White Shotgun

And Giovanni does. When we first met, at this spot, he was late. Irresponsible, even spoiled. The difference is that at that time he had still been whole — he could take for granted his mother’s steady presence, that his parents would be the center of his world forever. Picking up his American aunt had been just one of his many important obligations, including a flurry of calls to his customers in the bank of cocaine, the moment we got into the car. He bounded like a retriever then, never out of breath. Now he is willing to take orders, careful not to twist the leg or tweak the arm as he turns from an automated ticket machine. There is no way back to being that uninjured sixteen-year-old.

“Where do we go?” Zabrina asks as we hustle up the groaning steps of the bus.

“Just for a ride,” I assure her.

“Where?”

“Monteriggioni,” Giovanni answers. “Not far.”

“Why?” she asks, showing a suspicious streak that we will have to negotiate.

“Do you have other plans?” Sterling wonders, keeping her moving toward the rear.

She blinks at him with her kohl-rimmed eyes. “What kind of plans?”

Although we are the only passengers, the four of us have squeezed into the very last row, where we can see anyone who comes on board. The doors close and the bus moves out. You can feel the heat of the engine through the seats. Already Zabrina has a crush on Sterling, and it is easy to see why. He is the type of man who looks great even in yellow LED transit lighting, while everyone else appears tubercular. At ten-thirty p.m., on a local bus to nowhere, he is alert and protective, his eyes ceaselessly scanning the darkened countryside — which must appear to a young excitable girl as sexy indifference.

Mind you, if she were an asset we were working through the Bureau, things would be entirely different. We would still be back at the field office, filling out permission forms, and no encounter would have taken place without a remote team recording every word. But here in the back of the bus, there are no rules. We can get information out of Zabrina by any means.

“Why you kidnap me? I think maybe I should be scared.”

“You are free to go, any time.”

“In the nowhere? In the night?” she says haughtily. “What is that?”

“We need for you to tell us exactly where you saw Signora Nicosa,” Sterling says nicely. “And we don’t want anyone else to hear.”

“Oh, sure.”

Giovanni assures her this is true.

“I want a cigarette.”

“You can’t smoke on the bus.”

“Who cares?”

“It will draw attention.”

She stands, swaying with the movement. “I get off.”

“Why are you such a bitch all of a sudden?” Giovanni snaps. “You’re the one who came looking for me.”

Hanging on to a strap, Zabrina bends over in pain. A tremor passes through her body.

“I am scared.” She catches her breath. “I am looking for Giovanni and everyone knows I am— una straniera.”

“A stranger,” Giovanni explains. “When she entered the Oca district and was asking for me, naturally people are suspicious.”

This is a surprise. “I thought he was looking for you.”

“No, no,” says Zabrina. “We don’t really know each other. I search to speak to Giovanni, to tell him where his mother is. Because I hear his name from …”

“Around,” Giovanni interjects, as if we couldn’t guess it was through other druggies in the contrada.

“You went looking for him?”

“That’s a dangerous game so close to Palio,” Sterling drawls. “Is why I scared.”

She fidgets with her earrings. Sterling eases her into a seat and she sits with obvious relief. But the effort to speak English is too hard, and she begs Giovanni to translate.

“I am from Calabria,” she continues emotionally in Italian. “The poorest place in Italy. It is not like the north. The countryside is not like here. There it is very rocky and hard to grow things. The mafias — Camorra and ’Ndrangheta — they are a way of life. No family is untouched, and don’t get me wrong, the women are just as bad. They will be on the cell phone warning their sons what’s going on in the village or if someone has a grudge against them — because they are proud of their sons, they help them climb the ladder. Everyone sees people murdered in the streets, even little children. You can’t get out.

“It sucks for everyone. But if you’re poor, what do you do? My mother used to sew. She made lace and towels and things like that. It brought in a little money. In Calabria, the way to make money is drugs. You sell a little, you do a little. Then you become a courier. My mother was a courier. Yes, of course I am angry. She was a middle-aged woman taking drugs into the United States. I wish she’d been caught because now she is dead — one of those murdered in the street. A guy goes by on a motorbike and poom poom poom, at the market, in front of everyone. There were protests at the funeral and everyone got upset. A mother! It was in the news.

“I know I’m addicted. We’re all addicts — my friends, my old boyfriend, Yuri. We know we’re all going to die. I knew from the time I was born I was going to suffer. I tried to leave and come to a beautiful place like Siena, but it is my fate to suffer, like the women in Calabria. Sometimes they marry you off, and then the husbands leave. My father drove a truck all over Europe. He was never home. My mother raised six children alone. When I saw that lady … Giovanni’s mother … I recognized her. She was the doctor in Siena who said I have to stop taking drugs because already, at this moment, I have hepatitis.”

“You have hepatitis?” Surprised, Giovanni asks in English.

She pats his hand. “Don’t worry, I am fine.” Continuing in Italian, she says, “I went to Calabria to get high. Big deal. If you get there right after a new shipment comes in, the stuff is good, and my cousin, Fat Pasquale, takes care of me. This time, we went there to get high and Yuri almost died. Because that sick freak with the hands like Frankenstein made it too strong. He couldn’t give a shit. You are just a sack of weeds to them. And I saw this poor lady — I am sorry to tell you because she is your sister and Giovanni’s mother — well, she looked very bad.”

I press my lips and turn to Giovanni.

“The man she describes is called the Puppet. His real name is Cosimo Umberto, and he’s a well-known mafioso. He lost his hands in a bomb explosion and now he wears prostheses. Ring a bell?”

Giovanni shakes his head.

“He’s pretty hard to miss. When you were in the hospital, your mother and I saw this creep, right outside your room.”

“Why would he be outside my room?”

“You tell me.”

“I don’t know anything that happened in the hospital. I was in a coma, remember?”

The bus is slowing down. A shuttered convenience store swings into view.

“This is Monteriggioni,” Giovanni says with more enthusiasm than you’d expect for a deserted bus stop. “From here it goes straight to Poggibonsi. Do you want to go there?”

Satisfied that if someone was following us they aren’t anymore, Sterling says we don’t need to go any farther. Monteriggioni is another, smaller walled fortress town, a mini-satellite built for the defense of medieval Siena. We get off the bus outside the gates and see that in the piazza they are having a festival. A kiddie carnival has been set up in front of the old stone church. Although it is close to midnight, the rides are still going. Giovanni says the bus back to Siena won’t come for an hour, so we buy sodas and tufts of fried dough and sit on a wall.

The wind is humid and cold. The misty lights against the flat storefronts remind me of the outdoor dinner party in the ruins of the church at the abbey when I first arrived — white tables, white roses, the Nicosas’ flashy friends. All of that has vanished with Cecilia. Under tender little strings of lights, sleeping children are carried by their young fathers, leaves blow across the piazza, and the black sky presses in. The moment is surreal.

“Will you help us?” Sterling asks the girl.