White Shotgun (43 page)

“How long ago?”

“Hard to tell. We could go down there …”

“Something still might be recoverable.”

“I’m gonna bet,” Sterling says, “that no bone fragments, nothing from the vat, ever made it to the lab in Rome. The story that it was animal remains is a flat-out lie.”

Chris leans on the bar. “Whoever did this had knowledge, access, and means. So did whoever sent Ana the pictures. Who do you think that could be?”

I have been balancing the cell phone in my palm as if the weight of it could give me the answer. “Let me take a shot.”

I punch in a number. Inspector Martini answers. Her voice is noncommittal.

“Are you at work?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Just wanted you to know I’m going home soon.”

“Oh,” she says. “That’s too bad. I hope you enjoyed your time in Italy.”

“It’s hard to leave such a beautiful country. But luckily I have pictures to remind me.”

“I’m glad you will go with good memories,” she replies. “Thanks for all your help. Kisses to your daughter.”

“Prègo.”

The two men are watching as I click off the phone.

“It was her. Martini sent the photos. She must have been at the site with the police when they ‘found out’ it was torched.”

Chris and Sterling nod, not at all surprised.

“I knew the Commissario was dirty,” I say. “Now he’s succeeded in obliterating the entire investigation. Not only has he wiped out the evidence, but also he’s got Falassi, the only witness, and he could be dead by now, who knows?”

“He doesn’t have Falassi, love,” says Chris. “We do.”

• • •

Instead of heading through the gates of the abbey, we continue a hundred yards up the road and turn into Aleandro and Antonella’s driveway.

“What are we doing here?” I ask.

“The witness is inside,” Sterling says.

“Falassi?”

“Uh-huh.”

“The whole time? After you told me he was taken into custody by the provincial police?”

“Yup.”

“Why didn’t you tell me the truth?”

“You had no need to know.”

“No need to know?”

I stifle the exasperation as Sterling removes three handguns from the trunk of Chris’s Fiat and hands one to me. We go up to the front door of the red-tile-roofed house. It is late and we awaken Aleandro, who appears wearing pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. They exchange words in Italian, and we go down to the basement.

The room has a shiny new deadlock. Aleandro opens the door and turns on the light. We enter with weapons drawn. Inside it is stifling. There are no windows and nothing in the room but the canister where the olive oil is stored, a chair, and a cot, where Marcello Falassi is sleeping naked.

He does not offer any resistance.

“Che ora è?”
he asks.

Aleandro tells him it is time. When he puts on jeans and a maroon rayon shirt, he no longer looks like a brute who drives a truck and disposes of bodies, who turns his house into a toxic dump where his wife and mother limp around in the chemical waste of his crimes. All cleaned up—shaved, hair cut short—he looks like a witness, and that is what he will be.

When we had returned to Siena after discovering the vat of lye, between the time I made contact with Dennis Rizzio and when he notified the provincial police, Sterling and Chris had gone back to the campsite to stake out Falassi. Not trusting anyone, even me, they had taken Falassi prisoner for his own protection. While I was slavishly operating within protocol, Sterling was executing the independent covert action necessary to prevent the one link we had to the mafias’ chain of command from escaping, or being compromised by corrupt authorities.

Sterling and Chris had brought Falassi to Aleandro, whose anger at the disappearance of his uncle had been so palpable when we sat at the dining room table. For many years, Aleandro had been waiting for a better day, when the politics were right, to expose the lot of them. He promised Sterling he would hide the witness until the time came to present him to the world. Falassi agreed to become
pentito
—a penitent who confesses and is therefore forgiven by the Catholic state. For this he would recount everything he had witnessed. The bodies that were brought to be disintegrated. The ones who brought them. And those in charge.

“You were playing me,” I tell Sterling as we handcuff the witness and march him to the car.

“Protecting assets.”

“Chris knew.”

“Course he knew. He was there.”

“You trust him, but not me?”

“This ain’t about that,” Sterling says.

“What’d you think? I’d leak it to the FBI?”

Sterling stops and turns toward me in the chilly night.

“I was protecting you from being put in a compromising position.”

“I would not have told Rizzio if it compromised the mission.

There’s a lot of things I don’t tell him, but I tell you everything.”

“Okay!” says Sterling, raising his hands in defense.

We put Falassi in the backseat with Chris. We get into the car.

“You know exactly what I’m saying.” I slam the door.

“Kittens!” scolds Chris. “Play nicely. There’s a witness here.”

I doubt Falassi is interested in anything except hiding from the mafias for the rest of his life. He agreed to testify that he had taken care of Aleandro’s uncle’s body, and to state that it was the Commissario who gave the order for arrest and disposal. I am hopeful that the momentum of his confessions will encourage Inspector Martini to come forward and identify the Commissario as the one who ordered his police goons to torch the campsite.

I noticed that the only other object in Falassi’s basement room was a Bible.

A few days later Sterling gets the call from Oryx. A Russian billionaire is arriving in London and needs body-guarding for his family. I am surprised when he asks me to partner up.

“It’s an easy gig,” Sterling promises. “We pose as a couple of American tourists. Follow the Russian’s wife and kidniks to Harrods. Keep an eye out while they’re having tea. No worries, Atlas will hire you on a freelance basis. Make some bucks before heading back to L.A. How about it?”

If Sterling is trying to make it right after hiding Falassi from me, this isn’t cutting it. I want no part of the old lady hooch, nor am I up for wrangling over the same old issues. After being immersed in the mysteries of Siena, I want something shiny and concrete, like a brand-new apartment that smells of fresh paint, with appliances wrapped in plastic and pristine walls in which nobody has set a nail.

“Appreciate the offer, but I need to get home,” I tell him.

“Sure thing,” he says. “I’ll call when I’m back in the States.” But when we kiss good-bye in the courtyard, with Chris waiting to drive him to the airport in Rome, I honestly don’t know if we will see each other again. Cecilia is waiting sympathetically in the doorway when I hurriedly turn back to the abbey. I don’t want to see Sterling walk away, carrying the black rucksack, once again.

Just before the August Palio, Siena is swollen with visitors, and the sound of the
tamburino
mixes with human voices—not singing songs, but shouting for justice. When the story breaks that anti-mafia prosecutors have a witness willing to admit that he has been responsible for the disposal of hundreds of bodies killed by the mafias, the thirty or so polite citizens who had turned up in the Commissario’s office and were offered the opportunity to drink his piss, swell to a huge crowd of families and anti-mafia reformers demanding answers.

Siena becomes the scene of a parade considerably less charming than drummers in medieval costumes. Angry marchers pack the narrow streets—many of them young people, as well as relatives carrying snapshots of those who have been taken. They line up outside the
questura
in the sad hope that Falassi can identify the faces of the loved ones he cremated in acid. Their signs read,
ANTI-RACKET
and
ADDIO, PIZZO (GOOD-BYE, PIZZO)
, and
REFUSO!
International TV crews follow. One of the speakers is Nicoli Nicosa:

“The government can no longer silence what cannot be silenced,” he says into the cameras. “We have a witness to these diabolical acts. They cannot be hidden any longer.”

The marchers pour into Il Campo, where the police have mobilized. I stay on the periphery, a bystander, nothing more. Now it is up to the Italian prosecutors. I do not envy the job of diffusing the turbulent emotions of the marchers—thousands of them, from all over Italy. If the Commissario were not already in custody, the mob would tear him limb from limb. An older woman, well-dressed, wearing a suit and large sunglasses, passes close enough for me to see the photo she is carrying of a smiling young man wearing an earring. Over the picture she wrote in English, “Please help me find him.”

On my last night at the abbey, we make El Salvadoran
pupusas
. It is the kind of time-consuming dish for which you need the hands-on help of a sister. You have to make cornmeal dough from scratch, pork and potato filling, and a topping of marinated carrots and cabbage. I know I will never make it again, unless I make it with Cecilia.

“Nicoli cooked for us while you were gone.”

“He’s a good cook.”

We are both wearing aprons, flattening balls of dough into circles with our palms.

“I think you’re wrong about Nicoli,” I tell Cecilia. “He was desperate when you went missing.”

“I know.”

“I don’t think you do.”

“And I think you’re wrong about Sterling.”

“That’s another case entirely,” I say lightly. “Nicoli was lost without you.”

“He spent a lot of money and went through a lot of stress,” she acknowledges.

“Jesus, Cecilia, it’s not like he was buying a car! I can tell you, he was tortured to his soul.” She just laughs.

“You don’t believe he’s capable of really loving you?”

“What did he say?” she asks curiously.

“He said, ‘I love my wife.’ He would have done anything to get you back. He would have walked into the line of fire.”

“I’m glad,” she intones like a sleepwalker. “Don’t put too much filling in.”

My yellow stuffed half moons looked like Play-Doh time in kindergarten.

“Cecilia!” I want to shake her. “Your husband loves you! You have to believe me.”

“Like you believe me when I say our father loved
you
?”

“It’s hard when there’s no empirical evidence.”

“There is evidence.” She points with a wooden spoon. “In your heart.”

“Really? Our father was murdered. I’ll never know how he felt about me. But your husband is here, every day.”

She sighs. “Something like this goes so deep, it changes the way you look at life. You never feel right. It never goes away.”

“Are you still talking about the other woman?”

“Not only her. I have lost my belief,” she says.

We grill the
pupusas
. The cabbage goes on top. Giovanni and Nicosa come into the kitchen and we eat the
pupusas
hot with glasses of Pinot Bianco. Giovanni tells me he has decided to put off going to the university for another year.

“Are you sure?” I ask. We are driving back from Siena in the mailbox car, dispatched by Cecilia to get honey and pears for dessert.

“I don’t want to leave my mom.”

“That’s very thoughtful, but I don’t think she would want you to miss out on a whole year of school.”

“It’s okay; I don’t really know what I want to do.”

“What are you thinking about doing?”

“You’re going to laugh.”

“Make me.”

“FBI. You’re laughing.”

“It’s a
good
laugh,” I say. “But in order to apply, you have to be a naturalized citizen.”

“I’ll move to America.”

“The FBI requires you to have a college degree.”

He thinks about it.

“I can do that,” he says.

Already I am missing the combative teenager; it is bittersweet to see that he is growing up, deferential to his mom and peaceable with his dad. I don’t tell Giovanni about the sacrifice Zabrina Tursi made. At least I can preserve that much of his innocence.

Nicosa still refuses Rizzio’s insistence that the family relocate in exchange for his testimony.

“You can’t stay here,” I tell Cecilia after the honey and pears, when we take our evening walk. “The family is marked.”

“As I said, it’s a war. You adjust.”

“You people are targets! They’ll get you at a traffic light, Cecilia! They killed seven people in England over an egg fight in Calabria! Why are you so stubborn?”

“My husband will never leave Siena. His blood is here. His work is here. He won’t give in. For better or worse, I am with him. Isn’t that what you wanted?”