by Kai Meyer
The burning corpse was still there against the facade as Rosa stopped the car outside the church porch. The two halves of the door had been forced in, and parts of the wood were crackling as the fire caught.
She pushed the driver’s door open, shouting, “Iole! Where are you all? Come out, quick!”
A black shape shot out of the church and into the open air, leaped across her, and landed on Stefania’s lap. Thinking that yet another wild beast was attacking, Stefania yelled, pushed Sarcasmo off against the dashboard, and then saw her mistake. The dog withdrew into the floor in front of her seat. He was too large for it really, but he seemed to feel safer in a confined space.
Cristina and Raffaela were the next to run out of the church. The tutor flung the back door of the car open, and slid in over the slippery leather. Cristina stood outside for a moment calling to Iole, then hauled her along with her as the girl finally appeared. Cursing, she steered Iole in between herself and Raffaela on the backseat. Iole had picked up Rosa’s crumpled clothes and brought them.
“Lorenzo?” asked Rosa.
“Barricaded himself in,” replied Raffaela. “All on his own in the sacristy.”
Iole shouted a warning. Two big cats, lion and panther, came leaping through the flames toward the car and flung themselves against it. Cristina slammed the door.
Rosa stepped hard on the gas, and the BMW shot forward.
The Panthera followed them for some way along the village street before finally giving up. Looking in the rearview mirror, Rosa saw them standing in front of the wall of flame on their hind legs, shifting back into human shape.
The three women in the backseat were all talking at once, but Rosa wasn’t listening. The air whistled through bullet holes in the windows. Stefania, beside her, stared out into the darkness without a word.
Rosa understood. Silence was salutary. Silence was exactly what they needed now.
Soon the others fell silent as well, and there was only the purring of the engine and the rushing of the wind outside to fill the car.
They drove fast in the direction of the expressway, deeper into the night.
GRAVEYARD COUNTRY
AT THE FIRST REST area Rosa stopped the car to put on the clothes that Iole had brought for her. Iole handed the bundle forward. As Rosa took it, she could feel that there was something hidden in it. Lorenzo’s pistol.
It wasn’t difficult to conceal the gun to the left of her seat. Stefania was looking fixedly through the dirty window at the nocturnal landscape along the expressway. It was as if she were trying to block everything around her out of her mind: maybe so that she could think, maybe in a state of apathy.
Rosa was about to start the engine again when Stefania put her hand on the door handle beside her. “I’m getting out.” On the floor at her feet, Sarcasmo woke up and yawned.
“What, here?” asked Rosa doubtfully. The rest area was nothing but an asphalt surface with a few garbage cans crammed full. The expressway ran along one side of it, a terraced field along the other. Their car was the only one anywhere in sight. “There isn’t even an emergency phone here.”
“I’m not about to set my colleagues on you.” As she spoke, Stefania seemed to be looking at her reflection in the splintered wing mirror. “I told them about you two, about the metamorphoses. They wanted me to take a break, that’s the way they put it. And get some psychotherapy. This operation was kind of my last chance to show I’m still responsible for my actions. And I got that chance only because Antonio spoke up for me.” She abruptly turned her head, and looked directly at Rosa. Her eyes were a ghostly white in the middle of her black and red mask of blood. “What am I going to tell them this time? The truth again?”
“You’ll have to think something up. There’s a pile of dead bodies outside the church, and half of them are naked. Even if they dismiss Lorenzo as a deranged junkie, someone or other—”
“I was unconscious when it all began. A glancing shot, something like that. I have plenty of injuries to prove it. You dragged me into the car and threw me out here.”
“Well, thanks a million,” Iole commented.
Stefania let herself drop back into the seat for a moment, exhausted. “I admit it doesn’t sound like an abduction. If that still makes any difference.”
Rosa shook her head. “No one’s going to find out what happened this evening. The clans will make sure it’s all swept under the carpet before the media get wind of it. Or if not the clans, then the politicians in Rome who got the Hungry Man out of prison. I’ll bet you the investigations are discontinued by midday tomorrow, at the very latest.”
From the backseat, Cristina agreed with her. “People turning into animals—that doesn’t sound good in a press release. They’ll do all they can to keep any journalists from finding out.”
Rosa touched Stefania’s hand. “Look after yourself. They’re not squeamish when they think someone might tell people the wrong things. And by they I don’t mean Cosa Nostra.”
The policewoman swung both legs out of the car, but sat where she was and took a deep breath. “Well, the air’s much better out here.”
Inside the car, it stank like a slaughterhouse. Festa’s blood had dried on the seats and their bodies some time ago. If they came to a roadblock, they’d be taken for a gang of serial killers.
What they needed was another car. And water to wash in. Clean clothes. But most of all, Rosa was wondering how, and how soon, she could shake off the others.
Stefania looked at her once again. “Whatever you’re planning, Rosa, it can’t end well.”
“I’m doing my best.”
“Sure,” said the policewoman. “Of course I know you are.” With those words she got out of the car, hesitated again, and closed the door without another word. She walked slowly away toward a solitary bench at the side of the rest area.
Sarcasmo jumped up on the seat she had just vacated and sniffed at a bloodstain.
“She’ll give us away,” said Raffaela.
“No,” said Rosa. “I don’t think so.”
She started the engine, glanced at the lonely figure on the wide parking area, and then drove on.
Turning her head, Iole glanced out of the rear window. Rosa, too, thought she saw something in the rearview mirror, a faint flash in the dark, just as she turned the car onto the expressway.
“Did she have a gun?” whispered Iole.
In silence, Rosa stepped on the gas and didn’t look back.
Three quarters of an hour later, a sign told them that they were on the outskirts of Bagheria.
“I have friends there,” said Raffaela. Those were the first words she had spoken since they left Stefania behind. “I can call them. They’ll help us.”
“Good,” said Rosa. “Then you three can get out here.”
Iole shook her head. “Forget it.”
Neither of the others protested. Cristina gazed out the window in silence. She had long ago accepted the fact that Rosa didn’t want any of them with her as she continued her journey. When Iole looked indignantly from one to the other of them, the tutor laid a hand on her thigh.
“This is Rosa’s business, not ours.” It sounded honest, not like an excuse to clear out as soon as possible.
Iole shook her head vigorously. “I want to go too.”
After a few hundred yards, Rosa left the expressway.
“Don’t drive into the town,” said Raffaela. “Bagheria will be full of police. Drop us off somewhere here. My friends can come and collect us.”
Rosa took the BMW into the parking lot of a McDonald’s and drove to the far side of it, where the glow of the streetlamps was lost in the darkness. Beyond a low wall lay a stretch of urban wasteland, and two hundred yards away there were ugly apartment blocks with lights in rows of windows.
Iole didn’t want to get out, but Cristina and the tutor gently pushed her into the open air. It helped that Sarcasmo had taken the lead, full of enthusiasm, and was now waiting for her with his tongue hang
ing out, panting happily.
Rosa was left on her own in the shot-up, bloodstained car. She felt very much alone, even before Cristina closed the door behind her.
Iole tore herself away from the two women and opened the passenger door. However, she didn’t jump in, as Rosa had feared she might, but leaned into the car and gave her a long, sad look.
“You will come back, won’t you?”
Rosa nodded, a lump in her throat.
“Promise?”
She nodded again.
“You’re lying,” said Iole quietly.
She tried a faint smile. “Wish me luck.”
“I wish you both luck.” Iole swallowed, but no tears flowed from her glassy eyes. “See you.”
When she closed the door from outside, another crack ran through the perforated glass of the window.
Rosa left the three of them and the dog behind, and did not rejoin the expressway, but let the GPS guide her along a country road going south. After the first few miles, she placed the pistol on the passenger seat beside her.
“Now turn right,” the metallic voice instructed her.
Rosa was grateful for any company.
At just after eleven, she was following winding minor roads leading from the 121 up into bleak, mountainous country. In the village of Mezzojuso she left the BMW in an unlit parking lot at the foot of several palm trees whose leaves rustled with a ghostly sound in the dark. Without much difficulty, she stole an ancient silver Honda with the passenger door unlocked. In this vehicle she drove the last few miles back to Campofelice di Fitalia.
The hills rose as black outlines against a clear, starry sky. In the beam of the headlights, she saw that the area around the town was not as dismal as she had thought. There were a few vineyards, some green cultivated land, and low copses of trees. The wilderness must lie farther to the west, that area between Campofelice and Corleone that Alessandro had called the graveyard of the Mafia. Rosa had heard of it before: lonely, windswept peaks of rock, bare slopes, and hidden valleys where a few decades ago the Corleonese clan had buried hundreds of victims.
By night, Campofelice di Fitalia did not look very inviting. She doubted whether more than a thousand people lived there. Yet she passed several coffee bars still open at this hour. She couldn’t go into one in her present state, but she had to find out somehow whether there had once been a hospital here. And if so, whether anyone who had worked in it still lived in Campofelice.
But it was nearly midnight, and she realized that she wouldn’t find anyone by driving aimlessly along the streets. Instead, she left the town, parked the Honda in the shelter of some rocks, and followed a footpath with a few signs pointing the way to a small spring. Like every other such spring in Sicily, it seemed that it was credited with healing powers.
She washed herself as well as she could in the narrow channel of water. She soaked the black T-shirt, wrung it out, and put it back on still wet. She wasn’t going to get the stains out of the jeans, so she spared herself the trouble of trying. As she stumbled through the dark landscape back to the car, the slaughterhouse smell still followed her.
She spent the night in the Honda, the pistol jammed between the seat and the emergency brake.
She was awoken in the morning by a radiant blue sky and the tinkling of goat bells. Exhausted as she was, she would probably have slept on until evening if a herd of goats hadn’t made itself comfortable around the car. She had turned off the only paved road anywhere around, and was now a little ways along a dirt path.
The bleating of the animals was loud enough to wake the dead, not to mention the dozens of little bells that were ringing. When she looked around, she saw a weather-beaten old man. He was sitting in the grass a little way from the herd, an antiquated herdsman’s crook in one hand, a cigarette in the other. He stared at her without a word. Maybe he had been staring at her for ages already.
She rolled the window down. “Excuse me,” she called, “are you from this area?”
“Do I look like I’m on vacation here?” His rasping voice made him seem even older.
“I’m looking for a hospital.”
“What hospital?”
“It may not be a real hospital, something more like a first-aid station.”
“Not here, there isn’t.”
The disappointment in her face must have been visible even across the distance between them.
“There’s a doctor down in the village,” he went on. “A girl, kind of a young thing from Palermo. Says I badly need massage. What would my wife have said to that, God rest her soul? Massage at the expense of the state. Like those high-up fellows in Rome, eh?” He gave a bleating laugh. “Young folk these days get funny ideas. No wonder the bloody TV programs are so bad.”
“No wonder,” she agreed, not that she could see any conclusive connection. “Well, it could be something like a clinic. A place where scientists work.”
“Doing research and that?”
Her tongue felt as furred as a goat’s ear. “Yes, exactly.”
“There’s an old weather station.”
“Hmm, probably not that.”
“And then of course there’s the base.”
“What base?”
He got up from his place in the grass and came over. “Where the Resistance hid away in the war, back in the forties. We kids swapped stuff with them for cigarettes. Full cartridges that we’d collected. Found a landmine once, blew half Salvo Pini’s leg off. He never touched another cigarette, never again. Died of cancer all the same. Cancer of the ass. Didn’t come from smoking, that’s for sure.”
“And this base—”
“After the war the army did exercises on the land there. They built the fences a good bit higher. Barbed wire, electric fences, all that stuff. That’s what the commies like. Barbed wire and walls.”
She instinctively thought of autopsy tables with silvery surfaces, shining operating instruments. She thought of long rows of cages, with live experimental subjects shut up inside them.
“All that’s empty these days,” said the goatherd. “It’s been a while since the last transports went down the old road.”
“How long a while?” She didn’t like the smell of the goats much better than the smell of the blood on her jeans. “I mean, when did they close up shop at this base?”
“Oh, thirty, forty years back. No big deal, none of us had much to do with them. They even flew in their own goat’s milk after they built a landing strip out there.”
“And now?”
“Like I said. All deserted. A few buildings were blown up in the early nineties, after that crap over in Corleone got so hot it finally boiled over. Luciano Liggio, Totò Riina, Bernardo Provenzano . . . all those men of honor from Corleone, well, I guess you know about that. Felt for a long time like the police wanted to dig up the whole province, looking for bodies and folks shot in the neck and all that. If you ask me, people shouldn’t disturb the peace of the dead. At least, they were in the base too, blew part of it sky-high, and then after a while things got quiet again. Not much left to be seen there now.”
“Have you ever been there?”
“Not after that. The ground’s poisoned, they said. On account of all the maneuvers and the stuff they tested. Sheep and goats that graze the damn grass will get sick and die, folks say. You can’t sell the milk from here these days, and if any of it gets out of these parts they’ll close your whole herd down. Could be that a few of the kids go in and out of the place, to drink and have a scuffle. But most of them get out of here the moment they can tell a road from their playpen. There’s hardly no work here, there’s no cinema no more either.”
A nanny goat chewing at her leisure looked Rosa in the eye, as if she knew exactly why she had all these questions.
“Can you describe the way to this place to me?” she asked the old man.
“All they show on TV is crap.” He rose and made his way through the herd of goats. She quickly thrust the pistol a little deeper into the
space beside her seat, but left her hand close to the butt.
“Seen you somewhere before,” he said as he stopped outside the open window.
And I thought you hated TV, she was tempted to retort, about to start the car.
“You look like that actress in the sixties,” he decided.
Most. Certainly. Not.
“Oh no, not an actress. A model, she was. Twiggy. Not much flesh on her bones.”
“Is it this way?” she asked, pointing straight ahead.
“There’s only two ways,” he said. “Forward or backward. You better go forward, signorina, follow this track. It’s eight or nine kilometers, maybe ten. Then you’ll see part of the old fence. From there on the land’s all poisoned, that’s what they say. Not good for the milk, that’s what they say.”
“You mean along this trail through the fields?”
He nodded. “Eight or nine kilometers, maybe ten, like I said,” he repeated, as if he were running out of words.
She turned the key in the ignition. The goats surged apart in a movement like a breaking wave.
He still kept his eyes on Rosa. “Wasn’t you looking for a hospital?”
She pressed her lips together and waited impatiently for the last animals to get out of the way.
“On account of the blood?” he asked, putting out his hand to touch her face. She must have overlooked something, maybe at her hairline.
A goat let out a high-pitched bleat. The path ahead of the Honda was clear. Rosa stepped on the gas.
She reached the trail and headed for the empty hills, the steep rocks, and deserted valleys. She drove on into the graveyard country of the Mafia.
THE BASE
AFTER SIX MILES OVER bare hilltops, and through a valley recently devastated by a steppe fire, the trail led to a high plateau enclosed by hills and strange rock formations that might have come from another planet. Battered warning signs—BEWARE! MILITARY EXERCISES!—hung on posts stuck in the ground at an angle. Some of the notices had been peppered with bullet holes.
Far ahead, at the center of the plateau, a few low-built huts stood in a cluster around a craggy hilltop. All around, there were a handful of remains of larger buildings, distorted steel cages, masonry rubble, and concrete walls. The ruins were evidently a leftover product of the complex that the goatherd had mentioned had been blown up. It was natural enough to assume that the Corleonese had used the terrain as storage for drugs or a place to make them. But Rosa thought otherwise. The attention aroused by the raids—a couple of explosions, a few well-placed rumors about infected land to keep herdsmen away—all that fit only too well into the picture she had formed of TABULA and its methods.
