by Kai Meyer
“You wanted to kill him.”
“I wanted to find out what he was going to do. And he made no secret of that: He wanted a large part of the Alcantara fortune handed over to him. In return he would keep his mouth shut, and as a gesture of goodwill compensate Florinda with a suitable sum of money. You can imagine what I said to that. To cut it short, we quarreled. We fought. He won.”
“As simple as that?”
He laughed bitterly, placed the palm of one hand against the opaque glass, but did not push the door open yet. “He locked me up down here. He didn’t kill me, that would have been too easy. He wanted me to go through what he had experienced himself.”
“You mean you’ve been here all this time? For fourteen years?”
He turned around to her. Now there was such honesty in his eyes, such deep sorrow, that she almost softened. “Believe me, I know what it is to be buried alive in this place.”
“What about Florinda?” she asked. “She told Mom that you’d died of a heart attack on a plane.”
“Florinda told lies from the moment she opened her mouth.”
“That sounds like you’re blaming her for—”
“Did she so much as lift a finger to find me?” he retorted. “She could think of nothing better to do than have me declared dead, and bury a casket full of bricks in the family vault.”
He cast a final disapproving glance at her pistol, and then pushed the double doors open. The pungent smell surrounded her at once with such intensity that it took her breath away for seconds on end.
“Come along,” he told her. “This way.”
She lowered the gun, but kept the safety catch off.
Another hall opened out before them, higher than the corridor and the rooms along it. The sounds of obscure instruments came from all directions, technology that was probably decades old, but was still working like a perpetuum mobile.
This was where Sigismondis and Apollonio had stored the subjects of their experiments, taken them apart—tall shelves stacked with cylindrical glass jars where specimens floated, pale, bloated, some of them disintegrating, or cut into slices. Very few of them could still be recognized as what they had once been. These were body parts of hybrids and Arcadians, clumps of muscle, blistered organs, bizarre formations of fibrous flesh and venous systems. Pupils of eyes, earlobes, jawbones, joints, skullcaps, and spiky bones. Every fragment was preserved in a solution, most of them distorted by the curves of their jars.
Rosa opened her mouth and then shut it again. Took a few awkward steps past him into the hall, and stared at all these remains, an archive of Arcadian body parts.
A passage ran down the middle, with narrow aisles branching off it between the shelves to the right and the left. Rosa could see only the front compartments, with the vague outlines of the other rows behind them.
“Why all this?” she finally managed to say, turning around.
He was gone.
Alarmed, she leaped backward, swinging the pistol around.
She hadn’t heard him moving away, but now she saw him some way off, standing by a heavy steel partition in the side wall of the hall. She was instinctively reminded of the entrance to the cold storage in the Palazzo Alcantara.
“Can’t you stop waving that thing about?” He pointed to the gun. “You’re so easily frightened, you’ll pull the trigger without wanting to.”
“Don’t think you know what I want,” she snapped. “You don’t know anything at all about me.”
“I know you want to see Apollonio.”
She asked more quietly, “Is he in there?”
He placed both hands on the crank to open the cold storage. “Of course he is.”
The door swung open. A wave of bitter cold surged out toward Rosa.
“You go first,” she ordered.
“Do you really think I want to shut you in?”
“It wouldn’t be anything new down here.”
He sighed, obviously upset by her continued suspicion, and then went past the partition. She followed him into the cold, staying a few steps behind.
The cold storage was a long tunnel with ugly neon lighting, and plastic shelves on the white-tiled walls. Stacked on the shelves were transparent plastic bags. Ice crystals had formed inside, as if what lay inside had been breathing to the last. That was nonsense, as she knew, yet for a moment she saw it all before her: hundreds of pulsating plastic bags in the compartments, walls of twitching life under ice-pale plastic.
“Rosa.”
The bags lay still. Everything in this cold storage was frozen stiff. Nothing moved on the shelves.
“Are you coming?” He pointed to a curtain of vertical plastic slats dividing the back part of the room from the front of it.
He struck the frozen curtain hard to loosen it. There was a crunch as the layer of ice on it gave way. He pushed the plastic aside with both arms, and opened a way through for Rosa.
She gripped the pistol more tightly, and hesitated.
Behind the clouds of white vapor from his breath, his expression was concerned. “You’d rather not?”
Maybe it was a mistake to entrust herself to him. It was possible that all this was wrong, the worst of stupid ideas.
Stooping slightly, she stepped past him through the curtain. He let her go two steps in, then followed her and stood beside her.
“Are you sure you want this?” he asked, with more sympathy than she had expected.
“Yes.”
She was still in nothing but jeans and a T-shirt, and was freezing to the bone. Better get this behind her quickly.
There were no shelves in the back part of the cold storage, only five stretchers on small rubber rollers, the kind used in hospitals. Four of them were empty.
On the front stretcher, only a few steps from the slatted curtain, lay a body covered with a sheet of black plastic up to the throat. She went closer to look at the face.
His features had fallen in; his skin was almost white. There was a hole no bigger than the opening of a pencil sharpener in his forehead. Not a drop of blood; perhaps it had been wiped away before he was deep-frozen.
It was no surprise that he looked like the man beside her, yet it was a shock all the same. The triangle around his lips formed by the two lines running from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth looked shadowy, as if part of his face had sunk inward.
Her glance went up to the bullet hole in the forehead. “You did that?” she asked calmly.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“When he came back here”—he hesitated briefly—“from New York. A good year ago. Sigismondis was not a particularly careful prison guard, and with every passing year of his dementia he became more forgetful. One day my chance came, and I used it. Once I was free I lay in wait for him down here in the bunker.”
She put her hand out to the head of the dead man. Hard and cold as a block of ice. Slowly, she leaned over him so that she could look at his face from in front. Her hand touched the sheet of black plastic over his chest. Its folds were frozen almost rigid. All the same, she grasped it, felt the material give under pressure, and held it yet more firmly.
“No.” His fingers on her shoulder, touching it very gently. “That’s enough. Do you believe me now?”
“I still don’t understand,” she said, her breath coming out as vapor. “Why the rape? After all, Sigismondis had every means of crossing Lamias with Panthera artificially down here.”
He didn’t seem to think this the right moment to talk about that subject, but he answered her question anyway, perhaps to show that he respected her feelings. “For a long time he considered the ban on mating the two species purely rational, from the medical point of view. But finally he wondered whether the traditional myth might not, after all, be true. You’ve seen what he’s like—he didn’t lose his mind overnight. All of a sudden it was no longer a case of investigating his theory of the biological origin of a myth—now he wanted evidence of the existence of the gods!”
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“By doing all he could to break their commandments?” she asked in a toneless voice, frozen almost as rigid as the dead man.
“He thought he could challenge them by bringing a Lamia and a member of the Panthera together in the natural way, not in a test tube. And in addition, two Arcadians of high standing in the succession of their clans: Tano and you. You were to be impregnated by Tano—and that would show how the gods reacted to it. If they reacted to it. If they even exist at all.”
An idea stirred in her mind. Someone else had tried to get such evidence, but in a different way. In the search for the invisible being who had caused all those historical disasters. The gaps in the crowd. She had a feeling that the circle was about to close—but something was still missing. A last piece of the puzzle.
Once again she clenched her fist around the frozen folds of the plastic sheet, as firmly as if to dig her hand into the dead man’s rib cage and pluck out his ice-cold heart.
“Never mind what you do now,” he said, “it won’t change anything.”
She nodded, very slowly. Then she let him lead her a little way toward the curtain. She was walking backward, without taking her eyes off the body.
“Come away from here.” He spoke to her as if she was a child. His child. “This place is too cold. Apollonio is dead. And we are together again. Together you and I can—” With a jerk, she tore herself away and hurried back to the dead man. This time she took the sheet of plastic by its upper edge. It was like removing a board nailed into place from the body, but she tried it anyway with just one hand, pulling as hard as she could.
“Don’t do that!”
The frozen covering had taken on the contours of the body, like a mold for a gelatin dessert. Tiny cracks formed in the layer of ice, and then the black plastic sheet gave way.
And Rosa saw what was underneath it.
“Rosa . . .” He was standing behind her again.
She spun around to him and looked into his eyes. And found a silent request there, nothing bad, just exhaustion and a plea.
Fingers shaking, she raised her left hand and touched his cheek, let her fingers wander to the back of his neck, drew him toward her. Her head hurt, with sharp pains on all sides.
“You want evidence of the existence of God?” she whispered.
Then she shot him in the stomach.
NATHANIEL
HE SCREAMED AND HOWLED, but she closed her ears to him.
As he writhed on the floor, she looked back at the dead man on the stretcher. There was a rough incision on the left-hand side of his chest. Someone had removed his heart and closed the body up again without going to much trouble about it. Under the white skin, she could see where parts of the ribs had been taken out. The incision had not been properly stitched; the edges were merely stapled together.
Rosa touched the place with great tenderness. He no longer felt like someone who had once lived, laughed, and loved her. But she knew who he was. Davide Alcantara, her father.
She carefully picked up the sheet of black plastic and spread it over him again, trying to cover his face as well, but the material was too rigid for that.
Apollonio was lying doubled up on the white tiles, one leg bent at a sharp angle while he kicked out with the other in convulsive spasms. He was pressing both hands to the wound. Rosa had heard that few things hurt as much as a shot to the stomach, and she saw, with satisfaction, that this was true. He was still screaming his head off, and she watched him from above for a while, then stepped over him and crouched down in front of him. He tried reaching for her with one blood-stained hand, but not to hit her. It was only a gesture, a plea for help.
“How long?” she asked calmly.
Little bubbles of blood were bursting at the corners of his mouth.
“How long have you had him on ice down here? All fourteen years?” Once again she pushed his hand away. “You exchanged his body for the bricks, didn’t you? When was that? On the evening of his funeral? On the day itself?”
Her bullet must have caught all kinds of organs that were well supplied with blood. In between screams, he could manage only tortured breathing, no words.
“You shouldn’t have mentioned the bricks,” she said, in a tone of mild reproof. “I didn’t realize it right away. I only thought, there’s something wrong here. Something didn’t happen the way he claims. Clear as day, don’t you agree? Whatever really happened fourteen years ago, you couldn’t have known about the bricks. Unless you’d put them in the casket yourself.”
Threads of bright red saliva were dropping from his mouth. “He . . . he could have been . . . been the solution.”
“You shot him in the head to make me think it looked genuine,” she commented. “When did you do that? When I arrived here in my car? I assume you have cameras up there. And then you thought you could act out a touching scene of a father taking his long-lost daughter in his arms. You didn’t get your hands on the Alcantara fortune fourteen years ago, but you worked out that now it would be really easy. Father and daughter return to lead the clan together. They didn’t want me on my own—and I can’t really blame them for that—but they’d have accepted you. Costanza’s son, formerly believed dead, now running the show. No more games of hide-and-seek, no false identities—and with all your insider knowledge about TABULA, they’d have willingly laid the Alcantara fortune at your feet. And I’d have been your trump card. If I accepted you as Davide, they certainly would.”
He grimaced with pain and his screams had turned to groans, but his eyes showed her that he could hear what she was saying.
“The bad news is that it was all for nothing. You couldn’t have known, down here in your bunker, but there have been a few changes. For several days the Hungry Man has been back in Sicily, and right now I’m anything but reliable life insurance.”
Did he understand what she meant? It made no difference, although it gave her a certain satisfaction to make his inevitable failure clear. Physical pain wasn’t enough. Not for him.
“That heart attack on the plane,” she went on. “Was that when you saw each other again?”
He opened his mouth, tried to form words, but only spat blood.
“It was just like when you were still boys, wasn’t it? You met, you got him to shift shape. But his heart wouldn’t stand the strain. You knew that would kill him.”
“No,” he gasped. “It wasn’t . . . like that.”
“How, then?”
A wave of pain shook his body. He stretched, and then doubled up again.
Without pity, she put the barrel of the pistol to his wound, close to his twitching fingers. “I want to know the truth. Now.”
He screamed.
She withdrew the gun. “Well?”
“I didn’t . . . mean to kill him. Not at first . . . we wanted to investigate him . . . to find the . . . the defect . . . why metamorphosis would kill us . . . him as well as me. But then he died on the plane . . . before we met again.”
“Of natural causes?”
A faint nod.
“So then you stole the body to investigate it? To turn that at least to your advantage?”
“I went to see Florinda and . . . gave her an ultimatum. She . . . laughed at me and threw me out. ‘Go to the other clans and tell them about TABULA,’ she said. ‘You’ll see what they do to you then.’ And she was right, it was only . . . an empty threat. But I took Davide’s body away. . . . Florinda gave it to me. She knew there were only bricks in the casket because we—she and I together—we put them in there and . . .”
Maybe she should have guessed that. But it changed nothing. “Florinda is dead, and so are you.” She stood up. “Did you find it?”
“What . . . ?”
“The remedy. For your heart.”
At that, his face distorted in a grin of malice. “You’re scared, little Rosa. Scared stiff the same thing may happen to you some day . . . like Davide, that coward. Ran away from responsibility . . . went off to New York . . . and then, later
, again . . . so scared of meeting me that it finished off his heart . . .”
She aimed the gun at his face. He had shot her father’s body in the forehead. What kept her from doing the same to him? A little shocked, she realized that she was enjoying this. The power she had over him. The same power that he had wielded when he stood beside her and Tano in that New York apartment.
You’re not being paid to have a good time.
It would have been so easy to pull the trigger. Pay him back for everything, do away with him once and for all.
Slowly, she lowered the gun again. He would die anyway, he had already lost large quantities of blood. The prints left by her feet were deep red, and already freezing to ice.
She turned away and pushed the slats of the curtain aside.
“Rosa . . . !”
She went through it, and past the shelves with the frozen clear plastic bags.
“Don’t leave me here!”
With firm footsteps, she left the cold storage, closing the heavy steel door behind her. Her eyes fell on a display beside the entrance. Ten degrees below zero. Pressing a button, she lowered the temperature to twenty degrees below. Then she activated the locking mechanism, and heard the bolts shoot into place.
She walked through the hall in a daze. When she was passing the room with the monitors that opened off the corridor, she noticed something. Glancing down the passage at the great hall—no sign of Sigismondis—she entered the computer room and went straight to the old-fashioned screen with the rows of orange lettering. The news bulletin was still running on the laptop beside it. A wheeled chair stood in front of it.
She felt dizzy as she sat down and skimmed the words on the older of the two monitors. They were names in alphabetical order. After each there was a date from the last four decades. Then came combinations of signs; she couldn’t make anything of them. Possibly the places on the shelves where the remains of the person were stored.
The computer had no mouse. She scrolled down the screen for a while, using the arrow keys, shaken by the vast numbers of men and women listed in this catalog. The surnames beginning with A alone occupied three full screens.