“We have others,” says Diego.
“Yeah, we do,” Arturo says, “but that’s not the problem. The drone has our recordings on it. That’s the problem.”
“Do you think they could trace it back to us?” Viola asks.
“I don’t know how long it would take, but I wouldn’t count it out.”
“Cops,” says Diego, pointing to the monitor.
C1P8 has captured an image from the road. The carabinieri patrol is approaching Lilith’s bunker.
“Shit,” says Arturo, “this place is packed with stuff they can’t see.”
“Can we make it disappear?” Diego asks.
“It’s not like throwing your weed in the trash. This takes time.”
“Try it again with the drone. We’ll hide the others with the hard disks in the duffel bag and put it behind the woodpile,” says Viola.
Arturo opens the window and places a drone on the windowsill that’s identical to the one from the evening before. He takes the tablet and starts to maneuver it, directing it toward the woods. Making sure not to repeat the same mistake, Arturo slips it through the trees, lands it gently, and launches its signal. Green light. The “ignis fatuus,” as the carabiniere called it the other night.
On the monitor, the patrol car stops just a few feet from C1P8. Viola sees Donato step out and look into the woods. He’s alone.
“He’s casing us again,” she says.
“Let’s hope,” says Arturo.
Donato looks toward the woods. He has seen the green light. He’s walking toward the trees.
“Get ready,” says Arturo. “As soon as he moves, get the stuff out.”
Donato is in the woods. Arturo moves the drone back, managing to dodge the trees. He lands it again and launches the signal. The green light. The monitor switches from C1P8 to the drone’s view. Donato is walking through the trees. He can’t see the shed anymore.
“Go,” says Arturo.
Viola and Diego pick up the duffel bag. They open the door.
And they find themselves face-to-face with the Marshal.
“And what does that mean?”
Maglio is thinking aloud. He’s accompanied by three other lumberjacks. Their shift just ended, and they’ve arrived at Bar Fuga for their usual drinks. Chocolate liqueur is the only medicine that can banish the pain that arrives with their fatigue and the cold. But there’s a sign taped to the door of the bar. The message, scrawled in pen, says: CLOSED FOR THE HOLIDAYS.
“Donato, you can come back,” says Grazia, speaking into her radio. “The Spirits of the Woods are having a rough night.”
In the living room the fireplace is lit. Katerina’s scent still lingers in the air, even though he had to send her away. Someone is spying on them, and if his wife finds out, they’ll be in serious trouble. He needs to wait. Wait to pick the fruit when it’s ripe.
Eugenio Falconi takes off his cowboy hat and decides to take a shower while the fire destroys the photographs they left in his mailbox. Again. The first time it had been a single photo, but this time there were at least a dozen. What if Mirna had made it home first? The envelope had been addressed to him, fine, and usually his wife doesn’t open his mail. But what if she had? It would have been a pretty big mess.
In the living room the fire is devouring the evidence. In the air is Katerina’s scent, but the fire will devour that too. There’s only one thing that the fire can’t erase.
Certain things can only end one way. All it takes is a moment. You’re focused on your own problems, so absorbed that you don’t notice the one small detail slipping by. You pick up a stack of photographs in your hand, you think about what would happen if you hadn’t been the one to find them, and while you drink a glass of your favorite scotch to blunt your fears, one of those photos slips away under the coffee table in front of the sofa.
You can’t know it, not in the moment. You’re sitting by the fire with the taste of your favorite scotch in your mouth. You already feel more relaxed than you did a few minutes ago, now that you are watching the photos turn to ashes. You remind yourself that you’re always a step ahead of the rest, and your convictions return, the certainty that everything will go as expected. And you can’t know it, but a crack has appeared in your plans. A tiny crack. A crack no one could ever discern, at least not now. But soon. Very soon.
And while you’re in the shower, Mirna comes home and walks over to the sofa.
NINE
I’m the white cat. I’m the evil one.
I’m the one who feels certain things before the others. Especially bad intentions. It’s amazing how many people have bad intentions. How many people, if they were really free to say whatever they think and do whatever they want, would be ready to hurt someone. Everyone believes that evil people are crazy, people who suddenly lose their sense of reason and stop being normal people. But that’s not true. The fact is that humans, with all their clothes and everything else that makes them so different from us, are no better than we are in the end. They also get excited at the thought of blood; they just don’t show it. I know these things and I accept them. And then they say I’m evil. A beautiful paradox.
But there are some people I like. There are some, in particular, who give me great satisfaction. There’s that guy, for example. The one who’s always behind the counter at his bar, drinking like a sponge. Sometimes he’s so soft he has to cling to the counter just to stand. I say he’s cooking up something interesting.
Today my associate, the black one, made the guy’s wife, what’s her name, the blonde, get stuck in the snow. He knew that if he ran into the middle of the road she would skid. And so she did. Then he sat off to the side and enjoyed the scene. I was near, but no one noticed me. No one ever notices me.
The blonde is really stupid. When she can’t do something, she just keeps doing it in the same way and never realizes she’ll just keep making the same mistake. If humans didn’t help each other, they’d already be extinct. Someone like the blonde, for example, wouldn’t have a prayer. Lucky for her the girl came and got her out of it. I enjoyed watching them. But the really funny thing was that both of them, the girl and the blonde, were being watched by two other people who, unbeknownst to each other, observed the scene from their own positions, just like me and my associate.
The first was the Marshal. She was following her daughter. And I think she kept following her even after the girl left the blonde behind. But I was more interested in the other hidden observer of the scene. The guy from the bar.
He had squeezed in through the trees with one of those sweatshirts that should, as a rule, help him hide in the foliage. Of course, it doesn’t have quite the same effect when everything is white, but I don’t even think that the guy was completely sober when he planned it. He was using one of those things that they put over their eyes to see farther. Humans don’t have good eyesight, poor creatures, and they need those ridiculous things to see. Survival of the fittest gave them a major break, that’s the truth.
In short, that guy stayed for the entire scene. When the blonde left, so did he. He has a snowmobile. That’s right. He came through the woods on a snowmobile and left on it too, shielded by the trees, to follow the blonde. I followed him without him knowing. And we arrived at the house where the blonde pulled up.
The guy from the bar stayed there, hiding in the trees, with that thing in front of his face, while his wife went in the house. When she came out again and left, he got back on the snowmobile and continued to follow her. But I stayed there. Because I like houses. I like to spy on them from outside and see what the others can’t see. Because I can see things. I can hear them. And houses are places where strange things happen. Everything happens behind those closed windows. Some people succeed in showing the worst of themselves only when they’re inside. You would think that a den is a safe place, but for humans it isn’t necessarily so. If only some walls could talk, they would have stories, so many things to say. And in that house, in particular, by the twitch of my
whiskers, something happened. I tried to tell her too, but lately she’s been a bit distracted. If someone would just pay attention to me, they would understand that all the seemingly inexplicable things that have happened since old Peter’s disappearance didn’t happen by chance. But they’re all so caught up in themselves they can’t even see a hand in front of their own eyes. Then they’re so surprised to have understood things too late, so convinced as they always are that they know everything beyond a shadow of a doubt. The more stupid they are, the fewer doubts they have. They think they know what everyone else is doing, but they only know what others want them to know. And everything, for them, ends in tragedy.
Just like the person who was just killed only understood when it was too late.
PART FOUR
THE ESCAPE
“Viola? Viola!”
ONE
A flare of sunlight announces the arrival of dawn. Silence. Everything is still around the Gherarda. But the air is different, spring is near. In the coming weeks the snow will begin to melt, and little by little the grass will return with the flowers, the leaves, and all the colors of the forest. What is left buried under the snow will come to light, and the hawthorne will blossom.
Barbara walks around the hotel. She is holding the damp cloth where she tucked the ashes from the other evening, collected from the oven that had been lit all night for the Evening of Bread. It’s an ancient ritual.
The ashes are supposed to surround the houses, and then they must be brought to the heart of the old woods and offered to its inhabitants, who once lived in those same houses and after death found shelter among the trees. This is so that the ashes used for the rite of the bread, from the shared dinner, become earth, and from the earth life springs anew.
She opens her hand and lets the ashes fall. There’s no wind. Not even a breeze. Four years have passed since that day. The ashes she held were different then. In the heart of the woods. That day, she had done it for her sister. The ashes had been a body and a soul, dreams and weaknesses, the days they spent together, her childlike hands, the embrace of eternity, the voice she would never hear again. That day, she had dropped the ashes in the heart of the old woods so that what had once been her sister would become earth and life would blossom from it again.
She’s been away from the Crow’s Rock for too long. She’d like to return, one night, to listen to the moon. But she can’t right now. But she can wait for dawn. Walking alongside the snowy meadow and watching the white become illuminated little by little, as the sun invades the sky with its vanity, reflected in the mirror of ice. Welcome back, daylight. He who heals the wounds of darkness.
He could sell everything and leave. Take her away with him. Just for a while, enough time to make up for the hurt she caused and, when the money runs out, end it for both of them.
Gerri hasn’t slept a wink. He’s sitting in his armchair, next to the window, where he always makes the most important decisions of his life. The trip out East, to meet someone he met on Facebook with a great love for the Italian sun. And even before that, the decision to take over his parents’ bar, quitting archery, which didn’t offer half the security as a business in town. Maybe the problem with all the bad decisions he’s made is just that—the armchair. It’s crazy to realize only now that the damned armchair might be to blame for all the mistakes that have brought him to this point, meditating on whether to sell everything and pocket enough to take his wife on a luxury vacation for a few months. With a one-way ticket. It’s not a bad plan in theory. But he isn’t entirely convinced he should have to die because of that slut.
Gerri gets up and looks out at the sky, which is growing light. He made a whole pot of coffee because even when he was still drunk he had decided that by dawn he’d have decided what to do. But he doesn’t know yet. Everything else, however, he knows. He knows who his wife’s lover is, and the thought of it is like a hungry dog gnawing at his stomach. Tearing away mouthfuls of his flesh.
Gerri gets up. He stands next to the window. The sun is about to rise. It’s the chair that’s mistaken, Gerri. It was a bad advisor. Try changing this one habit. Choose a different point of view. Choose a place where it’s easier to aim.
He opens the sliding door. Outside it’s cold and he’s in his pajamas. No matter. He goes out on the balcony and feels his body contract in the frigid morning air. He fills his lungs with a deep breath. From here it all looks different, wouldn’t you know. Perspectives change. By now everything is illuminated, the sky, but not just that. And it comes. From behind the woods, in the lower part of the village, the sun escapes the line of trees along the horizon, and the reddish light shines on the roofs of the houses, through the chimneys and the satellite dishes. Along the balconies, through boxes of herbs and flowers, and clothes hung out to dry. Through the church bell tower and, above it, the castle tower. And on the soccer ball abandoned under a canopy in Adaster’s yard, where no one has bothered to shovel the snow. There it is, the ball. It’s far away, but Gerri can see it. He always had a good eye. And he knows now. He’s sure, in this moment. He doesn’t have the slightest doubt. He’d be able to nail it.
The tree has taken shape. The shutters don’t close well, and sunlight pierces Giulio’s room, coming to rest on the drawing he has been working on the whole night. He loves to draw at night, because that’s when everything disappears except for him and the gnome. The story begins there, in that tree house with the ladder that goes down to the ground. The owl, the butterflies, the birds.
They spoke for hours before collapsing.
Viola told her about the plan with the Spirits. To defend the forest, the place that holds the memory of those who are gone. It had been years since she had seen Viola so fragile. Since she had seen her daughter in tears as she talked about Michele, the boy who had taught her to play the guitar and who died on Bridge Day.
“Wounds heal, Mom,” she said, “but when they’re deep they leave a scar.” You don’t know how right you are, little one.
Viola had never forgotten that boy, but Grazia hadn’t realized how attached she’d been. Everything had happened during a time when they’d stopped being friends, so a great deal had been left unsaid between them. Voids. And in the face of the void left by an absence, Grazia knows, people need to cling to something so that they don’t fall in. For Viola, that something was the heart of the woods. The Crow’s Rock. That place she had known to be wonderful and magical since she was a child. And the real wonderful and magical thing was the way this place had taken root in her daughter, growing into something of such importance. So strong. To hear her story was like getting to know her all over again. But the enchantment was a luxury Grazia could only afford herself for a short time. Because, in addition to listening to her daughter, she had to think fast about how to act. What to do about the report she had to file, the pressure from Scalise to solve the vandalism case, the whole story about the Spirits of the Woods that GeoService wanted to get to the bottom of, along with any sabotage operations against its precious plant. They’ll try to come down as hard as possible, those assholes, to discourage copycat resistance. And for Viola and the other two, it will mean serious trouble. And then there’s the whole story of the photos and blackmail. The worst part. The good thing is that if it all goes that way, without any other hitches, that pig may not file a complaint to avoid outing himself.
Her job, her daughter. If she had to choose which side to take, the choice was already made. She knows it. That’s why Scalise doesn’t like women. All those boys who abandoned the station after she was appointed had been right. Friguglia had been right to get sick, because it makes no sense to have a commander who, when choosing between her role as commander and her role as mother, will always choose the latter.
Viola is asleep next to her. It has been years since they have slept like this, together, in the “big bed,” as Viola had called it as a child. A big bed that was always half-empty because the Marshal and mother never left any space for the woman. And God only
knows how much the woman wanted to be part of that life.
Grazia turns on her side. Toward Viola. Her breath is heavy. She’s sleeping in the kind of deep sleep that she’ll soon grow out of. Grazia passes her hand over Viola’s hair, above her pierced ear, where it’s only a few millimeters long. When did her little girl get so big? She knows every inch of that body. She finds the cut on the nape of her neck that she got when she was eight and fell off her bike. And she wondered when she got so distracted. It’s as if she turned away for an instant and someone snatched away those ten years that she had hoped to spend with her.
Outside it’s suddenly dawn. Her shift starts soon. Donato knows everything. It was only fair to tell him how things went. He listened, he understood. He already told her that he’s fine with any way she chooses to resolve it.
“I get this feeling that command has abandoned us here, chief,” he said. “At this point, we might as well do what we want.”
Donato isn’t someone who’s inclined to think this way. Grazia knows it, and it makes her feel even more in his debt. If the Spirits of the Woods disappear, people will soon stop looking for them. She has to think about this, first of all. She has to convince Viola to understand that it’s not worth it to get in trouble just to protect Michele’s memory. But in the end, after all is said and done, perhaps not even Grazia, Marshal and mother, is totally convinced about that. Because if Michele’s memory isn’t worth fighting for, what is?
The Hawthorne Season Page 15