Arcadia Awakens (24 page)

“You
will
come, won’t you?” It was the third time she’d asked, although Rosa had already said yes.

Zoe and Lilia were flying to Rome for two days, shopping and having a good time, they said, and they wouldn’t give Rosa any peace until she agreed to go with them.

In fact she had no objection at all. She wanted to turn her back on Sicily for a while. She needed time to catch her breath. Time to think. And she needed new clothes. There were hundreds of things she had to discuss with Zoe. Although not while her sister was running frantically around the room like a spinning top. And definitely not while this Lilia was present. Maybe there’d be a chance for a private conversation with Zoe on the way to Rome.

Lilia—red-headed, beautiful, stoned Lilia—clapped her hands when Rosa asked, “When do we leave?”

“Right now!” cried Zoe, delighted, laughing along with Lilia as if someone had cracked an incredibly funny joke.

“You’re planning to go to the airport just like that?”

With a flourish, Zoe produced three tickets from her bag. “Ta-da! All booked. The chopper will take us to Catania, and Catania—” She interrupted herself, exchanged a startled, wide-eyed glance with Lilia, and then burst out laughing again. “Well, not Catania, but the plane—from Catania, I mean—will take us to Rome. After we’ve taken the chopper to—”

“Yes,” Rosa interrupted her. “You said that already.”

“Did I?” Genuine surprise, and then a giggle. “Pack your things and let’s go!”

“Does Florinda know?”

“She won’t be back from Lampedusa before this evening. I wrote her a note.” She thought about it. “Or didn’t I?”

Lilia nodded. “Yes, you did.”

Zoe hugged Rosa. “I’m so glad you’re coming.”

“That’s okay.”

“
Really
I am.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll fetch my stuff.”

Zoe grasped Lilia’s hand and pulled her to her feet jubilantly.

They’re like a couple of cheerleaders on ecstasy, thought Rosa.

They landed in Rome late that evening, took a taxi into the city, and moved into a suite in a grand hotel not far from the Pantheon. It was one of those old, plush hotels that Rosa knew only from pictures, with high ceilings, a lot of stucco, gilded decor, and heavy, dark red curtains.

Zoe had stayed here several times. The receptionists greeted her by name, shaking hands, and Rosa noticed, morosely, that Zoe introduced her to perfect strangers as
my little sister
. To cheer herself up she stole a gold fountain pen from the doorman, then didn’t know what to do with it and left it in the potted plant just outside the elevators. As the other two were getting ready in the bathroom, she lay on her bed without any makeup on and immersed herself in “My Death.” After a while she tried calling Alessandro but only got his voice mail. She hesitated for a moment, and listened to the silence after the tone, then she hung up.

Zoe and Lilia came out of the bathroom on a wave of high spirits, enveloped in clouds of sweetish vapors. This was a no-smoking suite; they were lucky the smoke alarm hadn’t gone off. All they needed, thought Rosa, was to have the whole hotel evacuated just because those two couldn’t go ten minutes without their next joint.

“Ready?” asked Zoe.

Rosa lay where she was. Iole’s face came before her eyes, and for a moment her conscience pricked her. La dolce vita for her in Rome, while Iole—yes, what had become of Iole? Dead? Torn to pieces by beasts of prey?

Reluctantly, she sat up. “Yes, I’m ready. Can’t you see that?”

“You haven’t even brushed your hair.”

“Are we going out to eat or exhibition skating?”

“Both,” said Lilia. “We want the audience to look, but not touch.”

They ate in a small, comfortable trattoria near the hotel. Rosa didn’t talk much, but she couldn’t help watching Zoe all the time. Her scratches and bruises had healed astonishingly fast. She wondered how her sister had explained her injuries to Lilia.

And then there was Lilia herself.

After a while Rosa concentrated entirely on Lilia, looking for anything to show whether she, too, belonged to the Arcadian dynasties. But she had no idea how to tell.

Lilia’s red hair tumbled to her shoulders in profuse ringlets. She was wearing a black leather jacket, a tight-fitting top, and a short skirt with flat shoes. She wasn’t as heavily made up as Rosa had expected, considering the hour she and Zoe had spent in front of the mirror.

After dinner, the two of them dragged her off to an expensive club near the Spanish Steps. They were escorted past the people standing in line to get in, and Rosa felt uneasy under their glances. Zoe went ahead, gave the doorman a kiss on the cheek, and was the first to plunge into the droning, noisy darkness beyond the heavy iron door. Rosa followed the other two down a stairway to the lower floor, where it was even darker, more crowded, and noisier. She didn’t want anything to drink, but Zoe brought her something from the bar anyway—it was more ice than drink, and so colorful that Rosa assumed her sister had ordered it just because of the pretty decorations.

She found herself a place to sit with her back to the wall, then held her glass up to eye level, but didn’t drink. No one had come close enough to it to mix anything with its contents, but she couldn’t help it. She’d probably never shake off her distrust.

After a while the droning basses and the dim light were confusing her far more than the cocktail could have done. She stood up and went slowly toward the dance floor. Since the party a year ago she had avoided large crowds. On the flight here, she had hated the crush at the airport. All this was like her worst nightmare, but this time she let herself simply sink into it. She danced until her clothes were damp with sweat, until she felt almost intoxicated by the heat, the volume of sound, and everything she had avoided for months. Her mood was somewhere between panic and euphoria, her heart was racing to the rhythm of the music, and soon she felt as if she were in a bubbling cauldron with individual faces bobbing up to the surface again and again and then disappearing.

She stopped only once, looked for Zoe and Lilia, saw them at the bar with two other young women, and plunged back into the crowd. The noise level was still rising, and with it the temperature. Laughing faces whirled by in a blur, human bodies became a colorless mass. Sometimes she thought she heard sounds that were not voices or part of the music, a howling and screeching, and then she saw glowing eyes among all the others, saw fur on faces and sharp fangs, saw figures bending down and racing away on all fours amid all the confusion. Hands turned to claws, noses to muzzles, ears grew longer and pointed, eyes shone green and yellow and fiery red.

Someone took Rosa’s arm and drew her aside. She started, was going to resist, came up against a wall, and realized that she had reached the edge of the dance floor.

“That’s enough,” said Zoe. “Let’s go now.”

Lilia was beside her. They both looked sober and serious, and Rosa gradually came back to herself. When she looked over her shoulder at the crowd, she saw only dancing human figures. No beasts of prey, no curved fangs. Only their eyes still glowed in the flashing artillery of lights.

She felt a strong pulsing in her rib cage, then in her hips. That was how the phantom pain in her lower body announced itself. She had to get out of here, fast, and suddenly realized that Zoe had noticed already. Lilia, too, was looking concerned.

The two of them maneuvered her out of the crowd, up the stairs, and into the fresh air. Rosa made it to the nearest corner, just out of sight of the people waiting to go in, and then collapsed against a wall in one of those terrible crying jags that she could never explain and never control.

Zoe and Lilia stayed with her, giving her all the time she needed, and after that they helped Rosa back to the hotel, put her to bed, and stayed with her until she fell asleep.

She was up early, watching the sun rise over the roofs of Rome. The suite was on the top floor of the hotel. From the balcony, she could see red-gold light flowing over the jumble of gables and terraces, making its way into narrow ravines of masonry, while antennae on the rooftops cast shadows like charred skeletons.

As she leaned against the balustrade of the balcony in her knee-length T-shirt, images of the previous night came back into her mind. She wasn’t sure what had happened to her. She had enough hours of therapy behind her to analyze her behavior and talk about stuff like
emotional compensation
and
freely chosen confrontation
. But ultimately that was all nonsense. She had collapsed long before she got out into the air again, and instead of simply falling down, her body had become part of the crowd, drifting with it of its own accord.

Some memory that she had obviously suppressed had surfaced. She wasn’t perfectly well yet; a part of her was still sick and would stay that way.

At breakfast, Zoe and Lilia handled her with velvet gloves. Only when they realized that Rosa was not going to explode at the first wrong word they said did they relax and tell her their itinerary for the day. They wanted to initiate her into the mysteries of the city and—above all—its boutiques. Rosa put a damper on these plans by saying she was going to stay in the hotel that morning, and neither their long faces nor their objections could make her change her mind.

After the other two had left, she studied a map of the city that she had found among the other brochures in the room. She had no intention of hiding away in their suite, but a shopping trip with Zoe and Lilia was the last thing she needed right now. Instead she was going to explore the streets around the hotel on her own, letting herself wander around the district for a while.

She was just about to set off when there was a knock at her door. “Rosa Alcantara?”

“Who is it?”

A short pause, and then a second voice. “Police,” said a woman. “Open the door, please.”

Ironically, the first thing she thought of was the stolen fountain pen, and only then did her family’s businesses cross her mind. But instead of making a rope of sheets and shinnying down from the balcony, she put out her hand, like a sleepwalker, and opened the door slightly.

She had it open just a crack when she thought of the peephole in the door itself, and the fact that anyone could say they were the police.

She slammed the door shut again.

“Please,
signorina
, what was that for?”

Standing on tiptoe, she looked out and saw a man and a woman, both in leather jackets, hers short and waisted, his long, with bulging pockets. Not uniformed officers, then. Both were quite young, thirty at the most.

“Do you have ID with you?”

The two of them exchanged a glance, then took out small folders, opened them, and held them up to the peephole. Through its circular eye, Rosa could see only their photos. They might just as well have been student IDs.

“I could call reception,” she suggested, playing for time.

“We’d rather you didn’t. It would only cause unnecessary agitation.”

“But I
am
agitated.”

“No one wants to do you any harm. At least, we don’t.”

Keeping the police waiting worked on TV shows, but here and now it struck her as childish.” Okay,” she finally said, and opened the door.

“Thank you,” said the man, and he held out his ID to her again. “Antonio Festa. This is my colleague Stefania Moranelli. Please come with us.”

“Where to?”

The young woman, dark-haired and wiry, with slightly Arabian features, pointed down the corridor. “Only a few rooms down, don’t worry.”

Sure enough, there was a door open down the corridor, with light spilling out of it.

“Do I need a lawyer or anything like that?”

The man who had introduced himself as Antonio Festa smiled. His nose was so large that for a moment it was as if she were still seeing it through the magnification of the peephole. In an angular way, he was almost attractive. His hair was very short, and a narrow scar ran through one eyebrow. He might indeed be a police officer. Or a contract killer.

“You’re not going to be accused of anything,” he said with a crooked grin. “Apart, perhaps, from the theft of several chocolate bars, a bracelet, and a gold fountain pen that turned up in a flowerpot in the lobby here.”

Her heart missed a beat. “How long have you been following me?”

“Since you landed in Italy. But don’t worry, only while you were out in public. Your private sphere has been respected throughout your stay.”