White Shotgun

“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 could 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.”

“We’ll wait.”

“The meeting is in Florence.”

“When will the Commissario be back?”

“He won’t be back today.”

Dennis is steamed now, too, and showing it. “He’s there now? And I just got off a train? You couldn’t call? You don’t have phones in the police department?”

The Commissario is not in Florence, and we both know it.

But Martini is a professional who has to answer for her boss. She sits up and tightens her shiny black ponytail. Crosses her legs and settles a legal pad on her blue lap. The skirt is taut as a drum.

“I am here to help you. I will do my best. Agent Grey, what goes on with your hand?”

“After the race, a man armed with a knife came running through the crowd. He tried to push past the Americans you met outside. I intervened, he took a swipe at me and ran. In the process, the grandmother took a pretty bad fall.”

“Can you describe this man?”

“Twenties, Italian, dark curly hair, Levi’s, running shoes, clean shaven, silver bracelets. And he was wearing a Torre scarf.”

Martini stops writing.

“Like the men who alledgedly attacked your nephew?”

Dennis nods. “Exactly right. We’re looking for a connection. This could have been your ordinary crazed Torre guy out to get Oca — Ana had on Oca colors — or a mob assailant with a deliberate target.”

Martini raises large, black-rimmed eyes. “Who is this target?”

“Probably not Grandma Bunyon,” Dennis suggests.

Martini waits, not understanding.

“We think it might be Agent Grey.”