Chapter 20: Nobody Touches Her

The pistol shook in Irene's small hands.

She held it out at arm's length, the way she had once carried a tray of champagne.

She pointed it at my chest.

"You were supposed to stay dead," she said.

Every guard in the cathedral drew at once.

The sound of two dozen safeties coming off ran down the nave.

I didn't move.

I had lain on a steel table while the world went dark.

A gun in my little sister's hands was not the worst thing I had faced.

"Put it down, Irene," I said.

"No."

"There are twenty men with guns on you."

"Then they can shoot me," she said, and she began to cry and laugh at once. "Go on. Shoot me, in front of Mamma. See what she does."

"Hold your fire!" someone shouted. "Hold!"

Then I saw my mother.

She was crossing the marble in her black dress, with her bag still hanging on her arm.

She walked straight into the line of the guards' guns, and she stopped in front of Irene, with her back to the pistol and her arms spread wide.

"Nobody touches her," she said.

Her voice rang up into the rafters.

"Nobody here lays a finger on my daughter."

"Rosalba," Ugo said sharply, from the side aisle. "Step away."

"I said nobody."

She stood there, upright and shaking, with her face to the guns and her back to the girl who had paid for them.

Still, with her whole church watching, she shielded her.

I looked at the back of her head, the neat grey pins, the crucifix chain at her collar, and a cold calm came over me.

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