by Kai Meyer
Alessandro had gone into the village a few hundred yards downhill to buy some breakfast. With any luck, there would be a grocery store already open. All the money they had came from the wallet he had found in Festa’s leather jacket, just under a hundred and fifty euros. They would have to get by on that for now.
She rubbed her teeth with her forefinger and clear water, gargled at length, and washed the sleepiness out of her eyes. At some point last night, when Alessandro had continued refusing to let her take the wheel, she had nodded off for a while.
Now she caught herself scanning the sky again and again for birds of prey. The gray clouds seemed to press down on her like heavy weights. The cry of any bird made her jump. The graphic accounts of the death of the Moris were troubling her more than she wanted to admit.
As she stood up she caught her tangled hair in some twigs. Finally she lost patience, tore herself free, and left a strand of blond hair behind on a bush. She was already on her way back to the car when she thought better of that, and went back to remove the loose hair from the branches.
The worst of it was that they couldn’t be sure who was hunting them down. An image of dozens of big cats prowling the hills in search of them appeared in her mind. And the Panthera weren’t the only Arcadians who bore them a grudge. There were only a few Lamias in Sicily, but Rosa had relations in the north, in Rome and Milan and Turin, and maybe they had set out for the island well before now. Then there were Harpies. And perhaps also Hundinga, the Hungry Man’s canine mercenaries, who had set fire to the Palazzo Alcantara.
As she approached the car again she saw Alessandro emerging from the bushes a little way below. He was carrying a pale green plastic bag and had two bottles of water jammed under his left arm. She ran to meet him and reached him halfway, in the middle of the strip of tangled meadow just below the olive trees.
“Did anyone see you?” she asked.
“I shot everyone I met on the road.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“There was no one in the store but the woman at the cash register, and she was around a hundred years old, hard of hearing, and half-blind. Outside, a few workers drove past in a van, but they didn’t pay any attention to me.” He held the bag out to her. “Bread, cheese, and a few wilted lettuce leaves for the vegetarian among us. A knife, a daily paper—I haven’t looked inside yet, but we’re not on the front page.”
“Toothpaste?”
“Who needs it?”
She crossed her arms over her breasts. “No more kissing from now on.”
“Will gum do?”
“Not a chance.”
He put the plastic bottles down, searched the bag, and brought out a tube of Colgate.
She hugged him. “My hero.”
The toothbrush was followed by a hairbrush. “For girls,” he said. “Pink, with glitter.”
“How well you know me.”
He went on searching. “Something for headaches. Band-Aids. More adhesive tape for our guest.” Triumphantly he brought out something bulky. “And this.”
She looked at the brown box. “Chocolates?”
“Take a look inside.”
She took the flattish box. Heavier than she had expected. “A diamond ring?”
“Open it.”
She opened the lid. The smell of chocolate met her nostrils. “Oh!”
“I’m sure it will suit you.”
She grinned. “That is so romantic!”
“I’m afraid they didn’t have one in pink.”
A staple gun. Worked by compressed air. With a magazine for eighty steel staples.
“This is the most beautiful gift in the world,” she said, taking it reverently and feeling the grip and the release trigger. Perfect for driving five or six staples into someone’s skin at top speed.
He watched as she went up to the nearest tree, put the stapler against its trunk, and pressed the release three times. With a few steps, he was beside her, tenderly touching her hips. “That’s the smile I’ve missed these last few days.”
She turned her head and looked into his eyes. “Now the Natural Born Killers can tackle anything.” She waved the stapler in the air. “No ordinary gun can compete with this!”
“But we’re innocent,” he said a little more thoughtfully. “The couple in the movie weren’t.”
She stroked his cheek. “We’re not the good guys,” she said gently, “and you know it.”
He pointed to the stapler. “Anyway, they didn’t have a ring, or I’d have bought that.”
“Now I should give you something, too.”
His glance held her far more strongly than his hands. “I just want to be with you for always. Whatever happens.”
She put her outstretched hands on his shoulders, stood on tiptoe, and kissed him. Suddenly he laughed. “Give me that thing.” Only then did she notice that the stapler was against the nape of his neck.
“Don’t you trust me?”
He drew her close again. He had already taken off his jacket, but he still smelled of leather. At this moment everything about him aroused her.
They fell to their knees together and lay side by side in the grass. Not far away the plastic bag rustled in a morning breeze. Little goat-bells rang down in the village. In the trunk of the Volvo, Stefania woke up and shouted for breakfast.
Rosa stripped off Alessandro’s T-shirt, kissed his sunburnt skin, his ribs, the gentle curves of his muscles. He tasted salty; she liked that, too. She opened his jeans, pulled them down, and caressed his thighs.
Alessandro’s hands felt for the zipper at the back of her dress. She slipped out of the black fabric and pressed close to him. His tenderness almost broke her heart, as if there was nothing to lose, nothing to fear. Only the two of them in the grass under this tree, in this nameless place.
She trembled as he pushed her panties down over her thighs. She couldn’t help watching him, every one of his movements, every glance, every rise and fall of his rib cage. At that moment she wanted to keep him this close to her forever, just to hear him breathing. She placed her hand on his chest, felt his heart as if through a membrane. An unnatural clarity surrounded her whenever they were together, as if she could see him more keenly, smell him better, taste him more intensely than anything else she had ever experienced.
She wasn’t a romantic; she had never thought much of visions of flowery meadows and sunrises. So it surprised and disturbed her to find herself feeling things that would once have made her turn up her nose. And that now, when she was in one of those visions herself, it felt entirely real and unforced.
Her own heart seemed to wander through her body under his hand; she was throbbing and pulsating all over. The snake in her went on dreaming. Rosa had learned how to manage it. No involuntary transformation. Everything under control.
Alessandro whispered something into her hair, and the sound of his voice was as firm as everything he did. Her lips followed the muscular sinews under his skin from shoulder to throat, sought his mouth, kissed him until she was almost breathless. Her tongue seemed to tingle and then to burn, but it was still her own tongue, not the snake’s, and that aroused her more than ever. When she opened her eyes, their glances met, and they both had to laugh, but it deprived their passion of none of its intensity.
His hands moved over the curves of her small breasts, held her waist, moved lower again. She slowly rolled over on her back. Her fingers were in his hair, were holding his shoulders. Now he was above her, entirely human, and she responded wildly to his urging, wrapped her legs around him, and for a while she no longer felt pale and small and thin, but beautiful and strong, and so happy that she could have wept.
“What have you been doing all this time?” asked Stefania, as Rosa opened the trunk. The policewoman narrowed her eyes, dazzled by the sunlight. “I thought you’d gone off and left me behind.”
Rosa felt a slight pang of conscience when she saw the policewoman lying in the fetal position. Her ankles were still handcuffed together, bu
t she had freed her left hand, and only the right hand was in an iron loop. That didn’t give her much more freedom, but at least she could scratch herself if she felt like it.
“You shouldn’t have lied to us,” said Rosa.
“I didn’t. How was I to know they were bringing in a special unit? I wasn’t there when they made that decision.”
“Understaffed, you said. Not enough people, you said.” Rosa held out two tramezzini, white-bread sandwiches from the village store. “Here,” she said. “We don’t hold a grudge. Well, not much.”
“I do,” Alessandro called back. He was sitting behind the wheel beside the open driver’s door, looking at the maps he had found in the side pocket of his seat.
Stefania took the sandwiches and began eating. Rosa put a bottle of water in the trunk for her.
“You can’t leave me in here all day,” said Stefania, munching. “Do you have any idea how bloody hot it gets?”
Rosa had thought of that, but not, so far, of any solution. In the end they would probably have no option but to load her into the backseat again. Or let her go.
She leaned against the left-hand rear light of the Volvo and looked down at their captive. “What was she like? In private, I mean.”
“Quattrini?”
Rosa nodded, brought out the judge’s pendant from under her dress, and turned it between her fingers.
Stefania stopped eating for a moment when she saw the locket around Rosa’s neck. “Have you looked inside it?”
“Not yet.”
“She never told us whose picture she kept in there.”
“She liked cats.” Rosa remembered her first conversation with the judge in the Pantheon Hotel in Rome. “But she’d run over a good many of them hunting down Mafiosi. She told me so when we first talked.”
“So you know everything that matters about her.” Stefania unscrewed the bottle with her left hand, but didn’t drink from it. “She’d have done anything to stop the illegal trading the clans were engaged in. She was beside herself with fury when your capo dei capi was released from prison and allowed to go back to Sicily.”
The return of the Hungry Man was still very recent, but by now it was in the media. Only in brief reports, however, as if it wouldn’t really interest anyone much. As long as the politicians who controlled television and many of the newspapers in Italy owed their careers to making deals with the Mafia, a lot of dirt would go on being swept under the carpet. The early release of the former “boss of the bosses” from prison was another setback to the judiciary, and a victory for corruption and nepotism. Rosa could understand why that had given Quattrini sleepless nights.
“Did she have children? A husband?”
“She was divorced, had been for years. No children. She lived only for her job. Three cheers for every cliché there is about cops.” Stefania blinked again as she looked up at Rosa. “Don’t you think this is odd—we’re talking about her as if she were a friend we had in common? I mean, although you and I are on different sides.”
“I’m not on the same side as the capo dei capi,” Rosa contradicted her, shaking her head.
“But all the same, here I am, bound and gagged in the trunk of your car.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
Alessandro spoke up again from in front. “One that doesn’t include the words let me go or give yourselves up.”
“You two are digging yourselves deeper and deeper.”
“Yes, we noticed. But we’ve run out of alternatives.”
“Then what are you doing in Agrigento?”
Rosa sighed. She leaned over the wing of the car in Alessandro’s direction. “She was eavesdropping on us,” she told him.
Stefania kicked the lining of the trunk. “This bloody thing isn’t soundproofed. Can’t help that, can I?”
The maps rustled, and then Alessandro got out of the front seat and came around to join them at the back of the car. “You’ll never understand it,” he told Stefania. “You’ll never understand things like loyalty to friends and family—”
“Oh, do you mean the family that got you into this mess? That’s doing all it can to make everyone think you two murdered Quattrini?” The policewoman uttered an icy laugh. “You can bet they’ll know what to think of your loyalty, I’m sure of that.”
“Want another sandwich?” Rosa asked.
Stefania shook her head. She and Alessandro engaged in a duel of staring each other down, but neither of them seemed willing to fight on to the end.
Finally, he turned away and glanced down the slope at the yellow-tiled roofs of the village. “I need new clothes. Not from here, though. Let’s keep going, and maybe we’ll find something on the way.”
Rosa looked down at her own black dress, worn as mourning, although it was not so very different from what she usually wore. However, she was coming to feel like the leading lady in the old French film The Bride Wore Black. At the moment she’d rather be wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Okay, black jeans, and a black T-shirt.
Alessandro made for the driver’s seat of the car. Rosa cast Stefania a last apologetic glance and was about to close the trunk over her when she noticed something.
The policewoman crawled a little way forward, but it was too late.
“Shit!” Rosa exclaimed.
“What is it?” asked Alessandro.
“She has a cell phone there.”
“She has a what?” With a couple of swift steps he was back, looking down at Stefania in the trunk. He pushed her aside roughly, struck away the hand she was trying to raise in self-defense, and pulled the flat cell phone out from under her thigh. Cursing, he tapped the keys, but the display stayed dark.
“Dead,” he said.
Rosa took the phone from his hand. “The question is, how long has it been dead?”
“Who were you calling?” he asked angrily.
“Santa Claus,” replied Stefania.
Rosa got between them. “That’s enough. Leave this to me.”
“That stupid—”
“We’d have done the same in her place.”
“So I suppose that makes it all right?” he said. “And she really means well by us?”
“No, she doesn’t.” Rosa bent down and picked up her stapler from the grass where she had left it when she handed Stefania her breakfast.
The young policewoman looked at her grimly, but now there was a touch of uncertainty in her expression.
Rosa pressed the stapler to her calf. When Stefania tried to push it away with her free hand, Rosa took her forearm and held it tightly. “You were making calls, right? When did the battery run out? How long have they been able to locate us?”
Stefania tightened her lips.
Rosa pressed the release. The steel staple snapped shut on the policewoman’s jeans, just missing the skin and stapling the leg of the jeans to the carpeting in the trunk. “The next one will go into you.”
Alessandro shot her a glance of mingled surprise and concern. But she wasn’t going to lose her nerve, no matter what.
“You were right,” she told Stefania. “We won’t shoot you. But I promise I’ll staple each of your fingers to the trunk floor separately—then we’ll be able to do without the handcuffs. Unless I get an answer. Right now.”
“Are you really surprised that the clans want to get rid of you two?” asked Stefania. “You want to be capi? Then don’t act like kids who don’t want to go to bed. You don’t have a chance! You’ll never get away from this island, and there’s no place to hide here where someone or other won’t find you. If not my people, then yours. Which would you rather?”
Rosa’s finger curled slowly around the stapler. “What did you tell them? And how long was the phone switched on?”
The policewoman snorted softly. “Kiss my ass.”
The staple shot into Stefania’s thigh.
She suppressed a cry of pain, but uttered a curse between her teeth.
“How long?” asked Rosa again.
Al
essandro was running both hands through his hair. “Wait,” he said.
“Why give it to me if you don’t want me to use it?”
“Leave this to me.”
“What’s your problem?” she asked him angrily. “Exactly what do you think you could do better?”
She wasn’t really angry with him. She wasn’t even angry with Stefania. She just felt so helpless in the face of circumstances over which she had hardly any control.
He turned to their captive. “You spoke to Festa, didn’t you? You told him we were on our way to Agrigento. Am I right?”
Stefania closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and then nodded in silence.
Rosa lowered the stapler. Suddenly she felt exhausted. Cold sweat was running down her throat into the neckline of her dress.
“All he’ll know is the name of the city,” Alessandro told her quietly. “There are probably a hundred hotels in Agrigento. Any number of tourists visit it every year to see the excavations. Festa has no idea where we’re going. We didn’t once mention the hotel by name.”
Rosa managed a faint nod. The stapler seemed to weigh twenty pounds when she picked it up and grabbed it out of the trunk.
She went to the passenger door, threw the stapler on her seat, and took the small, sharp knife that Alessandro had bought for the bread and cheese out of the bag. With the knife in her hand, she went over to Stefania again.
The policewoman’s eyes widened.
Alessandro tensed.
Rosa bent over Stefania’s legs and pushed the point of the knife under the staple. With a slight jerk, she levered it out of Stefania’s flesh and her jeans.
Then she took a step back, looked Stefania in the eye once more, and closed the trunk over her.
THE HOTEL PARADISO
THE VOLVO ROLLED SLOWLY up a steep road, too narrow for two cars side by side. From time to time they passed places where one vehicle could pull into a bay to avoid oncoming traffic, but they were alone on the road with no one coming in the opposite direction.
