by Kai Meyer
“Everything okay?” asked Alessandro. He hadn’t taken his eyes off her since they’d started out.
Rosa steered the car around the last bends in the road. She had taken the wheel without a word when they left. Her face must have spoken volumes.
“Everything’s fine,” she said.
“You seem kind of relaxed.”
When was that damn hotel finally going to appear? They must be nearly there. The GPS hadn’t said anything for several minutes, probably intimidated by Rosa’s mood.
“You did exactly the right thing,” he said.
“Yes, sure.”
“You’re beating yourself up.”
“I’m wearing Quattrini’s locket around my neck while I cart her bodyguard through Sicily in the trunk of a car, driving a staple into her leg now and then.” She raised both hands in pretended innocence. “Why would I have a guilty conscience?”
“The wheel.”
“What?”
“Your hands. The wheel.”
“Oh.” She grasped what he was saying and grabbed the wheel just before the car could overshoot the next bend in the road.
When they had rounded it the hotel lay ahead, a few hundred yards below the top of the hill. Dusty winds and the salt air had weathered the facade, which was as gray as the wood of the shutters at the windows. The sun burned down from a blue sky, but the closed shutters made it look as if the building had something to hide. People didn’t take their families to places like this on vacation.
The house might once have belonged to a large landowner, not a magnificent villa, but attractive enough to impress the local farm workers. There were annexes to the left and right, with smaller windows and tiny balconies. The Harpies must have come down on one of the upper balconies there when they snatched Leonardo Mori and his wife. There were brown tiles on the roofs, and one of the chimneys had half collapsed.
Near the driveway up to the hotel there was a swimming pool now filled to the brim with rotting leaves and twigs, and old car tires. “Welcome to our oasis of well-being,” commented Alessandro.
Rosa parked in the shade of a chestnut tree not far from the entrance. They had folded down half of the backseat before they left to create an airway to the trunk. Air-conditioning from the front of the car made Stefania’s situation more bearable; with the engine switched off, she wouldn’t have lasted long in this heat.
“This won’t take long,” said Rosa over her shoulder, but the only response was silence. Stefania was still attached to an iron ring in the trunk by one handcuff; she wasn’t going to run away from them.
They got out of the car, went along the path to the front door, and looked around once more. The front courtyard of the hotel ended in a cliff, beyond which the slope of the mountains dropped steeply away. A good six miles farther off, they saw the ugly tower blocks of Agrigento rise on the other side of the hotel. The famous excavations in the Valley of the Temples could not be seen from here, but there was a good view of the Mediterranean, its turquoise waters reaching to the horizon.
Together, they went through a glass door into a foyer with furniture from the 1960s. There was also a stale cooking smell. An elderly man with a few long strands of hair combed sideways over his bald patch rose from behind the reception desk. His smile was not unfriendly.
“Good day,” he greeted them. “Signorina, Signore, welcome to the Hotel Paradiso. How can I help you?”
“You have a beautiful view here,” said Rosa, nodding over her shoulder at the entrance.
He was visibly pleased. “Thank you, Signorina. We’re very proud of our view. The Paradiso has an eventful history, but our location has always been a great asset, allowing us to make the most of what we can offer.” His old-fashioned phrasing sounded a little stiff, but it suited him. “I could give you a pretty room with a view of the sea. If you book for several nights, there will be a free bottle of our house wine thrown in.”
Alessandro placed one hand on the reception desk. “We really just wanted to ask you for some information.”
The old man’s smile did not disappear, but it lost a little of its warmth. “If you want the best route to the expressway, then you must go on along the—”
“No, but thank you,” Rosa interrupted, handing the photocopied picture of Fundling and Leonardo Mori over the reception desk. “We’re searching for a friend. Could you take a look at the men in this picture and tell us if he has ever been here?”
Alessandro put a twenty-euro bill from Festa’s wallet on the desk beside the photo.
The man was still gazing at them, his eyes moving from Alessandro to Rosa. Only then did he glance at the money, and finally at the photograph. “Hmm,” he said.
There was a faint clattering sound in the distance. A tractor? There was a cool, tingling sensation in Rosa’s fingertips.
The old man placed a hand stained with age spots on the bill, and without a word put it away under the desk. “Signor Mori,” he said when he looked up at them again.
Rosa shook her head and placed her forefinger on the side of the photocopy showing Fundling. “This is the man we mean. The younger of the two.”
“Signor Mori,” he repeated.
Alessandro and Rosa exchanged a fleeting glance.
“To make ourselves perfectly clear—”
The old man interrupted Rosa with a swift gesture that seemed to come from nowhere. On the desk the muscles of Alessandro’s arm tensed visibly. “That will have to be enough,” the man whispered.
Alessandro took a second twenty from his pocket. Rosa was almost sure that it was the last of their money.
The reception clerk pushed it away, shaking his head. “It’s not as simple as that.”
“What’s so difficult about it?” Alessandro did not bother to conceal his impatience. He was only here to do Rosa a favor, and she knew it.
“Not because of that,” said the man, bending his head and tapping the bill. “I’ll be in trouble if I say any more.”
Rosa picked up the photocopy and held it in front of his nose. “We’re not looking for Leonardo Mori, we’re looking for the young man in the picture. Was he ever here or not?”
“You are looking for Signor Mori,” he said, deliberately slowly. “At least, he registered here under that name. I don’t remember the man in sunglasses, but if you say his name is Leonardo Mori, very well. Is the young Signor Mori related to the older one?”
Rosa lowered the photocopy. “He spent the night here?”
“Did he ask for any particular room?” asked Alessandro.
The reception clerk let out his breath noisily. Rosa saw that the long hairs in his nostrils showed for a moment. He bent forward, nimbly appropriated the second twenty-euro bill, and put it away. “He asked for a room on the third floor.”
“The one where Leonardo Mori had been attacked?”
The old man shook his head. “No. There were two things he wanted: a view of the courtyard, and a room as close to the elevator as possible. We never talked about the other Mori, the older man.”
“Why close to the elevator?”
“Well, because of his wheelchair, I assume.”
Rosa’s jaw dropped.
The man looked at her thoughtfully. “Are you two from the media as well? I’m sure I’ve seen your faces somewhere. On TV, maybe? You seemed familiar as soon as I saw you come through the door.”
Alessandro’s nod was too fast, but the reception clerk didn’t seem to notice.
“Do you have an appointment with him?” asked the old man. “There’s been a lot of coming and going.”
Rosa nudged Alessandro’s foot with hers. “When was he here? How long ago?”
“I can call him for you.”
Alessandro leaned forward and placed his hand on the telephone behind the counter. “That won’t be necessary.”
There’s something odd going on here, thought Rosa. Suddenly she wanted to pinch herself and wake up in the seat of the Volvo, still on the way to Agrigent
o.
The old man took an alarmed step back. “Please leave now. Signor Mori can call you himself if he wants to speak to you.”
Rosa was breathing in warm air, but what she breathed out was icy. As if her insides were turning into a deep freeze. She had to pull herself together, had to get herself back under control.
“He’s here?” she hissed. “Now, at this moment?”
The engine she had heard before was louder now. Outside, car doors slammed.
Alessandro went to the entrance and looked at the front yard. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
Rosa stared at him, then at the door, then at him again. “How can Fundling be here? We saw his corpse.” If she had had time to think about it, she could probably have answered that question herself. But she was forced to fight so hard against the emergence of the snake from within her that she didn’t fully understand, not until Alessandro was beside her again, taking her hand.
“Back exit?” he shouted at the alarmed old man.
The reception clerk pointed to a door behind his desk. “Down that corridor.”
“Come on.” Alessandro was going to pull Rosa along, but she had already caught up with him, ran to the desk, and pushed the door behind it open. Beyond it lay an office from which a second door led into a long corridor.
“They took us for a ride,” she managed to say, her throat dry. “All this time. Beginning with Quattrini.” If Fundling was really in this hotel, only three floors above them and alive, then who or what had they buried in the graveyard? Only a casket full of bricks again, as in her father’s case?
Alessandro reached the rear entrance for the staff a couple of seconds before her. He was going to push it open when they heard hushed voices on the other side. “They’re waiting for us out there,” he whispered. “They’ll have surrounded the whole damn hotel.”
She shook her head. “Then they’d have gotten here before us, and they’d have caught us as we left the car.”
She went past him, took a deep breath, and pushed the heavy metal handle down.
There were indeed men outside it. They both wore white chefs’ uniforms, and they were smoking. They looked at Alessandro and Rosa in surprise.
“Only for the staff,” one of them began. He was as dark skinned as his colleague. Probably North Africans.
“Come on,” Rosa called to Alessandro, and then they ran past the startled hotel cooks and out into the open air. There was a broad strip of coarse grass behind the building, verging on wild undergrowth. Beyond that, the slope rose again, thickly overgrown with macchia.
“Fundling and Quattrini must have hatched this plot together.” As they ran over the rough meadow, she pushed out the words breathlessly. “We thought we were standing in front of him in that damn morgue, and he was alive the whole time!”
Alessandro didn’t reply, but kept looking right and left over his shoulder, back at the hotel. Any moment now police officers might appear around the corners of the annexes.
“But I don’t understand,” she gasped hoarsely. “Why would he get involved with something like that? And what did she get out of it?”
“Witness protection. He’d already worked for her as an informer. Maybe he wanted to disappear and begin again somewhere else.”
She let out an incredulous laugh. “What, here?”
Now there was shouting. When Rosa glanced back, she saw Antonio Festa at the open rear doorway and several police officers storming out into the open air with him. The two North Africans had dropped their cigarettes and looked as if they wanted to disappear into the wall so that no one could ask about their work permits.
“Stop where you are!” roared Festa.
“He wants his jacket back,” said Rosa.
“Then maybe he won’t shoot any holes in it.”
Another three yards to the bushes.
A shot shattered the silence over the mountain slope.
“Stop!”
They reached the undergrowth and flung themselves into it. Twigs scratched Rosa’s skin, and something sharp just missed her eye. She felt as if she had landed in barbed wire. She struggled another step forward, plunged into the bushes, and in her snake form slid out of her black dress. The fabric was left hanging in the branches behind her. Briefly, she turned back once more, took Quattrini’s pendant in her reptilian mouth, and threw it to land on the dress, so that it wouldn’t be lost. Festa would find it and take care of it. Then she looked around for Alessandro.
In panther form, he easily broke through the dense branches of the bushes. The men could not have seen the two of them shifting shape; they were too far away. But it would not escape their notice that something large and black was moving through the undergrowth.
The next moment, however, Alessandro’s instincts were those of a panther. He slunk over the ground, ducking low and skillfully using the smallest gaps in the bushes. Rosa stayed beside him while they made their way as fast as they could up the slope.
Once again shots rang out, but this time they were no longer just a warning. Festa and the others were hunting down the supposed murderers of a judge, the abductors of a policewoman. They would have no qualms shooting with live ammunition.
The rampant shrubs and bushes covered a large area of the slope. They offered protection to Alessandro and Rosa, and kept their pursuers from following them. Rosa would have liked to glance back at Festa, but she didn’t dare. She would have had to stop and put her snake’s head through the branches. It was too much of a risk.
So they fled on up the mountain, toward the wild and uninhabited hinterland of Agrigento.
THE LAW OF SILENCE
THE POLICE SEARCHED THE slope for them for hours, backed up by a helicopter circling above the mountain and the surrounding valleys. Early in the evening the chopper was taken out of operation. A little later the uniformed officers also returned to the hotel, with scratched hands and faces, and in a bad enough mood to keep them from continuing the search for the time being.
As long as Rosa and Alessandro were still in animal form, they had the advantage over the police. Their pursuers had been looking for two teenagers, not animals. It was possible that Stefania, once liberated from the car, had thought it more sensible not to talk about the unusual qualities of her abductors. And Festa and the others would have chalked it up to the heat in the trunk anyway.
North of Agrigento lay the large nature reserve of Macalube di Aragona, sparsely inhabited and crisscrossed by only a few paths. The police would likely assume that the couple would want to reach one of the nearby major roads as quickly as possible; the 118 and 189 probably had checkpoints set up on them already. It might have surprised the officers to know that, instead, Rosa and Alessandro were still on the mountain above the Hotel Paradiso.
Rosa, in snake form, lay coiled on a flat stone, well camouflaged by the sunbaked surroundings. From here she had a good view of the hotel several hundred yards farther down the slope. With the vision of a snake, she had less depth of focus, something she’d had to adjust to. In human form she would have seen more detail around the building, more of the comings and goings that went on until late in the afternoon. Only then did the activity begin to slow. The police officers assigned to keep the hotel under surveillance stayed in their cars, one or another of them walking around the hotel now and then.
Alessandro had not yet shifted back, either. She enjoyed his agility of movement as a big cat, the play of muscles under his gleaming fur. Even metamorphosis couldn’t banish the mocking sparkle in his cat’s eyes. If Rosa looked at him long enough with her amber gaze, she noticed a faint quivering of his sensitive whiskers, as if he saw something in her that touched him deeply. The longer she knew him, the less important it seemed whether he faced her in human or animal form. She loved the majestic panther as much as the boy with the dimpled smile.
When twilight finally began to close in, Rosa decided to shift back. She wound her way down to the ground where the bushes would shield her from anyone looki
ng up from the hotel. She returned to human form, lay first on her side, then had a good stretch, and finally leaned her bare back up against the rock. She drew up her knees, clasped her arms around them, and watched Alessandro’s own metamorphosis begin. In his human shape, unlike her, he still had all the cuts and scratches he had suffered as he escaped through the bushes.
“Let me see,” she said, finding a wound on his hip. He was about to lick the injury, just as he would have done in animal form, but then the reflex went away, along with the remnants of his big-cat existence. Rosa leaned forward and looked at the cut in his skin. It was not deep. The wound that had opened up to show fresh blood when he shifted back would soon close again.
“It’s okay,” he said, sitting down beside her and putting an arm around her shoulders. She nestled close to him, and felt him trembling slightly again.
It was cooler now in the evening, and they had had to leave their clothes behind in the undergrowth lower down. Soon their only option would be to shift shape again, so that they could bear the cold better.
“Do you think he’s really down there?” she asked. “Somewhere in the hotel?” There were lights in only a few of the windows, behind closed shutters. If the man at the reception desk was correct, Fundling’s room was at the front of the building, with a view of the courtyard, and invisible from where they were now.
“I’m beginning to think that just about anything is possible.”
“Yes, the way the police arrived so quickly would prove that.” Rosa had had hours to think about it all. “That scene at the morgue, the stitching in his chest, a dead Fundling who wasn’t really dead at all, the whole farce . . . Quattrini must have known about it. It could well have been her own idea.” The memory of the judge aroused mixed feelings in her: grief, and a reproach that she couldn’t quite express in words yet. “If we were really to believe that he was dead, then she had to show us his body. He played dead; maybe they anesthetized him for a little while. But anyway, he wanted us to think he was dead. And then he went on with his research here at the hotel where his parents had been murdered. Quattrini would hardly have sent him to stay here of her own accord, so it must have been what he wanted. And of course Festa and Stefania knew about it as well, and in fact they probably helped to get the whole thing under way. So when Stefania was in the trunk of the car and overheard us planning to go to a hotel in Agrigento, she knew which it would be. We didn’t have to mention the name out loud. She called Festa, and he knew at once where to find us. Our one stroke of luck was that he arrived a little later than we did. Otherwise we’d have run straight into his arms.”
