Steel, the only one who can negotiate with the mafias.”
“I believe Nicosa loves his son, and he’s desperate to get Cecilia back. He needs to be contained, that’s all.”
Sterling shakes his head. “I’ll say this, I’d hate for the guy to take a bullet the size of his ego.”
TWENTY-FIVE
The dead investigator was at least a good dead investigator. His report included phone records, photographs, lists of my nephew’s teachers, friends, and relations living in Siena. Family members alone took up two single-spaced pages. It could be days before we deciphered who was who, and we had no time for that. The surveillance section covered the boy’s activities during ten days over two weeks in January of last year, detailing to the minute when he left the abbey for school and returned through the gates at night.
We looked for patterns. Soccer, practicing the flag for Palio, chilling at the Fontebranda fountain in Oca territory — that was the norm. Then we looked for the exceptions, always more interesting. One jumped out at us: a cluster of encounters with a young Italian woman named Zabrina Tursi. Her photo showed a goth, raven-haired, undernourished university student who worked part-time as a waitress. A copy of a police report showed one arrest for the sale of marijuana, but she was placed on probation because she was a minor at the time.
The dead investigator hired by Giovanni’s parents had discovered his relationship with Zabrina after following him and two male friends to the wine bar where she worked, situated in the Medici fortress near the bus station on the outskirts of town. He observed the subject first being served by Zabrina Tursi and then engaging her in conversation on the patio after the place closed. Two nights later, the young woman appeared at the fountain in Oca territory and made contact with Giovanni. There is a photo of them with other students at a cafe in the square. At 1:05 a.m., Zabrina and Giovanni left the cafe and went to her residence, a ten-minute drive outside the walls, where he stayed until 3:45 a.m. Then he returned to the abbey.
The file details Giovanni visiting Zabrina’s residence five times. It bothered me until I realized the association — five was also the number of assignations the FBI recorded between Nicosa and Lucia Vincenzo, La Leonessa, the disappeared drug dealer. Numerology aside, I wondered if Giovanni was subconsciously imitating his father’s public transgressions by flaunting it with a woman who was also dangerous to his health.
Sterling and I drive to Zabrina’s address. It is a decent apartment building in a quiet neighborhood shaded by oak trees. Stacks of terraces with hanging laundry and potted plants face the west. The entrance is down a hill, past the usual fleet of parked motorbikes. Inside the building we get no farther than the vestibule. You have to be buzzed in. “Tursi” is listed on a mailbox with “Kosta” and “Lawrence,” but there is no answer to our ring. The vestibule smells of cigarette smoke and frying meatballs.
Sterling says, “Let’s go.”
“We should wait for the girl.”
“Best bet is to come back later, when she’s likely to be home.”
“You have another idea?”
“I would like to see how his neighbors make that olive oil Giovanni was talking about,” Sterling says.
“Why?”
“Brings me back to summers at home. When I was a kid, my job was snake wrangler. You want to cut the bottom branches of the olive trees to keep the ground clear of rattlesnakes, but they’re crafty. My all-time record was shooting six in one week. Now my folks give ranch tours to tourists, but when we first started planting, it was us, some clay hills, and a couple of Mexicans. Good times. I’m curious how they do it in the old country.”
It’s the blazing hot middle of the day, and most people will be going nowhere, hunkered down behind the shutters. The last place I want to be is sitting in the mailbox car.
“Okay.”
I agree to give it up for an hour. Climbing the hill from Zabrina’s apartment house back to the car, I slip my arm around Sterling’s waist, relieved that he’s able to connect to something besides bad wars and bad dreams.
The olive farm is just past the abbey, beyond a grape arbor and some chicken coops. The house, a two-story stucco building with a red tile roof, would not be out of place in a Los Angeles subdivision, except it is not likely you would find the wife eviscerating chickens, which is what Antonella Calabrese is doing when we show up. She and her husband do not speak English, but her reaction to uninvited guests is nothing but warmth.
She is over sixty, with dry reddish hair and a pleasant face filmed with sweat from hard work in the small alcove in the back of the house. Although scraping entrails into a bucket, she displays that Italian feminine self- respect by wearing pearl stud earrings, a black camisole that bares her arms underneath an apron, and a circular diamond pendant. Three chickens — supermarket clean — are folded up in a roasting pan with three full-feathered bodies to go. “Why would anybody,” she asks Sterling in Italian, “cook just one chicken at a time?”
Not wanting to leave the task unattended (flies are gathering), she calls for Aleandro and leads us to the basement, where he is plastering a wall. Her husband is hearty and weathered-looking, with dark skin and strong forearms, wearing a blue checked shirt splattered with white. His gray eyebrows peak like a horned owl’s. He’s got a broad fleshy nose and a wide smile. Side by side, he and Antonella look like brother and sister. Both radiate the grounded, earthbound simplicity we city folks associate with outdoor life.
But it wasn’t always so. Aleandro, we discover, is retired from a long career as an electrical inspector for a government agency, which explains the pleasant home and sense of tranquillity. He is done with it. He has always kept chickens and rabbits, always had olive trees, an organic vegetable garden and grapes, but now, he is proud to say, he and his wife are self-sustaining.
Their olive operation may not be as grand as what Sterling had in mind — it consists of a single windowless basement room, away from light and heat, with sacks full of chemical pellets, curing barrels, and a stainless-steel tank in which they store the oil, which is pressed at a community mill. All of this is fascinating — especially the discussion in Italian of how the Spaniards brought olives to Texas — and I am more than ready to leave, but somehow, by mental telepathy, before she went to finish the chickens, Aleandro and Antonella have agreed that we are not going anywhere until we’ve had something to eat.
We are shepherded upstairs and seated at a heavy dining room table with a white lace runner. Behind us is a dark wood cupboard jammed with glassware. Antonella comes through the brick archway of the kitchen, carrying a welcome carafe of water. The kitchen has a vaulted wooden ceiling that mocks older Tuscan architecture. I am antsy and uncomfortable. They are talking a blue streak that I can’t understand, and I am wondering if this will turn into a tedious lunch. I just want to get back to Zabrina, hoping she can shed light on Giovanni and his dealings, if she has anything to say that might factor into Nicosa’s alleged drug connection and Cecilia’s abduction.
No, it isn’t lunch. Antonella returns with the coffee and then bread and preserves made with fruit from their orchard — the most full-bodied, jewel-like jelly I have ever tasted. Unknown to me, the conversation around the dining room table has taken a much darker turn than Spanish olives. Sterling has been asking questions, that much I can tell. After a point, Aleandro’s powerful hand curls into a heavy fist. His wife’s eyes are downcast. They can only be talking about the mafias.
When we are shown to the door, we are given a gift — a recycled Sprite bottle containing their precious homemade olive oil, emerald as a mossy stream. Sterling and Aleandro shake hands and then embrace with such force it almost makes me cry. Something powerful has taken place between them.
When we are back on the road and walking toward the abbey, Sterling is hyper. He tells me that the Calabreses heard through town gossip that Cecilia is missing.
“He gave us a lead where she might be. First and foremost, you don’t have to come. I can handle it solo, spare you the upset.”
“Whatever in hell it is you’re talking about, I’m coming.”
Olives, as Sterling well knows, are cured in sodium hydroxide. It reduces the bitterness, and if you soak them long enough, it will turn green olives black. He had a hunch they might be doing it the same way in Italy, and he
