Arcadia Awakens

by Kai Meyer

  “No,” said Florinda firmly. “We’ll do it for you. Now, listen to me, Rosa. Cesare’s influence has its limits. This is what will happen. The tribunal will declare us innocent because the concordat was broken by an outsider, not an Alcantara. Lilia is not on our payroll. Or not on any of them that I was aware of.”

  Rosa clenched her hand into a fist. “You didn’t really just say that, did you?”

  “Will you keep—”

  “Bitch.”

  Florinda took a deep breath, hissing dangerously down the line. “So we can’t be held responsible,” she went on. “Cesare doesn’t know it yet, but a couple of the men who were there will speak up in your favor.”

  Rosa knew what that meant. “Pantaleone has a finger in the pie.”

  “He’s still the capo dei capi. And a friend of the Alcantaras.”

  Alessandro laid his hand on her thigh and pointed through the windshield. The car was turning onto a well-tended avenue lined with oak trees. Baroque villas came into sight behind the branches, their facades lavishly adorned with carving. His lips silently formed the words, Almost there. She nodded.

  To Florinda, she said, “I ought to be there, all the same. If the tribunal doesn’t believe your paid witnesses—”

  “Then they’re never going to believe you. But the two of them will be very convincing. And what’s more, we have proof that the gun belonged to Lilia.”

  “What kind of proof?”

  “You explain, Zoe.” Florinda handed Rosa’s sister the phone.

  “Lilia had a license for the gun,” said Zoe a minute later. “She bought it legally. She never wanted anything to do with our business.” Zoe’s voice was getting unsteady again.

  “You mustn’t come here for the time being,” said Florinda, joining the phone call again. “Not until this is over. The tribunal of the dynasties will meet at dawn tomorrow. Zoe and I will go and defend our family. Cesare will have to accept defeat, but the tribunal will sweeten it for him by recommending that the Carnevares elect him their new capo—which is what, in effect, he has been for years anyway, although neither the baron nor your friend would admit it.”

  “They’ll be declaring Cesare the capo tomorrow? Is that absolutely certain?”

  “It’s the most likely outcome.”

  If the human hunt, with Iole as quarry, was really going to be held in honor of the new head of the clan, thought Rosa, then they didn’t have much time left.

  “I have to hang up now,” she said.

  “Please, Rosa—don’t come here. Promise me that.”

  “What would my promise be worth,” she said cuttingly, “when we’re all so honest with each other all the time?”

  “I’ve given my word to Pantaleone you’d stay out of danger. And I intend to keep my promise.”

  “Okay,” she said quietly. “If that’s what you really want, then for now I won’t come home.”

  Florinda breathed a sigh of relief. “I just don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “Is that what you want, or Pantaleone?” And with that she hung up and put the cell phone down on her lap. She felt exhausted.

  “We’re here,” said Alessandro.

  The Dallamano villa stood at the end of the avenue, on a small hill overlooking the coast and the glittering Mediterranean. The drive led them through the garden and up to an impressive porch. Tall palms and pines cast a pattern of shadows over the handsome house, which seemed to have been renovated recently.

  The gate down by the road was open. There was a brass plate fitted to it.

  “A scientific library?” asked Rosa, surprised.

  “That’s the kind of thing that happens to Mafia property when the courts turn it over to the state,” Alessandro explained. “Usually they’re requisitioned for community purposes. As there were no heirs, the Dallamano villa was handed over to the provincial government. Not a bad catch for the local politicians. The site alone must be worth a fortune.”

  Two elderly men were talking outside the entrance. One of them held a stack of papers, the other was carrying several books.

  She groaned softly. “They’re never going to believe that we want to do scientific research here.”

  “Then we’ll come back when it’s dark. Easier getting into a library than a bank. The building won’t be all that secure.”

  She gave him a skeptical look.

  He smiled. “We’re gangsters, remember? That must come in handy for something.”

  He turned the car outside the entrance, drove back down the avenue, and took the road to the city at the next junction.

  On their way, Rosa repeated what Florinda had said about the tribunal, and Cesare’s appointment as capo of the Carnevares. “Which means,” she finished her account, “that time’s running out.”

  “Tomorrow night,” he murmured, with a grim nod. “Cesare likes to hunt in the dark.”

  “How will you find out where the hunt’s going to take place?”

  After a moment’s hesitation, he said, “The man from the island, the zookeeper. He’s still in the hospital, and I know which one.”

  Rosa’s eyebrows shot up. “I didn’t think he was that badly injured.”

  “He wasn’t when the captain and his men took him onboard the Gaia.”

  “You mean you gave them orders to—”

  “He was trying to kill you.” He spoke with such contempt that her mouth felt dry. “If anything had happened to you on the island, I wouldn’t have just had him beaten up. I’d have strangled him with my own hands.”

  She had realized by now what it meant in Sicily to be a member of Cosa Nostra, but she still wasn’t used to it.

  “I’ll find out where she is,” he said. “You discovered where we have to look for Dallamano’s papers—I’ll find Iole.”

  In the Syracuse city center, he stopped by one of the last public phone booths, near the Piazza Duomo. He asked Rosa to wait for him in the car.

  “Who are you going to call?”

  “The captain of the yacht. I want him to see about the man in the hospital.”

  “Is he still on your side?”

  Alessandro shrugged. “Honestly? No idea. But we’re starting to run out of allies.”

  His phone call lasted almost ten minutes. Thoughtfully, Rosa watched him through the glass: his handsome face, looking so grim, his untidy brown hair, his angular profile. He seemed to be strained and edgy, but at the same time he radiated a self-confidence that both surprised her and made her feel slightly afraid. Not of him, but for him. He was going to have powerful enemies all his life, enemies just waiting for him to make a mistake.

  At last he came back to the car. “If the zookeeper does know where the next hunt is to take place, then we’ll hear about it, too, first thing tomorrow at the latest.”

  A shiver ran down her back. But she hid her feelings behind a nod, leaned back, and waited for nightfall with her heart pounding.

  THE HIDDEN ROOM

  ONCE IT WAS DARK, they climbed over the fence and approached the villa under cover of bushes and weeping willows. There were no lights on inside; the last member of the library staff had left just after eight, and no other vehicle had passed the end of the oak-lined avenue in the two and a half hours since then.

  Silently, they crossed a narrow strip of lawn and reached the palm trees growing around the villa. They headed for the back of the building, where there was a broad terrace with a view of the rocky coastline. The lights of a freighter flickered out at sea, on the invisible horizon between the ocean and the starry sky.

  The Dallamanos’ swimming pool had been drained years ago. Huge terra-cotta pots contained dead plants, and a pile of old shelving was stacked against the wall of the house. Once, when the clan still lived here, the building must have been well guarded; today there wasn’t even an alarm system. Presumably no one was seriously expecting thieves to break in and steal collected editions of scientific works and encyclopedias.

  A dog barked somewhere fa
rther down the road, on the grounds of one of the neighboring villas.

  Alessandro had bought a long screwdriver, a rubber hammer, and a flashlight in the city that afternoon. Now he easily levered open one of the tall windows on the first floor.

  “Not the first time you’ve done that, huh?” whispered Rosa.

  “When you grow up in a castle full of Mafiosi, you learn a lot of strange stuff.”

  “Very practical.”

  “You told me you can break into cars.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “That’s Brooklyn for you.”

  They cautiously climbed inside. Rosa closed the window after her.

  The only lights in the place were the illuminated emergency exit signs over the doors. Alessandro turned on the flashlight. Its beam passed over tall bookcases, frescoes on the walls, and a few busts and statues on stone plinths.

  The two of them quietly walked through the rooms on the first floor. A pleasant smell of old paper lingered in the air.

  They followed the directions to the cellars Augusto Dallamano had given to Rosa and soon found the door they needed. At the foot of the stairs a passage led to several storerooms crammed full of books, dusty folios, and cartons. In the third room, the flashlight revealed a grate over the drain in the floor. Alessandro undid the screws, removed the grate, and unhesitatingly put his hand inside the dark rectangle. Rosa watched as he felt around the walls of the narrow shaft, and finally found an opening with a lever inside it, just as Dallamano had said. Once there had been a remote control for the mechanism, but it had disappeared along with the rest of the family’s possessions. What Rosa and Alessandro had here was only for emergency use, but it would do.

  The lever stuck, and Alessandro swore quietly. He tried it again several times before he thought of using his foot. Sure enough, the mechanism turned out to function like a pedal. From above, he could reach it with the toe of his shoe and push it down.

  There was a crunch, then a motor hidden in the wall hummed to life. Moments later, a door-size rectangle in the back of the room slid aside.

  There was darkness behind it, of course; they were underground. Only a glance at the steel core of the mechanical door showed Rosa that this was not just the entrance to a secret room.

  It was a bunker. A private bunker built as a wartime shelter, the kind of refuge that rich people all over the world had had erected in the 1950s and 1960s. Later, when the fear of nuclear war gradually receded, Ruggero Dallamano must have converted it into a second office. He would not have run his legal building company from here, only the business that had made him one of the most influential capi in Sicily.

  Nine-year-old Iole must have known about this place. She had probably hidden down here during the massacre of her family. Rosa could only guess how and why she had left this refuge again unseen, taking the two photographs with her. Perhaps she had thought that her parents’ murderers had left, but ran straight into their arms. The Carnevares had certainly not found the bunker, or else they would have looted it.

  Alessandro shone the flashlight into the darkness. “Do we go in?”

  The first of the two rooms beyond the door was full of cabinets containing hanging files from which documents, newspaper cuttings, and paperwork spilled out. Rosa glanced briefly at a few of the papers, recognized none of the names on them, and walked ahead of Alessandro into the second room.

  Her hand found a switch on the wall, and several neon tubes on the ceiling came on, filling the sparsely furnished place with bright light.

  There were more filing cabinets, many of them open, a leather reading chair, and wood-paneled walls with a few old family photos on them, including one of a child with big eyes and a happy smile. A large desk stood in the center of the room.

  “It really does look as though no one’s touched anything here for years,” whispered Rosa.

  A swivel chair lay toppled on the floor. There were more photographs on the desk, of Ruggero Dallamano and his family in narrow wooden frames, just like the photo of the two divers behind which Iole had hidden the picture of the statue. In the middle of the desk lay a thick notebook with a heavy cardboard cover. It was closed; the end of a ballpoint pen stuck out from between the pages. Photographs were scattered everywhere, dim, sometimes underexposed snapshots, many of them showing only pale, faded patches against a black background.

  The neon tubes crackled. Their humming suddenly stopped short. The lights went out.

  Rosa swore. Alessandro shone the flashlight at the doorway. Dust motes danced in its yellow beam. It was pitch-dark again in the front room of the bunker and the storeroom outside it.

  “The fuses,” Rosa whispered.

  “There should be a generator down here. It probably hasn’t been serviced for years, or the lights would have come on again right away.”

  Rosa took a deep breath. Only now did she notice how stale the air was here. Wasting no time, she picked up the notebook and a handful of random photographs. Although Alessandro had the beam of the flashlight turned on the door, its light was not enough to show any details on the pictures.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said, holding the notebook and photos against her and moving around the desk. Alessandro walked ahead to the door, listened for a moment, and went into the front room, then out of the bunker and into the cellar. Rosa followed. She was about to go on when Alessandro stopped, put his foot down into the drain outlet, and activated the pedal. The sliding door closed almost soundlessly behind them.

  “There’s someone up there in the house,” he whispered.

  She had heard the noises herself.

  Alessandro crouched down. With his free hand, he put the drain cover back into the opening. There was no time to get it back in place. Instead, he dropped the screws into the shaft through the bars of the grate and dragged one of the cartons of books up to stand over the outlet cover. “That’ll have to do.”

  Rosa wondered for a moment whether to leave Dallamano’s documents somewhere down here in the cellar, but decided to keep them with her. Not only was she eager to find out what he had discovered on the seafloor, but she also needed the information to exchange for Iole. Whoever was sneaking around the villa couldn’t be allowed to hold them up now.

  Alessandro switched off the flashlight and took Rosa’s arm. Feeling their way, they went out into the passage. The cellar stairs at the end of it showed dimly as a rectangle of diffuse stripes. Faint nocturnal light was reflected on the marble steps.

  Above them, a shadow hurried past.

  Rosa held her breath and pressed close to the wall. She expected someone to expose them at any moment.

  But no one came down into the cellar. Whoever it was had passed by the door to the stairs.

  Cautiously, they stole on. Alessandro stuck the flashlight, still switched off, into his waistband, and took out the screwdriver he had used to break open the window. He held it in front of him like a knife. Rosa put the photos between the pages of the notebook, so that she could hold everything with one hand. She took the rubber hammer from Alessandro and hefted it, weighing it in her hand. It wasn’t as good as her stapler, but it was better than nothing.

  He cast her a quick glance, but she could hardly see him in the dark. Once again they listened for sounds from above, then cautiously began to climb the stairs.

  They would have to walk through several rooms to reach the window through which they had entered the house. Moonlight cast deep black shadows between the bookcases.

  There was a clicking sound, like switches being hastily pressed up and down. Someone was working on a fuse box. That must have been why the lights in the cellar had gone out.

  Unnoticed, they reached the room with the window that they had broken open. It was just as they had left it. Whoever else was in the house had probably come in another way.

  Rosa pulled the window in by its handle. A cool draft of air from the sea came in. She put the papers and the hammer on the sill outside and clambered out, followed by Alessa
ndro.

  They heard a voice somewhere in the house. Then a short, dull sound. A second voice swore, saying something about moving shadows.

  “Was that a shot?” Rosa groaned.

  In the moonlight, Alessandro looked paler than usual. “Come on,” he whispered, ducking low and taking her wrist. It was good to feel his hand: a touch of warmth in the glacial cold that once again had taken hold of her body. But she couldn’t run like that. She moved out of his grasp with a quick shake of her head. Then they both took off, past the palm trees that offered little cover, over the dried-up turf of the lawn.

  There were voices behind them again, outside in the open air now.

  The bushes on the boundary of the property rustled. There was a barred fence beyond them.

  All at once they saw something else there as well. A long, black outline, winding its way through the dry grass like a rivulet of viscous oil.

  “A Lamia!” whispered Alessandro.

  The sound they had heard in the house was repeated. Twice.

  Right in front of them, two fist-size craters were torn into the ground. Grass and dust went swirling into the air.

  “Stay where you are!” said a man’s voice.

  Rosa spun around and threw the hammer.

  BETRAYAL

  THE GUNMAN WORE A black ski mask with slits for his eyes. He must have noticed Rosa’s movement, but it was too dark and the hammer flew through the air too fast for him to avoid it. The hard rubber head hit him in the face—a horrible noise—and threw him backward to the ground. The revolver dropped from his hand; he let out a groan as if half-dazed.

  A second man, also masked, swore, fired into the grass in front of Alessandro again, and strode quickly over to the two of them.

  “Get away from the girl!” he snapped at Alessandro. “Quickly!”

  It was possible that Rosa had smashed the first attacker’s skull with the hammer; at the very least she had broken his nose, yet she felt nothing. None of this fit together: the shadow flowing through the grass, the gun pointed at them.