The Demon Catchers of Milan #2: The Halcyon Bird (10 page)

“If you have doubts about her discretion …” said Giuliano, and made as if to rise from his chair.

“Of course not,” Signore Strozzi shrugged, and I knew he was lying. I also realized that he thought of us as servants, which was why we were not offered lunch. I hadn’t run into this before. Most of those my family helped treated them as respected doctors, or neighbors, or friends—at least as equals. This man had an air that made me want to apologize for not
wearing nicer clothes. I snuck a glance at Giuliano, who sat straight and silent in his chair, looking at our client with his far-seeing Della Torre eyes. At last, he asked, “Why did your wife ask you to see us?”

Signore Strozzi snorted and looked down at his hands. He gazed at them for some time, spreading his thick fingers wide on the polished oak of his desk, letting each separate ring tap the hard surface.

I remembered the night we exorcised Lisetta Maria Umberti, how Nonno had come to each of us, looked us in the face, and let the silence grow until it became a space of its own within the room, a protected place, where the unseen might be seen, where secrets might be spoken aloud. Was that what he was doing now? I found myself attending to my breathing, for a moment thinking of the wooden folds of the robe on the Madonna statue in my room, the one I meditated on, with the blue tinting and the gilded stars peeking out of the drapes; I could picture the edges of the robe where the paint had worn away, leaving half stars, and shades of blue paint and wood grain blending with each other.

The silence, the protected place grew around us, but still Signore Strozzi sat without speaking, and I tried to see how we could get him to trust us enough to unburden himself, for it seemed clear that he did carry a burden.

“My wife,” he said at last, “believes …”

We watched him decide not to tell us the whole truth.

“… believes I’m crazy.”

He paused.

“She called you and not the doctors because she relies on your discretion. The man who referred you said you are known to be ‘as secretive as the Vatican.’ ”

He looked up.

Giuliano smiled briefly. “More secretive than that, I hope,” he replied. He waited, then added, “We have to be, you see. Our lives depend on it.”

Is that how you do it?
I thought.
Show them that you are vulnerable, too?

Signore Strozzi looked him in the eye. “My wife believes that I imagine that my hands are rotting off. I don’t know where she gets this idea.”

“She had mentioned this to me,” Nonno said. “Your son, Tommaso, also.”

“Ah! She poisons his mind!” Signore Strozzi growled. I saw the thick fingers tighten into fists. “My own son! And he believes it.”

“And they are quite wrong?” Giuliano suggested. “Their fears are baseless?”

“Yes. I think I know why they do it, though.”

His eyes took on a manic gleam.

“They want to control me. My wife has never been content with everything I buy her, and my son waits and waits to see me in my grave.”

I hadn’t liked Tommaso, but, to be fair, I hadn’t gotten that feeling from him. He had seemed deeply worried about his father.

I could see Nonno watching Signore Strozzi’s clenching hands, as if he were working something out. I looked at them, too, then up at the banker’s angry eyes.

“Such family matters are beyond our help, I fear,” said Giuliano. “I can always listen, and offer the advice of an old man with a family of his own. The family is always complicated; it’s one of the first things we learn in our profession.”

“I fear this family is beyond any help,” replied Signore Strozzi angrily. “What did I do to deserve such a wife? Nobody warned me against her, not even my uncle, who was always very hard to please. Ah!”

I thought about what lengths Signora Strozzi and her son had already gone to to help him, tracking us down by word of mouth, for there was no other way—asking around discreetly until they found us, checking to make sure they could trust us. In spite of this, Signore Strozzi sounded so ungrateful. Were all rich people this untrusting? I wasn’t sure if my family here counted as rich, even though they owned a couple of apartments in the center of the city. In fact, I hadn’t thought about it until that moment.

Nonno rose.

“I understand,” he said gently. “Perhaps the best I can do is give you my card, and tell you that we will be happy to aid you
should you ever need us. And we are, as you have already learned, more secretive than the Vatican.” He smiled faintly as he said this.

He stood up. I started to rise as he took his card from his case and handed it across to Signore Strozzi.

“Please just place it on the desk,” Signore Strozzi said. “As you see, in my condition …”

He held out his hands, and looked down at them, frowning. “You should not have to see them this way. I cannot think for the life of me why Fiamma didn’t wrap them this morning! She’s a good wife,” he went on, smiling apologetically, “but she doesn’t always remember everything.”

The smile transformed his face; he looked warmer and kinder, which made the whole moment even more unreal. Giuliano changed gears faster than I did; I was still staring at Signore Strozzi’s healthy, heavy hands, full of rings, and wondering at his kind words for his wife when Nonno sat back down, dropping the card on the desk in front of Signore Strozzi. I sat down again, too.

“She wraps them in the morning?” Giuliano prompted.

“And the evening. It helps, though I fear it can’t quite take away the smell, for which I apologize. You are very good to come to me,
dottore
. I know house calls aren’t common any more, but I would prefer not to come to the clinic for this. My situation, my station in life, you see.”

“Of course, naturally,” said Nonno. “Perhaps you could answer a few questions for me?”

“Certainly,
dottore
. But first let me remedy this; it must disgust you and your assistant.”

“We are used to such things; please do not trouble yourself.”

I nodded, too, trying to keep my incredulity from showing in my face.

“Very well, if it is not too much for you,
dottore
.”

“I assure you, it is not. It will help us, too, if you leave them unwrapped, for then we can examine them more closely in a moment,” Giuliano told him. “So, please, tell me, signore. When exactly did you first notice there was something wrong with your hands?”

Signore Strozzi’s brow furrowed; he looked at the ceiling. Again, I felt sure he was calculating how much to tell us. “At least since October. I cannot remember the exact day, for my head was full of particular business at work. We bankers have had some hard years recently, you know. So much scandal, so many troubles in the market.”

I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was keeping an awful lot from us. I remembered the trial I’d seen mentioned, the composer’s relation—and then thought of my father, swearing at the news, calling men like Signore Strozzi the biggest thieves ever born, liars and cheats, the curse of the ordinary man. I remembered the marches back home, the calls to have bankers jailed. I knew kids who had cut school for weeks to Occupy Wall Street. Gina and I hadn’t gone, partly because we knew we wouldn’t have whole skins if we’d ever dared to come
home, and partly because the idea of camping on the streets of New York scared us even more than the thought of our parents’ anger. I looked back at Signore Strozzi, wondering if he had committed some of the same crimes that the American bankers had been accused of. Giuliano seemed sympathetic, tipping his head in agreement with Signore Strozzi. “So about the time of the difficulties with the banks, perhaps? Didn’t all that start in October?”

Signore Strozzi replied, “It started long before that, but yes, I suppose all that scandal was just breaking out in the press in October. What a mess. Well, we’ve nearly cleared it up.”

“So your hands began to trouble you in October.”

“Yes, I believe so.”

“Did you first notice the trouble at home or at work? At a particular time of day, perhaps?”

“Not that I can remember,” said Signore Strozzi thoughtfully. “Let me see … I suppose I was at home when I first noticed. Yes, at dinner; it became difficult to hold a fork and knife.”

“Ah,” Nonno said, as if he’d just learned something very significant. “And was there pain then?”

“Not so much pain as numbness, and the smell of course. My wife and son did not notice it right away. But then, sometimes they don’t notice anything!”

Giuliano leaned forward, gazing more intently at Signore Strozzi’s hands.

“And the state of your hands now …? Is this what they looked like at first? Or have they grown worse, or improved?”

Signore Strozzi looked up at him blankly.

“I’m sorry?” he asked. “What about my hands?”

“Their condition,” Nonno prompted.

Signore Strozzi held them out in front of him, flexing those powerful, grasping fingers. He laughed.

“Ah, you’ve been talking to my wife. Well, look at them! Perfectly healthy. I think perhaps I should send you to examine
her
, don’t you think?”

Again, I watched Giuliano switch gears while I struggled to hide my surprise. “I will certainly have a chat with her, if it’s what you desire,” he said.

Signore Strozzi considered this, and replied, “Yes, I think you should. She’s probably gone out shopping by now. Perhaps you might stop by another time.”

“We would be glad to,” said Nonno, rising and collecting the large black case that Signore Strozzi must have mistaken for a doctor’s bag. I had noticed that it had names embossed in gold on it, just like our small cases. I stood, and Signore Strozzi acknowledged me vaguely, but only shook hands with Giuliano.

Once Nonno and I were in the street, we walked in silence for a block or so. As we passed a shopwindow full of fluttering spring dresses, he said, “Tell me what you observed.”

“You mean besides the way he switched back and forth, with no warning, not even a change of expression?”

“That, and all else you saw.”

I told him, and as I talked, I began to see even more, like how his attitude to his wife shifted with his beliefs about his hands. Giuliano raised his eyebrows approvingly at this observation.

“You are doing well,” he said, smiling. I smiled back. “You are helping me organize my thoughts, too,” he added. “It’s a tricky case.”

“Is it?” I asked. “Is it one of the harder ones you’ve had?”

Nonno grinned wryly. “It’s far too early to tell. It depends, too, what you mean by ‘hard,’ ” he said, his face darkening, and I thought of the things he had been through, the terrible decisions he had had to make. I knew he had had to choose to let his middle brother, Martino, die, in order to prevent my demon from gaining power in this world. The choice had also cost him his beloved cousin, my grandfather Roberto, who had left Milan because of what had happened. All this, and he had lost his son to the same demon, too.

“But as you see, we must spend time with a client,” he went on finally. “It is nearly always best to listen, to wait, to humor them.

“And this can be treacherous, Mia, especially with a very cunning demon, like the one I believe we are confronting. You must find a way to remain an observer, while at the same time doing your best to climb into their shoes, to understand them.”

I blinked. “How can we do that? It sounds impossible.”

He raised one eyebrow, the corner of his mouth lifting in a smile like his grandson’s, and nodded.

“Oh, yes, it’s probably impossible. But we must do it just the same.”

He looked at me, tipping his head like a bird.

“I have noticed that the young are so impatient.”

Adults are always saying stuff like this. I usually just switch it off, unless it’s Mom or Dad, in which case I argue, but I had already found that even when I was annoyed with Giuliano, he was still worth listening to.

“You think you can learn it all in a minute,” he went on. “But the truth is,
cara
, the most important things take an age just to understand, let alone master. My Laura did not learn to cook in a day, you know, and we did not learn to be married in a month, I can tell you. Remember the conversation you had with your cousins on Nonna’s birthday? About love?”

I nodded.

“Anna Maria doesn’t know everything about love just yet,” he said.

“Even I know that,” I replied, laughing.

“Yes,” he agreed, smiling at me. “That will take time, too. Patience, and time, just like you will need for learning our work. Speaking of Anna Maria,” he added, “I want you to ask her for some help finding an account of a case concerning the ruler of Milan during the 1740s. She has been going through
some notes and needs to refresh her memory as well. So when we get home, I wish you to call her and ask her. Yes?”

I texted her instead. She answered right away. “I’ll be over for dinner, will bring them. Of course he didn’t say when, exactly, in the 1740s.”

I texted, “Of course not,” and she wrote back, “Ha, ha, ha. See you then.”

Nonna roped me in to make ravioli for dinner, stuffed with wild mushrooms a friend had brought from the south.

“You’ve been having a busy week,” she said. “Did you like the Biblioteca Ambrosiana?”

“I did,” I said. “I wish we could have stayed longer.”

“You’ll get more chances,” she said lightly, passing me a ball of dough to knead. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?… More flour on your hands.”

I dusted my hands thoroughly and worked the dough, thinking over Signore Strozzi’s behavior, and then the moment when I had heard my demon’s cold, gravelly voice in the piazza, and smelled cinnamon in the air.

“Be kind to the dough!” Nonna said with a laugh. “Don’t take your thoughts out on it.”

“Sorry,” I said. “It was not the most—comfortable—day.”

I realized immediately this was a ridiculous thing to say to a woman who had been married to a demon catcher for sixty years. She waited for me to go on.

“The interview went okay. Signore Strozzi is kind of a jerk.”

She grunted agreement and took the ball of dough from me.

“Peel and mince,” she commanded, passing me a head of garlic and some shallots.