Free White Shotgun by April Smith Page A

in the dining room, ready to roll. Someone else will do the cooking, but the key ingredients have to be assembled according to Cecilia’s standards, from individual shopkeepers she’s known for twenty years in the district of the noble contrada of Oca in the heart of Siena.
    Oca district is clearly marked by green and white silk with a crowned white goose flying from every building—as opposed to Oca’s blood enemy, Torre, the Tower, whose blue and burgundy banners, showing an elephant carrying a tower, warn that you are entering enemy territory. Just like gangland L.A., sporting the wrong colors in the wrong district during Palio is either a deliberate challenge or just plain stupid.
    We are dutifully wearing Oca scarves, flowing capelike over the shoulders, as we haul string bags filled with groceries up the forty-five-degree incline of Arte della Lana; it’s barely ten in the morning, and my neck is prickly with perspiration. We turn a corner and the street drops to S. Andrea Gallerani in a heartbeat. Ahead is another rise. If you graphed it, our little shopping trip would look like a killer hills workout on a treadmill.
    And yet Cecilia is stepping doelike over the pavers in high heels and an Armani dress with tiny dots that she will later wear to the hospital, movie star sunglasses, and a buckle-encrusted marigold leather purse as big as a watermelon. I notice that the other women, young and old, all of them in Oca scarves like flocks of green and white hens, are also carrying handbags and wearing dresses—tailored cotton with belts, or splashy bosom-revealing rayon—going about their morning business with self-assured femininity. And here I am, dressed L.A.-style for a day in the sun: hiking shorts, adventure shoes, water bottle, and baseball cap, trudging behind.
    Cecilia is so in charge of her world, you forget that it isn’t her world. Passing a shop with eye-catching patterns of blush peaches and dark plums reminds her of helping her mother at the fish store in El Salvador when she was five years old. Her stories are told in clean, thought-out paragraphs. Reflexively running Cecilia through my FBI profiling machine, I assess her as a high-functioning, fiercely well-organized, extroverted personality. Which means it will not be easy to get past her defenses. When she feels secure, she will tell me her secrets; why she asked me here and what her husband is up to. I must be patient.
    “I had to arrange the fishes on the ice so that they looked like flowers.” She describes the design with a doctor’s hand—long fingers, graceful and strong—gold bracelets jumping. “I was also working in the house. We had no housekeeper—no need for one since we didn’t own things. We had coffee bushes growing everywhere, like weeds, and when I was little, I would pick the beans when they were red and sell them at the market. I would help with the laundry and take care of the pets. I had two dogs; they were my most beloved things in the world.”
    “I couldn’t have pets,” I say. “My grandfather wouldn’t allow it. I used to talk to the worms in the backyard.”
    Cecilia laughs so hard she chokes and almost stumbles. “Playing with worms? That’s very sad.”
    “I was happy when it rained and all my friends came out.”
    “Stop, you are making my makeup run!”
    She dabs her eyes under the sunglasses. It pleases me to amuse her. Not everybody gets my jokes, especially at the Bureau.
    “We had beautiful wild birds,” she goes on. “We kept them in cages. I loved them, too. You know who was my favorite? That yellow one in the cartoon who is always making trouble, what is he called?”
    “Tweety Bird?” I ask incredulously.
    Cecilia laughs again and blushes. “Yes, that’s him.”
    “You had one, a toy?”
    “No, just a tiny room and a lamp. On the walls, I painted that little bird. I would spend hours painting him. It took me away from my homework or when I was overwhelmed and stressed out. My mother