by Kai Meyer
“You put one on too,” said Iole. “Otherwise you’ll catch a chill.”
Rosa took one of the coats at random out of its stiff protective covering and slipped it on. The fur was soft and supple, but it wasn’t just because she was a vegetarian that she felt there was something unpleasant about the touch of it.
Slowly, she turned once in the middle of the linen bags. Her coat, too, dragged on the floor. “What am I going to do with all this stuff?”
“Bury it?”
“What’s beyond the coats at the far end?”
“Containers of some kind,” said Iole, shrugging her shoulders.
Rosa frowned and hurried down the narrow aisle between two rows. The broad fur shoulders of her coat brushed against some of the linen bags as she passed them, and set them rocking gently. When she looked back to see whether Iole was following, there was ghostly movement all around her. As if something alive were stirring inside the cocoons and might slip out any moment. Iole was having fun pushing more of them to make them swing, and Rosa had to stop herself from snapping at her. It wasn’t Iole’s fault that she was on edge.
At last she reached the end of the rows of coats. From a distance it looked as if the long room became narrower and narrower toward the end, but she had been wrong. What she had taken for more linen bags was really a large number of white, circular plastic containers built into a wall. Stacked one above another, they formed a rampart reaching almost from one side of the freezer to the other, right across the aisles. But still she had not reached the far side of the underground room. You could pass to the right and left of the wall of containers.
Iole emerged from the swinging coats behind her. “Containers. Like I said.”
“Do you know what’s in them?”
“No idea.”
“And behind them?”
“A safe on the back wall. That’s all.”
Rosa went up to the containers and saw, upon glancing through the spaces between them, that there was a second row behind them. She did a rough calculation of their number and counted at least forty containers, each a good two feet high and a foot and a half in diameter.
“Are you going to look inside?” asked Iole eagerly.
“In a minute.” Rosa walked on to peer around the corner of the wall. Once again she had been wrong. There were not two but four rows of the round plastic containers. Around eighty, then.
Once again she looked back at Iole, who was already coming to join her. “First the safe. What’s in it?”
“It’s locked.”
“That didn’t stop you from opening the door.”
“Locked with a key.”
“Didn’t you try to break it open?”
“I tried, but it was no good.”
“Let’s see.”
With a conspiratorial expression, Iole followed her. Nine feet of empty space lay between the last row of containers and the back of the room. In front of the wall stood a gray iron safe, as massive as a church altar.
Rosa investigated the lock. Nothing complicated. Costanza must have relied entirely on the number code at the entrance. She herself had broken into cars on the streets of Crown Heights, and she knew that this mechanism would be child’s play. “I need something sharp.”
Iole went back around the containers, and Rosa heard her doing something to the rustling linen bags. A little later she came back with a wire coat hanger.
It didn’t take Rosa more than a minute before there was a click inside the lock of the safe. “Voilà,” she said, stepping back, and she dropped the coat hanger, now bent out of shape, on the floor.
Iole was rocking excitedly from foot to foot.
The two doors of the safe squealed as Rosa pulled them apart.
Countless ampoules containing a yellowish liquid were lined up on five shelves inside the safe. There was no written label on any of them, just row upon row of the little thumb-size glass flasks.
Rosa took one out, and held it up to the light. The honey-colored contents were clear, and as fluid as water.
“What’s that supposed to be?” asked Iole.
“I have no idea.”
“Drugs of some kind?”
“She wouldn’t have kept those here in the palazzo. Far too dangerous. There are secret places to store drugs all over Sicily.”
Iole picked up one of the ampoules herself. “Maybe your grandmother used some kind of substance like that herself. Or Florinda.”
Rosa could exclude that possibility, at least for her aunt. But as for Costanza…she knew too little about her. However, none of this seemed to fit together. The collection of fur coats, these ampoules. The rows of containers.
She put the vial back on its shelf. “Let’s see what’s in these.” She went over to the rampart of containers and tried to lift one of them off the top row.
Iole hurried over. “Wait a minute. I’ll help you.”
Together they got the container down on the floor. It had a screw lid similar to a mason jar, secured all around with a broad strip of tape.
Rosa’s fingernails, painted with black nail polish, were too short to get the tape off. Iole did better. She ripped it off with a tearing sound, got her fingers entangled in it, and then had her work cut out to get the sticky stuff off her hand. Rosa helped her—impatiently, because she was burning with curiosity to open the lid.
Finally, with both hands, she unscrewed the top a quarter of the way to the left. There was a hissing sound like air coming out of a Tupperware container.
“Ugh,” said Iole, holding her nose.
Rosa breathed in through her mouth and then took the lid right off. The stench was appalling. She was prepared to see anything.
What she found was a dirty, sticky fur. For a moment she felt sure it was the corpse of an animal. The chill in the freezer and the airtight lid of the container had prevented decomposition inside it, but the smell of old blood rose from the contents.
Iole retched. “Gross.”
Reluctantly, Rosa put out a hand and touched the fur. It was a relief that nothing moved underneath it. Hesitantly, she grasped it with her other hand, got hold of the edge of the fur, and pulled it out at arm’s length, like an item of laundry.
It was not a corpse, but a sandy brown animal pelt. Dried blood and remnants of skin clung to the underside.
Iole was about to touch it, but withdrew her fingers just before they reached it. “Were they going to make more fur coats out of these?”
“Looks like it.”
“There are more in there.”
Rosa put the fur down on the floor, then lifted out a second, using only her fingertips, and spread it over the first. She had to bend so far over the container to get out the third that the stench almost made her throw up. There was yet another one at the very bottom, but she left that where it was.
“Four,” she said. “Multiplied by eighty.”
“That’s a lot,” said Iole. “How many do you need to make a coat?”
Rosa shrugged her shoulders, and looked at the ampoules full of yellow liquid again. Not necessarily drugs; there was another possibility. She went over to the cupboard, picked up one of the little glass tubes again, and peered at it more closely. Its metal seal had a round rubber center through which a needle could be pushed to draw the liquid up into a syringe. Or a needle for an injection.
“Look,” said Iole. “There are little labels on the furs.” Rosa’s stomach muscles cramped.
“It says something on them.”
Her hands trembling, Rosa began taking off the fur coat she was wearing. It seemed to be sticking to her body as if by suction.
“They’re names.”
The fur fell around Rosa on the floor. “Iole,” she managed to say in a toneless voice. “Take off that coat.”
But the girl was crouching over the furs, undeterred, reading out the labels. “Paolo Mancori…Barbara Gastaldi…Gianni Carnevare.”
“Iole. Take the thing off.” Rosa’s legs felt numb as
she took a clumsy step away from the fur coat on the floor.
“Did you know any of them?” asked Iole.
Rosa went around behind her, and had to force herself to touch the fur to lift it off Iole.
“Hey!”
Rosa tugged the heavy coat off her, more energetically this time. “We’re getting out of this place.” In disgust, she flung the fur aside.
“But—”
Rosa hauled her to her feet, grabbed her by the shoulders, and looked hard into her eyes.
“These furs,” she said, “don’t come from animals.”
“They don’t?” asked Iole, her voice husky.
Rosa took her arm and led her around the containers, until they could see the rows of linen bags hanging in front of them, all the coats in their gray coverings.
“All of these,” she whispered, “were once Arcadians.”
APOLLONIO
“DID YOU KNOW?” SHE spat into the receiver. “Shit, of course you knew!”
At the other end of the line, Trevini sighed. “This is not a subject we ought to discuss over the telephone.”
“I want to know the truth. Now!” She had a date to meet Alessandro this evening, but instead of looking forward to it she had to grapple with this filth first.
“You’re being unreasonable. You’re letting yourself get carried away over something that—”
“That’s enough!” She jumped up from her swivel chair, went around the huge desk, and began pacing up and down the study. Her heavy metal-studded shoes hammered on the parquet flooring as if a military commando unit were storming the palazzo.
Far away in Taormina, the attorney let out a breath. “Wait.” Something clicked on the line, to be followed by a rushing sound, and then another click. “There, that’s better.”
“What?”
“I’ve switched on a distorting signal to keep you from informing on us all. You will never again—never!—try talking to me about such matters over the phone without previous warning.”
“What are those furs in the cellar? Why did my grandmother keep them together down there? Where do they come from? And why so many?”
“Costanza didn’t kill those people, Rosa. If that’s what has upset you so much. And if they can be described as people, indeed as human at all.”
“Don’t you consider me human, Avvocato Trevini?”
He laughed softly. “The fact is, I wish you were less human. More like your grandmother.”
“She was a monster!”
“A collector with discriminating taste.”
“Taste? Have you lost your mind? Those furs down there were once men and women! And there are a few hundred of them.”
“As I said: She didn’t kill them with her own hands. She didn’t even contract for their deaths.”
“Very reassuring.”
“We ought to—”
“Discuss this at your place? Forget it.”
“The bugging specialists at the public prosecutor’s office never take more than three or four minutes to crack a distortion signal. If they’re listening in now, we don’t have much time left.”
“Then press the button again.”
“You’re upset because—”
“Because I’ve found a fucking mass grave in my basement!”
He seemed to be drinking something; she heard a faint clink. She was going to explode with rage any moment now. He was right about one thing. She had to calm down, control herself.
Reluctantly, she used the brief pause to go back to her chair at the desk. Florinda’s spacious study was strange to her. It had once been a living room in the palazzo, with walls paneled in dark wood and a view of the inner courtyard from a wrought-iron balcony. She felt small and out of place here.
There was a crackle and a rushing sound on the line again. Trevini had recoded the signal. Another three minutes.
“Well?” she asked.
“I don’t know much about it, believe me. Costanza had a weakness for furs of all kinds. The palazzo was full of them. As hearth rugs, runners, even curtains. She loved furs more than anything. Most of them disappeared after her death. Florinda got rid of them.”
“Florinda didn’t know about the freezer?”
“Yes, I think she did, but maybe her mind suppressed the truth.”
“Who else knows?” Suddenly she had an idea. “Is that why all the other clans hate the Alcantaras so much?”
“If the others had the faintest inkling of it, your family would have been wiped out decades ago. And none of this must ever be known, or the palazzo will go up in flames within a few hours—and all of us with it.”
She let her head drop back against the leather upholstery of the chair. “That means that you, and I, and Iole are the only people who know it exists?”
“Don’t say you told that irresponsible child about this!”
“Iole isn’t irresponsible. And she was the one who cracked the code to the lock of the freezer. She found the coats.”
“Good God in heaven!” His agitation lifted her mood slightly. She liked to shake his composure. “You must silence the girl.”
“Iole won’t tell anyone. Leave that to me.”
His snort was contemptuous. “And there’s also someone else.”
“Who?”
“A man called Apollonio. He supplied the furs to your grandmother. I didn’t know him, had never heard of him before. But soon after Costanza’s death he made contact with me and said that she died owing him money. Obviously she hadn’t yet paid him for his last delivery.”
“What did you do?”
“I transferred the sum to a numbered account for him, to keep his mouth shut. And then I called Davide.”
She pricked up her ears. “My father?”
“Of course.”
“But by then it had been ages since he’d had anything to do with the clan’s business affairs. I always hoped that one of these days he’d come back to take his rightful place as head of the family.”
Interesting. Sounded as if Trevini had disliked Florinda so much that he’d rather have discussed the subject with the disinherited Alcantara son than with her. “What did my father say?”
“He was quite upset.”
“I can imagine. I’m quite upset.”
“Davide wanted to know everything about this man Apollonio, and he said for me not to do anything for the time being.”
“Did you tell Florinda?”
“He expressly forbade me to do that, too.”
“And you were only too happy to do as he said, right?”
“Your aunt wasn’t as effective a head of the family as she thought. In addition, she was under the sway of Salvatore Pantaleone. Just as well that he is dead.”
Did Trevini know that Rosa was responsible for Pantaleone’s death? Impossible, really—but by now she was ready to believe him capable of anything.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “The signal…” That clicking and rushing on the line again. “Right,” he finally continued.
She tried to put her thoughts in order. There were two things that she had to find out more about. “Did my father give you any other instructions?”
“No. He asked me to let the matter rest, saying he would see to everything else personally.”
“When exactly was this?”
“Shortly before his death.”
The mysterious phone call that her mother had mentioned. Her father’s strange reaction to it. And then his hasty decision to leave his wife and his two daughters and go to Europe.
“It was you,” she whispered.
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“You were the reason he left. You called him, and after that he…” She stopped, and turned the swivel chair slowly in a circle.
“I don’t know what happened,” said Trevini. “But it seems that Apollonio was reason enough for him to become active again himself.”
“Tell me all about this man Apollonio. Every last thing.”
“As I said before, I don’t know much about him. In the first place, an attorney’s office in Rome got in touch on his behalf. I finally managed to speak to him myself, but never face-to-face, only by phone. I was aware of Costanza’s collection in the cellar—”
Why did he know?
“—and I had always assumed that I was the only person she had taken into her confidence. However, this Apollonio left me in no doubt that he knew all about it.”
“Did he try blackmailing you?”
“I had to believe him, like it or not, when he said that he had supplied the furs. And I thought it possible that the last payment hadn’t yet been made at the time of Costanza’s sudden death. He was threatening to make the whole thing public. That could have meant the end of the Alcantaras.”
“A breach of the concordat,” she murmured.
“Worse,” he told her. “Treachery.”
The word seemed to echo down the line for a moment. “TABULA?” she whispered tonelessly.
“Apollonio never mentioned that name. But yes, I do think there is some connection. TABULA carries out experiments on members of the dynasties. How else could he have come by the pelts of so many Arcadians?”
She remembered the video that Cesare Carnevare had shown her. Endless rows of cages, with Arcadians in their animal forms shut up inside them. Obviously the captives had lost the ability to turn back into human beings.
“As far as I know,” Trevini went on, “hardly anyone who was abducted and held by TABULA ever appeared again.”
“And you think these people are sick enough to skin their victims and sell the pelts? Sell them back to another Arcadian, of all people?” She instinctively thought of Alessandro. Of his silky black panther fur.
“Maybe there are other collectors. Or maybe not. I can’t answer that question.”
“Right,” she said, after a brief pause. “So this Apollonio got the furs from TABULA. He’s probably even a member of it himself. And my grandmother did business with him—with TABULA, the archenemy of all the Arcadian dynasties.”
“That was the danger I saw looming at the time. And I had to react.”
“Did my father know about it?”
“He drew exactly the same conclusions as you did just now.”
