White Shotgun

“They come up from the south.”

“ ’Ndrangheta?” Nicosa flinches.

“What about the risk to the person who gives money?” I ask.

“No risk. Their hand is not dirty, and the profit is good. Sometimes the investors are asked to do a small favor, like hold the drugs, that’s all.”

It is now clear why Muriel left town. She knew the attack on Giovanni would lead the police toward mafia activity in Siena, possibly including the local branch of the bank of cocaine. I doubt very much that her partner had a recurrence of cancer. I expect Muriel and Sheila to be on the next plane to the Azores.

“Why did they beat you up, Giovanni?”

He clears his throat. “I am supposed to bring an amount every month, and I was behind. Muriel was my main customer, but she was drinking like a fish. She had no money to invest.”

“You took the hit for her.”

“I promise my customers to keep them out of it.”

“Not only are you in danger of getting killed, but you are helping the mafias!” Nicosa cries. “You are giving them more money to buy more cocaine.”

“That’s the idea, Papa.”

The phone inside the abbey starts to ring again.

Nicosa smashes the canvas across the bench, splintering glass and the wooden frame.

“Bitch! Fucking English bitch!”

“Hypocrite!” Giovanni shouts in return. “I only do exactly what you do! I learned from you!”

“This is not what I do!”

Giovanni screams at me. “Why did you tell him?”

“Because they tried to kill you, for God’s sake! That’s why Muriel split. She was afraid it would come back to her.”

“You are not my aunt! If you were my real aunt, you would be on my side!”

“I am on your side.”

“You’re FBI, that’s all you are!”

“Giovanni—”

“You and him together! Both liars and hypocrites!”

Grimacing with pain, he lopes across the courtyard on the crutch, slamming the kitchen door.

Nicosa is heaving. “That English bitch dragged him into it, you know that.”

“I will make sure Muriel Barrett is picked up in London and interrogated.”

Nicosa drops the wrecked painting at my feet. “Give her this.”

The door opens and Giovanni appears, holding the phone.

“For Signorina Grey!” he sings out contemptuously.

Sterling says, “I need a drink.”

When we get to the kitchen, whoever it was has already hung up. I ask if there’s a way to see who called. Giovanni grabs the receiver and punches two digits. The screen says Proibito.

“What does that mean?”

“ ‘Prohibited.’ You can’t.”

He turns away and opens the refrigerator and just stares into it. I’m thinking it was a blocked call from the American embassy about the recovered evidence from the vat. Nicosa enters the kitchen, turns on the taps, and sticks his head in the sink.

“There’s nothing to eat,” Giovanni observes.

Sterling ferrets out two beers. The phone rings again.

“Probably for me.” I reach for it, but Nicosa, shaking water off his head like a lion, snatches it away.

“Che vuole lei?” he shouts angrily.

He listens. The person on the other end speaks swiftly and ends the call. Nicosa lowers the phone, strangely triumphant.

“You see? This is what I have been waiting for! What I have said all along. She’s alive. These people have Cecilia.”

“Mama is okay?”

“What did they say?” I urge. “Exactly?”

“ ‘We have your wife.’ ”

“Did they put her on the phone?” demands Sterling.

“No.”

“Who are they?” Giovanni asks.

“Don’t worry!” cries Nicosa, in a delirium. “They will call again.”

“What do they want?”

“Two million euros.”

Giovanni is wide-eyed. “Do we have that much money, Papa?”

Nicosa laughs exuberantly, drumming the boy’s shoulders. “You see? Listen to the priest! God went looking. Your mother is alive!”

THIRTY

Just after dark, Zabrina and Yuri pass beneath the stone arch in the center of a dying coastal town in the province of Calabria — another set of stoplights in miles of unfinished shopping centers and buildings. Between getting lost, and pit stops due to stomach cramps, it has taken longer than they planned — almost nine hours on the motorbike — but by maintaining on Valium and caffeine, they keep pushing through the sweltering urban sprawl. The green hills of Tuscany don’t even exist.

By the time they enter the narrow streets of the husk that is left of the old town center, Zabrina has collapsed against Yuri’s back, crying softly from excruciating aches in her bones. She’s crashing and can’t hold on anymore. All he can do is shrug her off and keep going. He has the shakes too, and it’s hard to follow her mumbled instructions to the massive public housing project called la piccola citta, Little City. Because ’Ndrangheta is demanding higher fees for its contract to collect the garbage, household waste has been left in mountainous piles that block the streets, forcing them to keep making unexpected turns, getting more and more lost. Evening traffic comes to a standstill. Frustrated commuters are simply locking their cars, leaving them in the middle of the street, and going home. While they are stopped in a traffic jam, some skinny little jerk tries to rip Zabrina’s bag right off the rack, but Yuri hits the gas, hops the curb, and drives thirty kilometers per hour on the sidewalk.

They find the road into the hills. When the anonymous concrete roofs of the housing project rise like a multistoried fortress, Zabrina remembers the crack house is in the middle sector, second floor, the corner apartment way at the end. The Little City is as spread out as a good-sized American shopping mall, over a thousand units in all. The sectors are connected by courtyards within courtyards, odd bridges and narrow walkways. Projecting from every wall is a slovenly jumble of tiny balconies, satellite dishes, networks of exposed electrical cables. The temperature is a hundred and eight degrees. There is not a breath of air, as if the entire community is being smothered under glass. Only the smallest children are wound up enough to play in this heat, kicking soccer balls in their underpants, or splashing in rubber pools while unemployed onlookers smoke cigarettes and soak their feet.

Neither the colliding tracks of blaring pop music nor the jarring reek of marijuana and roasting fish has any effect on the ragged, glassy-eyed junkies lounging on the peeling stairs below the corner apartment.

Fat Pasquale, Zabrina’s cousin, is sitting on a chair, feet up on a cooler, listening to an iPod.

“Who’s this guy?” he says by way of greeting, jerking a thumb at Yuri.

They are speaking in the dialect specific to Calabria.