Martini grabs my wrist and hauls me into his line of sight, talking rapidly in Italian. He shakes my hand and his long soft fingers linger. The five of us keep walking past the computer tables, aiming for the door. Inspector Martini has ten seconds to tell him my story, before they are faced with a coliseum’s worth of spectators pumped to the gills at the most dangerous horse race in the world. Does it register with him who was taken? That it’s Cecilia Nicosa?
He utters five words, like the crack of a whip, affirming what Martini has told him: “You are from the FBI?”
“Yes, but that is not why I’m here. She’s my sister. They almost killed my nephew. The FBI’s hands are tied. The only one who can find her is you.”
“It seems the Nicosas are a marked family.” From beneath the fixed hooded eyes comes a piercing stare. He gives me his card. “I promise we will do everything possible to locate Signora Nicosa,” he says, and the entourage, including Martini, disappears through the door.
By the start of the race, I have inched and squeezed back through the spectators to almost where I was. Now points of sunlight crown the roofs of the palazzos, a moment that must be significant to the Sienese celestial calendar, because a heightened alertness has come over the multitude, the way a flock of birds will settle down, the body language of one individual passed to the next. When the corona of the sun spikes at a certain angle, sixty thousand bodies become ab
solutely still in the golden bowl of the Campo.
A crack! explodes with a puff of white smoke from the mortaretto cannon, calling the horses to the starting area between two ropes. Now you can see the dirty business. The jockeys, riding bareback, wear the colors of their contrada, painted helmets, and white running shoes. Their long legs hang over the heaving ribs of the horses, which are fired up on amphetamines. Round and round go the colors, as the jockeys circle in an unruly pack, negotiating deals and making lightning-fast alliances, menacing one another with long whips made from the phalluses of calves. There is more than one false start. And then the rope is dropped—the race begins—and a roar comes up like the explosion of a wind-whipped forest fire.
They gallop full-out, three times around the track, ninety seconds total. With each turn there seems to be another horse that has lost its rider. A jockey is thrown right in front of me and trampled. The whole bunch skids sideways in front of the San Marino curve. Dust flies, the jockeys trade whip smacks and try to shove one another off, the horses stretch, manic spectators cannot be stopped from running across the track, something happens at the far end that I cannot see, and then a banner unfurls from a window in the Mangia Tower, declaring Leocorno, Unicorn, orange and white, to be the winner.
Hand-to-hand combat breaks out everywhere. The losing contrade rush their horses, pulling off their own jockeys and pummeling them in the holy dirt. Young men stampeding blindly in all directions push me, spin me. Faces are contorted with rage and tears and joy. People are ripping at their own shirts. Someone running by smacks a little girl across the face with a flailing arm. They’ve breached the rails and are rioting in the center of the Campo—men are hugging, men are throwing punches. Women clutch one another, sobbing and screaming, in a wild blur of anarchy. I see the knife. I see the Torre scarf in burgundy and blue. The lips drawn back over the teeth of the man who is charging us. He shoves the American grandmother aside, and she hits the ground. The arm holding the knife is raised. I block it. The blade slices my hand. He keeps on running. If there is a coordinated police response, I can’t find it in the pandemonium.
SIENA
TWENTY-ONE
Among the crowd of passengers getting off the morning train in Siena, FBI legat Dennis Rizzio is easy to spot. Wearing a boxy charcoal plaid suit, a light blue tie, and Ray-Bans, he’s a head taller and a hundred pounds heavier than the Europeans in summer clothes. The bulky, scarred-up briefcase is a hint that all he really cares about is the business it contains. And you can bet he’s carried the grim look on his face all the way from Rome.
As soon as he has folded himself into Giovanni’s mailbox car, he demands to know if I am certain of the way to the police station. He has to draw his knees up to his chin and rest the briefcase on top of them since there is no room at his feet.
“Our appointment with the Commissario is at ten,” he reminds me testily.
“Under control.”
“How’s the hand? Lemme see.”
I display the gauze bandage that was wrapped around my palm yesterday by the paramedic.
“You’ve had a tetanus shot, I hope?”
“Yep.”
“How bad is it?”
“Kind of like when you’re cutting an onion, and you look up to watch the game?” I indicate a slice through the base of the thumb.
“Lucky he didn’t cut your finger off.”
“Stupid move on my part, getting into the middle of that.”
“You’re gonna let him attack an American grandmother? So the idiot was what? A guy from Torre?”
“He was wearing a Torre scarf, but he could have bought it on the street.”
The mailbox car stalls as we are climbing the hill from the train station. The stick shift is tall and spindly, and I’ve been having trouble keeping the car in gear.
“Who taught you to drive?” Dennis asks.
“My sainted grandfather,” I reply between gritted teeth, as Poppy’s voice lashes out, You’re gonna kill us! What’s the matter with you?
“I hope you’re going to kick butt with the Commissario,” I say.
“When you saw him, what did he tell you?”
“He gave me his card and promised to be on the case.”
The engine stalls again. I stomp on the brake, jam it into park, and restart the car. Traffic is backed up and everyone is leaning on the horn. In the rearview mirror is a row of sun-blinding windshields. The pain pill I took is wearing off, and I’m dying of the heat in my black FBI suit.
“You’re doing great,” Dennis says dryly. “Just don’t crash into that van behind us.”
It’s a battered “airport van” driven by an unshaven, wild-haired psycho with a sweat rag around his gritty neck. What dummy would get off a plane and into that vehicle? Changing gears, I roll back and kiss his bumper, then we lurch forward. He leans out the window and yells, “Vaffanculo!”
“What does that mean?” I ask Dennis impatiently. “Everyone keeps saying it.”
“Yeah, like all the time in Brooklyn. ‘Fuck you.’ ”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s what it means.”
It is now five minutes before ten and my colleague’s fingers are drumming the briefcase. You couldn’t find the police station if you were looking for it, but it can see you. In an alley leading to the Piazza del Duomo, just wide enough for one small car to pass, a shaft is formed that is open to the sky. The walls are made of three-foot blocks of stone layered with ebony marble, like the gothic Cathedral of Santa Maria that dominates the plaza. Tourists in shorts and cowboy hats walk spellbound through this pocket of light. A few steps farther and they will emerge to a vista of the cathedral that will knock their socks off, but meanwhile the morning sun plays softly over the black-and-white stone, and they never see the surveillance cameras hidden in the corners.
Nor would they notice the nondescript questura, whose worn steps seem to lead to another of those tired postwar European buildings smelling of fresh paint and cooked cereal that have been converted to tiny condominiums at huge prices—which at one time it was. I park alongside a row of cruisers in the shade of a neighboring art museum. Sophisticated older couples with shorn silver hair and Swedish walking shoes are calmly buying tickets. Every day another gallery. Pastries in the afternoon.
Inside the vestibule of the questura, we are stopped by an officer who is embarrassingly deferential to Dennis, shaking hands with a flattering smile. Without a weapons check or even asking for ID, he leads us through an ordinary wooden door into the cop shop. Dennis and I exchange a look at the astonishing lack of security.
Palio is over, but the bullpen is still chaotic. It has the crammed-full industrial look of a carpeting wholesaler who expanded too quickly. Messy partitions and hulking old computers. There is a locked cage for stolen property and a vault for guns; good-looking male inspectors in natty shirts and ties, and polizia who carry 9mm Berettas and wear navy shirts with epaulets and military berets. The universal accessory, I notice, is the rubber stamp. There must be three dozen old-fashioned wood-handled rubber stamps in revolving holders on every desk, testament to a bureaucracy in which the right mark by the right hand still has more power than all the computers in the world.
Sitting in a row on a bench are the Bunyons. Mom, dad, brother, sister, and grandma.
“Who are they?” Dennis asks without moving his lips.
“That’s the family. The Americans in the dustup yesterday.”
The moment they see us, all five Bunyons get to their feet.
“Hello, Ana,” says the somber dad. He’s all showered up in a clean white polo shirt and travel shorts.
The mother stares at my bandage. “That looks awful. Are you okay?”
“Fine,” I say. “Was anybody else hurt?”
The children shake their heads.
“Then why are you here?” I wonder.
“My mother was pushed to the ground,” the dad says indignantly. “She’s eighty-three years old! She c
ould have broken her hip!”
The grandma, thin and muscular, with rakish white hair and sharp blue eyes, looks more resilient than any of them.
“We’re gonna sue ’em!” she croaks.
“We’re filing a complaint,” says the dad. “We’ve never had such a terrible experience. Nobody told us they had riots in Italy.”
“Those young men were crazy. Out-and-out dangerous,” exclaims the wife.
The dad introduces himself to Dennis, taking in the suit and the briefcase.
“You must be Ana’s lawyer. I gotta say, she saved my mother’s life.”
“I believe it.” Dennis hands over his card. “Dennis Rizzio. I’m with the FBI.”
Mr. Bunyon stares at the golden seal with the eagle and his eyes pop. Then they fill with tears.
“God bless America,” he tells his wife with reverence. “They sent the FBI!”
Inspector Martini is coming. I make a break for it. She is in uniform, clutching her talismanic packs of cigarettes. I introduce Dennis and explain the plight of the Bunyons.
“Civilians,” I whisper, and she gets it immediately, handing them off to the obsequious officer, who leads them to a faraway corner, and, I’m sure, a morning of complete confusion on both sides.
We take off the opposite way, following Martini through the wooden door, across the vestibule, down a flight of steps, and through another door to a smaller secretarial office, which seems to have once been a barn. The old wooden gate, secured against a wall, has been replaced by a massive steel door that seals the entrance. There are remnants of a hayloft. Not exactly the boss’s office. Two or three female civilians sit at computers, working-class divas with dyed hair, wearing silky bosom-revealing blouses, tight slacks, and heels. Why not? Through that door there are a hundred horny men. Martini drags over some chairs and we squeeze around a desk.
“The Commissario sends his apologies. He cannot see you today.”
I am about to blow my stack, but Dennis handles it.
“We have an appointment. Ten o’clock.”
“I apologize for the Commissario. He is in a meeting.”