The Demon Catchers of Milan #2: The Halcyon Bird (4 page)

I could now.

After Nonno and Emilio had come to Center Plains and performed the exorcism, they had brought me to Milan, to a strange and unexpected homecoming. I hoped, if his spirit was still out there, my grandfather would one day forgive me.

My demon had come back to Milan, too. And for the first few months after I arrived, I had had to stay inside our apartment or in the candle shop, going outside only with the family to protect me. Finally, Signora Negroponte, a witch from Lucca who is a family friend, had helped me find a talisman that would protect me outside. She and I had spent quite a bit of time testing different objects, a harrowing process since it involved me stepping out into the street to see if the demon would come while I was holding a sacred acorn or wearing a smear of evil-smelling paste or clutching a splinter of wood pulled from our stairs. In the end, I found my talisman myself: a bell that had hung on the door of the shop. It was smaller even than Francesco’s Guatemalan bell and had a miniature bird engraved on its side, the same one that was carved in stone above the shop door. Now I wore it on a leather string around my neck.

“In Italia i treni arrivano tanto in ritardo che bisogna fargli
il test di gravidanza,”
Uncle Matteo was saying. “In Italy, the trains are so late they need a pregnancy test.” Égide threw back his head and laughed at the ceiling. I knew that the family hadn’t been all that excited the first time Francesco had brought home a six-foot black man (in some ways, sadly, they aren’t that different from other Milanese), but they seemed to have gotten over it. Aunt Brigida scolded her husband halfheartedly, but Nonna was laughing, too, finally taking a seat at the table with her own coffee.

Uncle Matteo took a long, appreciative sip of his. “Ah! So good,” and Égide nodded.

I asked myself for the first time why we had never met any of Égide’s family. I knew his father had brought him over from Rwanda, and that was all. I also noticed that Uncle Matteo didn’t ask Francesca about her work.

“We have to get going if I am to walk you to the office,” Égide said to her, and she nodded.

“We’ll get out of here, too,” said Aunt Brigida. “Any errands, Laura?” she asked, looking at Nonna.

“Nothing, thanks.”

The kitchen emptied; I picked up the cups and took them to the sink, looking out the window at our lavender plants and the courtyard next door while I ran the hot water.

“Thank you,” said Nonna, still sitting at the table. The winter sun picked out dust motes in the air. After a while, she asked, “How did last night go?”

It seemed to me that there was another question she really wanted to ask instead, and I wished I could work out what it was.

“Pretty well,” I said. “The demon jumped from the husband to the wife, but we got him in the end, and I think they will be okay. I hope they will stay together.”

“You think that would be the best thing?” she asked.

“Yes. Or … I don’t know,” I said. “But it was the
Festa di San Valentino
, after all. I guess they could work it out. They seem to love each other.”

“It can take more than that,” she said, turning her cup slowly.

“But isn’t there always a way? Can’t people work it out? Isn’t true love that important?”

Nonna looked at me. “Are you sure they are true lovers?” she asked.

I frowned at the ceiling. “No. But … how can you tell?”

At that, she laughed.

“Are we the ones who can tell?” she shot back. Then she glanced at the clock. “Go read your books,” she said. “I’ll need you in the afternoon, to help with dinner.”

I gave her a kiss and headed down the wooden stairs to the shop. Nonno was already sitting at the desk, reading the paper.

“Doing all right after last night?” he asked, glancing up.

“Yes, thank you.”

“Read for a while, then go for a good walk, to the Parco Sempione. Take the air, walk among some trees. You’ll be
remembering things, under the surface. Any dreams?”

“Yes … of … of that time,” I said.

“So. Walk. But start your books first. And then, after lunch.”

“Okay.”

The pile of books on the table had not shrunk since yesterday. I pulled it to me. I really was getting interested in all the history I had to read, but still, I think a part of me will always be a B student, looking for a way out of homework. I opened my study notebook and sighed. Nonno looked up from his newspaper and grinned.

“Try this,” he said, handing me the front page. “Glance at the headlines and tell me what you think relates to the history you’ve been reading. Which headlines have their roots in the past?”

I took the front page, greasy with ink, and glanced down, still thrilled that I could read it so easily. There was a trial featuring a couple of bankers. One of the people interviewed was a Piero Leone Strozzi, and I knew there was a famous Florentine family of bankers named Strozzi. Had a branch moved to Milan at one point? One of the guys on trial was named Lorenzo Benedetto Rota. “A relative of that famous composer guy, the one who wrote
The Godfather
soundtrack, is being charged with corruption,” I ventured. “Does that count?”

He nodded. “Do you think that family has made a habit of corruption?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’d have to look it up.”

I read another piece about the Sanremo Music Festival. Nonno nodded again. “It’s new, they only started it in 1951, as part of the effort to revitalize their city after the war.” I thought about how 1958, when my grandfather had left Italy, seemed like a long time ago to me. “Its founders have interesting roots, too,” Nonno went on. “Perhaps it’s related to the
famiglia
Rota? I can’t remember, myself.”

There was an article about the upcoming election, another about Italian politics in general, and one about the financial crises across Europe. I felt suddenly overwhelmed. Did Italy’s political problems begin during the
Risorgimento
, the nineteeth-century movement toward Italian reunification—or during the first time Italy had been united, under the ancient Romans? Did the financial crises have their roots in the banking systems of the Middle Ages or in the invention of numbers, or of money? Or with the development of carbon-based life-forms on Earth?

An old man had entered the shop. I saw him out of the corner of my eye and looked up.

I hadn’t heard the shop bells jingle to announce him, and that was the first clue. The second clue was that the light didn’t fall on him the same way it fell on Nonno; this old man’s face seemed to remember another sun. I waited for the third clue, for him to speak words that I could hear only in my thoughts, but it never came; the old man said nothing. He turned and raised his eyebrows at me.

Nonno said, without opening his mouth, “Allow me to
present you with the newest one. Cousin Roberto’s granddaughter, from America, Mia Della Torre. Mia, this is Respicio Della Torre, a relation of ours from the eighteenth century.” I looked more closely at him, annoyed at myself for not having noticed the family resemblance. The three of us shared the same high, square cheekbones, the same pale eyes, the same generous, sad mouth; yet at least twelve generations lay between him and Nonno. Signore Respicio bowed to me, and I saw that his clothes were old-fashioned; he wore a closely fitted, drab jacket, and tight pants that ended just below the knee, and white stockings smeared with dirt. His elegant shoes had buckles on them, and he wore his curly gray hair in a ponytail. I glanced at Nonno, not sure what to do, but he didn’t offer any advice, so I bowed, and said in my mind,
“Cugino, è un piacere di fare la sua conoscenza,”
as formally as I could. He smiled faintly, bowed again, and turned toward Nonno, holding out his hand. Giuliano opened his palm and Respicio put something in it. I blinked. When I opened my eyes, he had departed.

I knew what I’d seen: a messenger, a suicide, one of the spirits who has to keep to this world even though he or she tried so hard to leave it. These spirits could earn release by doing tasks, however, and some of those who remained trapped in Milan helped our family. I had never seen one before that did not have anything to say; usually the opposite: they were often crabby, or angry, or sad, or didn’t want to do what we asked of them.

Giuliano opened his hand. In his palm was a signet ring. It faded away as we both looked at it.

“He never speaks,” said Nonno. “As you see, he’s been with us longer than most; I think he has a great deal to work off. Our family did not record his death as a suicide. We might have been too ashamed, or too determined to have him buried inside the churchyard. He left a widow behind, and more than one child. I can’t tell how he provided for them, and I think he did not. Our family had hit hard times, and I do not think anyone else could take them in. Do you understand what that would have meant? They would have starved, or died of overwork or abuse, or the widow would have had to become a prostitute, and might have died in childbirth or of disease. It was a terrible thing, what he did, you understand.”

“I can’t imagine it,” I said. “Or maybe I can. It makes my stomach turn.”

He nodded. We sat in silence for a moment. Then I said, “The way he spoke by handing you an object, that was interesting. What does it mean, that ring? I didn’t get a good look at it.”

Giuliano laughed. “I didn’t, either. That’s the trouble with Respicio. Every time he brings me an object in order to give me a message, he knows precisely what he means, and I usually have no idea! And then it’s too late.”

I laughed, too. Then I said, “Maybe … maybe that’s why it’s taking him so long to do his service to the world?”

He frowned. “Even with rings, and old wine corks, and a
book of calculations for the stresses on bridges and arches, and once, a dead rat … a messenger can get a lot done in half a century, and he has been here more than two.”

He looked out the window. “A signet ring,” he mused. He turned to his open notebook and began to sketch what he could remember of it, asking me to look over his shoulder. He thought he had seen a compass on the face; I couldn’t recall anything like that, but I might not have been close enough.

“Could be a Masonic symbol,” he said.

I thought of all the puzzles I was trying to solve, about my own demon, and about the family and my grandfather. I thought about how each exorcism so far had seemed like a puzzle, where we had to figure out what made the demon do what it did. If we were successful, we could save lives.

I looked around the room, at the flickering candles on the shelves, and I smiled. I had fallen in love with history and the riddles of demons. What had begun as a desperate road to survival had started to bring me joy, too.

I tried not to think too much about how my demon would almost certainly kill me when (not if) he succeeded in possessing me again. Even so, I’d felt a thrill when we had worked out the nature of the spirit from a concentration camp that had plagued Signora Galeazzo, or when my demon had recited ancient Greek the third time I had encountered him. Or when he’d spouted poetry.

Because I knew now that my demon was a poet. Or at least
he recited poems. I have memorized the lines he spoke to me in Italian:

I have only ever heard this sonnet once, recited to me by a startled boy my demon had borrowed for a mouthpiece. But I remember every word of it, and I made sure to write it down afterward.

“Poetry!” I said aloud, breaking out of my thoughts.

“What?” asked Nonno, who had been gazing thoughtfully at his sketch of the ring.

“I’ve got to start trying to find that poem by my demon.”

Giuliano knit his brows. “You haven’t found it yet?”

“No, of course not. I haven’t started looking,” I grumbled.

“Well,” he said, “I should scold you. But your freedom is so new to you, and as far as I can tell, that bell around your neck is giving you some time.”

He paused, then looked at me. “No. I will scold you. Find the poem, Mia!”

He cuffed my shoulder. Then he stood up, putting his notebook away in a desk drawer and tidying the books with swift hands.

“In fact, come!” he said, grabbing his coat off the back of his chair. He paused at the door and asked, “Do you have the poem in your notebook?”

I stared at him, even more annoyed by this question than by his pompousness or his peremptory command. “Yes, it’s in my purse.”

“Good. We’ll take that walk now,” he added as I scrambled into my coat and followed him out the door into the freezing industrial fog of February. I pulled my scarf from my pocket and twisted it around my neck; I’d found it at the Thursday market in the Via San Marco, one of the first Italian things I’d ever bought for myself, edged with dangling circles of lace. I matched Nonno’s quick step as he turned down the Via Brera
toward the center of the city. We threaded our way through the art students in front of the Pinacoteca, dodging their giant portfolios, and headed out of the pocket-size piazza into the narrow part of the Via Brera, before it crosses Via Monte di Pietà and Via dell’Orso, and the people stop being students and start being NATO and EU employees.