White Shotgun (20 page)

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 with 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.

It is roasting down there, and the steaming bundle of pipes overhead radiates warmth like a heat lamp. Cecilia can feel her scalp start to burn, and tries to communicate that she wishes to move. The goon barks obscenities and warns her not to speak. But while he urinates into the black lake, she inches the chair out from under the heat, feeling such triumph she almost cries. Her heart beats with insane hope. If she can do this, she can fly right out of there and escape.

Then everything changes. Fat Pasquale comes out of the darkness to take her upstairs. She can barely walk after all those hours in the chair, but, carried away by euphoric delusion, she is only too happy to go. She never had any doubt Nicosa would pay quickly and naturally assumes she is being released.

NINETEEN

Palio, Day 4
—MONDAY, JULY 2, 3:30 P.M
. Another day has passed with the wretched slowness only possible in the heat of summer, in a Mediterranean country where time is measured in centuries. There has been no word from Cecilia in almost forty-eight hours, which, in America, would have already kicked off a missing person report. In Siena, during Palio, it gets you a shrug.

Last night’s fervor at the
contrada
dinner has given way to a mood of lugubrious devotion as the people of Oca force themselves to put on the brakes for the last religious moment before the race: the blessing of the horse by the priest.

A grim, quiet pool of humanity is gathering in front of Santa Caterina, the
contrada
church on Fontebranda. Nobody is smiling. The quality of tension matches the overcast skies and the oppressive layer of heat trapped close to the ground. Even the press photographers behave with deference, willing to wait with endless patience for the star of the show.

“Sofri, I have to talk to you.”

We have found a spot near the front portal of the church. He looks very much the distinguished elder, wearing a beautifully tailored dark gray suit with a green Oca pocket silk, his long white hair artfully swept back, emphasizing the unapologetically noble nose.