“Tell me where to meet,” he reads.
They hang up. Nicosa rips off the headphones and kicks away from the desk.
“Could you get a trace?” I ask Sterling.
“Disposable cell phone.”
“Don’t worry,” I tell Nicosa. “You did great.”
“This is not going to work,” he says angrily. “You, telling me what to say — they know something is wrong. It doesn’t sound right.”
Sofri intercedes. “You see, first you must talk to the right person. In Italy, the boss never speaks for himself. He is always one or two steps behind the one who is speaking”—which is exactly what Dennis Rizzio told me.
I nod. “I’m sure that with his connections, Nicoli could speak to whomever he pleases. Do you want to make a call?”
Nicosa shakes his head. “You must wait for the courtesy of
We agree that next time Nicosa will ask for the boss, as well as insist that he hear Cecilia’s voice. He jerks the refrigerator open and defiantly pours a long shot of vodka.
Night passes in fits and starts. Some hours go quickly; sometimes the clock doesn’t move. The TV stays on until Nicosa falls asleep on the couch with his mouth open, and then Sofri clicks it off and settles in one of the corn chip chairs, tipping it up like a recliner. The lights are low. Sounds are not lost way up here; crickets and the rustling of treetops blow in with the cold air. Sitting on the floor in an arc of moonlight, Sterling is fieldstripping and cleaning the Walther for the third or fourth time.
I settle beside him. “You’re not eating, and you’re not sleeping.”
He doesn’t answer.
“That’s a very clean weapon. Cleanest I’ve ever seen.”
He raises a warning finger. “Don’t nag.”
I watch him cleaning the gun. Meticulous. Obsessive.
“I’ve been there. That’s all.”
I went through it after the shooting incident — uncontrollable thoughts and some really bad insomnia. Like a vicious case of poison oak, it won’t go away, and everything you do to calm it only makes it worse. Especially touching it.
Sterling’s face is tight with concentration as his fingers rub the soft cloth back and forth. It seems as though he isn’t going to answer, but then—
“Nobody knows what I see through those sights.”
I put my arm around his shoulders. Massage the rigid muscles of his neck.
“It was a situation that gave us no way out,” he says.
“I understand.”
“No point in discussing it.”
“Okay.” I look over at the windows of black sky. “It’s just that I miss you, baby. Sometimes it doesn’t even seem like we’re a couple anymore. I feel like you keep shutting me down. On the other hand, you came back from the mission to be with me. I guess. I’m confused. Why did you come back?”
“Chris said you were in trouble.”
“Is that all?”
“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t care.”
His tone is flat.
“You’ll neither confirm nor deny?” I say, playfully.
“Pitiful,” he says of his own malfunctioning. “I know.”
“No,” I say. “It’s just hard right now, for both of us.”
“I hear you.”
“Be in touch,” I say.
He nods. I get up and lie on the other chair, adjusting it so my feet are in the air, like Sofri’s, as if we are on an airplane flying over a blacked-out continent. Sterling continues to clean his gun. My mind drifts toward sleep, lulled by the sound of Nicosa’s rhythmic breathing. A million images rush my mind at warp speed, and then I’m floating in a memory of being with Cecilia.
It was when I first arrived, and she had wished in some way to reveal herself to me, craving understanding beyond the wealthy circumstances of her life; she wanted me to know she was not happy in the austere halls of the abbey. So we went to the place in Siena that she said most moves her heart — and perhaps her husband’s, too — a medieval hospital and orphanage called Santa Maria della Scala. In Los Angeles you take a person to Dodger Stadium; here you wind up staring at a 1440 fresco called
“Contained in this picture are the reasons I wanted to become a doctor,” she said. “But I am not that kind of doctor.”
“Why not?”
“I became a doctor to serve,” she said. “Like them.”
“But you are. You’re helping people.”
“Not the way I want to be.”
She held a yellow patent leather bag to the bosom of her black knit dress, clutching tightly, gazing with hunger at the painting that showed the huge vaulted room in which we were standing as it had been in the fifteenth century, when sick pilgrims and abandoned children were received by hospital friars, who had renounced the world and devoted themselves to service.
“Those were wealthy people, like us,” Cecilia said, pointing to an attendant in a hospital tunic, washing the feet of a terrified young man with a grievous wound to the thigh. “But they became oblates, those who give everything they own to the hospital, including their labor, for life.”
“What did they get in return?”
She smiled grimly. “Freedom?”
Now I know that she had been talking about the awful contradictions of her life: a rich, attractive husband who has other women; a murderous organization to which she is forced to pay money for the privilege of saving lives. The air in the empty ancient ward was still and smelled of polished wood. Quiet voices of tour guides speaking other languages could be heard from the galleries.
“Children were left here with notes that told their names, and who their parents were,” Cecilia said. “So when times were better, they could be reunited with their families. They weren’t just abandoned.”
We stood together in front of the painting.
“When Papa used to talk about my relative, Ana, in America, I pictured you wearing a ruffled dress and patent leather shoes. I don’t know where I got that, probably from a movie.”
“I hated dresses until I was sixteen,” I told her. “That was me, in shorts and flip-flops. I had to hose off the sand before they let me in the house.”
“ ‘California’ always sounded magical,” Cecilia said. “When I was in medical school, I tried to do my residency in California. The best facilities. The most exciting cities. It was an impossible dream. We are put in our lives and that’s it.”
When we could find no more messages in the mauve and ochre pigments, we were drawn to a tall grated window at the end of the hall, where a breeze coming in from the mountains brought with it the sound of birdsong and church bells, stirring the pigeon feathers caught outside in the terra-cotta brick.
“We used to have a beautiful bronze statue here,
Through the grated window was the city, colorless in the pressing heat of noon.
When I awake in the chair, something is scrabbling around the edges of the tower. A blackbird has flown through an open window. We catch it in a wastebasket and let it go.
