A crack! explodes with a puff of white smoke from the mortaretto cannon, calling the horses to the starting area between two ropes. Now you can see the dirty business. The jockeys, riding bareback, wear the colors of their contrada, painted helmets, and white running shoes. Their long legs hang over the heaving ribs of the horses, which are fired up on amphetamines. Round and round go the colors, as the jockeys circle in an unruly pack, negotiating deals and making lightning-fast alliances, menacing one another with long whips made from the phalluses of calves. There is more than one false start. And then the rope is dropped — the race begins — and a roar comes up like the explosion of a wind-whipped forest fire.
They gallop full-out, three times around the track, ninety seconds total. With each turn there seems to be another horse that has lost its rider. A jockey is thrown right in front of me and trampled. The whole bunch skids sideways in front of the San Marino curve. Dust flies, the jockeys trade whip smacks and try to shove one another off, the horses stretch, manic spectators cannot be stopped from running across the track, something happens at the far end that I cannot see, and then a banner unfurls from a window in the Mangia Tower, declaring Leocorno, Unicorn, orange and white, to be the winner.
Hand-to-hand combat breaks out everywhere. The losing contrade rush their horses, pulling off their own jockeys and pummeling them in the holy dirt. Young men stampeding blindly in all directions push me, spin me. Faces are contorted with rage and tears and joy. People are ripping at their own shirts. Someone running by smacks a little girl across the face with a flailing arm. They’ve breached the rails and are rioting in the center of the Campo — men are hugging, men are throwing punches. Women clutch one another, sobbing and screaming, in a wild blur of anarchy. I see the knife. I see the Torre scarf in burgundy and blue. The lips drawn back over the teeth of the man who is charging us. He shoves the American grandmother aside, and she hits the ground. The arm holding the knife is raised. I block it. The blade slices my hand. He keeps on running. If there is a coordinated police response, I can’t find it in the pandemonium.
SIENA
TWENTY-ONE
Among the crowd of passengers getting off the morning train in Siena, FBI legat Dennis Rizzio is easy to spot. Wearing a boxy charcoal plaid suit, a light blue tie, and Ray-Bans, he’s a head taller and a hundred pounds heavier than the Europeans in summer clothes. The bulky, scarred-up briefcase is a hint that all he really cares about is the business it contains. And you can bet he’s carried the grim look on his face all the way from Rome.
As soon as he has folded himself into Giovanni’s mailbox car, he demands to know if I am certain of the way to the police station. He has to draw his knees up to his chin and rest the briefcase on top of them since there is no room at his feet.
“Our appointment with the Commissario is at ten,” he reminds me testily.
“Under control.”
“How’s the hand? Lemme see.”
I display the gauze bandage that was wrapped around my palm yesterday by the paramedic.
“You’ve had a tetanus shot, I hope?”
“Yep.”
“How bad is it?”
“Kind of like when you’re cutting an onion, and you look up to watch the game?” I indicate a slice through the base of the thumb.
“Lucky he didn’t cut your finger off.”
“Stupid move on my part, getting into the middle of that.”
“You’re gonna let him attack an American grandmother? So the idiot was what? A guy from Torre?”
“He was wearing a Torre scarf, but he could have bought it on the street.”
The mailbox car stalls as we are climbing the hill from the train station. The stick shift is tall and spindly, and I’ve been having trouble keeping the car in gear.
“Who taught you to drive?” Dennis asks.
“My sainted grandfather,” I reply between gritted teeth, as Poppy’s voice lashes out, You’re gonna kill us! What’s the matter with you?
“I hope you’re going to kick butt with the Commissario,” I say.
“When you saw him, what did he tell you?”
“He gave me his card and promised to be on the case.”
The engine stalls again. I stomp on the brake, jam it into park, and restart the car. Traffic is backed up and everyone is leaning on the horn. In the rearview mirror is a row of sun-blinding windshields. The pain pill I took is wearing off, and I’m dying of the heat in my black FBI suit.
“You’re doing great,” Dennis says dryly. “Just don’t crash into that van behind us.”
It’s a battered “airport van” driven by an unshaven, wild-haired psycho with a sweat rag around his gritty neck. What dummy would get off a plane and into that vehicle? Changing gears, I roll back and kiss his bumper, then we lurch forward. He leans out the window and yells, “Vaffanculo!”
“What does that mean?” I ask Dennis impatiently. “Everyone keeps saying it.”
“Yeah, like all the time in Brooklyn. ‘Fuck you.’ ”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s what it means.”
It is now five minutes before ten and my colleague’s fingers are drumming the briefcase. You couldn’t find the police station if you were looking for it, but it can see you. In an alley leading to the Piazza del Duomo, just wide enough for one small car to pass, a shaft is formed that is open to the sky. The walls are made of three-foot blocks of stone layered with ebony marble, like the gothic Cathedral of Santa Maria that dominates the plaza. Tourists in shorts and cowboy hats walk spellbound through this pocket of light. A few steps farther and they will emerge to a vista of the cathedral that will knock their socks off, but meanwhile the morning sun plays softly over the black-and-white stone, and they never see the surveillance cameras hidden in the corners.
Nor would they notice the nondescript questura, whose worn steps seem to lead to another of those tired postwar European buildings smelling of fresh paint and cooked cereal that have been converted to tiny condominiums at huge prices — which at one time it was. I park alongside a row of cruisers in the shade of a neighboring art museum. Sophisticated older couples with shorn silver hair and Swedish walking shoes are calmly buying tickets. Every day another gallery. Pastries in the afternoon.
Inside the vestibule of the questura, we are stopped by an officer who is embarrassingly deferential to Dennis, shaking hands with a flattering smile. Without a weapons check or even asking for ID, he leads us through an ordinary wooden door into the cop shop. Dennis and I exchange a look at the astonishing lack of security.
Palio is over, but the bullpen is still chaotic. It has the crammed-full industrial look of a carpeting wholesaler who expanded too quickly. Messy partitions and hulking old computers. There is a locked cage for stolen property and a vault for guns; good-looking male inspectors in natty shirts and ties, and polizia who carry 9mm Berettas and wear navy shirts with epaulets and military berets. The universal accessory, I notice, is the rubber stamp. There must be three dozen old-fashioned wood-handled rubber stamps in revolving holders on every desk, testament to a bureaucracy in which the right mark by the right hand still has more power than all the computers in the world.
Sitting in a row on a bench are the Bunyons. Mom, dad, brother, sister, and grandma.
“Who are they?” Dennis asks without moving his lips.
“That’s the family. The Americans in the dustup yesterday.”