“Where did this come from?”
“The investigators got it off a cell phone belonging to one of the three men who were detained at the Glasgow airport, off an Interpol no-fly alert originating from the Met. Three Italian nationals, trying to get to Rome through Cairo.”
“I’m aware of them. The FBI legat was here yesterday. He told me they had three suspects in custody.”
“Did he say anything about the bad guys being in possession of a picture of you?”
“No. Maybe he didn’t know,” I say. The failure of different agencies to talk to each other is a given these days.
“Oh, honey. He knew.”
To prove it, Sterling highlights the list of forwards on the screen. The Glasgow police had sent the photo to Inspector Reilly at the Metropolitan Police, who forwarded it to Dennis Rizzio. Sterling peers disconsolately over the bar of light rimming the laptop.
“That honcho in Rome is holdin’ out on you. He’s playin’ you for something.”
I do not reply.
“Why do you suppose that is?”
“It’s SOP at the Bureau,” I say bitterly. “Keep the field agent in the dark. Withhold information, so the Bureau maintains total control over everybody’s actions.”
I can barely speak. Why didn’t Rizzio tell me about the photo? Or, earlier, that Cecilia was paying bribes?
“Meanwhile,” Sterling says, “here’s the puke that shot up those kids.”
Mug shots appear on the screen. Three awfully young and stupid-looking men in their twenties. The names mean nothing, but I do recognize a face: the scowling eyes, long face, heavy and ruler-straight eyebrows. He looks remarkably like the drawing made by the sketch artist in Scotland Yard. Amazing how they can do that.
“That’s one of them,” I say. “The one I saw in the Ford.”
Sterling leans back and pushes up his baseball cap.
“We’re fucked.”
“How so?”
“What you just did.” He nods toward the screen. “Identified the bad guy.”
“Why’s that?”
“Security contractors have their own networks; you have yours, the criminal clans have theirs. According to my Scots friend, this picture went out on multiple servers that feed the terrorist networks. That means your face is on all the mafia websites, which also reach into Bulgaria, Turkey — basically wherever they do business, which is all of eastern Europe and North Africa, for a start. My contact says the Met thinks the attack in London was a reprisal shooting. The target was someone in the restaurant.”
“Someone at the birthday party?”
“That’s their theory. But the point is, the bad guys have your picture. You are not only a witness who can ID them, but also I’m sure that by now they know you’re Bureau. They want you as a bargaining chip, or to take you out of the game. Which could explain the knife attack in the Campo.”
He closes the laptop, leaving us in the ubiquitous red glow of the Walkabout Pub. We go out to the bar just as the TV news bulletin announcing the disappearance of Cecilia Nicosa comes up again.
“They’ve replayed that thing five times in the past half hour,” I sigh. “Worse than a mattress commercial.”
Sterling stares at Cecilia’s picture on the flat-screen. “You look a helluva lot like her.”
Long curly hair. Flat high cheekbones. Almond eyes. She has darker skin and definitely a different style — in the TV photo she’s on a yacht, smiling and windblown, large black sunglasses on top of her head, wearing a multistrand gold choker woven with jewels, like Queen Nefertiti cruising the Nile.
“There’s a resemblance,” I admit.
“A strong resemblance.”
“If you didn’t know us.”
“I’m sorry to say this.”
I know where he’s going. It’s the look in his eyes. A lump rises in my throat.
“Say it.”
“The mafia sees the cell phone picture. This lady could identify the shooter; she’s starin’ straight at him. So they put an APB out on their network. Every punk in Italy goes looking. And some lower-level dope says, Hey, I found her, smack-dab in the middle of Siena. They watch for a while. Yep, it sure looks like the lady in the photo. The bad guys, they’re not from around here; they’re from the south; they don’t know who Cecilia Nicosa is. They think they’ve got the witness in the photo, so they nab her in the church. But they took the wrong girl.”
“I was wearing Cecilia’s clothes that day,” I say softly. “She was always trying to get me to dress better.” I wait. “What will happen when they figure out she isn’t me?”
There is no need for him to answer.
Then comes the long, slow sigh of defeat. “Most of the time,” I say, “the ‘disappeared’ are never found.”
“Bad police work.”
“No, it’s because the bodies are dissolved in lye.”
Sterling’s eyes flare briefly. “Lye?”
I nod. “Nothing left to find.”
He slides his fingers over mine for just an instant. It’s the best he can do.
TWENTY-THREE
They blindfolded Cecilia and pushed her up a staircase. Thin metal stairs, leading up from the basement. She was between the two enormous men, a gun jammed into her ribs. They were moving fast, almost carrying her between them. Briefly outside, it smelled like night and hot winds. Hurrying up another staircase. Shouts, conversations, radios, the smells of coffee and spilled beer. As they turned abruptly she was able to put out one hand and feel a rough stucco corner — then she heard locks turning, murmuring voices, and she was pulled inside an apartment with a TV turned up, the scents of oilcloth and something in the oven — phyllo dough? — and shoved inside a room. The door was locked and immediately there was pounding on the other side by shrieking, taunting children.
She took off the rag that covered her eyes. The first thing she saw was a piece of foam on the floor, two feet by six feet. Grimy balled-up sheets. Who knew who had been sleeping there? A window. She lifted the blind and saw another window of another apartment less than five feet away. The window was the sliding type, secured with a lock. She noticed she was standing on a filthy remnant of gold carpet. It curled up at the edges, revealing a concrete floor. There was a plastic basket filled with clean folded laundry, as if someone had forgotten about it. Copies of the magazine Oggi, months old.
She sat on the foam pad and took off her heels. She was still wearing the shiny green suit she’d had on at the church in Piazza Provenzano where the Palio banner had been blessed. It was now so tight and uncomfortable she wanted to rip it to shreds. She peeked at the laundry. Kids’ clothes. Male sweats.
She threw off the sheets, turned the foam pad over, and lay down. The vertebrae in her neck cracked, and she realized that her back was killing her. With the window closed, the room was stifling, like the room in El Salvador, in the outbuilding near the garden, where she sometimes hid to rest from the exhaustion of working while she was pregnant. There was no sleep. Roosters crowed and dogs barked all day long. Outside, her uncles and brothers lopped corn off the stalks with machetes. It was like an oven in that room. She felt the baby kick. She could only feel sorry for it, to be born to such a failure of a mother. Cecilia couldn’t move in that room because of the heat of the afternoon and the weight of sadness. It was during the time her own mother had exiled her to work in the garden and grind the corn for tortillas, giving her study room with its unfinished mural of Tweety Bird to a younger brother, as punishment.