The Demon Catchers of Milan (16 page)

“Yes, but you study with the best.” (I didn’t correct him; it stung too much to think about what I wasn’t studying.) “Giuliano Della Torre is known far outside Milan. Your whole family has an ancient reputation among those who know, those who care about such things, who realize that there is more to this world than what we see.”

“Really? He’s known outside Milan? I know the Church doesn’t like the Della Torres.”

“Ah, the Church doesn’t like anybody. They want to have it all to themselves, the power. They fear people like your grandfather for good reason. I believe he has a greater understanding of the netherworlds and their inhabitants than the men of the Church. He may have a greater understanding than anyone alive.”

I sipped my coffee. Under his gaze, my mouth and my hands needed something to do.

“How much do you really know about your family, Signorina Della Torre?” he asked gently.

Signorina Della Torre
—that sounded good.
I’m in the family business
, I thought, though it wasn’t true at all.

“Not much,” I admitted. I was still considering what Lucifero had said about the Church, and what he had said about Giuliano and my family’s reputation. I could tell from our neighbors that we were known and loved here, in this little corner of Milan, but I hadn’t really thought outside of that, except for that one bit of information my father had given Emilio, about Rome forbidding an exorcism on me.

“Your grandfather is a great man, indeed,” said Lucifero. (I still did not correct him; it felt oddly good to hear him refer to Giuliano that way.) “I hope he will talk to me sometime soon. But even he has made mistakes. You might ask him about a young brother of his, named Martino, who died about thirteen years after the war.” (I knew by now he meant World War II.) “Has he told you about him? Has he mentioned a cousin of his named Roberto?” He went on, watching me. “Have your cousins said anything?”

Did I know of a cousin named Roberto? I couldn’t decide how much to let on. Could he know that Roberto was my grandfather?

“No,” I said. “I never heard of anybody named Martino. I think I know of Roberto.”

He saw the shadow crossing my face and said quickly, “I
don’t wish to turn you against them. I’m sure they will tell you in their own time.”

He looked down at his empty coffee cup.

“Well, I think your grandfather won’t be back soon, and I should go. But,” he said, rising, his voice muffled for a moment as he dressed for the cold outside, “but—”

He stopped, uncertain again.

“Perhaps you would meet me for coffee sometime? There’s a place in the Galleria that does very good hot chocolate.”

When I didn’t answer, he added, “Pardon me.”

“No, no!” I said. “I mean yes. I would like to.”

His face lit up. “Are you free on Thursday? Maybe five o’clock?”

“Yes, I think I could be.”

“Zucca, in the Galleria, then. You know it?”

“I think I can find it.”

“Good, I look forward to it.”

He was out the door before I thought,
I don’t even know your last name. Or your first, for that matter
.

FOURTEEN

Hot Chocolate

I
could hardly eat dinner that night. I couldn’t stop thinking about Lucifero. In my mind, I turned over different solutions to the problem of getting out of the house alone, of traveling safely outside, of being safe at a café. As Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday passed, I found Zucca online and more or less figured out where it was in the Galleria. I had the nightmare again, about my feet swinging and kicking together, about drifting up and out of the bed.

Each day during my meditation practice, I stared at the Madonna. Her blue cloak, draped over her head and falling to her feet, had golden stars painted on the inside of its wooden folds. Her expression was complicated: mournful and joyous, serene and startled, at the same time. Her son didn’t have the same mixed, arresting expression on his face; instead he looked
happy waving one hand around like babies do, pleased to be in her arms, under her protection.

Must’ve been hard to be her, knowing his whole story to come.

“Did you ever have crushes?” I asked her.

No matter how paranoid my dad was, or how sure my mom was that I was the most beautiful kid in the world (after Gina, obviously), boys were not a problem I got to have. A kid named Jimmy had kissed me twice in the third grade before moving to New Jersey, and then basically nobody had come near me, unless I counted Tommaso D’Antoni. One Friday afternoon, after I had watched him work on his car for two hours, we had shared a soda and a kiss. I think he did it as an experiment, and I’m guessing it didn’t work, because after that he went back to not acknowledging my existence.

Like with everything else, drugs, alcohol, all of it, I was just too scared. Maybe the boys could tell. I wondered when I’d last had a crush on a guy. Sure, I had one on Emilio, but that didn’t really count, did it? He was an untouchable god, and also a cousin, even if a distant one.

Lucifero had looked at me like I was real.

“Um,” I said to the Madonna, trying to address her politely, “um,
Santa Maria
? How would you go about getting to Zucca if there was a demon chasing you?”

When I spoke, I remembered that I was supposed to be meditating. It was hard to meditate on anything but Lucifero.

“I’ve got to get out,” I explained to her. “Plus,” I added,
weirded out by the fact that I felt shy talking to a wooden statue, especially one that might not approve of my motives, “I’ve got to see this guy. I think I was wrong about him, I don’t know. Either way, I need to know if he’s up to something. Also he’s really cute. How can I do this?”

She didn’t seem to have any answers. I didn’t ask her what to wear, since she obviously had no fashion sense. I thought of asking Pompous, but on reflection I decided that would be a really bad idea. I was pretty sure she was—had been?—part of the family, and she would want to know what was up. Any explanation would lead to a lecture, the way it did with living adults, too.

Instead I waited until everyone was away or asleep and tried on every single item of clothing I owned, about five times. At least it distracted me for a while from the problem of how to get to Zucca—and whether I’d be safe there.

In the end, I lied. I guessed that I would be safe once I was under a roof, because any time we went out to dinner, everybody relaxed once we were inside. Then, by pleading that I was desperate for a change of scene (okay, not a lie at all), I got Francesca and Francesco to walk me to the Galleria on their way to a lecture, and promise to pick me up afterward. I figured I’d work out how to get rid of Lucifero before they saw him; I’d think of something once I got there. Once outside, I still waited for the whispers, the cold, and a part of me couldn’t believe that they never came. Was it really this easy?

Despite the fact that I was walking with two relations, I felt
glad to get off the streets and under the high Galleria roof. It didn’t seem like quite enough, but I told myself I would be in the café soon.

The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II is what every American shopping mall wants to be when it grows up. It was built in the 1800s, I think, so it’s also a very old shopping mall. It feels so real, so right, that it seems that all the other malls I’ve ever been in are just trying to imitate it, from the elegant ground-floor shops to the intricate glass roof arching high above.

Francesca and Francesco left me at the door of Zucca, and as grateful as I’d felt for the roof of the Galleria, I appreciated the low ceiling of Zucca even more. I appreciated most the sight of Lucifero, rising from a table near the back, one hand stretched out toward me.

“The hot chocolate is very good,” he reminded me while I looked at the menu. “I didn’t think your family would let you come,” he added.

“They don’t—” I was about to say,
They don’t know I’m meeting you
, but I caught myself before I let it all the way out. “They don’t really care one way or the other. I guess they trust me.”

“Well, they should,” he said to me, and to the waiter, “Two hot chocolates.”

“Verdi used to come here,” he told me when the waiter was gone. “Along with everybody in his scene.”

“How cool,” I said. We hadn’t been to an opera yet, but Nonna and Emilio had both promised they would take me when the season opened, and by now I knew who Verdi was.
I could picture him and his artsy posse, the hipsters of their day, spending hours over their coffee, messing around and flirting like we did down at the mall back home (less coffee and hipness, more McDonald’s fries and braces). Or maybe more like the Milanese and the tourists all around us, shopping bags clustered at their feet, tinkling their spoons in their coffee cups. Sometimes when we went to restaurants now, I found that I no longer had to focus entirely on translating every word the Della Torres spoke, so I could listen around at the other tables, hearing snatches of gossip about people I didn’t know, coming into conversations that didn’t quite make sense: Had that baby really joined the circus? Did her friends really wear newspaper? The words gradually resolved into more familiar shapes as I got my translations right.

I didn’t listen to anyone in Zucca. I looked at Lucifero, and he looked at me.

“So, do you miss your American boyfriend?”

“Me? Right. No, I don’t have one.”
Great
, I thought.
Why don’t I just write “loser” all over my entire body?

“That’s crazy,” he said, laughing. I stared at him. He said, “Are the American boys just blind?”

I blushed, wishing I was the kind of person who could come back with something really snappy and cute. I couldn’t really believe him, me with my eyes too close together and my mousy hair, but I wanted to.

“I can’t figure you out,” he said, leaning his hand on his chin.

“That’s okay,” I replied. “I can’t figure me out, either.”

He laughed again, and I started to feel a little more confident. The hot chocolate came, not at all like American hot chocolate but thick, kind of like our pudding but not as sweet. It always came with a glass of water and a spoon, Lucifero explained, and if you left it too long it thickened up so that the only way you could drink it was to eat it, which I suppose is what the spoon was there for.

Once again it was great to have something to do with my hands. I felt so awkward, and neither of us was talking. I was too nervous to try to carry out my plan of finding out what he was up to. As I snuck a look at him across the table, stirring his hot chocolate, his long, strong-fingered hand dwarfing the tiny spoon, I began to wonder whether he was up to anything at all.

He looked up at me, catching me staring at him, and pointed his spoon at my cup, saying, “Good, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“First they take the best cocoa beans you can buy. They roast them carefully and grind them up into a very fine powder. Then they mix this with an equal amount of sugar, and mix that with an equal amount of milk, or maybe some more. They boil it once without scalding it, and then strain it; then they boil and strain it again; then they boil and strain it a third time. That’s how you get what we are drinking.”

“A lot of trouble for a cup of hot chocolate,” I pointed out.

He shrugged. “It’s worth it, isn’t it? The most valuable things are worth the trouble.”

He looked at me, and I felt as if I might be worth the trouble.
I said quickly, “How do you know how they make the chocolate? Everybody here seems to know so much about making food.”

He smiled.

“Worked at my uncle’s café when I was a kid. Le Due Farfalle, near the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana. My uncle is one of these hardworking types. A little too Protestant for me, you know? All the guilt and none of the fun. Protestants don’t get it. They confess first and sin later, if they dare to sin at all,” he went on, and I wondered why this seemed to matter to him, since he was a Satanist. Wasn’t he? “Sin first, confess
later
, that’s the point. I don’t understand Protestant countries.”

I thought of Signora Galeazzo, and the woman who had spoken through her, that abyss of sorrow. I was about to say something, but Lucifero was on a roll.

“Even your America,” he went on, launching himself into a full-blown lecture about the puritanical values of my country. I surprised myself by arguing straight back, starting with the point that I was actually raised Catholic and, from what I could tell, I was about as devoutly Catholic as any random Italian on the street.

We went back and forth, first about Puritan America, then about the separation of church and state. Gina, the good student, would’ve been proud of me, but frankly I had learned a lot sitting at Nonna and Nonno’s dinner table every night. I even pointed my finger upward when I really wanted to make a big deal out of something. He did the same thing, leaning forward,
poking the air with one long, strong finger to make his case.

“
Tu sei vivace
—You’re feisty,” he told me, looking immensely satisfied; he had some color in his face now, probably from the argument. I smiled at him, and we both got very quiet. I looked down at my cup, hugely shy again, and when I looked up at last, he was watching me so intensely it scared me.

I looked away across the restaurant, my heart thumping. The clock on the wall caught my eye: it read 6:32. I jumped. My cousins would be back soon.

“Is that really the time?”

“Yes, it’s really the time.” He laughed.

On the spur of the moment, I came up with a plan. It wasn’t much of one, but it could work. I would get us to walk around the Galleria, and if he didn’t leave me before my cousins got back, I could just say I’d run into Lucifero while I was hanging out.

I wasn’t sure that was the best idea, but I wanted to keep him by me a bit longer. On the other hand, though, I hadn’t figured out if he was up to anything. It didn’t seem like it. He seemed pretty into me, that was all.

I found it surprisingly easy to convince him to wander around the shops with me. He paid our bill and helped me into my coat, making my stomach feel jumpy and shiny somehow, when he stood so close to me.