strides past them, smacking each one on the back, hard.
“Are we playing this?” he wants to know.
Buckled into the Ferrari and hurtling downhill, Nicosa says, “Tell me what bullshit is this, two different locations? You give them the money, but she’s somewhere else?”
“It’s not uncommon — it’s called the double-drop. They think they can protect themselves that way, but once we make the exchange, Sterling and Chris will be on their tail, and then it’s over. We’ll get them.
And Cecilia.”
For the next forty-five minutes we follow orders on the cell phone that have us driving loops around Siena. It is a charade without logic, meant to ensure that we’re not being followed, no doubt with mafia homies looking out along the way. The old woman with her feet up on a box, crocheting with a tiny needle. The waiter in an outdoor cafe, shredding cheese. The candle maker in the tourist shop window, folding curls of wax into a rose. Snitches, druggies, businesspeople, wannabes, killers — the whole network of cowed citizenry, keeping track of the red Ferrari. Inside the walls. Outside the walls. Sterling and Sofri are with Chris in the nondescript Fiat, listening to the instructions we are receiving, holding back at varying distances.
Daylight is still bright and scorching when the Puppet instructs us to park the car on Via di Pantaneto. Then I am to continue alone on foot.
“How will Signora Grey know your man?” Nicosa asks through the earpiece.
“By his colors,” the creep replies.
Now we are back on familiar ground. The coded Sienese response. The maddening symbolism. By this time I realize, with some relief, that the ultimate destination, to which they have been steering us all along, is Il Campo, the huge crowded plaza where the Palio was held. They plan to pull off the exchange and blend into the crowd, while limiting our opportunities for pursuit. All right by me. The public venue is safer than an isolated meet.
I tell the team: “It’s a go.”
When we have parked the Ferrari, and I am buckling on the bulletproof vest that came out of Chris’s trunk, Nicosa removes his sunglasses. His eyes are softened with emotion.
“Please, let me do this.”
“Sorry. It’s in my job description.”
“It’s my fault; I let Cecilia go—”
“You didn’t. She was taken.”
He stares, at a loss. “God protect you.”
He kisses me rapidly on each cheek. I hoist the duffel with the money and the tracking device inside and get out of the car. I could not have been an FBI agent all these years without also asking the question that if Nicosa’s ties to the mob are as real as Dennis Rizzio thinks they are, could he not, right now, be setting me up? And what if Sterling, for all his assurances of covering my back, is still not totally in his right mind? Trust whom? Where? Only the clear bright image of the victim’s face before me keeps me walking straight ahead.
“I’m on Banchi di Sotto,” I say into the microphone hidden in my hair. “Going into the Campo.”
“Which entrance?” comes Sofri’s voice.
Of course! There are eleven!
“Jesus, I don’t know!”
“Which side of the Mangia Tower?”
“East. I
“Is there a cafe that says Pizzicheria?” Sterling asks.
“Pizzi — what?”
“Tell us what you see.”
“Okay, here’s a street sign. I can’t pronounce it — Mezzolom—?”
“Mezzolombardi-Rinaldi,” Sofri says, and then he and Nicosa overlap. “She’s at Palazzo Ragnoni.”
“Gotcha!” Sterling says. He’s in position somewhere, looking through the sniper rifle, and I am in his sights.
“Going to the fountain.”
“Copy that.”
Although it is barely five days since the Palio, you would never know the square had recently been filled to capacity with life-and-death drama, spectators clinging to every ledge. The track of special yellow earth has vanished without a trace. Where there had been horses crazy to run, jockeys beating one another, mad ecstasy, and underhanded deals on which the fate of the universe seemed to turn, now there are placid globs of tourists checking out cafe menus, and international students playing Frisbee. Only the
I sit on the edge of the Fonte Gaia, the Fountain of Joy, which was totally obscured by human bodies during Palio. How little I understood about Cecilia then, and about the entanglements of this family with the mafia beast, which has infiltrated this proud city through the sewers, despite
“All clear?” asks Sterling.
“So far.”
I breathe the funky mist coming off the fountain. The she-wolf statue spits a docile stream as on this balmy evening the drama becomes much smaller than the grand pageantry of Palio, down to a subtle eye movement between an American woman perched on the stone and a balding Italian man wearing a white polo shirt and an Oca scarf coming toward her, who stops in the middle of the piazza, turns his back, and lights a cigarette.
“That’s the contact, wearing green and white. The Oca colors.”
Nicosa says something urgently into the earpiece, maybe Sofri does, too, but I don’t hear them. I am in vapor lock, floating in a pool of now. I hoist the duffel and walk toward the man, who is standing alone, larger and more distinct than anything in the square. Objects become magnified and time slows down. I see the sunlight on the bald spot of his skull, reflecting hot as tin. I see the brown uniforms of a Boy Scout troop, and an orange Frisbee slicing by. The multicolored
I hear the first rifle shot. You wouldn’t hear it unless you were listening with extraordinary care. Not even the pigeons move. I don’t stop walking. As far as I know, the gunfire does not concern me. Ten meters from the contact, though, there is a second blast. This one is heard by everybody. It echoes off the palazzos like the
I swerve slightly and keep on going, still carrying the duffel, through the first and second waves of panicked bystanders — not like during the riot after Palio, careening into one another’s arms, laughing and crying, but a one-way, horror-driven stampede for all eleven exits, leaving the sprawling corpse in the Oca scarf in the center of the piazza, bleeding out on the sloping brick.
THIRTY-THREE
Back in the car, we are instantly surrounded by the clanging blare of ambulances and police.
“My God, what happened?” Nicosa says.
“Sterling took out the contact.”
“I can’t tell you right now, but I promise you, he had a reason.”
“He’s crazy! I knew it!”
“We’re okay,” I tell Nicosa soothingly. “Stay calm and just drive normally.”
I have no idea what went down, except that I am still gripping the bag with two million euros, and the
