I get back to the hotel by mid-afternoon and decide I’m done walking past the Duomo every day and never getting inside. I pound on Carson’s door. “If you want to hear what I found out, you’re going to church with me.”
She bitches all the way until we step inside the Duomo.
Now we’re standing in the west end of a nave that can pack in forty thousand people. I look up with my mouth hanging open—like the few dozen tourists around us—thinking about the thirty generations of craftsmen and foremen and engineers and architects who built this place. All that backbreaking work, and it was so worth it. “Tell me you’re not impressed. Just try.”
Forty massive dove-gray columns, eighty feet tall, define the nave. Billboard-sized paintings hang from iron rods between the columns. The ceiling’s almost a hundred fifty feet above us. Four side aisles stretch like freeways toward the stained-glass apsidal windows a football field and a half away.
Carson shoves her hands down her jeans pockets and sighs. “Okay, yeah. I’m impressed.”
“Uh-huh. Come on, let’s walk. This floor’s over three hundred years old, by the way.”
We pick our way across Pellegrino Tibaldi’s red-white-and-black eye-breaker of a marble floor, passing tour groups and the stray rubberneckers. Carson’s not immune; she’s checking out the sights almost as thoroughly as I am.
“What’s this party about?” she asks.
I hand her the crisp white card Gianna gave me about an hour ago. “It says, ‘Associati Ingegneria Lombardia s.p.a. invites you to attend a celebration of summer at AIL’s most successful project to date, Palazzo Italia in Expo 2015.’ I looked them up. AIL built the pavilion, apparently for only a 60% cost overrun.”
She scowls at both sides—it’s all in Italian—then hands it back. “Where’s Rossi in this?”
“Gianna said Belknap got the invites from Rossi. I don’t know how he’s connected to the company. What’ve you been up to?”
“Researching the local ‘Ndrangheta. Pretty standard stuff—cocaine, meth, whores, loansharking, extortion. Those ‘Addio Pizzo’ stickers on windows around here? That’s about the protection racket. They also go for padding public construction contracts and ripping off the health service.”
Something clicks inside my skull. “AIL builds hospitals and subway stations and sports stadiums.”
“Bet they suck at it, too.” We reach a roped-off part of the central aisle, then drift south. “They moved into the small-business loan market the banks left. High-rate loans to entrepreneurs. They end up owning businesses.”
Gianna’s words come back to me: it is very hard to get the loan to start the business. I hope like hell she doesn’t try to get her start-up money from these guys. “Real estate?”
“Yeah. Restaurants, clubs, bars, anything that spins cash. And private security—bet those shooters Monday night were officially security guards.”
“So you think that warehouse from Monday is theirs?”
“With a conex full of sex slaves?” Her face goes grim. “It’s theirs.”
We halt at the south transept. Enormous stained-glass windows surround the huge, colonnaded marble monument in the central alcove at the end. The afternoon sun throws patches of multicolored light against the floor and east wall and sparkles the dust specks in the air. Carson’s mouth drops.
My big sister Dianne and I got bedtime stories about Mom’s Italian adventures the way other kids got fairy tales. Mom was here almost forty years ago. It’s everything she said, and more. I wish I could call her and tell her where I am, share this dream she never got to relive. My heart breaks a little.
Carson feels her way onto a pew, sitting sideways so she can see both the transept and the altar. I settle behind her, not wanting to startle her out of her thoughts.
“It’s beautiful,” she whispers. “Had no idea.”
I just nod. Sometimes I wish I could be an architect again, but seeing this makes me glad I’m not. I’d compare whatever I did to this.
Carson leans her elbows on her knees and sighs. “Hate to talk about this sh… stuff here, but I got the dope on the ‘Ndrangheta locale leadership. Morrone family from Rovito. Salvatore’s the chief, the capo bastone. His brother Lucca runs the business end—he’s the capo società—and Salvatore’s son Angelo is kinda Dad’s PA. Want pictures?”
“Yeah, send them to me.” She’s right—it seems wrong to talk about this in front of a pack of saints. “Come on, let’s walk.”
We circle the transept until we reach a bronze of a man holding a book, standing on a marble plinth. Carson frowns. “What’s this?”
“It’s Saint Bartholomew. He was flayed alive. That’s his skin slung around him. The work dates from 1562. Check out the detail on his muscles.”
“Nasty.” She cocks her head. “Kinda cool, though.”
We follow the ambulatory as it curves around the apse. Carson keeps close to the carved stone wall ringing the choir so she can take in the lush stained glass on the outside wall. “Taking your new girlfriend to the party?”
“She’s not my girlfriend. We had a nice conversation—”
“With condoms?”
“You use that mouth in a church? She’s going with Belknap.”
“They a thing?”
“I don’t think so. It sounded like ‘it’s work and I have to go with the boss.’” At least, that’s how I wanted to hear it. I’d hate to see her hooked up with that slime. “Gianna’s going to point out Rossi to me. I’ll meet her there, see—”
“No way you’re walking into a Mob party alone.”
The heat in her voice stops me. “Why? What’s—”
“I know these people. They’re animals. You gotta finish your job so I can finish mine, remember? You’re not going in a trash compactor on my watch.”
Her face is as serious as I’ve seen it. I step closer so we can argue about this without the tourists (or God) listening in. “What’re they going to do? Rub me out in public? I’m just meeting this Rossi dude, start a conversation, maybe find out—”
“And if he’s an ‘Ndrangheta heavy? Think he’s gonna like some dart asking about his stolen paintings? You’re with a woman, he’ll figure you’re showing off for her. I can help if things turn to… go sideways. You’re not going alone. Understand?”
Once I get past her talking to me like I’m a child, I can see she has a point. But… “Why would Hoskins take his assistant to a party?”
That stops her. “I’ll think of something.”
“You do that. Look, I want to spend more time here, you don’t have to stay. Send me what you found, I’ll look it over later.” I stroll down the ambulatory.
“Matt?”
Did she just call me “Matt”? For the first time? I turn to see her drifting toward me.
Her mouth’s all twisted up. “Mind if I stick around? I kinda like it here.”
Well, I’ll be damned.
We take another ninety minutes doing the whole circuit inside, including the crypt and the Roman-era ruins under the cathedral. Then we go up to the forest of spires, stone cherubs, demons and saints on the roof.
“Why do this?” Carson asks. “Nobody can see it.”
“They figured God can.”
“No wonder it took six hundred years.”
We perch on the ridge at the roof’s west end and get an incredible panorama of Milan and the distant mountains fading behind the smog. At almost two hundred feet up, we catch the breeze that gets lost down on the streets. The late afternoon sun blushes the cathedral’s pale-pink Candoglia marble cladding.
“Know why Hoskins takes me to the party?” Carson asks out of the blue. She’s been in intense listening mode since the apse.
After playing tour guide for over two hours, I’m talked out. “Why?”
She gazes out at the silver shard of the Pirelli Building. “I’m his girlfriend, too.”