I pour some cold wine. The pills are kicking in, and I’m feeling kindly toward my fellow man.
“Why are you giving your dad a hard time?”
“He’s giving me a hard time,” answers Giovanni.
“What about?”
Giovanni’s eyes rise toward his father. “Ask him.”
“He’s up all night on the computer,” Nicosa says. “And now he decides he’s not going back to school. All he wants is to play video games all day. He’s depressed, which is understandable—”
“He thinks I should be doing homework!” Giovanni cries incredulously.
“You’ll fall behind,” warns Nicosa.
“My father thinks everything is a race. Be first or die.”
I pour more wine. “I might have been followed here.”
Nicosa’s eyes widen. “When?”
“Just now.”
“Followed from where? By who?”
“From the police station, by a thug in a white van.”
I straddle a stool and toss back a few olives.
Nicosa frowns. “What does this mean, that you were followed?”
“Beats the hell out of me.”
“Did you call the police?”
“I told you. I was just at the police station. The Commissario refused to see us. He instructed the inspector to lie and say he was out of town. Maybe he’s the one who sent the guy in the van.”
“Are you drunk?”
“I’m taking pain pills. Knife wounds tend to sting.”
Nicosa puts down his glass. “I think it is best if you go back to the United States.”
“You’ve said that.”
“You make everything worse.”
“I’m trying my best to help. We can help each other, Nicoli, but we can’t be in denial about Cecilia.”
Giovanni looks up. “What are you saying about Mama?”
“Nothing,” says his father.
“Doesn’t he know?”
“Know what?” Giovanni asks.
“Your mother is missing,” Nicosa says at last.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was Palio. You were sick—”
“Where is she?”
“We’re not sure what happened,” I say. “But she disappeared two days ago, during the blessing of the Palio. Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”
“No!” says Giovanni angrily. “Papa? What is going on?”
I want to confront my nephew. Right now. I want to thrust the bag of cocaine in his face and ask him what’s going on, but he is still too weak.
“Where’s Mama?” he cries.
“See what you have done?” Nicosa demands.
“I’m sorry. I promise we will find your mom.”
I take my wine and leave the kitchen. My eyes are drifting closed. By the time I’ve climbed the endless marble steps to my room, it seems to have become so late in the day that all the reptiles have come out, and the balcony is alive with snakes of sunlight and shadow, whipping across the tile and up the walls, and the only way to escape them is to quickly get inside and climb on board the bed, which is rocking like a raft in the ocean.
I wake up in the middle of the night with the heart-stopping knowledge that there is a man in my room. The shutters are open and cool air is pouring in, along with monochrome brightness that shows the shape of someone near the door. Seconds go by. I don’t move. I still don’t move. Can he see that my eyes are open? Sweat builds under my back. He has the advantage.
A silent contest of wills. He is lifeless. I am frozen. My eyes adjust to the half dark. No weapons. Attack first. Bad hand. Let him come to you. Grab his head, break his nose across your knee. I smell him before he gets close. Metal. Dirt. Heavy sweat. The sense of coarse fabric and leather. He steps from the shadows and the stench becomes awful. Excrement, earth, and decomposing bones. In the anti-light his face is stubbled and dark, his eyes colorless. The rucksack drops to the floor. It’s what we call in the Bureau a WTF moment.
“Sterling? Is that you?”
He sits heavily on the bed.
A hoarse whisper. “Hello, cupcake.”
TWENTY-TWO
Sterling unties the bandanna around his head.
“Don’t turn on the light.”
My heart skips. I don’t need light to see that the gorgeous blond hair has been shaved off, and the bare scalp is impacted with dirt. He unfastens the field jacket with trembling fingers. Dried flakes of mud that have been carried who knows how many miles, across how many time zones, scatter over the linen sheets. The smell of recent death is undeniable.
He unfolds a rain poncho, meticulously spreads it on the floor, then empties the contents of the rucksack.
“What are you doing?”
“Better wash this stuff out,” he says slowly, as if in a dream, taking off his shirt and Under Armour.
“I’ll take care of it.”
Heeding the silent message, Don’t touch me, I slip off the bed and retrieve a robe from the bathroom. He continues to face away, as if he doesn’t want me to see his body. He used to eat breakfast in the nude, not give it a thought. Has he been wounded, a ladder of sutures up his chest?
Gently I slip the robe over his shoulders. I bend down, draw up the sides of the poncho and shoulder it, maybe too fast, because suddenly he is suspicious.
“Where’re you going with that?”
“I’m going to the laundry room to wash your stuff,” I reply patiently. “It’s in the family quarters, in the main building. Are you hungry?”
“Yes, ma’am, I am hungry.”
“I’ll bring you something. There’s soap and shampoo in the shower. Is it okay if I leave?”
“Go on.”
“You’ll be okay?”
“I just said so, didn’t I?”
In the night, cold wind rakes through my hair. I carry Sterling’s combat clothes in the poncho like contraband. I would rather burn them, but they are crucial to him, to his other self. As I cross the torchlit courtyard, goose bumps rise at the thought of the silent monks who would have been at prayers in a few hours, shuffling through the dark to kneel on the unforgiving floorboards. The workings of the human mind haven’t changed over the centuries: in the perilous hours just before dawn, everything our rational minds have been telling us flies up and away to the realm of the gargoyles.
Shoving rancid woolen socks and bloodstained camos into the washer, and later, assembling a he-man sandwich out of a kilo’s worth of salami, mortadella, mozzarella, and roasted peppers on an entire loaf of bread, I try to draw the shredded realities of the present together. As relieved as I am to see him whole, I know something has happened to Sterling. I have no idea how deep it goes, or how he found me, why he came back, or how long he will stay. It could be overnight. He could have deserted and be on the run, or about to be reassigned. Putting all these unidentified conditions alongside my sister’s disappearance makes my knees go weak. I sit down on a kitchen chair, immobilized.
I suppose it is something like panic. It makes no sense to start evaluating a relationship at four in the morning, when the man has shown up out of nowhere, hostile and disoriented and not himself, but that’s where my stubborn mind keeps going. True, I had become impatient with his comings and goings, but there was something comforting, even pleasurable, in the delayed satisfaction of his return. Until tonight, his reappearances had been smooth and hearty — he had been as happy as I was to recharge with some robust sex, bittersweet chocolate cake for breakfast, the afternoon in a hotel bed, sleeping, reading newspapers, watching movies, staring idly into each other’s eyes. From the glimpse of the bones poking through his back, it looks as if he has dropped ten pounds, which is a lot when you weigh one-fifty. From the deadness in his voice, it sounds as if he’s not feeling the deprivation in his body — or very much at all.