Notorious

by Roberta Lowing

  Devlin stops tilting his glass.

  ‘Fragments,’ I say. ‘Things which made no sense.’

  ‘You would have to know the – how do you say? – the big picture,’ says Pietr.

  ‘I think Mr Devlin knows. But he won’t tell me.’ I lay down my fork. I open my eyes wide. ‘No matter how much I try to persuade him.’

  Devlin’s hand tightens around the stem. ‘You give me too much credit.’

  ‘Oh, we all know your function, Mr Devlin,’ says Pietr. ‘But this is Sicily. The wolf revolving on the rope has two faces. There is no reason why we can’t all get what we want.’ He puts his hand over mine. ‘What I want is for my – friend to get what she wants,’ he says. ‘You were good to Anna,’ he says to me. ‘Everyone else failed her. There was no other woman to help her.’

  ‘Your mother?’ I say.

  He slowly spears a small piece of veal, presses it against the china until it flattens. ‘Once my mother adopts a position she doesn’t alter,’ says Pietr. ‘She murders her memories.’

  Murder. I wonder whether the word is deliberate.

  ‘I want to find my brother,’ I say. ‘I hoped he would contact me after my father died. I always assumed he would come out of hiding then.’ I look at Devlin. ‘That’s all I want.’

  ‘To find him?’ says Pietr. ‘Or find out what happened to him?’

  The ground is black water beneath me. ‘Either.’

  ‘Mr Devlin promised to help you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Devlin’s eyes are unreadable in the low light.

  Pietr picks up his glass. ‘Then, whoever supplies that answer will be – most fortunate.’

  ‘And you think you’re the guy?’ says Devlin.

  Pietr raises his glass. ‘To the victor go the spoils.’

  The girl brings in dessert, a chocolate and cream confection with wafers. ‘I can never imagine you with my father,’ I say to Pietr. ‘You, the cultured European.’

  ‘Your father appreciated culture.’

  ‘Did he? I wonder.’

  Devlin pulls out a wafer and begins snapping it into little pieces, dropping them on the tablecloth.

  ‘The papers were full of the trial,’ I say.

  Pietr says, ‘You get used to it.’

  ‘The notoriety?’

  ‘Yes.’

  We look at each other.

  There is the sound of glass against metal. Devlin has knocked over his wine. He puts his hand in the spreading pool of red, levers himself up.

  ‘You won’t make Trepani tonight,’ says Pietr.

  We look through the window. Mist drifts past in distinct sheets.

  ‘It’s clearing,’ says Devlin.

  At the door, he says to me, fast, ‘You talked about something.’

  I say, ‘If I tell you again that it’s nothing, you won’t believe me will you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We swapped good times,’ I say. ‘You know, when I was eighteen and super-wild and he was thirty-five and we did drugs and orgies together.’

  Devlin is still.

  ‘Joke, Devlin,’ I say. ‘I rarely met him. He was mostly in Europe.’

  I put my hand against the light spilling onto the front terrace.

  ‘We talked about Anna,’ I say. ‘He showed me the house.’ My hand makes strange shadows on the passing sheets of mist. ‘He read to me in French. Are you satisfied?’

  He says, ‘That’s worse.’

  SATURDAY

  My bedroom is on the first floor, tucked behind the silver lattice. It is above the living room, looking away from the coast and facing the plain and Santa Margherita. This room has a low ceiling and white concrete walls with recesses for lighting and bookshelves; a warm wooden floor with a few scattered rugs – Moroccan, probably, from the weave – and a small wrought-iron balcony which steps up to join the rear walkway.

  The bedroom sits under a small section of the same black tiles which matches the roof of the glass tower rearing over me. Pietr’s mother’s room is next to mine and then the spare room he had offered Devlin. Under the eaves are two video cameras enclosed in metal hoods. I see more cameras on the curve of the silver shell and fixed to the walkway railing.

  I step onto the balcony. Rain falls in light strands on my face as I look down to the plain.

  The peak the house is built on falls steeply for about a hundred feet with only tough scrubby bushes clinging in pockets to the stony hillside. Some of the land has the sullen, unforgiving baldness of forcible clearing. There is a gravel path, its steps made by holding the earth back with the split trunks of pines. Glass lamps sit on stocky black metal poles at regular intervals down the path.

  It would be hard to approach without being noticed, I think. Even at night. Almost impossible if the lights were on and the cameras cover every angle.

  Beyond the denuded land the peak falls into ridges which gradually flatten to the plain. Where the ridges begin, so does the forest proper: a thickly wooded swathe of trees gripping the hillside, many slanted, some growing out at extreme angles, knotted wood arms chafing the sky. Peaks and furrows, light and shadows, step off into the distance. Directly below are pockets of dark green firs, pines, oaks. I think I see the glint of water through the trees, a flat dark strip that might be a road.

  A sound above me: Pietr is standing on the walkway. He points to the glass tower. ‘Do you want to come up and see me, as your famous Mae West says?’

  ‘We’re not Americans yet, Pietr.’

  ‘True. And nice girls don’t visit men’s bedrooms.’

  ‘Oh, we all know nice girls finish last these days. Nice men, too, I’m sure.’

  ‘The police would say I wouldn’t know about that.’

  ‘The police.’ I slap the railing. Water drops rise slowly in the pale air and fall, weighted, onto my hand. ‘You’re the only one who doesn’t make me feel like a criminal.’

  ‘What about Mr Devlin?’

  ‘He always makes me feel like a criminal.’

  ‘Really?’ He points down. ‘Meet me.’

  The lobby is deserted, the dining room empty. I walk around the staircase. The doors leading to the kitchen and staff room are both closed. A murmur of voices rises and falls between the cycle of a dishwater.

  In the softer light in the alcove behind the staircase, I see a door set into the wall. I try the metal handle; it won’t turn.

  Pietr is waiting on the terrace outside the back sitting room. He leads me down the path into the woods. The sun is trying to break free of the grey clouds and it isn’t more than chilly.

  As the clouds separate and the light increases, the house’s silver shell blazes into white; light reflects endlessly back and forth in the metal and glass panels.

  Pietr is watching me. ‘Why a glass house, do you think?’

  ‘Because you can see what everyone is doing?’

  He narrows his eyes as the sun judders forth and the house flares. ‘Maybe,’ he says.

  The temperature drops once we are under the cover of trees. With short half-hearted gasps, the wind tugs at the treetops although it hardly reaches us on the ground.

  We cross onto a narrow road which looks new.

  ‘My mother has it redone every other year,’ says Pietr. ‘It’s the back road that runs parallel with the coast road, but on the other side of the hill. We use it to get down to the plain or along to Trepani.’

  On the opposite side, white posts with reflectors are set, tightly spaced, along the curve. I rub at a plastic diamond, making the red cat’s eye wink.

  ‘Is it a dangerous corner?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s above the lake,’ he says.

  We walk down the slope, through colder air. The soil looks darker here, the leaves blacker. The cold bites the inside of my nose and the back of my throat. A branch cracks nearby.

  ‘There it is,’ says Pietr. Through the black spears of trees, I see a dark blue oval patched with silver, its surface adorned with shadows and fissur
es and crusted ice glittering in the sun. The lake.

  Pietr picks up a branch and moves forward slowly, probing the muddy patches. Every now and again, the branch disappears into ground that looks solid. When it comes back, it is dripping wet black earth.

  ‘We won’t go all the way,’ he says, but he continues walking. Several times he hesitates but each time, he goes on.

  No sound except for the wind breathing across the dark wet earth and the occasional creak of branches. The leaves are rough with glitter. There are no birds here. The tree nearest me looks as though it is covered in water. My finger slips; the trunk is sheathed in ice.

  Pietr stops on the steep bank. Around the lake’s rim, jagged brown rocks poke through the dirty brown slush – half ice, half mud – along the waterline. The slush grows darker and thicker until at the lake’s centre, it forms patches of ice on the surface. I hold Pietr’s arm and lean over carefully.

  ‘It’s always the coldest place,’ says Pietr. ‘It always tells us when snow is coming.’

  Through the fissures in the surface glitter, the water moves richly in the winter light: not blue, not black, but a turquoise veined with orange and red.

  ‘Did you know,’ Pietr says, not taking his eyes off the surface, ‘in medieval times, in Dante’s time, they believed the sky was made of crystals. That the light from the sun passed through crystals to illuminate our world. If the crystals were withdrawn it would be a time of blackness – the crystals were directly linked to the age of learning. The alternative was a world falling in on itself, into blackness.

  ‘Before that, they believed the world was made of water.’

  He points across to our left and a shifting of light, water running over the larger rocks on the opposite bank.

  ‘The water runs off the mountains into the lake,’ he says. He points to his right. ‘When it spills over the north end, it runs back into the ground where it joins a network of underground rivers which feeds this whole region. Fresh water is worth more than gold here.

  ‘That is why it was so devastating after the war when the factories at Palermo and Modelphi dumped their chemicals in the lake: heavy metals, plastics, poisons. Noxious gases still erupt like volcanoes from the bottom of the lake, spuming upwards, toxic, deadly. Rising to the surface, lying like wreaths of sighs, thick as toffee, turning the water blood-red in places. The chemicals make strange patterns in the surface: faces, animals. Butterflies. No wonder the locals think this place is cursed.’

  He stares at the water. ‘Eventually, the plastics and poisons seep back into the ground, through the network of subterranean waters, into the deep caverns. The labyrinth of dark places and wet walls.

  ‘Everything that’s important,’ says Pietr, stamping his feet, ‘happens underground.’

  ‘That’s the same everywhere isn’t it?’

  ‘More so,’ he says, ‘in the Triangle of Hunger.’

  The cold presses into me. I pull my jacket hood over my head, put my gloved hands on my cheeks. Pietr throws a pebble into the lake. It sits on the surface for long moments; finally, it sinks, leaving a sullen bubble which slowly subsides.

  Pietr says, ‘Italians returning from the concentration camps – from Auschwitz and others – told how the prisoner children would spontaneously start drawing butterflies on the wet walls. Even those returning from different camps told the same story. Some said it happened on the same day. Others said it was only children with certain numbers tattooed on their wrists. Anything with the figure eight. A misshapen butterfly lying on the skin.

  ‘Now,’ he says, ‘the locals won’t come near the lake. My mother’s road is rarely used. Castelmontrano is isolated.’

  He picks up another pebble, throws it into the water. It sinks as slowly as the first.

  ‘A few minutes’ exposure is all it takes,’ says Pietr. ‘Just as you become aware of the smell of rotten eggs from the sulfur, the brain ceases to be able to absorb oxygen. You lose control of your arms and legs, find it hard to think.’ He stares without blinking. ‘Just as you recognise you must leave, you lose the strength to drag yourself away. So you lie on the edge of the lake as your brain gradually dies.’

  He says, ‘You should know; someone will surely mention it. There’s bad blood between the coast people and anyone from Santa Margherita.’ He stabs at the crusty slush along the waterline. ‘I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea.

  ‘It was an overcast day,’ he says, ‘a day drenched with winter light, which means little light at all. My mother says they got out of the crashed car quite easily. It was resting on the bank near the most stagnant water. She dragged my father out, he was unconscious, and covered him carefully. He was alive when she went for help. But when they came back, his body was gone. There was nothing there except his jacket and shoes. He had broken the shoelaces.

  ‘They found his body hours later, floating face down in the reeds on the far side of the lake.’

  Pietr says, ‘Sicily in the 1950s – you can imagine what they thought.’

  ‘Poison,’ I say.

  ‘She was suspected – the peasant girl, the beast. How did she snare the shining Polish aristocrat? She would have suffered more but she was pregnant with me. When they discovered that, the Polish family – my grandfather – decided not to pursue the matter. And then I was born, a son.

  ‘It took years before the talk died down. She had to hire a geologist from America, a famous man attached to the government, to probe the lake bed and issue a report. He assured the locals the eruptions are sporadic but they are too scared to breathe the air. We have to pay the staff triple the usual wage. Most of them are relatives of Stefano’s wife.’

  As we walk to the road, Pietr stops next to a tree and puts his hand on the trunk. ‘Lass dich nicht in die dunklen Wälder locken von den trügerischen Stimmen. Die Wälder sind wunderschön, doch sie sind wild,’ he says. ‘Do not be lured into the black forests by the deceptive voices. The forests are most lovely but they are wild.’

  ‘You prefer German,’ I say. ‘Not Polish?’

  ‘I used Polish,’ he says, ‘when I was a child and we lived at Koloshnovar. As I got older, I grew . . . ambivalent.’ He pats the trunk. ‘Isn’t English the international language for success?’

  ‘Don’t tell that to the French,’ I say. ‘Or the Chinese. Or the Arabs.’

  The sky is lightening as we climb the slope to the house. The dull silver skeleton shimmers under the shifting clouds.

  ‘When the sun hits it,’ I say, ‘you must be able to see it for miles around.’

  He says, ‘Everyone knows where to find me.’

  We reach the back terrace steps, high enough to look across the plain to Santa Margherita.

  I say, ‘You would have a great view from there to here.’

  ‘I never go there.’

  ‘Oh.’ I stare across to the pale ruins. ‘But your mother goes?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, kicking at ice rimming the step. ‘But she knows her way around. The ruins are dangerous for visitors.’

  ‘Point taken,’ I say. But I continue to stare at the village.

  We go up the steps and around the back sitting room to the infinity pool. ‘Look,’ he says, pointing across the guardhouses, the garage, the descending road. The sea falls out in all its shifting white-humped glory, moving slowly under the lowering sky, darker ripples running through the light green below the rocky cliffs to merge with the blue-black of the deeper water.

  ‘Forget Santa Margherita,’ says Pietr. ‘I’ll take you out in the boat on the first good day. That’s the better view.’

  I look at the green waves which sawed against the dark brown rocks. ‘Where do you launch boats?’

  ‘There’s one spot,’ he says. ‘Only the locals know.’

  As I watch the horizon wavering under the rolling clouds, rolling steel grates behind me. Pietr stands by the infinity pool, his hand on a switch in the wall. Steel rods holding metal panels slowly extrude from the flat roof. They
grind out across the pool, darkening the water. When the panels stop above the edge of the terrace, Pietr touches a bolt, one of several on the inside of the railing. He kneels by the pool, feels the water. ‘It’s designed to be enclosed in winter.’ He shrugs. ‘I haven’t bothered since Anna stopped coming.’ Comingk. That hard finality again, maybe a reflection of the struggle to control his own stress.

  He says, ‘I can put up the wall panels. I can heat it.’

  ‘To swim,’ I say slowly.

  He looks up at me. ‘To forget,’ he says.

  My image is a dark shroud in the water. ‘Swimming is forgetting for me. And poetry.’

  Pietr frowns down at whatever he sees there. ‘You would like the book I mentioned. Poetry as redemption by an unknown French explorer.’

  ‘I would like anything that was not my father’s lootings.’

  Pietr stands up, carefully. ‘It was not looted by your father,’ he says. ‘But maybe another day. Too many ghosts today.’

  MONDAY

  ‘You’ll have to be wary of these people,’ says Devlin after lunch. ‘You don’t know what they’re capable of.’

  We are in the forest between the road and the house. The rain is still falling but not hard; an umbrella and a raincoat over my jacket and jeans are enough. The forest has a damp smell, laced with heat. The leaves are soggy on the ground, curled with the year’s knowings. I press my foot down. Frail little vessels, scrolls of the past and the future. The rain falls on my umbrella, vibrating the wooden handle.

  I say, ‘I know what they’re capable of.’

  It is quiet between the beats of rain: only an occasional rustle; the drip of water on the sodden leaves. I stare at the twisted roots, the rotting bark, the mould in radiant patches on the broken trunks and fallen logs, the centipede moving like a caravan of tiny, hunched, black-robed refugees.

  Devlin sits on a fallen log, an umbrella propped over his shoulder, his notebook on his knee. He says, ‘How do you know?’

  I walk away, skidding on a muddy patch. A small clump of white star-shaped blossoms pokes up between black roots. When I touch a petal, fine silver specks coat my finger. I taste salt.