by Kai Meyer
“But you have no objection to all that money, do you?”
Angrily, she spun around, and noticed at the same time that the movement had alerted her bodyguards. With a shake of her head, she let them know that everything was all right.
“Was that really necessary?” asked Trevini, glancing at the two men.
“You tell me.”
There was a touch of warmth in his smile. “What makes you think that I don’t wish you well?”
“I’m a nuisance to you, Avvocato Trevini. An annoying inheritance from my aunt, and you have to battle it as best you can.”
“Do I look to you as if I want to fight anyone?”
“Why did you send me that video?”
“As a warning. And before you misunderstand that, too: a warning not against me, but against the company you keep.”
She turned her face to the wind and closed her eyes for two or three seconds. “You know, I’m really sorry to hear that. My family is consumed by fear of the Carnevares. The women managing my companies in Milan, my so-called advisers, they all predict disaster after disaster. And a great many older men make a great many conjectures about my sex life. Maybe I should worry about that rather than my relationship with Alessandro Carnevare.”
There was a glint of mockery in Trevini’s one good eye. “I have never taken the slightest interest in what the Alcantara women do behind closed doors. I am concerned only with the business of the clan: its financial prosperity, profit margins.”
“But the responsibility is mine.” Big words, but she didn’t believe them herself.
“The Carnevares are not to be trusted. You ought never to forget that.”
“I’m not sleeping with the Carnevares, avvocato. Only with one of them.”
“That’s not what I’ve heard.”
She stared at him. She thought she was going to have to punch a defenseless old man in the face, here and now. With immense difficulty she controlled herself, understanding that provocation was one of his strongest weapons. The realization didn’t make what he had said any less hurtful, but it did lessen its poisonous sting.
“I know exactly what happened on that occasion,” he said. “At Eighty-Five Charles Street, wasn’t it? Michele and Tano Carnevare, along with a few others. It’s no secret, even if you may wish it were, Signorina Alcantara.” He slowly shook his head. “I wonder how you can still stay close to a Carnevare, that’s all.”
“I wasn’t raped by Alessandro,” she managed to say tonelessly.
“But he’s one of them, and he always will be. He was present that evening.”
For a moment, doubt entered her mind, and she hated herself for it. She was letting him force her on to the defensive. She couldn’t allow that.
“How did you get hold of that video?” There was cold fury in her voice, and a chill was spreading through her.
“You know me a little, Rosa.” He used her proper name for the first time, and although she didn’t like it, she didn’t tell him not to. That would have been admitting that she felt too young for the part she had to play. Let him call her what he wanted.
Cristina di Santis was watching them from the far end of the terrace.
“You know me,” Trevini repeated, as if that made it truer. “I would love to tell you about a clever plan that allowed me to acquire that video. But the truth is much more mundane. The cell phone with the video on it was delivered to you at a Palermo branch of the Alcantara bank. The employees there didn’t know quite what to do with it. Simply putting it in an envelope and mailing it to the other end of the island may not have struck them as entirely appropriate.” He shrugged his shoulders, which looked odd, because he had difficulty with certain movements. “Or else they felt it their duty to let someone who has been a buffer between the Alcantaras and the harsher side of life for thirty years see it first.”
She wondered whether she could manage to haul him out of his wheelchair and throw him over the balustrade. He couldn’t weigh much; he was only skin and bone under his elegant gray suit.
“That’s how I came by the recording. I saw you on it, Rosa, you and young Carnevare, and I thought it must have some deeper significance, or someone wouldn’t have been so anxious to get the video into your hands. So I had a few inquiries made of the New York police. It didn’t even take an hour for my capable contessa to find all the information.” He was beaming. “Ah, I love to call her that—my contessa…Well, be that as it may, an apparently unimportant snippet of film showing some party or other suddenly became a highly explosive pictorial record.”
Rosa glanced at his assistant again. She was standing motionless in her chic skirt suit and elegant high heels. One of the bodyguards was staring at her ass. Rosa decided to fire him.
“The next step was obvious,” said Trevini. “I had the person who handed in the cell phone tracked down.”
She was fighting against the cold again, and wondered what Alessandro would have done in her place.
“My people found her at a sleazy hotel. She was not in a good state, but she was still able to answer a few questions.”
“You talked to Valerie?”
“Of course.” Trevini was jubilant. “And so can you. You see, Rosa, Valerie Paige is here with us in Taormina.”
THE PRISONER
AT THE END OF a long trek through the basement, some way from the hotel laundry room and wine cellar, Trevini braked his wheelchair in front of an iron door with a bolted and shuttered peephole in it.
“The management was kind enough to outfit this for my purposes,” he explained.
Rosa couldn’t tear her eyes away from the closed peephole. “Good service.”
“I’ve been living in my suite here for thirty-four years. One can expect a little more than fresh orange juice for breakfast.”
She went past him to the door and pushed aside the bolt over the peephole. Before she opened the viewing window itself, she turned to the attorney again. “Was this what you meant by ‘further material’?”
“You’ll see. I didn’t promise more than I could deliver.”
With an abrupt movement, she opened the viewing window.
The interior of the cell was decorated with shiny, moisture-repellent paint in the unhealthy green of hospital walls. There was a mattress on a concrete base, with a crumpled quilt and a pillow showing traces of blood.
On the ground in front of it, knees drawn up and empty-eyed, sat a thin figure in torn jeans and a creased T-shirt so dirty that you couldn’t make out the logo of the band on it. Valerie’s dark hair was short and untidy; she had probably cut it herself. Her face was emaciated, and the dark rings under her eyes could have been drawn on with finger paint. She had been biting her lips again and again; that was probably where the blood on the pillow had come from.
Without turning to Trevini behind her, Rosa asked, “You haven’t been torturing her, have you?”
“She was questioned. But she has no physical injuries to show for it. She was a wreck already.”
Valerie’s arms were covered with tattoos, all dating from the last sixteen months. She’d had piercings when Rosa knew her before, but now she had several rings in each ear and half a dozen silver pins on her eyebrows, nose, and chin. Whatever she saw at this moment with her bloodshot eyes wasn’t anything that was actually in the cell with her.
“Drugs?”
“Sedatives. She’s had injections on her arms, between her toes, and under her tongue, but they’re not our doing. When my people found her, she’d been pumped full of chemicals. I’ve no idea what your friend has gone through, but I don’t imagine she remembers much of it. Or at least not any of it from the recent past.”
Valerie must have been able to hear the voices on the other side of the door, but she showed no reaction.
“Valerie?” Rosa stood on tiptoe so that her face filled the viewing window. “It’s me. Rosa.”
Not even a twitch.
Rosa took a step back and looked at the lock of the door. �
�Open that.”
“Are you sure?”
“Damn it, will you just open that door?”
The avvocato took out a key and handed it to her. “Here you are.”
She put it in the lock, but before she turned it, Trevini said, “There’s just one thing we ought to be clear about.”
“What?”
“Everything else is up to you and you alone. She’s your prisoner now, not mine.”
Once again she turned to the door, taking a deep breath. The smell of laundry detergent wafted through the hotel basement, and machinery was throbbing in the distance. The pipes under the hall ceiling gurgled.
“Make up your mind,” said Trevini. “About what happens to her. Do you want to ask her more questions? Let her go? Dispose of the problem entirely?”
She couldn’t look at him. She hated him with all her heart, and even more she hated the fact that he was telling the truth. Now that she had seen the captive in the basement with her own eyes, she couldn’t act as if she didn’t know about her. Trevini was on her payroll; the Alcantara clan also financed his assistant and the men who had caught Valerie and questioned her. Rosa felt bile rising in her.
“You understand what I’m telling you.” Trevini found her sore spot and probed it. “If you want to get rid of the girl in there, it will be done. No one will know. She treated you badly. Who could blame you for holding a grudge against her?”
She half turned to Trevini, closed the shutter over the peephole with her other hand, and asked, “What did she tell you?”
“I’m glad to see I’ve been able to arouse your curiosity after all.”
She had come in order to offer him a proposition. Now she was glad that she hadn’t mentioned it yet. Seething inside, she realized that it was in her power to dispose of him entirely. He knew it, and yet he was playing games with her. Because they depended on each other. Without him and his knowledge of three decades of the Alcantara businesses, she would never survive a tug-of-war for leadership of the clan. And without Rosa, he was just an ordinary attorney whom the rising generation of capodecini would be only too happy to replace with a modern legal office in Palermo.
But did she really want to be in a position in which she had to make decisions like this about the life or death of a young drug addict?
“You’re sorry for her,” Trevini remarked. “You ought not to be. Michele Carnevare told her to take you to that party. And she obeyed him. That’s the truth of the matter. She wormed herself into your confidence, Rosa, only to lead you like a lamb to the slaughter.”
“Maybe she didn’t know what Michele planned to do.” She could hardly believe that she, of all people, had suggested such a flimsy reason for Valerie’s innocence.
“That’s possible.” Trevini wheeled his chair a little closer, until the footrests almost touched her shins. “Maybe, as you say, she didn’t know. Does that make it any better? Isn’t ignorance the oldest and hoariest of excuses?”
Mattia had said that Valerie had flown to Europe to ask Rosa to forgive her. She had promised to pass along his message if she met her, and in return he had saved Rosa’s life. Would she really sentence Valerie to death now?
She turned the key and pushed the door open.
Trevini laughed softly. Or was it only the gurgling of the water pipes?
“Valerie.” She stopped in the middle of the cell, a few feet from the despondent figure on the floor. Valerie’s eyes went straight through her. Rosa resisted the urge to turn around and look behind her.
“Valerie, can you hear me?”
No reaction.
Rosa took another step forward and crouched down. Their faces were level now. She hadn’t mourned their friendship over the last year, and she certainly didn’t mourn it now. Her mind was full of accusations instead. Anger. How practical it would have been to feel nothing but indifference today. Instead, rage seethed inside her.
Hesitantly, she followed Valerie’s gaze and looked over her shoulder.
Only the bare wall.
“It’s up to you,” she thought she heard Trevini say. Or was that a voice from her memory?
A drop of blood was running down Valerie’s chin. She had taken her lower lip between her teeth and bitten it again. But her eyes were as fixed as ever.
Why didn’t Rosa feel sorry for her? Was this the inheritance that she had claimed here in Sicily? The cold-blooded nature of her grandmother, and Florinda after her?
She stood up and left the cell, too quickly, too obviously in flight. Trevini was bound to register that, and when she forced herself to look at him again, his smile was the smile of an understanding schoolmaster.
“I can teach you,” he said. “Everything you need to know.”
She left the door unlocked and dropped the key in his lap. “Keep her here for now. I spent a year in hell on her account; a few more days won’t make any difference to Val.”
“And then what, if I may ask? What’s to become of her later, after another week or another month?” He weighed the key in his hand as if it were much heavier than before. “You could give her her freedom. You could be gracious and generous. What does your conscience tell you, Rosa Alcantara? And what does your blood tell you?”
She left him behind her and walked quickly down the corridor in the direction of the elevator.
He called after her, “You asked me just now what Costanza would have done.”
“I am not my grandmother.”
“But you must learn to be like her. You want a life here on the island? You want young Carnevare? Then you must be harder than any of the others, more cruel than your enemies. Costanza knew that. And you will soon understand it as well.”
“I’ll see you on the terrace,” she called back over her shoulder. “We’ll discuss it further there.” Not down here. Not in the dark.
But the darkness followed her up into the daylight.
A PACT
ROSA BREATHED IN THE fresh air as if she couldn’t get enough of it. A cool breeze off the sea was blowing in her face, but she couldn’t shake the smell of the hotel basement.
She closed her eyes, but the sun was still burning bright red through her eyelids. Forcing herself not to show any weakness, she looked ahead again, and was irritated to see Contessa di Santis coming toward her on the terrace with a concerned expression.
“Everything all right, Signorina Alcantara?”
“Fine.”
“You look pale.”
“I have a fair complexion. Always did.”
The assistant nodded understandingly. “We can’t choose what we’re born with, can we?”
Before Rosa could reply, di Santis turned to Trevini, who was guiding his wheelchair out of the hotel lounge and into the open air. Rosa thought this would be a good moment to throttle him from behind.
“Can I bring you anything?” asked the assistant. “Drinks? A little snack from the kitchen?”
Trevini shook his head. “Leave us alone, please.”
Di Santis looked back over her shoulder, almost reproachfully. As she did so, her left eyebrow rose higher and higher, until Rosa began to fear that it might disappear right into her hairline.
“As you wish,” said the assistant, stalking away into the lounge. Rosa signaled to the two bodyguards to go into the building as well. Di Santis could not refrain from saying, “Please come with me, gentlemen. Maybe I can do something for you.”
Trevini moved his wheelchair past Rosa and over to the balustrade. His good eye wandered over the water in the distance. “We’re all inclined to take ourselves too seriously, don’t you agree? To think of all that this sea has known in its time! Ancient Greece, Rome, Carthage, the early Mesopotamian tribes. Ur and Babylon, the biblical peoples. And here we are discussing a single life, just one unimportant human being.”
“You move me deeply, avvocato, you really do. But I didn’t come here for a history lesson or to look at the beautiful view.”
“Without the sea I couldn’t live here,�
�� he continued, undeterred. “It’s one of the reasons why I never leave this hotel.”
“What are the others?”
“I’m too old to take risks.” He put his fingertips to his temples. “What I have in here, in my head, is the only capital I have. Did you know that I don’t even own a computer? And no cabinets full of files.” Of course she knew; it was the first thing she had heard about Trevini. “I keep everything that matters in my mind, as I have for years. No evidence, no trails. I was born with an extraordinary memory, and I imagine it’s only right that I pay for it with certain deficiencies in other respects.”
She was watching him as he spoke. But he was still staring out over the Mediterranean, into that breathtaking blue space.
“I’m sure you have wondered why I appointed the contessa my assistant,” he went on. “She has top qualifications and references, she is easy on the eye—but none of that explains why she is really here. The truth of it is that she has the same qualities as me. I have spent a long time looking for someone who can compete with me in that respect. She is young, enormously ambitious, and she is certainly a complex character. I suffer from that more than anyone.” The twinkle in his eyes ought to have seemed insinuating, but instead it looked almost friendly. “Above all, however, she has a remarkable ability to absorb facts. She hears something, sees something, and after that it’s stored in her head as if it were on a hard disk. I have to resign myself to being less unique than I have always thought. That young lady is perfect.”
Rosa sighed. “At least as far as her bra size is concerned, right?”
“I’m sorry,” he said in kindly tones. “You don’t have to like the contessa, Rosa. I’m not even sure that I do. But think of her as your personal security copy of me. Just in case something happens to me one of these days.”
“She’s been initiated into everything? Every deal? Every transaction?”
“I took the liberty of revealing them to her. We sit together and I tell her the facts. Hour after hour, day after day. The contessa stores it all in her mind. I’ve tested her more than once. She’s fantastic. She remembers everything. And with her excellent education, she’s in a position to make judgments that surprise even me.”
