Arcadia Burns

by Kai Meyer

  She wasn’t ashamed to let him see her nakedness. Or her vulnerability, or the sense of being handed over to the mercy of others that she’d seen in her own eyes. Until now, she’d assumed that she had been unconscious through the entire rape. But that wasn’t so. She had just forgotten. The drugs in her cocktail had wiped out her memory of it, but she had been awake at the time. She had gone through the whole thing conscious, every damn second of it.

  “I’m getting on the expressway now,” said Alessandro. “Be with you in less than an hour.”

  She was still huddled motionless in the armchair, doubled up and hugging her knees to her chest. Her tears ran down her chin and dripped on her black top. “Keep talking, will you?” she asked him softly. “Say something, just so I can hear your voice.”

  “Trevini’s going to be sorry for this. Trevini and Michele.”

  She shook her head, thought for a moment, and then said, “I’m grateful to Trevini.”

  “He only wanted to hurt you.”

  “He made sure that I knew the truth.”

  “But—”

  “Tell me what you’ve been doing today,” she interrupted him. “All about your day. Your boring meetings, lunch. What your advisers said. Anything.”

  He gave in, and his voice merged with the soft, monotonous noise of the car engine. She listened, let his words lull her, and got through the next hour that way.

  Alessandro’s face might have been turned to stone. His skin looked dull and almost waxen. The flicker of the video was reflected in his eyes as Rosa paced up and down the library, biting her nails.

  He didn’t say a word all through it. He had wanted to mute the sound, but a shake of Rosa’s head had stopped him. She had to hear when the moment she was waiting for came.

  Distorted voices in the background merged with the rushing sound of the cell phone’s weak microphone. The pictures had etched themselves on Rosa’s retina; she had no defense against them. A fire was burning in the hearth of the room where it all took place. Probably the living room of Tano’s apartment on Charles Street, one or two floors above the scene of the party. Several people were present, but they were visible only as outlines in the dimly lit background. Michele had been filming with the cell phone; his voice was the most distinct. He had trained the camera on a broad sofa, a kind of divan with a dark cover. Cushions were scattered everywhere. Tano had swept most of them aside.

  To take her mind off it, Rosa stopped in front of one of the bookcases, closed her eyes, and ran her hand over the crumbling backs of the tomes. She took out a volume, opened it in the middle, and held it under her nose. The book should have smelled better, of glue and paper, of printer’s ink. But she could smell only the dampness that had crept in between the pages.

  Suddenly, among all the sounds from the video, she recognized her own voice. Alessandro looked at her and muted the video.

  “No one should have to listen to this,” he said hoarsely. “Not me, most certainly not you.”

  “Yes,” she protested, putting the book back on its shelf and hurrying over to him. “We’re nearly there.”

  “Where?”

  “You’ll see for yourself in a minute.”

  Reluctantly, he looked back at the display. Because she was so insistent, he turned up the sound slightly, but his expression showed how much he disliked it.

  His eyes were shining more than ever, she noticed now. She turned away to hide her own tears.

  Tano could be heard more clearly now. For a moment nothing else seemed to exist, only his voice—the voice of a dead man—

  His tiger face exploded. The bullet from Lilia’s pistol blew it apart like a head of cabbage.

  A dead man who was still alive and well in this video.

  A doorbell rang. Almost at once, it rang again. Someone put the cell phone down in a hurry. It went on filming from a fixed position.

  Voices in the background, then Michele’s. “Good evening, Mr. Apollonio.”

  Rosa looked at Alessandro, whose expression was still full of distaste, even revulsion.

  “Ah, the gentlemen of the Carnevare clan,” said a harsh voice. “A real family party. Have you finished?”

  Tano swore.

  The newcomer’s tone became sharper. “You’re not being paid to have a good time.”

  Alessandro glanced at Rosa, seemed about to say something, but was at a loss for words.

  “You have to watch!” Her voice almost broke. “Look at his face!”

  He was at the point of flinging the cell phone across the library, but then he looked down.

  “No sign of Apollonio,” he said, with difficulty. “Michele put the phone down. All you can see is a bit of the sofa.”

  “Apollonio comes into the frame in a minute.”

  Now Tano was speaking again. When one of the bystanders made a stupid remark, the visitor lost his temper. “Get out of here! All of you, except you two.” By that he must have meant Tano and Michele.

  Soon after that, a door slammed.

  Rosa walked behind the armchair where Alessandro was sitting and leaned over his shoulder. For the first time since he had started watching the video, she too looked at the display.

  “Press Pause,” she said. “Wait…now!”

  Alessandro stopped the film. A blurred red and yellow patch of color, a figure, a face, all extremely indistinct. It could be anyone.

  Rosa hurried in front of the chair and sat on its arm, next to Alessandro. “Let me have it.”

  She took the cell phone from his hand and pressed PAUSE and PLAY three or four times in quick succession. Finally the picture, while still blurred, was clear enough for Apollonio’s features to be made out.

  She gave the phone back to Alessandro, jumped up, stood in front of him, wrapped her arms around her upper body, and rocked back and forth nervously on the balls of her feet.

  He held the display closer to his eyes, then farther away. She could tell that he still had no idea who the man in the video was.

  “You don’t recognize him,” she murmured, disappointed.

  “Maybe the picture isn’t clear enough.”

  The photo album that she had looked at and opened before he arrived was lying on a table. Breathlessly, she brought it over and put it on his lap. She pressed her forefinger down hard on a photo stuck into it.

  “Is that the same man?”

  The anxious lines on Alessandro’s forehead deepened. The shadows around his eyes grew darker. “Looks like it.”

  “Apollonio,” she said. Her astonishment and disbelief were back.

  “Rosa,” asked Alessandro, hesitantly, “who on earth is this?”

  Her mouth was dry; her tongue stuck to the roof. All the same, she managed to get the words out, quietly, in the faltering voice of a stranger.

  “That man,” she said, “is my father.”

  AN EXPERIMENT

  MINUTES LATER, THEY STILL hadn’t said a word.

  Rosa was sitting on Alessandro’s lap in the armchair, with her head on his shoulder. In the silence of the library, his heartbeat was the only sound she heard. The artery in his throat throbbed against her cheek. The rhythm seemed to pass through her whole body, filling it from head to toe. As if he were keeping her alive with his own heart, while hers felt dead.

  After a while she raised her eyes and looked at him.

  “You do see it, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said gently. “Of course.”

  “I mean, really?”

  “He looks just like the man in your photo.”

  She moved apart from him and stood up, walked two or three steps away, and then turned abruptly again. “He doesn’t just look like him, Alessandro. That man in the video is my father.”

  He too got to his feet. The next moment he was beside her, intending to hold her. But Rosa raised both hands to ward him off and shook her head without facing him. “The man who gave Tano instructions to rape me was…” She broke off, lowered her arms, and stood there helpless
for a second. “Oh, shit,” she whispered.

  He made another attempt to take her in his arms, and this time she let him. She just stood there, and he gave her as much time as she needed.

  Suddenly she moved away from him, rubbed her eyes, and straightened up. “There,” she said.

  “There?”

  “That’s enough. Collapse over. Good-bye tearful, self-pitying Rosa. The old Rosa is back, all fixed up, house-trained, neuroticized, guaranteed dry-eyed.”

  He raised one eyebrow. “Neuroticized?”

  “If the word doesn’t exist yet, then it’s mine.”

  “No one else will want it.”

  “I do. I like my neuroses. I like them to have their own adjective.”

  He sighed. “What are you going to do?”

  “Step one: Look back at what’s happened to date.”

  Alessandro, anxious, said nothing. He seemed to be waiting for a shock, a fit of hysterics. But she was keeping herself under control. She thought she was the very image of a perfectly poised young woman.

  “So my father gets a phone call after my grandmother’s death,” she began. “A man called Apollonio has come to see Trevini, demanding money—for the fur coats made from the skins of Arcadians that haven’t been paid for yet…sounds kind of crazy. Like something out of a soap opera.”

  “Okay.”

  “Because of that phone call, my father leaves his family and flies to Europe to track down this Apollonio in person. Soon after that, his wife and his two dear little daughters hear that he’s died of a heart attack. None of them fly out to his funeral. Big mistake. Because it turns out, later, that his tomb is empty.” She wrinkled her nose. “Sound like a credible story?”

  “With reservations.”

  “Since it all seems so run-of-the-mill in these parts, let’s introduce a little complication. TV viewers are used to that kind of thing.”

  To please her, he went along with the game. “Plenty of people have seen Lost.”

  “One of the daughters is raped. Of course she gets pregnant.” Cynicism made it easier to talk about it, almost as if it had happened to someone else. “Eighteen months later a video of the rape turns up, and in it there’s a man who everyone calls Apollonio. That’s weird enough, but there’s more: Apollonio is her father! End of season one. Now the scriptwriters have a year to think how to get themselves out of this crazy scenario.”

  He looked at her hard, as if to make sure that she had not lost her mind and wasn’t heading for a nervous breakdown. “What was Apollonio’s motive?”

  “What does the viewer know about him so far?” asked Rosa. “Not a lot. He probably belongs to a mysterious, super-secret, and of course worldwide organization called TABULA.”

  “Which has a weakness for fur coats.”

  “Through which Apollonio earns a nice bit on the side by selling them to an evil-minded woman who is head of a Mafia clan. He could be doing that on behalf of TABULA, or maybe he’s working for himself.”

  “More likely for TABULA, I’d say.”

  She nodded. “Apollonio sells the furs to the old Mafia witch on orders from TABULA, then. Maybe to sow discord among the Arcadian dynasties if the deal ever comes to light. He’s a faithful supporter of the organization and would never do anything to thwart its aims. Unfortunately for him, soon after that the old woman’s son tracks him down and kills him.”

  Alessandro raised an eyebrow. “How do we know that?”

  “We don’t. But obviously the son slipped into the role of Apollonio thirteen years later. Now he is Apollonio. Same character, new face.”

  “Objection.”

  “What?”

  “The son can’t simply take on a new role. That’s not logical. Davide is still Davide—except that now he acts as if he were Apollonio. Undercover. Maybe he’s some kind of secret agent trying to destroy TABULA from inside.”

  “But he wouldn’t stand by and watch his own daughter being raped by one of the Panthera, just to maintain his own cover. He couldn’t do that, unless he really didn’t care what happened to her.”

  Alessandro chewed his lower lip.

  “So now Davide is Apollonio,” she said. “He’s turned into a true believer in the aims of TABULA.”

  “Brainwashing?”

  “I’d think it’s more likely that they convinced him, won him over. Like the first Apollonio. And now Davide thinks they’re right—so much so that he doesn’t care about anything else, even his own daughter.”

  “But is it certain that there were two Apollonios? The one with the furs and the one on the video?”

  “Good point. If Apollonio and Davide had been the same man from the start, then he wouldn’t have sold the furs to Costanza—his own mother—would he? What’s more, Trevini would probably have recognized him later.”

  Alessandro was still skeptical. “You’re assuming that Trevini has really told you everything, and has given you the truth.”

  “That’s what I’m going to find out—in step two. For now, however, we’re still looking at Apollonio’s motives—the motives of TABULA. They made sure that one of the Panthera raped a Lamia. Why?”

  “So that she’d get pregnant by him?” suggested Alessandro hesitantly. “You think the whole thing was some kind of experiment?”

  “The problem is that we don’t know what TABULA is really after. Why are they experimenting on Arcadians? What do they hope to achieve?”

  He followed this up with another idea. “You remember the statues of Panthera and Lamias on the seabed? Was it TABULA that salvaged them and removed them from the site?”

  “We’ll clear up the question of whether Thanassis and the Stabat Mater are all part of TABULA at the next script conference.”

  “But all the same, one thing is important,” he said. “We’ve been connecting the statues to ourselves all this time, right? At least I did. As if they were a kind of prophesy, and the two of us were going to make it come true.”

  “Kind of like that, yes.”

  “But that had nothing to do with TABULA. We fell in love, but they had no control over that. And they can’t have been very happy about it. Agreed?”

  Rosa nodded.

  Now Alessandro was hitting his stride. “Scientists prefer to carry out experiments in a controlled environment, don’t they? In the laboratory, where they can influence everything.”

  “You think—”

  “They knew about the statues. They probably even know what they stand for. And that’s why they wanted a Panthera and a Lamia—” He struggled with himself, but he couldn’t finish the sentence. “Why it was one of their conditions,” was all he added.

  “So there’s no such thing as artificial insemination where they come from?”

  He shrugged his shoulders, unsure.

  “The question is,” she said in a neutral voice, “did they want a child, or would aborted tissue be enough for them? A fetus?”

  Alessandro’s cheekbones were working, but he said nothing.

  She perched on the edge of the table where she had put down the photo album. Her head felt as if she had unexpectedly run into a glass door.

  “I’ll go crazy if I play this game to the end. My father has turned into Apollonio, and Apollonio was paying Tano and Michele. Those are the facts. That’s all.”

  “Seems like it.” He took a deep breath. “Then it was your father who also supplied Tano with the serum.”

  Rosa pushed up her sleeve and looked at the blue marks where the needles of the syringes had gone in. “They’ve probably infected us with their fucking mutant blood.”

  “But none of this has anything to do with us. With what we did last night.”

  “No.”

  “Really?”

  She shook her head. “High time for me to get the transformations under control. I can’t take that stuff again. It’s almost as if my father—”

  “Was making sure that we slept together, too?”

  She looked darkly at him. “I didn
’t sleep with Tano, Alessandro. I can tell the difference.”

  “Yes…sorry. I…I don’t know why I said that.”

  She gave him a kiss, first tentatively, then firmly.

  “They won’t leave us alone,” she whispered. “Even if they don’t do anything, I mean don’t do anything else to us, they’re there all the same, distorting our thoughts and our feelings and—”

  “I know exactly what my feelings are.”

  She nodded slowly. What she had seen on the video changed everything—and nothing. And if Trevini had thought he could use it to bring her to her knees, he’d been mistaken.

  “Thank you,” she said softly.

  “What for?”

  “For understanding me. Even if you don’t understand me.” She gestured clumsily. “You shouldn’t understand me. But somehow you do anyway.”

  He smiled. “The Rosa version of those three words?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  HUNDINGA

  THEY SPENT THE NIGHT on the sofa in the library, sleeping in their clothes, Rosa’s head on Alessandro’s chest.

  But when day began to dawn, that position wasn’t nearly as comfortable as it had been a few hours earlier. Rosa moved and felt as if someone had been driving steel nails through her joints. Her back was really stiff.

  “Good morning,” he said, kissing her on the forehead.

  “Morning,” she groaned. “Just how good it is I’ll find out—if I can stand up without collapsing.”

  Alessandro moved, shifting his own position, and he, too, let out a groan. “Who the hell builds sofas like this?”

  She sat up. “At least it was expensive.”

  “So we have to put up with the discomfort.”

  Rosa smiled, but even her facial muscles hurt. She grimaced to relax them, saw her reflection in a glass picture frame on the wall, and cursed. “Well, could have been worse,” she finally said. “I could have woken up a hybrid.”

  “Which isn’t—”

  Suddenly she leaped to her feet. “Why didn’t I change shape?” Her aches and pains were all gone at once. “Because of my father, I mean. I thought it happened on its own with violent outbreaks of feeling?”