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The door to the police station in the town square was locked. Giusy jabbed at the bell with one of her broken fingernails and hollered into a speaker, “Giusy here. Ciao. Ciao.”
She looked over her shoulder at me. “They know we’re coming.”
I wasn’t sure who I expected to answer the door, our karaoke buddy the chief of police maybe. It certainly wasn’t a striking young woman a few inches taller than me. A very young woman. She couldn’t have been older than twenty and yet the crisp navy blue and red-trimmed uniform of an officer fit her well. She was formidable. The late-afternoon sun gleamed off the gold eagle insignia on her cap. She greeted Giusy with a tight nod as if she was indeed expecting us. The police station appeared empty, and the woman officer led us past the front desk and into a small but neat office. She gestured to the chairs and then shut the door behind her.
“You were robbed?” Her English was heavily accented.
“I was. Someone broke into my hotel room.”
“At the Palazzo Luna?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see them?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I think it was a man who did it. I saw a guy wearing a black or navy blue jacket with a hood pulled over his head running down the stairs when I was going to my room and that’s when I noticed it had been broken into.”
“Did you see their face?”
I rubbed my shoulder where he had slammed me into the wall.
“I didn’t.”
“How tall?”
“Definitely shorter than me.”
The officer addressed Giusy next. “Who is staying in the hotel right now?”
“Just Sara and an old German couple.”
“I have seen them around town, these Germans. They did not do it.” The officer opened a desk drawer and brought out a form. “What did they take? The thief.”
“Just my passport.”
“How do you spell your name? Giusy said you were called Sara?”
“It’s short for Serafina. My name is Serafina on my passport. Serafina Marsala,” I said.
“My name is Serafina too,” she replied quietly. “But everyone calls me Fina.” The officer sighed and looked up at me. “There are some things that are better left forgotten. There are wounds that stopped bleeding long ago. Now they are bleeding again.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand.” But part of me did. I thought back to the terrible police report that Giusy showed me. How she got it from a friend who worked for the police. Fina had to be that friend. I suddenly realized that I was at the police station for reasons other than my missing passport.
“You’re not safe here. And now that you’re here, now that the wounds of Serafina Forte’s murder have been reopened, none of us are safe. Your stolen passport is only the beginning.”
TWELVE
SERAFINA
1921
The first time all of us women really talked about the work we were doing was an accident.
Actually, it was a funeral.
Stefano Parlate, the town’s oldest citizen, passed away the day after the Easter feasts. No one knew how old he was. Some said a hundred, some said a hundred and ten. His first wife, the only one who might have been able to verify such a thing, was long gone and he was on his third when he keeled over in the middle of the piazza while playing dominoes and smoking cigars with Brunu Favata. When Stefano’s heart expired, his cigar was still lit and his left hand was still tucked into the top of his pants, scratching his testicles. Everyone at the funeral commented that it was exactly how he would have wanted to go.
By then most of the men left in town were elderly, like Stefano, the ones older than fifty and useless to the American factories and mines. Or they were children, younger than thirteen and not yet men at all. Only a handful of working-aged men remained, mostly those tied to organized crime. They had plenty of money coming in from protection rackets and blackmail despite the poverty in the rest of the country and no reason to leave unless they were summoned to Palermo for their work.
