The Demon Catchers of Milan #2: The Halcyon Bird (3 page)

“The first references are from notes from 1322 and 1343,” said Emilio. “Baldassare Della Torre was practicing at the time, with his cousin Martino and their families. But many of our customs are from much further back, before we began writing things down.”

Anna Maria waved her perfectly manicured hand. “I think it’s outdated. Nowadays, people live together for years without getting married. You’re sleeping under the same roof, you’re in the same bed every night. How would you not figure it all out, for heaven’s sake?”

“How would you know that you had anything to figure out?” asked Emilio.

We turned into the Via Giovanni Boccaccio, and Anna Maria glanced back to make sure Nonno and Francesco were far enough behind us before she said, “So you’re going to let Alba think you’re cheating on her, all this time?”

Emilio smiled.

“How is this any of your business, Anna Maria?” he replied.

“Fair enough.” She shrugged.

He nodded. “But just so you know, no, I don’t like having her think that—except sometimes—when it’s not such a bad thing, maybe, that she jumps to that conclusion.”

“It’s not like you come home smelling of some demon’s perfume,” I pointed out.

They stared at me for a moment. Then they both burst out laughing.

Emilio wiped his eyes. “Thank you, dear Mia. I wasn’t looking forward to Alba’s anger, and now you have lightened my heart.”

I tried not to feel smug, and failed. Why did he bother with Alba? I wondered. She seemed so high-maintenance.

“And what will What’s-His-Name say when you see him next?” Emilio asked Anna Maria.

“I don’t know if I will see him,” she said thoughtfully. “This might have been it, for him. It was the third date I’d canceled. Anyway, he wasn’t who I wanted to go out with for the
festa
, but my other guy already had a date.”

“I can’t keep track of them,” said Emilio.

“Yes, you can’t even remember Mario’s name,” she pointed out.

“I didn’t, either,” I admitted, realizing she probably didn’t care whether I remembered this guy’s name or not.

“Well,
somebody’s
got to!” she said, laughing. “I keep forgetting how to tell them apart, myself. Mario is the snowboarder, and Fabio’s the lawyer who has almost certainly neglected to tell me that he’s married, and Gerhardt is the visiting professor of aeronautics, who may have forgotten whether he is or not.”

“No models?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“
Stai sputando nel piatto dove mangi
—don’t spit on the plate you’re eating from,” she said. “Anyway, the ones that aren’t gay are either high all the time or unfathomably narcissistic. Or just too stupid to do anything but …”

She caught Emilio’s eye and stopped.

“I know what you were going to say,” I said grumpily. “No need to hold back on my account.”

“Not that that’s a bad thing … being good at only one
thing, I mean,” Emilio said lightly. “In moderation.”

“Moderation’s a bad thing, too, sometimes,” said Anna Maria, looking as if she was trying not to smile.

“Yes. Well,” Emilio said.

“So,” I mused, “we have to wait until we’re married, and then a year and a day, huh?”

“That’s the rule we’re supposed to follow, yes. I’m not sure my father did, to tell you the truth,” said Anna Maria. Emilio flicked his eyes at her in surprise. I tried to imagine gruff Uncle Matteo and proper, glamorous Aunt Brigida—who was a number of years younger than her husband—breaking a rule.

“Oh, Papa and Mamma were together for ages,” she added. “If they tell you when their first date was, and then the date of the wedding, and you add that to Francesco’s birth date, you know they were a couple for a long time before they were married. Or he was a miracle birth. Now, I love my brother,” she finished. “But he’s no miracle.”

“Someone will think he is,” said Emilio. “Just wait.”

“He has to get near enough to talk to her, first,” retorted Anna Maria, as Francesco and Giuliano caught up to us.

A minute later, we saw Anna Maria to the door to her parents’ apartment in the Via Melone, then made our way to the shop in the Via Fiori Oscuri. Francesco and Emilio kissed us good-bye and headed back to their flat a couple of blocks away in the Via dei Giardini. I tried not to wonder if Alba was waiting there. I rubbed at my cheek where Emilio had pecked
it, leaving behind his pinesap scent; just a cousinly, Milanese good-bye kiss.

“I always forget that Francesco’s older than Anna Maria,” I said to Nonno as we stepped inside the shop, shutting out the cold winter air. “He’s like me and my sister, Gina. She’s a year and a half younger, and people always think she’s the older one. She’s got it more together.”

He was moving around the little shop with paneled walls and wooden shelves full of candles. Sometimes he would stop to sniff one or touch another. I watched him, knowing he probably wouldn’t explain what he was looking for. Sometimes he explains everything, like he’s talking to a child, and other times, he seems to think the knowledge will stick better if I have to claw it out of the woodwork myself.

Before we’d left to go to the exorcism, he’d asked me to put out each flame with the old silver snuffer. I’d noticed their oddities a while ago—how one always left behind a whiff of swamp gas, and another expired with a faint giggle. Long ago, Emilio had made me promise I would never blow out any of the candles with my breath, but would always use the snuffer. Now I thought I knew why: nearly all of them were inhabited, either by imprisoned demons, or helpful spirits, or both. On those rare occasions when someone came into the candle shop to buy a candle, we had to get a new—and empty—one from the back. It scares me, when some tourist leans in close to a flame, and I wonder if they are about to accidentally swallow a demon.
But my family has been doing things this way for centuries; I’m pretty sure there are more protections than I know about.

I love the candle shop. I love the smell of the wood and the beeswax, the ghosts of sulfur matches, and the way that, when the door to the street closes, I feel like I am in another century. For me, the shop really has been a sanctuary, and still is.

More than anyone else at the exorcism we had just left, I knew what that man and woman had gone through. I knew what it meant to have another mind invade my body.

I hadn’t really allowed myself to remember, not all the way. Not yet. Sometimes a part of it would come back to me, and I would remember floating through the air, making the books on the shelves ripple like dominoes. I tried not to remember what it was like to fling my sister against the wall.

I was pretty sure she knew that I wasn’t the one who had done it.

I remembered drifting down the stairs, the photos on the wall beside me falling and shattering, the sight of broken glass below my feet. I blinked and came back to myself, standing in the candle shop, Nonno Giuliano’s eyes on me.

“You don’t need to be older than your sister,” he said. “You are old enough, as you are. Sit down! We need to write up our case notes before we go to bed.”

He pointed at the chair across from him, and we both sat down at the desk, worn and oiled smooth by twelve generations of hands. He pushed a notebook in front of me. I saw it was
already labeled:
Mia Gianna Della Torre, Taccuino numero 1
. He told me, “Write precisely what you remember. Each detail, even the ones that do not seem significant. Tell what you smelled and tasted. What you heard and saw and touched. And the impressions that came into your mind. See if you can remember the order of events. Practice! We will keep these notes for your great-grandchildren to read.”

No pressure. I hadn’t realized until then that every family member who was present for an exorcism kept notes.

I began to write and wrote until the words blurred in front of me. “Bed,” Nonno said, and steered me toward the stairs. He did not follow me, but stayed at the old oak desk, writing about lost souls in the lamplight.

E
very morning, the smell of Nonna Laura’s coffee tugs me back from my dreams. After the
San Valentino
exorcism, I woke up remembering what it was like to be able to see through walls and listen through skulls—memories of terrible helplessness and secondhand power, of being able to see and hear what others couldn’t.

But I could smell the espresso Nonna was making in the kitchen, so I got up and got dressed.

“Buon giorno,”
she muttered as I came in and kissed her on the cheek. She clashed dishes into the drying rack above the sink. I did a quick mental check to see if I was the reason she was crabby and decided I probably wasn’t.

“It’s my leg,” she said, answering my unspoken question. “It’s sore again. Makes me cross as a bear. Did you sleep well? Coffee?”

“Yes, please,” I said. She always offers, as if I might have changed my mind overnight, and I always accept. “Can I do anything? Run errands for you this morning?”

“No, because you need to study.”

Plan foiled. I would much rather have stepped out into the chill February air, smelling of diesel and rosemary and baking bread, than stayed inside with my books, even though they meant survival.

She set a
caffè latte
in front of me. I swirled it around in the bowl, gazing down, and then took a sip.

The Italians take their coffee seriously, and Milan is full of excellent cafés. I don’t know what Nonna does differently, but her
caffè latte
is always perfect. I took my time with it. The books could wait.

While I sat, my cousin Francesca and her fiancé Égide emerged from their room down the hall and came into the kitchen, kissing Nonna on the cheek and saying yes to coffee. Égide helped himself to a pastry from the breadbox, and held one up to Francesca, who nodded. He set them on the same plate and sat down beside her. Nonna put her espresso maker back into action. It looks like a double showerhead for dolls, with a miniature platform for two espresso cups. The first time I saw it, I’d been fresh off the plane from Center Plains, New
York, still rubbing the jet lag out of my eyes, still in shock. Five months later, I felt like I had always sat at this kitchen table, had always heard Francesca ask Égide, “What time is the hearing?”

“Ten. But they’ll postpone it.”

“Again?”

He shrugged. Égide can shrug more elegantly than any Italian. He’s a tall, slender man with the darkest, smoothest skin I have ever seen, the gift of his Rwandan parents. Here, in this casually racist country, I’ve seen him walk up to a stranger to ask if the metro train has left, and heard them snap, “I don’t want to buy anything!” They don’t notice his expensive, beautifully tailored lawyer suit. It’s not like the Milanese to miss a detail like excellent tailoring, but with Égide, they do.

Most of the time, he ignores it magnificently, as does Francesca. She is as pale as he is dark, with long dark-brown hair that she wears in an elegant knot. Both Francesca and Égide always seem so calm, which, since they are lawyers, kind of surprises me.

The doorbell to the apartment rang.

“Mia,” said Nonna, concentrating on the coffee. I jumped up from the table and pressed the intercom button.

“Who is it?”

“Brigida and Matteo. Just for a minute.”

Aunt Brigida swept in, tall, perfectly made-up, with magenta nails like claws, and opinions about everything. She kissed me on the cheek and asked, “Everyone’s still having coffee?” as if
we were all running late for something.

Uncle Matteo followed her, smelling of cigarettes, and kissed me, too. “Keeping well?” he asked. “How do you like getting around on your own, now you don’t have to stay inside all the time?”

“I love it,” I replied fervently.

His eyes crinkled. “The freedom or the city?”

“Both,” I said.

He nodded.

Aunt Brigida was setting a bag on the kitchen table. “Two bottles of the red from Lucia and Mario, that sponge I was telling you about, and your shampoo,” she told Nonna.

“Thank you,” Nonna said. “Coffee?”

“We’re just stopping by,” said Aunt Brigida, just as Uncle Matteo said, “Yes, please!” They looked at each other. “Yours is the best in town,” Aunt Brigida conceded, and took a seat at the table while Nonna set the coffee shower in motion again. Uncle Matteo pulled out a chair for me, then sat himself.

“What’s on the docket for today?” he asked Égide.

“Political asylum for three Sudanese women fleeing”—he paused and rolled an eye toward me—“their enforced traditions.”

“Ah,” said Uncle Matteo, who clearly knew what Égide was talking about, even if I didn’t. I made a mental note to Google Sudan’s traditions.

“But they’ll postpone the hearing,” Égide said.

“Our government specializes in postponement,” said Uncle Matteo. “We’ve taken many years to perfect our skills in that direction.”

Even though Uncle Matteo was speaking Italian, I heard my father’s voice for a moment. My father’s name is Matt, too, and though his voice is pure American, he looks like Uncle Matteo, and Dad would totally be complaining about the government.

Like Dad, Uncle Matteo gathered thunderclouds on his brow more easily than his older brother Giuliano. Nonno either had a lighter heart or a milder temper, which had always suprised me, since he was the hardworking head of a family of demon catchers. What we’d witnessed the night before was nothing compared to some of the cases I knew he’d worked on, including my own.

Last October, when the same demon that had killed both Nonno’s middle brother, Martino, and Nonno’s son, Luciano, had crossed the ocean and taken over my body and my mind, Giuliano and Emilio had arrived to rescue me. That was the first time we’d met them, since my own grandfather Roberto had never even mentioned their existence. Grandfather Roberto, cousin to Nonno, had left Italy in 1958 for reasons he never told any of us. He had certainly left out the part about coming from a family of exorcists.

It had come as a shock to Dad when the priest, calling Rome for help as I thrashed around in the air, had been refused:
“Under no circumstances was an exorcism to be performed on a Della Torre,” Dad had repeated later, dropping his deep voice even deeper. “Their exact words, Father Amadoro told me later. Can you believe it?”