The Demon Catchers of Milan #2: The Halcyon Bird (17 page)

“You have plenty of ancestors who have been doing the same thing over and over, and that’s good; we’ve had a chance to get rid of some of the things that don’t work. We need the notes we take, we need the centuries behind us. It’s a good thing. What I am trying to say is that it is not the only thing, do you understand?”

I nodded, and he went on. “The ritual we use to open the Second Door is a newer ritual. Do you remember what G. Della Torre called it?”

I’d written it down; I could see it in my handwriting, on the page.

“The song of something,” I hazarded. “The song of the gate of …”

“Yes.
Il canto della porta d’Orchoë
—the song of the gate of Uruk. It uses words from a much more ancient text. I do not know where G. found it, because it has only recently been
found on some clay tablets and translated. He died long before those books were published.”

I knew when he said “recently” he could mean anytime in the last couple hundred years; I’d even started to think that way myself.

“The text he uses is a song sung by a goddess, a great goddess, while she stands at the gates of the Land of the Dead.

“Signora Negroponte spoke to you of the gods of place, the laws of the house, and the laws of the road,” he said. I couldn’t tell if it was a question.

“Yes,” I said. “Everyone can use the roads, no matter if they are good or evil, demon or saint or angel.…”

I didn’t mean to wax poetic, but Giuliano smiled with approval.

“Yes,” he prompted.

“But to enter a house,” I went on, “you must be invited in. And you are under the protection of the roof, even if it is a roof where you are giving silver for food, or a bed, or for anything, really. You are under the wings of your host.”

“Yes.”

He waited. I’d gotten used to this over the last few months. Neither he nor his grandson ever liked to do my thinking for me. I suppose I should have been grateful, but it always made a place behind my eyebrows ache.

“So … we have to be invited into the Strozzi house.”

He nodded.

“But haven’t they already given their permission, because Signora Strozzi said it was okay to build the balcony?”

He nodded again.

“So … we have to ask someone else?”

Another nod.

“A spirit,” I said, more to myself now, thinking hard, no longer looking at him to see if he agreed. “A spirit. Not the demon we are after, I am guessing. Someone else who lives there. A member of the family? Probably.”

I looked up at him. He was smiling.

“Do we know who we have to ask for permission?”

He shook his head.

“Oh,” I said, meeting his eyes. “That makes it complicated,” I said.

He nodded, grinning like a boy up to no good.

You
love
this job!
I thought, suddenly enlightened.
You love it with all your heart. The study, the danger, helping others, all of it
.

I grinned back.

I guess that was a signal. He slapped a hand down on the open book and gestured for me to pull my chair in closer. I looked down at the page, ready to read the song of a goddess, to see holy words, and saw—gibberish.

“It is a transliteration of the words found on a clay tablet, in the Akkadian language, once spoken all over Mesopotamia,” he explained.

Oh, all right, then. He drew out a notebook and showed me a translation.

“This isn’t the part we use for the Second Door; this is the beginning of a hymn to the goddess, though she is known by another name in the song that we use.”

I had never heard of anybody talking to a goddess that way.

“So,” Nonno went on. “We are using very ancient words, which people once believed were spoken to, and by, a powerful goddess. We know it has worked once before, because G. succeeded in subduing the demon of the palace. But the song of the gate is just the first part: it is a song of descent into the underworld. We are going outside of our ordinary time and place. It is the only way to reach this demon of place.”

“We go to another place to reach the demon of place? No offense, but this is getting weird,” I told him.

Giuliano laughed.

“It always does,” he said. “That’s the way it is.”

I thought of the smell of stagnant water in my mind the night Tommaso Strozzi had dropped by, the night I had seen the candle go out. I shivered suddenly, thinking about Lisetta Maria Umberti’s face, so still in death. Was the underworld where she had gone?

I watched Emilio outside, pacing the cobblestones while he talked on his phone. I saw his face break into a wide grin at something Alba said. The streetlamps picked out the bright glint of his hair against the gray walls of the Pinacoteca di Brera.

I thought of the Second Door we had built, and of the goddess covered in blood, and again, of Lisetta Maria Umberti’s face, after we’d done our best to save her. We dealt with such vast powers and we had so much responsibility to the people we tried to help. And we were going to knock on a door using the words of someone who had been trying to get into the Land of the Dead. I shivered. As much as I wanted to learn this job, I felt afraid down to my bones.

“Nonno,” I said.

“Yes?” he asked.

“I’m glad I got to help with the Second Door. But I’m too young for this. I’m not ready to go with you.”

Nonno laughed.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said brusquely. “In any other age, you would already be a wife and mother—or you would have taken the veil—or you would have already stood your vigil for a witch.”

He looked hard at me.

“Of course, you cannot conduct the ritual. Of course, it’s a risk to bring you. You might make a mistake. But too young …? No, that is no excuse.”

I said nothing more for a long time. Nobody would ever say that to me back home in Center Plains, would they? Sometimes I felt so at home here, and sometimes the strangeness of this new world hit me hard.

“Nonno never allows excuses,” Emilio said as he came back in, smiling to take the sting out of his words. “I have no idea what you were talking about. Just thought I should point it out.”

His grandfather waggled his brows at him and told him to drink his wine.

I was still thinking about Nonno’s words when I climbed into bed that night. A wife and mother? At sixteen? A witch, a nun? It was so hard to imagine.

“He’s quite right,” Signora Gianna agreed, speaking over my head in the dark.

“You are certainly old enough,” said Gravel. (I still had no idea what his real name was.)

“Not that you know anything about it,” Signora Gianna told him.

“Oh, don’t I?” Gravel riposted. I started laughing.

“You guys know I have a big day tomorrow, right?” I asked.

“You do, don’t you?” said Gravel, speaking to me directly for the first time.

“Yes,” I answered, fascinated, sitting up in bed.

“Opening a Second Door, I hear,” he continued, in his deep, rough voice.

“Yes,” I said again.

“They’re going about it the right way,” said Signora Gianna with what sounded like professional interest. “Research, precedents.”

“Thank you,” I said. “We’re not missing anything, are we?”

Signora Gianna and Gravel both laughed.

“There’s always something missing,” said Signora Gianna. “You do the best you can with what you know.”

“But you would tell us, if you knew something, right?” I asked, suddenly full of hope. “You would mention it to me?”

“I would, if I remembered to,” she said kindly.

“Which wouldn’t be very likely,” Gravel put in, less kindly.

“Hush,” snapped Signora Gianna. “You are ridiculous. My memory is not what it once was, true,” she went on. “And I cannot see all I would want to see, with the case you are working on. There’s a great deal that I have no way of finding out.”

“I hoped …” I began.

“I know,” she said. “But you will have to do it without my help,” she finished wryly. “Go to sleep, young one.” I did, which
would have surprised me if I’d been awake to notice.

The next night, we gathered for a rather solemn dinner, with what I was starting to think of as the usual crew for a big job: Nonno Giuliano, of course; Uncle Matteo, Emilio, Francesco, and Anna Maria.

Nonna Laura made
trofie al pesto
, a dish from the Ligurian coast that reminded me somewhat of gnocchi. She roasted chicken and pigeons, and served fresh fava beans in olive oil for a
contorno
, followed by a salad of baby greens, then cheese and fruit.

“A simple meal, before a big job,” she explained. “It will sustain you, but it shouldn’t be too hard on your stomachs.”

“Yes, none of this should taste too bad coming back up,” Francesco told me cheerfully.

I looked down at my plate, then back up at him.

“Really?” I asked faintly.

“Behave yourself,” Nonna told him sharply. But she did not look at him when she said it, and both she and Francesca seemed unusually quiet. Égide squeezed Francesca’s hand where it rested on the table.

At the end of the meal, Égide said, “Why don’t I make the coffee, Nonna? Go sit.”

She accepted his offer gratefully. Francesca stayed behind to do the dishes; her brother stood beside her at the sink, drying and teasing her, snapping his towel at her. I wiped down the table and watched them, thinking what they must have been
like as kids together. It seemed like Emilio was trying to comfort her.

I ferried the coffee to the
soggiorno
, handing the first cups to Nonna and Nonno, sitting beside each other on the couch, holding hands, fingers tightly interlaced. Nonno kept her hand in his even when he opened a notebook. Emilio came in and sat down on the arm of the couch, cupping his coffee in both hands; I heard Francesca and Égide finishing up in the kitchen.

“We will be using an invocation called the
canto della porta d’Orchoë
,” Giuliano said, nodding at me. “This is the same entry spell that G. Della Torre used in the account Anna Maria and Mia found. I will also bring Nonno Francesco’s spell in case the
canto
does not work, but I believe it will. It’s a straightforward enough recital, and then we fit the key in the lock. We may not be welcomed in, precisely, but we should be allowed to enter. Emilio will wait with his candle ready in case anyone comes out at us right away.”

He paused and met his grandson’s eye, then looked around at the rest of us.

“Once inside, we do not know what we will find. Keep together. Keep to the patterns of exorcism you know. Keep your senses wide open. We may have to wait to do an exorcism; we must see what we find. Is it understood?”

My cousins nodded, and so did I. Uncle Matteo got up with a grunt and went out on the balcony to light a cigarillo. Emilio moved to a chair and leaned back, running a hand through his
curls. Anna Maria asked, “Can I see what’s on?” and got a nod from Nonna.

She settled on a Roberto Benigni film that was halfway through. I wasn’t the only one who kept glancing at the clock. The second hand ticked round and round, but the minute and hour hands seemed to stay in the same place. Then, somehow, they moved, and it was midnight.

The doorbell rang and Anna Maria jumped up. Nobody else seemed surprised that we might be having visitors. Then Anna Maria opened the door, smiled, and said,
“Buona sera,”
letting in an older man who seemed familiar, and a younger man who looked very much like him: Bernardo.

He glanced down at me once, smiling slightly. At least this time, he got to see me dressed entirely in black. I looked good, I thought, though not as stunning as Emilio and Anna Maria.

The older man kissed Nonno and Uncle Matteo on both cheeks, and I understood that he was Rinaldo Tedesco, Bernardo’s father.

Bernardo and his father were dressed in ordinary clothes. Bernardo wore a dark shirt and a smooth chocolate-brown leather jacket. Standing calmly beside his father, listening to the small talk of the older men, he looked even more beautiful than I remembered.

Then we were all rising, and I was touching my shaking fingers to my breast pocket to make sure I had my case, and following Anna Maria down into the courtyard, where
we crowded into her father’s Fiat. Everyone else was riding a
motorino
tonight: even Giuliano had one. He took Emilio on his; Bernardo took Francesco; Signore Tedesco rode alone, talking on a cell phone, his tight scarf unfurling over his shoulder as we followed him out under the archway and into the Via Fiori Oscuri. The drive to the Via Vincenzo Monti didn’t take long. I watched the streetlights flash over Signore Tedesco’s back as he leaned and dodged from street to street.

“Why is everyone but us on
motorini
?” I asked Uncle Matteo and Anna Maria.

Uncle Matteo grunted, eyes on the road.

Anna Maria said, “So we can scatter faster if we have to. Papa is bringing us like this because we get to stay behind and do a bit of—information management—if anything happens.”

“Oh,” I said, worried I would be expected to help out with that. I was afraid all I could do was stand there if the police showed up. It hadn’t even occurred to me that they might. Or was that what she meant by “if anything happens”?

We parked in the courtyard belonging to the Intesa Sanpaolo. All the BMWs had gone home to wherever BMWs live; there was only a lone Mercedes, grand and forlorn, close to the door of the bank. The Strozzi apartment building rose up before us in the dark. The balcony and the door were faintly lit by the streetlights. No lamp shone in the windows of the Strozzi apartment.