Arcadia Burns (9 page)

Iole picked up a lock of Rosa’s hair and smelled it, as if that were the most natural thing in the world to do. “Have you asked the judge yet?”

“I’ll talk to her when…as soon as I see her.”

“She
must
let me go! I’d love to see Uncle Augusto again.”

Augusto Dallamano was Iole’s last living relation. Six and a half years before, the rest of her family had been murdered by the Carnevares. Iole herself had been held hostage—until Rosa and Alessandro had freed her. She’d been pestering Rosa for weeks to be allowed to visit her uncle. But that was far from easy to arrange.

“Uncle Augusto taught me how to shoot,” announced Iole.

“Terrific.”

“With an automatic pistol. And a shotgun, too.”

“How old were you then?”

Iole frowned, and counted silently. “Eight?”

Rosa groaned.

Dallamano was living, with a new identity, under the witness protection program of the state prosecutor’s office. Rosa had met him once, in Sintra, near Lisbon, and in the park of the Quinta da Regaleira he had answered some of her questions about the mysterious find made by the Dallamanos on their diving expeditions in the Strait of Messina.

“The judge isn’t very happy with me right now, did you know that?” Rosa guessed that her explanations would simply bounce off Iole. She had missed six years with other human beings, six years of contact with the outside world. It was easy
to like her, but sometimes she could rile you, without knowing what she had done wrong. She had quit therapy after the first session, and Rosa could understand that. Her own experience with psychotherapy had not been a good one.

“Judge Quattrini never gives you anything for free,” added Rosa. “If there’s nothing in it for her, she isn’t interested.”

“Then we’ll have to give her something.”

“Like scented candles?”

“She could have the pine-scented ones. I don’t like those so much.”

“I kind of think that won’t be enough.”

“How about some sort of Mafia information?”

Now and then Iole said something so disarmingly naive that Rosa wondered whether there wasn’t an element of calculation in it after all. But the girl’s mind had already moved on to another thought. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

“What else did you buy?”

Iole leaned forward conspiratorially, as if someone might be eavesdropping on them. “I explored the cellar.”

Rosa looked past her and down the long corridor. She’d been down here only once since the deaths of Florinda and Zoe. The light came from yellow lamps held in latticework grilles at wide intervals on the ceiling. In between the circles of light they cast, strips of shadow moved over the masonry. Like striped tiger fur.

“There’s an iron door right at the back, under the north wing,” said Iole, with an air of mystery. “And something mechanical humming behind it. An engine, I think.”

“It’s the old freezer. It still works, but it’s not in use. No one can get in there to turn the thing off.”

“They can now.”

“The door has a lock with a number code.”

Iole nodded, and the corners of her mouth turned up in a grin of pride.

Rosa looked at her doubtfully. “You cracked the code?”

“Maybe.”

“How did you do it?”

“I tried everything.”

The code consisted of four or five digits. Millions of possible combinations. Rosa shook her head, unable to take it in. “Nonsense,” she said.

“Well, I had luck. And five days without Signora Come-Do-Your-Lessons-This-Minute.”

“Did you write it down?”

“Memorized it.”

Shaking her head, Rosa took Iole’s hand and said what she assumed she
should
say. “I don’t want you running around down here on your own.”

“There’s nobody else around.”

“But it’s…dark.” God, she thought, she was worse than her own mother.

“So?” Iole laughed. “I’m not scared of the dark. It was dark in those places where they shut me up. The huts up in the mountains. The empty farmhouses. Even in the villa on Isola Luna.”

Rosa felt that the role of big sister was beyond her. Zoe
hadn’t been much good at it, and she wasn’t doing any better herself. “Okay,” she said, resigned. “I guess there’s no real reason why you should stay away from the cellar. Do what you want, but don’t come to me later and…and complain.” Good god.

Iole looked at her triumphantly. “Don’t you want to see?”

“See what?”

“The freezer. What’s behind the door.”

“Is it important?

“Well, important…” Iole shrugged her shoulders.

“Then it can wait until tomorrow, okay? I’m worn out.” She glanced along the dimly lit cellar corridor again. Dust hovered in the yellow, tiger-striped light. She suppressed a shudder. “Anyway,
I’m
scared of the dark!” She said that with a twinkle in her eye, but at the moment it was closer to the truth than she liked.

Iole poked a finger into her stomach. “You are not!”

Rosa sighed. “Today I am.”

R
OSA SLEPT LIKE THE
dead until morning. Once awake, though, she remembered her date with Alessandro, and got up in frantic haste, showering and eating breakfast in record time.

The helicopter was waiting on the landing pad near the palazzo. In jeans, black sweater, and sneakers she climbed aboard and buckled her seat belt. As usual, the pilot complained about everything that was wrong with the old chopper, but she trusted him when he told her, with a gloomy expression, that they were likely to arrive safe and sound just this once.

Soon the gray volcanic cone of Mount Etna rose ahead of them. To avoid the treacherous winds blowing up its slopes, and to keep out of the monitored airspace of Catania, the pilot took the helicopter farther south over the open sea. Keeping their distance from the coast, they followed its course northeast and then, flying low over the water, raced toward the Strait of Messina between Sicily and the toe of the Italian boot.

Below them, the steely blue Mediterranean rushed past, the crests of the waves throwing the helicopter’s shadow back and forth like an oil slick. Apart from a few sailboats, the sea could have been swept clean.

Only some time later did two dots appear on the horizon.

“There they are,” said the pilot’s voice in Rosa’s headset. She was sitting beside him in the cockpit, but the helicopter made too much noise for her to go without ear protectors. Soon after that the headset began to crackle. They were entering the area where Alessandro’s people scrambled radio traffic.

The
Gaia
, the Carnevares’ 130-foot yacht, lay dazzling white on the water. From above, Rosa saw that the whirlpool on the sundeck had been covered with an awning. No one was using the luxury seating either.

The second boat, rocking on the waves not far from the yacht, was not as impressive at first sight, although Rosa was sure it couldn’t be worth much less than the
Gaia
. Belowdecks the modest-looking vessel had hundreds of cubic feet filled with high-tech equipment. She knew what vast sums the
Colony
’s day-to-day operations
—
not to mention the use of the unmanned drone diver—required.

The helicopter came down squarely on the
Gaia’s
landing pad.

Alessandro, ducking low, hurried toward her as she jumped down from the cockpit. He hugged her while they were still below the circling rotors, and then they walked hand in hand to the railing, as the chopper rose in the air again behind them. The pilot waved a hand in farewell, turned west in a tight curve, and flew back toward the coast.

She gave Alessandro a long kiss as the noise of the helicopter died away in the distance. He held her tight as if the wind might carry her off with it across the sea. A hot, tingling
sensation ran over her from head to foot, so unexpected and exciting that it took her a moment to work out what it was—her new skin reacting to his touch. Its tinge of pink had faded by now, but her nerves were in turmoil as she felt Alessandro near again. She had expected a chill, the sign of the snake stirring inside her, but instead a comfortable warmth took possession of her. She nestled closer in his arms.

When they finally moved apart, she realized that so far she had felt him but hadn’t looked at him. She looked now—and it was a shock.

He was pale and seemed exhausted, with dark rings under his eyes. His brown hair was even messier than usual, and the dimples that were always there couldn’t disguise the fact that he clearly hadn’t had much to smile about in the past few days. Even in his weary state he was still outrageously good-looking, and his green eyes easily outshone his pallor, but she could tell that something was wrong. All at once her own exhaustion disappeared.

“You look terrible,” she said.

“I haven’t been sleeping much. And when I did, I had bad dreams.”

She’d had those, too, but she had already decided to keep the reason for them to herself for the time being. Not just out of consideration for him, but also out of sheer self-interest. She wasn’t going to let Tano’s ghost cast a shadow over their reunion. She had that much power over it. Tano might have taken possession of her body, but with a little effort she could wipe him from her memory.

“If I’d known you were coming here, I’d have—”

She put her hand on the back of his neck and silenced him gently with another kiss. Only then did she ask, “What’s wrong?”

“Well, my own people would like to be rid of me, and sooner or later someone will try to do something about it, but that’s nothing new.” He smiled with the mixture of melancholy and determination that no one had mastered as well as Alessandro. “How about you?” he asked. “You stopped calling.”

“Later, okay?”

He looked her in the eye. “You’ve found out something.”

“Give me a little time?”

“They hurt you.”

“Alessandro, please…I’ll tell you all about it, but for now I just want to be with you. We don’t have to tell each other all our problems right away.”

He took her hand and led her from the landing pad to the wood-paneled interior of the yacht, and along a stairway with gold fittings down to the main deck. When they were in the open again, Rosa saw that the
Gaia
and the
Colony
were fastened together with cables as thick as a man’s arm. They moved from one vessel to the other along a gangplank.

Two men and a woman, all in blue overalls, were standing by the
Colony
’s rail, smoking and looking at them. One of the men, gray-haired and tanned brown by the sun, nodded briefly in Rosa’s direction. Professor Stuart Campbell, Englishman and egocentric treasure hunter—he was in charge
of the investigations that Alessandro had commissioned the group of marine researchers and archaeologists to carry out.

“Signorina Alcantara,” he greeted her.

“Professor Campbell.” She didn’t like the way he looked at her, as if she were some dumb little blonde who had hooked Alessandro. However, she wasn’t interested enough in Campbell for it to infuriate her seriously.

Alessandro let her enter the control room of the
Colony
ahead of him. Half a dozen men and women, also in overalls, were sitting close together in front of a great deal of radar and echo-sounding equipment. The windowless room might as well have been inside the drone that was operated from here by remote control through the trenches and ravines on the seabed. The air was stuffy, and cigarette smoke from outside drifted in through the doorway, which did nothing to improve the atmosphere, but the others didn’t seem bothered.

“Here,” said Alessandro, pointing to one of the screens. “Take a look at that.”

It was a three-dimensional diagram of the seabed, covering three hundred square feet. Alessandro used a touch pad to alter the perspective. As he moved two fingertips apart on the pad, the virtual camera zoomed in on the curving lines of the pattern.

“Those are the exact coordinates from the Dallamanos’ documents,” he said.

Rosa looked intently at the graphics. They took some getting used to. “Looks empty.” Which would explain why when she and Alessandro had tried diving, twice, they
had found nothing either time.

“Wrong,” said a red-haired woman in her midthirties. Rosa had forgotten her name, but on her last visit the redhead had been the only one on board who would condescend to give her more than a brief greeting. “To call it empty isn’t quite accurate.”

“But?”

The woman archaeologist moved Alessandro’s hand aside and used the touch pad herself. Perspective and size changed rapidly as she zoomed in on an inconspicuous part of the network of lines. A brief tap on the keypad, and at once a second and much finer pattern overlaid the first. Rosa’s brow wrinkled. “Stones.”

“That’s what we thought ourselves at first,” said the woman. “Not statues, anyway—not what we were looking for.”

Rosa glanced inquiringly at Alessandro.

Patience
, his eyes said.

The researcher dragged a cursor down to the edge of the picture. A column of figures in the corner changed. The framework filled in from the outside; then it looked as if someone had placed a gray cloth over the structure.

Rosa leaned closer to the screen. “
Round
stones?” she asked skeptically.

“Plinths.”

“Twelve of them,” added Alessandro. “All inside that square.”

Rosa ran her fingers through her hair. “Does that mean…?”

“Someone got here ahead of us,” said the woman. “Someone snapped up the statues from under our noses.”

“But no one knows the coordinates!”

“Are you sure?”

“Dallamano was taking us for a ride,” she murmured.

Alessandro shook his head. “Not necessarily.”

“You of all people defending him? He almost killed you.”

“According to him, your aunt had the documents in her hands, at least for a few hours. And Pantaleone got them from her. We don’t know who may have been told about the contents of the documents, by either or both of them.”

“Not to mention the fact,” the researcher added, “that this area is more than three miles offshore, outside the country’s borders, so in theory anyone could have come across them. Maybe by chance, maybe because he knew what he was looking for.”

Rosa snorted. “Chance!”

“We don’t believe that either,” one of the men said behind them. Rosa could smell the cigarette smoke that he brought into the control room even before she turned to him.

Professor Campbell pointed to a monitor on the opposite wall. One of the men at the controls vacated his seat for the professor. Rosa exchanged a glance with Alessandro, who nodded encouragingly at her.

“Let’s get to the reason why I asked you to come here, Signore Carnevare. Look at this.” The treasure hunter indicated the screen, where the different camera angles of the underwater drone were changing in quick succession. Finally he stopped at one of them. “This one was taken by the
starboard camera on
Colony Two
.”

One of the floodlights moved over the seabed. Crevices and holes gaped wide in the rock. The Strait of Messina was constantly exposed to underwater earth tremors, and was encrusted with geological scar tissue.

“How deep is it?” asked Rosa.

“ Not very deep. A little over a hundred and twenty feet. We’re also searching the bed with divers, but that’s laborious, and not half as effective as the instruments on board
Colony Two
.” Campbell kept the photograph on the monitor and tapped the glass with a ballpoint. “This is what I’m interested in. It’s one of our plinths.”

Rosa couldn’t see much more than a raised round shape, with a few angular chunks of rock in the background.

“It measures roughly three feet in diameter, but it’s probably taller than that. We can assume that, like the other eleven, it’s sunk deep into the seabed. But we’re going to take a closer look at it.”

The dim, ghostly illumination from the searchlight and the floating particles visible in the foreground of the picture reminded Rosa of the Dallamano photographs. Those, however, had shown a statue of two animals: a panther upright on his hind legs, with the broad body of a giant snake coiled around him. The reptile’s head hung before the eyes of the big cat, and the two of them were looking at each other.

“We’ve compared the photos you gave us with these.” Campbell pressed a combination of keys. The picture of the panther and the snake that they had found at Iole’s house
moved over the picture on the screen like a film. The perspectives were not exactly the same, but because of the rocky structures in the background there was no possible doubt. It was the same place, but the statue was gone.

“Fuck,” whispered Rosa.

The treasure hunter smiled. “My sentiments exactly.”

She glanced at Alessandro. The greenish light from the screen intensified the color of his eyes. For a moment she couldn’t look away from him. “Did you know about this?” she asked.

“Not until yesterday. I was going to tell you about it today.”

“Does it mean that’s it? Everything here was all for nothing?”

“Definitely not for nothing,” said Campbell drily. “Wait until you see my invoice.”

“Wasn’t salvaging the statues supposed to be your job?” she asked sharply.

“I’m not through yet.” For the first time he spoke as if he took her seriously. “I have some information that will be new to your friend as well.”

Alessandro’s cheek muscles twitched. “Go on, let’s hear it.”

Campbell zoomed in closer on the round block of stone. “As I said, the plinths probably go down several feet into the seabed. That assumption is based on values drawn from past experience of the geological nature of this region, tremors, volcanic activity, et cetera, et cetera…. But let’s look at the surface of the stone, so far as the picture quality allows it. I already have divers down there who will look more closely
at our find, put it under a magnifying glass, but it looks like someone cut the statues neatly away from their plinths.”

“You mean each plinth and its statue were carved from a single piece of rock?” asked Alessandro.

Campbell nodded. “Do you see that fluted structure? What we have there are either traces left by extremely fine conventional cutters, or a laser cutter manufactured specially for an underwater operation like this one.”

“Then someone must have invested a lot of money to get hold of those statues,” said Rosa thoughtfully.

“Going down to a hundred and twenty feet isn’t a problem for a well-trained amateur diver, and certainly not for experienced deep-sea or military divers. With the right equipment, you can stay at that depth for quite some time. However, we’ve calculated that to sever a stone block like that cleanly would probably take several hours. Which means that the teams down there either worked with top-quality respiratory technology, probably the kind used by military divers, or worked in several shifts.”

Rosa’s hand was lying on the back of Campbell’s chair. When she felt the touch of Alessandro’s fingers, they exchanged a fleeting smile. She couldn’t have said just what she had expected of this venture. She had trained intensively as a diver herself, but when she and Alessandro had finally gone down, they had been unable to find anything but rocks and mud. Only after that had they hired a professional salvage team.