Arcadia Burns

by Kai Meyer

  “Signorina Alcantara,” she cried, sounding as if she might suffer a stroke any minute. “Ah, signorina, it’s high time you were back here!”

  Rosa hugged Sarcasmo one last time, and stood up. The dog ran into the building ahead of her as Rosa climbed the steps, looking at the tutor through the unruly hair that fell over her eyes. Raffaela Falchi was in her midthirties but looked fifteen years older, and seemed to have given up fighting against her advancing age. She looked sober and a little matronly, and that was why Rosa had trusted her impressive references. It would never have crossed the mind of a woman like Signora Falchi to have her résumé produced in some Sicilian forger’s workshop. She didn’t seem likely to be an informer for the public prosecutor’s office, either. Ultimately, though, Rosa had left the choice to her secretary in Piazza Armerina. Her own high-school days were barely a year behind her, and she felt totally unequipped to be the judge of a tutor’s competence.

  “Signorina Alcantara!” cried Raffaela Falchi for the third time. By now Rosa was wishing she was surrounded by the advisers she usually disliked, so that she could hide behind them.

  “Ciao, Signora Falchi,” she said unenthusiastically.

  “Now then—about your cousin. I just don’t know where to begin…”

  Irritated, Rosa pulled her blond hair back from her face. They had said that Iole was her cousin in order to avoid unwelcome questions. “Didn’t we agree that you’d decide all that for yourself?”

  The tutor’s feathers were obviously ruffled, and as she was still standing a few steps above Rosa, it made her look quite intimidating. “Iole won’t discuss it with me, and it would be better if you didn’t make the same mistake, Signorina Alcantara.”

  Rosa sighed. “What happened?”

  “Iole doesn’t turn up regularly for her lessons. She talks to herself. She scribbles in her exercise books. Sometimes she hums to herself, and not even in tune. She won’t accept my authority.” And so it went on, while Rosa mentally ticked off the complaints she’d already heard before she went away. “She does her makeup while I’m teaching her. And she goes ‘la-la-la’ when I ask her to listen to me.”

  “‘La-la-la’?” Rosa raised an eyebrow.

  “In a loud voice!”

  “And then what?”

  “Then nothing. She just does that.” The tutor was wringing her hands. “Yesterday she belched like an uneducated peasant! The day before yesterday she insisted on wearing a hat with a veil. Heaven only knows where she found it. And then there are those dreadful scented candles.”

  “Scented candles?”

  “She ordered them on the internet, she says. Do you know how many hours a day that child spends in front of the computer?”

  “That child will soon be sixteen.”

  “But we both know that she hasn’t reached the intellectual level of a sixteen-year-old.”

  “Iole isn’t mentally challenged, Signora Falchi,” said Rosa firmly.

  “I know that. And I’m well aware of what she’s been through. Six years in the hands of criminals…but that doesn’t change the fact that she has to adhere to certain rules if I’m to help her catch up on those six years. I’m not a therapist, but as a teacher I know what I have to do. And what’s necessary to make Iole an educated young woman. But to do that she’ll have to take my advice to heart whether she likes it or not.”

  Rosa took a deep breath, then nodded. “I’ll talk to her.” She continued climbing, and reached the tutor’s side on the wide step in front of the entrance. “But I’m not Iole’s mother. Or even her big sister. Maybe she’ll listen to me, maybe not. Where is she, anyway?”

  Signora Falchi straightened her glasses, puffed out her cheeks, and then let the air escape with a plopping sound. “In the cellar!” she uttered.

  “What on earth is she doing in the cellar?”

  “How on earth would I know?”

  There it was again. Responsibility. For the business affairs of the Alcantara clan, for her relationship with Alessandro, for herself—and for Iole as well. She felt a sudden urge to get into one of the sports cars in the garage and race off toward the coast at high speed. Or through the mountains. Anywhere so long as she was alone.

  “Talk to her,” said the tutor, adding, surprisingly gently, “and if you need my help or advice, I’m here for you. For both of you, Signorina Alcantara.” It was one of the few moments when she showed that she knew very well that her employer wasn’t much older than her pupil.

  “Okay,” said Rosa. “Thanks. I’ll see to it.”

  The indignation disappeared from Signora Falchi’s features, and suddenly there was understanding and sympathy in her face. She was a good teacher, and although she could also be a terrible battle-ax, so far Rosa hadn’t seriously regretted hiring her.

  “Iole is a clever girl,” said the tutor. “She just has to give herself—and me—a chance.”

  Rosa nodded, and headed down to the vaulted cellar.

  “They smell of vanilla! And mango! And amber! And snowflakes!”

  “So what do snowflakes smell like?”

  “I’ve never smelled one. I’ve never seen a real snowflake. Only on TV.”

  “Amber, then?”

  “Like honey. Honey with raspberries!” Iole laughed happily, took Rosa’s hands, and, doing a silly dance, swung her around in a circle. “They smell so good! And there are so many different kinds! And if you order five hundred they cost hardly anything!”

  “You ordered five hundred scented candles?”

  “Only in that one shop.” Iole let go of Rosa but kept dancing in a circle by herself. She had often done that for hours, all alone and chained at the ankle, when she was the Carnevares’ hostage.

  Rosa groaned. “How many stores did you order from?”

  “All of the ones that had great offers!” she gushed, and looked at Rosa out of her pretty eyes as if she couldn’t imagine that her friend wouldn’t understand. “That’s why they have them on sale, see? So that everyone can buy them cheap. Even people who don’t earn much money. It’s so, so great!”

  “And what exactly do you do with all those candles?”

  “I light a different one every hour. Signora Falchi likes the place to smell good, too.”

  “That’s not true.”

  But Iole was already changing the subject, as she turned a final pirouette and came to a halt, swaying slightly. “Alessandro called.”

  Rosa chewed a fingernail. “So?”

  “Don’t you want to know what he wanted?”

  “You’re about to tell me anyway.”

  Iole lowered her voice conspiratorially. “He asked me how I was.”

  “That’s nice of him.”

  “I think he still worries about me.”

  “Alessandro worries about a lot of things.”

  “But he likes me.”

  Rosa smiled, took Iole by the shoulders, and held her close. “Of course he does. Everyone likes you. Including Signora Falchi. Or she would if she saw more of you.”

  The dank smell of the cellar clung to Iole’s short black hair. She must have been down here for some time.

  “But he likes you best of all,” said Iole.

  “Maybe.”

  “You know he does!”

  “Can we talk about something else?”

  “He’s had Fundling moved. To a hospital near the sea.”

  Rosa felt guilty for not having asked about Fundling herself. He’d been in a coma ever since the exchange of gunfire at the Gibellina monument. The doctors had removed the bullet from his head, but four months later he still hadn’t regained consciousness. Alessandro paid all his bills, and he had made the decision, some weeks ago, to have Fundling taken from the public hospital to an expensive private sanatorium. Rosa still wasn’t sure why. Alessandro said very little about it, but she sensed that he felt responsible for Fundling, maybe because of the crucial role Fundling had played in opposing Cesare Carnevare, the murderer of Alessandro’s parents.
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  Iole picked up a lock of Rosa’s hair and smelled it, as if that were the most natural thing in the world to do. “Have you asked the judge yet?”

  “I’ll talk to her when…as soon as I see her.”

  “She must let me go! I’d love to see Uncle Augusto again.”

  Augusto Dallamano was Iole’s last living relation. Six and a half years before, the rest of her family had been murdered by the Carnevares. Iole herself had been held hostage—until Rosa and Alessandro had freed her. She’d been pestering Rosa for weeks to be allowed to visit her uncle. But that was far from easy to arrange.

  “Uncle Augusto taught me how to shoot,” announced Iole.

  “Terrific.”

  “With an automatic pistol. And a shotgun, too.”

  “How old were you then?”

  Iole frowned, and counted silently. “Eight?”

  Rosa groaned.

  Dallamano was living, with a new identity, under the witness protection program of the state prosecutor’s office. Rosa had met him once, in Sintra, near Lisbon, and in the park of the Quinta da Regaleira he had answered some of her questions about the mysterious find made by the Dallamanos on their diving expeditions in the Strait of Messina.

  “The judge isn’t very happy with me right now, did you know that?” Rosa guessed that her explanations would simply bounce off Iole. She had missed six years with other human beings, six years of contact with the outside world. It was easy to like her, but sometimes she could rile you, without knowing what she had done wrong. She had quit therapy after the first session, and Rosa could understand that. Her own experience with psychotherapy had not been a good one.

  “Judge Quattrini never gives you anything for free,” added Rosa. “If there’s nothing in it for her, she isn’t interested.”

  “Then we’ll have to give her something.”

  “Like scented candles?”

  “She could have the pine-scented ones. I don’t like those so much.”

  “I kind of think that won’t be enough.”

  “How about some sort of Mafia information?”

  Now and then Iole said something so disarmingly naive that Rosa wondered whether there wasn’t an element of calculation in it after all. But the girl’s mind had already moved on to another thought. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

  “What else did you buy?”

  Iole leaned forward conspiratorially, as if someone might be eavesdropping on them. “I explored the cellar.”

  Rosa looked past her and down the long corridor. She’d been down here only once since the deaths of Florinda and Zoe. The light came from yellow lamps held in latticework grilles at wide intervals on the ceiling. In between the circles of light they cast, strips of shadow moved over the masonry. Like striped tiger fur.

  “There’s an iron door right at the back, under the north wing,” said Iole, with an air of mystery. “And something mechanical humming behind it. An engine, I think.”

  “It’s the old freezer. It still works, but it’s not in use. No one can get in there to turn the thing off.”

  “They can now.”

  “The door has a lock with a number code.”

  Iole nodded, and the corners of her mouth turned up in a grin of pride.

  Rosa looked at her doubtfully. “You cracked the code?”

  “Maybe.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “I tried everything.”

  The code consisted of four or five digits. Millions of possible combinations. Rosa shook her head, unable to take it in. “Nonsense,” she said.

  “Well, I had luck. And five days without Signora Come-Do-Your-Lessons-This-Minute.”

  “Did you write it down?”

  “Memorized it.”

  Shaking her head, Rosa took Iole’s hand and said what she assumed she should say. “I don’t want you running around down here on your own.”

  “There’s nobody else around.”

  “But it’s…dark.” God, she thought, she was worse than her own mother.

  “So?” Iole laughed. “I’m not scared of the dark. It was dark in those places where they shut me up. The huts up in the mountains. The empty farmhouses. Even in the villa on Isola Luna.”

  Rosa felt that the role of big sister was beyond her. Zoe hadn’t been much good at it, and she wasn’t doing any better herself. “Okay,” she said, resigned. “I guess there’s no real reason why you should stay away from the cellar. Do what you want, but don’t come to me later and…and complain.” Good god.

  Iole looked at her triumphantly. “Don’t you want to see?”

  “See what?”

  “The freezer. What’s behind the door.”

  “Is it important?

  “Well, important…” Iole shrugged her shoulders.

  “Then it can wait until tomorrow, okay? I’m worn out.” She glanced along the dimly lit cellar corridor again. Dust hovered in the yellow, tiger-striped light. She suppressed a shudder. “Anyway, I’m scared of the dark!” She said that with a twinkle in her eye, but at the moment it was closer to the truth than she liked.

  Iole poked a finger into her stomach. “You are not!”

  Rosa sighed. “Today I am.”

  A REUNION

  ROSA SLEPT LIKE THE dead until morning. Once awake, though, she remembered her date with Alessandro, and got up in frantic haste, showering and eating breakfast in record time.

  The helicopter was waiting on the landing pad near the palazzo. In jeans, black sweater, and sneakers she climbed aboard and buckled her seat belt. As usual, the pilot complained about everything that was wrong with the old chopper, but she trusted him when he told her, with a gloomy expression, that they were likely to arrive safe and sound just this once.

  Soon the gray volcanic cone of Mount Etna rose ahead of them. To avoid the treacherous winds blowing up its slopes, and to keep out of the monitored airspace of Catania, the pilot took the helicopter farther south over the open sea. Keeping their distance from the coast, they followed its course northeast and then, flying low over the water, raced toward the Strait of Messina between Sicily and the toe of the Italian boot.

  Below them, the steely blue Mediterranean rushed past, the crests of the waves throwing the helicopter’s shadow back and forth like an oil slick. Apart from a few sailboats, the sea could have been swept clean.

  Only some time later did two dots appear on the horizon.

  “There they are,” said the pilot’s voice in Rosa’s headset. She was sitting beside him in the cockpit, but the helicopter made too much noise for her to go without ear protectors. Soon after that the headset began to crackle. They were entering the area where Alessandro’s people scrambled radio traffic.

  The Gaia, the Carnevares’ 130-foot yacht, lay dazzling white on the water. From above, Rosa saw that the whirlpool on the sundeck had been covered with an awning. No one was using the luxury seating either.

  The second boat, rocking on the waves not far from the yacht, was not as impressive at first sight, although Rosa was sure it couldn’t be worth much less than the Gaia. Belowdecks the modest-looking vessel had hundreds of cubic feet filled with high-tech equipment. She knew what vast sums the Colony’s day-to-day operations—not to mention the use of the unmanned drone diver—required.

  The helicopter came down squarely on the Gaia’s landing pad.

  Alessandro, ducking low, hurried toward her as she jumped down from the cockpit. He hugged her while they were still below the circling rotors, and then they walked hand in hand to the railing, as the chopper rose in the air again behind them. The pilot waved a hand in farewell, turned west in a tight curve, and flew back toward the coast.

  She gave Alessandro a long kiss as the noise of the helicopter died away in the distance. He held her tight as if the wind might carry her off with it across the sea. A hot, tingling sensation ran over her from head to foot, so unexpected and exciting that it took her a moment to work out what it was—her new skin reacting to
his touch. Its tinge of pink had faded by now, but her nerves were in turmoil as she felt Alessandro near again. She had expected a chill, the sign of the snake stirring inside her, but instead a comfortable warmth took possession of her. She nestled closer in his arms.

  When they finally moved apart, she realized that so far she had felt him but hadn’t looked at him. She looked now—and it was a shock.

  He was pale and seemed exhausted, with dark rings under his eyes. His brown hair was even messier than usual, and the dimples that were always there couldn’t disguise the fact that he clearly hadn’t had much to smile about in the past few days. Even in his weary state he was still outrageously good-looking, and his green eyes easily outshone his pallor, but she could tell that something was wrong. All at once her own exhaustion disappeared.

  “You look terrible,” she said.

  “I haven’t been sleeping much. And when I did, I had bad dreams.”

  She’d had those, too, but she had already decided to keep the reason for them to herself for the time being. Not just out of consideration for him, but also out of sheer self-interest. She wasn’t going to let Tano’s ghost cast a shadow over their reunion. She had that much power over it. Tano might have taken possession of her body, but with a little effort she could wipe him from her memory.

  “If I’d known you were coming here, I’d have—”

  She put her hand on the back of his neck and silenced him gently with another kiss. Only then did she ask, “What’s wrong?”

  “Well, my own people would like to be rid of me, and sooner or later someone will try to do something about it, but that’s nothing new.” He smiled with the mixture of melancholy and determination that no one had mastered as well as Alessandro. “How about you?” he asked. “You stopped calling.”

  “Later, okay?”

  He looked her in the eye. “You’ve found out something.”

  “Give me a little time?”

  “They hurt you.”

  “Alessandro, please…I’ll tell you all about it, but for now I just want to be with you. We don’t have to tell each other all our problems right away.”