Arcadia Awakens (7 page)

She withstood Tano’s stare through the lenses of his glasses easily enough. Shook his hand. Expressed her sympathy courteously. Didn’t look away, made no nervous movement. She didn’t have to pretend; aggression was her strong point, and the challenge in Tano Carnevare’s eyes only made her feel more self-confident.

Come on if you dare,
her handshake told him, and from the flash of surprise in his eyes she saw that he’d read the message.

She turned to Cesare, Tano’s father and the dead man’s cousin. He was a more formidable man, there was no doubt of that even from a distance. At close quarters, she could physically sense the aura of menace that surrounded the late baron’s
consigliere
. As she returned his cool, calculating glance, she saw her aunt in a new light, and for that she was grateful to him. Florinda must be an extremely determined woman to have faced an enemy like this all her life without giving an inch.

“You must be Rosa,” said Cesare Carnevare.

How did he know her name?

“Welcome home.” His voice was deep and pleasant, not at all what she had expected.

She nodded to him and continued on.

Stopped in front of Alessandro.

She put out her hand—and promptly missed taking his because instead she was looking into his eyes, into that unfathomable deep-sea green that seemed even brighter in the sun-bleached graveyard among all the black of the mourners. Finally, after a short, almost embarrassed moment that hopefully no one else had noticed, their hands found each other.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

She bit her lower lip and was about to move on when he smiled—smiled at her from beside his father’s grave.

“I hoped you’d come,” he said quietly.

R
OSA AND
A
LESSANDRO STROLLED
together down the avenues between the tombs, keeping their distance from the other mourners. After expressing their sympathy once again, most of them were making for the exit from the graveyard, where a buffet had been set out in the shade of a tall stone cross, and waiters offered champagne on sparkling silver trays. The priest who had led the funeral procession was standing with the heads of the clans, taking lively part in their conversation.

Many glances followed Rosa and Alessandro as they moved away from the others and past the monuments. Florinda never took her eyes off them, and Cesare also kept glancing at them. Zoe stood alone with a glass of champagne in the shadow of the archway. With those dark glasses on, Rosa couldn’t tell where or at whom she was looking.

“We’ll start them gossiping,” said Alessandro. “I ought to have warned you they’d talk.”

“Let them.”

“You don’t mind?”

“Should I?” She answered her own question with a shake of her head. “I don’t know nearly enough about this place to be seriously worried. I don’t know any of these people, so they can think what they like about me.”

And that was the truth. She wasn’t interested in the others. She was on her guard only with him. Although at the same time she enjoyed the hint of risk in the encounter. Last year in New York she’d been sent to see a therapist who told her, straight out, that she lived in constant expectation of danger, and that she invited many of those dangers herself in order to eliminate the element of the unexpected and stay in control. By showing excessive aggression. Stealing stuff that meant nothing to her. And the high point of her career as a risk junkie to date was this walk with Alessandro Carnevare through the graveyard before the eyes of all the feuding Mafia bosses of the island.

“At the airport,” said Alessandro, “I said something wrong. Something that made you angry.”

“I wasn’t angry, and you didn’t say anything wrong.”

“I did. And I’d like to know what it was. So I don’t make the same mistake again.”

“I’m telling you it was nothing.” She was brilliant at nipping promising conversations in the bud.

But Alessandro wasn’t giving up. “Anyway, now you know why I came back from the States. How about you?”

“I’m on vacation,” she lied.

“Your sister’s been living here for two years. How long is your vacation going to last?”

“Is this some kind of grilling?”

“Just curiosity.”

“That’s why you wanted to talk to me?”

He sighed softly and led her off the main path through the graveyard, turning onto a narrow walkway between walls of marble tombs. Five or six long rows of rectangular structures, with framed black-and-white photographs of the dead on them, giving their names and dates of birth and death. Flower arrangements lay on some of them.

“I really wanted to give you something,” he said as they disappeared from the view of other mourners among the marble tombs. “A present. And then I wanted to invite you on an outing.”

“Me—”

“The present first.” He took something out of his jacket pocket.

“Oh,” she said without enthusiasm. “A baby book.”

It was tiny, smaller than a pack of cigarettes, with leather binding and gilt on the edges of the pages.

“Unlike a real baby, it has the advantage of staying small and cute all its life,” he said. “And it doesn’t cry.”

“And smells better, I hope.”

He opened it and put his nose between the pages. “Not as good as when it was freshly printed, but it’s okay.” Her first reaction didn’t seem to deter him. “My father gave it to me before he sent me off to boarding school in the States.”

She bit back a comment and just watched him. His gaze wandered over the countless faces in the photographs on top of the tombs, most of them old and curiously indistinct, like ghosts. Many of the arrangements on the tombs were dried flowers.

“They die so quickly,” she said.

“I can tell you,” he replied quietly, nodding in the direction of the Carnevare family vault, “on
his
tomb they’d wither even without any heat.”

She fished the book out of his fingers. “Let me take a look.”

His smile returned, wandering from the corners of his mouth up to his green eyes, which momentarily distracted her attention from the little leather-bound book she was holding. But then she examined it more closely and saw there was no wording on the front and back covers, where the leather was scratched. The title was on the spine, in pale gold lettering:
Aesop’s Fables
.

She looked questioningly at him, and he showed her that smile again. When she realized that she was returning the sign, she instantly restored her expression to its usual mixture of arrogance and bad temper. She had several variations on it, and this one would make anyone run away. Except train ticket inspectors.

And Alessandro Carnevare.

“Do you know Aesop?” he asked.

“Sounds like an airline.”

“He was a Greek slave—lived six hundred years before Christ. He collected stories about animals. Well, really about human beings and their qualities—mainly the bad ones—which he attributed to appropriate animals.”

“Like the tortoise and the hare?”

“That’s the general idea. Except that one isn’t in Aesop.” His smile seemed a little arrogant again, but he probably couldn’t help it. “He never got to write them down himself; someone else did it a few hundred years later. Only a few of the stories that are called Aesop’s fables these days were really by him.” He shrugged his shoulders, while his eyes stayed sharp and piercing. “I liked them a lot when I was younger.”

“And now you’re giving them to me?” She didn’t want to sound sarcastic, but there was no way around it. “How sweet.”

She opened the little book and touched the binding with the tip of her nose. It did smell good—strange and unusual. At home in New York she’d had paperbacks, but none as old as this. The smell made her think of the library in the Palazzo Alcantara. She’d glanced into it in passing that morning. But still, this book smelled different. Not at all musty, but rather more like it had been opened again and again over many years, as if people had leafed through it and then settled down to read it.

And she realized that the book still meant something to him. Which made it even harder to understand why he wanted to give it to her, of all people.

Aesop’s Fables.
Stories about animals with human qualities. He was watching her.

“Thanks,” she said, closing it again. “I like books. I just haven’t ever had many.”

“A baby book, you said.” His eyes were sparkling. “Let one in and the next will arrive by themselves.”

She scrutinized him through narrowed eyes, interested but a little irritated. “But that’s not all,” she said. “Is it?”

“Like I said, I wanted to invite you out. I haven’t been in Sicily for years except on vacations, so I’m basically as new to it as you.”

“And you think that makes us friends.” She said that fast, in a cold, hard voice, and she could see that it had hit home.

But he was trying not to let it show. “Several of us are going over to Isola Luna tomorrow. It’s just a big chunk of rock, really. Volcanic rock with a few houses and a landing up on the north coast.” He shrugged his shoulders apologetically. “The island belongs to my family. Tano’s drummed up a few of his friends for the expedition, but you can believe me when I tell you they’re definitely not
my
friends.”

“You’re asking me if I’ll go with you and your, forgive me, only barely tolerable cousin—”

“Second cousin.”

“—and a gang of definitely-not-your-friends who are total strangers to me, out to some offshore island?”

“Don’t forget the fabulously showy yacht that’ll take us. Another of my father’s toys.” He pushed his hair back, but it instantly fell over his forehead again. “I can also guarantee that after the first ten minutes a few of the gang will be stepping out of line, probably consuming some kind of banned substance and then sooner or later throwing up on deck.” He smiled. “Your aunt will forbid you to come, of course.”

She bent her head, looked at him closely, and then glanced past him to Florinda, who had changed position and propped her sunglasses in her hair. She was watching them with eagle eyes as they walked down the path between the graves.

“You’ll have to get out of the house unseen.” He followed her eyes. “Fundling can collect you tomorrow morning if you like.”

Twilight lengthened the humpbacked shadows of the trees. The mountaintops were still bathed in sunlight, falling like golden icing on the tops of the pines, but nocturnal shadows had begun rising some time ago from the inner courtyard of the palazzo and the silent olive groves.

Rosa was sitting at the open window of her room with her knees drawn up, looking out. Two floors below her was the roof of the greenhouse. The glass was clouded with condensation on the inside, and only the faint light of a lamp showed through a tangle of palm leaves and branches. But palms grew outdoors in Sicily, so what else was Florinda growing in there? Maybe orchids?

In the car on the way back, Florinda had been trying to pump Rosa about her conversation with Alessandro. Rosa just said she’d met him at the airport, he had recognized her, and obviously wanted to make friends in spite of the old family feud. She could hear for herself what that sounded like, and it amused her that the reaction of the other two was exactly what she’d expected. Florinda suspected a plot hatched by her archenemy Cesare, while Zoe acted like the big sister and condescendingly warned her against Alessandro’s bad influence. The whole thing made Rosa sleepy rather than angry. She blamed it on jet lag; she still wasn’t entirely over that. And while the two of them got worked up, she simply dozed off and slept for most of the drive home.

She didn’t say a word about the island.

Instead, she waited until Florinda was running herself a bath, then went into her study again. She opened the computer, planning to find out more about this Isola Luna and maybe look at two or three of the articles she hadn’t had time to read in the morning. She was also going to Google the name Tano Carnevare.

But a new window opened on the desktop, asking for a password. Florinda must have discovered that she’d been on the computer earlier, and had taken precautious to make sure she didn’t do it again without permission. Rosa angrily closed it down, fervently wishing it would get a virus, and wandered out onto the terrace with the panoramic view to the west of the palazzo.