T
HE SUN WAS BLAZING
above the sea, its rays sparkling on the rotor blades of the helicopter, which had come to a halt. It was standing on the landing pad below the hotel while its engines cooled off. The pilot sat in the cockpit, leafing through the
Gazzetta dello Sport
.
Rosa stood higher up, on the terrace of the Grand Hotel Jonio, her hands on the wrought-iron balustrade, looking down the steep coast at the gray-blue water. Far below, train tracks ran along a narrow strip of land between the rocks and the breaking waves. A small, red-roofed station building rose from the bleak rock. The old town center of Taormina lay on the plateau to the left of the hotel, six hundred feet above the sea and the railroad.
Rosa was wearing a three-quarter-length leather coat, black boots, and a close-fitting Trussardi dress. She had tied her blond hair back in a ponytail, hoping that it made her look sterner and older. If there was one thing she had learned from Florinda, it was to dress well for business meetings. She wanted Avvocato Trevini to see immediately that she was the head of her clan, not an intimidated girl who had let his video lure her here.
Behind her, she heard the sharp click of stiletto heels on
the marble of the terrace. Rosa waited until the sound stopped directly behind her, then turned around.
“The
avvocato
will be here in a moment,” said the young woman who had come out of the hotel to join her. Contessa Cristina di Santis—Trevini’s new assistant, confidante, who knew what else?—was descended from the old Sicilian aristocracy, as Rosa’s secretary had found out for her. She had studied in Paris, London, and Milan, earning her doctoral and law degrees in record time. There was no di Santis clan in the Mafia these days; it had been almost entirely wiped out in the 1980s by the Corleonese. Its last few members had a good amount of wealth of their own, but no longer kept in active touch with Cosa Nostra.
With one exception. As Trevini’s assistant, Cristina di Santis accepted the rules of the Alcantara clan.
Rosa’s rules.
“The
avvocato
asks me to say he is very glad that you have come to see us, Signorina Alcantara,” said the young attorney formally. “He is extremely sorry that his state of health makes it necessary for him to keep you waiting for a few minutes.”
“That doesn’t matter,” said Rosa untruthfully. The delay was nothing but an attempt at harassment. Trevini had been asking for weeks for an appointment with her, and now that she had come to Taormina, couldn’t he turn up on time?
“If I can offer you some refreshment—”
“Thank you.” Rosa did not take her eyes off the other young woman, deliberately leaving it to the
contessa
to guess whether she meant yes or no, and watching the way Cristina
di Santis dealt with the uncertainty.
The
contessa
was half a head taller than she was, black-haired, slender, but with all the curves that Rosa lacked. Her raised left eyebrow suggested that she was sizing Rosa up. She seemed to be waiting to test Rosa seriously, and then she would show this stupid, full-of-herself American girl how contempt was expressed stylishly here in Europe.
None of this surprised Rosa. In a way, she could totally understand it. What did surprise her was the
contessa
’s reaction when the soft sound of rubber tires on stone announced the attorney’s arrival.
An expression of diligent civility appeared on the
contessa
’s face. Like a robot without any personality of its own; as if her emotions had suddenly been extinguished.
Careful not to show any irritation, Rosa turned to the old man in the wheelchair. This was the third time she had met the Alcantaras’ attorney, the gray eminence of the clan, and once again she thought that he was like a certain actor, though try as she might she couldn’t think of his name. She didn’t remember seeing him in any movie; she just had a sense of him staring down at her from a screen, larger than life. Not that there was anything about Trevini to intimidate anyone at first sight. He was an emaciated old man, he had been confined to a wheelchair since childhood, and he was blind in one eye. Threat and intimidation didn’t look like that in Mafia circles. Yet there was an aura that followed him, surrounded him, came into a room with him, and lingered in the air out on this terrace.
“Signorina Alcantara.” The corners of his mouth moved,
merging with his countless wrinkles. “We meet again at last. I am so glad to see you.”
The wind off the sea swept Rosa’s ponytail forward over her shoulder, but the
avvocato
’s white hair was untouched by the draft. Maybe he had put gel on its few remaining strands to keep it in place. His lips were narrow and colorless, as if he were parting scar tissue when he smiled.
She went to meet him, with a surreptitious glance at her two bodyguards standing motionless in their black suits at the edge of the terrace. She was already regretting that she had let Alessandro persuade her to take the men with her.
She offered Trevini her hand.
“Avvocato.”
“You received my message,” he said.
“You haven’t replied to my questions about that.”
“Because matters call for discussion face-to-face.”
She took this ploy with a good grace. “And that’s why I’m here.”
“Will you come a little way with me?” He steered the wheelchair along the balustrade of the terrace. The
contessa
was left behind.
Rosa walked beside the wheelchair for some twenty or thirty yards, until they were out of earshot of anyone else. “I haven’t seen much of my business managers and the other annoying people who usually harass me whenever they have the chance,” she said. “Since I came back from the States, they’ve left me alone. I assume I have you to thank for that.”
“I am sure that you value a little rest after such a strenuous journey.”
“What did you tell them? That from now on you would be making the decisions on all economic matters?”
“Is that what you’d prefer?”
She had some difficulty in not letting the milky membrane over his right eye distract her. “What do you think my grandmother would have done, in her time, if you had gone over her head like that?”
He smiled. “I certainly would not be here any longer.”
With a sigh, she grasped the balustrade and looked out at the sea. A few isolated yachts were cruising off the coast. Even in February, Taormina was not entirely free of tourists. There was hardly another place in Sicily as popular with foreign visitors as this town high above the water.
“I hate what you’re trying to do here,
avvocato
,” she said quietly. “I’m sure you think it’s stupid of me, but I just don’t like it. Not you, or your cheap tricks, or the whole damn thing.”
“But you have no objection to all that money, do you?”
Angrily, she spun around, and noticed at the same time that the movement had alerted her bodyguards. With a shake of her head, she let them know that everything was all right.
“Was that really necessary?” asked Trevini, glancing at the two men.
“You tell me.”
There was a touch of warmth in his smile. “What makes you think that I don’t wish you well?”
“I’m a nuisance to you, Avvocato Trevini. An annoying inheritance from my aunt, and you have to battle it as best you can.”
“Do I look to you as if I want to fight anyone?”
“Why did you send me that video?”
“As a warning. And before you misunderstand that, too: a warning not against me, but against the company you keep.”
She turned her face to the wind and closed her eyes for two or three seconds. “You know, I’m really sorry to hear that. My family is consumed by fear of the Carnevares. The women managing my companies in Milan, my so-called advisers, they all predict disaster after disaster. And a great many older men make a great many conjectures about my sex life. Maybe I should worry about
that
rather than my relationship with Alessandro Carnevare.”
There was a glint of mockery in Trevini’s one good eye. “I have never taken the slightest interest in what the Alcantara women do behind closed doors. I am concerned only with the business of the clan: its financial prosperity, profit margins.”
“But the responsibility is mine.” Big words, but she didn’t believe them herself.
“The Carnevares are not to be trusted. You ought never to forget that.”
“I’m not sleeping with the Carnevares,
avvocato
. Only with one of them.”
“That’s not what I’ve heard.”
She stared at him. She thought she was going to have to punch a defenseless old man in the face, here and now. With immense difficulty she controlled herself, understanding that provocation was one of his strongest weapons. The realization
didn’t make what he had said any less hurtful, but it did lessen its poisonous sting.
“I know exactly what happened on that occasion,” he said. “At Eighty-Five Charles Street, wasn’t it? Michele and Tano Carnevare, along with a few others. It’s no secret, even if you may wish it were, Signorina Alcantara.” He slowly shook his head. “I wonder how you can still stay close to a Carnevare, that’s all.”
“I wasn’t raped by Alessandro,” she managed to say tonelessly.
“But he’s one of them, and he always will be. He was present that evening.”
For a moment, doubt entered her mind, and she hated herself for it. She was letting him force her on to the defensive. She couldn’t allow that.
“How did you get hold of that video?” There was cold fury in her voice, and a chill was spreading through her.
“You know me a little, Rosa.” He used her proper name for the first time, and although she didn’t like it, she didn’t tell him not to. That would have been admitting that she felt too young for the part she had to play. Let him call her what he wanted.
Cristina di Santis was watching them from the far end of the terrace.
“You know me,” Trevini repeated, as if that made it truer. “I would love to tell you about a clever plan that allowed me to acquire that video. But the truth is much more mundane. The cell phone with the video on it was delivered to you at a
Palermo branch of the Alcantara bank. The employees there didn’t know quite what to do with it. Simply putting it in an envelope and mailing it to the other end of the island may not have struck them as entirely appropriate.” He shrugged his shoulders, which looked odd, because he had difficulty with certain movements. “Or else they felt it their duty to let someone who has been a buffer between the Alcantaras and the harsher side of life for thirty years see it first.”
She wondered whether she could manage to haul him out of his wheelchair and throw him over the balustrade. He couldn’t weigh much; he was only skin and bone under his elegant gray suit.
“That’s how I came by the recording. I saw you on it, Rosa, you and young Carnevare, and I thought it must have some deeper significance, or someone wouldn’t have been so anxious to get the video into your hands. So I had a few inquiries made of the New York police. It didn’t even take an hour for my capable
contessa
to find all the information.” He was beaming. “Ah, I love to call her that—my
contessa
…Well, be that as it may, an apparently unimportant snippet of film showing some party or other suddenly became a highly explosive pictorial record.”
Rosa glanced at his assistant again. She was standing motionless in her chic skirt suit and elegant high heels. One of the bodyguards was staring at her ass. Rosa decided to fire him.
“The next step was obvious,” said Trevini. “I had the person who handed in the cell phone tracked down.”
She was fighting against the cold again, and wondered what Alessandro would have done in her place.
“My people found her at a sleazy hotel. She was not in a good state, but she was still able to answer a few questions.”
“You talked to Valerie?”
“Of course.” Trevini was jubilant. “And so can you. You see, Rosa, Valerie Paige is here with us in Taormina.”
A
T THE END OF
a long trek through the basement, some way from the hotel laundry room and wine cellar, Trevini braked his wheelchair in front of an iron door with a bolted and shuttered peephole in it.
“The management was kind enough to outfit this for my purposes,” he explained.
Rosa couldn’t tear her eyes away from the closed peephole. “Good service.”
“I’ve been living in my suite here for thirty-four years. One can expect a little more than fresh orange juice for breakfast.”
She went past him to the door and pushed aside the bolt over the peephole. Before she opened the viewing window itself, she turned to the attorney again. “Was this what you meant by ‘further material’?”
“You’ll see. I didn’t promise more than I could deliver.”
With an abrupt movement, she opened the viewing window.
The interior of the cell was decorated with shiny, moisture-repellent paint in the unhealthy green of hospital walls. There was a mattress on a concrete base, with a crumpled quilt and a pillow showing traces of blood.
On the ground in front of it, knees drawn up and empty-eyed, sat a thin figure in torn jeans and a creased T-shirt so dirty that you couldn’t make out the logo of the band on it.
Valerie’s dark hair was short and untidy; she had probably cut it herself. Her face was emaciated, and the dark rings under her eyes could have been drawn on with finger paint. She had been biting her lips again and again; that was probably where the blood on the pillow had come from.
Without turning to Trevini behind her, Rosa asked, “You haven’t been torturing her, have you?”
“She was questioned. But she has no physical injuries to show for it. She was a wreck already.”
Valerie’s arms were covered with tattoos, all dating from the last sixteen months. She’d had piercings when Rosa knew her before, but now she had several rings in each ear and half a dozen silver pins on her eyebrows, nose, and chin. Whatever she saw at this moment with her bloodshot eyes wasn’t anything that was actually in the cell with her.
“Drugs?”
“Sedatives. She’s had injections on her arms, between her toes, and under her tongue, but they’re not our doing. When my people found her, she’d been pumped full of chemicals. I’ve no idea what your friend has gone through, but I don’t imagine she remembers much of it. Or at least not any of it from the recent past.”
Valerie must have been able to hear the voices on the other side of the door, but she showed no reaction.
“Valerie?” Rosa stood on tiptoe so that her face filled the viewing window. “It’s me. Rosa.”
Not even a twitch.
Rosa took a step back and looked at the lock of the door. “Open that.”
“Are you sure?”
“Damn it, will you just open that door?”
The
avvocato
took out a key and handed it to her. “Here you are.”
She put it in the lock, but before she turned it, Trevini said, “There’s just one thing we ought to be clear about.”
“What?”
“Everything else is up to you and you alone. She’s your prisoner now, not mine.”
Once again she turned to the door, taking a deep breath. The smell of laundry detergent wafted through the hotel basement, and machinery was throbbing in the distance. The pipes under the hall ceiling gurgled.
“Make up your mind,” said Trevini. “About what happens to her. Do you want to ask her more questions? Let her go? Dispose of the problem entirely?”
She couldn’t look at him. She hated him with all her heart, and even more she hated the fact that he was telling the truth. Now that she had seen the captive in the basement with her own eyes, she couldn’t act as if she didn’t know about her. Trevini was on her payroll; the Alcantara clan also financed his assistant and the men who had caught Valerie and
questioned
her. Rosa felt bile rising in her.
“You understand what I’m telling you.” Trevini found her sore spot and probed it. “If you want to get rid of the girl in there, it will be done. No one will know. She treated you badly. Who could blame you for holding a grudge against her?”
She half turned to Trevini, closed the shutter over the peephole with her other hand, and asked, “What did she tell you?”
“I’m glad to see I’ve been able to arouse your curiosity after all.”
She had come in order to offer him a proposition. Now she was glad that she hadn’t mentioned it yet. Seething inside, she realized that it was in her power to dispose of
him
entirely. He knew it, and yet he was playing games with her. Because they depended on each other. Without him and his knowledge of three decades of the Alcantara businesses, she would never survive a tug-of-war for leadership of the clan. And without Rosa, he was just an ordinary attorney whom the rising generation of
capodecini
would be only too happy to replace with a modern legal office in Palermo.
But did she really want to be in a position in which she had to make decisions like this about the life or death of a young drug addict?
“You’re sorry for her,” Trevini remarked. “You ought not to be. Michele Carnevare told her to take you to that party. And she obeyed him. That’s the truth of the matter. She wormed herself into your confidence, Rosa, only to lead you like a lamb to the slaughter.”
“Maybe she didn’t know what Michele planned to do.” She could hardly believe that she, of all people, had suggested such a flimsy reason for Valerie’s innocence.
“That’s possible.” Trevini wheeled his chair a little closer, until the footrests almost touched her shins. “Maybe, as you say, she didn’t know. Does that make it any better? Isn’t ignorance the oldest and hoariest of excuses?”
Mattia had said that Valerie had flown to Europe to ask Rosa to forgive her. She had promised to pass along his
message if she met her, and in return he had saved Rosa’s life. Would she really sentence Valerie to death now?
She turned the key and pushed the door open.
Trevini laughed softly. Or was it only the gurgling of the water pipes?
“Valerie.” She stopped in the middle of the cell, a few feet from the despondent figure on the floor. Valerie’s eyes went straight through her. Rosa resisted the urge to turn around and look behind her.
“Valerie, can you hear me?”
No reaction.
Rosa took another step forward and crouched down. Their faces were level now. She hadn’t mourned their friendship over the last year, and she certainly didn’t mourn it now. Her mind was full of accusations instead. Anger. How practical it would have been to feel nothing but indifference today. Instead, rage seethed inside her.
Hesitantly, she followed Valerie’s gaze and looked over her shoulder.
Only the bare wall.
“It’s up to you,” she thought she heard Trevini say. Or was that a voice from her memory?
A drop of blood was running down Valerie’s chin. She had taken her lower lip between her teeth and bitten it again. But her eyes were as fixed as ever.
Why didn’t Rosa feel sorry for her? Was this the inheritance that she had claimed here in Sicily? The cold-blooded nature of her grandmother, and Florinda after her?
She stood up and left the cell, too quickly, too obviously
in flight. Trevini was bound to register that, and when she forced herself to look at him again, his smile was the smile of an understanding schoolmaster.
“I can teach you,” he said. “Everything you need to know.”
She left the door unlocked and dropped the key in his lap. “Keep her here for now. I spent a year in hell on her account; a few more days won’t make any difference to Val.”
“And then what, if I may ask? What’s to become of her later, after another week or another month?” He weighed the key in his hand as if it were much heavier than before. “You could give her her freedom. You could be gracious and generous. What does your conscience tell you, Rosa Alcantara? And what does your blood tell you?”
She left him behind her and walked quickly down the corridor in the direction of the elevator.
He called after her, “You asked me just now what Costanza would have done.”
“I am not my grandmother.”
“But you must learn to be like her. You want a life here on the island? You want young Carnevare? Then you must be harder than any of the others, more cruel than your enemies. Costanza knew that. And you will soon understand it as well.”
“I’ll see you on the terrace,” she called back over her shoulder. “We’ll discuss it further there.” Not down here. Not in the dark.
But the darkness followed her up into the daylight.