by Kai Meyer
“Another foundation that he generously supports?” asked Rosa sharply.
“His first wife, who wasn’t my mother, was an Arcadian. Over fifty years ago, soon after the wedding, she became a hybrid. She shifted shape, as she had done so many times before, but for some reason she couldn’t complete the metamorphosis. She couldn’t return entirely to human form either. I’ve seen photos of her before the wedding. She was such a beautiful woman—a Hunding, a swift, slender hunting hound. But in the end she was neither one nor the other. She hid away in one of my father’s villas, and never showed herself outside it again.”
Rosa watched Alessandro out of the corner of her eye. His own mother, Gaia, had not been an Arcadian, but she, too, had gone into voluntary exile alone on Isola Luna. There was sorrow and maybe sympathy in his eyes.
“My father stood by her,” said Danai. “He promised her that he would find a cure, even if it cost him his entire fortune. He consulted the best doctors, the most highly esteemed scientists, but his wife refused to see a single one of them. She wouldn’t have anyone setting eyes on her in that condition. For a long time my father respected her wishes, but when she became severely depressed he had to do something. He anesthetized her and had several doctors come to examine her. None of them could suggest anything. They wanted to take her away with them and investigate her in their institutes like some kind of laboratory rat. At that, my father sent them all packing. When his wife came back to consciousness, she realized what he had done. She felt that he had deceived her and, even worse, humiliated her.”
“No wonder,” said Rosa.
“Of course he was very sorry, but she wouldn’t listen to him. Then he knew that he wasn’t going to get any further by ordinary means. He had to try another, more dangerous way.”
“He must have loved her very much,” said Alessandro.
Rosa groaned. “Yes, but he abused her trust.”
“Because he loved her.”
That’s no excuse, she was going to say. But then she thought that maybe she wouldn’t like what he might reply: that love justified anything, even deceit. On that point their convictions were poles apart.
“In his search for a solution, after many years my father finally came upon a group of men who were experimenting with ancient alchemical formulas, writings from the Middle Ages. These people claimed that they knew how to transform one . . . substance into another. They were already calling themselves TABULA at the time, but they were a very small, unimportant outfit, with no money, only a few crazy ideas. In a half hearted way, some of them had written studies of human beings undergoing transformation into animals, not because they knew about the Arcadians, but because there’s a lot about it in alchemy. And of course they also knew the historical records of werewolves, bear-men, fox-spirits, all the old legends that originated a few thousand years ago in Arcadia.”
She sounded sad now, as if she herself wished for nothing so much as to be able to move freely among other people. Rosa remembered Danai’s bizarre appearance in New York, when she had tried exactly that: to be like other girls at any price, do what they did, create an impression of normality. Except that in fact there had been nothing normal about the dance she performed in the Dream Room, and people had stared as if she might be all kinds of things, but certainly not one of them.
“After my father had made contact with TABULA, he got to know a young scientist there, a man called—”
“Eduard Sigismondis,” whispered Rosa.
“Do you know him?”
“Only his name. We know he belongs to TABULA.” Strictly speaking, that was something of an exaggeration. In fact she had only the information that Eva had gathered for her, no evidence. But the name had simply been on the tip of her tongue, as if waiting for a gap in Danai’s account into which it fitted.
“Sigismondis made my father all kinds of promises,” Danai went on. “As a matter of fact, he had been experimenting for some time with crossbreeding humans and animals, not because of some kind of alchemical nonsense, like the others, but out of scientific curiosity. Sigismondis had joined TABULA because up to a certain point the interests of its members coincided with his own. But my father says he was never really like them. Alchemy and all that stuff meant nothing to him. My father trusted him because Sigismondis promised him nothing short of a miracle.” There was a sharp undertone in Danai’s voice. “No, said Sigismondis, of course he did not have to see the woman with his own eyes in order to concoct a cure for her, since there were plenty of other crossbreeds available for that, weren’t there? The world was positively teeming with them, he said, you just had to know where to look. With a little financial support, it would be no problem to capture some of them and carry out certain tests.” She fell silent for a moment, and then said, more calmly and softly, “My father agreed. He gave Sigismondis everything he asked for. A laboratory was set up, then a second, a whole troop of talented and unscrupulous assistants was hired, anything that Sigismondis wanted. They all worked for him under the seal of absolute secrecy, and if anyone threatened to talk, Sigismondis was not squeamish in his methods of dealing with that person.”
Danai rose and glided on the black tip of her scorpion’s tail several yards past the mountain of broken statues. Then she turned around. She seemed to be looking straight through Rosa and Alessandro.
“Sigismondis told my father that he could reverse the metamorphosis only if he had first created a cross between human and animal himself. He had to understand the process in order to make it work in the opposite direction. So he began creating hybrids of his own by means of operations and insemination.”
“The first artificial inseminations were at the end of the 1970s,” said Alessandro.
“The first that were successful and known to the public,” replied Danai. “But they had been taking place earlier; there were trials years before that. And I didn’t say that all the inseminations were artificial.”
For a couple of seconds, Rosa closed her eyes, fighting off a sense of nausea.
“And of course he experimented with Arcadians as well,” said Danai. “Heaven only knows how he came to know so much about them. Very likely the other members of TABULA, all those alchemists and esotericists and weirdos, found out and told him. It doesn’t make any difference now. At first they may have been volunteers who let him examine them in return for money, but the more extreme his experiments were, the more difficult it was to find suitable subjects. He’d probably been having people abducted earlier for his first experiments, but now it was open season for him to hunt Arcadians. The kidnappings, the specter of TABULA so feared by the Arcadian dynasties, the rumors about secret laboratories and experiments—all that started then.”
Alessandro was furious. “And your father knew all this?”
“Thanassis was the sponsor in the background,” said Rosa, angrily. “The generous patron. Who cared about a few Arcadians who’d mysteriously disappeared, if it meant that his wife got better?”
Danai’s gestures and facial expressions suggested that she couldn’t choose between rage and tears. “She never did get better. Sigismondis deceived my father. There was no cure, and he had never seriously been looking for one. All that he did come up with was a kind of side product of hybrid blood, and even that he found by pure chance—a serum that kept an Arcadian in his or her shape for a few minutes, either in human or animal form. Sigismondis’s assistants used it during their experiments, to ensure that their victims couldn’t change shape under their knives and in their radiation chambers and breeding stations. It must have come in very useful to them, but it wasn’t a great success, and it certainly wasn’t what their experiments were aiming for. Only later did it become important.”
“They began marketing it,” concluded Rosa. So at last that made sense. For the first time she was on a trail that might explain the part played by her grandmother. And also what had become of her father.
“Forty years ago my father’s wife killed herself,” said Dan
ai. “Overnight, he found himself facing a gigantic pile of ruins. TABULA had committed terrible crimes with his money and on his instructions, indeed was still committing them, and at last he realized that for almost a decade Sigismondis had been pulling the wool over his eyes. At first my father threatened to make the whole thing public, but of course he knew what would happen to him and his fortune then. So he withdrew into the background, broke his connections to TABULA, put a stop to all payments to the organization, and hoped that would be enough to starve Sigismondis out.”
Rosa’s mouth twisted. “You mean he was too cowardly to go public. Because it would have cost him his shipping empire. Because he’d have been put in prison, never to come out again. Do you really think he wanted you to tell us that?”
“Yes, I do,” replied Danai, with spirit. “We discussed it at length before you came on board. He is offering to be absolutely straightforward with you.”
“In exchange for what?” Alessandro snapped. “What does he expect us to do?”
“Listen to the rest of the story first.” Danai took a deep breath, cut Rosa’s objection short with a gesture, and went on. “What my father didn’t guess was that for some time Sigismondis had no longer been dependent on his money. Meanwhile, he and his assistants had set up a flourishing business. The serum they gained from hybrid blood was a blessing for Arcadians. For the first time, there was a way to hold a metamorphosis back. And during the quarrels of the dynasties with one another, during the great Mafia wars of the seventies and eighties, the serum was a weapon of incalculable value for the clans. So TABULA began selling the stuff, through middlemen, to the dynasties, who were ready to pay a fortune for it. It all became a vicious circle: TABULA abducts Arcadians, breeds hybrids, manufactures the serum from their blood, and sells it back to the Arcadians—even those whose own family members have been abducted.”
In her short time at the head of the Alcantara clan, Rosa had heard of many crimes, but this was the worst of all. “The furs,” she said. “Were they part of the bargain as well?”
Danai nodded. “TABULA is still selling the coats of murdered Arcadians to collectors all over the world, humans included, in the United States, Japan, all over Europe. Certain circles in Russia—even Arcadians, as far as we know—will pay more for them than for the best sables. Strictly speaking, TABULA is no longer a secret scientific society, but a criminal organization like your own. And don’t look at me like that—they are not unlike you whether you want to admit it or not. The clever business ideas with which Sigismondis financed his experiments after my father pulled out of TABULA has become a secret monopoly. It sells the serum, the furs, and other substances, too. In Japan there are billionaires who swear by the effects of powdered Arcadian bones, supposed to increase potency—”
“Yes,” said Rosa. “We get the idea. And in order to put a stop to TABULA’s trade, your father wants to eradicate all Arcadians.” She added, with biting sarcasm, “Because he’s already been so successful in turning off the money supply to TABULA.”
All emotion drained from Danai’s face. The excitement she’d worked up during her long account was gone in a heartbeat.
“That’s the plan,” she said wearily. “And unfortunately it won’t work without you two.”
THE CONCORDAT
DANAI LED ROSA AND Alessandro up a series of metal stairways and back into the daylight. On the way, she told them about her mother.
“She was rescued from a TABULA laboratory during one of the first liberation raids. She was an Arcadian, but not a hybrid, abducted from some coastal resort in Croatia. Obviously they were going to artificially inseminate her to get her pregnant with God knows what.” She stopped for a moment as they passed another steel bulkhead on their way up. “Even the creatures in these elevator shafts had human mothers, although no one would think so now. TABULA made them what they are.”
“But why are you a hybrid?” asked Rosa.
“They’d probably given my mother all kinds of drugs before she was freed from the lab. Her arms were covered with the marks of injections, my father says, and she was hooked up to a drip when the experimental station was raided. Presumably her blood already contained everything necessary to create hybrids. At the time my father didn’t yet know much about what Sigismondis and his people were up to. He’d seen some of the results, that was all. With every lab that he and his men destroyed, they gained new knowledge. Maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference if he’d known what they had injected my mother with. He fell in love with her, and I guess she did with him. I was born as a hybrid, but they did all they could to give me a normal childhood. If you can call places like this normal.”
“Have you always lived here?” asked Alessandro.
“Oh no, the Stabat Mater is much younger than me. She was converted to her present form only eight or ten years ago. My father has many houses, islands, and ships. . . . I spent time sometimes in one place, sometimes in another. It depended how long I could bear it somewhere.”
Rosa pricked up her ears. “How long you could bear it?”
“I have . . . attacks,” replied Danai hesitantly. “Sometimes I’m not feeling well. And then I’m . . . difficult. I was always angry that the Arcadians never accepted us. They ought to have taken us in. Instead, hybrids have nearly always been outcasts, until they fell into the hands of TABULA, committed suicide, or in these last few years ended up here with us. I can understand that people see me as a freak. But the Arcadians at least ought to recognize what we are and how much most of us have suffered. Don’t get me wrong, I know that I’m relatively well off. I’m privileged, my father is a rich man who has always done everything in his power for me. Yet I always wanted to be like you, able to stand up for what I am, not live hidden away in a”—she hesitated—“in a damn floating zoo.”
Before either of them could reply, they passed a bulkhead and came out into the open air. Ahead of them lay a wide deck, and a little way off a swimming pool. It was covered with a sheet of black plastic. Beyond the ship’s rail, the Mediterranean glittered inky blue and turquoise. The sky was cloudless, with not even streaks of condensation to be seen.
They followed Danai and saw something moving near a superstructure on deck. Evangelos Thanassis was being pushed out of a transport lift in his sickbed by his bodyguards. Not far from the rail, he waved to them. The bed was stabilized, stands with containers of infusions anchored at the head of it.
Danai led them past the swimming pool, and Rosa realized that she had been wrong. There was no black plastic cover over the pool. The water itself was pitch black, and something moved in it. Outlines were gliding along under the surface, winding around one another like huge eels. Once Rosa saw parts of a shimmering fish, and then something that was almost a human face.
They left the pool and its inhabitants behind, and reached Thanassis’s sickbed. It stood with its long side aligned to the rail, so that he could look out to see past the bars of the frame. Danai leaned down and whispered something to him. Thanassis slowly nodded.
“There’s something I’d like to ask,” said Rosa. “Your people took our cell phones away during the flight. But there’s someone I urgently have to speak to.”
“We do all we can to be as invisible as possible. A phone call that could be traced back here—”
Alessandro spoke up. “We’re not your prisoners. You can’t simply—”
“Can’t I?” Thanassis sharply interrupted him. “I can tell you exactly what you are, you and your girlfriend. You’re wanted criminal suspects. The police are looking for you. Your own families set the Malandras on you. And I’m pretty sure that TABULA would also like to exchange a few words with you. At the moment you are guests on board my ship, and I would advise you not to adopt that tone, young man.”
Alessandro laid a hand on the balustrade and closed his fist around the steel rail.
“We shouldn’t be here at all. Your stories of gods and sunken bridges, and all these creatures here on board—n
one of it has anything to do with what I am or what Rosa is. Arcadia fell thousands of years ago, and it doesn’t interest me why—”
“Arcadia is about to fall for the second time,” said Thanassis. “And that ought to interest you.”
Rosa’s angry glances were for Thanassis and Alessandro alike. “All I want is to make a phone call, okay?”
Thanassis turned to her, but before he could say anything Danai came between them. She spoke to her father vigorously in Greek.
Finally, if reluctantly, the old man nodded. Danai gave Rosa a shy smile, touched her hand, and led her a little way along the rail. Alessandro was about to follow them, but Rosa gestured to him to stay behind.
“Here,” said Danai, handing her a smartphone.
Rosa nodded gratefully, and called Iole’s cell phone number. Danai moved a little way off, but stayed within earshot.
A metallic female voice answered. “This is the mailbox of—” Rosa was about to break the connection when Iole’s recorded voice came in. “Rosa, everything’s okay.” She gave the time of day, less than two hours ago. “I’m fine. Signora Falchi is complaining a lot, but she’ll survive. And Cristina can’t keep her hands off all the old papers down here. I’ll try to update this every two hours and—” The recording broke off; the voice mail setup did not leave her more time.
“Everything all right?” asked Danai.
“I hope so.” Rosa handed her the phone back. As Danai took it, Rosa touched her wrist. “Thanks. That was really nice of you.”
Danai looked almost moved. She smiled briefly, and led the way back to the others.
“Well?” asked Alessandro, sounding anxious.
“She was fine two hours ago, at least.”
The worry lines didn’t disappear from his forehead, but he breathed a sigh of relief.
