by Kai Meyer
After twenty yards she came to a wooden door that probably led into a backyard. It was locked from inside with a chain and secured by a padlock. She couldn’t climb over it because the wall was too high. However, there was a small gap under the door, presumably for the neighbor’s cat.
She looked cautiously in all directions, saw no one in the alley, and shifted shape. Winding her way out of her heap of clothes, she slithered through the gap.
The yard was tiny, just large enough for an old bicycle and a drying rack. Clotheslines with dripping sheets hanging from them stretched above her head. There were two doors at the back of the yard. One was barred and led into the shop; the other was a door to the neighboring house. A light was on in a second-floor window there. The sky was not entirely dark yet, but the last of the day’s brightness hardly reached this walled corner of the Old Town. The distorted sound of music on a radio came from somewhere.
Rosa pushed her snake’s head back through the gap, and taking her clothes in her mouth pulled them out of the alley and into the yard. She hoped fervently that the bookseller’s neighbor wouldn’t look out the window at this minute and see the giant amber-colored snake among her laundry.
A brief investigation revealed that the back door of the shop had several security measures in place. Only the small window, also barred and a good six feet above ground level, could give her access.
She slowly wound her way up one of the iron posts outside the door. Once at the top of it, she pushed her head over to the window at an angle, and then, exerting all her strength, hauled the rest of her reptilian body after it. Finally she was lying, closely coiled, on the windowsill between the glass and the iron bars outside it. Hoping that the radio would drown out the noise, she pressed her scaly body against the pane as hard as she could. It gave way and fell with a clink of broken glass to the floor inside the room.
Rosa stayed where she was for some time, expecting an alarm to sound, or the angry neighbor to appear. Only when all remained calm did she glide through the broken window into the room, reach the floor, listen once more for suspicious sounds, and then return to human form.
She was standing, naked, in the gloom of the back room. Faint twilight fell through the little window looking out on the alley, just enough to show her the semicircle of reading desks. With every step she took, she worried about crossing some kind of barrier that would switch on the lights, or about touching hidden sensors on the floor.
She found the book and switched on the little lamp above the desk. After one last glance at the barred door into the corridor, she opened The Gaps in the Crowd.
It was a bound book, printed on high-quality paper, and as far as she could tell unblemished. Hesitantly, she leaned forward and breathed in. It smelled new, as if it had never been opened before.
The title page had Mori’s name, the title of the book, and the year of publication. Right at the bottom of the page the name of the publisher was given in small lettering: Hera Edizioni, RG. The two capital letters stood for Ragusa. Of course: Hybla Hera, the city of the Siculians. Hera Edizioni.
On the next page the details of the firm included its address.
It was this one: The house where she was standing.
And then she realized that she had spoken to the publisher himself a few hours ago. The old man had known Leonardo Mori personally.
Her fingertips shook slightly as she opened the book at the table of contents. Each chapter dealt with a historical catastrophe, and the names of the chapters were the places where they happened. At random, she read several of the names. Sodom and Gomorrah. Alexandria. Carthage. Santorini. Sicily.
And somewhere among them, Arcadia.
She turned the page and skimmed the prologue, then the beginning of the Sicily chapter. It seemed to be about the eruption of Mount Etna as well as the earthquake of Messina.
The chapter about Arcadia began like this:
Arcadia may have been many things in its eventful history, but one thing it certainly was not: the earthly paradise to which the myths of later generations—
A sound in the shop beyond the door.
Rosa switched off the lamp on the reading desk and closed the book, but she kept her finger between the pages.
A horizontal line glowed under the wooden door at the end of the corridor. The light had been switched on in the room beyond it. Dragging footsteps. The old man had come back.
She heard him moving about in the front room as she tiptoed back to the window. Throwing the book out through the broken pane would make a noise. She didn’t want to run any more risks. Without further ado, she placed it open on the floor and tore out the pages of the chapter on Arcadia.
The footsteps were coming closer.
She left the thin pile of pages where they were, and tried lifting one of the reading desks to haul it over to the window. It was very heavy—and creaked as she put it down again.
The old man stopped.
Rosa became a snake.
The door into the corridor flew open. Light flooded through the bars.
She snapped up the Arcadia chapter in her mouth, coiled her way up the reading desk, pushed off, and shot the last part of the way to the window. She managed to push her head and the crumpled paper in her mouth through the bars, and hastily pulled the rest of her body after it.
The old man called something. His footsteps reached the door. Keys clinked.
Rosa pushed her way out into the open air, afraid of getting stuck in the bars over the window, half in the room, half outside it. But then the weight of the front part of her body hauled the rest after it, and she fell to the yard below.
She heard the old man pushing the door open and hurrying into the room. He must have seen her; perhaps he had even seen the paper in her reptilian mouth.
She reached the ground, and hissed as the whole weight of her body buried her head under it, glided out from under her own coils, and wound her way over to the door of the yard. Her clothes were still lying there in front of it. She tried frantically to push them through the gap in the door with her head, without losing her grip on the pages of the book.
The bookseller was fumbling at the outside door. Security lock after security lock snapped open.
Leaving her clothes behind, Rosa pushed herself through the gap and into the alley, and raced away over the paving stones with the Arcadia chapter between her teeth. She wound her way at high speed along the bottom of the wall of the house, away from the door to the yard, away from the old man whose outline she could see in the light from the corridor as he stood motionless, looking the way she had gone in the darkness.
THE ARCADIAN INHERITANCE
WHEN ROSA REACHED THE VAN, Aliza was dead.
“What happened?”
Alessandro raised both hands, warding off her criticism. “She tried making a break for it.”
He was wearing clean clothes, the second set they had bought from the street vendor in Gela. His hair was wet; he must have washed himself as best he could with water from one of the plastic bottles.
“And that suited you just fine, right?” Rosa was breathless, naked, and had just stumbled through thorny bushes into the little clearing on the mountain slope. She had gone most of the way back as a snake, without realizing how stressful that would be. Right now, she wished for any other animal shape—to be one of the Panthera, the Harpies, the Hundinga—anything but a damn Lamia. With no legs.
Alessandro’s nerves were on edge, too. “Hell, she attacked me!”
“She was locked up. In a steel box. Like—” She fell silent, took a deep breath, and scrutinized him. “Did anything happen to you? Are you hurt?”
Shaking his head, he dismissed her question. “First she cracked up completely, letting out bird cries that could probably be heard all the way to Ragusa. Then she suddenly went deathly quiet. I tried to look through the peephole from in front, but it was too dark. She’d wrecked the interior lighting. What was I supposed to do? I went around to the back and open
ed the doors just a crack. That’s when she attacked.”
“You’ve been wanting to get rid of her the whole time. And you knew perfectly well that I wouldn’t be back in a hurry. This is just great.” Furiously, she took a step toward him. “I told you I wouldn’t go along with anything like that.”
He was about to respond, but she waved his reply away. She toyed briefly with the thought of opening the doors at the back and looking at the body, but then remembered that she was still stark naked and went to the front instead. She flung the pages from Mori’s book onto the seat and rummaged in the dead sisters’ bag. A little later she slipped into a black stretch dress and sneakers that were at least one size too large. Then she emptied the bag and threw the pages, badly battered by now, into it along with the Malandras’ wallet, the rest of the serum, and the syringe.
She heard Alessandro doing something at the back of the van. She walked around to him and saw that one of the doors there was open; she couldn’t help glancing in.
Panthers were not squeamish killers. She had already seen how Alessandro dealt with opponents, and it was never a pretty sight. But what had happened in the van made her recoil a couple of steps. The bag fell into the grass beside her.
Alessandro had climbed into the loading area and seemed to be looking for something. The only source of illumination was a cigarette lighter that he had found in the glove compartment. The little flame flickered in the evening wind from the valley, casting more shadows than light.
“What happened?”
“What does it look like?” he asked, annoyed.
The inside of the van stank of blood, feathers, and worse, a combination of a slaughterhouse and a rundown chicken shed.
“She didn’t want to give in,” he said. “She was rather . . . irritated.”
“You did that? With your teeth? Fuck, Alessandro, how—”
“Blaming me is a big help right now, thanks.”
Shivering, she stepped from one foot to another outside the van. “Can you tell me what you’re doing there? You’re not cleaning up, are you?”
“We can’t drive around with a corpse and a severed head.”
“Let’s look for another van. Or travel by train. Why not?”
She was not sorry about Aliza. The Harpy’s murder of Quattrini had been positively bestial—and she had done it for money. But yet again, Alessandro’s efficiency as a killing machine scared her. She was with the boy she loved so much, and at the same time she saw a little more clearly, every day, the killer instincts in him surfacing whenever his Arcadian heritage was awakened.
But was she any different? She had killed Salvatore Pantaleone, and only recently Michele Carnevare too. And then there were the Hundinga mercenaries when the palazzo burned down. She was no better than him—and certainly no more humane. It was time to accept that.
“I’m not sitting in that van anymore,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
He jumped out of the loading area, landed on all fours—the smell of blood kept the beast in him awake—and stood upright. Carefully, he wiped the soles of his shoes on the grass.
“Going where?” A final cat-like spark died away in his eyes. “Someone or other will find the van in this mess. With our fingerprints and hairs all over the interior.”
“They already want us for murder. This won’t make matters any worse.” She smoothed down the dress and picked up the duffel bag. Then she walked past him and slammed the back doors of the van. The stink still hung over the clearing, and she had an unpleasant feeling that it would follow them wherever they went.
When she turned, he was facing her. “What I told you is the truth,” he said quietly. “I wasn’t waiting until you were out of the way to . . . to do that. You mustn’t think that of me. She attacked me, and she’d have killed me if I hadn’t been faster than she was.”
She laid one hand on his cheek and felt how cold it was. “I shouldn’t have said that just now. It was just the long wait in the city, then the difficulty of getting hold of Mori’s book. The bookseller saw me—I mean he saw me as a snake—and I have no idea if that’s bad or not. He knew Mori, and maybe he knows all about Arcadia and all about us. Let’s just hope he keeps his mouth shut, so that he doesn’t get killed like Mori did.”
He touched her hand, and for a while they simply stood there, looking at each other.
Finally she said, “When we’re on the road I’ll tell you all about what happened. And I want to read what Mori wrote about Arcadia. But there’s still—”
“Iole.”
She nodded, narrowing her lips.
“There’s nothing we can do, is there?” His expression was harder again. “We’re helpless.”
“If we leave Sicily and the police hear about it . . . if they stop looking for us, and word of that gets through to the clans, do you think they’ll withdraw from Isola Luna?”
“Maybe.”
That wasn’t good enough. Of course it wasn’t. But what alternative did they have?
“Those forged passports and tickets,” she said. “Can we get at them?”
“All Quattrini knew was that I’d had them prepared. They were in a safe-deposit box at a bank in Syracuse for a few days, but they’re not there any longer. I got them out of the city. Now they’re hidden in an abandoned farmhouse. I can’t imagine anyone finding them there.”
A bird called above them in the night.
Alessandro looked up at the darkness.
A second bird answered the first, and a third screeched in the treetops farther down the slope.
“Is that them?” she whispered.
“Aliza’s screams must have brought them here.” He spun around, and his eyes followed a movement above the trees. “They’ll arrive anytime now.”
They ran.
FLORINDA’S FEAR
THEY TOOK THE FOOTPATH that Rosa had come up, found a road, and followed it to a small parking lot. Beyond that rose the first houses of Ragusa Ibla.
The angry screeching of birds came down the mountainside. Even down here in the valley it was alarmingly loud.
“They’ve found Aliza.” Alessandro took the duffel bag from Rosa and put it over his shoulder as they ran. There was not much in it, but without it she felt faster and more agile.
They sprinted down an alley, then up a broad flight of steps. Three taxis stood in the yellowish light cast by a street lamp. They were all empty. Rosa’s hands were shaking far too much for her to venture to break into one of them. And she had no tools with her.
A man emerged from the entrance of a small bar, eating a piece of white bread with grilled vegetables. He munched for a moment, swallowed, and asked, “Want a taxi?”
They nodded.
“Mind if I finish this first?”
“Not if we can wait in your car,” said Alessandro. Rosa suppressed an impulse to look up at the sky again.
The driver stopped for a moment, looked past them at the alley with the steps, and frowned. “Okay,” he said, unlocking the doors with his remote control, and waving to them. “Won’t be a moment.”
A few minutes later they were on their way out of Ibla, driving into the modern city center of Ragusa. The taxi turned into a circular courtyard full of scaffolding covered with ads and posters for concerts. Palm trees rustled in the wind. The station was on the other side, a modest, two-story building. The hands of a clock on the roof showed that it was just after ten thirty in the evening.
“If you hurry—” began the driver, as he brought the car to a halt.
“Thanks.” Alessandro gave him money. Rosa was already getting out.
She had the feeling that she ought to crouch down as she ran. But if the Harpies had been following them, they hadn’t shown themselves. There were only a few people outside the station; most of them must have just arrived and were hurrying to get out of there. It was not an inviting area.
“Quick!” Alessandro took her hand. After a last glance at the night sky, they entered the station c
oncourse. Rosa felt a little safer with a roof over her head, but that feeling disappeared when she saw the pigeons pecking around for food on the floor of the concourse—and all of them raised their heads at the same time and looked at her and Alessandro.
Rosa nearly stumbled as they ran past the creatures. She remembered Florinda’s inexplicable fear of birds. And the burnt nests in the basin of the fountain outside the Palazzo Alcantara.
“It’s leaving any minute,” called Alessandro.
Out on the first platform, a conductor was already raising his whistle to his mouth.
They ran through the glass doors and onto the platform. The conductor had his back to them. Out of breath, they reached the train and flung themselves into the nearest car. As Alessandro closed the door behind them, the whistle blew. A second door closed somewhere farther along the train, which began to move.
Without a word, they hurried past empty compartments, until Rosa said, “This one is as good as any.”
Alessandro looked pale as they dropped into seats on opposite sides of the window. Her eyes went from him to his reflection in the pane, then focused on the lights of the station going past.
Dozens of pigeons were sitting on struts under the roof over the platform. Some were hunched in the shadows, others in the pale illumination of the station lighting.
They were all staring at the train.
They all looked back at Rosa.
Had he told the truth about Aliza’s death?
Rosa gazed out into the darkness, at the silhouettes of hilltops, gray trees, deserted roads running across the tracks. The night was a black screen on which the light in the compartment projected their faces, two ghostly masks. They were bone tired, but still full of energy after escaping from Ragusa.
Had he told the truth?
Maybe she ought to forget, once and for all, that he had already lied to her twice. First on Isola Luna, soon after her arrival in Sicily, then again when he took out the contract for the assassination of Michele. The first was all in the past; they had hardly known each other at the time, and she had forgiven him for that long ago. With the second lie, he had wanted to protect her, and it wouldn’t have infuriated Rosa half as much if she hadn’t learned the truth from Avvocato Trevini.
