by Kai Meyer
“My grocer doesn’t ask me why I want cauliflower and not some other vegetable.”
He went over to the cash register and picked up a copy of his catalog. He knew his way around the leaflet and opened it to the page listing Mori’s book. “Not a cheap volume,” he said, as if he were seeing the catalog entry for the first time.
“I know. Is it really such a rare book?”
“Indeed it is. Once, years ago, there was talk that a new edition would appear on the list of one of the larger publishing houses, but then it never came to anything because, to this day, no one knows who holds the rights.”
“Because the author was murdered?”
“You’re well informed.”
“May I look at it?”
He put the catalog down again, then nodded slowly. “I suppose that can’t do any harm. Come with me.”
She followed him into the back room, which was so full of books that it felt oppressive. The smell of old paper and printer’s ink had something heady about it, setting off the same reaction she would have to an intense floral perfume. Up to a certain point she found it intoxicating and sensuous, but after that it turned her stomach.
The bookseller opened another door. At the end of a corridor only a few yards long there was a door consisting of a set of bars. Beyond it lay a room much larger than the other two. An air conditioner under the ceiling was humming. There were no bookshelves here, only many high desks arranged around the center of the room in a semicircle. Every desk had a small lamp over it, and a single book lay on each of them.
The old man pressed a button, and all the reading lamps came on. Their dim yellow lights were all carefully pointed at their books, and there was a table beside the door with a box of disposable gloves on it, as well as a magnifying glass and another box containing white face masks like those worn in hospitals.
“I’ll admit,” she said, “there wasn’t a room like this in our library.”
“There wasn’t?”
She hesitated before she answered, but then thought that she might as well tell him the truth. “It burned down. Along with the house.”
He got between her and the locked, barred door, as if afraid that her mere presence might set fire to his precious volumes.
“It wasn’t my doing,” she said.
“No,” he replied. “Presumably not. It’s just that I’d like to know whether you can really afford the purchase price.”
“May I look at the book first?”
He slowly stepped aside, and pointed through the bars at one of the books. “It’s that one, over there. The Gaps in the Crowd.”
A nondescript volume without a dust jacket, only a brown binding with plain typography stamped on the front.
“It doesn’t seem like much from here,” she said. “Can I look inside it?”
“First I have to ask you again: Can you afford that book?”
Only two days ago she could have bought this entire street with her family’s money, including all the books and all the cats in it. Now she had exactly a hundred euros in her pocket, and even that didn’t belong to her.
“I’m afraid I don’t have enough cash on me,” she said.
“Of course not. But if you give me your credit card, I can check it. There’s a device for reading cards at the front of the shop.”
“I don’t have my credit card with me, either.”
“That is certainly a problem.”
“So you aren’t going to show me the book?”
He smiled. “Most certainly not. The books in that room are worth a small fortune. It would be very irresponsible of me to let just anyone leaf through them, wearing out the binding and the paper.”
“Very well,” she said, forcing a smile, “I’ll tell you what it’s all about. I’m a student, and I’m working on a dissertation about”—here she hesitated for a moment—“about natural catastrophes in fiction.”
He made a face as if the sound of the words hurt his ears.
“And their effects on human sensitivity to climate change,” she added.
“I see.”
“Leonardo Mori’s book is considered one of the best studies of accounts of disasters in classical antiquity, or at least that’s what my professor says, and I’m interested in finding out whether authors have ever used it as a basis for their novels.” Rosa had never seen the inside of a university, and the only books she had read were tattered paperbacks at home in New York. She felt like a one-legged man being pushed out to play on a football field.
The old man might be a prickly loner, but he wasn’t unworldly. “So you were lying to me,” he pointed out.
“I’m sorry.”
“You never really had enough money to buy the book.”
“No. I’m sorry, I mean I really am. But I thought if I asked you whether I could just look through it you’d never let me.”
“And you were right.”
“Does it help if I say please nicely?”
“I’m afraid not.”
She could have shifted shape, strangled him in her serpentine coils, and slipped into the room through the bars. For the first time she cursed herself for not really being the unscrupulous criminal who was wanted all over Sicily.
“Can I give you my professor’s phone number, so that you can call and confirm that I was here? He’s never going to believe me if I tell him you’ve put the book in prison. With no visiting rights.”
For the first time one corner of his mouth twitched. Maybe she was in luck, and he was about to have a stroke.
“Would you do that?” she asked again.
He took a deep breath and nodded in the direction of the front room. “Come with me a moment, and I’ll tell you something about the book. Maybe that will be a help in your research.”
He sounded friendlier now. That gave her a glimmer of hope that her plea for sympathy might work after all.
Taking care not to overdo the pathos, she followed him into the front of the shop, where he pointed to the only chair. “Sit down.”
She did so, while he leaned against the cash register with his arms folded.
“What do you know about Leonardo Mori?” he asked.
“Only that he was murdered. Presumably murdered, anyway. Under rather mysterious circumstances.”
“He and his wife died,” the bookseller confirmed. “The couple had a child who disappeared without trace at the time. The little boy is probably dead as well.”
“A sad story.”
“But you knew that already, didn’t you?”
“To be honest, yes.”
“Then I’ll tell you something that you don’t know yet. You can make it a footnote in your dissertation if you like.”
She waited, as he hooked his thumbs into the shapeless pockets of his pants and looked past her at the window display. Only now did she notice that the dim light in here bathed the shop in eternal twilight.
“Mori was obsessed with major catastrophes—deluges, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes. He spent years working on his book, traveling all around the Mediterranean to see the most important sites with his own eyes. You know the kind of thing: Pompeii, Santorini, of course Mount Etna, as well as the former Carthage, Uruk, and a few dozen other locations. He thought they were all parts of a greater whole. The subtitle of his book is New Facts about the Cataclysms of Antiquity, but it’s much more than a collection of factual accounts. Of course he did collect facts: the numbers of victims if they were known, geological reports by experts, anthropological theses about the consequences, and so on and so forth. But what interested him most—and that is what makes his book so fascinating—were the eyewitness accounts. There are more of them than you might think. The ancient Greeks and the people of Mesopotamia, North Africa, and elsewhere, left written reports. People then were much the same as they are today. If we have the bad luck to be present at some truly overwhelming disaster, we feel an enormous need to talk about it. Look at all the books that have been written about September Eleve
nth. Or the tsunami in Southeast Asia. If you’ve experienced something like that personally, you want to talk about it, and usually you’ll find an audience eager for every detail. Mori knew that very well. He’d written a great deal of nonsense for journals in the course of his career, stuff that you, as a budding scholar, wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.”
There was something challenging about his smile. The suspicion hadn’t disappeared from his face, but he seemed to like the sound of his own voice.
“Mori confined himself to the catastrophes around the Mediterranean,” he went on, “probably because that was where the great civilizations that left written records were to be found. In the end he had collected a vast number of accounts, but that wasn’t enough for him, and he extended his field of research to the modern era. He was particularly fascinated by the great earthquake of Messina in the year 1908. Thirty thousand dead within minutes. While he was reading all those accounts, drawing up a catalog of them, and comparing them with one another, he noticed something that they had in common. Something that a great many writers and historians of classical antiquity had documented again and again and again.”
“The gaps in the crowd?”
The bookseller nodded. “What exactly do you know about them?”
“Not much. Someone told me about them once. About places in large gatherings of people that always stay empty, moving through the crowds like something alive. ‘Who is in the gaps in the crowd?’ he asked me. That was all.”
“Had he read Mori’s book?”
“Possibly.”
“As a rule there’s mass panic when catastrophes of that order happen, powerful human movements thronging the streets of burning or flooded cities. And that, at least according to Leonardo Mori, is when the existence of gaps in the crowd is most clearly visible. ‘Who is in the gaps in the crowd?’ is a quotation from his book. Mori asks that question several times, but even he finds no satisfactory answer to it in the end.”
“Did he have a theory?”
“Mori was not a scholar. Ultimately he was only a sensationalist scribbler, but one with a certain talent for choosing his subjects, and extremely persistent. The mystery of the holes in the crowd never lost its grip on his imagination. He was convinced that they were not chance phenomena, but living beings—that’s what he called them. Invisible powers, not harmless observers but entities that had caused all those catastrophes.”
She thought of something she had heard in Sunday School lessons as a child. “Like the angels sent by God to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah?”
“Mori was not a Christian believer. As far as I know he didn’t believe in God. Not in the one God, and certainly not in his angels.”
“But?”
“Who knows what he believed in? Maybe the pagan gods of antiquity, Zeus and the rest of the Greek deities on Mount Olympus. Jupiter and the Roman gods. In the end, all myths are the same: They’re always about beings who are greater than we are, older and more powerful and merciless.”
Feeling uncomfortable, she shifted position in the chair. “Mori really thought that those invisible beings caused earthquakes and volcanic eruptions? That they were responsible for such disasters?”
The old man nodded. “And he thought that in a way, crowds of people made them visible by flowing around them. It still happens, he believed, in modern times. He found eyewitness reports of the 1908 earthquake that matched other accounts that were two or three thousand years old, almost word for word.” The bookseller’s narrow lips looked as if they had been drained of blood. “At any rate, it’s certain that Mori is dead. He died mysteriously. And at the time of his death he was working on a second book that was to be the next step in his presentation of his case. I don’t know exactly what it was, but probably some subject on which he had only touched briefly in The Gaps in the Crowd. In his new book, he wanted to develop that aspect in more detail. He claimed to have found echoes still reverberating in the present day. To people alive now who are deeply interested in that history.” The bookseller’s gaze was piercing. “He’d dug up something or other. Something so sensational, it convinced someone that Leonardo Mori had to be silenced once and for all.”
BREAKING IN
SHE FELT DIZZY WHEN she stepped out into the open air: the catalog leaflet that the old man had given her in one hand, Aliza’s cell phone in the other. She had to call Alessandro as quickly as possible.
She hurried back to the well she had passed on the way to the shop, sat down on the steps, looked at Aliza’s list of numbers, and called her dead sister Saffira’s cell phone. Alessandro answered after one ring.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“Sure.” His anxiety made her smile. “I’ve only been to a bookshop.”
“While half of Sicily is looking for you.”
Apart from Rosa there was no one at all in the little square with the well. All the same, she shifted along the circular step surrounding the well until she was at the back of it. Through her sunglasses, she had a view of the windowless wall of a house. In a whisper, she told him everything that she had learned from the bookseller.
“Let’s speculate for a moment,” he said after she had finished. “So Mori wrote that book about the gaps in the crowd. For some reason it falls into the hands of the Hungry Man while he’s in prison, and he decides that Mori is the right man to find out more about the history of the Arcadian dynasties for him. The Hungry Man claims to be the reincarnation of King Lycaon of Arcadia, but you and I both know that’s nonsense. He’s just a megalomaniac capo exploiting the myth of the Arcadians to regain power. Right?”
“But we’re only assuming that Mori worked for him.”
“Mori certainly meddled too much with matters that had nothing to do with him. He wasn’t a political journalist, or someone who wrote about economics, so I can’t imagine that he stumbled into some kind of Cosa Nostra business. There must be more than that behind it, or my father would have set a couple of human hit men on him, not the Malandras. The fact that Mori was killed by Harpies can really only have been a warning—my father’s warning to the other Arcadians, to the Hungry Man, or who knows who else. Someone must have talked to Mori about the dynasties. What he found in old books can’t have been enough to get him murdered.”
“That’s just more speculation,” Rosa objected.
“My father hears about Mori’s research and decides to put a stop to it. Maybe to harm the Hungry Man if Mori has been working for him, maybe just to preserve the secret of the dynasties. The Harpies kill Mori and his wife, and get Fundling to my parents. Later on, Fundling begins taking an interest in his origins, finds out that the hotel in Agrigento never burned down, and so he comes upon the story of the Moris’ child who disappeared. In secret, he collects more and more information, at first only about the two Moris, but then also about the subjects that were on Mori’s mind. When Fundling comes out of his coma, and the judge has taken him to a safe place, he asks her to put him up in the very hotel where he”—Alessandro hesitated—“where he’s now doing, well, whatever it is he’s doing.”
“Whatever it is, yes.” Rosa groaned and sat back against the little wall enclosing the well. “If we want to know more precisely what happened, we have to take a look at Mori’s book. Maybe that could get us further forward.”
“Or maybe Mori kept the really interesting things for the second book, the one he was working on when he was killed.”
“We’ll see.”
Alessandro said nothing for a moment. “You’re not planning to get back into that bookshop and steal the book?”
“Can you think of a better plan?”
His reply was drowned out by indistinct shouting.
“What’s going on there?” she asked, alarmed.
“Aliza. She’s been rampaging in the back of the van ever since you left, raising hell.”
“Can anyone hear her?”
“There’s no one for miles around. She keeps shifting shape—it can’t be healthy.
But she has stamina, you have to give her that. When you’re back we have to get rid of her whether you like it or not. She’s nothing but trouble.”
She didn’t want to have this conversation with him again, particularly not on the phone, so she changed the subject and said that she would stay in Ibla until the evening. As soon as the old man left his shop, she was going to try to get the book out. The way back to the van would take her almost an hour, she said, and it wasn’t worth going there and then back to the city. Secretly, however, she was afraid that Alessandro might persuade her to change her mind.
“I don’t like it,” he said. “I’d rather be with you.”
“One of us has to stay with Aliza. And the chances of getting into the shop are far better for a snake than a panther.”
“Promise me you’ll look after yourself.”
“And you do the same. Aliza is still dangerous.”
After they had hung up, she held the phone uncertainly in her hand, then put it in her pants pocket. Another few hours before darkness fell. She had to retreat to some place where no one could recognize her.
She glanced up at the sky above the Old Town. No birds anywhere, no owls. If Aliza had been telling the truth, and the other Malandras were searching for them, at least they hadn’t yet followed them to Ragusa.
Looking down again, she strolled along the streets, and finally found a park. She took off her clothes among some bushes, became a snake, and coiled up behind a rock.
She slept until twilight fell.
The old man locked the door of his shop and pulled a grille over it. Dragging his feet, he moved away downhill, a leather briefcase in one hand, a canvas bag full of books in the other. Rosa—now in human form again, her blond hair untidy and her blouse crumpled—waited until he had disappeared around the next bend. Then she approached the corner building where the shop stood.
After one last look down the street she turned into the narrow alley beside the shop. There were bars over the windows on the first floor of the building, and those of the back room, with its valuable collectors’ editions, were too far above ground level for her even to look in.
