by Kai Meyer
Alessandro stretched. “Shall we drive on?”
Shaking her head, she reached over to the backseat and transferred Fundling’s things to her lap. She felt around for the lever to adjust her seat, and sat upright again. In that position, the box came up to her breasts and was uncomfortable to hold, so she opened the door, dumped it on the ground beside the car, and took several books out. Putting them on her lap, she began leafing through the volumes one by one.
“When the Seas Were Gods,” she read aloud, shaking her head. “The Model of the Hollow World. Hand-Ax and Magic Staff. The Cosmic Orient. Great Cataclysms. Creation in Reverse.” She handed the books to Alessandro, who made a face as he took them. “Surely he didn’t read all these, did he?”
He examined the covers. “Looks to me like most of them are a few decades old.” A glance inside confirmed his suspicion. “1972. 1967. 1975. Were people then more gullible about such nonsense than today?”
“There are some notes in this one. Is that Fundling’s writing?”
He looked at the handwritten notes in the margin of the text. “Could be. I don’t know for sure.”
She continued paging through the book. The appendix contained a long bibliography. Many of the titles had a cross beside them; a handful had been encircled. She put the book to one side and took another stack out of the box.
Snakes in the Sky. The Deluge. The Last Days of Ur. And then, unexpectedly, she found a title in one bibliography that rang a bell with her.
The Gaps in the Crowd by Leonardo Mori.
“Does that mean anything to you?” she asked, holding the page out to him.
“No. How about you?”
“Fundling once said something like that to me. When he was picking me up to take me to the Gaia, before our first expedition to Isola Luna.”
“Gaps?”
“Gaps in the crowd. All pretty vague. He believed that there are often empty spaces in crowds of people, spaces that stay empty however great the crush around them. And he thought those spaces move about.”
“So?”
“He called them the gaps in the crowd. Then he said they aren’t really empty. It’s just that we can’t see who’s occupying them.” She closed the book and put it with the others. “I think he was afraid of them. They’re always around us, he said. Always there, but we can’t see them.”
In the faint interior light of the car, Alessandro looked at her skeptically. He seemed older than usual, more reasonable. “You and I would agree that that’s nonsense, wouldn’t we?”
“Sure—like humans who can turn into animals, as I’d have said if you’d asked me six months ago.”
He tapped one of the books. “Atlantis. Extraterrestrials building the pyramids. What do you bet we’d find something about the yeti and the Loch Ness monster if we spent awhile reading this stuff.”
“I didn’t say I believe in it,” she retorted sharply. “Fundling talked about it, that’s all.” To avoid the temptation to argue with him, she opened the next book, running her finger back down the titles in the bibliography to the one that had caught her eye. Mori, Leonardo: The Gaps in the Crowd—New Truths about the Cataclysms of Antiquity. And a publisher: Hera Edizioni. The line was encircled in felt pen. No other title stood out in the same way.
She unloaded the second pile of books on Alessandro’s lap. He groaned. Then she leaned out of the car to keep searching the box. She found another two or three books, but The Gaps in the Crowd was not among them. Instead, she took out the many catalogs from antiquarian booksellers that Fundling had collected. At a loss, she looked more closely at a few, and leafed through them.
She found something in the eighth or ninth catalog. Under a thick stroke of yellow highlighter, she saw the entry: Mori, Leonardo: The Gaps in the Crowd—New Truths about the Cataclysms of Antiquity. Privately printed by Hera Edizioni. Plus the year of publication, a comment on the condition of the copy, but no picture of the cover. However, it was expensive: 2,500 euros.
“Wow,” she whispered. “Privately printed means—”
“A tiny print run. Something between a couple of dozen and a few hundred copies.”
“Hand-numbered, it says here. Copy number eighteen.”
Alessandro opened his door and got out, carrying the tottering piles of books around the car, and letting them drop into the carton on Rosa’s side. “Listen, this is all very well, but we have worse problems than Fundling’s eccentric taste in reading.”
“How can someone who doesn’t read at all have eccentric taste in reading?”
“I only said I never saw him reading. How would I know what he got up to in his own room? We didn’t always spend twenty-four hours a day together.” He lowered his voice; there was a regretful note in it. “In fact we very seldom did.”
She looked in more of the catalogs, but Mori’s book was listed only in that one. The antiquarian bookshop was called the Libreria Iblea, and was in Ragusas in southeast Sicily.
Alessandro stretched his legs outside her door, keeping a watchful eye on the nocturnal landscape of lava rock, and strolled back to his side. He was just behind the back of the car when he let out a low-voiced exclamation. “Hey!”
In alarm, Rosa reached for the pistol, but then he was standing beside her again. “Everything okay?” she asked. Her heartbeat thudded in her ears.
He nodded, crouched down, and held out several photographs in the faint interior lighting. “They were lying on the ground outside. They must have dropped out of the books when I was carrying them around the car just now.”
There were seven or eight of them, sticking together slightly. They must have been lying pressed close together in one of the volumes for some time.
He handed them to her one by one, looking at them in sequence first himself. The first photo was really made up of two black-and-white pictures that Fundling had obviously fitted together on a copier. One showed Fundling as Rosa had known him. The second was of a man in what looked like his late thirties. He had short dark hair, a high forehead, and he wore a jacket and sunglasses. Fundling had placed the photographs side by side so that the horizon was on the same level. At a fleeting glance you might have thought that the two men were standing next to each other.
The rest of the photographs, all of them in color, showed the same subject: a large building against hills scorched by the sun. The wording over the entrance looked old-fashioned, no neon-lit letters, just a painted sign illuminated by two lamps mounted on the upper rim. HOTEL PARADISO. Two of the pictures had been taken at night, the others in daylight. Under the last photograph two more came into view, not glossy copies like the rest but in sepia and taken from old brochures, or perhaps from newspapers. The building was the same, but the landscaping around it was different. In one picture a horse-drawn carriage stood outside the hotel. There could have been half a century between that photo and the later ones.
“Here!” Rosa pointed to one of the color photographs. “That’s your car, isn’t it?”
A red Ferrari stood outside the hotel, and she could read part of the license plate.
Alessandro nodded. “Fundling must have taken the pictures. He often went out in different cars from the garage at the Castello. When he was old enough my father and the others were always sending him on errands. I’d guess he had a forged driver’s license as he was seventeen. That was when I was away at boarding school in the States. He probably took the Ferrari out quite often—I can hardly blame him.”
Rosa rolled her eyes.
Alessandro smiled. “He must have taken the pictures on one of those drives.”
She leafed through the photos again. “What do the words Fundling and hotel make us think of?”
“My father’s men rescued him from a burning hotel when he was small.”
“After setting it on fire themselves in the first place. How old was he then? Two?”
“And you think it was this hotel in the photos?”
“Doesn’t look like it ever burned down.
”
“It could have been rebuilt.”
She held up one of the two old photos, and the one with the Ferrari so that they were side by side. “Same facade. No one would bother to rebuild such an old place exactly the way it was before, right down to the window frames. Doesn’t look like it was under a protection order as a historical monument, either.”
Alessandro took the books out of the carton again, one by one, and shook them out. He found no more photographs. “Wait a minute,” he said. “There was something else with them. Kind of an album or scrapbook.” He rummaged among the remaining booksellers’ catalogs in the carton, and finally took out something that, at first sight, looked like a photo album covered in brown artificial leather. When he opened it, however, they saw no pictures, just newspaper articles stuck into the pages.
Rosa sat sideways on the passenger seat, put her feet on the bottom of the doorway, and drew her legs almost to her chest. Her dress slid up over her pale thighs, but that didn’t bother her. Alessandro was still sitting by the door of the car with the scrapbook open in front of him. He leafed through it with one hand, and absent-mindedly stroked her calf with the other. Together they read the captions and the bold lettering of the article headlines.
“He was trying to find out what happened back then,” said Alessandro.
“What really happened,” she said, without taking her eyes off the press cuttings. Most of them were short reports from daily papers, and at the end there were three in English from something that called itself the Global Gnostic Observer, and appeared to be a tabloid for aficionados of UFOs and Atlantis.
What they all had in common was their subject, although they differed about the facts. Or in the case of the Global Gnostic Observer, what it claimed were the facts.
The first articles were the most objective. A married couple had been murdered in a hotel in the country around Agrigento, a town on the south coast of Sicily. No names were given, and there were no other details, either about the Mafia or any other possible killers. All the cuttings said was that police inquiries were ongoing.
The second report was about the murdered couple’s small child, who had obviously disappeared from his parents’ room while the crime was being committed. There was no mention of any fire, but this time the name of the hotel was given. The Hotel Paradiso.
Several other reports gradually went into details of the mysterious case. According to them, the murderers had entered the room through the balcony. As there was no way of climbing up to it, the criminals must have scaled the three floors by some other means.
The next report had appeared only four weeks later. There was still, it said, no trace of the child. One of the investigators said the murderers had probably taken the little boy with them and simply abandoned him somewhere. The chances of finding him were few and far between. Exposed in the open, such a small child would be easy prey for wild animals.
The case became really interesting, however, in the articles published by the esoteric paper. It revealed the name of the dead man, in huge letters: Leonardo Mori, “the highly esteemed scientific writer and guest columnist of the Global Gnostic Observer.” Which in Rosa’s opinion was no great tribute to his scientific reputation. And the photograph that Fundling had copied along with his own came from one of those articles.
There was no information about the dead woman, but this report mentioned for the first time that the couple had not been shot or stabbed; instead, it said they had been “dropped to the ground from a great height.”
Alessandro ran his finger over the paper, as if that would bring a hidden truth to light. “What do they mean, ‘from a great height’? Thrown off the balcony?”
“Well, not off the dresser.”
Smiling, he gave her a kiss.
Rosa picked up the scrapbook, paged through, and came to the last article, which was also the longest and was once again taken from “the specialist international journal for the borderline sciences, occult phenomena, and pre–space age archaeology.” It read like that, too.
This time the authors resorted to their own stock of theories. According to them, Leonardo Mori and his wife had not been killed by human beings at all. Credible witnesses—none of them named—said that on the night of the murder, two gigantic birds had come flying out of the darkness. They had smashed the windows of the hotel room with their vast weight, snatched the unfortunate couple from their beds, and carried them out into the open in their claws. They had not simply thrown Mori and his wife over the balcony but carried them a good hundred yards up in the air. Then the giant birds had let go of them both. The impact had inflicted fatal injuries; the article did not refrain from recounting the appalling details. Finally one of the creatures had flown back into the room, seized the little boy, and then carried him off.
Asked what the birds had looked like, one of the eyewitnesses replied, “They were owls. Owls the size of men.”
Rosa looked at Alessandro.
“Saffira and Aliza Malandra were too young at the time,” he said, “but their clan has been known for generations for taking on contract killings. Particularly if the goal was to create confusion and divert attention from the Mafia.”
“Did they ever work for your father?”
“No idea. But if the boy who disappeared really was Fundling, then I can’t think of any other reason why he finally ended up with us. The Harpies probably didn’t know what to do with him. Most of the Malandras aren’t what you might call masterminds; they just carry out orders. They’d have taken him with them to make sure they weren’t getting anything wrong.”
“And your mother saved him.”
“From that point on, yes, the story rings true. Or that’s the way she told it to Fundling and me.”
“But why would your father have given the order to kill Mori? He must have found out something. Something that didn’t sit well with the Carnevares.”
“The truth about the dynasties?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“And what do the gaps in the crowd have to do with it?”
“Maybe nothing. Or maybe they do. Again, I’ve no idea. As long as we don’t know what’s behind it, all this is just assumptions.” Rosa remembered something else. “And Salvatore Pantaleone once said something about gaps in the crowd. About them and about TABULA. It was just before his death.” The former capo dei capi had mentioned both terms in the same breath, and now she wondered whether that had been more than just coincidence.
She continued flipping through the scrapbook, but there were no more articles. What it contained seemed to be all that Fundling had been able to find out about the case.
“He must have decided, at some point, to look for the hotel where my father’s men allegedly rescued him.” Alessandro turned to Rosa, still squatting on the ground, and ran both hands over her thighs. She put the scrapbook down and stroked his hair.
“This is getting crazier by the minute,” she said softly. “As if what’s happened to us wasn’t crazy enough.”
His dimples deepened. The green of his eyes was unfathomable. “The crazier everything around us gets, the more normal I feel. Mafia boss at eighteen? Shape-shifter? In love with obviously the craziest Rosa in the world? None of it compares to the craziness out in the world.”
She kissed him on the forehead, the tip of his nose, and then pressed her lips to his. Their kiss was long and deep, while his fingers slowly wandered up her bare thighs, touched the hem of her dress, and were soon on her hips.
A police siren howled somewhere in the distance, far away in the darkness. It was not for them, but the sound roused their hostage in the trunk. There was loud banging, and they heard a muffled shout.
“Damnit,” whispered Rosa. “I’d almost forgotten her.”
“Down the coast we’ll sell her to an Algerian gangster,” said Alessandro, raising his voice and speaking in the direction of the trunk of the car. “Maybe he’ll put her in his harem.”
That prompted a muted
tirade of curses and insults.
Rosa bent her head. “Down the coast? What about Iole and the others?”
“I don’t think your people will occupy the island for long.” He kissed her knees in turn. “They wanted to keep us from hiding there. The police will probably turn up there sometime, too. If no one finds us there, they’ll all go away again. If we can think of a way to help Iole before they do, then we will. But for now the three of them will have to manage on their own.”
Sometimes it was so easy for her to read his eyes—yet sometimes she wasn’t sure what to make of him. “But you don’t want to run away either. Or we’d have been on the way to Syracuse long ago, to pick up those tickets and the forged papers.”
“That would just confirm what they expect of us. They think we’re weak. They think we don’t deserve to be the capi of our clans.”
“You can’t drop it, can you?”
“How about you?”
She sighed quietly. “Fundling saved our lives. I think we owe him this.”
“You want to go to that hotel. To Agrigento. And then what?”
“He tried to find out more about his parents and their murder.” Rosa lowered her eyes, moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue, and sought Alessandro’s gaze again. “The least we can do is put his real name on his grave.”
THE GIFT
IN THE GRAY LIGHT of dawn, they stopped not far from a village. It was less than thirty miles from here to Agrigento and the coast, but they wanted to stop for a break outside the city. They couldn’t risk using one of the resting places on the 640 expressway; too many people, too many curious glances. So they had turned off the main road and driven a little way into the hills. Now the Volvo was standing on the outskirts of an olive grove, with both front doors open. A few yards away, lost in thought, Rosa was listening to the chirping of the cicadas. Lizards were waiting for sunrise on the pale rocks.
She knelt on the bank of a narrow stream winding its way down the slope between bushes, scooped up water in both hands, and did her best to wash herself. In films, that looked romantic; in real life it was merely uncomfortable, cold, and far removed from what she thought of as hygiene. She wasn’t compulsive about washing, but a toothbrush and soap were starting to seem like unattainable luxuries.
