by Kai Meyer
“You say that as if it were something for him to be proud of.”
“Depends on how you look at it. You yourself have had a shot at leading a criminal organization—he built one up with his own hands! But never mind what the two of us think, Costanza saw him as a tool she could use to gain power over the Alcantaras. And considering all she had already done for him, and the prospect of what she might yet do, he was ready and willing to help her.”
“But surely she would never have put herself in danger as a guinea pig for scientific research.”
“She thought he would simply make it possible for her to get pregnant. He, however, had something else in mind, something that he naturally preferred to keep secret from her. But here you have to know something else. Have you heard the story of the concordat?”
“I’ve heard of the civil war between the Lamias and the Panthera long ago in old Arcadia. And about their peace treaty.”
“And you’ve also heard that Lamias and Panthera were forbidden to have children together?”
“To prevent two strong families from merging into a single invincible clan, yes.”
He stopped at the end of the row of cages. “Allegedly that was what the gods commanded. You may call it garbage, but as a rule there’s a kernel of truth in such stories. It’s easy to understand that the pact kept the power in Arcadia evenly balanced, as a kind of coalition with an equal division of labor. But that was not the only reason why Panthera and Lamias were right to keep their hands off each other.”
As hard as she tried, she could no longer blot the thought of Alessandro out of her mind. Suddenly she felt so queasy that she was afraid she might have been trapped into taking some kind of poison.
“There’s a biological reason for the fact that Lamias and Panthera don’t suit one another,” he said. “It has to do with their children.”
She clutched the pistol, thought of Nathaniel, and then of Alessandro again. She had been forcibly brought together with Tano, one of the Panthera. She had been a guinea pig herself, her rape nothing but an experiment. All at once she was terrified of what he might say next.
He went over to the tall steel door in the side wall, only a few yards from the stairway and the freight elevator. The smaller door set into it was open just a crack.
“You weren’t the first it’s been tried with,” he said, turning to look at her with a dark expression. “The first Lamia—or at least the first we know—to be crossed with one of the Panthera was Costanza. Except that she didn’t know anything about it. The good professor knew the old legends; he was obsessed by the myths of Arcadia. And he wanted to find out whether there was any factual reason for the ban on unions between Lamias and Panthera. Myths can often be a disguise for the truth. People blamed the gods for everything that they couldn’t understand. Or used them as a pretext for banning such things. Almost certainly there were unions between the two dynasties in times of classical antiquity, but the children born of them were . . . different. And above all weak.”
“Weak?” she asked quietly.
“Sickly at birth, but that wasn’t the worst of it. For some reason, the genes of the two species don’t suit each other; newborn babies from their mating almost never grew up in those days. Today, however, there are ways of keeping such weak babies alive and raising them. And that is what Sigismondis did. For him, the birth of Costanza’s twins was a scientific triumph. Without her knowledge, he impregnated her with semen from one of the Panthera. The fact that my brother and I had only barely survived our first few days confirmed his hypothesis. The concordat anticipates natural selection. Instead of bringing into the world children who would soon die anyway, Lamias and Panthera were forbidden to produce them at all. They were kept apart, maybe for fear that any surviving sons and daughters could poison the bloodlines of all the dynasties.”
Rosa was still aiming the pistol at him, and had no intention of lowering it. At the same time, she was starting to feel childish, because he knew as well as she did that she wouldn’t pull the trigger.
“So Costanza was mated with one of the Panthera against her will,” she said. “And the twins, you two, were living proof that it was not the gods who had forbidden such unions but the dynasties themselves? Is that what Sigismondis wanted to show?”
“Among other things, yes. The facts behind the old legends interested him. Of course he didn’t tell Costanza anything about it; she was angry enough with him already. She had wanted a daughter, or even two, but not even Sigismondis could influence that. He may have liked the idea of playing the part of a god, but he was still a long way from being a real one.” That appeared to amuse him, but when he went on he seemed to be entirely serious again. “Her sons’ weak condition after their birth was, as I said, due to only one defect. The second showed itself only much later.” He looked almost a little sympathetic. “You’re wondering what that means for you and that Carnevare boy, am I right?”
She had indeed been thinking about that, but above all she wanted to know what it meant for herself. So her unknown grandfather, the father of Costanza’s children, had been one of the Panthera. Meaning that a certain amount of Panthera blood flowed in her own veins. And the defect he was talking about affected her, too.
“Don’t let that worry you,” he said. Obviously it was easy enough to tell, from looking at her, what was on her mind. “It has to do with the shape-shifting. And you seem to have no problems at all with that, from what I hear.”
Were they broadcasting it on the eight o’clock news? How on earth had he heard about her shape-shifting in this hole in the ground?
“It was heart trouble,” he said, “with both my brother and me. If we shifted shape, the heart stopped. Just like that. Not strong enough for the metamorphosis. The heart stops. R.I.P.” He struck one hand with the fist of the other. “That’s all.”
So far, her own heart had always gone along with the shape-shifting. But who could guarantee it would stay that way?
“What happened to Costanza, then?” She had hated her grandmother without really having known her—and now she almost felt sorry for her, because TABULA had treated Costanza as shamefully as they had treated her, too.
You’re running away from the ghost of Costanza, Trevini had said to her once. That was all over. She would face her inheritance. And she wanted to hear everything, the whole story.
“She brought us into the world,” he said, “and then she went home to place herself at the head of the clan once and for all, without consideration for anyone or anything else whatsoever. That’s why the first thing she did was to shoot her mother.”
Rosa’s aunt Florinda had also died of a gunshot wound.
“And then she murdered her sister.”
Zoe, too, had been killed. Zoe, who had really been destined to succeed Florinda.
“So that made Costanza the head of the clan.” He smiled. “And who does that remind you of?”
FATHER AND DAUGHTER
“HOW MUCH OF ALL this did Evangelos Thanassis know?” asked Rosa. “He was financing Sigismondis, after all.”
The man who might be her father was still standing in front of the steel door, as if suddenly reluctant to reveal the last piece of the research-station puzzle. It was only a few steps from here to the stairs and the way up to the surface. Rosa could have run away from the truth. But she didn’t even consider it.
“Thanassis had no idea,” he said. “Sigismondis exploited him, just as he exploited Costanza, but the two of them knew nothing about each other. If there was one thing he couldn’t allow himself, it was to make enemies of those two, at least not at the beginning of his work. Later, after TABULA was well established and earning millions from the sales of the hybrid serums, it wouldn’t have made any difference. By that time, he had long ago built up such a network of supporters, sympathizers, and those who benefited from his work that even a man like Evangelos Thanassis could no longer have been a serious danger to him.”
“Until his friends themse
lves threw him out.” She was gradually getting the hang of all these entanglements.
“He realized, too late, that he had made a pact with the devil. You don’t do business with such people without surrendering some of your power to them. Sigismondis had built up TABULA so that he could pursue his experiments at his leisure. The serum trade was meant only to finance his work. However, his partners didn’t see it the same way, and before he knew it they wanted to share in the profits. Naturally they couldn’t care less about an old man doing research in an abandoned bunker somewhere. They forced him to withdraw from TABULA—and in return they left him with this complex and a modest amount of financial support, and made sure that the place was well and truly forgotten. They did it by using all the methods at their disposal: rumormongers, the army, even the Corleone clan. This isolation was all the reward Sigismondis got for everything he had built up.”
She pointed to the door behind him. “What’s behind that?”
“The laboratories and the former hospital wing. You want to see them, do you?”
Rosa nodded, although she wasn’t sure that she did. She was wasting time. What she really wanted was Alessandro. And she was starting to believe that she wasn’t going to find him here.
Davide pushed the door open and climbed over the ankle-high steel threshold. More neon lighting, this time in a long corridor with concrete walls. There were several rooms on both sides of it. At the end of the hall was an opaque glass double door.
Rosa followed him down the corridor, past the first room, a medical laboratory with microscopes, centrifuges, incubators, and refrigerators, and other equipment she couldn’t identify. All the doors on the left side were closed; those on the right side wide open. In the next room several clunky computer monitors stood, out of use with one exception. An orange row of figures glowed on a black background on its screen. Beside it was a modern laptop on which filmed images with captions running underneath them shimmered; it looked like a news bulletin. He must have been sitting here when she entered the bunker.
“Why did no one ever mention Apollonio?” she asked. “None of my entire family has ever said a word about him, not even Florinda.”
“Florinda was born a few years later. I don’t think her conception was intentional. By then Costanza had probably given up hope of a daughter of her own. Later, she initiated Florinda only into the bare essentials about the family. She knew nothing about Apollonio, and very little about the Alcantaras’ links to TABULA.”
“But Apollonio was her brother!”
“Apollonio never lived with the Alcantaras. Sigismondis claimed him for himself directly after the birth, and Costanza, who had wanted a girl anyway, didn’t care what became of him. She took one baby home with her and left the other here. She didn’t even name him; Sigismondis did that. In the Arcadian myths it was the god Apollo who, with the help of Hermes, brought peace to the kingdom. To Sigismondis, on the other hand, Apollonio was the symbol of hope for new scientific discoveries, new knowledge.”
“You mean Apollonio was a kind of lab rat?”
“To begin with, anyway. Apollonio grew up here at the institute under constant observation, every fiber of his body scientifically investigated, his every step, every word, every mood recorded. After a while Sigismondis may have seen him as a kind of foster son, but that didn’t keep him from studying the boy day and night. For the first few years he wasn’t allowed to leave the complex. Later he went out only under supervision for short excursions in the light of day.”
She was very far from feeling sorry for Apollonio, yet the idea of the little boy kept down here year in, year out, having needles stuck into him, being measured, weighed, x-rayed touched her heart.
“And Costanza never took any interest in him?”
“Not the slightest. She simply expunged him from her memory like afterbirth left behind in the hospital. Sixteen years passed before she was reminded of him again.”
“What happened?”
“Apollonio was a teenager. He was curious about the outside world, and he rebelled. By that time he was free to move about down here in the Institute, and one day he came upon the documents recording his birth. Until that point he hadn’t known that he had a twin brother who had grown up in the Alcantara family, had total freedom, and enjoyed every imaginable luxury. Costanza was not a loving mother, but she had made sure that Florinda and I lacked for nothing. Among other things, the files of the institute contained press clippings about the Alcantaras, mentioning the appearance of Costanza with her son and daughter, who was the younger of her children, at social occasions. You can probably imagine it for yourself. Sigismondis was always a dedicated collector and archivist, and his documentation on the Alcantaras was comprehensive.”
“So Apollonio got out of here and set off to see the Alcantaras, right?” She would probably have done the very same thing.
“We were seventeen at that time. Apollonio got into the grounds of the Palazzo Alcantara and caught up with me on the way to the garages.”
“And you’d known nothing about his existence before?”
He shook his head. “All of a sudden we were facing each other, almost mirror images, but one in expensive clothes, all spruced up, the other unkempt after his flight from the institute and several days living rough. Yet there could be no doubt about it. We could have been looking at our own reflections. It was far more than just the similarity. The only problem was that he dealt with the meeting far better than I did. He was prepared for it; he’d been working on it for weeks. While I was taken entirely by surprise. And then something happened that, properly speaking, was impossible. In the midst of all this emotional turmoil I began shifting shape.”
“But male Alcantaras—”
“Can’t in fact shift shape. Or never grow to an age when they’ll try it. However, Apollonio and I were half Panthera—and that made it complicated. For one thing, we had not, like the other male Alcantaras, died soon after birth, and for another we definitely had the ability to shift. That was the first time it had shown itself in me, maybe because of the excitement, the surprise, I don’t know exactly. My body changed shape—and in the process my heart stopped.”
“The defect,” she whispered in a dismissive tone designed only to divert his attention from her own uneasiness.
“I survived. Costanza and a couple of other people appeared, and they somehow managed to revive me. The meeting with my brother had very nearly killed me. Costanza was beside herself with fury, on the verge of striking Apollonio dead. But he managed to get away again, and fled back here. It was the only safe place he knew, and in his confusion and rage—and yes, his hatred for the Alcantaras—he decided to stay here, to accept his role as Sigismondis’s foster son and become something like his student. Within a few years he went from being an experimental subject to acting as Sigismondis’s right-hand man, not just in his work at the institute but also, after a while, in the sale of the serum. While the professor hid away in his laboratory, devoting himself entirely to research, Apollonio took over more and more of the business side. He traveled the world on behalf of TABULA, made contact with the Arcadian dynasties in Europe, America, and Asia, supplied them with the hybrid serum—and also, in the case of a few privileged collectors, with the furs of Arcadians who had been killed in the course of laboratory experiments. Here he had to deal with Costanza again, whether she liked it or not. She had to accept the fact that she was doing business with him, even long after she had stopped giving Sigismondis information. Apollonio demanded exorbitant prices for the furs and the serum, but she seems to have come to terms with that—maybe, after all, some remnant of conscience stirred in her.”
Rosa’s blood was boiling. “TABULA abducted thousands of Arcadians, murdered them or made hybrids of them, but Costanza and the others were still doing business with Apollonio and Sigismondis?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “The idea of morality has never figured much into our family history.”
She felt like
she needed a long, hot shower to wash all the filth away.
“In the end the others, who were pulling the strings, left Sigismondis powerless,” he said. “And no one wanted any more to do with Apollonio, who was thought to be his son. He could either leave, burning all his bridges behind him, or stay down here with his foster father and continue to work as his assistant. He chose the second option. And what else would he have done? Most of the money had been handed over to TABULA, and he had no friends or anyone else to turn to. As for his family, he hated them with all his heart, me—his brother—as much as Costanza.”
They stopped at the double door of opaque glass. A pungent medicinal smell hung in the air. Somewhere on the other side of the corridor, electronic devices were beeping.
“After Apollonio heard of Costanza’s death, he decided to get in touch with me again. But I wasn’t in Sicily any longer. I had moved to New York with your mother, Zoe, and you. I assume Gemma’s told you how that happened.”
She slowly nodded, not sure whether she wanted to hear his version of events as well. However, she didn’t say so; she was afraid of taking his attention off more important matters.
“Apollonio turned to Trevini, claiming that Costanza hadn’t paid him for some of the furs before her death. He knew very well that alarm bells would then start ringing for Trevini, and he would get in touch with me. If Costanza’s link to TABULA became known, there would have been disastrous repercussions for all the Alcantaras, including you and Zoe. The other dynasties would have avenged themselves on us, so we had no choice but to try silencing Apollonio. Trevini kept the threat on ice for a time by paying him, and at the same time I set out for Italy to meet my brother.”
