R
OSA BREATHED IN THE
fresh air as if she couldn’t get enough of it. A cool breeze off the sea was blowing in her face, but she couldn’t shake the smell of the hotel basement.
She closed her eyes, but the sun was still burning bright red through her eyelids. Forcing herself not to show any weakness, she looked ahead again, and was irritated to see Contessa di Santis coming toward her on the terrace with a concerned expression.
“Everything all right, Signorina Alcantara?”
“Fine.”
“You look pale.”
“I have a fair complexion. Always did.”
The assistant nodded understandingly. “We can’t choose what we’re born with, can we?”
Before Rosa could reply, di Santis turned to Trevini, who was guiding his wheelchair out of the hotel lounge and into the open air. Rosa thought this would be a good moment to throttle him from behind.
“Can I bring you anything?” asked the assistant. “Drinks? A little snack from the kitchen?”
Trevini shook his head. “Leave us alone, please.”
Di Santis looked back over her shoulder, almost
reproachfully. As she did so, her left eyebrow rose higher and higher, until Rosa began to fear that it might disappear right into her hairline.
“As you wish,” said the assistant, stalking away into the lounge. Rosa signaled to the two bodyguards to go into the building as well. Di Santis could not refrain from saying, “Please come with me, gentlemen. Maybe I can do something for you.”
Trevini moved his wheelchair past Rosa and over to the balustrade. His good eye wandered over the water in the distance. “We’re all inclined to take ourselves too seriously, don’t you agree? To think of all that this sea has known in its time! Ancient Greece, Rome, Carthage, the early Mesopotamian tribes. Ur and Babylon, the biblical peoples. And here we are discussing a single life, just one unimportant human being.”
“You move me deeply,
avvocato
, you really do. But I didn’t come here for a history lesson or to look at the beautiful view.”
“Without the sea I couldn’t live here,” he continued, undeterred. “It’s one of the reasons why I never leave this hotel.”
“What are the others?”
“I’m too old to take risks.” He put his fingertips to his temples. “What I have in here, in my head, is the only capital I have. Did you know that I don’t even own a computer? And no cabinets full of files.” Of course she knew; it was the first thing she had heard about Trevini. “I keep everything that matters in my mind, as I have for years. No evidence, no trails. I was born with an extraordinary memory, and I
imagine it’s only right that I pay for it with certain deficiencies in other respects.”
She was watching him as he spoke. But he was still staring out over the Mediterranean, into that breathtaking blue space.
“I’m sure you have wondered why I appointed the
contessa
my assistant,” he went on. “She has top qualifications and references, she is easy on the eye—but none of that explains why she is really here. The truth of it is that she has the same qualities as me. I have spent a long time looking for someone who can compete with me in that respect. She is young, enormously ambitious, and she is certainly a complex character. I suffer from that more than anyone.” The twinkle in his eyes ought to have seemed insinuating, but instead it looked almost friendly. “Above all, however, she has a remarkable ability to absorb facts. She hears something, sees something, and after that it’s stored in her head as if it were on a hard disk. I have to resign myself to being less unique than I have always thought. That young lady is perfect.”
Rosa sighed. “At least as far as her bra size is concerned, right?”
“I’m sorry,” he said in kindly tones. “You don’t have to like the
contessa
, Rosa. I’m not even sure that I do. But think of her as your personal security copy of me. Just in case something happens to me one of these days.”
“She’s been initiated into everything? Every deal? Every transaction?”
“I took the liberty of revealing them to her. We sit together and I tell her the facts. Hour after hour, day after day. The
contessa
stores it all in her mind. I’ve tested her more than once. She’s fantastic. She remembers everything. And with her excellent education, she’s in a position to make judgments that surprise even me.”
“How nice to know that in the future I won’t have only you to deal with, but also”—here she glanced into the lounge and saw di Santis flirting with the bodyguards—“but also the
contessa
.”
“Life is a never-ending series of tribulations, my dear.”
“If you call me that again, I’ll push you over the railing.”
He laughed. “Mutual respect is a wonderful thing. But that’s not what brought you here. The video interested you, but that wasn’t all, am I right?”
The strong breeze off the sea had loosened several strands of hair from the clip she wore, and they were blowing around her face. “I’ll make you an offer,
avvocato
. We can beat around the bush for hours, but we both know what the end result will be. We depend on each other. I don’t like you at all—well, maybe I like you a little better than I like your
contessa
in there. She’s probably unbeatable at sprinting in high heels.”
He laughed heartily at that. Ah, so this was the way to get at him. Just tell him the truth.
“You depend on me as much as I depend on you,” she said, slightly relieved that now she could fall back on the speech she had prepared in advance. “I don’t know anything about the business affairs of the Alcantaras, and I need someone to keep all that at a distance from me. As you’ve obviously already begun to do. On the other hand, you could never be
capo
of
the Alcantaras, because you don’t belong to the family. My relatives in Milan and Rome would never accept someone like you as head of the clan. As a lawyer who can spring them from prison, and as a miraculous human calculator and financial genius—no problem there; they love you for that. But you’re not an Alcantara, and you never will be.”
He was observing her very closely now. “What are you suggesting?”
“I am the head of the clan, and nothing will change that. I’m beginning to feel at home here on the island. I represent what this family stands for, and I am now the public face of the clan, whether the others like it or not.”
She had learned it by heart, but she thought it sounded good.
“Why are you doing this to yourself?” he asked. “Why don’t you just take a large sum of money and your new boyfriend and go off to live happily ever after somewhere at the other end of the world?”
“Because no one—not you, not those idiots in Palermo and Rome—none of you trust me to do anything. Because everyone’s just waiting for me to mess it all up.”
“That,” he said, smiling again, “that’s an unorthodox view of the situation. But I understand what you’re getting at.”
“I’m accepting my inheritance,
avvocato
. I will lead the Alcantaras.”
“And you think you can do it?”
She gave him a sweet smile. “This is where you come in. You do what you’ve been doing all these decades—you remain the
genius in the background. The one who pulls the wires. Lord God Almighty of Taormina. I can butter you up as much as you want. I know how to pay compliments, I promise you I do.”
He sighed. “I think I understand you, too. You represent the clan; I do the work.”
“That’s the plan.”
He breathed in and out deeply. “I’m an old man.”
“What do you need? Another nurse like your protégée there? With longer legs, bigger breasts?”
“I can be very obstinate. Pigheaded. Difficult to deal with.”
“But you have the
contessa
. You can always take it out on her.”
He smiled. “You have no right of veto. No say in business affairs.”
“Forget it. I do.”
“We play the game like that or not at all.”
She shook her head. “You obviously don’t understand yet,
avvocato
.
I
make the rules. You throw the dice and see that they always come up sixes.”
He blinked, maybe because she was standing in front of the sun. Or because his expression had become a little more forced than ever. “What do you want, Rosa?”
“I’m no Mother Teresa. I know what I’m getting into. But there
will
be rules. No arms deals. No drugs.”
He laughed at her, just as she had planned. “Then how are we to earn money? With ringtones?”
“With what’s been most profitable to us over the last few years—the subsidies from Rome and Brussels that you fixed.
Money for wind turbines that don’t generate any power, for instance.”
“It can’t be done without the arms deals,” he said categorically. “You may have to look around for someone else.”
Rosa had seen that coming, and realized that she had to make some concessions. “Where do the arms go?”
“Africa. South America. Southeast Asia. Most of the stuff comes from Russia, but some of it from the USA, Germany, France. Where do you suppose that helicopter of yours was made? It certainly isn’t branded ‘Made in Italy.’”
“How about the drugs?”
“That trade’s not what it once was. Too much competition from Russia and the Balkans. My heart’s not set on it. But you can never be one hundred percent sure it’s not going on, with some of the
soldati
doing deals of their own.”
“If that happens, I should hear about it.”
“You won’t make friends that way.”
“I know.” She smiled. “That’s why I want you to do it for me.”
“You think you’re making it easier for yourself, but you’ll soon see it’s exactly the opposite. It’s not the law you want to guard against; it’s your own people.”
“Then I’d better begin with you, right?”
“I swore to your grandmother, on oath, that my life belongs to this family. And I’m a man of my word.”
“You haven’t done badly up until now.”
“And as we happen to be discussing it, I have one condition. Lampedusa.”
“Florinda’s favorite project?”
“Some of her signatures still have to be honored. I have, shall we say, a personal interest in the business with the refugees on that island. We can forget about the drugs, we can reduce the arms deals, but Lampedusa must stay as it is. You will not place any obstacles in my way in that respect.”
Reluctantly, she nodded.
“We’re of the same mind, then?” he asked.
“I don’t think we’ll ever be of the same mind,
avvocato
. But we have a deal.” A pact is more like it, she thought, grinding her teeth.
He offered Rosa his hand, and she shook it without hesitating.
As she left, she gave Contessa di Santis a charming smile, and as they said good-bye to each other, she held the
contessa
’s hand a little too long. On the way back to the helicopter Rosa threw the diamond ring she had been holding in her clenched fist into the sea.
R
OSA FOUND
I
OLE IN
the greenhouse. The glazed annex was like a long arm reaching out from the north wall of the Palazzo Alcantara. The walls and the vaulted ceiling were made of glass panes that creaked dangerously in high winds. Rust and verdigris covered the iron framework. Like everything else in the palazzo, the place was in urgent need of restoration.
“They like me,” said Iole proudly.
She had a snake draped around her neck like a shimmering stole. Iole was caressing its skull. The other end of the reptile was coiled around her waist. More snakes were winding around her feet, darting their tongues in and out and hissing.
Rosa closed the door of the greenhouse behind her and entered the sultry jungle inside. Palm trees, giant ferns, exotic shrubs, and climbing plants had merged into dense thickets over the years. The humid heat that clouded the glass with condensation took her breath away at first. But in a moment her body adjusted to it. In fact it felt like she could breathe freely in the palazzo for the first time in months. Part of her duties, those that had lent a leaden heaviness to the place, had been left behind with Trevini in Taormina. She felt better—but at the same time she was confronting new anxieties.
“Would you like to see it now?” asked Iole, carefully trying
to lift the snake off her shoulders. The creatures were remarkably trusting. Iole was not a Lamia, indeed not an Arcadian at all, yet the reptiles accepted her as one of their own.
“Would I like to see what?” Rosa dismissed the image of the captive Valerie that had superimposed itself on Iole’s cheerful face.
“The freezer!” Iole made a reproachful pout. “
Hello?
The keypad working the door, remember? Days and days working away down in the dark cellar? Me, the genius with numbers!”
Rosa smiled, and helped her to put the snake down on the floor with the others. The sound of hissing and spitting came from all directions. More and more snakes came winding their way out of the undergrowth and formed a wide circle around Rosa, not as playful as they were with Iole but rather preserving a respectful distance.
Rosa took Iole’s hand. “Okay, let’s go. Can’t wait to see what you found.”
Iole beamed. “You really have time?”
“You act as if I never do.”
Iole’s mouth twisted, and she looked at Rosa as if to say:
Well, think about it
.
Rosa groaned guiltily and led Iole to the door. The snakes swiftly glided aside and formed an avenue for them. Rosa was glad when they had left the greenhouse and the latch clicked behind them. It wasn’t that she didn’t like to be near the snakes; it was more that she got slightly irritated finding, week after week, how she felt about being near them.
There were several ways into the palazzo cellar. They used
a staircase behind a door in the kitchen, not far from the open range where whole pigs used to be roasted on spits.
The stairway was narrow, and clearly hadn’t been used for years. Iole went ahead, warning Rosa of cobwebs and any steps that were shorter than the others, obviously enjoying the role of guide. When she operated an old-fashioned rotary switch on the wall, round lamps in metal frames on the hall ceiling came on.
After the tropical climate of the greenhouse, it was definitely cold down here. A slight draft of air smelled of dank stone and mold.
“There’s something I have to ask you,” said Rosa as she followed Iole along the brickwork corridors. Iole liked to wear white—perhaps to declare her independence from Rosa’s habitual black—and had a strong aversion to anything too close-fitting. In the dim light, there was something fairy-like about the loose material of her dress wafting around her.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know if you’ll want to talk about it.”
Iole didn’t look back at her. “What it was like when I was being kept prisoner?”
Rosa sighed softly. “Yes. But something particular about it.”
“Ask away.”
“How did you feel about the men who were keeping you captive? Did you hate them, or were you angry or afraid of them? A mixture of all that? Or something different?”
Iole shook her head. Rosa could still see her only from
behind. “I didn’t feel anything about them.”
“Nothing at all?”
“I didn’t think about them except when they came to bring me food or clothes. Or when they were taking me to a new hiding place. Otherwise I pretended they didn’t exist. Like when you dive into the water with your hands over your ears—you don’t hear anything. It works with feelings, too. Everything inside you closes up; it doesn’t let anything through. And then it’s like you’re deaf to feelings. You just don’t have them anymore.” She stopped and turned around. “Sounds a little crazy, right?” Rosa hugged her. “It doesn’t sound crazy at all.”
Raising her head from Rosa’s shoulder, Iole looked at her. “Why are you asking?”
“No reason.”
“That’s not true.” Iole tilted her head a little and stared at her, hard. “Are
you
keeping someone prisoner?”
“What makes you think that?”
“There was one of those men who brought me things, and he always seemed a little sad, like he was ashamed of himself. You look just the same.”
Rosa took a step back, shook her head, and ran her fingers through her hair. “Let’s keep going, okay?”
Iole shrugged. “You have to make sure the prisoner always has something to drink. And something to eat. Not too sweet, not too sour. And a TV set. Otherwise your prisoner goes soft in the head.”
Rosa didn’t know how well Trevini was looking after
Valerie, but she was pretty sure there was no TV set in her cell. Oddly enough, it was that point that pricked her conscience.
Iole continued walking, and Rosa hurried to catch up with her. She had been down here once before, but none of it seemed familiar. The coarse brown masonry, the cobwebs over the electric bulbs in their metal holders, the cracked concrete underfoot, which had been laid down over even older floors—as if the palazzo were about to show its true face, one that had been hidden behind halfhearted renovations.
“It’s cold down here.” She folded her arms around her shoulders as she walked.
“It’ll be colder in a minute,” said Iole.
Soon they reached the space outside the freezer. They had been going for only a few minutes, but it felt to Rosa as if an hour had passed. Below the ceiling, neon tubes came alight, humming. The place was empty except for a metal box beside a heavy iron door.
“And you’ve been in there already?”
Iole nodded. “Sarcasmo was with me. He got excited when he smelled those things.”
“What things?”
“Wait and see.”
Iole opened the flap on the little metal box. Her feet crunched on crumbs of dog biscuit. Her fingers danced over an unilluminated keypad. The numbers on the display consisted of large lines in a style that must have been the latest in modern technology two decades ago.
A hydraulic mechanism hissed, as if the iron door were
uttering a reluctant groan. Several locks opened with clicking sounds. It seemed an unusual security system for a freezer that would normally have held provisions and game animals killed in the hunt.
“Give me a hand, will you?” Iole was tugging at the enormous door handle.
Rosa still wasn’t sure that she really wanted to see what her grandmother had left here. But the adrenaline junkie in her surfaced. That did her good.
She pulled at the handle with Iole, and retreated, step by step, as the heavy door swung out into the corridor.
Darkness reigned beyond it. The cool air of the cellar retreated before a surge of Arctic cold.
“You do know I’m a vegetarian?” She peered past Iole into the darkness. “If there are ancient pig carcasses or something dangling from the ceiling in there—”
Iole vigorously shook her head. “No, much better than that.”
The neon tubes outside shed light into the freezer for only a few feet. To the right and left, it fell on something that looked like rows of cocoons lined up. They hung from the ceiling without touching the ground. An aisle ran between them.
“Wait.” Iole pressed a button next to the display on the keypad. More neon tubes lit up on the ceiling, crackling. Their light flickered on in a wave from the entrance to the depths of the freezer. The white light showed a long room, more like a tunnel than anything else. It was wide enough for not just one but three aisles between the hanging shapes.
Rosa went up to the steel doorway. Iole hurried past her, brought a metal doorstop out of the room, and wedged it under the open iron door. “There,” she said, pleased with herself.
Vapor rose as Rosa breathed out. “What
are
those things?”
Iole went ahead. “Come with me.”
Together they approached the nearest dangling forms, which Rosa now saw were fabric bags. Made of linen or cotton, and stuffed very full. Four rails ran under the ceiling, parallel to the side walls. Animal carcasses had probably once been hung in here. The idea turned her stomach.
She looked more closely at one of the bags.
The shapes of arms showed right and left inside the fabric.
No legs. No head.
Iole put out one hand and tapped the front fabric bag. The hook fastening it to the rail made a slight grinding sound, and the shapeless thing began swinging back and forth.
“Fine. Right,” said Rosa, working hard on sounding matter-of-fact. “Not dead bodies, are they?”
Iole grinned. “Depends how you look at it.” She ran both hands over the fabric, found a zipper, and pulled it down with a firm jerk.
Brown fur spilled out of the opening. Iole put one hand inside and stroked the fluffy surface.
“Fur coats,” she said. “A hundred and sixteen. I counted them.”
Rosa bent her head and tried to look between the rows at the opposite side of the tunnel-like cellar room. But the
hanging linen cocoons seemed to be moving closer and closer together at the back, as if to bar her view of the far end of the freezer.
“My grandmother stored her
fur coats
down here?” she whispered.
“They keep better in the cold,” said Iole, pride in her voice. “I read that somewhere.” She took the fur at the front off the rail, removed it entirely from its bag, and rubbed her cheek against the garment, enjoying its softness.
Once again Rosa realized how cold she was. “Who needs a fur coat in Sicily? And who, for god’s sake, needs
a hundred and sixteen
of them?”
However, she could answer that question for herself. Cosa Nostra loved status symbols, from magnificent properties to fast cars to designer fashion. Many a Mafioso collected villas on the Riviera; others surrounded themselves with crowds of beautiful women. Costanza had obviously had a weakness for furs. Florinda had hated her, Rosa knew that much.
She pointed to the rows. “No black leather jackets, I suppose?”
“If you sell all those coats you can buy yourself a thousand leather jackets.”
“Then I’ll have all the animal-rights activists in Italy after me, not to mention the police.”
“I think they’re great!” Iole put the coat on. It was much too large for her; its hem fell in folds to the floor around her feet.
Rosa walked slowly past the linen bags. Four rows—that
made it around thirty to each rail. They hung at intervals of a foot and a half. And it seemed that the freezer went on beyond the last fabric bags. She could see the neon lighting at the far end of the room.
“You put one on too,” said Iole. “Otherwise you’ll catch a chill.”
Rosa took one of the coats at random out of its stiff protective covering and slipped it on. The fur was soft and supple, but it wasn’t just because she was a vegetarian that she felt there was something unpleasant about the touch of it.
Slowly, she turned once in the middle of the linen bags. Her coat, too, dragged on the floor. “What am I going to do with all this stuff?”
“Bury it?”
“What’s beyond the coats at the far end?”
“Containers of some kind,” said Iole, shrugging her shoulders.
Rosa frowned and hurried down the narrow aisle between two rows. The broad fur shoulders of her coat brushed against some of the linen bags as she passed them, and set them rocking gently. When she looked back to see whether Iole was following, there was ghostly movement all around her. As if something alive were stirring inside the cocoons and might slip out any moment. Iole was having fun pushing more of them to make them swing, and Rosa had to stop herself from snapping at her. It wasn’t Iole’s fault that she was on edge.
At last she reached the end of the rows of coats. From a distance it looked as if the long room became narrower and
narrower toward the end, but she had been wrong. What she had taken for more linen bags was really a large number of white, circular plastic containers built into a wall. Stacked one above another, they formed a rampart reaching almost from one side of the freezer to the other, right across the aisles. But still she had not reached the far side of the underground room. You could pass to the right and left of the wall of containers.
Iole emerged from the swinging coats behind her. “Containers. Like I said.”
“Do you know what’s in them?”
“No idea.”
“And behind them?”
“A safe on the back wall. That’s all.”
Rosa went up to the containers and saw, upon glancing through the spaces between them, that there was a second row behind them. She did a rough calculation of their number and counted at least forty containers, each a good two feet high and a foot and a half in diameter.
“Are you going to look inside?” asked Iole eagerly.
“In a minute.” Rosa walked on to peer around the corner of the wall. Once again she had been wrong. There were not two but four rows of the round plastic containers. Around eighty, then.
Once again she looked back at Iole, who was already coming to join her. “First the safe. What’s in it?”
“It’s locked.”
“That didn’t stop you from opening the door.”
“Locked with a
key
.”