Arcadia Awakens

by Kai Meyer

  “There’s a second harbor on the north coast of the island,” Alessandro explained. “Even large ships can anchor there to unload vehicles and so on.”

  The villa was an extensive complex of several buildings and annexes. Rosa had expected a comfortable holiday home, a place to spend a few days or weeks. Instead she saw a luxurious building that she could easily imagine in the most expensive neighborhoods of any big city.

  White masonry, a great deal of glass, flat roofs, and a kind of lookout tower that had to have a view over half the island. The sea would be visible from most of the rooms, which had walls that were all windows and glazed doors. Even if you felt shut up anywhere else—or at any other time in your life—here you would be overcome by a huge sense of freedom and space. She began to like Alessandro’s mother without ever having met her.

  “And no one uses all this anymore?” asked Rosa.

  “Not as far as I know.”

  “No curious tourists on their own yachts?”

  He shook his head. “Everyone on Sicily knows who owns Isola Luna. And they all know it’s better not to tangle with us. The same goes for most skippers in the Mediterranean.”

  She was impressed, against her will, to think that a name could be better security than barbed wire and walls. And she began to have an inkling of how much more powerful and influential the Carnevares were than the Alcantaras with their wind turbine empire.

  “Hardly anyone ever came here except my mother,” he said, walking ahead to the barred gate in the wall. She followed him, staying two steps behind and not sure whether she’d be better off watching him or the building.

  Crickets chirped in the midday sun; the lava slopes behind both sides of the villa flickered in the heat haze.

  Alessandro took a bunch of keys out of his jeans pocket. The tall gate swung open, squealing.

  “Tano didn’t want us to come here,” she said abruptly.

  Alessandro glanced at her over his shoulder. Anger flashed in his eyes. For the first time she saw something in him that wasn’t just attractive, it was exciting, too.

  “If Tano has any objections,” he said with deliberate calm, “he’s welcome to come and make them.”

  He was about to walk on, but Rosa took his arm. A fine film of sweat gleamed on his bare torso, and the light reflected off it like gold dust on marble.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “If you weren’t afraid of Tano, I wouldn’t be here, would I?”

  He pressed his lips together. Her faint hope that she might have been wrong burst like a balloon.

  “Yes or no will do,” she said.

  He hesitated for a moment and then nodded.

  “Because of the concordat,” she stated. “As long as I’m with you, Tano and his friends won’t touch you.”

  Another nod. A cautious one.

  “So I’m kind of your guardian angel. They can’t do anything to me no matter what happens.” This time Rosa didn’t wait for confirmation but forged straight ahead. “And they don’t want anyone knowing if they do harm you. If they kill you here on the island and get rid of the body. Those men down there aren’t Tano’s friends at all.”

  “Depends how you look at it,” he said. “But they’re not the killers Cesare has set on me.”

  “They’re not?” She frowned. “The girls?”

  He nodded.

  “All three of them?”

  “Only the two who ran into the water. The third one’s harmless.”

  “But they can’t do anything to you while I’m around, is that right?”

  He sighed. “Look, I don’t want you to think I was—”

  “Shit, Alessandro!” She prodded him firmly in the chest with her forefinger. “Don’t try that emotional shit on me. Cesare and Tano wanted to get rid of you—that was their original plan. They were going to do it here, today.”

  “My family is split,” said Alessandro. The white villa shimmered in the heat haze behind him. “Half of them are on my side, the other half back Cesare. If it got around that he’d had me murdered, that would lead to the final break—maybe the downfall of the Carnevares. He hoped to do it here, without witnesses, so that it could pass for an accident, at least in theory. But you—well, you’re an Alcantara, so whatever happens he can’t touch a hair of your head. As long as you could tell the truth to my supporters—”

  “—you’re safe.” She finished the sentence for him. “Never mind what you find out here in the villa. About your mother’s death. And whoever was responsible for it.”

  He nodded again. “Yes.”

  She felt deceived and exploited, but she’d be damned if she was going to let him see it. Suddenly she wanted to cover up the bikini top that left so much of her on view, but her T-shirt was down on the beach. She took a deep breath.

  “Okay,” she said. “Is that all?”

  “No,” he said. “I like you. It’s the truth.”

  She swung her arm back and slapped his face. Hard.

  He didn’t move a muscle. “It is true.”

  She did it again. Then she looked at him for a long time without saying a word.

  Finally she walked past him to the entrance of the villa. “Come on, then. Let’s find what you’re looking for.”

  Ahead of them was an entrance hall with daylight flooding in from all sides through huge windows. Even the stairs up to the next floor were made of thick Plexiglas.

  “This way.” He led her through several rooms so white that she began to shiver in spite of the sunshine. The furniture was unique as well, with curving bowl-shaped plastic chairs, floor-standing lamps on complicated columns that looked like DNA models, rounded plastic shelving—all of it white with a touch of bright orange here and there. The psychedelic chic of the early Bond films. “My Death” was echoing in the back of her head again, and it seemed like it had been composed for this place.

  The house smelled of musty rooms, warm plastic, and the dust motes hovering in the rays of sunlight that slanted in as if to support the glazed conservatory ceilings.

  A flight of stairs led to the upper floor. There was a new smell here—first like wax crayons, and the next moment, more intensely, of oil paint. They walked into Gaia Carnevare’s studio. After all the dazzling white, the colors in this room looked brighter.

  Here, too, the ceiling was made entirely of glass, and was the only surface not covered with pictures. Unframed canvases hung or were propped everywhere, covered with an inferno of brushstrokes and wild dabs of paint, explosions of color that at a second glance were faces. Distorted, twisted, disfigured faces.

  Rosa said nothing. She turned slowly on the spot and let her eyes wander over the paintings. There were pictures stacked one behind another all over the studio, five or eight or ten at a time; she could only guess how many of those disturbing grimaces were hidden behind the pictures in front.

  “Why’s all this still here?” she asked.

  “Cesare kept my father from taking them over to the castle. He didn’t want to have them around him.” Alessandro’s jaw muscles were working. “He hated her.”

  “And her pictures?”

  “Them, too.”

  Now she looked him in the eye for the first time since slapping him. “Did he do it? Did Cesare kill your mother?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “And you’re looking for evidence here?”

  He went over to one of the paintings, a face with a mouth wrenched wide-open, red and black and dark violet. His fingertips gently stroked the surface. “I think she found out that Cesare had been deceiving my father. Cesare knew him better than anyone and was his closest adviser in everything—not just business. But Cesare also likes the old Cosa Nostra traditions. He insists that might is right, and as he sees it, power struggles should be carried out openly. These days the families work more and more like other business enterprises, they run scams just this side of the law, and their quarrels aren’t necessarily settled in shootouts between a few stupid, hired henchmen—but al
l that’s passed Cesare by. He can’t stand any kind of innovation, everything has to stay the way it always was. That’s why he wants the power in the Carnevare clan. He wants to keep what he calls the old values going. And I think that as he saw it, my father had gone too far off that track, with all the deals he did as cover, his facade of charity donations, fraternizing with politicians in Rome. Cesare’s been putting funds secretly aside to be ready for a change of power, and my father was blind to it and didn’t notice. Or maybe he just didn’t want to face facts.”

  “And your mother was different?”

  “She and Cesare hated each other from the beginning, even before she married my father. Later on she realized what Cesare was planning. She must have tried to warn my father, but when he wouldn’t listen to her she got more and more withdrawn, and she spent most of her time out here on the island.”

  Rosa was studying the distorted faces. “Doesn’t look like being on her own did her much good.”

  “That wasn’t enough for Cesare, anyway. He couldn’t let her know the truth.”

  “So he had her killed?”

  Alessandro’s eyes were narrowed, cold, frightening. “I think he did it with his own hands. Here or somewhere else. But he did kill her.” He walked slowly past more of the pictures, tracing the outlines of the brushstrokes. “My father must have known. Or at least guessed. I’m almost sure Cesare will have talked him into thinking that was the only way. Told him my mother was unhinged, would talk to the wrong people about the kind of business the Carnevares did. And I guess my father just—caved in.” Fists clenched, he swung around, and now there was such fury in his eyes that Rosa almost took a step back. But she stood her ground, feeling sure there was something else about him, trying to work it out. Something about his eyes. As if their pupils were suddenly widening. And for a brief, intriguing moment she thought his hair had changed color. Was darker, pitch-black. Maybe it was just the strange lighting up here.

  “My father went along with Cesare,” said Alessandro. “Went along with the murder of his own wife!”

  “But you’re only assuming that—aren’t you?”

  “She wrote things down. Put them together. It was what she always did.”

  “Like a letter, you mean? To you?”

  He shook his head. “She didn’t trust letters.”

  Rosa raised an eyebrow.

  “I know she wasn’t exactly clear in her mind!” he went on. “I know that, Rosa! But she wasn’t totally crazy, just … confused. There must be notes, diaries, something like that. I’m sure of it. And if there are—”

  “Then they’re here,” she said.

  “Yes.” He went over to a large, paint-splashed draftsman’s desk covered with sketches on large sheets of paper, as if the artist had left the studio only a few minutes ago. He opened the only drawer in the desk, rummaged around in it, and finally brought something out.

  A gleaming scalpel.

  He turned it over.

  She thought of the letter opener that she had taken from Florinda’s desk first thing in the morning. She’d left it down on the beach in her shoulder bag.

  Alessandro’s hair looked nut-brown again, but his pupils still filled his entire eyes. He went over to one of the pictures and slit it from top to bottom. With a tearing sound, the painting gaped open. A bloodless wound split the distorted face.

  He did the same to a second picture.

  And a third.

  Rosa watched, motionless, as he devastated picture after picture, each with a swift diagonal cut, and she thought instinctively that once, in the time of the great Mafia wars, these faces would have been real people, and the capi and their soldati would have dealt with them the same way. There was something of that in Alessandro Carnevare. An heir to those times, those men.

  She had the same legacy herself. Like a gene firmly anchored inside her. She could sense something stirring. Something in her changing, trying to break out. An eerie fascination joined the tension she had felt just now and the anger that still seethed inside her.

  Alessandro stopped and pointed to the open drawer. “There are more in there.”

  She joined him, looked inside, and saw a muddle of brushes, spatulas, pencils—and blades. Hesitantly, she put out her hand. Took one out of the drawer. Weighed the cool metal in her fingers.

  A scalpel just like his. Gaia Carnevare would have used them to scrape paint off canvases. Red paint, by the look of it.

  “A single cut,” said Alessandro. “That should be enough to show whether there’s anything underneath.”

  She went over to one of the pictures and put the blade against it. Slit open the screaming face. Only a picture. Only paint. She got goose bumps, but at the same time she couldn’t help smiling. A tingling ran through her knees, her thighs, her lower body. It reached her rib cage and leaped up into her skull like a flame.

  The next picture. And then another.

  Once she thought she heard a ringing sound, like tiny bells chiming. Not in her head. Somewhere in the house. But by now she was in a kind of frenzy, and Alessandro obviously felt the same. They were destroying his mother’s pictures in search of what might be hidden in them, or under them, or behind them. Cheeks, eyes, mouths gaped open. Where canvases had been stacked behind one another, more distorted faces came into view, more and more grimaces of fear, gaudily colored glimpses into the depths of Gaia Carnevare’s soul.

  “Here we are,” said Alessandro.

  And at that very moment Rosa’s blade, too, met a surface harder than canvas and paint, not behind the picture but in it.

  Alessandro’s mother had stuck folders of hard plastic or very thin metal on the canvases, and then painted them over thickly with oil paint, weaving them into her visions and nightmares.

  They found ten folders distributed among a hundred or more paintings. And there were documents in all the folders. Bank statements, balance sheets, photographs of Cesare Carnevare with men in dark suits. And sheets of paper handwritten in tiny letters, illegible except with a magnifying glass, probably written with the aid of one as well.

  They stood there, breathless, in the middle of the devastation. Alessandro had the scalpel in one hand and the sheaf of papers in the other. Rosa’s breasts were rising and falling. Her black bikini top was stretched over them; she felt as if her whole body was in disorder.

  Alessandro smiled, while tears glittered in his eyes. Sweat gleamed on his bare skin and the muscles of his forearms.

  He took a step toward her, and she could see that he was going to kiss her.

  She stepped back, shaking her head.

  His smile faded slightly as the reality of their situation gradually made its way back into his mind, and hers as well, and they were both themselves again, realizing what the scene around them looked like, and what effect it would have on anyone unexpectedly coming through the door.

  Once again Rosa heard the clear, glassy ringing sound.

  Closer this time. Out on the stairs.

  Alessandro stowed all the loose sheets of paper and the photographs away in one of the paint-stained plastic folders and held it to his chest with his left hand. He kept the knife in his right hand as he spun around in the direction of the door.

  Rosa stole over to the entrance of the studio, clutching the handle of her scalpel, which was wet with sweat. With a swift movement she peered around the doorpost, glanced out into the corridor.

  In front of all that brightly lit white stood a frail figure, looking lost.

  A girl, younger than Rosa herself.

  She wore a narrow metal ring on one ankle. A silver chain, pencil-thin, led across the floor and disappeared, tightly stretched, around the nearest corner.

  When the girl moved to speak, the links of the chain rang faintly, like little bells.

  “Have you come to kill me?”

  THE GIRL ON THE CHAIN

  HER NAME WAS IOLE Dallamano. She spoke softly and slowly. She didn’t seem afraid of the scalpel in Rosa’s hand.<
br />
  She was fifteen but looked younger, in spite of the shadows under her sad eyes. Her black hair was cut short. One of the men who regularly came here had done that, she said. Otherwise they hadn’t touched her. Every few months, when her hair was long again, one of them chopped it short. Iole had asked them why they didn’t cut her throat right away, but they never answered that question.

  She told Rosa and Alessandro all this even before they reached the bottom of the stairs. Iole was barefoot and moved on the Plexiglas steps without a sound—except for the slight ringing of the chain around her ankle. It had to be eighty to a hundred yards or more long, enough for Iole to walk almost all over the house, but it was too short for her to reach the top of the stairs to the upper floor. Her freedom of movement ended a few yards short of the door to Gaia Carnevare’s studio.

  Rosa followed Iole down the stairs as she talked. The silvery links of the chain dropped, clinking quietly, from step to step. Alessandro followed them, clutching the folder of documents firmly in both hands. They had left the scalpels up in the studio.

  “How long have you been here?” asked Rosa as they reached the first floor. The stairs led to one of the sitting rooms.

  “Over six months on the island,” said the girl. “Before that they hid me in other places. A remote farmhouse in the west, then somewhere up in the mountains. There are wolves there, they said.”

  Rosa looked at Alessandro, whose expression was getting darker and darker. “I didn’t know anything about this,” he said, seeing the question in her eyes.

  “It’s been six years,” said Iole. “Six years, two months. And seven days.”

  Rosa swore quietly.

  “They took me away from my parents’ house.” Iole looked at the floor. “They said everyone was dead there. My parents. Both my brothers, all my uncles and their families. All except one person.”

  “There was a Dallamano clan in Syracuse,” Alessandro explained. “I don’t know what happened, but—”

  Iole interrupted him. “My uncle Augusto … he was helping a judge. A woman judge. They said he’d betrayed the families. A lot of people were arrested because of him; some of them worked for the Carnevares. But the Carnevares think he knows even more—knows about them and their businesses. They took me prisoner to keep him from talking. If he does, they’ll kill me, they say. They think he knows that, and that’s why he won’t tell the police any more.”