by Kai Meyer
Alessandro had had to get into the driver’s seat naked. Rosa handed him a T-shirt from the duffel so that he could wipe away the rest of the bloodstains with it. “Maybe I ought to drive,” she said. “Someone might get suspicious, seeing a naked man at the wheel.”
“The windows are tinted glass. No one will notice.”
“Well, I get interested when I see you.” Not just because she liked his body, but because the smell of blood seemed to intensify his powers of attraction. She, too, was finding it difficult to suppress her animal nature. After each metamorphosis, a little more of it seemed to stay with her.
Was that how the first hybrids had come into being? Not the mongrel creatures bred by TABULA in its laboratory, but those Arcadians who one day, for no apparent reason, had been caught in transition from one body to the other, and kept features of both species? Ever since Alessandro had first told her about the hybrids, Rosa kept thinking about them. Heaven knew there were plenty of other things that she ought to have had on her mind. But the idea of ending up as a freak, half human, half snake, troubled her more than she liked to admit.
When she looked around the cab of the van, she found a blanket behind the driver’s seat. She dragged it out and offered it to Alessandro. With a sigh, he draped it around his hips. “Happy now?”
She nodded, grinning, and investigated the glove compartment again. There was nothing to provide any information about whoever had hired the Malandras. Basically, it didn’t matter which member of her family had given them up. Her second cousins, the female directors of the Alcantara bank? One of the business managers of her Milan companies, women whose names she could never remember? Or had they all ganged up to forge a new concordat with the Carnevares?
Shrugging her shoulders, she closed the glove compartment. “Eight vials left.”
“That’ll be enough,” he said.
“What are you planning to do?”
“I’m making sure that she tells us everything.”
Rosa didn’t care for his tone of voice. Once again, she heard too much of his other side in it, the ruthlessness of a Sicilian capo. There were times when she liked the hint of danger in him, the subliminal threat to everything and everyone. Today, however, that note in his voice made her feel queasy.
“How are you going to do it?” she asked.
“Leave that to me.”
“How, Alessandro?”
He started the engine.
The fastest way to Ragusa was down the 115, along the coast, but there might be roadblocks there. So instead they drove through the night into the interior along winding mountain roads—endless hairpin turns on bleak, rocky slopes, interspersed now and then with small vineyards. Glowing eyes observed them from bushes and roadside ditches.
Not until daybreak did they turn toward the south coast again. When the red light of dawn rose over the Mediterranean, the van was parked on a deserted sandy beach close to a village called Scoglitti. A little farther east, on the other side of a sandy promontory, stood a lighthouse beaming the last of the night’s signals out to sea.
Rosa was sitting alone in the front of the van, adjusting the volume of the radio to loud and then soft again in turn, and wondering over and over again what they were doing here. What she was doing here.
She heard muted voices from the back of the van. Alessandro was asking questions; Aliza was cursing or screaming.
Rosa bit her nails, and she hated it. Hated the nail-biting, the inactivity, her own indecision. Most of all she hated the moral conflict going on in her mind. She didn’t understand it herself. Aliza had torn Quattrini to pieces. She was a cold-blooded murderess—her cute freckles didn’t change that. She had slung Rosa into the van in midflight, not caring whether she broke all her bones. Aliza deserved no pity, and it was some time before Rosa figured out that pity wasn’t what troubled her so much.
Her inner turmoil had nothing to do with the young woman in the van behind her. It had to do with Alessandro. He was hurting Aliza, after injecting her with another dose of serum and tying her up. He was acting like a torturer—or at least that was how she imagined it, because to her own annoyance she couldn’t bring herself to climb out of the cab and watch. Hell, she only had to push back the flap over the viewing hatch and take a look through it.
But she sat there, biting her nails, feeling useless and childish. It wasn’t fair to blame him. He was doing what had to be done to keep them alive. He was doing it for her, for Rosa, far more than for himself.
Yet all the same she couldn’t get her head around it. She loved him. And she knew him well enough to know that he had demonstrated the ruthlessness necessary for a capo to survive much earlier than she did. He had defeated Cesare, disposed of several other adversaries, and only a few hours ago he had killed Saffira. Rosa wasn’t judging him, of course she wasn’t. She herself had shot Michele Carnevare and never for a moment regretted it.
But Aliza’s screams were getting to her, and it didn’t help to turn up the sound on the radio again, roll down the window, and hold her face in the cool breeze coming off the sea.
Nothing helped.
What was going on in the van behind her was right and wrong at the same time. It might help them both to survive this business intact. She just wondered whether it might not also leave traces that wouldn’t show until much later.
Finally she took one of the two cell phones out of the duffel bag, got out of the van, and went a little ways along the beach with the phone. She came within a few yards of the breaking waves and sat down in the sand. Streaks of cloud striped the scarlet sky like muscle fibers. Dawn had never looked so much like raw meat before.
She dialed Iole’s number, not for the first time since they set off in the van, and let the phone ring until her voice mail picked up. She didn’t dare leave a message; she didn’t know whether the police might be listening in on Iole’s connection somehow. Better if it looked like an unknown caller. Iole would draw the right conclusions and call her back on the number of this cell phone as soon as she could.
If the men hadn’t found her in the bunker on Isola Luna. And if she, Cristina, and the tutor were still alive. If. If. If.
Rosa drew up her legs, linked her hands behind her head, and pressed her chin down on her knees so hard that her lower jaw hurt. As she did so, she looked out to sea in dawn light that on any other day she would have thought beautiful. Today, she thought of nothing but wounds, pain, and death. Even the smell of seaweed reminded her of decay.
The beach was deserted, not a human soul in sight. Somewhere beyond this sea lay Africa. She had never been there, had never even thought of going to see it. But now she suddenly wanted to. She would have loved to leave right away.
Behind her, the rear door of the van slammed shut. She didn’t turn around, but waited in silence until Alessandro reached her side.
He was wearing jeans, some kind of cheap imitation brand, and a printed T-shirt. They had bought two each of those items at a stall kept by a Moroccan street trader, a man who sold his trashy wares to truck drivers and commuters early in the morning north of Gela.
“She’s told me everything,” said Alessandro quietly, sitting down cross-legged beside her. He spoke matter-of-factly, no triumph in his voice.
She looked out to the sea again, asking no questions, letting herself drift on the flow of her melancholy mood just as the gulls out there drifted on the rocking waves.
“It’s exactly as we thought,” he went on, letting his hands rest in his lap. “The Carnevares and Alcantaras got together and hired the Malandras. They were to take us to the Castello. My people”—he sounded contemptuous, but not angry—“occupied it while we were at the graveyard. They probably didn’t have to touch a hair on anyone’s head. Most of those I could rely on were at the funeral as well. I only hope nothing’s happened to any of them.”
“No one would let himself be killed for you,” she said quietly. “No one but me.”
It was like a vow that she had neve
r put into words before.
I’d die for you.
And I for you.
Alessandro kissed her, then leaned back and propped himself on his elbows in the sand. “The judge was murdered to isolate us. Everyone was to think we killed her. The families must have found out, only a little while before, that you were in touch with Quattrini.”
“Who told them?”
“The same person who told them that she’d be at the funeral. Someone from her unit was open to a bribe. But I believe Aliza when she says she has no idea who that informer could be.”
“Festa? Or Stefania? It could be anyone, probably ten or twenty others in her unit.”
He nodded. “Anyway, their plan worked. We can’t turn to anyone now: not the other clans because they think we were working with Quattrini and not the police because they’re convinced that we murdered the judge. Now they can sit back at their leisure and watch the Malandras hunt us.”
“And because the anti-Mafia cops are after us, our people find out the latest from their informants about where they think we are.”
“Right now they should all be groping around in the dark. The police don’t know anything about this van, and the Malandras won’t find us in a hurry.”
She looked him in the eye. “So how about Aliza?”
“We’ll have to get rid of her somehow. And in a way that keeps her from putting anyone on our tail.”
“I’m not going to let you kill her. She can’t defend herself. It would be murder.”
A smile flitted over his face. He didn’t look like someone in the middle of a conversation about the life and death of a human being. “I know.”
“I mean it. We’re not about to kill anyone who doesn’t attack us first. I’m going to defend myself, just like you, but I won’t watch you going over to her in this van and—”
“Do you believe that of me?”
“I have no idea,” she said truthfully. “A little while ago, when you were in the back of the van there with her, I’d have believed a great deal of you.”
He looked out at the sea. Wave upon wave rolled into the sand in front of them not two feet away. “I’m not a murderer,” he said after a while. “Or not as I understand the word.”
“I know—there have to be good reasons. But aren’t there always?”
“You saw what they did to Quattrini. You were there.”
“And I’d have killed Aliza on the spot if it would have saved Quattrini. But I can’t get into that van and kill someone lying tied up on the floor in front of me.”
“She isn’t tied up. She’s simply sitting in a corner. I haven’t touched her. All I threatened to do was feed her sister’s head to the seagulls.”
“Seriously?”
“Did you think I’d beat her up? Or stick needles under her fingernails?”
“I’m not so sure what I thought.”
“She finally caved in when I said we might hand her over to TABULA.”
“You did what?”
He smiled faintly. “That’s what they think of us. That we’re hand in glove with TABULA—you in particular. Someone must have leaked the fact that your grandmother did business with TABULA. Like Florinda, and finally, they assume, you yourself. That’s why your family is so bent on showing the dynasties that they disown you. They’re putting on a big show of remorse, promising to atone for the errors of their leaders.”
“The lying hypocrites!”
“Who knew about your grandmother and TABULA?”
She realized what he was getting at. “Only you and me, a number of people who are dead now—and the Hungry Man.”
“Aliza is convinced that he’s going to take over. When he comes back everything will change, she says. Then the dynasties will be able to drop their masks and live as they lived in the past. Hunting human beings, enslaving them, or—”
“Eating them when they fancy human flesh,” she finished his sentence for him. “We’ve heard that a hundred times before. As if the world would go back to the days of antiquity, just like that.”
“So far, the dynasties themselves have opposed it. Some were for the Hungry Man, some against him. But if he’s succeeded in winning over the last doubters, then there’ll certainly be changes on the way.”
“But why would he suggest that I’d made a pact with TABULA?”
“Very likely all he had to do was tell them what your grandmother did. The furs of Arcadians in the Palazzo have been burnt or buried, but perhaps he knows something more. Or maybe a few cleverly spread rumors were enough. Your family couldn’t do anything but crawl to him.”
“I’ve met him, though. I spoke to him when he was in prison. He wanted us to be his allies, not his enemies.”
“Then he’s changed his plan. Or his notion of an ally isn’t the same as ours.”
“You mean because the Malandras were supposed to take us alive?”
“He needs us for something,” Alessandro said. “Seems like we’re no use to him dead. This new concordat between our families must suit whatever mischief he has in mind. Because otherwise the Panthera and the Lamias would have been more likely to tear each other apart than unite in an alliance.”
“When I saw him, he wanted me to promise him something. In return, he lifted the death sentence on you. He said that the day would come when he asked me a favor.”
“A favor,” he repeated scornfully. “Oh, sure.”
“There’s something he wants me to do for him. That’s why he wants to get his hands on us as soon as he can.”
There had been reports in the media of the imminent release of the former capo dei capi, but the Ministry of Justice had not given the precise date. To avoid a lot of publicity, or so it was said. It was perfectly possible that the Hungry Man was already free. And back in Sicily.
“He’ll have all his opponents liquidated,” said Alessandro. “The police will write it off as conflict between Mafia clans. A few criminals more or less, who’s going to mind that?” He slowly shook his head. “But what does he want from us? Why the two of us?”
“The statues,” she said. “Maybe they’re the key to it all. He must know their significance. For some reason he knows more about Arcadian history than most of the others.”
“He’s been in prison for thirty years. No prison library is that well stocked.”
“Then someone outside did the research for him. Someone who knew exactly how to go about it. Where to begin. How to go to the right source for finding out about events that took place thousands of years ago.”
Their eyes met.
“Leonardo Mori,” Alessandro whispered.
Rosa jumped up. “You think he’s the link between old Arcadia and the dynasties of today, between the Hungry Man and . . . Fundling?”
They hurried back over the sand to the van. Aliza didn’t even let out a squeak when Alessandro started the engine and drove back down the narrow road to the beach.
A few minutes later they passed Vittoria and turned onto the expressway for Ragusa.
SIGISMONDIS
A FEW MILES FROM the city, Rosa tried reaching Iole once more. No answer. Only her voice mail.
“Damnit.”
“Can you try the hotel again too?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Hotel as in Hotel Paradiso?”
“Ask to speak to Signor Mori. The old guy at reception said there was someone wanting to speak to him all the time. It just might work.”
After Rosa had directory information connect her, a woman’s voice answered. No, there was no Signor Mori among their guests. Yes, she was perfectly sure of that. However, she’d be happy to take Rosa’s name and number, and call back if any such person arrived.
Rosa ended the call. “She’s lying.”
Alessandro looked attentively in the rear and side mirrors. “The police will already have told them what to do. They probably moved Fundling to a safe house long ago.”
Rosa stared out the window, not sure what to make of it all. Alessandro was s
trictly observing the speed limit to make sure they didn’t fall into a radar trap.
There was knocking on the bolted flap of the peephole to the loading area. Without opening it, Rosa called over her shoulder, “What do you want?”
Aliza knocked again. Not violently, but in a slow, almost comfortable rhythm.
Rosa put the cell phone down and opened the peephole just a crack. “What is it?”
An owl’s eye the size of a coin appeared in the crack, bloodshot, with a huge black pupil. In the next moment it changed back into the eye of a young girl with sandy lashes and freckles.
“You won’t get away with this,” she whispered, barely loud enough to be heard over the sound of the engine.
Rosa was going to close the peephole again, but Aliza thrust a bird’s claw as sharp as a knife through it. It was not an attack, only a blockade.
“You killed my sister. My family will kill you for that. Our contract isn’t in force now. You’ll die as she did.”
“Great,” replied Rosa. “Thanks for the information.”
“All the Malandras will be hunting you. Look up at the sky. Maybe they’re up there already. If you can’t see them, that doesn’t mean they’re not around. It definitely doesn’t mean that.”
“Okay.”
“She’s only trying to frighten us,” said Alessandro.
“Get your finger out of there or I’ll cut it off,” Rosa told Aliza, annoyed.
The long, horny claw bent enticingly, like a witch’s finger. So ugly.
“They’ll find you. There are many more of us than you think. We Harpies are everywhere.”
Rosa pushed the peephole shut with all her might. The claw got wedged in it, but stayed in bird form. Rosa repeated that three times, before Aliza took her finger away. There was a blood-stained edge to the steel flap now.
“And I wasn’t supposed to hit her,” growled Alessandro.
