by Kai Meyer
There were more earth-shattering things in life than a family who had belonged to the Mafia for generations.
They were flying over a breathtaking landscape of steep slopes, precipitous rock formations, and small patches of yellow, which, as they came closer, turned out to be clusters of square little houses. Mountain villages clung to the rock walls, hanging like eagle’s nests above bottomless ravines. In the valleys Rosa saw endless rows of grapevines, now and then groves of lemon trees, and dried-up pastures. Narrow roads ran from place to place in winding bends, sometimes ending up nowhere.
The farther they went into the interior of the island, the more parched and empty the countryside became. Most noticeable of all were the countless ruins of deserted farms, the remains of a time when the farmers and farmhands working for great landowners had lived there. Today both the farmers and the landowners were gone, and no one went to the trouble of demolishing the last ruined hovels. Wind and weather would do it in the course of time.
Rosa was overwhelmed by the rugged beauty of the landscape. Now and then, on the crests of mountains outside the villages, they saw dilapidated villas, some of them fortified like castles, with battlements and defensive towers, with chapels and their own graveyards. Above the noise, Zoe explained that many of the ancient ruins still showed the influence of the Arabs who had occupied Sicily long ago.
Once they flew over crumbling pillars and the ruins of a temple like a miniature Acropolis, and finally over the stone tiers of an ancient amphitheater. Nowhere else in the Mediterranean, said Zoe, were there so many Greek ruins so close together. The island had once been a Greek colony, and it was said, on fairly good authority, that many of the adventures of Odysseus had taken place on the Sicilian coast. “There’ve always been monsters here,” shouted Zoe, raising Rosa’s ear protectors. “Not just since Cosa Nostra took over.”
After a while the land turned greener again. Gorse bushes, oleanders, and cactus fields gave way to light woodland. The pilot gave them a sign, and next moment they began their descent. The helicopter flew in a wide curve above a slope covered with olive trees.
“Here we are,” mouthed Zoe silently.
Rosa pressed her nose to the glass and saw their destination below. Exactly what she’d been looking for. Somewhere as isolated as possible.
The Palazzo Alcantara.
PREDATORS
“WELCOME,” SAID THE TALL woman as the sisters reached the side of the meadow where they had landed, and the sound of the helicopter blades died away behind them.
Against the background of the baroque house and its grounds, Florinda Alcantara looked like an apparition from bygone days. She was standing in the shade of a huge chestnut tree. There were dozens of them here, forming a dark rampart in front of the gnarled and twisted olive trees.
Florinda had the southern Italian features of her ancestors. Her high, dark brows made her look stern, although there was something very sensuous about her full lips. Her hair, which was black and pinned up on top of her head, had been tinted light blond. The dark roots were showing.
Her warm embrace came as a surprise. So did the kiss she dropped on Rosa’s forehead. “We’ve been looking forward to seeing you,” she said, and her beaming smile startled Rosa. When Florinda smiled, she looked kind and warmhearted. Only when her expression was serious was there an oppressive darkness to her gaze. Then it seemed as if she had a lot on her mind, and it had been troubling her for a long time.
On the way to the house, Rosa glanced back at the helicopter. Now she noticed that its paint was flaking in many places. The pilot was evidently concerned about a thin plume of smoke rising from the rear engine. He stood on the grass in front of it, legs planted apart, hands on his hips, assessing the damage. A little later she heard the sound of a hammer on metal.
The faded splendor of past centuries surrounded the Alcantara estate. The broad facade of the house cast its shadow on a graveled front courtyard with a large fountain rising in the middle of it. No water flowed from the mouths of the stone fauns. As she came closer, Rosa saw dozens of empty birds’ nests in the dry basin; someone must have removed them from the trees and collected them here.
Wrought-iron balconies dominated the front of the palazzo. The wall was adorned with elaborate stucco work. Statues of pale brown tuff stone watched over the front courtyard from niches. Most of the sculptures were damaged, and almost all were overgrown with moss and lichen.
Florinda led them through a tall, rounded arch. At the end of this tunnel gateway—some ten yards long, smelling of mildewed plaster, and surprisingly cool inside—lay a sunlit inner courtyard. There was a large flower bed in the middle of it, neglected and overgrown with weeds. The main part of the palazzo beyond the courtyard was taller than the other three wings, though it had the same kind of stucco ornamentation, iron balconies, and statues as on the outer facade. Two broad flights of stone steps, one on the left and one on the right, led up to the main entrance on the second floor. Part of the semicircular porch was open.
Florinda asked about Rosa’s flight, and the connection in Rome. She herself, she added, thought the whole procedure was an unreasonable imposition. Rosa agreed with her.
“Your sister says you’re a vegetarian,” said Florinda as she walked up the steps to the entrance with the two girls. The paint on the double door was flaking. A lizard scurried ahead of them over sun-baked stone and disappeared into the building.
“I’ve been a vegetarian for years.”
“I can’t remember hearing of any Alcantara who didn’t like meat.”
“Well, someone here doesn’t like birds.”
Florinda didn’t reply as she climbed the last step.
Zoe shot Rosa a sideways glance. “Florinda hates their twittering. The gardeners have instructions to take all the nests out of the trees, and then once a month they’re burnt in the basin of the fountain, so the flames can’t get out of control. Forest fires are always a danger in these parts—don’t let all the green around here fool you. The whole island is dry as a bone in summer, specially when the sirocco blows over the sea from Africa.”
“Sirocco?”
“Hot desert wind. It often brings sand from the Sahara with it.” She shrugged. “Doesn’t do the skin any good.”
“And the nests—”
“Only the nests,” her aunt interrupted her. “Not the birds.” She showed her winning smile again. “I’m not a monster.”
Now they were in the entrance hall, which was high ceilinged, dark, and again full of faded magnificence. Florinda excused herself, saying she had to see about preparations for supper. Obviously she did the cooking herself. On Sicily, Zoe explained, no one ate a hot meal before eight in the evening.
She took Rosa up a stone staircase with worn-down, carpeted steps, then through long corridors into the back part of the main house. They didn’t meet anyone else on the way.
“I thought there’d be servants here.”
“Not many,” said Zoe. “Florinda doesn’t like strangers around the house. It’s obviously always been like that with the Alcantaras, even when our grandparents and great-grandparents were alive. In the mornings a couple of women come in from the village near the mountain to do the cleaning, but they don’t sleep at the house. The two gardeners come for a few hours in the afternoon, but that’s hardly long enough to do more than the minimum necessary.”
“Like collecting birds’ nests?”
Zoe shrugged.
To Rosa’s surprise, her room turned out to be bright and sunny, large enough to be a stately hall anywhere else. It was empty except for a four-poster bed with elaborately carved bedposts and an antique chest of drawers with a marble top that made it a dressing table. A small room to one side appeared to be a walk-in closet. The walls of the bedroom were covered with old tapestries. A tapestry beside the door had come loose, revealing faded wall paintings underneath.
“I’ll unpack later,” said Rosa, throwing her traveling bag with a sweeping gestu
re into the small room, where it lay surrounded by walls of empty shelves and cupboards.
Zoe went on talking. About the cook who sometimes did the cooking on her own, but often just lent Florinda a hand. About the helicopter pilot, who lived in Piazza Armerina and was really a mechanic. And about the guards who patrolled the surrounding olive groves and pinewoods on Florinda’s orders.
“Looks as if about ninety percent of the rooms here are empty, right?”
“More like ninety-five percent. It’s only at night that it sounds as if they were all occupied. Creaking and cracking noises all over the place.”
Rosa whispered, “‘The after-dream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into everyday life…’ Maybe I should go take a closer look at the facade of this place, make sure there are no cracks in it.”
“What?”
“Edgar Allan Poe. The Fall of the House of Usher. The narrator compares his feelings when he first sees the Ushers’ house to the way an opium addict feels waking up. In the end the whole place falls apart…. I read it in school. Don’t you know it, Zoe?”
Her sister’s brow wrinkled. “Well, there are no ghosts here, anyway.”
“Madeline Usher wasn’t a ghost. She seemed to be dead, so her brother buried her alive. Then she crawled out of her coffin again. Where’s the family vault?”
Zoe looked critically at Rosa’s black nail polish. “Still crazy about all that horror crap, I see.”
Rosa gently touched her hand. “Will you show me Dad’s grave?”
A granite slab, one among many, laid into a wall devoted to the dead. No pictures, no flowers, just a stone chessboard pattern of carved names.
DAVIDE ALCANTARA. Not even his dates of birth and death.
The vault was in a chapel next to the east wing of the house. There was a connecting door to the main house, but Rosa told her sister she’d like to walk back around the outside.
In the open air it smelled of gorse and lavender. The palazzo was built on a slope rising gently toward the east. On the other side of the chestnut trees, the pinewoods grew all the way up to the top of the mountain. The wide olive groves began downhill, on the slope to the west of the house, below the terrace with its panoramic view, and couldn’t be seen from here.
Something drew Rosa’s gaze up to the chapel. A cast-iron bell, old and encrusted with black as if it had been hanging in a fire, was mounted in a niche in the facade above the porch.
“Did a bird once nest in there?”
“Florinda doesn’t like birds twittering. You don’t like other people. So what?”
“Everyone likes songbirds.”
“Not her.” Zoe waved her off. “And she feels differently about birdsong, believe me.”
Rosa looked up at the blackened bell once again, then at the open entrance to the chapel. “I never knew him at all, not like you.”
“He was okay, I guess.”
“Then why did he marry Mom?”
“She’s not as bad as you think.”
“You weren’t there.”
Zoe lowered her gaze. “No, I wasn’t. I’m sorry.” She said nothing for a moment. “I ought to have been there to help you.” But it sounded as if she was still glad that she’d been a long way away at the time.
Rosa took Zoe’s hand. “Come on, show me around the place.”
Together they walked around the palazzo under the chestnuts. The shining glass of some kind of greenhouse was visible among the trees, like a long glass finger sticking out of the back wall of the house. Rosa had noticed it earlier from her room; it was right under her window.
On the west side, on the outskirts of the olive groves farther down the slope, they met neither the gardeners nor the guards of the property. Rosa was walking in a kind of daze, as if on cotton, but she knew that if she lay down in bed now she wouldn’t be able to sleep.
“Florinda wants us to go with her tomorrow,” said Zoe.
“Go where?”
“It’s kind of an official thing. Has to do with family politics.”
“Robbing a bank?”
A vertical line appeared between Zoe’s brows. “I told you, we don’t have anything to do with all that.”
“We just collect what comes in from the people who commit the crimes in our area, right?”
“A lot of the business is … let’s say semilegal these days. Do you know how Florinda’s been making a small fortune year after year? With wind turbines. All over the mountains, all over Sicily, she has one of her companies putting up wind turbines. She gets millions from Rome in funding for the project—and so far they haven’t produced a single watt of electricity.” When she realized that Rosa was hardly listening, she sighed. “Tomorrow is a funeral. Everyone has to go, I mean every family sends its representatives. One of the big capi has died. That means we all have to be there at his last rites to show respect, even his enemies … code of honor, blah, blah, blah.”
“His enemies?” said Rosa. “Is that us?”
“The Alcantaras and Carnevares have hated each other forever. But there’s kind of a truce that no one will break.”
Rosa stopped as if rooted to the spot. “That name.”
“Carnevare? They’re burying their capo tomorrow. Baron Massimo Carnevare.”
The cotton under Rosa’s feet gave way a little.
Family business, he’d said.
ENEMIES
ROSA SLEPT UNTIL WELL into the morning. After breakfast in the dining room, she explored the building. On the second floor up, the piano nobile, where there were salons adorned with faded frescoes and a dusty ballroom, she met one of the housekeepers who came in from the village, working for an hourly wage trying to get the better of the dust of centuries. The woman gave her a monosyllabic greeting and scurried into one of the other rooms.
At the end of a long corridor on the third floor she found Florinda’s study, a spacious room paneled in dark wood. It had no door, only an open, rounded arch that gave her a view straight through to the desk. A wrought-iron balcony looked out on the inner courtyard of the palazzo. The glass balcony door was open. All was still outside, with only a few cicadas chirping in the overgrown flower bed in the courtyard.
There was a computer on a side table. Rosa looked around, and as there was no one in sight to ask for permission, she sat down in front of the monitor. When she moved the mouse, it came to life.
She downloaded “My Death” to Florinda’s desktop and made the song the background to her own MySpace page. She hadn’t updated her status in over two years, and her list of friends was as dead as the names on the tombs in the family vault. Same with Facebook. She checked out Twitter and her email, found a few from people she communicated with only sporadically over the internet—and only over the internet—but didn’t feel like answering and closed the program again. Then she sent the music file to the recycle bin and emptied it.
She was about to get to her feet and continue looking around the palazzo when something occurred to her. She opened her MySpace page again, looked at her profile, and found the sentence, “Would like to be as self-confident as my sister.” It felt like she’d written that a hundred years ago, and she thought of deleting it with all the rest of the nonsense that no longer had anything to do with her. But that felt like killing off a whole person, her old self, the Rosa of a year ago.
It was silly and childish, but she couldn’t bring herself simply to delete her profile. It would be like sweeping out a room that no one had entered for too long. She would never open the door to it again, but at the same time something about it fascinated her. The old Rosa would still be alive on the internet, as if the world hadn’t stopped for a moment and then started turning in an entirely different direction.
While Scott Walker sang about death, she stared at the profile of a stranger, and at a photo in which she’d taken a lot of trouble to look melancholy and profound. Shaking her head, she left it as it was, closed the browser again, and felt like she’d just buried herself deep in
the internet under a granite slab without any date of death on it.
Outside, gravel crunched under tires as a car drove into the inner courtyard. Maybe it was Florinda coming home from somewhere. Rosa hadn’t seen her in the palazzo that morning.
She typed the dead baron’s name into the search window. Massimo Carnevare. To make sure, she added the name of the place she’d read in Alessandro’s passport: Genuardo.
A car door slammed. She heard hasty footsteps.
The screen offered countless sites, mainly connected with the names of all kinds of companies. Most of them sounded straightforward and boring: construction firms, agricultural machinery importers, even a foundation supporting disadvantaged kids in the slums of Palermo and Catania. But there were also press reports of court proceedings, of financial scandals over the construction of government buildings, alleged contacts with North African drug barons. She’d expected all that. She was sure that if she’d entered Florinda’s name, similar sites would have come up. Including wind turbines that never went around.
She deleted the name Massimo and replaced it with Alessandro.
She glanced briefly at the archway, which gave her a view through several other rooms to the far side of the wing. No one in sight.
Enter.
A year ago Alessandro had been on a sports team at an American private school in the Hudson Valley. Then he took a course for law students who were going to work in economics. In her mind’s eye she saw him in a gray suit standing at a speaker’s podium with a laptop, explaining the fascinating attraction of forged balance sheets to other seventeen-year-olds.
She was just losing interest when, ten or eleven links down, she came upon a story about a charity gala in Milan. The article was excruciatingly slow coming up; broadband speeds in the Sicilian backwoods obviously left a lot to be desired. The text appeared first, then, gradually, the pictures.