April Smith - White Shotgun

Yet even across the room I feel it when Sterling’s body stiffens. He jumps up, grabs the gun bag, and unzips a compartment that holds a Walther PPK/S 9mm and a cleaning kit. Sitting cross-legged on the rug in front of the TV, he fieldstrips the gun, removing the magazine and the front of the trigger guard.

Sofri and Nicosa watch, fascinated.

“What does a private security company do?” Sofri wonders.

“Whatever the customer wants. Bodyguard. Protect assets. Fight a war.”

“Have you ever been hired on a kidnapping?”

Sterling works a soft brass brush over the residue on the outside of the barrel. “All the time.”

“How do they usually end?”

“It all depends on patience, sir. Patience and negotiation. Mind if I have one of those?”

Sterling reaches for a bowl of chocolates.

“Sure, of course,” says Nicosa, handing it over. “Can I get you something else? You didn’t care for my food?”

“It looked great, but I’m not much hungry these days.”

“He just came back from a mission,” I explain. “Still adjusting to the concept of lunch.”

“Really?” says Sofri, leaning forward, elbows on knees. “Can you tell us what the mission was?”

“All I can say is, I quit.”

This is news to me. Anything he says would be news.

“Was it difficult?” Sofri asks.

Sterling doesn’t answer. He’s reassembling the Walther, pulling the slide back onto the barrel and checking the alignment.

Sofri and Nicosa watch every move.

“On this mission,” Sofri continues, “was it too much fighting, people getting killed?”

“Is that why I quit, you mean?”

Sofri nods. “If I may ask.”

Sterling finishes off with gun oil and a cloth. “We quit because they wouldn’t give us holiday pay.”

“Holiday pay?”

“That’s right. Promised, wouldn’t deliver, so we walked.”

Nicosa laughs. “It’s the same in every business!”

But I know that’s not all. That’s not why he showed up in my bedroom in the middle of the night, looking like a refugee, looking like something happened that was powerful enough to permanently take away his appetite.

The phone rings.

Everyone scurries into position. Sofri stumbles over a wire. We put on headphones and move to the desk, where four chairs are waiting. Sterling checks the tape recorder and gives the nod. Nicosa hits the phone.

“Prègo.”

The conversation takes place in Italian, with Sofri softly speaking English into our ears.

“Who are you?”

“We have your wife.”

“I want to hear her voice,” says Nicosa.

“Not possible.”

“Why not? If she’s alive, put her on the phone.”

“We want the money.”

“I have the money. But first I hear her speak.”

“We want two million euros.”

“I have it, believe me.”

I write him a note. He hesitates, but I urge him on.

“Tell me where to meet,” he reads.

They hang up. Nicosa rips off the headphones and kicks away from the desk.

“Could you get a trace?” I ask Sterling.

“Disposable cell phone.”

“Don’t worry,” I tell Nicosa. “You did great.”

“This is not going to work,” he says angrily. “You, telling me what to say — they know something is wrong. It doesn’t sound right.”

Sofri intercedes. “You see, first you must talk to the right person. In Italy, the boss never speaks for himself. He is always one or two steps behind the one who is speaking”—which is exactly what Dennis Rizzio told me.

I nod. “I’m sure that with his connections, Nicoli could speak to whomever he pleases. Do you want to make a call?”

Nicosa shakes his head. “You must wait for the courtesy of their call.”

We agree that next time Nicosa will ask for the boss, as well as insist that he hear Cecilia’s voice. He jerks the refrigerator open and defiantly pours a long shot of vodka.

Night passes in fits and starts. Some hours go quickly; sometimes the clock doesn’t move. The TV stays on until Nicosa falls asleep on the couch with his mouth open, and then Sofri clicks it off and settles in one of the corn chip chairs, tipping it up like a recliner. The lights are low. Sounds are not lost way up here; crickets and the rustling of treetops blow in with the cold air. Sitting on the floor in an arc of moonlight, Sterling is fieldstripping and cleaning the Walther for the third or fourth time.

I settle beside him. “You’re not eating, and you’re not sleeping.”

He doesn’t answer.

“That’s a very clean weapon. Cleanest I’ve ever seen.”

He raises a warning finger. “Don’t nag.”

I watch him cleaning the gun. Meticulous. Obsessive.

“I’ve been there. That’s all.”

I went through it after the shooting incident — uncontrollable thoughts and some really bad insomnia. Like a vicious case of poison oak, it won’t go away, and everything you do to calm it only makes it worse. Especially touching it.

Sterling’s face is tight with concentration as his fingers rub the soft cloth back and forth. It seems as though he isn’t going to answer, but then—

“Nobody knows what I see through those sights.”

I put my arm around his shoulders. Massage the rigid muscles of his neck.

“It was a situation that gave us no way out,” he says.

“I understand.”

“No point in discussing it.”

“Okay.” I look over at the windows of black sky. “It’s just that I miss you, baby. Sometimes it doesn’t even seem like we’re a couple anymore. I feel like you keep shutting me down. On the other hand, you came back from the mission to be with me. I guess. I’m confused. Why did you come back?”

“Chris said you were in trouble.”

“Is that all?”

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t care.”

His tone is flat.

“You’ll neither confirm nor deny?” I say, playfully.

“Pitiful,” he says of his own malfunctioning. “I know.”

“No,” I say. “It’s just hard right now, for both of us.”

“I hear you.”

“Be in touch,” I say.

He nods. I get up and lie on the other chair, adjusting it so my feet are in the air, like Sofri’s, as if we are on an airplane flying over a blacked-out continent. Sterling continues to clean his gun. My mind drifts toward sleep, lulled by the sound of Nicosa’s rhythmic breathing. A million images rush my mind at warp speed, and then I’m floating in a memory of being with Cecilia.

It was when I first arrived, and she had wished in some way to reveal herself to me, craving understanding beyond the wealthy circumstances of her life; she wanted me to know she was not happy in the austere halls of the abbey. So we went to the place in Siena that she said most moves her heart — and perhaps her husband’s, too — a medieval hospital and orphanage called Santa Maria della Scala. In Los Angeles you take a person to Dodger Stadium; here you wind up staring at a 1440 fresco called The Care and Healing of the Sick .

“Contained in this picture are the reasons I wanted to become a doctor,” she said. “But I am not that kind of doctor.”

“Why not?”

“I became a doctor to serve,” she said. “Like them.”

“But you are. You’re helping people.”

“Not the way I want to be.”

She held a yellow patent leather bag to the bosom of her black knit dress, clutching tightly, gazing with hunger at the painting that showed the huge vaulted room in which we were standing as it had been in the fifteenth century, when sick pilgrims and abandoned children were received by hospital friars, who had renounced the world and devoted themselves to service.

“Those were wealthy people, like us,” Cecilia said, pointing to an attendant in a hospital tunic, washing the feet of a terrified young man with a grievous wound to the thigh. “But they became oblates, those who give everything they own to the hospital, including their labor, for life.”