April Smith - White Shotgun

His tone is serious and I think, Good. A new case .

“I understand you came into an inheritance in Italy,” he says.

“Yes, but it wasn’t much.”

“Whatever it was, you still have to declare it to the Bureau. Any undisclosed income has to be reported. Here are the forms,” he says, and damn if they’re not right there, waiting on his desk.

“How’s it going?” asks Mike Donnato when I join him at the coffee machine.

“Another day at the office,” I say, dropping the forms into the wastebasket.

“Want some?” He holds up a blackened glass pot.

“No, thanks. I’ve been ruined by coffee in Italy. Especially the Nicosa brand. They really invented a tasty bean.”

“They never invented any bean.”

“What are you talking about? The Nicosa bean that broke the case? The DNA specific to their coffee? Sofri, rest in peace, cracked the coffee genome and created a new plant.”

“He’s not the one who cracked it.”

“Yes, he was.”

“No, he wasn’t. I came across that particular factoid researching the case. The Brazilians are the ones who decoded the coffee genome.”

“Then how did Nicosa get ahold of it?”

“Sofri sold it to your brother-in-law for a share in half the company.”

“How did Sofri get it?”

“How do you think?”

It takes me half a second. “Sofri stole it from the Brazilians.”

Donnato gave me that world-weary look that says, Welcome back .

• • •

If you move the chairs into the far corner of the deck, you get a slice of the Pacific Ocean through the roofs and telephone poles sloping down to a private beach just north of Santa Barbara, where I’m house-sitting for an old college friend. Her dad had the foresight to be a professor at UCSB back in the seventies, and to buy this modest stucco family home, which now would sell for a gazillion dollars. It’s worth the commute to work, while I’m still looking for that dream apartment.

Sterling promised to call when he came back from Europe, but he never did. Instead, he just shows up.

“I’m at the L.A. airport,” he says in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. “Where are you?”

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.”