by Kai Meyer
That mental image paled when she found herself, against her will, thinking of Alessandro again. She thought it unlikely that Tano had simply given up his plan. Had something else happened on the island after Florinda had swept her away? She felt like a child dragged away from the playground, and it made her furious.
“You like him?” Zoe suddenly remarked.
“Alessandro?”
“You know who I mean.”
“I don’t even know him.”
“Exactly, and that’s the problem. The Carnevares aren’t like us. Their family and ours—”
“Oh, don’t start with all that Romeo and Juliet crap!”
“Then you really do like him.” It wasn’t a question this time.
“He invited me to the island with him. I went. That’s all. We didn’t make plans to have five kids and topple Cosa Nostra.”
“Don’t take it so lightly.”
Rosa’s hand clasped her bony knee more firmly. “We wanted to go swimming, that’s all.”
“Sure.”
The convertible was crossing the plateau of a flattened mountain peak. Once again a wide panorama of mustard-colored hills opened out in front of them. Below was a large expanse of water. At first Rosa thought it was a broad river, but then she saw that it was a long lake winding its way through several valleys. To the right of them, in the east, she saw a huge dam. It looked out of place in this deserted yellow landscape.
“Nearly there.” Zoe steered the car down around several bends, until the two-lane road led straight across the dam. To their right yawned a valley full of ravines, to their left the water of the reservoir glittered.
Zoe parked the car by the roadside, right in the middle of the reservoir. There was no other vehicle in sight, nothing but a flock of birds soaring above them in the cloudless sky.
“Lago Carnevare,” said Zoe, mockery in her voice. “That’s not really its name, but it belongs to them.”
Rosa shrugged her shoulders. “They own a lake. So?”
“So they earn a pile of money with an asset like that. Building projects for the state serving no real purpose. No one here needs a reservoir. Hardly anyone around here grows any crops, so there’s no need for irrigation. Take a look—this is a wilderness, mountains where nobody goes, deserted farm-houses.”
“We build wind turbines that don’t generate any electricity. They build dams. What’s the difference?”
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” replied Zoe, shaking her head. “What you ought to know … why you’re here…” She hesitated, and began again. “It’s about what’s in the lake.”
She opened the driver’s door and slipped out into the open air. Rosa joined her sister at the waist-high parapet. For one or two minutes they looked down on the smooth surface of the water in silence. The sunlight sparkling on the reservoir dazzled Rosa.
“So what is down there?” asked Rosa at last.
“Ruins,” said Zoe.
Rosa shrugged. “Sicily is full of those.” There was no missing that fact, any more than you could overlook the piles of garbage by the roadside. Whichever way you looked on this island, you’d soon see at least one deserted farmhouse, at least one ruined barn. No one bothered about them, so why start here?
“There’s a whole village under the water there,” said Zoe. “Giuliana. The signposts on some of the roads near here still point to it. If you went that way in the dark and didn’t watch out, you’d end up in the lake. They didn’t even build barriers over the roads.”
Rosa blinked hard, trying to see something under the surface, but it was useless. The water was much too deep, the light too bright.
“The Carnevares moved heaven and earth to land that building project,” Zoe went on. “Mountains of fake reports, expert opinions, surveyors’ plans. Huge amounts of hush money paid out, up to and including the highest political levels in Rome and Brussels. But what they spent on that they got back a hundred times over: European subsidies, state financing, and of course the wages for an army of engineers, construction workers, and so on.”
“It still doesn’t sound to me any different from what Florinda does with her wind turbines. Except that the Carnevares are clever enough to do it on a larger scale.”
“Wind doesn’t kill anyone. Water does.”
Rosa looked askance at Zoe. A gust of cool wind from the lake ruffled her blond hair. Zoe didn’t return her glance, but kept looking out over the water.
“What happened?”
“The inhabitants of Giuliana protested. They did what you’d expect people to do when the village where they live is going to be simply wiped off the map. Meetings first, then public rallies, even a demonstration outside the Parliament building in Rome. No one showed the faintest interest in it. And then nothing more. That was four years ago.”
“Nothing more?”
“No more protests, no resistance.”
Rosa guessed what this was leading up to, but all the same she asked, “They were bought out?”
“Resettled, apparently.” The corners of Zoe’s mouth twisted into a bitter smile. “Given new homes somewhere in Calabria, on the other side of the Strait of Messina. As if you could just put eight hundred Sicilians in a boat, ship them off across the water, and leave them somewhere else for the rest of their lives.” She wasn’t smiling anymore when she said, “That didn’t even work with us.”
“So what’s the truth?”
“Officially they’re all living over there raising sheep or cattle. It’d be closer to the truth to call them the sheep themselves. The wolves came and tore them to pieces. Well, the lions and tigers, to be precise.”
Rosa suppressed her memory of the tiger in the olive grove. “The Carnevares killed them? You know what that sounds like, don’t you?” Then she thought of the girls on the island with their machine pistols. “They drowned them in the lake?”
Zoe picked a tiny pebble off the parapet and threw it over. Rosa couldn’t hear it hit the water. “They didn’t drown. Or not as far as I know. Officially they simply went away. Overnight. The dam was almost finished by then. Giuliana lay in the valley down in its shadow.” Zoe pointed to the depths of the lake. “And there it lies today. So, probably, do its people. If you ask me, I’d bet that their bodies aren’t the only ones down there. Did you know that the Carnevares are kind of grave diggers for Cosa Nostra? If the other families want someone to disappear, they turn to them for help. Roads, airport runways, even administrative buildings in Catania and Palermo. Cesare Carnevare’s labor force builds concrete into their foundations—and not just concrete.”
So this was the inheritance that mattered so much to Alessandro. He was fighting Tano and Cesare so fiercely for the chance to dispose of corpses under buildings and expressways. Leaving depopulated villages at the bottom of quiet lakes.
Rosa clambered up onto the stone of the parapet wall and took a step forward, until she was directly on the edge of it. The surface of the lake lay some sixty feet below.
“Come down from there.”
Rosa brushed her sister’s hand off her calf. “No, you come up to me.”
For a moment Zoe looked furious, then she took a deep breath and managed a smile. She took the hand that Rosa reached out to her and climbed up on the wall. They stood there side by side, just a finger’s breadth from the edge, while the wind blew through their clothes and ruffled their hair.
“Why did you tell me that?” asked Rosa quietly. “I mean, really why?”
“Because Alessandro Carnevare is not—”
“Because Florinda told you to? Did she think up this story herself?”
“It’s true, Rosa.”
“Well, maybe it is. But is that supposed to scare me? Am I supposed to hate him now? I knew exactly where I was going when I boarded the plane for Italy. Do you think I’m so naive? Does Florinda think so? I know who and what our family is. And I know it’s no better than the Carnevares and the Riinas and all the rest of them. You and I are a part
of it.”
“You don’t know just what we’re a part of,” Zoe whispered into the wind.
“I think I do.” Rosa felt for her sister’s hand, something she hadn’t done since she was little. “But other crimes have been committed in other places, crimes for which we’re responsible. Our family, anyway. Probably our father. What does Florinda expect? Does she want us to fall in love with nice boys from respectable, law-abiding families in Turin or Milan? Or live alone all our lives just like her?”
Zoe’s hand was very cold. “You can’t understand it. Not yet.”
“You know,” said Rosa, depressed, “I don’t have a guilty conscience, I don’t have scruples about what may have happened to the people of Giuliana. Because I’m an Alcantara and I can’t change that. Just as Alessandro can’t change what he is.”
Zoe opened her mouth to say something, but no sound came out. She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue and said no more.
“Nothing happened on the island,” said Rosa, blinking again as she looked at the dazzling surface of the water. “It’s not what you think.”
She said nothing for a while, gazing at the far bank of the reservoir in the distance.
“Nothing,” she whispered again, and this time it wasn’t Zoe she was trying to convince.
TIGER AND SNAKE
IT WAS ALREADY DARK when they got back to the palazzo. Alone in her room, Rosa tried calling Alessandro, but a recorded voice told her that the number was no longer in service. Annoyed, she tried again, with the same result. She flung the gold cell phone down on her pillows, where it landed softly as if in a snowdrift.
The plastic folder containing Gaia Carnevare’s documents also lay on the bed, with Aesop’s Fables beside it. Both of them evidence that Alessandro trusted her. So why couldn’t she reach him? Had something happened to him on the island? But if that were the case, would the first thing Cesare do be to block the cell phone? It seemed unlikely.
She had to admit she was worried. Even though she had every reason to be disappointed in Alessandro after he’d taken her to Isola Luna only for his own protection. She could handle that. It wasn’t like her to sulk just because someone wasn’t nice to her. In fact there were few things she could excuse as easily as not being nice. After all, she herself never apologized to other people. But why was she worried about someone when she ought to be furious with him?
He liked her, he’d said. But you could also like puppies and guinea pigs. It wasn’t any reason to go worrying about a changed phone number. She wasn’t even sure whether she liked him.
She tried his number a third time. Not from speed dial, but typing in each digit separately. She’d stared at the number long enough to know it by heart. She didn’t have a delete key in her brain.
She got the same recording again.
The cell phone landed in the cushions once more. Impatiently, she jumped up, opened the window, and took a deep breath. The air smelled pleasantly like pine needles.
Below her the greenhouse shimmered. The glass was covered with condensation on the inside. Again she wondered what the point was of a greenhouse on an island where palms grew outdoors. There were even some here at the palazzo, along the huge panoramic terrace on the west side, where they cast their shadows over the pool at sunset.
She couldn’t see anything through the condensation on the glass.
She saw a movement just around the corner of the house, and knew at once that it was Zoe.
Her sister moved out of the shelter of the building and crossed the strip of open land, stopping halfway. Rosa quickly stepped back into her room until she could no longer see whether Zoe was looking up at her window. When she next dared to look outside, her sister was moving into the shadow of the chestnuts.
Rosa was wearing black jeans and canvas sneakers, with one of the dark T-shirts that Zoe had given her. She had the key to the front door in her jeans pocket. That was all she needed; a flashlight might give her away.
She quickly left her room and crept along the high-ceilinged, dim corridors to the stairs, until she reached the back door and was out in the open. Florinda was usually in her study at this time of day; the domestic staff had gone home to the village or to Piazza Armerina long ago. Rosa just had to take care not to run right into the arms of one of the guards patrolling the grounds.
Her sister had been heading up the slope. Beyond the row of chestnuts, pinewoods rose toward the top of the mountain. Although Zoe had not looked as if she were in a hurry, she had a considerable head start by now.
Rosa had noticed exactly where Zoe disappeared among the trees. The sky was still clear, the moon, half-full, gave a little light. Soon Rosa found a small trail leading up the mountainside.
Pine needles muffled her footsteps as the path wound its way past hollows and steep slopes. Just before she reached the top of the mountain, she saw her sister, a shadow among the tree trunks. Zoe was about fifty yards ahead of her. She was walking briskly, but not with any great haste.
Once, Rosa looked back over her shoulder and saw a few isolated points of light beyond the trees. The palazzo windows. Why hadn’t the motion detector light outside the house come on? Had Zoe switched it off? And if so, whose eyes was she hiding from? Florinda’s? Rosa’s?
Zoe disappeared down the other side of the mountain, and Rosa quickened her pace. More pine trees, more shadows. Somewhere ahead of her Zoe was walking through the darkness. Wind rustled in the needles of the trees.
And then the slope came to an end as suddenly as if someone had chopped a piece off it with a gigantic spade. A sharp edge, and below it a rocky, wooded ravine. Maybe thirty feet deep, no more. The opposite slope was also wooded, with the clear, starlit sky above it.
Rosa stopped at the edge of the drop. Now she could see that the path, after bending sharply, led along the side of the ravine, and she thought she could see Zoe again, a slender figure between the rocky edge and the trees. Rosa followed her more slowly now, which kept her from being seen when her sister stopped abruptly and looked around. There was no time to look for a hiding place farther in among the trees. She stood where she was, in the shadow of a pine, and hoped the darkness would hide her. Zoe was looking straight at her now. But she turned her eyes first to the ravine, then up to the sky, as if expecting airborne pursuers.
When Zoe continued on, Rosa stayed put a little longer before finally moving again herself. The path led on for several hundred yards farther along the edge of the drop, not more than a couple of steps from the ravine below. Somewhere in the distance, an owl hooted.
The bulky outline of a farmhouse emerged from the darkness. Rosa thought at first that the run-down place was empty, but then she saw a faint light inside. The tiles on the roof were crumbling, the pale walls were dilapidated. There were no shutters on the windows anymore, but someone must have hung black curtains inside. A thin strip of light showed through a narrow gap in the dark fabric.
Zoe shouted something that Rosa couldn’t make out. The back of the house came right up to the edge of the rock, and the front of it faced the woods. The door opened, creaking, and yellow light flooded out onto the ground. Zoe was silhouetted against the bright rectangle, in which a figure appeared, thickset and broad-shouldered. The man beckoned her in, and the door closed again.
Rosa took cover among the trees on the edge of the pine-wood, choosing a place that would be out of the light when the door opened again. She wasn’t sure what to do now. Stealing over to the window seemed childish. Why would she be interested in what Zoe was doing inside the house? But then, why else had she followed her sister? She felt almost ashamed of it now.
She was about to simply turn away, leaving Zoe to go about her own business, when the door creaked again and swung open. There had hardly been time for the two people inside to exchange greetings.
Her sister came out with the sturdy man, both of them black silhouettes against the brightness of the doorway. Zoe leaned forward, kissed the man on both cheeks in a friendly f
arewell, and hurried back along the path at the edge of the ravine. She was holding a flat bundle of something in one hand, as she had the first time Rosa saw her out like this. She looked back over her shoulder once, waved to the man, and disappeared into the darkness.
Rosa held her breath as the outline of the man lingered in the doorway for a few moments. He seemed to be looking around. His gaze wandered over the outskirts of the wood, including the place where she was hiding. He paused several times, as if he had noticed something, but then went back into the house and closed the door. Rosa bit her lower lip, hardly daring to move.
As she hurried back to the path, she realized there was no real reason for her to be nervous. This was Alcantara land, the palazzo was quite close, and her aunt’s armed guards were patrolling on the other side of the mountain. Florinda must know about the man living in this ruin. Rosa assumed Zoe was visiting him on her aunt’s behalf. But what did she come here to do?
Ahead of her the path above the ravine was empty. Zoe must have made good time. Rosa quickened her pace too, and was soon climbing the slope, following the narrow trail to the mountaintop.
Something growled among the pines.
First on her left, then behind her, then on her right.
She didn’t run away, but instead stopped in her tracks.
Slowly, her eyes moved over the tree trunks. No undergrowth blocked her view, and the trees grew far apart.
There was no missing the tiger. She had always thought that big cats were elegant and supple, but the animal standing there in the dark was powerful, a mighty mountain of muscle and fur striped black and orange, with white markings around his muzzle. The tiger bared his canine teeth.
