Arcadia Awakens

by Kai Meyer

“Not exactly in the house,” said Zoe. “On the doorstep.”

  “How did he get past the guards?”

  A shrug of the shoulders. “He asked permission over the intercom to come up.”

  “And Florinda let him?”

  “She even expressly invited him, she says. To tell him face-to-face that she’d break the concordat if he didn’t take his filthy fingers off her stupid, naive, ungrateful niece. Her words, not mine.”

  Rosa jumped up. To her surprise, this time it worked quite well. “That was when we were out in the forest, right?”

  Zoe nodded.

  “Was he alone? Or was Tano with him?”

  A shadow crossed her sister’s face. “Florinda didn’t mention anyone but him.”

  “What did he want? Fuck, Zoe—don’t make me drag every word out of you.”

  “What do you think? He wanted to talk to you.”

  “And Florinda threatened to murder him?” Rosa’s eyes sought the plastic folder that had been on the bedside table. Had anyone looked inside it? Whoever had put Rosa to bed, Florinda or the doctor or one of the guards, must have cleared away the folder and the book.

  Gaia’s documents were still there, but the little book of Aesop’s Fables was missing. Or no: It was lying open on the floor a little to the left, beside the baseboard. As if it had been thrown there.

  Obviously someone around here didn’t like animal stories.

  Zoe followed the direction of Rosa’s eyes, frowned, and went over to the little book, limping slightly. She gasped with pain as she bent down to pick it up. Rosa would have bet that the Zoe who’d lived in the States until two years ago had never heard of a Greek slave called Aesop, but now a fleeting glance at the title was enough to send her into a fury.

  “Did Alessandro give you that?”

  Rosa clenched her hand into a fist among the bedclothes. “That’s none of your business. Or Florinda’s either.”

  “He’s playing with you.”

  “What, by giving me a book?”

  Zoe flung the little leather-bound volume down on the bedspread, shook her head vigorously, and limped to the door.

  “What the hell is this all about?” Rosa yelled at her.

  Zoe stopped with her hand on the door handle and looked at her. “He’s interfering in matters that have nothing to do with him. And don’t go thinking it’s for your sake.”

  She opened the door, but stayed there with her back to Rosa, as if expecting another outburst.

  Rosa’s voice was icy. “Maybe the Carnevares sink dead bodies in lakes,” she said, “but what were you really doing out in the woods?”

  Zoe froze, and looked like she was about to turn around again, but she stayed where she was. The seconds passed by

  Rosa stared at Zoe’s back. “You have to help me.”

  “So?”

  “So I need the Porsche.”

  Zoe let out a sharp breath. “The key’s in the ignition,” she whispered as she walked out.

  CASTELLO CARNEVARE

  THE GPS LED HER to Genuardo. She had intended to ask the way to Castello Carnevare there, but that proved unnecessary. The clan’s fortress rose on a peak above the village, a medieval colossus of yellowish-brown rough-hewn stone walls, looking about as homey from the outside as a collection of monuments.

  The winding road led up the mountain. On her way, even before she reached the village, she noticed several guards posted. A biker with a motorcycle at the side of the road, pretending to check his exhaust. A man with a pair of binoculars, sitting on the hood of his car in a parking lot making a show of bird-watching. Probably even the teenager taking a dog for a walk near the fork in the mountain road, talking on his cell phone and surreptitiously scrutinizing her car at the same time. There’d certainly been a few others who’d escaped her notice. But no one stopped her.

  She drove Zoe’s convertible to the gateway of the castle. Close up, the facade looked just as uninviting as it had from down below, but now she saw that the historic walls were deceptive. The roofs were covered with glazed ceramic tiles, and modern window frames had been set into the ancient stone masonry. No one could get past the iron gate to the front courtyard without being watched by several cameras. The fact that it stood open was the final proof that they were expecting her.

  She drove through the arched gateway at a crawl. Twice her wheels jolted over the beds of lowered steel spikes that could be raised in an emergency. More cameras followed her as she rolled into the inner courtyard of the fortress.

  The extensive open space had a garden where palm trees, climbing roses, and orchids grew. Huge topiaries had been pruned into the shape of seated animals. At first Rosa thought they were meant to be dogs, but when she looked more closely she saw that they were actually cats as tall as men. She had expected a gloomy ancestral home, something out of a horror novel. Instead she saw signs of good landscaping, with fountains running and an aviary full of songbirds on the far side of the courtyard.

  In the dim light of the open garage doors, well-polished vintage cars gleamed. Something was scurrying among them—a black dog. Sarcasmo! He recognized her, wagged his tail—and suddenly shot around as if someone had called to him from the shadows. Maybe Fundling, but she couldn’t see him anywhere.

  Several men were sitting on balconies behind stone parapets, their eyes hidden by sunglasses. Rosa was sure they were all looking down at her.

  She turned off the engine, and was about to get out when the big door at the top of a flight of marble steps swung open. Alessandro came out, wearing sneakers, a pair of faded jeans, and a T-shirt with a band logo on it. He looked furious. Glancing briefly over his shoulder and back into the building, he called something that she couldn’t make out, then hurried down the steps and leaned over the passenger door.

  “Turn the engine on,” he said without any greeting.

  She put her fingers on the ignition key again, but didn’t turn it. She was preparing a not particularly friendly reply, but he grimly shook his head and swung himself over the door and into the passenger seat. He did it so casually that one of her eyebrows shot up in sheer surprise.

  “Wow, I’m impressed!” Her irony was merely meant to hide the fact that she really was.

  “Drive.”

  She waited a moment longer, looking at the darkness beyond the open portal, and noticed the men on the balconies rising from their chairs as if on command. As if an invisible puppeteer above the rooftops were pulling the strings that worked them. Only now did she see that they all wore headsets.

  She switched the engine on and turned the car.

  “What about the gate?” she asked.

  “Don’t worry. I’m with you.”

  This was such a wrong answer that it left her speechless. She was tempted to stamp on the brake and throw him out of the car.

  Except for that undertone to his voice telling her that he wasn’t showing off. He really was convinced that his presence was keeping her from harm.

  She sighed. “Go on, say it. I shouldn’t have come.”

  “You shouldn’t have come.” He looked sideways at her and gave her a fleeting grin. “But I’m glad you did.”

  She steered the convertible through the arched entrance, waiting for the metal spikes to rise. Her tires rolled over the first barrier with a slight jolt. Then the second. The dark eyes of the cameras watched the car leave. There were loud voices in the courtyard behind them. When she glanced briefly in the rearview mirror, she saw someone approaching the balustrade of the marble stairway, leaning both hands on it, and looking at them as they drove away. The jolt as they passed over the second barrier prevented her from seeing him clearly.

  “Cesare?” she asked.

  Alessandro nodded.

  They left the tunnel and passed the cameras and microphones on the outside. Out on the winding road, Rosa stepped on the gas harder than necessary. Alessandro turned pale as she raced around the next bend. She smiled, satisfied.

  “Your aunt was ri
ght,” he said.

  “I bet she wasn’t.”

  “Right to take you off the island, yes. Tano was furious when Cesare discovered you’d been there and he hadn’t even … given you a fright.”

  It was Alessandro who had given her a fright when he changed into a different person during his fight with Tano. Or she thought he had changed.

  He smiled suddenly.

  “We’ll just act as if you’ve come to pick me up for an outing.”

  “If you say, ‘Let’s start over again,’ I’ll scream. My tolerance for scenes from bad movies is pretty low since I met Tano’s bikini babes.”

  He laughed, and briefly touched her hand where it rested on the gearshift, but his fingers were gone again so quickly that it could have been a warm breath of air. “How are you?”

  Rosa shrugged her shoulders. “My sister turned into a giant snake last night. And your cousin Tano—”

  “Second cousin.”

  “He was there too. He was a tiger. I recognized him from his eyes. Then I fainted.” She looked at him. “How does that sound?”

  “Like Aesop’s Fables. The one about the snake and the tiger.”

  “Is there really one?”

  He laughed. “No, but it would fit.”

  “The other possibility is that I just imagined the whole thing.” She was still driving way too fast as she passed the sign for the village. “I sometimes do that. I imagine things.”

  “Well, you’re not imagining that speed trap ahead.”

  She braked sharply and managed to slow down to fifty kilometers per hour just in time. “Who puts up a thing like that in your village?”

  His eyes fell on the plastic folder of documents. It was on the floor of the car in front of the passenger seat. “You brought it with you!”

  “That’s what you were after when you came to see us yesterday.”

  “Mostly I came to see you.”

  She frowned. “I happened to be lying in my aunt’s greenhouse in delirium, with something in my blood that the doctor had injected me with, and I saw some crazy things. Believe me, I wouldn’t have missed that for any visitor in the world.”

  “What did they do to you?”

  “What anyone would do to someone who has hallucinations of giant snakes and tigers. In the woods. In the dark. They tranquilized me. I was out of it.”

  He looked at her, frowning, and finally took a deep breath.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I often have funny dreams. I don’t usually need a shot for them.”

  “Sounds like you have experience with those.”

  “Plenty, yes.”

  They passed the sun-baked piazza at the center of the village. The Porsche glided through the shadow of a stone statue of a saint. A dozen old men sitting outside a bar watched silently as they drove by.

  As they left the village again, Alessandro bent down and picked up the folder. “Did you look at it?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “None of my business.”

  “Seriously?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “How about Iole?”

  He took the documents out and leafed quickly through them. “I’ve spoken to Cesare about her. He’ll see to it.”

  Her jaw dropped. “And that’s all?”

  “Officially he has to do what I say. There were other people there when we talked, enough of them to make sure he can’t afford to ignore my orders.”

  “Your orders! He wanted to kill you, have you forgotten?”

  “It’s complicated,” he said, putting the papers back in the folder.

  Her voice was icy. “Don’t you talk to me like I’m too stupid to understand.”

  “This whole thing is a mess. Cesare and Tano and my father, even if he’s dead, and—”

  “And your mother.” She meant that to hurt.

  “Yes,” he said quietly. “Her, too.”

  “The family lost its leader when your father died,” she commented, when he didn’t continue talking at once.

  “The clan’s split. Some of the family support Cesare, some support me. And neither can risk offending the other.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Because then the Carnevares’ all-powerful Mafia empire would fall apart?”

  “That’s the best-case scenario. Worst case, one of the groups might try getting the protection my father used to give them from the public prosecutor’s office instead. It’s not like the old days, when everyone stuck together and going to the police was considered dishonorable. Now anyone will weigh his personal advantages. Two or three years in prison, with cable TV and visiting rights, sounds more appealing than risking life and limb in guerrilla warfare between two capi.”

  She could tell where this conversation was going. “So neither Cesare nor you can openly challenge the other? And because you’ll come into your inheritance in a few weeks’ time, Cesare is keeping up appearances and obeying you.”

  “At least about unimportant things.”

  She struck the steering wheel with her hand. “That girl has been shut up for six years!”

  “That’s unimportant to him,” he corrected.

  She looked into his eyes. In the background, bare hills were gliding past.

  “You don’t trust me,” he said.

  She laughed mirthlessly. “Of course not.”

  “Because I took you to the island with me?”

  “Because you didn’t tell me the truth about why you did it.”

  “Would you have come if I’d told you?”

  “Maybe.” She thought about it for a moment. “Yes, I would.”

  She sensed that he was still watching her, but she had to concentrate on her driving. The road was winding again.

  “Would you make a right just up ahead?” he asked.

  “And then?”

  “I’ll show you something.”

  “More mysteries.”

  “There’s nothing mysterious about it.”

  “You’re the mystery.”

  He smiled. “Me?”

  Rosa nodded, and brushed her hair back from her face. But she didn’t say any more, and turned off to the right next time the road forked.

  They came to a dusty barrier across the road, made of wooden planks nailed together crosswise. Alessandro indicated that she should drive around the blockade. And the next two as well.

  They were the only people in a bleak landscape of burnt stubble fields and wild olive trees. A cloud of dust billowed in their wake, dividing the landscape behind them like a brown wall. On the hills, cacti reached their arms to the sky.

  Ahead of them lay an expressway access road. Except that there were no guardrails or markings. No road signs either. And no other vehicles at all. Yet the road, following a narrow curve, led to a broad ribbon of asphalt tracing a straight line all the way to the horizon. Again, it had no lines painted on it and there were no signs. Rosa thought there would have been space for four traffic lanes on it, but it was covered with the dust and loose soil that had blown over it.

  No other sign of life. Just the two of them, the car, and a forgotten road to nowhere.

  “Where does it go?”

  “To the end of the world,” he said.

  He was right about that.

  THE END OF THE ROAD

  ROSA COULDN’T DRIVE AS fast as she would have liked because there were cracks in the asphalt of the road surface. It had risen up in many places, where one tiny plant had found its way through to daylight, followed by a hundred others. There was something unsettling in knowing there was so much life seething under the dead gray ribbon of road, eager to break the bars of its dungeon and burst out into freedom.

  “What is this road?” she asked.

  “An expressway that was never completed. It was supposed to link the A19 right across the interior to the A20 up on the north coast. My father landed the contract and let his construction gangs loose in this area—until a new government in Rome put a stop to it.”

  “And now it s
imply stays the way it is?”

  “Tearing up the finished part would cost almost as much as building the whole thing in the first place. The provinces of Sicily have no money. There were protests years ago, but after a while the organizers just moved on to the next scandal, the next ruined building that made someone or other rich.”

  “Not someone or other. The Carnevares.”

  He was looking straight ahead. “My family, yes.”

  She concentrated on the road, staring at the ugly, now useless, construction ahead of her—and suddenly realized that she liked it here. Maybe because nothing like this existed anywhere else—its charm lay in the totally unique nature of the place. Of course there were deserted roads elsewhere. But in front of her stretched mile upon mile of empty asphalt over which hardly any vehicle had ever driven apart from bulldozers. It gave her goose bumps all the way down her back.

  “And under it?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Is this just an expressway that no one uses, or is something hidden underneath it?”

  He’d understood her at once, she was sure of that, and it was to his credit that a trace of shame made him hesitate to talk about that part of his family’s business.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “and that’s the truth.”

  “I saw your lake. And the dam.”

  He waved a dismissive hand. “That old story? Not a word of it is true.”

  “Who told you so?” she asked contemptuously. “Your father?”

  He pressed his lips together and didn’t reply. “Children of the clan,” he said at last, “are lied to from the moment we’re born. If our mothers and fathers pretend we’re leading a perfectly normal family life—well, that’s the first big lie, and after that it never stops. They try to make us think everything’s the same as for other people, other families. But nothing is the same.” He shifted restlessly in the passenger seat. “If we grow up and have kids ourselves, and then grandchildren, we keep finding out stuff we’d never have thought possible. Finding out—”

  “Crimes,” she suggested, with a shrug.

  “Business deals. With all the inevitable consequences, going beyond anything we can imagine. And it’ll be just the same for our kids, and their kids—because after a while we lose any real sense of our own behavior. We don’t even realize we’re no better than our fathers and grandfathers.”