Book of Stolen Tales (20 page)

H
er words stunned me. I didn't know what to say. It was a ridiculous notion, and yet a part of me had sensed that Alessio and his power over me were—unnatural. “He's included you in some of those occult rituals, then?”

“No. He never allowed women to participate. I hid and watched it.” A shiver ran through her as if she were watching it all over again. “That's why the man you call Alessio terrifies me.”

“He's a dead ringer for Giambattista Basile.”

“Exactly.”

“That only proves he bears a likeness to his ancestor.”

“No. He's a product of the conte's sorcery.”

I felt my rational mind sliding into a dark place it didn't want to go. I tried one more angle. “Alessio speaks English. It sounded antiquated but almost perfect grammatically. How do you explain a seventeenth-century Neapolitan with the ability to speak modern English?”

“Only a few hundred years ago he lived as one of the best-educated members of the Spanish court in Naples. And he traveled. Of course he could speak English. French and Spanish too.”

Challenging her any further would serve no purpose. She believed. It was that simple. Ideas like that could cripple even the most rational people if their motivation was strong enough. And Dina had been exposed to Mancini's warped thinking for years. There was one thing I was sure of, though—Alessio worked for Mancini.

“How are we going to get the rest?”

“I can't approach … all the owners on my own. I need your help with that. I made a mistake. I should have destroyed the whole book when I first laid eyes on it and never tried to sell it.”

“Okay, so who has the other four volumes?”

Dina dug her nails into my arm and cast a startled look behind her. She'd parked the car so it couldn't be seen directly from the road. I hadn't paid much attention to the cars whizzing by, but now I heard what she heard, a vehicle slowing down behind us. Its high beams shot a blinding light through our back window. The car swung in beside us. I opened the passenger door, ready to confront the driver.

A sturdy guy of about twenty-five got out, and without even looking at me strode over to Dina.

“It's all right.” Dina's deep sigh of relief was audible. “This is Joachim.”

“A friend?”

“The cousin of my friend Luisa. We have to change cars now.”

She got out and said,
“Grazie, Joachim.”

“E' arrivat' sta bbuon'. Tutt' a appost'. Luisa sarrà felic.”

“Pe' ffavor' ringraziatel' pe mmè. Luisa è na bbon' amica,”
Dina replied.

He tipped his baseball cap and they exchanged keys. After we grabbed our bags he climbed into the Alfa Romeo and sped away.

The new car looked like a discard from a low-end rental agency. I volunteered to drive. She handed me the keys and remained standing outside while I shifted into the driver's seat. Then she said, “I'm just going behind that clump of trees over there. I don't want to stop for a restroom on the main highway because we'd be too visible. I won't be long.”

I watched her make her way over to a grove of stunted palms and thought about Joachim. At no time had he glanced my way, almost as if he'd been expecting me to be there. I suppose Dina could have told Luisa about me earlier tonight, but even then it felt unusual for the guy not to have at least acknowledged my presence.

Visibility was good thanks to the full moon although not enough to see much in the engine. Being hunted months ago in New York with a tracking device taught me to be vigilant.

I grabbed my bag and quietly left the car, taking out my penlight. I lifted the hood and played the light over the motor. Everything looked normal. Just paranoia on my part, perhaps. I felt carefully along the underside of fenders and finding nothing, bent down and peered underneath. The penlight shone on the mud-encrusted undercarriage and picked up an object that didn't belong under any vehicle. A series of colored wires twisted out of a small package wrapped in black plastic.

I straightened up like a shot and ran toward the palms. I didn't catch Dina dishabille; instead I found her leaning against a tree, talking on her cell. She jumped when she saw me and abruptly clicked off her phone.

“Who were you talking to?”

“Just Luisa. She called to make sure Joachim came on time. Why are you carrying your bag?”

“There's a bomb under the car your friend so nicely lent you.”

She let out a little cry. “No! Luisa would never do that.”

“Maybe she didn't know. Mancini's people probably tapped your phone. If you've used your cellphone to talk to her, Mancini could have gone straight to her cousin and forced him to cooperate. Or just crossed his palm with a hell of a lot of silver.” I looked right into her eyes. “I'm telling you it's there. I just saw it. Where did you say we're headed?”

“Rome.”

“Call her back right now. Apologize for cutting her off. Say I interrupted you. Then let her know we'll be leaving here in about fifteen minutes for Rome as planned.”

She protested bitterly when I said we couldn't get her things out of the car and she'd have to ditch her phone, but I managed to persuade her and we took off. They'd figure out pretty fast no one was in the car when it blew and I felt anxious Joachim might park close by, waiting to hit his remote and touch off the explosion. We probably had only seconds left.

My answer came soon enough. We'd just mounted a small hill when we heard a deep
whump
. As we turned in the direction of the sound, a flash seared the surrounding terrain, lighting up the roof-line of the building we'd left, followed by a belch of smoke and the irritating smell of burning plastic and oil. Tires sprayed gravel as a motor started up farther away. We hid behind some trees in case Joachim was on his way back. Thankfully the sound of the engine receded into the distance.

To be sure, ours was a shaky alliance. I had far too many questions about Dina's trustworthiness, starting with that phone call she made. Was she really just communicating with her friend or telling her I was in the car and they could blow it up? “We've got to get off this road,” I said grimly. “Is there a highway anywhere near? We'll have to hitch a ride.”

“Yes. It will take a while to get there but we can reach it.” Dina clasped her arms around her chest and shivered. “I can't believe it. That Luisa would betray me.”

“Maybe they didn't give her any choice.” I took off my jacket and handed it to her. It was far too big. She looked like a street waif with it draped awkwardly over her slight shoulders.

We cut across several minor roads and found a footpath winding through some kind of park. The trees gave way and we stepped onto a huge gravel plain with a pond near its center. In the distance, smoke poured from crevices in the rock. Dina anticipated my question. “The crater of the Solfatara volcano. Some believe it is the home of Vulcan, an entrance to Hades.”

After what we'd just been through a visit to hell seemed somehow perfectly fitting, and it wasn't hard to see where the idea had come from. The air reeked of sulfur. Across the crater, smoke billowed from pits and holes. A weird yellowish light emanated from the fumaroles. Encrusted rocks and minerals surrounded these openings—brimstone, the old-fashioned name for sulfur deposits. In places the soil had burned so it was little more than cinder, all the vegetation scorched off. It was a strange sensation to put my hand on the ground and feel how hot it was, as if the very earth were dying of fever. Not being of a religious turn of mind, I'd never paid any heed to stories about sinners roasting forever in the fires of hell. And yet here, with night closed in around us and the flares of light turning the plumes of smoke an eerie yellow, I could almost be convinced.

We walked at a good clip, anxious to reach the access road to the highway. “Tread carefully here,” Dina said. “We're only on a thin crust. It's all boiling liquid underneath.”

Fortunately, we'd almost reached the end of the crater when Dina told me that. I burst out laughing. “Thanks for taking me on the scenic route.” She made a good choice, though, by coming here. We were totally alone and no one, I now felt sure, was mapping our progress away from Naples.

After a long trek we made it to an interchange for the A56, which led to the E45, the major highway north. As we waited to hitch a ride I said, “Your game plan was to go to Rome—then what?”

“I needed the anonymity of a large city away from Italy, one I could get lost in. Luisa bought me an air ticket to Berlin under her name. I have an old friend there the conte doesn't know about. He'd expect me to travel to London instead because that's where I went to school.”

“Did you discuss this with her on your cellphone?”

“I told her.”

“Well, that's out then. So, let me suggest this. If we recover even one volume of the five you sold, at the very least, it will give us some leverage. Who has the others? Who did you sell them to?”

“The nearest is in France, a rich businessman named Alphonse Renard. Ewan told me he's a prominent rare book collector but the only contact is through a post box at Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.”

Twenty

November 21, 2003

En route to Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, France

W
e landed a ride with english tourists who vacationed every year in southern Italy and chose November to avoid the summer crowds. They were driving overnight to Florence and kindly dropped us off at a junction where we hitched another ride to the seaport town of Civitavecchia. At six in the morning we huddled in a café until we could get a ferry to Marseilles. We ended up having to wait most of the day and finally boarded a ferry that accepted walk-on passengers. The ship had launched only a few weeks earlier; it was brand spanking new and very comfortable. Our trip would last, weather permitting, about fourteen hours. In the passenger lounge we watched the Tyrrhenian Sea turn from shimmering aquamarine to copper to flat mauve in the fading light.

Once safely away from the shores of Italy, Dina relaxed a little and told me more about her family. “My mother had a lot of trouble conceiving,” she said, wrapping her hands around a flimsy paper cup full of coffee. “She prayed every day for a child. She'd almost given up hope when she learned she was pregnant. I came into the world on her fortieth birthday. She died two years later.”

“Do you remember her at all?”

“Only from photos. When I was very little I'd stand the framed picture of her I liked best on my bookshelf and talk to her. Pretend it was really her in the room. My nurse scolded me for it and said if she'd died it must have been part of God's plan and I had to accept it. She took all my photos away. I cried for days after that but by then, her face had been imprinted on my memory.”

“We have that in common. My mother died in a mining accident before I turned three.”

Dina's features softened for an instant. “Oh. Sorry to hear that.”

We all have a tendency to think other people's lives are happy and full until we get to know them better. I couldn't be sure that Dina's sad story was true, but I found myself wanting to believe it. I suggested she consider moving to New York, a big enough city to get lost in, far removed from Mancini's influence. Somewhere I could look out for her.

“A city might give me a place to escape to,” she said in reply, “not permanently. I suffocate in cities. I much prefer country life.”

I nodded, even though I didn't understand the appeal.

I cast around for a way to get her mind off her troubles. “Okay, let's talk about something else. Well, since stories are dictating our lives right now, tell me your favorites when you were a kid.”

That cheered her a little and her eyes sparkled. “Oh, that is hard! I like so many of them. I've always loved fairy tales. I guess my favorite is ‘The Young Slave.' It's one of Basile's.” She rolled her eyes at me and smiled. “It is like ‘Snow White,' but much darker. The Grimms' first ‘Snow White' was quite disturbing. The king fell incestuously in love with his own daughter, and her mother, not a stepmother, tried to kill her.”

I didn't recall seeing ‘The Young Slave' when I read some of Basile's stories. “Tell it to me. I'd like to hear it.”

“Well, I may not be able to recite all of it but here's how it starts: ‘There was once upon a time a Baron of Selvascura who had an unmarried sister.…' I can't remember the next lines but she swallowed a rose petal. Then it goes, ‘Not less than three days later, Lilla felt herself to be pregnant, and nearly died of grief, for she knew well she had done nothing compromising or dishonest, and could not therefore understand how it was possible for her belly to have swollen. She ran at once to some fairies who were her friends, and when they heard her story, they told her not to worry, for the cause of it all was the rose-leaf that she had swallowed.'”