Arcadia Awakens (23 page)

“Wouldn’t my passport have told you that?”

He lowered the gun, came over to her, and gave her a resounding slap in the face. Her hand shot up to hit back, but he had already seized her knuckles and was holding them firmly. His fingers were surprisingly strong and painful. Her cheek was burning, but its heat had more to do with her fury than the slap.

“I apologize,” he said, but he did not let her free herself when she tried to jerk away. Only a full minute later did he let her go. She took a single step back. He smiled, not in an unfriendly way. His face was thin and wrinkled. In his midseventies, she guessed. Maybe older.

“What was the slap for?” she asked calmly.

“I’ve already apologized.”

“I’m not deaf.”

“Don’t you accept my apology?”

“Is that the way you act here? Hitting people first, then apologizing?”

“Only if there’s a good reason for it. You were impertinent to your
capo
. You have learned that that’s a serious offense. However, you should also know that I don’t hold a grudge, even against an Alcantara. And finally: Apologizing for something is not a sign of weakness. Any more than accepting an apology is.”

“‘I’m not looking for a friend,’” she quoted. “‘I’m looking for a Jedi master.’”

He looked at her in surprise. “What?”

“
Hamlet
.” She offered him her hand. “I’m the stupid American girl from the house down the mountain. My passport just happens to say Alcantara by chance. I guess I was switched with some other baby at birth. My real parents were probably tourists passing through. First time ever in Europe, no map, travel guide falling apart, all very exciting. If I had my way I’d be in line to inherit a doughnut stall in Taylor, Arizona.”

The old man stared at her, astonished. But then his harsh expression softened, and he burst out laughing. He took a step toward her and raised his hand again, but this time he only patted her other cheek and stroked her hair. “Your sister has never made me laugh!”

She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “Well, she’s a criminal. No laughing in Cosa Nostra.”

“More than you think, my dear. More than you think.” He produced a key and unlocked the door. “Come in,” he said, going ahead. “You look half-starved. I have bread and sausage and cheese. Your aunt and your sister care for me well.”

He had a house inside the house. Below the collapsing roof of the ruin a new ceiling of wooden beams had been fitted, about six feet high. Walls had been built inside the crumbling outer walls. They made the single room less spacious, but they insulated it. There was a rough, sturdy wooden table, two chairs, an unmade bed, and an old chest of drawers with tarnished brass knobs. A mirror with a crack running through it. A tiny washbasin with an old-fashioned faucet. A few framed family photographs, most of them yellowing, hung on the walls. The men and women in them looked as if they’d lived around the time of the Second World War, maybe earlier. Rustic scenes in the fields or in narrow village streets, a couple of posed group photos in front of a painted landscape.

There was a rancid smell in the air, and she hoped that it came only from the dried sausages and the ham dangling from the beams on strings.

No books, but there was a tiny TV set. Its satellite dish must have been hidden in the ruined roof. Beside it stood a refrigerator, on top of that a clock radio. No phone, definitely no computer.

Not exactly the HQ of a supervillain. But the old man hadn’t had to say the word
capo
to give Rosa the right idea.

“You’re the
capo dei capi
,” she said, looking around her. The boss of bosses. Head of the Sicilian Mafia. “Is that why the other families hate the Alcantaras so much? Because Florinda and Zoe run errands for you?”

The gun landed on the table with a clatter. He opened the refrigerator, took out a wooden board with cheese on it, and placed it beside the firearm. There was also a sausage and a loaf of bread. “Sit down,” he said, pointing to one of the chairs.

She chose the other chair, which was closer to the door. He registered that with a smile, sat down on the first chair himself, and brought out a pocketknife. Very much at his ease, he cut the sausage into finger-thick slices. Rosa watched him. He drew the sharp blade through the firm meat again and again with practiced ease.

“I am Salvatore Pantaleone,” he said, without looking up. “If you were to go to the police and tell them that name, there’d be more carabinieri than trees in this forest in no time at all. They’ve been after me for nearly thirty years, and in that time I’ve lived in many dilapidated hovels. But this one, I trust, will be the last.”

If there was melancholy in his words, he hid it well. It sounded more like the voice of a man on the verge of a great triumph.

“I told your sister to bring you to me.”

“Well, she didn’t.”

“Oh yes, of course she did. You think it was just chance that she passed beneath your window every time she came here?”

“Why didn’t she just take me with her?”

“I told her not to.”

“But—”

“You have courage. And a strong will of your own. I’d hoped that would be the case, but I wanted to be perfectly sure. Zoe told me what happened that night. The attack by the tiger, that Carnevare bastard. But you came back anyway. I like that.”

“So Zoe was only a decoy?”

“She carries out other tasks. You said so yourself. She works as a messenger for me, just as Florinda and others did before her. I had to disappear from the view of the authorities very early, and since then the Alcantaras have been my link with the outside world. I put my life in your family’s hands, Rosa. So far they haven’t disappointed me.”

“That package Zoe had with her—it was letters to the other families? With instructions?”

Pantaleone nodded. “I am not the first
capo dei capi
forced to spend a lifetime in hiding. The world out there has changed, technology has developed—but some things never lose their usefulness. Paper and ink. Messages may travel faster by these newfangled methods, but everyone understands a note with a few sentences on it, whether he’s the
capo
of a clan or a man from a mountain village. Even the stupid can read these days, but not everyone gets along with a computer. What’s more, data files can be traced back, but a sheet of paper?”

She thought how easy it had been for her to wave goodbye to her own online existence, to Facebook and MySpace. If she’d sent any of her digital friends a handwritten letter, most of them would probably have thought it was a joke.

“You wanted to meet me. Why?”

“You’re an Alcantara. You will be an important person someday.”

She laughed. “Sure.”

“You’re Florinda’s heiress, didn’t you know that? She has no children, no other close relations. The Alcantaras are dying out, and who can blame their menfolk?” He grinned in a knowing way that sent a shiver down her spine. “There’s only Florinda, your sister, and you left. With an empire of companies—it’s quite easy to assess their value, and they can be kept going by a few trusted employees and some distant cousins.”

“In a couple of weeks I’ll be flying back to the States. And that will be it as far as I’m concerned.”

“I doubt it,” he said, and pushed a piece of bread, some slices of sausage, and the cheese across the table to her. “Eat that.”

She didn’t touch it. “None of this has anything to do with me. I’m only here because…”

“Because you lost your child. I know.”

Zoe. Of course. “Go to hell,” she spat, and did not retreat an inch when he leaned over the table. “And if you try hitting me again, I’ll defend myself.”

He grinned. “You’re right. It has nothing to do with me.”

She didn’t for a moment think he meant it seriously.

“I apologize again,” he said in friendly tones.

“I’d better go now.”

“Eat.” Just the one word, calm, without emphasis.

She hesitated. There was something Alessandro had said that she couldn’t get out of her mind: The
capo dei capi
came from the Arcadian dynasties. So Salvatore Pantaleone was one of them, but for the life of her she couldn’t imagine what animal might be lurking inside him. And she wasn’t anxious to find out. Certainly not here and now.

She tore off a piece of dry white bread and chewed without pleasure.

“The sausage is good,” he said.

“I’m a vegetarian.”

Whatever else he might be, he was a Sicilian who had spent his whole life in the country. The idea of someone not eating meat seemed to annoy him.

“Then eat some of the cheese. You’re too thin.”

“It runs in the family.”

He sighed softly. “Yes, so it does.”

To satisfy him she ate a piece of cheese. It didn’t taste bad, but she didn’t feel like eating.

He watched her chewing, both elbows on the table, his mottled hands clasped in front of his chin.

“You don’t often get visitors,” she commented.

“Only your sister. Even Florinda hasn’t been here for a long time. I wouldn’t let her.”

“Wouldn’t let her?”

“Waste of time, talking to Florinda. She’s not the future, you are.”

She was going to contradict him again, but something kept her back. His keen eyes, his firm tone of voice. He seemed perfectly sure of himself.

“Never forget who you are,” he said. “You Alcantaras are my voice and sometimes my eyes. My hand is over you, protecting you. No one will dare to touch a hair of your heads while I’m watching over you.”

“Tano Carnevare obviously didn’t see it that way.”

His fist crashed down on the table. “That boy has no idea what he’s done! The entire Carnevare clan are nothing but trouble. Make sure you don’t get too close to them.” So Zoe hadn’t told him about
that
. “The baron was a weakling who listened only to what his advisers whispered. God knows what plans Cesare’s thinking up. I’d have given orders to exterminate the whole brood long ago if their influence on the mainland hadn’t been so extremely useful to us all.”

This was the time to ask the question that had been on the tip of her tongue for ages. “And who makes sure the concordat’s still in force? You?”

He snorted softly. “The concordat protecting the Lamias is too old for anyone to break it.”

“But who makes sure that peace is kept? And who will punish Tano Carnevare if he ignores the agreement again?”

“You know more about the Arcadian dynasties than Zoe and Florinda think. Who told you?”

“Oh… I overheard them talking. They thought I was asleep, but I picked up a few things.”

His glance became more penetrating.

He doesn’t believe me, she thought. He can tell I’m lying.

Brusquely, he pushed his chair back. “Maybe you really should go now.”

She put the rest of the bread on the table and stood up. Being careful to walk slowly, she went to the door.

“Over there, the letters.” He pointed to a bundle lying on the floor near the doorway. “Take them with you. And tell Zoe she needn’t come up here anymore. I want you to do it in future.”

Everything in her cried out to tell him where he could shove his letters and his orders. But then she only bent down in silence, picked up the package, and opened the door.

“Why do you trust me?”

“You’re one of us.”

“So are the others. Even Tano.”

He smiled. “But I know your destiny. And it’s waiting for you here, not in America.”

She stared at him for a moment longer. Then, without a word, she closed the door behind her and headed home.

S
HE DIDN’T KNOW WHICH
surprised her more: that her sister had a best friend here, or that Zoe hadn’t breathed a word about her before.

Lilia was pretty, red-haired—and stoned to the eyeballs. Zoe too was in an unusual state of euphoria, acting as if nothing had happened last night. She didn’t say a word to Rosa about the furious scene in the hall outside her room. She didn’t even want to know where Rosa had been with her car when she was gone for almost twenty-four hours.