by Kai Meyer
There was a rancid smell in the air, and she hoped that it came only from the dried sausages and the ham dangling from the beams on strings.
No books, but there was a tiny TV set. Its satellite dish must have been hidden in the ruined roof. Beside it stood a refrigerator, on top of that a clock radio. No phone, definitely no computer.
Not exactly the HQ of a supervillain. But the old man hadn’t had to say the word capo to give Rosa the right idea.
“You’re the capo dei capi,” she said, looking around her. The boss of bosses. Head of the Sicilian Mafia. “Is that why the other families hate the Alcantaras so much? Because Florinda and Zoe run errands for you?”
The gun landed on the table with a clatter. He opened the refrigerator, took out a wooden board with cheese on it, and placed it beside the firearm. There was also a sausage and a loaf of bread. “Sit down,” he said, pointing to one of the chairs.
She chose the other chair, which was closer to the door. He registered that with a smile, sat down on the first chair himself, and brought out a pocketknife. Very much at his ease, he cut the sausage into finger-thick slices. Rosa watched him. He drew the sharp blade through the firm meat again and again with practiced ease.
“I am Salvatore Pantaleone,” he said, without looking up. “If you were to go to the police and tell them that name, there’d be more carabinieri than trees in this forest in no time at all. They’ve been after me for nearly thirty years, and in that time I’ve lived in many dilapidated hovels. But this one, I trust, will be the last.”
If there was melancholy in his words, he hid it well. It sounded more like the voice of a man on the verge of a great triumph.
“I told your sister to bring you to me.”
“Well, she didn’t.”
“Oh yes, of course she did. You think it was just chance that she passed beneath your window every time she came here?”
“Why didn’t she just take me with her?”
“I told her not to.”
“But—”
“You have courage. And a strong will of your own. I’d hoped that would be the case, but I wanted to be perfectly sure. Zoe told me what happened that night. The attack by the tiger, that Carnevare bastard. But you came back anyway. I like that.”
“So Zoe was only a decoy?”
“She carries out other tasks. You said so yourself. She works as a messenger for me, just as Florinda and others did before her. I had to disappear from the view of the authorities very early, and since then the Alcantaras have been my link with the outside world. I put my life in your family’s hands, Rosa. So far they haven’t disappointed me.”
“That package Zoe had with her—it was letters to the other families? With instructions?”
Pantaleone nodded. “I am not the first capo dei capi forced to spend a lifetime in hiding. The world out there has changed, technology has developed—but some things never lose their usefulness. Paper and ink. Messages may travel faster by these newfangled methods, but everyone understands a note with a few sentences on it, whether he’s the capo of a clan or a man from a mountain village. Even the stupid can read these days, but not everyone gets along with a computer. What’s more, data files can be traced back, but a sheet of paper?”
She thought how easy it had been for her to wave goodbye to her own online existence, to Facebook and MySpace. If she’d sent any of her digital friends a handwritten letter, most of them would probably have thought it was a joke.
“You wanted to meet me. Why?”
“You’re an Alcantara. You will be an important person someday.”
She laughed. “Sure.”
“You’re Florinda’s heiress, didn’t you know that? She has no children, no other close relations. The Alcantaras are dying out, and who can blame their menfolk?” He grinned in a knowing way that sent a shiver down her spine. “There’s only Florinda, your sister, and you left. With an empire of companies—it’s quite easy to assess their value, and they can be kept going by a few trusted employees and some distant cousins.”
“In a couple of weeks I’ll be flying back to the States. And that will be it as far as I’m concerned.”
“I doubt it,” he said, and pushed a piece of bread, some slices of sausage, and the cheese across the table to her. “Eat that.”
She didn’t touch it. “None of this has anything to do with me. I’m only here because…”
“Because you lost your child. I know.”
Zoe. Of course. “Go to hell,” she spat, and did not retreat an inch when he leaned over the table. “And if you try hitting me again, I’ll defend myself.”
He grinned. “You’re right. It has nothing to do with me.”
She didn’t for a moment think he meant it seriously.
“I apologize again,” he said in friendly tones.
“I’d better go now.”
“Eat.” Just the one word, calm, without emphasis.
She hesitated. There was something Alessandro had said that she couldn’t get out of her mind: The capo dei capi came from the Arcadian dynasties. So Salvatore Pantaleone was one of them, but for the life of her she couldn’t imagine what animal might be lurking inside him. And she wasn’t anxious to find out. Certainly not here and now.
She tore off a piece of dry white bread and chewed without pleasure.
“The sausage is good,” he said.
“I’m a vegetarian.”
Whatever else he might be, he was a Sicilian who had spent his whole life in the country. The idea of someone not eating meat seemed to annoy him.
“Then eat some of the cheese. You’re too thin.”
“It runs in the family.”
He sighed softly. “Yes, so it does.”
To satisfy him she ate a piece of cheese. It didn’t taste bad, but she didn’t feel like eating.
He watched her chewing, both elbows on the table, his mottled hands clasped in front of his chin.
“You don’t often get visitors,” she commented.
“Only your sister. Even Florinda hasn’t been here for a long time. I wouldn’t let her.”
“Wouldn’t let her?”
“Waste of time, talking to Florinda. She’s not the future, you are.”
She was going to contradict him again, but something kept her back. His keen eyes, his firm tone of voice. He seemed perfectly sure of himself.
“Never forget who you are,” he said. “You Alcantaras are my voice and sometimes my eyes. My hand is over you, protecting you. No one will dare to touch a hair of your heads while I’m watching over you.”
“Tano Carnevare obviously didn’t see it that way.”
His fist crashed down on the table. “That boy has no idea what he’s done! The entire Carnevare clan are nothing but trouble. Make sure you don’t get too close to them.” So Zoe hadn’t told him about that. “The baron was a weakling who listened only to what his advisers whispered. God knows what plans Cesare’s thinking up. I’d have given orders to exterminate the whole brood long ago if their influence on the mainland hadn’t been so extremely useful to us all.”
This was the time to ask the question that had been on the tip of her tongue for ages. “And who makes sure the concordat’s still in force? You?”
He snorted softly. “The concordat protecting the Lamias is too old for anyone to break it.”
“But who makes sure that peace is kept? And who will punish Tano Carnevare if he ignores the agreement again?”
“You know more about the Arcadian dynasties than Zoe and Florinda think. Who told you?”
“Oh… I overheard them talking. They thought I was asleep, but I picked up a few things.”
His glance became more penetrating.
He doesn’t believe me, she thought. He can tell I’m lying.
Brusquely, he pushed his chair back. “Maybe you really should go now.”
She put the rest of the bread on the table and stood up. Being careful to walk slowly, she went to the door.
; “Over there, the letters.” He pointed to a bundle lying on the floor near the doorway. “Take them with you. And tell Zoe she needn’t come up here anymore. I want you to do it in future.”
Everything in her cried out to tell him where he could shove his letters and his orders. But then she only bent down in silence, picked up the package, and opened the door.
“Why do you trust me?”
“You’re one of us.”
“So are the others. Even Tano.”
He smiled. “But I know your destiny. And it’s waiting for you here, not in America.”
She stared at him for a moment longer. Then, without a word, she closed the door behind her and headed home.
ROME
SHE DIDN’T KNOW WHICH surprised her more: that her sister had a best friend here, or that Zoe hadn’t breathed a word about her before.
Lilia was pretty, red-haired—and stoned to the eyeballs. Zoe too was in an unusual state of euphoria, acting as if nothing had happened last night. She didn’t say a word to Rosa about the furious scene in the hall outside her room. She didn’t even want to know where Rosa had been with her car when she was gone for almost twenty-four hours.
“You will come, won’t you?” It was the third time she’d asked, although Rosa had already said yes.
Zoe and Lilia were flying to Rome for two days, shopping and having a good time, they said, and they wouldn’t give Rosa any peace until she agreed to go with them.
In fact she had no objection at all. She wanted to turn her back on Sicily for a while. She needed time to catch her breath. Time to think. And she needed new clothes. There were hundreds of things she had to discuss with Zoe. Although not while her sister was running frantically around the room like a spinning top. And definitely not while this Lilia was present. Maybe there’d be a chance for a private conversation with Zoe on the way to Rome.
Lilia—red-headed, beautiful, stoned Lilia—clapped her hands when Rosa asked, “When do we leave?”
“Right now!” cried Zoe, delighted, laughing along with Lilia as if someone had cracked an incredibly funny joke.
“You’re planning to go to the airport just like that?”
With a flourish, Zoe produced three tickets from her bag. “Ta-da! All booked. The chopper will take us to Catania, and Catania—” She interrupted herself, exchanged a startled, wide-eyed glance with Lilia, and then burst out laughing again. “Well, not Catania, but the plane—from Catania, I mean—will take us to Rome. After we’ve taken the chopper to—”
“Yes,” Rosa interrupted her. “You said that already.”
“Did I?” Genuine surprise, and then a giggle. “Pack your things and let’s go!”
“Does Florinda know?”
“She won’t be back from Lampedusa before this evening. I wrote her a note.” She thought about it. “Or didn’t I?”
Lilia nodded. “Yes, you did.”
Zoe hugged Rosa. “I’m so glad you’re coming.”
“That’s okay.”
“Really I am.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll fetch my stuff.”
Zoe grasped Lilia’s hand and pulled her to her feet jubilantly.
They’re like a couple of cheerleaders on ecstasy, thought Rosa.
They landed in Rome late that evening, took a taxi into the city, and moved into a suite in a grand hotel not far from the Pantheon. It was one of those old, plush hotels that Rosa knew only from pictures, with high ceilings, a lot of stucco, gilded decor, and heavy, dark red curtains.
Zoe had stayed here several times. The receptionists greeted her by name, shaking hands, and Rosa noticed, morosely, that Zoe introduced her to perfect strangers as my little sister. To cheer herself up she stole a gold fountain pen from the doorman, then didn’t know what to do with it and left it in the potted plant just outside the elevators. As the other two were getting ready in the bathroom, she lay on her bed without any makeup on and immersed herself in “My Death.” After a while she tried calling Alessandro but only got his voice mail. She hesitated for a moment, and listened to the silence after the tone, then she hung up.
Zoe and Lilia came out of the bathroom on a wave of high spirits, enveloped in clouds of sweetish vapors. This was a no-smoking suite; they were lucky the smoke alarm hadn’t gone off. All they needed, thought Rosa, was to have the whole hotel evacuated just because those two couldn’t go ten minutes without their next joint.
“Ready?” asked Zoe.
Rosa lay where she was. Iole’s face came before her eyes, and for a moment her conscience pricked her. La dolce vita for her in Rome, while Iole—yes, what had become of Iole? Dead? Torn to pieces by beasts of prey?
Reluctantly, she sat up. “Yes, I’m ready. Can’t you see that?”
“You haven’t even brushed your hair.”
“Are we going out to eat or exhibition skating?”
“Both,” said Lilia. “We want the audience to look, but not touch.”
They ate in a small, comfortable trattoria near the hotel. Rosa didn’t talk much, but she couldn’t help watching Zoe all the time. Her scratches and bruises had healed astonishingly fast. She wondered how her sister had explained her injuries to Lilia.
And then there was Lilia herself.
After a while Rosa concentrated entirely on Lilia, looking for anything to show whether she, too, belonged to the Arcadian dynasties. But she had no idea how to tell.
Lilia’s red hair tumbled to her shoulders in profuse ringlets. She was wearing a black leather jacket, a tight-fitting top, and a short skirt with flat shoes. She wasn’t as heavily made up as Rosa had expected, considering the hour she and Zoe had spent in front of the mirror.
After dinner, the two of them dragged her off to an expensive club near the Spanish Steps. They were escorted past the people standing in line to get in, and Rosa felt uneasy under their glances. Zoe went ahead, gave the doorman a kiss on the cheek, and was the first to plunge into the droning, noisy darkness beyond the heavy iron door. Rosa followed the other two down a stairway to the lower floor, where it was even darker, more crowded, and noisier. She didn’t want anything to drink, but Zoe brought her something from the bar anyway—it was more ice than drink, and so colorful that Rosa assumed her sister had ordered it just because of the pretty decorations.
She found herself a place to sit with her back to the wall, then held her glass up to eye level, but didn’t drink. No one had come close enough to it to mix anything with its contents, but she couldn’t help it. She’d probably never shake off her distrust.
After a while the droning basses and the dim light were confusing her far more than the cocktail could have done. She stood up and went slowly toward the dance floor. Since the party a year ago she had avoided large crowds. On the flight here, she had hated the crush at the airport. All this was like her worst nightmare, but this time she let herself simply sink into it. She danced until her clothes were damp with sweat, until she felt almost intoxicated by the heat, the volume of sound, and everything she had avoided for months. Her mood was somewhere between panic and euphoria, her heart was racing to the rhythm of the music, and soon she felt as if she were in a bubbling cauldron with individual faces bobbing up to the surface again and again and then disappearing.
She stopped only once, looked for Zoe and Lilia, saw them at the bar with two other young women, and plunged back into the crowd. The noise level was still rising, and with it the temperature. Laughing faces whirled by in a blur, human bodies became a colorless mass. Sometimes she thought she heard sounds that were not voices or part of the music, a howling and screeching, and then she saw glowing eyes among all the others, saw fur on faces and sharp fangs, saw figures bending down and racing away on all fours amid all the confusion. Hands turned to claws, noses to muzzles, ears grew longer and pointed, eyes shone green and yellow and fiery red.
Someone took Rosa’s arm and drew her aside. She started, was going to resist, came up against a wall, and realized that she had reached the edge of the da
nce floor.
“That’s enough,” said Zoe. “Let’s go now.”
Lilia was beside her. They both looked sober and serious, and Rosa gradually came back to herself. When she looked over her shoulder at the crowd, she saw only dancing human figures. No beasts of prey, no curved fangs. Only their eyes still glowed in the flashing artillery of lights.
She felt a strong pulsing in her rib cage, then in her hips. That was how the phantom pain in her lower body announced itself. She had to get out of here, fast, and suddenly realized that Zoe had noticed already. Lilia, too, was looking concerned.
The two of them maneuvered her out of the crowd, up the stairs, and into the fresh air. Rosa made it to the nearest corner, just out of sight of the people waiting to go in, and then collapsed against a wall in one of those terrible crying jags that she could never explain and never control.
Zoe and Lilia stayed with her, giving her all the time she needed, and after that they helped Rosa back to the hotel, put her to bed, and stayed with her until she fell asleep.
She was up early, watching the sun rise over the roofs of Rome. The suite was on the top floor of the hotel. From the balcony, she could see red-gold light flowing over the jumble of gables and terraces, making its way into narrow ravines of masonry, while antennae on the rooftops cast shadows like charred skeletons.
As she leaned against the balustrade of the balcony in her knee-length T-shirt, images of the previous night came back into her mind. She wasn’t sure what had happened to her. She had enough hours of therapy behind her to analyze her behavior and talk about stuff like emotional compensation and freely chosen confrontation. But ultimately that was all nonsense. She had collapsed long before she got out into the air again, and instead of simply falling down, her body had become part of the crowd, drifting with it of its own accord.
Some memory that she had obviously suppressed had surfaced. She wasn’t perfectly well yet; a part of her was still sick and would stay that way.
At breakfast, Zoe and Lilia handled her with velvet gloves. Only when they realized that Rosa was not going to explode at the first wrong word they said did they relax and tell her their itinerary for the day. They wanted to initiate her into the mysteries of the city and—above all—its boutiques. Rosa put a damper on these plans by saying she was going to stay in the hotel that morning, and neither their long faces nor their objections could make her change her mind.