White Shotgun (6 page)

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 alliances. 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 complete 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.

“I’ll show you to your room and then I have to go.” Giovanni punches the cell phone yet again. “My dad just texted. He says to make yourself comfortable.”

I look around. Comfortable, where? The fortified palace, first an austere monastery, then a seat of power for rulers of the church, is no less commanding in its present role as a private residence. The open space is bounded by potted palms and urns filled with geraniums, carefully pruned, not a paper cup to mar the raked gravel yard. The clean perspective of shaded walkways and sun-washed tufa-stone walls creates a solemnity even deeper than the monks’ devotion.

Who are these people who reside like old-fashioned royalty in a compound the size of a five-star resort? God may have lived here once, but the premises have since been vacated; this is about the ascending fortune of a single man. I feel more disoriented than ever, unable to imagine any connection to this foreign way of life, looking for a foothold to dig into for my work as an agent. The insistent beep of Giovanni’s technology does nothing to dispel the eerie sense that when I entered the shadowed hush of this ancient courtyard, the curtain parted to a strange reality.

• • •

I lie down briefly and wake up an hour later. The room floats in quietude. The bedspread is sage-green damask. At the foot of the bed is a folded cashmere throw. The cast-iron headboard is made to look like the tendrils of a sweet-pea vine. A strip of wallpaper with similar coils is set along the midline of eggshell plaster walls. There is one small arched window—no screen, no glass, just a pair of shutters over a grate that frames a grove of olive trees. I stick my face into the fresh air and listen to the regular splash of someone doing laps in a pool that is hidden from my sight. I am a pool rat. In Los Angeles I swim with a Masters team, a mile and a half every day. Nothing could make me happier than to work out right now. After the bus trip from Rome, my neck feels like a tangle of wire. I unpack eagerly, almost frantic from the nearby call of water.