The Demon Catchers of Milan #2: The Halcyon Bird (5 page)

“We are going,” said Nonno, “to a place where you can look for the poem. I know I said you should go to the Parco Sempione, but we are out in the fresh air, now—or fresh fog anyway—so let us go to the library first.”

We turned right at La Scala, and I wondered if Emilio was going to get us tickets to the opera, like he’d said he would. All I knew of opera involved scratchy dresses and long songs that made no sense, so I hoped he wouldn’t. We headed down the Via Santa Margherita and crossed the Piazza dei Mercanti, past the ancient, covered marketplace that gave the square its name. I asked Nonno to slow down so I could look at the great iron horse rings in the walls, the high arches over the empty, raised platform where the market had once stood.

“One of the oldest buildings in the city, covered with the young,” Nonno said, laughing. There were people my age all over the steps and leaning against the columns, holding hands, hanging out. Maybe they were older than I was, but they didn’t look it.

At home in Center Plains, they would be in trouble. Somebody from the shops around the piazza would have called the
school. I thought of my high school, of the ice in the parking lot on February mornings like this. I suddenly wished all the girls back home could see me now, walking through the heart of Europe’s fashion capital, looking like I belonged there. I wanted to casually answer my cell phone,
“Pronto,”
and have an animated conversation in Italian, preferably with some gorgeous guy.

I sighed, looking over at all the teenagers, and Nonno smiled at me.

“Not enough people your own age in your life, I think,” he said as we went on. I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure I truly minded; I didn’t hang out with people my own age at home, except for my sister, and she’s one and a half years younger, even if everyone always thought of her as older than me. But to have a crowd of friends like the ones sitting on the steps; to have something to do on Friday nights besides help Nonna Laura cook fish; to have a boyfriend to post pictures of on Facebook—well, I did wish for that.

What did it matter, anyway? I was probably going to die, killed by the demon that had taken two of my cousins in the last century, and killed another young woman practically under my eyes. She had come back to herself before she died, that was true. But, like many others, she had died because she’d been possessed. Sometimes all we could do, I had learned, was make sure they died free of whatever creature had attacked them. It seemed a pretty miserable victory.

“Anna Maria can’t really introduce you to anyone,” Nonno was saying. “She left school at fifteen to become a model, and she never seemed all that interested in making friends her own age. I don’t want you meeting the kinds of people she works with, or the men in her life,” he added. “Your father would not be happy with me. He’s angry enough that we had to take you away, isn’t he?”

“I think he’s getting over it,” I said. “But I don’t think it matters: I don’t live the life that other girls my age live, do I?”

He nodded. “It’s a lonely matter, being a member of this family,” he said. “When you can get away from all the other family members,” he added, grinning.

I grinned, too, in spite of myself. “But that’s not what I meant,” I said. “I mean, with … with someone chasing me.”

“I was thinking of that, too. Yet so many people have a demon after them, you know,” he told me.

“You mean, like a metaphor?” I asked, feeling impatient. “Because mine isn’t a metaphor.”

He could only shrug in agreement. We had been waiting to cross the busy Via Orefici, streetcars rumbling along while cars and
motorini
zipped past. Now we stepped hastily into the street, taking advantage of a window in the traffic and getting sworn at by a biker, the dog in her basket yapping as if it were swearing, too.

“Have patience with an old man!” Giuliano called after her, and then we were across the street, heading for an old building
far up the Via Cesare Cantù. “It first opened to the public in 1609,” he told me as we got closer and climbed the dimpled stone steps. “The Biblioteca Ambrosiana,” he said.

There was no sign over the door, just a poster for an exhibit. Inside, the hallway smelled like the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine, where my family occasionally attended services. It occurred to me as we pushed through the glass doors that it smelled kind of like our shop, too.

“Here,” said Nonno, opening another door, and we entered the great library.

“Libraries always take me by surprise,” Nonno reflected in a whisper. “I always expect them to be bigger than they are.” The Biblioteca Ambrosiana’s main room was carpeted in red, and its walls of books rose to the arched ceiling. There was a walkway that ran around the walls, one tall story up, so that patrons could easily reach the higher tiers of shelves, and there were ladders, too. Otherwise, I supposed, only really tall people could be hired as librarians there.

People spoke in soft, echoing voices in what seemed like a hundred languages. If I had shut my eyes, I would have thought the books themselves were speaking, in all the tongues they were written in. At the center of the room, pages from Leonardo da Vinci’s
Codex Atlanticus
were displayed in special cases. Giuliano agreed that we might go and look at these for a moment, so I got to see Da Vinci’s famous, elegant mirror writing up close. I studied his sketches and notes, including
a prophecy, of all things: “Men shall speak with and touch and embrace each other while standing each in different hemispheres.”
The ‘men shall speak’ came true
, I thought. Nonno laid a hand on my shoulder. I turned and followed him off to the side.

A cheerful, youngish man in impeccable clothes sat behind a desk. He stood up immediately and held out his hand. When he smiled, dimples appeared in his cheeks, and his eyes seemed to be full of light. I tried to stop myself from thinking cute-guy thoughts—he had to be at least as old as Emilio, who is nine years older than I am—but I couldn’t help myself.

“Giuliano Della Torre,” he said. “It has been much too long.”

Nonno smiled at him and shook his hand, nodding agreement. “Fernando Vesuvio, allow me to introduce my cousin in the third degree, Mia Della Torre.”

My American last name is Dellatorri. But I heard Nonno say the Italian name clearly. I stood up straighter.

“Piacere
,” said the young man, shaking my hand also. “Welcome to our library.”

“Thank you,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”

“It is, isn’t it?” He turned and gestured around him. “I love it.”

Remembering my own, spontaneous love for our shop, I asked impulsively, “What’s your favorite thing about it?”

Nonno turned his head sharply, and I knew this was too personal a question for a stranger in Milan. Fernando widened his eyes and laughed.

“I don’t know if I can answer that,” he replied. “But it is a good question. Let me offer a question of my own: What are you here to find? Because you know your cousin here never comes without some unbelievably hard historical question.”

“Most of the time you can answer them,” Giuliano pointed out.

Fernando laughed again. He had a wide-open laugh that was still not too loud for the library he worked in.

“It is not so much a historical question as a literary one this time. We need to find a poet,” Nonno told him.

“We have some,” Fernando informed him gravely, his eyes dancing.

Giuliano turned toward me. Now that the moment had come, I wasn’t sure I wanted to show the poem to anyone outside my family. My hands felt heavy and stiff as I fumbled with the zipper to my purse. As I passed the poem over to Fernando, it seemed to jump out of my hand; he feinted to catch it, not looking in the least surprised. He leaned back against his desk and began to read, and I realized he was the first librarian I had ever seen who did not wear glasses.

When he finished, he looked up at me with an alert expression in his eyes. “Is it a translation? What do we know?”

“We don’t know anything—” began Nonno, and then waved a hand at me.

“It’s true,” I said. “It was recited to me in modern Italian. The person who recited it didn’t tell me who the author was,” I
added, feeling embarrassed. Although I suppose it wasn’t completely a lie.

“Ah,” said Fernando. He looked out across the room, down the walls of books, over the heads of whispering tourists gazing at Da Vinci’s notes. “I’m having trouble even placing the era. Sometimes it doesn’t matter, you think you have it and it turns out that the writer was far ahead of his time, or far behind it. Or her time,” he amended, looking at me. “But I am no reader of poets, really. I know the masters but not their students. I think we need a poet for this, an educated poet, one who isn’t afraid to know all those who came before him. Or her,” he repeated, again looking at me.

Giuliano asked, “Aren’t all poets educated?”

Fernando laughed again, and said, “You’d be surprised. You grew up in an age when they were, they had to be. But …”

As he went on talking, I glanced over at the display cases and froze: there was a man, looking at the page that contained the prophecy with a famished look in his eyes—a dark-haired, handsome man, with a red scarf around his throat. It was Lucifero, the Satanist who had tried to harvest my demon from me on our one, utterly disastrous date, when we had had hot chocolate in the Galleria. He was alive.

D
on’t look up, don’t look this way
, I thought. I tugged Nonno Giuliano’s sleeve.

“Yes?” he asked, turning away from Fernando.

“Lucifero,” I whispered.

“Hmm? Ah,” he replied, following my eyes. “Fernando, perhaps we could continue our debate in the Sala della Rosa? Someone we wish to avoid.”

“He’s seen us,” I whispered, despairing, even though I wasn’t perfectly sure. I couldn’t see how he could miss us, standing over by the librarian’s desk. I didn’t understand how Nonno could stay so calm; he and Fernando kept their voices even as the librarian directed us to follow him through the door beside his desk.

“I can’t be away long; Marco is at the other end of the room, but it takes two of us,” Fernando said. “In any case, I don’t believe I can help you. We must find a poet for that. But I will take you to look at some that had an interest in Greek history and pacifism.”

“You don’t think it was written by a Greek?” I asked.

At Lisetta’s exorcism, my demon had smugly spoken ancient Greek to Uncle Matteo. (Uncle Matteo had answered him in ancient Greek, too, which I hadn’t expected at all.) I had begun to wonder if we were dealing with a human spirit, one that had walked the earth a very long time ago.

“It certainly seems intended to sound that way, but somehow I do not think a Spartan wrote it,” Fernando murmured as we passed into the Sala della Rosa. A couple of patrons at the reading tables raised their heads at his voice. “I believe they would have considered such a sentiment unworthy of their warlike traditions.”

“Oh,” I said, disappointed. If I had to have a demon chasing me, an ancient Greek one would have been cool, especially one who might have been at the Battle of Thermopylae. And knowing that about him, I might have had a way in to his mind.

Fernando shrugged, going to a shelf of poets and pulling down volume after volume.

“I am not an expert on Spartan culture, so I only guess,” he added. “Remember that I could be wrong.” He set a pile of books on the nearest reading table. “I cannot send these home
with you, but if you haven’t time to look at them now, please note down the titles of any that seem promising and come back. Here are some neoclassicists, among others; and you might try, just for a lark, a bit of Leopardi.”

I nodded.

“Today we will simply make a list of titles,” said Nonno. “I have no wish for a meeting with Lucifero, do you, Cousin?”

“No,” I said.

I still felt cold and afraid, but I was annoyed, too. I vividly remembered what it had been like when I couldn’t go outside because of my demon. I didn’t want Lucifero to keep me from staying here in this palace of books, and talking to Fernando. And I certainly didn’t want him finding out about the poem.

“It was a pleasure to see you again, Signore Della Torre,” Fernando said, giving me back my notebook. “And a pleasure to meet you, Signorina Della Torre.”

“Likewise,” I said, accepting the hand he offered me.

“I should get back,” he said. “Awkward if someone steals a page of the
Codex
.”

Nonno and I matched his wry grin, and he left us with a pile of books on a table. I sat down and pulled out a pen, beginning a quick list of titles and authors.

“Note place and date of publication, too,” said Nonno, who seemed to be idly scanning the shelves.

I couldn’t help myself. “Why?”

He raised his eyebrows.

“We are dealing with a demon of place … or so we think. And if we can get a date, a time, a place to search, anything, that would be good, don’t you think?”

I bowed my head, embarrassed.

“The more information you can find, the better; you will save yourself time and trouble later, when you find a clue and want to place it in context.”

I went as fast as I could, and thankfully Lucifero did not come in. Finished, we slipped out through a courtyard.

“I feel cheated,” I said.

Nonno looked surprised. “How so?”

“It’s like so many things I want to do … spoiled by someone evil,” I said.

He nodded. “Yes; it can be difficult to enjoy what we are given when the shadows crowd around,” he said.

I remembered once seeing a glimpse, over his shoulder, of soldiers marching down the street. We had been standing in the candle shop at the time, and I had never been sure afterward if I’d seen what I thought I’d seen.

“Someday,” I asked, “would you and Nonna ever tell me about when you were young … about the war, maybe? I mean if you could talk about it.”

“Someday, perhaps. Not today, not now. It’s time for lunch, and there is a place on the Largo Cairoli I want to take you. Then you can have your walk in the park; then come home and study.”