Arcadia Burns

by Kai Meyer

  Dallamano had come in only half an hour before. He was obviously doing research of some kind over in the Quinta da Regaleira. Rosa had known that he had started studying sculpture after finding the statues, a discovery that he and Iole’s father had made together six and a half years ago. Enough time for him to acquire a certain amount of knowledge. But she was surprised to find him devoting himself so enthusiastically to the mysteries of the Quinta. Dallamano was an academic—an engineer, if she remembered correctly—so he was no stranger to books. For Rosa, who had only just made it through the end of high school, it made more of an impression than she wanted to admit.

  He still wore his dark hair shoulder length, and it was still untidy, but he no longer hid behind that bushy beard. Instead, his chin and cheeks were shaded with stubble. Last time she had met him, in the Initiation Well, he had been wearing a pin-striped suit; today he wore khaki cargo pants with a great many pockets, and a brown sweater. Both were covered with dust, and he had brushed off only the worst of it when he’d arrived.

  He was leaning back in his armchair, chain-smoking. The ashtray stood on an unsteady pile of books beside the armrest. His dark, intent gaze was turned on Rosa through the clouds of cigarette smoke.

  “Iole says she likes living with you,” he said, breaking the silence.

  Rosa glanced doubtfully at Iole. It was only a few days ago that Val had been holding a pistol to her head.

  Iole looked up from the white cat, gave Rosa a silent smile, and devoted herself to the animal again.

  “I do my best,” said Rosa.

  “She told me she has a private tutor. That’s good. Iole has a lot to catch up on.”

  “She was extremely anxious to see you again, Signore Dallamano. You two must be very fond of each other.”

  He held the cigarette motionless in his hand, and stared into the smoke curling up from the glowing tip. “My brother didn’t always leave himself as much time for his daughter as she needed. Someone had to look after her.”

  Rosa remembered something that Iole had told her. “You taught her how to shoot. How old was she at the time—eight? Maybe nine?”

  “I was a different man back then.” His mood of regret surprised her. “There are many things I wouldn’t do the same way now, and that’s only one of them.”

  Iole cast Rosa a glance that wasn’t hard to interpret. It was her ability to handle a gun that had saved both their lives at the Gibellina monument.

  “Why are you here?” he asked Rosa. “Iole flew to Portugal on her own. She could have found her way back without you as well.”

  “Can’t you guess why I’m here?”

  “More questions? About the statues in the Strait of Messina?” He inhaled smoke, and let it drift out through his lips with relish. “I’ve already told you and your Carnevare friend all I know.”

  “The statues are gone,” she said. “Someone got to them before us.”

  He took a deep breath, looking as if he wasn’t accustomed to doing so without added nicotine and tar. “Someone?”

  “Evangelos Thanassis.”

  “The shipowner?”

  “The statues were taken on board one of his ships. The Stabat Mater. Does that name mean anything to you?”

  “It’s a musical composition.”

  Rosa nodded. “A medieval poem set to music. The first line runs, ‘Stabat mater dolorosa.’ The mother stood in sorrow.”

  “A few years ago I’d have been impressed,” he said. “But these days knowledge has nothing to do with education, only with typing the right questions on a keyboard.”

  Iole pricked up her ears. “That’s what Signora Falchi always says.”

  “The woman obviously knows what she’s talking about.”

  “The Stabat Mater is the flagship of Thanassis’s fleet of cruise ships,” Rosa went on, undeterred. “At least, she was before he withdrew from public life. Odd name for a pleasure ship, wouldn’t you say?”

  “To the best of my knowledge, Thanassis is an odd character.”

  “Did the Dallamanos ever have anything to do with him? I mean, your companies built harbors and so on.”

  He shook his head. “Thanassis has enough firms of his own to do that for him.”

  “What about TABULA? Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Hermes Trismegistos,” he said, without even thinking about it.

  Rosa nodded. “The emerald tablet.”

  “Tabula Smaragdina Hermetis. What do the Hermetics have to do with a Greek shipowner?” He abruptly sat up and ground out his cigarette in the ashtray. “So that’s why you’re here? To ask me about that?”

  “You knew so much before about the Quinta, and that crazy Freemason with his stone alphabet. Isn’t that what you said the Quinta itself was?”

  “A stone alphabet of alchemy.”

  The white cat yawned luxuriously, and Iole let it infect her with a yawn too. But Rosa wasn’t taken in by her show of indifference to the conversation. She knew Iole too well by now for that. The girl had her ears pricked up the whole time, and she usually drew the right conclusions from what she heard, remarkably quickly.

  “You seem to be very busy with all these.” Rosa indicated the mountains of books in the conservatory.

  “Most of them belong to my landlady. There’s much more material on the upper floors. She’s sublet the first floor here to me.”

  Rosa’s suspicions were stirred. “Is she one of these Hermetics?”

  “She’s all kinds of things. She doesn’t talk about herself much. But you’re not here on her account, are you? What exactly do you want to know?”

  Rosa caught herself looking through the glazed roof of the conservatory up at the second floor. “There’s a group of people…an organization…They call themselves TABULA, and they probably take the name from the emerald tablet of this Hermes Trismegistos.”

  “There are many such groups. Most of them consist of muddle-headed persons, esoterics and so forth, and these days they’re joined by all the crazy Dan Brown fans—would-be Freemasons making the Templars their hobby. Genuine alchemists are natural loners who hide themselves away in their laboratories. They were like that five hundred years ago, and it’s the same now.”

  “They also hide themselves away behind books?” she asked, glancing at the room.

  He lit another cigarette. “Of course.”

  “I don’t think that TABULA really has anything to do with alchemy. The tablet is only some kind of symbol to them. These people are scientists. And they must have some rather prosperous patrons.”

  “Evangelos Thanassis?”

  “Could be. It’s only a suspicion so far, that’s all.”

  “But there’s something you’re not telling me.”

  Somewhere in the house a telephone rang loudly. The cat jumped off Iole’s lap in alarm, leaped up onto a tottering tower of books, and hopped off it again just before the pile collapsed in a cloud of dust.

  Dallamano stood up with the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and bent over the chaos. The next moment he picked up the cat by the nape of its neck and carried it out of the conservatory and into the house. A little later they heard his voice on the phone, indistinctly.

  Rosa turned to Iole. “How much does he know?” she whispered.

  “About the dynasties? I haven’t told him anything.”

  “You sure?”

  “Rosa!”

  “Sorry. It’s just that—”

  Dallamano came back and stopped beside his armchair. “Scientists, then. Top-ranking people, I guess. At least they ought to be, if someone’s investing large sums of money in them. In them and in secrecy.”

  “Sounds logical.”

  “Nobel Prize winners?”

  “How would I know?”

  “If you have any idea what kind of research this organization is doing, then you’d better start by looking at the list of winners of the Nobel Prize for the last few decades. And it would also be a good idea to find out who was
expected to win but didn’t. After that you could check who of those has carried out investigations into your subject. It’s possible that you might come upon a couple of people who could be involved with TABULA. Depending how much you really know, you might even find a name or two that you’ve heard before.”

  “I’ll try that,” she said. “Thanks.”

  Dallamano turned to Iole. “The taxi driver called. He’s waiting down on the road. If you two want to catch your flight, you’d better leave now.”

  “If I do find out anything,” said Rosa as she got to her feet, “would you mind if we talked about it some more?”

  “Of course I’d mind,” he snapped at her, then added in milder tones, “but that’s not going to stop you, is it? One of these days you’ll be at my door again to pester me. Just so long as that young Carnevare doesn’t turn up here.”

  She smiled. “I’ll make sure of that.”

  Outside, in the spacious entrance hall of the villa, Rosa’s eyes fell on a figure at the top of the stairs to the second floor.

  “Olá,” she called.

  “Olá,” the woman replied. She was delicately built, and at the most in her midtwenties. Her jeans and close-fitting blouse were black, like the long hair that fell smoothly over her shoulders. Rosa couldn’t see much more, but she noticed her strong, dark eyebrows.

  The woman stood there at the top of the stairs, with one slender hand on the banister, and Rosa wondered whether she had overheard the conversation in the conservatory.

  “Your landlady?” asked Rosa, turning to Dallamano as he picked up Iole’s bag to take it out to the taxi.

  He nodded, and walked out with his niece. Rosa glanced up at the landing once again. The woman was gone. A door closed up above in the house.

  “Coming?” called Iole from outside.

  Rosa pulled herself together, hurried down the steps, and followed the two Dallamanos along the enchanted path to the road.

  THE ISLAND AND THE MOON

  A GOAT LOOKING FOR tufts of grass among the volcanic rocks bleated as, a few hundred feet farther down, the waves broke in cascades of spray on the shores of Isola Luna.

  Rosa and Alessandro were on their way uphill along a rocky slope. They had spent all morning climbing over porous stones, bizarrely shaped ridges, and lava glaciers frozen solid. Rosa had grazed her ankles and the palms of her hands, had lost no opportunity to curse volubly, but it had been a long time since she’d felt so content and happy.

  Now the rim of the crater was directly above them. So close to their destination, she was almost sorry that the climb was nearly over. She stopped and looked back at the rooftops of the higgledy-piggledy house far below, down the mountain. Aside from the former bunker by the shore, the villa was the only building on the Carnevares’ private island.

  The helicopter had brought Rosa and Alessandro there the evening before, and had then flown back to the Sicilian coast, thirty miles to the south. Apart from the goats who had taken up residence after Alessandro demolished Cesare’s enclosure for big cats, they were alone on the island.

  Rosa stood with her back to the mountain, enjoying the sensation of the wind on her face as it came up from the sea. She briefly closed her eyes, thought of nothing at all, simply sensed the gentle caress of the breeze on her skin. Then she felt that Alessandro was close, and the next moment his lips were on hers.

  “It can stay like this,” she said.

  “What can?”

  “Life. Everything. You and me.”

  “Not before we’ve seen the crater,” he replied, forcing a smile. It was stupid of him to come on this climbing expedition with his injuries only half healed. But he claimed that he had never been up to the peak and this was the best day for it. He didn’t tell her why and she suspected that any other day would also have been the best day for it. Just as long as the two of them were together and no one disturbed them.

  “You really never looked into it?”

  “Never.”

  “Not even from the chopper?”

  He shook his head.

  She looked at the last part of the climb up the mountain. “We still have…what, about three hundred feet to go? So this is our last chance to think about what we expect to see.”

  “A crater?”

  “You can be so boring.”

  He returned her grin. “A base for extraterrestrials.”

  “The way down to the earth’s core.”

  “A launchpad for nuclear warheads.”

  “The ruins of Arcadia.”

  “TABULA’s secret control center.”

  She bowed her head. “Would that be good or bad?”

  “How would I know? Let’s not talk about TABULA today.”

  “You started it.”

  “Only in the heat of the moment.”

  They set off again. On the way, she said, “I went back to the palazzo yesterday. I’ve decided to leave the whole place exactly as it is for now. Everything is covered with ash. Even the lemons are gray.”

  “The rain will wash it off again soon.”

  “Do you know what I wish I’d done?”

  “What?”

  “Make a snow angel. In ashes.”

  “Good idea.”

  “No, seriously. I almost did it. I’ve realized that I can do or not do whatever I like. And if I want to lie down in the ashes with my clothes on and leave a snow angel shape there, how can anyone object?”

  “Snow angels are only romantic if there are two people making them.”

  “Then come with me next time.”

  “I will. I’ve always wanted to roll about in a bed of ashes with you.”

  She took his hand, and together they went the last few feet to the rim of the crater. It had been Rosa’s idea to come to the island this morning, after they’d heard the radio news reporting the murder of an attorney in Taormina. She badly needed fresh air, and—at least for a while—the feeling of being alone in the world with Alessandro.

  “Okay,” she said, as they stopped and looked ahead, over the rim of the crater. “Wow! And it’s official.”

  In front of them, a barren rock basin opened up, at least nine hundred feet in diameter and half that depth. Light and dark veins of stone meandered over its sides, meeting at the center in a pattern of countless shades of gray. They saw no hidden extraterrestrial base, no landing strip for flying saucers, only volcanic rock, hostile to all life, where thousands of years ago the lava had solidified into clumps and hillocks. There was a flickering above the bottom of the basin, like the heat of an imminent eruption, but it was only a mirage.

  “Look—there’s more here than just the end of the world,” said Rosa softly, pointing to a solitary dandelion growing from a crevice.

  “Or the beginning.” He smiled. “No one’s been up here for ages. Maybe no one ever. So let’s lay official claim to the place as its discoverers.”

  “We can found a colony. And a mission station for the native population of beetles and spiders.”

  “And ours are the first footprints here, like on the moon.”

  “There’s only one problem,” she said. “The island has belonged to you Carnevares for centuries. Don’t tell me there’s any kind of remote spot that your family wouldn’t have exploited in its business deals.”

  “Oh,” he said, frowning. “You really think so?”

  A smile stole over her features. “No, the island was your mother’s favorite place. She wouldn’t have let that happen.”

  “She wouldn’t have let Cesare murder her, either, given any choice.”

  She sighed softly. “No.” A gust of wind blew through her hair from behind, sending it fluttering around her face. She had to tame it with her hands so that she could lean over and kiss him.

  When she opened her eyes, she saw that he was staring at her.

  “Not fair,” she complained. “People aren’t supposed to look when they’re kissing.”

  “Says who?” His smile was as infectious as ever, and
she was glad that he had forgotten his grief again.

  “Kissing calls for concentration if you want to do it properly.”

  “We don’t have transformations anymore when we kiss. Did you notice?”

  She reacted with pretend surprise. “And I was just wondering what was different from usual.”

  His grin widened, the dimples were deeper. “Want to go down there?” He pointed into the crater.

  Rosa shook her head. “No, I’m sunburned already.”

  “That’ll go away again after the next transformation.”

  She moved away from him and climbed up a small rise with a flattened surface on top. “Come up here.”

  In spite of his injuries, he followed her nimbly. They sat down on the rock, held hands, and looked out over the slope of the volcano onto the wide expanse of the Mediterranean.

  “It’s out there somewhere,” she said thoughtfully.

  “The Stabat Mater?”

  “The answer. The ship is only a part of it.”

  “Probably.”

  “And Arcadia once lay somewhere there.”

  They fell silent as their eyes lingered on the horizon, looking for something that might have existed thousands of years ago. They themselves were only an echo of it, the shadow cast by Arcadia into the present.

  “We ought to try it again sometime,” he said after a while.

  “Kissing without turning into monsters?”

  “I like you even as a monster.”

  “But at the end of love stories like that, the monster always falls off the Empire State Building.”

  “Except that we’re both monsters. Or all the others are, depending how you look at it.”

  This time the kiss lasted much longer. Rosa peeked, but Alessandro’s eyes were shut tight. With a warm feeling inside, she closed her own eyelids, searched for the chill of the snake inside herself, and found nothing but a faint breath of icy air that she could easily tamp down. Was it only a question of practice? Of readiness? Of being an adult?

  The sun was high in the clear sky, yet the moon was visible, pale in the radiant blue.

  “You can only see it from here at this time of the year,” he claimed.