by Kai Meyer
“That’s nonsense; you know it is. They’d like to be rid of you yesterday.” Rosa held his glance, marveling at the intense, bright green of his eyes. “What would they say if you flew off on vacation with an Alcantara, with things here the way they are?”
When Zoe was dying in her sister’s arms, she had made Rosa promise something: to find out what linked their dead father to TABULA, the mysterious organization secretly at war with the Arcadian dynasties. It was Rosa’s bad luck that she could think of only one place to begin, only one person who could tell her more about their father, and that was their mother.
There was no one in the world Rosa wanted to see less. Not after all that had happened. Not after Gemma had refused to come to Sicily even for Zoe’s funeral. Bitch.
Alessandro sighed. “I wanted to be in charge of my family, and now it’s in charge of me.”
“Well,” she said with a glance of wide-eyed innocence—she’d worked hard on perfecting that—“you should have thought of that before, right?”
A voice over a loudspeaker announced that her flight was now boarding.
“I’ll probably dream of you every night,” he said. “And when I wake up, I’ll know that the best part of the day is already over.”
“You read that somewhere.”
“Did not.”
She kissed him again, a long kiss, and very tender. He still tasted of another world. The snake began to stir once more as he put his arms around her.
“Hey!” she said, laughing. “My flight. The gate. I have to—”
“What we have won’t ever end,” he whispered.
She ran her fingers through his unruly hair. “Never.”
Then she freed herself from his embrace, picked up her bag, and hurried to the exit.
NEW YORK
WHAT ROSA FOUND THAT evening was not her own New York, but the New York of tourists and theatergoers, the glittering madhouse of Broadway.
It was almost thirty degrees colder than in Sicily. Her jacket was too thin, her nose was running, and she’d packed only one of a pair of gloves in her suitcase. Home, sweet home.
Wearily, she left the lobby of the Millennium Broadway Hotel, trudged through the snow around the candy-colored corner facade of Toys “R” Us, and was in Times Square surrounded by milling crowds of people, bright billboards, and walls of video ads.
She had spent almost her whole life in New York, although admittedly on the other side of the East River. She knew what went on between Wall Street and the Bronx more from TV than from her own experience.
Rosa had grown up in Brooklyn, in one of those down-at-the-heel neighborhoods that didn’t have views of the Manhattan skyline. Home had been a dump of a building with too many tenants in apartments too cramped for them. With graffiti in the stairwell, busted central heating, drafty windows, clattering fire escapes that drove you crazy with the noise they made during storms. Cats had their kittens next to dead rats on the ledges outside the basement windows, and Rosa could remember more than one cockroach plague of biblical proportions.
All around there were endless rows of apartment buildings like hers, basketball courts surrounded by high fences, grubby playgrounds where young mothers stared vacantly at sandboxes during the day and speakers played at full volume in the evenings. Traffic lights dangled from cables above the streets. Photocopied faces of missing children, dogs, and cats looked out from tree trunks. Faded American flags hung under windowsills. And sometimes, at night, an empty baby carriage rolled across an intersection, on fire, a declaration of war by a gang fighting off boredom.
That had been Rosa’s New York. Today, only a few months after leaving it all behind, she was staying in a luxury hotel booked by her secretary in Piazza Armerina. She was paying with a platinum credit card, and the doorman addressed her as Ms. Alcantara. Six months ago he’d have thrown her out on her ear. She didn’t just feel like a stranger in this city; she felt like a stranger in her own body. Taking over some other girl’s identity.
She walked around for almost an hour, let herself drift with the flow of the crowd, and finally decided that what she needed was a grubby backyard, a snow-covered blind alley, some kind of still eye in the hurricane of the metropolis. She found an alley wider than she had hoped for, but dilapidated enough to remind her of the New York she knew. She felt the worn asphalt through the snow, listened to the roar of traffic in the streets, smelled the stale air coming up through a subway grate.
Why did her longing for him have to hit her here, right at this very moment? Well, nothing she could do about it. One moment she was thinking, So here I am again, and the next, It would be better if he were here. If she wasn’t careful, she’d soon be dreaming of ironing his shirts.
Almost reluctantly, she started rummaging around for her iPhone, began to think someone must have stolen it in the crush of people, but finally she felt it among the other stuff in her bag: paper tissues, eyedrops, a notebook. She wasn’t sure why she even carted the notebook around with her.
But what she’d thought was her cell phone turned out to be another book. Smaller, fatter, in a disintegrating binding. The leather on the spine bore the words Aesop’s Fables in tiny lettering. She held it under her nose and breathed in deeply. The smell took her straight back to a sun-drenched graveyard deep in the Sicilian countryside.
Silly. Totally childish. She quickly put the book away, found her phone, and discovered that it had been on during the entire flight. Obviously God wanted her to live and suffer.
No text message. No email. Out of sight, out of mind.
She tapped in: arrived. new york in the snow. v. romantic. Then she hesitated, and added: getting a bladder infection. bad climate for snakes. stupid weather. stupid city.
SEND. And her sensitive love letter was winging its way to the other side of the Atlantic. Where it would be two in the morning. She bit her lower lip, feeling guilty. Alessandro’s cell phone always lay beside his pillow, switched on.
It was only a minute before the answer came back.
can’t sleep. thinking of you too much.
Her heart beating faster, she typed: did you shift shape?
deprivation = no transformation, he replied.
This must be International Bad Equations Week.
new york minus alessandro = even colder, she wrote back.
He replied: cold + rosa = snake (better not).
only when cold + sex.
sex + city, like on TV?
must buy manolos. hope you sleep better now.
His reaction was a little while coming. rosa?
alessandro?
steer clear of the new york carnevares. meant to say so at the airport, but your tongue got in the way.
idiot.
i mean it. my ny relations don’t like the alcantaras.
OK.
I really do mean it.
I get the idea.
have fun buying shoes.
That’s not likely, she thought. will be in touch soon.
wow, HAIR everywhere…ewww!
She was grinning at the screen like a lunatic. She waited a moment to see if there’d be anything else, then put the cell phone back in her bag.
She stood there in the alley, undecided, rubbing her hands to warm them and staring at the snow around her shoes.
Well, why not?
The next morning she took a taxi to Gothic Renaissance on Fourth Avenue and bought black steel-toed boots with a diagonal seam and eight lace-up holes, the only winter-weight tights in the store, and a heavy-duty stapler at a shop around the corner.
Now she had really arrived.
The stapler felt good in her hand and contained a hundred steel staples that could be driven into practically anything by compressed air at intervals of a second. After the rape she’d made it a habit to have a stapler like that always ready. Why make do with pepper spray when you could buy one of these in any hardware store?
Of course she had enough money now to hire bodyguards to protect her
full-time, but the mere thought of it made her feel unlike herself. She hadn’t come to New York to ask for trouble; she’d come to talk to her mother. But the weight of the stapler in her hand made her feel safer.
It was sixteen months since she’d been drugged at a party and then raped by a stranger or strangers. Afterward, they’d left Rosa unconscious in the street. To this day she knew nothing more about what had happened that night, and after endless sessions of counseling and therapy she had come to the conclusion that she didn’t really want to remember. She had given up searching for suppressed images and scraps of thoughts, emotions blocked out by her unconscious mind. If there was one thing to be grateful for, it was the blackout that kept her from knowing the details, the memory of faces or voices. Not even physical pain remained. Only her fears. Her neuroses. Her bitten fingernails, her kleptomania, and for a long time the feeling that she couldn’t trust anyone—until she met Alessandro. Sometimes you had to see through another person’s eyes to understand yourself better.
But the rape had left other traces behind. Nathaniel. The baby she’d aborted. She knew it would have been a son; she just sensed it. She had waited a long time, until the third month, before caving to pressure from her mother and the advice of all the doctors. The operation had been under total anesthesia—just routine, the doctor had said. Routine for the doctor, maybe.
Slush sprayed up on the sidewalk. There was a white bicycle chained to a lamppost on the other side of the street, one of many ghost bikes in New York, placed around in memory of cyclists who had been run over. Rosa stood outside the hardware store, weak at the knees now, staring at her stapler as if it held the answers she’d been avoiding for months. Maybe it had been a bad idea to come back; she hadn’t put enough distance between herself and the rape yet. Confronting her mother wasn’t going to make matters any better. A conversation to clear everything up. As if there were still anything to be cleared up.
She walked to the Union Square subway station at Fourteenth Street, hesitated at the stairs, and then continued to the next entrance, at a traffic island on Astor Place. Here again she couldn’t bring herself to go down to the platform, and instead went on to Broadway-Lafayette, where she’d have changed trains anyway.
On the way, however, she decided it was ridiculous to put off the meeting any longer. After walking through the cold, it occurred to her that she didn’t have to watch every dollar anymore, and she took a taxi over the Brooklyn Bridge in the direction of Crown Heights.
She got out of the cab outside the building where she had grown up, searching her mind for any sense of coming home, or at least of familiarity. Nothing. She had felt a void like this before, when she’d arrived in Sicily last October. Now she wondered where her home really was. Her hand went into her bag and touched Aesop’s Fables.
Slush spurted up from the tires of the taxi as it drove away. Rosa stood on the sidewalk staring at the eight steps up to the front door. The building had only three floors above ground level, and there was a faded burn mark below the flat roof, left by the riots during the 1977 blackout. In all the decades since, the owner hadn’t thought it necessary to invest a few dollars in painting the facade.
The curtains of her mother’s apartment were open, all the windowpanes clean and shiny. A bunch of fresh flowers stood at one window. Gemma must have chosen the place because it got the most sunlight. The Petersons’ station wagon was parked right outside the door to the basement apartment, as always. If Mr. Piccirilli hadn’t drunk himself to death on cheap bourbon yet, there’d be the usual trouble.
And if she went on staring at the building like this, she was going to burst into tears of sentimental nostalgia.
It was only a few steps to the front door and the apartment buzzers beside it. She hadn’t taken a key with her when she left for Italy. Now it felt as if she’d been away not four months but forty years. That, more than anything else, made her realize how definitively she had broken with everything here.
The idea of climbing those steps made her feel terrible. Her mother probably wouldn’t be home anyway. She must still have that job at Bristen’s Eatery, and the second job at the Laundromat. At night she sometimes cooked glass noodles in a Chinese restaurant two blocks away, and then took the next day off. So she might be home after all. Which only made it worse that Rosa was standing there on the sidewalk as if frozen to it, easily visible.
What would she have chosen if her mother had advised her to keep the baby? Would she have brought Nathaniel into the world? And then what? She’d still be living here, hearing Mr. Piccirilli’s snores through the floorboards at night, feeding a howling infant, trying to get by somehow or other.
She had to get away from here. Right away.
Hadn’t Gemma been right to say Rosa would be doing herself no favors by having a baby at seventeen? Didn’t she have enough trouble with herself already? But they didn’t have to talk about that. She only wanted to find out something about her father and TABULA.
It was pathetic, just standing here doing nothing. Not going in, but not going away, either. Indecision of that kind had killed Nathaniel.
The lace curtain beside the bunch of flowers moved. A draft of air?
Why didn’t the snowplow come along and run her down? That would make it all so much simpler.
Her hand, she noticed almost to her own surprise, was still clutching Aesop’s Fables inside her bag. She let go of the little book and took out her cell phone instead. She tapped in the number and stopped with her finger hovering above the CALL key. The curtain moved again. Yes, just the wind. The windows had hardly any insulation. Rosa took a deep breath and pressed CALL. Was tempted to hang up.
She saw a silhouette behind the lace, someone going from the bedroom into the kitchen.
“Hello?” Her mother sounded tired. So she had indeed been working the night shift. “Hel-lo?” More awake now, and annoyed.
Rosa’s eyes were burning. She heard Gemma breathing. A small dog appeared at the entrance to the building and barked. Her mother must be able to hear it too. Twice, like an echo—through the window and over the phone.
Rosa quickly hung up and walked away.
The dog, yapping, followed her a little way down the street and then left her alone, pleased with itself for chasing off an enemy.
HIS FACE
SHE DISCOVERED THE BRONZE panther by pure chance.
He was crouching on a hill in Central Park, his black eyes looking down on East Drive, one of the two streets running north to south through the park. From up there his view over the treetops must reach as far as the skyline of high-rise buildings on Fifth Avenue. Up there on his rock, surrounded by leafless tendrils of Virginia creeper, he seemed about to pounce.
Rosa sat down on a bench and examined the statue from a distance. Joggers and walkers passed by, and now and then one of the horse-drawn carriages driving tourists and amorous couples around the park. Icicles hung from the big cat’s jaws as if he were baring his teeth. But she could see only sadness in his dark eyes, nothing threatening.
She had grabbed her laptop from the hotel before coming here. She brushed the snow from the bench, but a chill still seeped through her jeans and tights.
The bronze panther looked as if he were watching her. She knew how that effect was achieved from the oil paintings in the Palazzo Alcantara. If she got up and walked a little ways away, the statue’s eyes would seem to follow her.
The laptop lay closed on her knees as she tapped Alessandro’s number into her phone. It would be just after nine in the evening in Italy now. She had once asked him what he did during the evenings they didn’t spend together. “Nothing,” he had said. “I sit there doing nothing.”
“You mean reading? Or watching TV?” Even as she said it, it struck her as such a boring question that she could have screamed at herself.
Alessandro shook his head. “If it’s hot, I go up on the battlements and look across the plain to the south. Over the hills on the horizon. When the sirocco
blows, you can smell Africa.”
“Is that a panther thing?” She gestured clumsily. “I mean…like panthers. Jungles. Africa.”
“That’s where we come from. Originally, anyway.”
“I thought it was Arcadia.”
“The human part of us. But the origin of the other part, the roots of the Panthera, they’re somewhere in Africa.”
“How about snakes?”
“Same for snakes, I guess.”
“Will you show me? How to smell Africa up there on your battlements?”
“Sure.”
The panther on the rock looked as if he, too, were dreaming of somewhere far away.
The ringing of the phone brought her back out of her thoughts, and the next moment Alessandro’s voice mail kicked in. Rosa hesitated for a second, cleared her throat, smiled, and said, “I was just thinking of you. What you said about Africa. There’s a panther here with me. He’s made of metal, but I’d love to climb up and put my arms around him.”
Good God. That was easily the most ridiculous thing she’d ever said. In panic, she broke the connection, and realized at the same moment that it was too late. She couldn’t unsay what she’d said. Climb up and put my arms around him. She felt like crawling under the park bench.
But the panther kept looking down at her, and now his icicle teeth flashed in a sunbeam as if he were grinning at her, saying, Come on up here, then.
She let the cell phone drop to her lap, picked it up again, and buried it deep in her bag. Maybe he’d forget to listen to his messages. For about the next fifty years.
Almost automatically, she turned to her laptop. The casing felt icy. She desperately needed gloves and was annoyed with herself for not having bought a pair at Gothic Renaissance. Although black lace probably wouldn’t have been the best choice for this cold weather.
Her new emails wouldn’t all fit on a single screen. A handful were addressed directly to her—mostly from the men who had escorted her to the airport—but the majority she was only cc’d on. Correspondence between the managers of her companies, meaningless stuff to give the police surveillance experts something to do. Some of it seemed to be in a bewildering code, but really it was only randomly picked sequences of letters and numbers. Every minute that the anti-Mafia commission wasted trying to decipher the code was taking police attention away from other work.