“Security contractors have their own networks; you have yours, the criminal clans have theirs. According to my Scots friend, this picture went out on multiple servers that feed the terrorist networks. That means your face is on all the mafia websites, which also reach into Bulgaria, Turkey — basically wherever they do business, which is all of eastern Europe and North Africa, for a start. My contact says the Met thinks the attack in London was a reprisal shooting. The target was someone in the restaurant.”
“Someone at the birthday party?”
“That’s their theory. But the point is, the bad guys have your picture. You are not only a witness who can ID them, but also I’m sure that by now they know you’re Bureau. They want you as a bargaining chip, or to take you out of the game. Which could explain the knife attack in the Campo.”
He closes the laptop, leaving us in the ubiquitous red glow of the Walkabout Pub. We go out to the bar just as the TV news bulletin announcing the disappearance of Cecilia Nicosa comes up again.
“They’ve replayed that thing five times in the past half hour,” I sigh. “Worse than a mattress commercial.”
Sterling stares at Cecilia’s picture on the flat-screen. “You look a helluva lot like her.”
Long curly hair. Flat high cheekbones. Almond eyes. She has darker skin and definitely a different style — in the TV photo she’s on a yacht, smiling and windblown, large black sunglasses on top of her head, wearing a multistrand gold choker woven with jewels, like Queen Nefertiti cruising the Nile.
“There’s a resemblance,” I admit.
“A strong resemblance.”
“If you didn’t know us.”
“I’m sorry to say this.”
I know where he’s going. It’s the look in his eyes. A lump rises in my throat.
“Say it.”
“The mafia sees the cell phone picture.
“I was wearing Cecilia’s clothes that day,” I say softly. “She was always trying to get me to dress better.” I wait. “What will happen when they figure out she isn’t me?”
There is no need for him to answer.
Then comes the long, slow sigh of defeat. “Most of the time,” I say, “the ‘disappeared’ are never found.”
“Bad police work.”
“No, it’s because the bodies are dissolved in lye.”
Sterling’s eyes flare briefly. “Lye?”
I nod. “Nothing left to find.”
He slides his fingers over mine for just an instant. It’s the best he can do.
TWENTY-THREE
They blindfolded Cecilia and pushed her up a staircase. Thin metal stairs, leading up from the basement. She was between the two enormous men, a gun jammed into her ribs. They were moving fast, almost carrying her between them. Briefly outside, it smelled like night and hot winds. Hurrying up another staircase. Shouts, conversations, radios, the smells of coffee and spilled beer. As they turned abruptly she was able to put out one hand and feel a rough stucco corner — then she heard locks turning, murmuring voices, and she was pulled inside an apartment with a TV turned up, the scents of oilcloth and something in the oven — phyllo dough? — and shoved inside a room. The door was locked and immediately there was pounding on the other side by shrieking, taunting children.
She took off the rag that covered her eyes. The first thing she saw was a piece of foam on the floor, two feet by six feet. Grimy balled-up sheets. Who knew who had been sleeping there? A window. She lifted the blind and saw another window of another apartment less than five feet away. The window was the sliding type, secured with a lock. She noticed she was standing on a filthy remnant of gold carpet. It curled up at the edges, revealing a concrete floor. There was a plastic basket filled with clean folded laundry, as if someone had forgotten about it. Copies of the magazine
She sat on the foam pad and took off her heels. She was still wearing the shiny green suit she’d had on at the church in Piazza Provenzano where the Palio banner had been blessed. It was now so tight and uncomfortable she wanted to rip it to shreds. She peeked at the laundry. Kids’ clothes. Male sweats.
She threw off the sheets, turned the foam pad over, and lay down. The vertebrae in her neck cracked, and she realized that her back was killing her. With the window closed, the room was stifling, like the room in El Salvador, in the outbuilding near the garden, where she sometimes hid to rest from the exhaustion of working while she was pregnant. There was no sleep. Roosters crowed and dogs barked all day long. Outside, her uncles and brothers lopped corn off the stalks with machetes. It was like an oven in that room. She felt the baby kick. She could only feel sorry for it, to be born to such a failure of a mother. Cecilia couldn’t move in that room because of the heat of the afternoon and the weight of sadness. It was during the time her own mother had exiled her to work in the garden and grind the corn for tortillas, giving her study room with its unfinished mural of Tweety Bird to a younger brother, as punishment.
Now she was a lady of elegance, a doctor. What had those years of suffering come to? She saw her death outside the door. The fat man with the gun. She would be humiliated by these men, that was a given. They would take her dignity, but what did it matter? We are all naked in death. She could accept everything else, she thought, but not that she would never see her son again. Lying down, with tears running along her temples, she forced herself to prepare, to travel slowly through the tunnel of darkness, at the end of which, in a bright mist, was Giovanni.
The lock slid open and a woman entered. The woman was ordinary. Middle-aged and silent. She had a mass of black hair and wore a cheap print dress. She brought a small bowl of garbanzo beans in olive oil and a piece of bread. She didn’t look at Cecilia but picked up the laundry basket and left. Cecilia knew better than to try to talk to her. Women can kill you, too.
TWENTY-FOUR
Exuberant shouts are coming from the courtyard — sounds I’ve never heard in the abbey before. Sterling had woken early, leaving the sweet-pea bed with quick and economical movements, so as not to wake me. He told me he’s been dreaming about airplanes falling out of the sky, and I’m afraid that’s what got him up — although maybe it was also to avoid the possibility of sex. He has been uncharacteristically indifferent. “I’m kinda all wore out,” he said. Alone, the former monk’s room seems even starker than before, somehow even threatening. Without the safe harbor of his warm, accepting body, I feel like I’m the one falling through space.
The morning sun lies in curtains across the inner space of the compound, warming the old stone. The electric torches are still burning, pale as the new day. Looking down from the second-story loggia, I see Sterling and Nicosa playing soccer, grunting and hooting. The taut leather ball sails off their feet with hard percussive pops. Giovanni, still on crutches, coaches from the sidelines. The sun plays golden notes in his dark curly hair, but his
