by Kai Meyer
“I know how I look,” said Val. “You can leave out the comments.”
“Ever thought of giving up smoking?”
“Who wants to get fat?” So there was something still left in there of the old Valerie. Her gallows humor spared Rosa a pang of conscience for feeling no pity.
“What are you doing here?”
Val stepped aside to let her into the room. “I wanted to talk to you.”
Rosa stayed out in the hall. “Trevini has my cell phone number.”
“Your friend Trevini—”
“He’s no friend of mine.”
“He’s just waiting to stab you in the back.”
“Too true. That’s why he sent you here.”
Valerie shook her head. “No. His people bought me a ticket to New York and dropped me off at the airport. Then I ran away.”
“And you can bet they’ve been doing their best to catch up with you.”
Valerie shrugged her thin shoulders. “No idea. Come in. I can’t…I mean, standing is a bit of a strain for me at the moment.”
“Try lying down. On your back. With a couple of guys holding you there.”
Sarcasmo came in and pressed against Rosa’s leg. He growled at Valerie, who took a step back. “He’s been standing outside the door for three hours, yapping,” she said.
“Sleep deprivation is one of our specialties here in Sicily. If we don’t pump our prisoners full of drugs first.”
“Leave the dog and come in. Please.”
Rosa gave her a cool stare. “You shouldn’t have come here. That ticket was your chance to go back to New York.” She looked down at Valerie’s emaciated body. “Although I wouldn’t be too sure that Michele will welcome you with open arms.”
“I’m here because I want to ask you to forgive me.”
“Well, then everything’s fine again, isn’t it?”
“Could we spare ourselves the verbal sparring? I know I have no right to be here. And maybe I really should have disappeared. But I did want to say it to your face, at least once. I’m sorry. For everything. Not only the party, and taking you there. The lies earlier, too. Not telling you anything about Michele. I want to ask you to believe that I’m sorry.”
Rosa bent down to Sarcasmo, patted his head, and sent him off with a gentle tap. Then she walked past Valerie into the room, closing the door behind her. Slowly, she went over to the window, pulled back the heavy red velvet curtain—and saw, to her surprise, that there was no glass behind it. The tall window had been bricked up. She remembered noticing it once from outside the house. But she’d had no idea that it was this room.
Then she understood. Iole was so much smarter than anyone expected.
Rosa let her eyes wander around the chamber. There was no other way out, only a door to the bathroom, which had no window. Iole hadn’t simply offered Valerie a place to rest. She had shut her in.
“Why is that window bricked up?” Valerie was still standing close to the door, as if afraid that Sarcasmo might be able to press the handle down from outside.
Rosa didn’t know the answer to that. But then she noticed the initials embroidered on the canopy of the four-poster bed. And the fact that this room was almost twice the size of most of the others.
Up on the canopy, it said C. A.
Costanza Alcantara? Had this been her grandmother’s room? The C could stand for all kinds of names, yet she felt a strange certainty.
Had Florinda had the window bricked up? Two months ago Rosa had given orders for all rooms in the palazzo to be thoroughly cleaned. All of them without exception, because she wanted to drive the mausoleum atmosphere out of the walls. Had this one been locked until then? A prison for all the memories linking Florinda to the mother she hated?
She said to Valerie instead, “This is what you might call our condemned cell. You wouldn’t think it of Iole, but she knows exactly what’s up.”
The corners of Val’s mouth twitched, but she couldn’t hide a trace of uneasiness. “If that’s it…if you’re planning to have me killed, go ahead. I’ve told you the truth. I’m only here to apologize.”
“For the rape, too?”
“I didn’t know that would happen. That’s the truth. I had no idea.”
“Michele got you to bring me to that party, and you thought—what?”
“I didn’t think anything. I was in love. I was stupid. God, I’d have done anything for him. He’s a Carnevare. You know how they—”
“Don’t you dare compare Alessandro with Michele!”
“If you say so.”
Rosa felt a macabre fascination in watching the play of expressions on Valerie’s face. At the same time, it disturbed her to see what a stranger her former friend had become. Only in her tone of voice did the old Val come through now and then: the Suicide Queen who fooled everyone else. Sunsets under the Brooklyn Bridge. Nights in Club Exit. Outwardly, the wreck in front of her had almost nothing left in common with the girl of the old days.
“Were you there?” asked Rosa. “When they did it?”
“No!” Valerie’s shoulders sagged even further. “I really didn’t know anything about it. Not that evening. Only the next day—”
“If you felt such a pressing need to apologize, you took your time over it. Almost a year and a half.”
“I was ashamed. Not just ashamed. I made myself sick. And I…I didn’t want you to know that…that I’d been obeying Michele when I took you there. I couldn’t face you. When you were in the hospital, I wanted to visit you.” She shook her head, and avoided Rosa’s eyes. “But I just couldn’t. It didn’t work.”
As if the engine of her car had failed to start. Or her subway train had been late. It didn’t work. You’d have thought someone else entirely was responsible.
“I’ll call you a taxi,” said Rosa. “Don’t try showing up here again. Or anywhere else our paths might cross.”
Valerie didn’t move from the spot. She shifted her weight uncertainly from one foot to the other, again and again, but she didn’t sit down. “It wasn’t only Michele,” she said.
“I know. Tano Carnevare was there. And a few others.”
“Yes. But that’s not what I mean. It wasn’t Michele pulling the strings. Or Tano.”
Rosa didn’t want to listen to any more of this. It would be wise to leave the room now. Call the taxi. Forget Valerie and with her all that had happened in the past.
“I eavesdropped on conversations,” Valerie went on. “Conversations between Michele and Tano. And for a long time I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d overheard. But I had so many months to think about it…Tano persuaded Michele to go along with the whole thing. No, I don’t mean persuaded. That sounds like I want to defend Michele. Tano recruited Michele and his men to help him.”
“Help him rape me?”
Once, Valerie had never been at a loss for a smart retort; now she was beating around the bush. Then, hesitantly, she nodded. Her chin was quivering. Exhausted, she let herself drop onto the edge of a chair.
“Tano supplied Michele with drugs for years…some kind of stuff, I don’t know what it was. I never tried it, but Michele was crazy about it.”
Did Valerie know exactly what the Carnevares were? What Rosa was? Had she ever seen Michele in his leopard form? Or did she still think the worst thing she’d tangled with was the Mafia?
“Glass vials?” asked Rosa. “With a yellow fluid inside them?”
Valerie nodded. “Michele always had ten or twenty of them in stock. He kept the stuff in this refrigerator that he could lock, like a safe. Tano got hold of it from somewhere, which was weird. Michele had contacts of his own in Colombia and Southeast Asia.” She took an unsteady step toward the four-poster bed and dropped onto the edge of it. For a moment she closed her eyes and breathed deeply. “Tano promised Michele even more of the drug, in return for his…his support that night. After that, they fought over the deal. I was listening. Michele wanted more of the stuff than they’d agreed on. Or he wanted to pay
less for it—I’m not sure which. Tano was furious. He said they’d had an agreement, and now his supplier wouldn’t come up with any more.”
“Tano’s supplier?”
Valerie’s nod looked undecided. “The whole thing wasn’t Tano’s idea. He talked two or three times about someone who had given him the order to attack you. Michele must have known him. I think he’d met him at least once himself.”
Rosa’s throat felt clogged with disgust, and aversion, and a sense of panic that she’d thought was all in the past. “And now you’re saying it wasn’t Tano’s own idea? Someone gave him orders to do it?”
“I think that was it,” said Valerie. “When they were talking, Tano and Michele, it seemed clear enough. Tano had bought Michele’s services, and in turn this other man had bought Tano’s.”
Rosa’s voice was hoarse. “If they discussed him, I suppose they mentioned his name.”
Valerie nodded. “An Italian. I think.”
“What was he called?”
“Apollonio.” For a moment Val pressed her lips together, and then she said, “That was the name they used. Mr. Apollonio.”
Rosa slowly approached the bed. Valerie looked as if she was about to flinch, but she seemed to summon all her self-control and stayed where she was. Rosa turned and dropped onto the mattress beside her. There they sat, thigh to thigh, staring at the empty room.
“Do you know him?” asked Valerie after a while.
“No.”
“But it’s not the first time you’ve heard the name.”
“No.”
Val hesitated. “Okay,” she said quietly.
Rosa still wasn’t looking at her. “What are you going to do now?”
“No idea.” A shudder ran through Valerie’s body. Rosa could feel it in her leg. “Or maybe I do know…there’s still someone in New York.”
“Mattia,” Rosa whispered.
Valerie’s head swung around. There was surprise in her wide eyes. And a question. But she didn’t utter a sound.
“I met him,” said Rosa. “When I was in New York. Michele was trying to kill me, and Mattia helped me. He guessed that you’d show up here. He wanted me to tell you something—to say you could go to him anytime, whatever happened.”
“He said that?”
“Yes.”
“Then he doesn’t hate me? Because of Michele? And because I ran away?”
Rosa shook her head.
“He…he once told me he liked me.” Her voice was vibrating slightly, and it was a second or two before Rosa realized that what had upset Valerie’s self-composure was hope. More hope than she had felt for a long time.
“He’s dead,” said Rosa. “Michele’s men murdered him.”
Silence.
After a while, a whisper as quiet as a breath passed Valerie’s lips. “That’s not true. You’re just saying it to hurt me.”
“They burned him. Maybe he was dead already. Or maybe not.”
A high-pitched sob made its way out of Valerie’s throat. That was all. Just that one awful sound.
Rosa stood up and went to the door. “I’ll call a doctor for you. You can stay until tomorrow morning. Then you’re getting out of here.”
Val didn’t watch as Rosa left. She just sat perfectly still, like someone in a photograph, almost entirely black and white and two-dimensional.
Rosa walked out and closed the door. Sarcasmo ran over to her and sat down outside the room, asking to be praised. She scratched his throat, and then she went away.
Behind her, the dog started barking at the door again.
THE VIDEO
THE LIBRARY PROMISED SECURITY. The shelves along the walls rose fifteen feet high, to the ceiling. Thousands of yellowed books stood there, often in double rows, one behind the other, and even the last spare bit of space was full of volumes stacked horizontally. If you took one out, you often came upon patches of mold. Like all the rooms in the palazzo, this one suffered from the damp masonry.
But Rosa wasn’t interested in the books, only in the atmosphere that they created. The room made her feel like she could creep away to hide here, unobserved, undisturbed.
The paper blanked out all sounds. Nothing existed outside your own thoughts.
She sat in a creaking leather armchair with her knees drawn up. Curtains hid the tall windows; the fiery-red evening sky glowed through patches where the fabric had worn thin. An old-fashioned lamp with a fringed shade threw off mustard-colored light.
She crouched there with the cell phones that Trevini had sent her, one in each hand.
She switched on the right-hand phone. Someone had written the password on the edge in waterproof felt pen, in a neat girlish hand. Someone who knew how to crack these things. Probably Contessa di Santis.
On the display, an atomic mushroom cloud above a desert appeared. Valerie’s cell phone, no doubt about it. So Rosa would begin with the video of the party. She knew most of that one already, and breathed a sigh of relief.
Only a single video file had been stored. Trevini and the Contessa had prepared everything meticulously in advance.
So once again she watched the wobbly film of the party, saw herself put a glass down on a table and walk away, saw all the laughing people greeting one another, Alessandro among them. But this time the picture didn’t freeze on him. The camera panned around, zoomed at random through the crowd, to the sound of Valerie’s intoxicated giggles. Suddenly Rosa came back into the frame, glass in hand. Laughing, she said something to Valerie behind the camera, then drank half the contents of her glass. Put it down. Drank again. Swayed in time to the muted music coming from the overloaded loudspeaker.
The film suddenly stopped.
Rosa’s hand was shaking. She hadn’t noticed before, because the picture was so unsteady. Once again she considered leaving it at that, throwing away both cell phones, and never giving another thought to the second video.
But then she put the first phone down and took the second in both hands, as if she had to hold it tight to keep it from jumping out of her fingers. Its password, too, was written on the casing in blue felt pen.
Rosa had expected a suggestive background image, something to suit Michele the club owner, wild nights and every kind of excess. Instead, up came a picture of the cartoon cat Tom, holding Jerry in one hand and a knife in the other.
This phone, too, contained only one file. The thumbnail image in the videos folder was dark and blurred; nothing could be made out on it.
Rosa’s thumb hovered over the ok key.
Her hand wasn’t trembling anymore. Instead she felt paralyzed. Incapable of completing that last small movement.
She had thought about what she would see. She had imagined pictures of her own, of herself and Tano. His short dark hair. His smiling eyes behind the narrow frames of his glasses.
She remembered her first meeting with him in Sicily, at Baron Massimo Carnevare’s funeral. A little later, among lines of silent tombs, Alessandro had given her the tiny volume of Aesop’s Fables. After that she had met Tano twice more. Once on Isola Luna, the little volcanic island off the north coast of Sicily. And finally, for the last time, when he and his gang of bikers had encircled Rosa in the ruins of an ancient amphitheater and he was planning to tear her to pieces in his animal form as a powerful tiger. She had witnessed his transformation, and then his death. As if in slow motion, she saw the bullet shattering his face in her mind’s eye.
Rosa closed her eyelids, felt the key under her thumb. Had to summon all her strength to press down on it slowly, very slowly.
There was a crackle in the speaker of the cell phone. The display went dark, then light again. Reddish.
She was looking at her own face.
Looking into her own eyes, open wide and fully awake.
“I need you,” she whispered over the phone. “I want to be with you.”
She hated her voice, choked as it was with tears. Even hated herself for calling him.
“I’m going to get into
my car,” she said quietly, “and come to you.”
“No, you’re not.” Alessandro’s voice took on that undertone with which he could nip any contradiction in the bud. The capo tone that he had inherited from his father. “You’re not driving anywhere in that state. I’ll be right there with you. An hour and a half, maybe I can make it sooner. I’m on my way.” She could hear his footsteps in the stone corridors of Castello Carnevare, fast and agitated. His haste gave him away. The calm determination in his voice was only for show.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I…I don’t want to be alone right now.”
Her lips touched the receiver of the phone. It was an old-fashioned one, with a curved receiver on a spiral cord.
“I’m leaving now,” she heard Alessandro say, not much later, and the engine of his Ferrari promptly roared.
“That’s nice of you.”
“I ought to have been there when you looked at the thing.”
He must have been burning with questions, but he held them back. She imagined his grim expression. This was going to be difficult for him, too, as she knew. But she wanted him to see it for himself, and then tell her that she wasn’t going out of her mind.
“Are you sure it’s genuine?” he asked a little later. There was a slight echo to his voice. He had switched on the hands-free headset in the car.
“What else would it be? Toy Story?”
“I mean, because Trevini sent it.”
“He couldn’t have faked this. Not even Trevini.”
“He only sent it to hurt you.” Alessandro didn’t try to conceal his fury with the attorney.
“Could be. But if I hadn’t seen it…”
“You’d be feeling better right now.”
“I can’t explain to you over the phone.”
The car engine hummed monotonously in the background. In her mind, she saw the Ferrari racing along lonely roads, past bleak, dark hills. “I don’t know if I should really look at it,” he said. “It’s too—”
“Intimate?” she snapped. “What’s on that video is about as intimate as a bolt fired into an animal’s head in a slaughterhouse.”
Once again he didn’t reply, probably because he guessed that whatever he said would be the wrong thing. She was sorry, but she wasn’t making any headway against her temper. If she weren’t so furious, she’d be howling.