“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.
R
OSA 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.
Alessandro smiled out of the screen at her, hair as unruly as on the plane. He looked unexpectedly elegant in a dark suit. Not even the flash photography could affect him much. He had a small scab on his chin, probably from shaving. Thank heaven there were no photos of Rosa’s shins on the internet.
A man of about fifty was standing beside him, with black hair and a high forehead, dark brows, and a politician’s frozen grin.
Baron Massimo Carnevare
, said the caption,
with his son, Alessandro.
She didn’t meet a soul as she left the palazzo, then walked through the shadowy circle of chestnut trees to the outskirts of the olive groves. She was wearing a short black skirt, a black T-shirt with the words
THERE ARE ALWAYS BETTER LIARS
on it, and her metal-studded boots. She’d removed the rest of the polish from her nails that morning.
Alessandro’s name had led her to another site, and she clicked on it, although there just seemed to be more stuff about his father and his father’s businesses on that one as well. But she hadn’t had a chance to read more than the opening sentence before it struck her as too risky to go on using Florinda’s computer.
Ten thousand people had died in southern Italy because of the Mafia in the 1980s alone—three times more than in the Troubles of Northern Ireland over a whole twenty-five years.
She didn’t know how many of those victims could be chalked up to the Carnevares and Alcantaras. Today she was going to meet many of the men and women responsible for the massacres carried out by Cosa Nostra. Men and women who had made decisions and given orders back then. It made her kind of nervous, as if she’d been invited to attend a serial-killer convention that afternoon.
My God, what am I going to wear?
She smiled to herself, because that question had probably been on Zoe’s mind for days.
By now she was in the middle of the olive groves, and she walked downhill past the distorted tree trunks. Florinda’s men must be on patrol somewhere near—the property was surely guarded the whole time—but she saw no one, and was glad of that.
Back at the airport Alessandro Carnevare had offered to drop her off at the palazzo. Not far out of their way, he had claimed. Nonsense. The village of Genuardo, where the Carnevares had their headquarters, was over an hour’s journey from here. She knew that now. Had Alessandro just wanted to use her as a pretext for getting to the heart of an enemy clan, so that later he could boast of it to the sons of the other bosses, the
capi
? She didn’t trust him a bit.
Which brought up her real problem. She couldn’t trust herself anymore, either. She’d learned that a year ago, and now she had to come to terms with it, because there wasn’t any other option. It was easier to shift her distrust to other people than face herself in the mirror, gaze into those eyes that looked mascara-rimmed even without mascara, and tell herself: It’s
you.
You’re the problem.