White Shotgun by April Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

tenth-century church, brutally exposed as if it had been cut in half, leaving nothing but crumbling buttresses and an empty arch.
    We drive between rows of dark green cylindrical cypress trees, tips bending in the wind so they uncannily resemble a procession of monks with bowed heads. We turn into a gravel driveway that opens into an empty square big enough to hold a farmers’ market. The engine stops. In the quiet, all you hear is birdsong. The abbey looms around us, rows of iron torches reaching out of sixty-foot pale stone walls that have been standing for over eight hundred years. The scents are pungent—oil of lavender, meat roasting over cedar chips. To the left is the entrance to the restored chapel, where the hand of the dead saint lies.
    “I’ll show you to your room and then I have to go.” Giovanni punches the cell phone yet again. “My dad just texted. He says to make yourself comfortable.”
    I look around. Comfortable, where? The fortified palace, first an austere monastery, then a seat of power for rulers of the church, is no less commanding in its present role as a private residence. The open space is bounded by potted palms and urns filled with geraniums, carefully pruned, not a paper cup to mar the raked gravel yard. The clean perspective of shaded walkways and sun-washed tufa-stone walls creates a solemnity even deeper than the monks’ devotion.
    Who are these people who reside like old-fashioned royalty in a compound the size of a five-star resort? God may have lived here once, but the premises have since been vacated; this is about the ascending fortune of a single man. I feel more disoriented than ever, unable to imagine any connection to this foreign way of life, looking for a foothold to dig into for my work as an agent. The insistent beep of Giovanni’s technology does nothing to dispel the eerie sense that when I entered the shadowed hush of this ancient courtyard, the curtain parted to a strange reality.
• • •
    I lie down briefly and wake up an hour later. The room floats in quietude. The bedspread is sage-green damask. At the foot of the bed is a folded cashmere throw. The cast-iron headboard is made to look like the tendrils of a sweet-pea vine. A strip of wallpaper with similar coils is set along the midline of eggshell plaster walls. There is one small arched window—no screen, no glass, just a pair of shutters over a grate that frames a grove of olive trees. I stick my face into the fresh air and listen to the regular splash of someone doing laps in a pool that is hidden from my sight. I am a pool rat. In Los Angeles I swim with a Masters team, a mile and a half every day. Nothing could make me happier than to work out right now. After the bus trip from Rome, my neck feels like a tangle of wire. I unpack eagerly, almost frantic from the nearby call of water.
    My bedroom is on the second story of the monks’ quarters. I walk along an exterior corridor laid with terra-cotta tile where archways look down on the courtyard. Apricot-colored draperies are gathered in the arches, the sun hitting them like golden chimes. Centuries of leather sandals and whisperings of prayer have softened the air and smoothed the stone.
    I head down a marble staircase leading to the garden, carrying nothing but a towel and goggles, an old rayon dress thrown over my Speedo. Almost naked, the still hot air is now my friend. I come to a stand of pines. The scent of pitch is intoxicating, heavy and tinder-dry. Several cars are parked in the shade, engines hot and ticking. I wonder if these are guests, come to use the pool, but then sharp male voices cut through the torpor.
    Peering over a gate, I see Nicoli Nicosa, wearing bathing trunks, holding back an angry group of hard-looking men—field-workers, judging from the size of their forearms and hands. They wear track-suits, even in this heat. Nicosa has just climbed out of the pool, evidently surprised by their arrival. He is dark-chested, his longish hair