job, the best work is often done off the grid, on your own terms. You deal with the blowback later. Sterling and I are the same — happiest when we’re acting solo. Or maybe it’s the American way to go it alone. Looking around, I seem to be the only non-Italian packed into the Roman bus station; certainly the only woman not in the company of a mother or a sister.
There’s no place like Italy to make you feel like an orphaned child.
I leave the cafeteria, dragging the suitcase toward an open lot backed by tenements that has been turned into a field of corn, a hopeful sign that somewhere in this degraded landscape the human spirit has prevailed. Ahead at the horizon is an elevated highway where cars are speeding out of the city.
Silhouetted against the setting sun is a woman, six feet tall with storklike legs, wearing nothing but a bikini and heels; obsidian-black skin, hair in a knot at the nape of her neck, languidly moving to a boom box playing African music. Curtains of laundry flutter from the windows above her. A car pulls off the ramp. A white businessman steps out. The woman extends her hand and leads him into the cornfield.
When the bus comes, it is new and air-conditioned. Despite the hordes at the station, there are not many going to Siena. The front seats are taken by two elderly nuns and a blind priest. When we pass the outer industrial rings of the city, the terrain becomes deeply green, broken by raked fields of mustard yellow, dappled with rolls of hay. As we enter the provinces of Umbria, and then Tuscany, there are no malls or subdivisions. The bus stops in few towns along the way. Soon the only sign of modernity is a power line going by in a hypnotic stripe.
I open the file Dennis gave me on Nicoli Nicosa. It describes a cagey player, adept at choosing the side in power, and apparently without political loyalty. He first came to the FBI’s attention when he was observed by a surveillance team that had been following Lucia Vincenzo, forty-two, the widow of a crime boss who was executed in classic manner while he drove to the sweatshop he owned outside Naples, where he employed master tailors and seamstresses to make high-quality copies of designer clothing. He got behind on his extortion payments to ’Ndrangheta; they threatened to seize the business. He resisted; they took him out before breakfast.
After her husband’s murder, ’Ndrangheta made Lucia a deal. She would continue to run the fake high-end clothing business, but now as a money-laundering scheme for their cocaine operation. Profitable for everyone. Her mistake was to hire Chinese immigrants, cheap labor, to work in the shop. It didn’t matter that drug money flowed in and out as usual. By hiring the Chinese she had crossed the crime families who control the counterfeit merchandise trade — an unforgivable slap in the face that could unbalance the delicate truce between the clans. She was a wild card. ’Ndrangheta had to cut her off.
They called her La Leonessa, the Lioness, because she was remorseless and arrogant as a cat, and she obliged the nickname by sporting skintight animal prints, furs, and ropes of gold. From the photos and news clippings reproduced in the file, the Lioness looked like the cliche of a mistress: full-busted, with thick black hair and the size-two body of a teenager. She vanished from a supermarket parking lot in January of this year — punishment for dealing with the Chinese without permission.
That was the theory. But if the husband is always the prime suspect, the lover must be second in line. While the file details five trysts in luxury hotels in Como and Milan between Nicoli Nicosa and Lucia Vincenzo over the past year, it contains no hard evidence that they were in the cocaine business together — but why not? Lucia was an overconfident amateur and Nicosa a street-smart opportunist who might have been looking for a partner. Maybe he saw a way to prove himself to the big boys by aiding in her death.
Like the princes of the Italian city-states, Nicosa seems to possess a natural understanding of alliances. The son of a Sienese coffee roaster, he graduated from the Universita degli Studi di Roma and studied in the United States at Harvard Business School. There he connected with the son of a member of the ruling class of El Salvador. In that deeply troubled country it was open season for ruthless young men. His classmate’s father liked the charming, big-eyed Italian and treated him like another son; he gave him a postgraduate course in bribery and corruption that allowed Nicosa to buy out the indigenous farmers who were growing yucca, in order for him to plant coffee. The file notes that although the civil war had ended, “buy out” was often a euphemism for “disappeared.”
Nicosa continued to profit from a cordial relationship with the right-wing power brokers. After a major earthquake, he was awarded a contract to build a water treatment system. Although the water project is still touted on the official government website as having revitalized a devastated area, it was never built. Nicosa and his behind-the-scenes benefactors pocketed millions.
It was in the aftermath of this earthquake that he met Cecilia Sanchez, a young doctor working in an emergency clinic set up near his plantation. There is a gap of three years before Cecilia immigrated to Italy, and they were married in Nicosa’s hometown of Siena. It could not have been easy for a young woman to leave a poor extended Catholic family that depended on her income as a doctor. There isn’t much in the file on Cecilia’s side of the story, except copies of the letters she sent to FBI HQ in Washington, D.C., searching for an American relation named Ana Grey. She gives the reason as a small inheritance she is allegedly holding for me, but then the letters grow more desperate:
I can hear her voice as it was on the phone, with its unique blend of accents, like nutmeg and tamarind, speaking through the words on the dull photocopy.
Glancing out the bus window, I see the landscape has changed. The yellow fields are gone; instead there is a cheesy strip mall with a discount shoe pavilion and outlets for tires and wine. As I observe families at tables outside a pizzeria, the image of the two young brothers at the London restaurant comes into my head. I watched as the younger boy expired in his brother’s arms. I saw his body receive that decisive stillness. And Marco never once let go.
I hear the desperation in Cecilia’s voice on the page and wonder if this is ultimately what she asks of me — the unconditional devotion of family. My heart stirs, but I deny the feeling. My grandfather Poppy’s house, where I grew up, was a forbidding, unsafe place of locked-away love with no possibility of consolation. All my life I have held myself apart from family bonds because I never believed family could mean anything but cold disappointment. Yet now, under orders of my superiors at the FBI, I am speeding toward it.
SIENA, ITALY
FIVE
The commercial sprawl continues until the bus swings around a corner, heading straight for a huge stone wall. At the last minute we swerve through a narrow gate topped by a statue of a wolf. Once inside the walls, we halt at the Siena bus station, a concrete island in a small piazza.
The driver waits as I bump along the aisle, impatient eyes meeting mine in the mirror. Out on the street, the air is baking and the spare trees are heavy in the stillness. The air brakes whoosh, and the bus is gone. I look hopefully for Cecilia Nicosa, but nobody approaches. I wait in the shade. The suitcase and rumpled shorts must immediately make me for American. I can’t get a signal on my cell phone. After fifteen or twenty minutes, I set out to find a landline.
Straight ahead there is a fortress in a park. Turning the other way, you face a jumble of signs. Il Duomo, the
