Arcadia Burns (20 page)

M
INUTES LATER, THEY STILL
hadn’t said a word.

Rosa was sitting on Alessandro’s lap in the armchair, with her head on his shoulder. In the silence of the library, his heartbeat was the only sound she heard. The artery in his throat throbbed against her cheek. The rhythm seemed to pass through her whole body, filling it from head to toe. As if he were keeping her alive with his own heart, while hers felt dead.

After a while she raised her eyes and looked at him.

“You do see it, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said gently. “Of course.”

“I mean, really?”

“He looks just like the man in your photo.”

She moved apart from him and stood up, walked two or three steps away, and then turned abruptly again. “He doesn’t just look like him, Alessandro. That man in the video
is
my father.”

He too got to his feet. The next moment he was beside her, intending to hold her. But Rosa raised both hands to ward him off and shook her head without facing him. “The man who gave Tano instructions to rape me was…” She broke off, lowered her arms, and stood there helpless for a
second. “Oh, shit,” she whispered.

He made another attempt to take her in his arms, and this time she let him. She just stood there, and he gave her as much time as she needed.

Suddenly she moved away from him, rubbed her eyes, and straightened up. “There,” she said.

“There?”

“That’s enough. Collapse over. Good-bye tearful, self-pitying Rosa. The old Rosa is back, all fixed up, house-trained, neuroticized, guaranteed dry-eyed.”

He raised one eyebrow. “Neuroticized?”

“If the word doesn’t exist yet, then it’s mine.”

“No one else will want it.”

“I do. I like my neuroses. I like them to have their own adjective.”

He sighed. “What are you going to do?”

“Step one: Look back at what’s happened to date.”

Alessandro, anxious, said nothing. He seemed to be waiting for a shock, a fit of hysterics. But she was keeping herself under control. She thought she was the very image of a perfectly poised young woman.

“So my father gets a phone call after my grandmother’s death,” she began. “A man called Apollonio has come to see Trevini, demanding money—for the fur coats made from the skins of Arcadians that haven’t been paid for yet…sounds kind of crazy. Like something out of a soap opera.”

“Okay.”

“Because of that phone call, my father leaves his family and
flies to Europe to track down this Apollonio in person. Soon after that, his wife and his two dear little daughters hear that he’s died of a heart attack. None of them fly out to his funeral. Big mistake. Because it turns out, later, that his tomb is empty.” She wrinkled her nose. “Sound like a credible story?”

“With reservations.”

“Since it all seems so run-of-the-mill in these parts, let’s introduce a little complication. TV viewers are used to that kind of thing.”

To please her, he went along with the game. “Plenty of people have seen
Lost
.”

“One of the daughters is raped. Of course she gets pregnant.” Cynicism made it easier to talk about it, almost as if it had happened to someone else. “Eighteen months later a video of the rape turns up, and in it there’s a man who everyone calls Apollonio. That’s weird enough, but there’s more: Apollonio is her father! End of season one. Now the scriptwriters have a year to think how to get themselves out of this crazy scenario.”

He looked at her hard, as if to make sure that she had not lost her mind and wasn’t heading for a nervous breakdown. “What was Apollonio’s motive?”

“What does the viewer know about him so far?” asked Rosa. “Not a lot. He probably belongs to a mysterious, super-secret, and of course worldwide organization called TABULA.”

“Which has a weakness for fur coats.”

“Through which Apollonio earns a nice bit on the side by
selling them to an evil-minded woman who is head of a Mafia clan. He could be doing that on behalf of TABULA, or maybe he’s working for himself.”

“More likely for TABULA, I’d say.”

She nodded. “Apollonio sells the furs to the old Mafia witch on orders from TABULA, then. Maybe to sow discord among the Arcadian dynasties if the deal ever comes to light. He’s a faithful supporter of the organization and would never do anything to thwart its aims. Unfortunately for him, soon after that the old woman’s son tracks him down and kills him.”

Alessandro raised an eyebrow. “How do we know that?”

“We don’t. But obviously the son slipped into the role of Apollonio thirteen years later. Now
he
is Apollonio. Same character, new face.”

“Objection.”

“What?”

“The son can’t simply take on a new role. That’s not logical. Davide is still Davide—except that now he
acts
as if he were Apollonio. Undercover. Maybe he’s some kind of secret agent trying to destroy TABULA from inside.”

“But he wouldn’t stand by and watch his own daughter being raped by one of the Panthera, just to maintain his own cover. He couldn’t do that, unless he
really
didn’t care what happened to her.”

Alessandro chewed his lower lip.

“So now Davide is Apollonio,” she said. “He’s turned into a true believer in the aims of TABULA.”

“Brainwashing?”

“I’d think it’s more likely that they convinced him, won him over. Like the first Apollonio. And now Davide thinks they’re right—so much so that he doesn’t care about anything else, even his own daughter.”

“But is it certain that there were
two
Apollonios? The one with the furs and the one on the video?”

“Good point. If Apollonio and Davide had been the same man from the start, then he wouldn’t have sold the furs to Costanza—his own mother—would he? What’s more, Trevini would probably have recognized him later.”

Alessandro was still skeptical. “You’re assuming that Trevini has really told you everything, and has given you the truth.”

“That’s what I’m going to find out—in step two. For now, however, we’re still looking at Apollonio’s motives—the motives of TABULA. They made sure that one of the Panthera raped a Lamia. Why?”

“So that she’d get pregnant by him?” suggested Alessandro hesitantly. “You think the whole thing was some kind of experiment?”

“The problem is that we don’t know what TABULA is really after. Why are they experimenting on Arcadians? What do they hope to achieve?”

He followed this up with another idea. “You remember the statues of Panthera and Lamias on the seabed? Was it TABULA that salvaged them and removed them from the site?”

“We’ll clear up the question of whether Thanassis and the
Stabat Mater
are all part of TABULA at the next script conference.”

“But all the same, one thing is important,” he said. “We’ve been connecting the statues to ourselves all this time, right? At least I did. As if they were a kind of prophesy, and the two of us were going to make it come true.”

“Kind of like that, yes.”

“But that had nothing to do with TABULA. We fell in love, but they had no control over that. And they can’t have been very happy about it. Agreed?”

Rosa nodded.

Now Alessandro was hitting his stride. “Scientists prefer to carry out experiments in a controlled environment, don’t they? In the laboratory, where they can influence everything.”

“You think—”

“They knew about the statues. They probably even know what they stand for. And that’s why they wanted a Panthera and a Lamia—” He struggled with himself, but he couldn’t finish the sentence. “Why it was one of their conditions,” was all he added.

“So there’s no such thing as artificial insemination where they come from?”

He shrugged his shoulders, unsure.

“The question is,” she said in a neutral voice, “did they want a child, or would aborted tissue be enough for them? A fetus?”

Alessandro’s cheekbones were working, but he said nothing.

She perched on the edge of the table where she had put down the photo album. Her head felt as if she had unexpectedly run into a glass door.

“I’ll go crazy if I play this game to the end. My father has turned into Apollonio, and Apollonio was paying Tano and Michele. Those are the facts. That’s all.”

“Seems like it.” He took a deep breath. “Then it was your father who also supplied Tano with the serum.”

Rosa pushed up her sleeve and looked at the blue marks where the needles of the syringes had gone in. “They’ve probably infected us with their fucking mutant blood.”

“But none of this has anything to do with us. With what we did last night.”

“No.”

“Really?”

She shook her head. “High time for me to get the transformations under control. I can’t take that stuff again. It’s almost as if my father—”

“Was making sure that
we
slept together, too?”

She looked darkly at him. “I didn’t
sleep with
Tano, Alessandro. I can tell the difference.”

“Yes…sorry. I…I don’t know why I said that.”

She gave him a kiss, first tentatively, then firmly.

“They won’t leave us alone,” she whispered. “Even if they don’t do anything, I mean don’t do anything else to
us
, they’re there all the same, distorting our thoughts and our feelings and—”

“I know exactly what my feelings are.”

She nodded slowly. What she had seen on the video changed everything—and nothing. And if Trevini had thought he could use it to bring her to her knees, he’d been mistaken.

“Thank you,” she said softly.

“What for?”

“For understanding me. Even if you don’t understand me.” She gestured clumsily. “You shouldn’t understand me. But somehow you do anyway.”

He smiled. “The Rosa version of those three words?”

“Oh, yes.”

T
HEY SPENT THE NIGHT
on the sofa in the library, sleeping in their clothes, Rosa’s head on Alessandro’s chest.

But when day began to dawn, that position wasn’t nearly as comfortable as it had been a few hours earlier. Rosa moved and felt as if someone had been driving steel nails through her joints. Her back was really stiff.

“Good morning,” he said, kissing her on the forehead.

“Morning,” she groaned. “Just how good it is I’ll find out—if I can stand up without collapsing.”

Alessandro moved, shifting his own position, and he, too, let out a groan. “Who the hell builds sofas like this?”

She sat up. “At least it was expensive.”

“So we have to put up with the discomfort.”

Rosa smiled, but even her facial muscles hurt. She grimaced to relax them, saw her reflection in a glass picture frame on the wall, and cursed. “Well, could have been worse,” she finally said. “I could have woken up a hybrid.”

“Which isn’t—”

Suddenly she leaped to her feet. “Why didn’t I change shape?” Her aches and pains were all gone at once. “Because of my father, I mean. I thought it happened on its own with violent outbreaks of feeling?”

“Maybe you have it under control better than you think.”

“But I don’t want to be able to do something without understanding why! I’m sick and tired of that. Just for once, I’d like to feel like I know
everything
about myself, and not keep seeing a total stranger in the mirror.”

“There’s no one
I
know as well as you.”

“Weird.”

“No, great.” He smiled with difficulty as he sat up straight. “A person who knows you doesn’t have to know anyone else. There are enough facets to your character for twenty people.”

“Schizophrenic, you mean.”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

“At least you’re not trying to compliment my eyes.”

“Oh, those are only average.”

“Idiot.”

He stood up, more mobile already. Even as a human he couldn’t deny the panther in himself. Rosa, on the other hand, was desperately searching for the supple flexibility of her snake form.

“If you can manage to keep your feelings under control,” he said, “then you can also control the transformations.”

“But I don’t have my feelings under control.”

“You did last night. You simply made up your mind to be the old Rosa—and it worked. That was probably how you kept yourself from turning into the snake.”

She frowned. “Is that the kind of thing the animals in the zoo tell you at night?”

“More or less.”

Rosa shook her head. “I don’t even know if I
want
to understand all this.”

“It’s not about understanding it. All we can do is
feel
the truth. This whole thing, being an Arcadian, the transformations, none of it is logical. The early Arcadians let their instincts and urges guide them. That’s why now many of them are so keen for the Hungry Man to come back—it’s exactly what he’s promising them. No more laws, no reason, just animal instinct and the satisfaction of their desires.”

“Then we’re no different from them.”

“No one said we were. We can’t reject our own nature. But giving it free rein, no rules, no consideration—that can’t be the solution either.”

“Sounds to me about the same as what the Mafia does…I mean, what our people out there are doing when they deal in human beings and armaments.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe not. But we can’t just press a switch and turn into someone different. I am what I am, Rosa. Same with you.”

“I’m not like Costanza.”

“And I’m not like my father.”

“Too much moralizing first thing in the morning.” She breathed into the hollow of her hand. “Time to brush our teeth. Shower. And then—”

“Breakfast?”

She shook her head. “Then step two.”

Wild dogs were howling in the hills.

The rotors of a helicopter droned in the distance.

The sun was only just above the peak of the mountain. The silhouettes of trees looked like charred matches against the reddish-gold ball of fire, and the scent of pine needles was wafting down the slope to the palazzo, but it was mingled with the smell of dirty animal enclosures.

“They can’t have been lured here by Sarcasmo’s barking, can they?” asked Rosa, looking up at the mountain. She and Alessandro were standing in front of the palazzo, close to the gateway leading to the inner courtyard. They had hurried outside when the howling in the woods grew too loud to ignore.

Grimly, Alessandro shook his head. “Hundinga,” he said. “Dog men. Slaves of the Hungry Man. The helicopter must have dropped them off up there.”

“Slaves?” she repeated incredulously.

“As he sees it, nothing has changed, and classical antiquity never really ended. There are still masters and servants—and slaves. In that respect, he thinks the same as many of the
capi
. I mean, do you think all the Africans trafficked by your family into Europe from Lampedusa were anything but slaves?”

“I tried to stop that trade.”

“And of course Trevini wouldn’t go along with you, right? The business makes millions.”

Rosa pushed the thought aside. “Do you really think it’s Arcadians up in the woods? Sicily is teeming with packs of feral dogs.”

He nodded again. “Hundinga have always been his most faithful servants. His first, too. The real Lycaon was changed into a wolf by Zeus, remember. Wolves and dogs have always been the Hungry Man’s favorites. At the time of the witch
hunts, the wolf men were almost wiped out, but there’ll always be dogs, and that’s also true of the Arcadians among them.” He paused for a moment. “Two of my managers were attacked by wild dogs yesterday. One of them was killed in the garden of his villa in Mondello. And there’s not much left of the other one.”

“You didn’t tell me about that.”

“I warned you how dangerous the Hungry Man is, and you didn’t want to listen.” This time he wasn’t waiting for her protest. “Look, there are three of my men waiting down at the gate. If you won’t hire any bodyguards for yourself, then take mine. They’re reliable; they know what to do.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Probably the first thing they’d do is shoot Sarcasmo.”

“Gianni loves dogs. Real dogs. Not Hundinga.”

“Gianni?”

“You’ve met him. He’s in charge of the armed guard at Castello Carnevare. He likes Mozart and reads Proust.”

“Nine feet tall, six feet wide? Face like the bark of a tree?”

Alessandro grinned. “I’m not asking you to marry him. If you let him protect you, that’ll be enough.”

“If I let a troop of Carnevares into the palazzo, word will reach Rome and Milan within the day. And you know just what they’ll think there.”

He ignored her objection. “If you want to phone Trevini and ask him questions, then go ahead, but please don’t leave this house. It would be a good idea to close that portcullis.” He pointed to the broad iron teeth protruding from the roof of
the gateway above the entrance.

“Doesn’t work anymore,” she said. “All rusted.”

“Will you let Gianni and the others in now?”

The dogs in the woods were howling nonstop.

“Do I have a choice?” she asked.

“Do it for Iole, if you’re too proud to do it for yourself.” His eyes darkened. “I have to try to speak to the Hungry Man. As long as he’s breathing down my neck, we won’t have any peace to find out more—”

“About TABULA. I know.”

“It won’t be easy to get access to him in prison, but maybe I can call on a few of my father’s old contacts.”

“Are you seriously going to see him?”

“I have to make him understand that we Carnevares weren’t responsible for his arrest. We were not the ones who gave him away back then.”

“And exactly
where
did you find that out all of a sudden?”

He became evasive, which wasn’t like him at all, and once again she had a feeling that he was keeping something from her. “I think I know who it was now. Someone has promised me evidence.”

“Someone. And that someone wants money for it, of course.”

“No, only a promise. Strictly speaking, two promises. One was that I wouldn’t talk to anyone about it. Absolutely anyone.”

“Well, you don’t have to break your stupid promise on my account.”

Smiling, he dropped a kiss on her forehead. “You’ll be the first to know when all this is over.” He nodded in the direction of the woods. “And until then, keep all the doors locked. Gianni and the others know what they have to do.”

There was no point in arguing with him. Even if the howling up in the hills only came from a few wretched strays, he wasn’t going to drop the subject. It annoyed her that he hadn’t told her either about the attack on his managers or his secret informant. But she consoled herself by thinking that he was soon going to be much angrier with her. Poetic justice.
Surely you can understand it
, she’d say then.
And anyway, you started it
.

Rosa took out her cell phone, called the guards she had down on the driveway, and asked them if there was a car there containing three orangutans in suits. “They can come up,” she said.

Alessandro cast an anxious glance at the hills. “If those are really Hundinga, they’re going to take their time. They’re putting on this show to frighten you. Maybe they’ll be satisfied with that for now. It won’t be really dangerous until you don’t hear them anymore. Then they’ll probably be on their way to the palazzo.”

He took her hand and went through the gate with her, back to the inner courtyard. His Ferrari was parked at the foot of the double flight of steps up to the porch. “Don’t let Sarcasmo out of the house. They’d go for him first.”

“He’s busy anyway, guarding Valerie in her dungeon.”

“You shouldn’t have let her stay here.”

“I was going to kick her out today, but while those creatures are still roaming the woods it might not be a great idea.” She had in fact called the doctor in Piazza Armerina, asking him to come and check up on Valerie; he would be here some time in the next few hours to examine her. Then, and only then, would Rosa throw her out with a clear conscience.

“You actually feel sorry for her.” He shook his head, but he couldn’t help smiling at the same time.

She leaned against the Ferrari, took Alessandro’s hands in hers, and drew him to her. “Promise me you’ll be careful.”

“If I don’t go and see him, there’ll never be an end to this. I can’t simply stand by and watch him hurt you.”

“If he kills you, that will
really
hurt me.”

“I only have to convince him to call someone and listen for a few minutes.”

“And he’ll believe what this person has to say?”

“It’s our only chance.” He kissed her good-bye and slipped behind the wheel of his car. “If you call Trevini, don’t tell him anything about the Hungry Man.”

Suspiciously, she cocked her head. “What exactly does Trevini have to do with it?”

For a moment he looked as if he were going to say something, but then he touched her hand through the open window of the car again and started the engine. Moments later the Ferrari was roaring out of the courtyard. Rosa watched it go until it disappeared at the other end of the gate. For a while she listened to it retreating into the distance, on the long way downhill between the olive groves and lemon trees; then she
turned around and hurried up the steps to the porch.

Iole came out of the shadow of the open door. “Sarcasmo’s scared.”

Rosa couldn’t see the dog anywhere.

“I think,” said Iole, “he’s afraid of that howling in the woods.”

Even before Rosa could answer, a black Mercedes rolled into the inner courtyard. Three men in dark suits with mirrored shades climbed out. Rosa rolled her eyes.

Gianni, the tallest and broadest of the three, came up the steps. Mozart and Proust—who would have thought? “Signorina Alcantara,” he greeted her, nodding. “Signorina Dallamano.”

Iole was visibly flattered that he knew her name. “You’re a killer, aren’t you?”

“No,
signorina
,” he said untruthfully.

Iole thought for a moment, then shrugged her shoulders. “That’s all right, then.”

Rosa discussed what was necessary with Gianni and the two others and let them take up positions inside the palazzo. She had no choice but to trust the three of them. She didn’t think they were Arcadians, just highly paid professionals who were well trained in the use of weapons and other ways of inflicting pain. Not the kind of men one liked to have in the house—but better than leaving Iole, Signora Falchi, and even Valerie alone here while Rosa was elsewhere, doing what she had promised herself she would do.

“One more thing,” she said to Gianni before the three
disappeared into the palazzo. “There should be a doctor arriving from Piazza Armerina. He’s to examine a guest up in one of the bedrooms. I asked him to come, so don’t shoot him in the kneecaps on sight, okay?”

Gianni nodded, and then he and the two others entered the house. As they did, they put headsets on.

Iole’s cheeks were flushed. “Hey, they’re nice!”

“Men from Mars.”

“They’re here to protect us. And they look like they’d be good at it.”

“Yes,” said Rosa. “I’m sure they are.”

Iole glanced at her. “You’re going somewhere, aren’t you? And you didn’t tell Alessandro.”

“How do you know that?”

But Iole simply walked away. “I’ll look after Sarcasmo. Take care.”

Rosa watched her go. “You, too. And Iole?”

The girl turned back.

“If there’s any kind of danger, I don’t care what, just hide. There’s a secret room in the study behind the—”

“Behind the paneling. The room with the white telephone. I know.” Iole waved to her, began humming a tune, and disappeared.

With the soft melody in her ears, Rosa shook her head and set off for the greenhouse.

In the humid, hot, tropical thicket she talked to the snakes.