FBI agent is in town?” I ask lightly.
“Usually only for tickets to Palio.” She smiles and tosses her head and then fixes me with a steely stare. “What do you do in the FBI?”
“I’m a field agent. My visit here is almost like being undercover,” I say. “My sister has asked me not to tell her husband I am with the FBI. It’s strange, because that’s how she found me, through the Bureau. I wonder what else she’s keeping from him.”
Inspector Martini frowns. “I am of the same contrada as your family—Oca, the Goose. I know Cecilia well, but I don’t understand what is in her head, keeping this secret from her husband.”
“Could it have to do with Nicoli’s relationship with Lucia Vincenzo?”
“We don’t have the whole story there, except that she is most probably dead.”
“Is there a connection between Vincenzo, the southern mafias, and Nicoli Nicosa?”
“I can’t speak about that.”
“I understand.”
When you need to know .
“I could never go undercover like you,” she reflects. “I have my baby.”
“How are you able to make that work?”
“Around the time that she was born, a statue of Christ by a Renaissance master named Vecchietta was stolen from a church in Siena. A task force was formed to recover it. I have a degree in art history, and it was part-time, so I applied for a position. I went back full-time when she was one year old.”
“Did you recover the statue?”
She shakes her head. “It is somewhere in the hands of a private collector. Now I’m back on the street, and I like it much better.”
“Hard to go back to a desk job,” I agree.
She hesitates. “You have experience with homicide?”
“I make trips to the crime lab and testify in court, just like you.”
We give it a moment. Her arms are crossed. She grinds the concrete with a heel.
Finally she says, “I did not tell you this—”
“I never heard a thing.”
I am becoming attuned to these disclaimers— “This is not a problem,” Sofri said when the police car arrived at the party flashing emergency lights.
“It is about the police report. On your nephew, Giovanni.”
“What about it?”
Materializing as if from nowhere, the paparazzi appear out of the shadows of the parking lot—half a dozen athletic young men on the hunt, weaving and pointing the eyes of their cameras at everything in their path, like an assault unit of spiders.
“Cazzo!” grunts Inspector Martini, glancing at them, and then at her cell. “The boss must be here.”
They had gotten here before the Commissario, grabbing whatever shots they could to feed the universal craving to see rich people suffer—no matter how pathetic the crumbs, like shots of Nicosa’s Ferrari and the exterior of the hospital. They ferret out the two of us near the entrance, but Inspector Martini speaks sharply in Italian, and they back off with apologetic waves, signifying to me the ultimate control of the government over the press. Instinctively, she and I separate without a word as TV news vans swarm the parking lot.
A white car pulls up, doors open, and two plainclothes detectives spring out, positioning themselves for the exit of the chief. The Commissario is taller than everyone else, and extremely thin. Wisps of white hair flying in the backlight of the TV cameras show that he’s balding. He walks like a marionette, lower legs extending stiffly on their own, as if badly in need of a double knee replacement. But the odd gait only adds to a kind of worldly elegance; at this late hour, wearing a well-tailored dark suit, he looks as if he has been called away from a state department dinner party behind locked gates.
Nobody stops anyone from entering the hospital, and I’m thinking the whole entourage is going to march right into the operating room, but in a country where politics is theater, Nicoli Nicosa recognizes the opportunity for an entrance and is waiting, with the priest in the background, for Il Commissario in the
“Usually only for tickets to Palio.” She smiles and tosses her head and then fixes me with a steely stare. “What do you do in the FBI?”
“I’m a field agent. My visit here is almost like being undercover,” I say. “My sister has asked me not to tell her husband I am with the FBI. It’s strange, because that’s how she found me, through the Bureau. I wonder what else she’s keeping from him.”
Inspector Martini frowns. “I am of the same contrada as your family—Oca, the Goose. I know Cecilia well, but I don’t understand what is in her head, keeping this secret from her husband.”
“Could it have to do with Nicoli’s relationship with Lucia Vincenzo?”
“We don’t have the whole story there, except that she is most probably dead.”
“Is there a connection between Vincenzo, the southern mafias, and Nicoli Nicosa?”
“I can’t speak about that.”
“I understand.”
When you need to know .
“I could never go undercover like you,” she reflects. “I have my baby.”
“How are you able to make that work?”
“Around the time that she was born, a statue of Christ by a Renaissance master named Vecchietta was stolen from a church in Siena. A task force was formed to recover it. I have a degree in art history, and it was part-time, so I applied for a position. I went back full-time when she was one year old.”
“Did you recover the statue?”
She shakes her head. “It is somewhere in the hands of a private collector. Now I’m back on the street, and I like it much better.”
“Hard to go back to a desk job,” I agree.
She hesitates. “You have experience with homicide?”
“I make trips to the crime lab and testify in court, just like you.”
We give it a moment. Her arms are crossed. She grinds the concrete with a heel.
Finally she says, “I did not tell you this—”
“I never heard a thing.”
I am becoming attuned to these disclaimers— “This is not a problem,” Sofri said when the police car arrived at the party flashing emergency lights.
“It is about the police report. On your nephew, Giovanni.”
“What about it?”
Materializing as if from nowhere, the paparazzi appear out of the shadows of the parking lot—half a dozen athletic young men on the hunt, weaving and pointing the eyes of their cameras at everything in their path, like an assault unit of spiders.
“Cazzo!” grunts Inspector Martini, glancing at them, and then at her cell. “The boss must be here.”
They had gotten here before the Commissario, grabbing whatever shots they could to feed the universal craving to see rich people suffer—no matter how pathetic the crumbs, like shots of Nicosa’s Ferrari and the exterior of the hospital. They ferret out the two of us near the entrance, but Inspector Martini speaks sharply in Italian, and they back off with apologetic waves, signifying to me the ultimate control of the government over the press. Instinctively, she and I separate without a word as TV news vans swarm the parking lot.
A white car pulls up, doors open, and two plainclothes detectives spring out, positioning themselves for the exit of the chief. The Commissario is taller than everyone else, and extremely thin. Wisps of white hair flying in the backlight of the TV cameras show that he’s balding. He walks like a marionette, lower legs extending stiffly on their own, as if badly in need of a double knee replacement. But the odd gait only adds to a kind of worldly elegance; at this late hour, wearing a well-tailored dark suit, he looks as if he has been called away from a state department dinner party behind locked gates.
Nobody stops anyone from entering the hospital, and I’m thinking the whole entourage is going to march right into the operating room, but in a country where politics is theater, Nicoli Nicosa recognizes the opportunity for an entrance and is waiting, with the priest in the background, for Il Commissario in the
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