The Demon Catchers of Milan #2: The Halcyon Bird (9 page)

“It’s made from grapes grown on the original rootstock brought from Greece a couple of thousand years ago,” said Uncle Matteo. “These were among the few vines in Europe that escaped the vine blight in the last century. You know about that? You Americans saved us. We grafted our ancient grape varieties on to your rootstock, since our own were dying. Nearly every wine in Europe owes its survival to you.”

I wanted to say, “Not to me, specifically,” but instead I accepted his thanks solemnly, feeling a sharp pain in my heart when I heard him say “you Americans.” It wasn’t because of all the lame things my country was doing at the moment, but because I had finally started to feel like part of the family. On the other hand, it was nice to hear that we had done a few things right over the years. Grape rootstock, the Marshall Plan, stuff like that.

We ended the evening by singing some song that Nonna was trying to remember the words to, and some pop songs that everybody knew because you couldn’t avoid hearing them on the radio.

“Ma gelido sarai,”
I sang to myself as I struggled with the zipper on my dress, thinking what it would be like to kiss various people.

“You don’t quite have it yet,” Signora Gianna told me, speaking out of the air above my head. I jumped, having forgotten
for a moment that I shared my room with a couple of nosy and opinionated spirits. I reminded myself to try to find out which member of the family Signora Gianna had been, and to try to work out who her gravel-voiced friend was (I still just called him Gravel). I wondered why I kept forgetting to look her up, once I was out of the room. It was still hard to even talk about her to Nonno and the rest of the family.

“Try again,” she prompted. “Listen, first.” And she sang:

Which I would translate sort of like this:

Signora Gianna has a beautiful voice, and I got lost,
listening to her sing, so I was surprised when she said, “Now your turn.” I thought about asking who had appointed her my singing teacher, but I didn’t. Instead, I tried again, and this time I sounded much better. We ended up singing the whole thing together before I fell asleep.

In the morning, Giuliano informed me that I would be going with him to visit Piero Strozzi, Tommaso’s father, because the only time the banker would see us was over his lunch break, and none of the others could get off work or school to go with us. Giuliano had insisted on seeing him in his home, a point that Signore Strozzi had made some difficulty over, since they were very busy people. Why couldn’t Nonno come to Signore Strozzi’s bank, or meet him for lunch? There were several very private tables at his favorite restaurant. But Giuliano was firm, and we were to see him today at noon at his home.

The Strozzis lived on the other side of the Castello Sforzesco.

We headed down the Via Madonnina toward the Foro Buonaparte. Nonno stopped to talk with another old man, their voices echoing across the cobblestones. As we continued on our way, he said, “He used to live down the street from us during the war. We would drive the Germans crazy, throwing rocks from windows and dodging away before they could see us. Nobody wanted them here, never mind that we were allies.”

Just at that moment, a herd of German tourists emerged from the Via Madonnina, following their leader, who held a fake daisy on a long stick. I thought Nonno would lower his
voice, in case one of them understood Italian, but he didn’t.

“They were pompous and loud. They really thought they were the master race, building a better world. But you and I have glimpsed what they built—a monumental sorrow.”

I knew he was talking about the spirit that had possessed Signora Galeazzo, a spirit that had taken many years to return from Majdanek concentration camp to her home here in Milan. Giuliano followed my gaze to that pack of earnest, sensibly dressed older people. For a moment, I thought I could see what he saw, but then I thought,
They’re just people
. I remembered Emilio’s warning, before we entered the house of Signora Galleazzo five months ago.
Trust your own senses.… Don’t just believe what you are told. You’re not a child
.

One of the Germans turned toward us, and I saw his eyes flicker and change before I realized what I was seeing: another soul looking directly at me—one that gave me a cold shudder as I recognized it.
You again?
I thought, and my stomach turned over. Then the man’s eyes flickered once more, and he was only a slightly bewildered-looking tourist with his wife’s shopping bags in his hands. A young, black-haired Italian going the other way stopped and took a step toward me, and I saw the same soul looking out of his eyes, before it flickered away yet again, into the eyes of a young woman standing nearby, her gilded blonde hair floating around her face, and then, fluttering like a candle flame, it blew into an old man just beyond her, his own tired eyes vanishing for a moment. He was holding the hand of a
small boy, who looked up at me and spoke in my demon’s voice. I stopped still.

“I will come for you,” the child said simply, his voice deep, gravelly, horribly familiar. The grandfather frowned down at his grandson; the air opened and parted; the boy blinked in confusion, himself again. I smelled cinnamon in the air.

G
iuliano touched my arm.

“About time,” he said when the old man and his grandson had walked on, both already forgetting what had happened. The Germans swirled sensibly around us and vanished down the Via Mercato.

I shivered.

“Really?” I managed.

“Yes,” he replied firmly.

“Did you smell it?” I asked. “This time?”

“Smell what?”

“The cinnamon,” I said, still wondering why the demon had sounded so cold, but so full of longing. “He always leaves behind the scent of cinnamon.”

“I remember,” he said. “From Lisetta Maria Umberti’s exorcism.”

I shuddered. That exorcism had taken place about a block away, inside the Church of Santa Maria delle Carmine. My demon had taken over an art student and had been able to enter the church because the sign for Christmas Eve Mass had said
ALL ARE WELCOME
. I had held Lisetta’s wrist, feeling the double pulse of her heart and the demon’s presence beating against my fingers. I remembered visiting her in the hospital afterward, seeing her gray face as she slipped away from us, weakened beyond recovery by the ordeal of possession. Suddenly, I felt deeply grateful that the couple we had rescued on
San Valentino
had survived.

“Cinnamon,” I repeated. “Why, though?”

I thought of the stagnant smell that had entered my mind when Tommaso Strozzi had come to see us. I thought of the smell of the roses outside Signora Galeazzo’s house, the smell of bitter almonds—of Zyklon B gas.

“Do they all leave behind different scents?” I asked Giuliano.

“I don’t know if every single one does,” he replied, “but many I have encountered do.”

We kept walking but my legs felt weak. By the time we crossed the Foro Buonaparte, I found myself shrinking against the tall, dark buildings, my stomach heaving.

Nonno took my elbow in a tight grip and hurried me forward. His fingers drove into my arm, and I yelped.

“Ow! You’re hurting me,” I said.

He loosened his grip but said, “You can’t get lost in your fear. You need to snap out of it.”

I thought this was pretty unfair. Nothing more frightening had ever happened to me—or to anyone I’d ever known.

Giuliano went on, “He can’t come in while you wear that bell, and it was about time he turned up: we want him where we can see him, not off making trouble with someone else, do you see?”

I muttered something that probably sounded like I was agreeing with him. I didn’t want to admit that when he’d pinched my arm, I’d stopped feeling sick.

We contined walking on the Foro Buonaparte after navigating through the Largo Cairoli, with its traffic and swirl of foreign languages—Russian, Portuguese, Greek, French, and, startling me, English, which for a moment I didn’t understand. I hadn’t spoken it since my recent Skype with my parents and Gina. As we entered the Via Vincenzo Monti, where the Strozzis lived, I asked Giuliano about the man and woman from the night of
San Valentino
. Had he stopped in on the couple since then?

“Two phone calls, one with the husband and one with the wife,” he replied. “Would you like to come with me when I visit them?”

“Yes, please,” I said, wanting to know what had happened to them.

“Good,” he said. We crossed the street in silence.

Nonno said, “This is one of the big avenues, as you can
see, that the city planners created, working on the same principle as Baron Haussmann did in Paris—you need to be able to get soldiers to the center of the city if there’s a revolt. But it backfired in Paris, and here, too. They didn’t think about
whose
soldiers.”

I didn’t say anything, watching him stare into the distance. Once, I had thought I had seen the soldiers from his memories marching past; now, I saw only the street we were on.

The Via Vincenzo Monti was full of traffic, and some of the shops looked pretty fancy. The tall door to the Strozzis’ apartment building was made of well-polished wood, and the brass intercom plate shone like a gilded mirror. No flowers grew beside the door, like the rose outside Signora Galeazzo’s that had smelled of bitter almonds and snow, giving us a clue what lay inside. I thought again of the stagnant-water smell on the day Tommaso Strozzi had come to see us, as Giuliano stepped up and pressed the button for their apartment.

“I believe they own the entire building,” he told me.

The intercom gave a burst of static. “Who is it?” asked a woman’s voice.

“Signore Della Torre and his assistant.”

“Come up, then.”

Nonno looked down the wide entryway into the courtyard of the building, then pressed the button again.

“What?” snapped the voice.

“I don’t know where your apartment is,” he said simply.

“Straight through the courtyard, staircase on the right, number seven,” she said impatiently, as if he were at fault.

The courtyard’s garden was as carefully manicured as the door, a wreath of clipped bushes waiting for spring. Yet the soil smelled dank, as if there was nowhere for the water to drain. Around the garden smooth stones were set in patterns, white and red and black. The walls were faced with cream-colored marble, a fine pattern in different colors of stone running in a band around the whole court. We climbed a marble staircase and came to the Strozzis’ front door, with its polished brass fittings.

Signora Strozzi didn’t look like her voice at all. I had expected someone narrow-faced and tight-lipped, angry even. But she had a wide mouth and high cheekbones, arched eyebrows, and what novels called “the remains of great beauty.” I could hardly tell she was wearing makeup, and she had a chic haircut and huge diamond earrings.

She looked at Giuliano, then at me, and gave me a twenty-four-karat frown. I looked around, taking in the silk-lined walls, the antique benches, and the dark portraits.

“My young cousin, Mia,” Giuliano explained, introducing me. “She is studying with me.”

Signora Strozzi grudgingly greeted me and let us into the house. Even though we were arriving precisely at noon, we had already eaten lunch, for Giuliano had told me beforehand that we wouldn’t be offered a meal. “You’ll see,” he said. I didn’t, yet.

Signora Strozzi allowed us to take seats in the hall, on a bench with clawfoot legs, upholstered in red silk. Across from us hung the dark portrait of a man in antique clothes who had Tommaso Strozzi’s eyes. Once she’d seen us seated she disappeared down the hall.

“So they’re bankers?” I asked softly.

“Yes,” replied Nonno.

“And Signore Strozzi thinks his hands are rotting off,” I mused aloud.

Giuliano didn’t show that he’d heard me. I saw his hands twitch. One moved absently to his breast pocket, touching the bulge of his case. I took the hint and sat quietly, staring up at the man in the painting, with his measuring eyes, and his square, thick-fingered hands covered in ornate rings. One had a tiny mason’s compass and square on it, like I’d seen on buildings and on some costumes in the parade for Sant’Ambrogio. And, I remembered with a start, in Respicio’s hand. I nudged Nonno and pointed. He nodded, frowning.

The man also wore a single enormous pearl earring in one ear and a big gold chain draped over his shoulders. He himself had nothing of the elegance of his clothes, however. His hands looked like wrestler’s hands, like he could throttle anybody who made him mad; and the set of his jaw and the look in his eyes seemed to bear out this promise. It was the look of someone who wouldn’t let anyone stand in the way of what he wanted.

I’d seen that look in Lucifero’s eyes, I realized now.

I’d seen it in Giuliano’s, too.

When we were finally ushered into Signore Strozzi’s study, I began to understand what Giuliano meant about not being offered lunch, and also why he had wanted to see Strozzi in his own home.

“Go ahead and sit,” Signore Strozzi said, and we did. “I’m only seeing you to placate my wife,” he told us bluntly, as he took a seat behind his broad desk. He could have been the son of the man in the portrait. He was certainly Tommaso’s father. He tapped one thick finger on the desk, and sure enough, there was a heavy ring, set with a black stone inlaid with a gold compass.

“I understand,” Giuliano said calmly.

“And this is your apprentice?” Signore Strozzi asked abruptly, gesturing at me.

“Yes, one of them,” replied Giuliano.

“We can speak freely?”

“Of course,” said Giuliano, frowning. Signore Strozzi went on looking hard at me.