by Kai Meyer
“I guess they were offering him the inheritance.”
“That’s what I thought. Even if Costanza’s death had affected him so much…well, I could have understood that. I don’t mean I could have forgiven it, but for God’s sake, she was his mother.” Gemma slowly shook her head. “But it wasn’t any of that. For two or three hours after he put down the phone, he didn’t say a word. He just stared out the window—and then he stood up and told me he was leaving us, you two girls and me. That he was going away and wouldn’t be back. Just like that.”
Rosa’s hands pressed firmly down on the edge of the wooden windowsill. A splinter ran into one thumb, but she didn’t feel it. “So he left you?”
“Us, Rosa. Not only me: all three of us.” Gemma’s tone of voice demonstrated to Rosa, for the first time, the self-discipline it must have taken for her to keep that secret all these years. She and Zoe had always been told that Davide was dead; he had been traveling in Europe and died there of heart failure. His body had been laid to rest in the family vault in Sicily. Rosa had been four at the time, Zoe seven. Gemma had told them it was impossible to fly to Italy for the funeral. Rosa didn’t remember what reason she had given—probably that they couldn’t afford it.
But no one had ever told her that her father had left his family before he died. Oddly enough, she felt more shocked than upset. It was so long ago, and he hadn’t been around anyway, for whatever reason. Yet it affected her in a way that surprised and shook her.
“Did Zoe know?” she asked quietly.
“Not from me. I never told either of you.” Gemma raised her hands defensively. “And before you blame me for keeping quiet about that, too, put yourself in my position. I was deeply hurt when he told me he was leaving. We had our problems, sure, but who doesn’t? With two small children, and no money, but the knowledge that there was so much wealth almost within reach, but only almost…he’d have had to take you girls and go back to Costanza to get the money. Instead he cut himself off from her, never said a word about her, and accepted all the deprivations of life in a shabby apartment in this run-down neighborhood. I’d be lying if I said we were always happy. And I’m sure he missed Sicily, the countryside, the loneliness of the hills, the Mediterranean…but I don’t think any of that was the reason for his final decision. Longing, or discontent, or simply disappointment—I could have explained any of that to you. But when he said nothing at all, gave no reason…how could I make that clear to two little girls?” Gemma let herself drop to the floor in the doorway, drew up her knees, and stared at them. “So I thought I’d wait until I heard from him, until we could discuss it all again.”
“Did you hope he’d come back?”
Gemma shook her head. “I looked him in the eye when he said he was leaving. And he seemed so determined…Perhaps it was also fear that—”
“Fear?”
“It was a look I’d never seen on his face before. Almost panic.”
“What could have scared him so badly? Something he’d heard about Costanza?” She used the name deliberately this time, because Gemma was right about one thing: Rosa had never known the old woman, and the word grandmother sounded as if they’d had a close relationship, which they hadn’t.
“He didn’t tell me who had called or what it was about,” her mother said. “And he hardly said a word himself during the phone conversation.”
“Did you ever hear anything from him again once he left?”
“No, nothing. Soon after that, Florinda called and said he was dead. The doctors discovered that he’d had a weak heart—in fact it was a miracle that he lived as long as he did, they said. Maybe there’s something to the story of the curse on the male Alcantara descendants after all.”
“Nathaniel didn’t die because of any curse. That would have been nice and neat, wouldn’t it have? But it wasn’t like that.”
“You can’t blame me for that all your life. I knew exactly how tough it is, bringing up children as a single mother, holding down several jobs—and I wasn’t seventeen! How could you have—”
“You were just afraid of being saddled with another kid.”
“And you blame me for that?” Both Gemma’s hands had clenched into fists on the floor, but the gesture was helpless, not aggressive. “Take a look around! Is this what you’d want for your child? Crown Heights, a dump of an apartment?” Resigned, she leaned her head back against the door frame, took a deep breath, and said more quietly, “There’s something else I didn’t tell you.”
Surprise, surprise, thought Rosa.
“A day after you called Zoe and told her you were pregnant, Florinda called me. She made me the same offer as Costanza all those years ago, if I’d send you to her with your child.”
“She offered you money?”
“Florinda wasn’t as obvious about it as her mother. She promised me that you and the baby would never want for anything. And that as soon as you were eighteen, you would also be free to provide for me.” Her laugh was a little too shrill. “‘Provide’ for me. That’s how she put it.”
Rosa remembered Florinda’s expression when she first arrived in Sicily, the smile on her aunt’s face. Maybe it hadn’t been friendliness. Only triumph, because she had won at last.
In fact Rosa had been used more often than she’d thought. By Tano and Michele; by Salvatore Pantaleone, the capo dei capi; by Florinda; even by Zoe, who had gone along with her aunt.
The only one who hadn’t been using her was her mother. The person she’d blamed most for everything.
“Did it ever occur to you,” she asked, “that Florinda might be responsible for Dad’s death?”
Gemma laughed quietly. “I was sure of it for a long time. They never liked each other, and Florinda was in charge of the Alcantara businesses after Costanza got sick. In a way she earned her claim to the inheritance, and in the end she enjoyed managing things after all. Maybe she was afraid that Davide would come back after Costanza’s death and take it all for himself, the way their mother had originally planned. Florinda would have had good reasons to get rid of him.”
“But now you don’t think she did?”
“No. Because I know Florinda…or knew her. And because she came to New York to see me a few months after Davide died.”
That was news to Rosa, too.
“We talked for a long time, she and I, and she assured me that she had nothing to do with his death.”
“She was a good liar,” Rosa pointed out.
“But not a hypocrite. There wouldn’t have been any need for her to show up here and pour out her heart to me. However, that’s what she did. She told me how Costanza had made her suffer, even as a child. Part of that was because Costanza always preferred Davide. And Florinda made no secret of the fact that she was glad at first when Davide left Italy with me. Until she realized what it meant to be head of the clan with her mother breathing down her neck. If Florinda ever killed anyone, it was Costanza herself—I could have understood that. I don’t know if she did, and I never asked. But she swore to me that she was in no way to blame for Davide’s death. I mean, she was head of a Cosa Nostra family! Why would she bother to come and talk to me about it? Never in her wildest dreams could I have harmed her. And whatever can be said about her, I had the feeling back then that she was honest with me.”
Rosa tried to reconcile all this with her own picture of her aunt. She had certainly hated Florinda’s methods—but at the same time she had to admit that her aunt had been a woman who lived by principles of her own. If Florinda had done away with her brother, she wouldn’t have made any secret of it. She had been cold as ice, and must have walked over corpses more than once to get where she wanted—but she would never have flown halfway around the world just to put on an act for the benefit of Davide’s widow.
Rosa leaned against the cold glass of the window. “How did he die?”
“A heart attack. It was very quick. In business class, on a Boeing 737 as it took off. There was an autopsy, and Florinda had him laid to rest in the vau
lt in the chapel of the palazzo.”
“I’ve seen his slab on the tomb.”
What connection had there been between her father and TABULA? Had he really died a natural death? And if not, could it maybe have been the work not of a Mafioso or Arcadian, but of TABULA?
“Why are you telling me all this now?” Rosa asked.
“Because you blame me for keeping secrets from you and Zoe. And I want you to understand why. Should I have made everything even worse for you both after Davide’s death by telling you the truth? That I didn’t lose him because he died, but because it was his own decision to walk out that door and never come back? Exactly how would that have made anything better?” She shook her head. “Think whatever you like about me, Rosa—but I still believe I did the right thing. I wanted you and Zoe to have a chance to grow up as normal girls, and it was bad enough with all that Mafia garbage, all the times you were summoned by the police for interrogation.” She looked tired now, drained by her memories. “And as for the transformations: I’m not an Arcadian, and Davide never had the ability to be anything but himself. I hoped that as the children of ordinary parents, you’d be like your father and me—not like Costanza. Just what should I have told you? That the two of you might turn into snakes someday when you grew up? Don’t you think that I’d have lost you much earlier that way?”
Outside, an ambulance raced down the street, its siren howling. The little dog that Rosa had seen on her first visit ran around the building and barked at the noise.
“If you think I’ve let you down, then I can’t change it now,” said Gemma. “It’s too late for so much—certainly too late for that.”
“Maybe you did lose Zoe to Florinda,” said Rosa. “But not me. I almost shot Florinda once.”
Gemma smiled sadly. “Sounds like my girl.”
“You can always come back to Sicily with me. They could show up here looking for me.”
“Arcadians?”
“Carnevares.”
“What about the concordat?”
“That was broken months ago, by both sides. I guess it’s not valid anymore.”
“I thought that was for the tribunal to decide.”
“You still remember a lot about it.”
“I lived with the Alcantaras long enough.”
“Come back with me,” Rosa said again.
Her mother shook her head. “That’s nice of you. But no thanks.”
“You’re not safe here.”
“I wouldn’t be safe in Sicily either. No one who has anything to do with the dynasties is safe there.”
Rosa’s eyes wandered over to the photos on her mirror—and there he was, half covered by a picture from a magazine. “You really did love Dad, didn’t you?”
“Very much.”
“And he loved you?”
“I think so.”
“But he left anyway.”
“Yes.”
This time she didn’t ask why.
Her mother gave her the answer, anyway. Or an answer.
“I think he had no choice.” Gemma stood up, but stayed there in the doorway. “You know, it’s a lie when people say there’s nothing as strong as love. It’s one of the biggest, worst lies of all. Love isn’t strong. It’s incredibly vulnerable. And if we don’t take care of it, it shatters like glass.”
“But you still love him. Even now.”
“Does that help me? Does it make me any stronger?” She shook her head. “It just hurts, that’s all. It hurts like hell, every day and every night. And it’s not true about time healing all wounds, either. It makes them worse. Time just makes everything even worse.”
Outside the window, the little dog turned its head, saw Rosa on the other side of the windowpane, and howled as if it were howling at the moon.
SICILY
ROSA’S CONNECTING FLIGHT FROM Rome landed in Palermo late in the afternoon. A limousine met her at the airport. As the driver stowed her suitcase in the trunk, she was already dozing off in the backseat.
Somewhere along the way she woke up, freezing, and realized that ever since that night in Central Park, cold temperatures had new and unwelcome associations for her. She asked the driver to adjust the air conditioning, and soon after that the sense of being hunted and the heavy weight of winter started to drain away from her limbs.
Golden sunlight shone in through the tinted panes. Although it was mid-February, on the island it already looked almost like summer. Outside temperature fourteen degrees Celcius—around fifty-seven degrees Fahrenheit—Rosa read on the dashboard, and it rarely got any cooler during the day in Sicily. The difference from the biting cold in New York was so great that she was going to have a hard time adjusting to the climate change as well as jet lag over the next few hours.
The expressway passed across a wide, ocher plain with mountains rising steeply on either side. Abandoned farmhouses falling into ruin, the remains of feudal Sicily, lay on their yellowish-brown slopes. Now and then a billboard shot past beyond the guardrails, and then there was nothing but sunlit emptiness again. The rectangular white buildings of a mountain village dotted one of the peaks like a cap. Behind them small clouds drifted across the deep blue sky.
Rosa had never said much about the love she’d felt at first sight for this landscape, but now she felt it again—this was a place so close to the ancient history of the Mediterranean. After tightly packed New York, where everything aspired to height—buildings, expectations, egos—this was the exact opposite. The world went on and on, far beyond the horizon.
She couldn’t wait to see Alessandro. There was a lot that she anticipated with distaste: meetings with her advisers, with the managers of her companies, many of them women, and—worst of all—with Avvocato Trevini. But looking forward to seeing Alessandro helped her feel better about the pressure and terrors of the last few days. She would have liked to ask the driver to take her straight to Castello Carnevare. However, Alessandro was in the conference room of one of his firms in Catania; she hadn’t told him when her flight was landing, only that she was on her way home. What she had to discuss with him wasn’t a subject for phone calls or crowded airports. And there was something new that they did have to talk about. An address: 85 Charles Street. An apartment that had belonged to Tano.
The memory of Mattia briefly surfaced in her mind. She saw his face before her, his last desperate leap through the flames in his panther form. Had the other Carnevares caught up with him? Michele would show no mercy to the man who had saved her life.
At the Mulinello exit they left the expressway and raced along Route 117, going south. After a while the domed church tower of Piazza Armerina and the rooftops of the town appeared behind the bare trees. Rosa had expected to feel uneasy on her return, but it was just the opposite. She was glad to be back.
A good six miles outside of the town, right after the road forked off for Caltagirone, a driveway on the left led into the wooded hills. When the two guards recognized the car and its driver, a heavy iron gate slid aside on a guide rail, clattering.
As they closed the gate behind the limousine again, Rosa glanced through the rear window. A silver BMW passed the entrance to the drive and continued south. It had been following them ever since they’d left the expressway. Judge Quattrini’s anti-Mafia team had only a limited number of cars at its disposal, and Rosa knew most of them. This one had shadowed her a few weeks ago. She sent the judge a text message with a brief thanks for the welcome committee.
The driveway rose gently uphill for just over a mile. Gnarled olive and lemon trees covered a large part of the slope, and pines grew here and there. When the rooftops of the Palazzo Alcantara appeared above the crowns of the trees, she finally felt the uneasiness that she had been expecting ever since she landed. There was only one car parked in the courtyard of the palazzo: a decrepit red Toyota, none of the flashy roadsters that her business managers drove. Thank God. The old rust heap belonged to Signora Falchi, Iole’s private tutor.
The fountain with
the stone statues of fawns wasn’t back in working order yet, but the gardeners had stopped collecting birds’ nests in it. One of Rosa’s first acts had been to revoke Florinda’s orders for the regular removal of all nests from the trees around the palazzo, to be burnt in the stone basin of the fountain. She’d decided to make sure that water flowed from the blackened jets again as soon as possible.
The palazzo had four wings, arranged in a square around an inner courtyard. Plaster was peeling off the pale brown facade in many places. And the tuff statues looking out of niches and down from the edge of the roof were also in urgent need of restoration. Wrought ironwork on the balconies nodded to the property’s former magnificence. Today it was a sad, neglected sight.
The limousine rolled through the tunnel beyond the gate in front of the house. The flower bed in the center of the inner courtyard was still overgrown with weeds; the four facades around it were the color of terra-cotta that had been outdoors for too many winters.
The car stopped at the foot of the double flight of steps leading up to the main entrance on the second floor. Rosa got out before the driver could open the door for her. The smell of damp, crumbling stone was everywhere, even in high summer, and you certainly couldn’t ignore it in February. Once again she wondered whether it would be a better idea to find somewhere else to live. Another decision that she kept putting off.
There was a sound of frantic barking as a black mongrel raced down the steps, leaped at Rosa, and planted his paws on her shoulders. He exuberantly licked her face, panting with excitement.
“Hey, Sarcasmo!” she managed to say, crouching down to hug the dog. Smiling, she ran her hand through his woolly coat, scratched him behind the ears, and buried her face in his neck. “I’ve missed you, boy. Wow, you still smell just as good as I remember.” No wonder; Sarcasmo lounged about on the antique sofas and rugs in the palazzo all day long. At night he jumped up on Iole’s bed and snored for all he was worth.
The driver carried Rosa’s suitcase into the house, and almost collided at the door with a frail-looking woman who came hurrying out at the same moment. She wore wire-framed glasses and a white blouse, and her jeans had creases ironed into them.