I explain the situation, and he is there in two and a half hours.
“Where’s your pack?” I say when he comes up the driveway.
“In the rental car.”
“Planning to stay?”
“Thought I might.”
“Good, because I have everything we need.”
“What would that be?” he asks, with a light kiss on the lips.
“Fresh sea bass and a grill?”
I don’t ask where he’s been or where he is headed. From his restlessness it is a given that he is on a job. We are halfway through a pitcher of margaritas, but it is still almost like a first date. The needle is hovering at “Maybe.” We could push through the charged, heavy air that still seems to separate us, or we could let it go. I’ve had time to obsess over whether I love him, and decided that I do. But you can love a lot of people and still let them go.
There is a large envelope on the patio table. I put a rock on top to keep it from lifting off in the sea breeze. Sterling notices that the stamps are from El Salvador.
“What’s all this?”
“A letter from Cecilia. They moved down there, the whole family.”
“They left Siena?”
“It wasn’t safe.”
“No kidding.”
“The abbey is going to become one of those historic five-star hotels.”
“I wouldn’t know about those.”
“Me either, but that’s what Cecilia said. She was going to just take Giovanni, but Nicoli decided to go. And she decided that she wanted him to come.”
He perches on the wooden arm of the Adirondack chair, where I am minding my own business, looking at the view.
“You can read it,” I say. “Go ahead.”
Sterling draws out the letter and a smaller envelope that is sealed.
“When were you planning to open this?”
“When I’m ready.”
He fingers the envelope. “Any clue as to what’s inside?”
“It’s a picture that Cecilia wants me to have.”
“What’s the problem?”
“When I open it, I know what I’ll see. My father.”
He downs the margarita and pours another.
“No time like the present,” he says.
“Except the past.”
He gives me a reproving look. I grimace and open the envelope. Inside is a color print that has turned yellow and magenta with age. It shows a squarely built, dark-skinned young man in his twenties standing on a rise over a newly plowed field. In the background is jungle. His black hair is slicked back and he holds a straw hat. He is looking out of frame with an expression of calm anticipation, as if everything — the harvest, the rest of his life — is before him.
Sterling puts his arm around me, and looks over my shoulder at the photograph of my father.
“First time you’ve ever seen him, huh?”
“I was too young to remember.”
I never imagined him that youthful. His face is untroubled and confident. For a long time we don’t say anything.
“I see the resemblance,” Sterling says. “You never found out what happened to him, did you?”
“I know that he was murdered, and they never found the body. Like the ‘disappeared.’ ”
I lower the photo and notice that Sterling has been stroking my neck.
“Are you feeling me?”
“Yes, babe. I’m very glad you’re here.”
I put my hand over his hand.
“You know, all the time we were in Italy, whenever you’d touch me, I couldn’t feel it,” he says. “I mean, literally, I was numb.”
I look into his face, surprised. “I guess you were still getting used to buildings that didn’t have bomb craters in them.”
He pulls back. “Should we take a walk on the beach?”
It is close to sundown and the air is chilly. We throw sweatshirts over our bathing suits. You have to go down a long flight of redwood steps, and then there is a tiny cove the other houses share, with big charcoal gray carved-out volcanic cliffs on either side; if you go around them you would be on a wide state beach. A steady gust is coming off the ocean and everything seems to be in motion — seagulls, waves, pelicans, sailboats way out. We walk along the wet sand, mirrored with flocks of long-legged pipers needling for crabs.
“What happened was, they changed the rules of engagement,” Sterling says.
“This was after London?”
“When I left you back in London, yeah. The mission was in Pakistan. We paid the right people and crossed the border to Afghanistan. The target was a senior Hamas commander who was supplying guns to the militants. He was responsible for a lot of deaths, not only in Gaza. As you know, it’s hard to get close to these guys, so they have a new policy — like with all these predator drones now, they’re willing to accept a certain number of civilian casualties. I’m a sniper. It ain’t how I was trained. For me, you sit in a hole for three days and surgically remove the bad guy. I was very vocal about the changes, but they overrode me. The client was just going to go ahead with it, knowing there could be other deaths, including family members. It became a numbers game. Like seven people is acceptable, but not eight.
“The way we pulled it off, we put a bomb in his cell phone. We switched out his phone and planted a small explosive charge in one exactly like it — had the same wear and feel as the old one. We were in a hide site in the desert. He showed up on the road driving his Land Rover. We called, he answered the phone. Our interpreter confirmed his identity: ‘Is this Colonel So-and-So?’ He said yes. We tapped in a code on the keypad, and it sent a signal and blew his head off. Surgical strike and no collateral damage. Mission accomplished. I should have felt good, right? Except the Hamas commander was also a dad, and he got his head blown off in front of his wife and kids, who were also in the car.”
I suck in brackish air. “Doesn’t quite sit right, does it?”
“I never used to have a problem. This time I didn’t feel justified. I just felt dirty.”
“Quit.”
“And do what?”
“Go back to horses?”
We have been walking in surf up to our ankles. The damp salt wind keeps pushing, wrapping itself around our legs and insistently through our hair, as if nuzzling us to pay attention. The light is holding strong. Against the tide we walk into the water, finding ourselves waist-deep in a forest of rust-colored kelp, the soup of life. No longer resisting loneliness, I fold into his arms. My fingers dig into his flesh with desperation. He never flinches. He never once lets go. Halfway hidden, he pulls off my bikini bottom, and I wrap my legs around his hips, and the swells lift us together.
In Siena, Italy, a miracle occurs. The 1476 bronze sculpture of Risen Christ by Lorenzo Vecchietta, a Renaissance masterpiece that disappeared from the Santa Maria della Scala orphanage chapel four years earlier, is anonymously returned to the high altar. Experts believe it was stolen on behalf of a wealthy collector who kept it in a vault in his private museum, because it reappeared in perfect condition — the face of suffering, the right hand reaching out in forgiveness — as luminous and powerful as ever. No explanation was given for this apparent change of heart.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I must first acknowledge the work of others that has informed this journey. Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah, a first-person account of organized crime in Naples for which he is still at this time forced to live in hiding, was inspirational, along with McMafia by Misha Glenny. To understand the meaning of the Palio, La Terra in Piazza by Alan Dundes and Alessandro Falassi was an essential text, and Palio, The Race of the Soul by Mauro Civai and Enrico Toti was an insightful tribute.
White Shotgun would not have come into being without the generous assistance of many international law enforcement professionals. In Los Angeles: FBI Supervisory Special Agent Pam Graham and Special Agent George Carr, Principal Firearms Instructor for Los Angeles, as well as Assistant Director in Charge Steve Martinez and Supervisory Special Agent Mary B. Prang — with thanks for the privilege of attending the FBI Citizens Academy. In Washington, D.C.: Rex Tomb, Unit Chief, retired, and FBI Public Affairs Office and Public Affairs Specialist Philip Edney. In Rome: FBI Legat Leo Taddeo. In Siena: Commissario Dottore Andrea Arcamone and Barbara Poazzolti of the provincial police, who were extraordinarily welcoming and patient.