Captain Ferrara said, "You are a prisoner, you have no rights. In Italy, you are guilty until proven innocent."
Chip said, "I don't think you understand what I'm saying."
The captain's face tightened, like he wanted to go over and knock Chip on his ass.
He said, "No, I think you are the one who does not understand, but you will."
He turned and walked out of the room and closed the door.
McCabe said, "Do me a favor, don't say anything else, okay?"
Chip said, "What's your problem?"
"You're being an asshole. Every time you open your mouth the situation gets worse." He'd never seen Chip act like this before. Jesus.
"You want to get out of here?" Chip said. "We've got to tell these idiots who they're dealing with."
"All you're doing is pissing him off," McCabe said, "making things worse. I'm in this thanks to you, and I don't want you talking for me."
Captain Ferrara never came back, and a few minutes later a cop in a uniform came in and cuffed McCabe's hands behind his back and took him to the garage and pushed him in the rear seat of a Fiat. Two heavyset cops squeezed in on both sides, flanking him like he was a hardened criminal, a flight risk.
The cops sitting next to him had breadcrumbs on their jackets and there was a comic-opera quality about them, big men in fancy, over-the-top uniforms with red stripes running down the sides of the pants and white leather sashes worn diagonally across their jackets, and matching white leather holsters. They held their brimmed blue hats in their laps. McCabe thought they looked like cops from some made-up Disney dictatorship.
They pulled out of the garage and turned right and drove down Via del Corso past Victor Emmanuel, the Wedding Cake, also known as the Typewriter, past the Colosseum and the Forum and Campidoglio, the cops talking about Italy playing in the World Cup.
The cop on his left said, "Did you see Grosso score the winning penalty?"
The cop on his right said, "How about that crazy Frenchman?"
"Unbelievable," the cop behind the wheel said. "Zidane's a madman. Ten minutes to go, he headbutts Materazzi. That was the game."
"It was a factor, sure," said the cop to his right.
The cop to his left said, "A factor, it was the difference."
The driver glanced in the rearview mirror and said, "What are you, head of the Zidane fan club?"
"I don't like him," the cop to his right said. "But you have to admit he is one of the all-time greats — up there with Vava and Pele."
"How much have you had to drink?" the cop to his left said.
When they got on the autostrada, McCabe said to the cop on his right, "Where're we going?"
The cop looked at him and grinned like something was funny.
Twenty minutes later McCabe understood why, the walls of a prison looming in the distance, 3:30 in the morning.
The cop on his right said, "Rebibbia. Your new home."
He'd heard of Rebibbia, the prison for hardcore cons, and wondered why they were taking him there. Stealing a taxi didn't seem serious enough. They drove along a fence topped with razor wire, the prison set back on acres of flat open land.
They entered the prison complex and McCabe's carabinieri escorts took him into the processing area, released the cuffs and handed him over to the Polizia Penitenziara, a prison cop signing a form and giving it to one of the carabinieri cops, making the transaction official.
Then he was standing in line with at least twenty other prisoners — some he recognized from the holding cell — waiting to be processed. Each prisoner was photographed and fingerprinted. Then they went through a room where they were given a blanket, a tin cup, a spoon, a bar of soap, a towel.
McCabe heard Chip's voice and saw him at the far end of the line. "I'm an American. My father is a US senator. Capisce? "
The guard looked bored, his expression saying he had no idea what Chip was talking about, but there was no way he could mistake Chip's attitude, his arrogance.
McCabe said, "Hey, Tallenger, with your connections I thought you'd be out by now. Don't they know who you are?"
He spent the night in an eight-by-eight-foot cell, solitary confinement. As he was waking up, he was thinking about
Chip and the taxi and being taken to Rebibbia, wondering, before he opened his eyes, if it was a dream, and then opening them and seeing sunlight coming through the barred window, making a distorted pattern on the floor.
He sat up studying the room in daylight for the first time. The door was made out of steel, painted blue. It had a little square window about three quarters of the way up, so the guards could look in, check on him, which they did on a fairly regular schedule.
There was a metal sink against the wall, and the bunk he was sitting on, the frame painted orange, bolted into the wall. There was a stainless-steel toilet without a seat, squares of newsprint cut for toilet paper. The walls were cracked and scarred with graffiti. Some guy named Ricki professing his love for Anna in black marker.
McCabe got up, went to the sink, turned on the faucet and scooped water in his hands and splashed it on his face. He dried himself with the towel they gave him, gray-white and stained. He wondered how many inmates had used it before him to dry their own parts. He moved to the window and held the bars, looking out at the prison walls and guard towers, and below him the exercise yard, an expanse of concrete surrounded by a high fence topped with razor wire, the yard empty first thing in the morning. It looked like ghetto playgrounds he'd seen in the projects around Detroit.
A guard came to his cell and got him, 3:30 in the afternoon, took him through the cellblock, passing blue steel cell doors just like his, to a barred gate at the end of the hallway. It felt good to get out of the little room, stretch his legs. He'd never been in a confined space for that long without being able to leave and it was getting to him, messing with his head.
Adding to the problem, McCabe was on an academic scholarship, thirty-five grand's worth of tuition, room and board. He'd lose it if he was involved in a disciplinary situation, school rules listing a dozen things that would get a student kicked out: drinking, drugs, fighting, cheating, missing classes, not maintaining an acceptable grade point average and a few more infractions he couldn't remember, but stealing a taxi was definitely not one of them.
The school would bend the rules where Chip was concerned. He wasn't on scholarship and his dad was a US senator who had generated a lot of positive PR for the Rome Center Year Abroad Program.
Mazara watched him walk across the yard and stand with his back to the fence, face tilted up feeling the sun after almost twenty-four hours in a cell, the white box as prisoners referred to it. Mazara studied him, one of the Americans from the holding cell. He was not big, but looked like he was in shape, about his age. He had surprised Mazara, taking the cigarette pack out of his pocket, surprised him and caught him off guard by the boldness of the move, not expecting it. Now Mazara wanted to see how good he was, see if he could back it up.
He dribbled the basketball over to the American, inmates watching him, wondering what he was going to do. Mazara bounced the ball off the concrete at him, the ball thudding into his chest. The American opened his eyes, reached over, picked it up and held it, eyes on him.
"I don't have any cigarettes, if that's what you're looking for."
Mazara said, "Want to play? You and me. The winner walks through the gate a free man."
The American smiled, looking up at him, eyes squinting in the sun.
Mazara said, "They catch you selling drugs?"
"Stealing a taxi," the American said.
" Va bene," Mazara said. "They keep you here eight, ten months, no more than a year."
The American said, "What about you?"
Mazara said, "Is a misunderstanding." He pulled his hair back and wrapped a rubber band around the ponytail.