The Demon Catchers of Milan (26 page)

“I don’t think there’s much time,” said the doctor apologetically, turning to ask us to do what we were already doing, which was leaving so that the Umbertis could have a moment alone. But as we went, Signora Umberti called out to me.

“Signorina Della Torre!”

I turned back.

She pointed to the bed. Her daughter’s eyes were rolled toward me.

I ran over and stood beside her, then bent down. Her eyes were hard to read. I thought she would be full of questions about why she was here, what had happened to her; I thought she would be as dazed as I had been.

She spoke very softly in my ear.

“Get him,” she said, her voice still hoarse from the night before last. I shivered at the ferocious determination in her voice. I was wrong. She knew exactly what had happened.

“I will,” I whispered back.

She heaved in a breath.

“Good.”

She paused, then added, “He wants revenge. Find. Out. What. For.”

She shut her eyes in exhaustion.

“I will,” I whispered. “You’ll be avenged, too.”

I wanted to say something more, but her family was right there, needing those last minutes with her. I straightened up, said, “Thank you,” and walked quickly out of the room.

I didn’t see the others right away. Apparently I couldn’t walk anymore, because I found myself leaning up against the wall, and finally, finally, the tears came.

I don’t think I’d ever expected to find such a good friend in such a stranger, so briefly met. While I stood there, I thought of Emilio on Christmas Eve, and the Battle of Thermopylae. Lisetta, stranger, had spent part of her last breath on me, soldier
to soldier. I owed her; I owed her big-time, and I was determined to pay her back, for the sake of her memory, at least.

Nobody tried to make it better; nobody tried to hold me; they just let me cry. I wanted more than that, but after a while I understood this was the best thing they could do for me.

I don’t remember much from the next few days; what I do recall are strange, inconsequential moments. I remember apologizing to Signora Gianna for never thinking to ask her name before. I wondered what Gravel’s real name was, but I couldn’t get up the energy to ask.

We did have one last duty to Signorina Lisetta Maria Umberti. The day after she died, we paid our respects to her in the hospital’s
obitorio
, because we would not be attending the funeral (in Turin, after all). I don’t remember anything except Lisetta’s face, as deserted as a boarded-up building. I’d like to say she looked peaceful, but really how she looked was—just not there.

I know this is going to sound strange, but I was glad they had an open casket. I needed to see her one more time, even if it wasn’t really her. I made myself look down into her empty face. I had only seen her body full of life, her life, once, when she was dying. I wondered why she hadn’t hated me; after all, I had called her back, asked her to trust us, and we hadn’t saved her after all, had we? She was still dead as dead.

I couldn’t stop picturing myself in the coffin.

We didn’t stay to talk to her family again. Emilio came up
beside me, breathing frost, as we walked back to the car. He didn’t say anything, just walked close beside me, and opened the door for me when we got there. I looked up at him as I got in, just one look of thanks. He gave the faintest, kindest blink of both eyes in reply.

We came back to Milan late, pulling slowly up the Via Fiori Oscuri while a bunch of small boys threw firecrackers under the car. Older neighbors greeted us with cries of
“Auguri, auguri!”
rising up to the lights strung across our street that spelled it out in twinkling letters:
AUGURI
, good fortune. I wasn’t sure that the New Year would bring me any. I looked up at the glittering word and thought about the eyes that were darkened and would never see those lights again. I made up my mind.

TWENTY-FOUR

The Case

T
he next day, the sun got up and so did I, somehow.

“I still don’t understand what protected me,”

I mused over coffee with Nonna. I was thinking about Christmas Eve. I still felt certain about my decision, but I needed my caffé Nonna for courage. “Now that it’s over I can feel him waiting outside again. Thank goodness, Signora Negroponte is coming back.”

She shrugged. “It may well have been the Madonna by the altar.”

“The one where there’s a bear holding her up?” I asked.

“Yes, that one. We gave that to the church, you know, a long time ago.”

When I had first arrived in Italy, I would have assumed she
meant that she and Giuliano had given the Madonna to the church. Now I thought differently; I assumed some distant ancestor gave it, centuries ago.

“She has useful protections worked into her,” Nonna went on. “Nobody pays attention to the little things, but they should.”

She swirled her coffee. “Speaking of little things,” she went on, “Francesco tells me he saw that worthless man, that Lucifero, the other day. He said he still looks pretty sick, but he was out on the street. Francesco doesn’t think Lucifero saw him. Be careful, Mia.”

She held my eyes until I nodded.

When she stood up to start her day, I stood up, too. I made sure she didn’t need my help, which was a relief, because I needed to act before my courage failed me. I walked down the wooden stairs to the shop, my feet feeling like lead, my stomach churning with anger.

I found Giuliano in the shop, along with Emilio, who was just picking up his briefcase to go as I came in.

“Good morning,” he said, and this time I heard all the unasked questions in his voice: How are you doing? How are you managing after yesterday? What do you feel?

“Good morning,” I said. “Um, before you go, Emilio. I have something to ask both of you.”

They waited in the dim shop, eyes of different shades of stormy blue glinting, looking at me. I smelled the old wood around us, the beeswax, the sulfurous ghosts of matches and, as always, the scent of the candle flames themselves. I took a deep breath.

“Teach me,” I said. My voice shook. I tried to fill it with all the frustration and rage I felt about everything that had happened: Lisetta’s death, the world’s worst first date, the suffering of the woman of Signora Galeazzo’s house, my claustrophobic life in the apartment, the miserable words I had overheard, the secrets I had guessed—everything the demon was responsible for, some stuff he wasn’t, and a few things that were their fault, too.

“Teach me everything you can. Please: teach me.”

Nonno and Emilio looked at each other for a long time. I saw then that there had been more than one midnight conversation about me, many more than one. I wonder if perhaps at that moment I realized, truly, for the first time, that the world was not a stage that sprang to life only when I walked onto it.

“It’s not enough to protect me,” I went on. “You know that now. It’s not enough to show me just part of it. You can see that I am … that I can feel things, that I know things. You know that I’m really a Della Torre.” I paused, because that was so scary to say. “At first, I thought that figuring out Majdanek was an accident. But we all know now that it wasn’t. And I”—my voice broke—“I have to avenge Lisetta, I have to. You must understand. I know you understand,” I said, looking into the eyes of Martino’s brother, Luciano’s father. “I survived; I have to avenge them all. And I have to fight for myself. I have to.”

Nonno held up his hand.

“Steady, steady,” he said. “One impossible thing at a time.” Emilio twitched the corner of his mouth, eyes narrowing.

Nonno frowned for a century or so, looking out the window,
over the candle flames. Then he nodded, partly to his grandson and partly to himself, before walking back to the office. Emilio only looked at me. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but I didn’t see any haughtiness, any condescension in his eyes. Nonno came back, holding something close to his side where I could not see it.

“There are books to study, histories to learn,” he said. “But we have been doing this a long time, our family, since before we wrote things down. So we begin, always, with our hands, with our tools. We begin with
doing
. So, we start with this,” he finished, placing the thing he held into my hands.

I looked down. I caught my breath.

It was the last thing I expected, the only thing I really coveted, the strangest thing I could imagine holding in my hands and calling my own: a demon catcher’s case.

“I—” I tried again. “I haven’t even started to earn this yet, Nonno, have I?”

I met his eyes.

“No,” he answered gently. “That’s why I’ve given you this particular case. You should get used to handling it, taking care of it, restocking it. When the time comes, you will replace it with another, finer case.”

As I looked down at it, I saw that it wasn’t slender like the other cases; it was bulky and kind of clunky, actually. The fittings were battered, and the leather covering the wood had been improperly stretched, so that it was too thin on one side and too loose on the other.

Yet I had worried that they would give me a new case. I had wondered whether they had run out of old ones. After all, didn’t the cases sometimes fall apart, or get destroyed—my mind faltered as I thought about how they might be destroyed—or get married off into other families with their owners? This case, however, was very old. I could tell because the gilded letters proclaiming the name of its first owner looked much like those on Emilio’s case. I ran my hands over the tops of them, spelling them out under my fingers:

       
G. DELLA TORRE

I had seen the gilded name before, in ghost letters long since peeled away in the window of the shop and on the spines of books. The founder of the candle shop, Francesca had said. Had he looked like Giuliano, gazing through the glass, sheeted by the reflections of the buildings across the street, watching the light change, waiting for a grandson perhaps?

“Thank you, Nonno. Oh, thank you.”

He smiled the widest and purest smile I had ever seen on his face and closed his worn hands over mine where they held the case.

“Mind you, this is only one of nine he used at one time or another, and the most cantankerous.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, everybody has small preferences, you know? Anna Maria uses a Tibetan bell instead of a local brass one. Emilio
had his case refitted so he could use a Waterman pen and some fancy leather notebook. Francesco is always losing nails, so he had a box built in. Sometimes the case is too large for your tools, or too small, or falling apart, anyway. When he made this case, he was trying out all kinds of things. Nine cases, all different sizes, different fittings, different covers. I’ve had three in my lifetime. Emilio will probably always keep the one he has. He’s such a sentimentalist,” he said, looking up at his grandson, who smiled.

“This one, our ancestor was experimenting with a new imported wood—mahogany—and different fixtures. The candle always falls out, and the notebook too. The wood itself is very hard to rework. But it’s a start.

“Begin by familiarizing yourself with the case. Also, Signora Negroponte returns today,” said Nonno. “Find that ward you need, to be safe in the street for a time.”

I clutched the case.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you, Nonno.”

He smiled sadly.

“Thank me when you realize what you have asked,” he said. I saw Emilio start out of the corner of my eye, as if to say, “She already knows, Nonno.” He came forward.

“I believe it is well done,” he said gravely. He leaned across and kissed me on the cheek. “I’m late for work,” he said. “It is well done. Good luck with Signora Negroponte.”

“Thank you,” I repeated. “We’ll need it.”

He smiled and slipped out the door, bells jingling.

I watched him go, his pinesap smell hanging in the air behind him. I heard him speak to someone in the street; then the bells jangled again and Signora Negroponte walked in.

She sniffed the air, then raised her eyebrows and looked at Nonno and me.

“What’s changed?” she asked.

“Long story,” Nonno said.

“Ah,” she said, shrugging. “You Della Torres.”

TWENTY-FIVE

The Bell

I
n the end, I was the one who found the right talisman to protect me. It was an odd choice, I suppose.

“What’s that?” Signora Negroponte asked when Nonno had gone to get us coffees. I looked down at my new case. I didn’t want to show it, not yet.

“A case, I see,” she answered herself. “He has given you one? Well. I think that is good. Are you ready to start?”

“Yes,” I replied, and she raised her chin at the fierceness in my voice. “Very ready.”

She smiled grimly.

We did the usual drill, but the first time I stepped outside, I didn’t feel the same slow panic I’d felt before. I’d faced my demon up close since then. I knew exactly what, or who, I was
afraid of; I knew what he felt like from the outside now. I’d rung a bell over him. Besides, I was mad now, too. Signora Negroponte had to make me take breaks. I went in and out all morning, carting a new assortment of twigs, family heirlooms, and increasingly random objects from around the house.

By noon, even Signora Negroponte was starting to look a little rattled, and she didn’t rattle easily. I was standing by the doorway, fiddling with a knot in my pocket to take my mind off the fear and anger that wore me out each time I stepped outside. Signora Negroponte was massaging her hand, having taken notes all morning. I felt like I could fall asleep right there, leaning against the door frame. Signora Negroponte took up her pen again and made a few final notes, while I absently opened the door and swung it back and forth, jingling the shop bells.

“Don’t do that,” she said without looking up. “It’ll ruin the next trial.”

As I banged the door shut, I heard the church bells toll just as the shop bells chimed. The shop bells are a chain of sweet-sounding brass bells that hang from inside the door. I’d never really looked at them before. Now I walked over and lifted the chain.