Arcadia Awakens (4 page)

January thirty-first, that was right. But the year was wrong. Both documents made Rosa sound a year older than her real age. That would mean she wasn’t a minor.

“Everyone here has them,” said Zoe, laughing. “Nothing special about it. You
can
drive, can’t you?”

Rosa had gotten her license when she turned sixteen, just before Zoe left. “Yup. I can steal cars too.”

“We leave that to other people here,” explained Zoe, perfectly seriously. “That and a few other things. The family hardly touches them.”

The family. Of course. Their mother had married into the Alcantara family, well aware of what she was getting herself into. Only later had there been a rift between Gemma Alcantara and the clan, once she and Davide had begun a new life in the States with their daughters. After Davide’s death, her scruples, maybe her wish for independence, prevented her from accepting any support for the two girls from her sister-in-law, Florinda, so Rosa and Zoe had to put up with being permanently short of money. Only recently had Rosa found out that Florinda had secretly sent Zoe checks now and then. Some of the money was meant for Rosa, but she never saw it. She didn’t hold it against her sister. As kids they might both have dreamed of the fairy-tale wealth of the Alcantaras, but by now Rosa had lost all interest in money and social status. She’d always been happy enough wearing some of Zoe’s better castoffs, and at fourteen or fifteen she had felt mature and grown-up in them. But a year ago, fate had taken the grown-up bit too literally.

Zoe had gone back to Sicily when she turned eighteen, hoping for a different, more comfortable life. For Rosa, on the other hand, the money and the prospect of luxury held no temptations. She was coming here to find herself, or so she thought on good days. On bad days she knew she was running away.

A honk roused her from her thoughts. Zoe was passing a cattle truck. Ostriches with ruffled feathers looked out through the gratings. “Why don’t you text Mom to let her know you arrived?”

“Later. Maybe.”

They had been driving for less than half an hour when Zoe left the expressway, turning onto a country road that wound its way through vineyards and ended in a gravel driveway leading up a bare hillside.

At the top of the hill a helicopter was waiting.

“Does everyone here have one of
those
as well?” asked Rosa.

Zoe left the key in the car and took Rosa’s carry-on bag off the backseat. They walked over to the helicopter together. The pilot gave them a monosyllabic greeting and helped them to climb in. Zoe thanked him with a smile, but Rosa was too tired to bother. They were both given ear protectors that looked like heavily padded earphones, and had to strap themselves in before the chopper took off.

When Rosa looked back at the ground below, she saw a long cloud of dust moving uphill from the road. A second car drew up beside the Nissan they had left there. A man and a woman got out, both in leather jackets and sunglasses. The man was speaking on a phone and pointing up to the sky.

“Not taking much trouble to lie low, are they?” shouted Rosa above the noise of the helicopter.

Zoe shook her head. “They want us to know they’re watching us. Some new kind of strategy being tried out by the public prosecutor’s office. It’s worst around Palermo and Catania. They’re not quite as obvious about it in the mountains and other places. It’s kind of a game—they really know exactly where we’re going.”

Rosa realized that her pulse had quickened only very slightly. She’d known what she was getting into. The helicopter ride was more exciting than the fact that the police and the public prosecutor’s office had their eye on the Alcantaras.

She’d been questioned for the first time when she was twelve, although by then it had been eight years since she’d had any contact with her father’s clan. And again at fourteen, and once a year after that. If her mother could have afforded a good attorney, very likely he could have put a stop to that, but as it was she simply let the questioning wash over her, feeling more and more bored each time.

If Rosa really had something to hide, at least that would have made it exciting. As it was, however, she just replied, “No,” and “No idea,” to all the questions, while someone made squiggly marks on a sheet of paper, someone else translated for the Italian prosecutor, and then they all went their separate ways.

There were more earth-shattering things in life than a family who had belonged to the Mafia for generations.

They were flying over a breathtaking landscape of steep slopes, precipitous rock formations, and small patches of yellow, which, as they came closer, turned out to be clusters of square little houses. Mountain villages clung to the rock walls, hanging like eagle’s nests above bottomless ravines. In the valleys Rosa saw endless rows of grapevines, now and then groves of lemon trees, and dried-up pastures. Narrow roads ran from place to place in winding bends, sometimes ending up nowhere.

The farther they went into the interior of the island, the more parched and empty the countryside became. Most noticeable of all were the countless ruins of deserted farms, the remains of a time when the farmers and farmhands working for great landowners had lived there. Today both the farmers and the landowners were gone, and no one went to the trouble of demolishing the last ruined hovels. Wind and weather would do it in the course of time.

Rosa was overwhelmed by the rugged beauty of the landscape. Now and then, on the crests of mountains outside the villages, they saw dilapidated villas, some of them fortified like castles, with battlements and defensive towers, with chapels and their own graveyards. Above the noise, Zoe explained that many of the ancient ruins still showed the influence of the Arabs who had occupied Sicily long ago.

Once they flew over crumbling pillars and the ruins of a temple like a miniature Acropolis, and finally over the stone tiers of an ancient amphitheater. Nowhere else in the Mediterranean, said Zoe, were there so many Greek ruins so close together. The island had once been a Greek colony, and it was said, on fairly good authority, that many of the adventures of Odysseus had taken place on the Sicilian coast. “There’ve always been monsters here,” shouted Zoe, raising Rosa’s ear protectors. “Not just since Cosa Nostra took over.”

After a while the land turned greener again. Gorse bushes, oleanders, and cactus fields gave way to light woodland. The pilot gave them a sign, and next moment they began their descent. The helicopter flew in a wide curve above a slope covered with olive trees.

“Here we are,” mouthed Zoe silently.

Rosa pressed her nose to the glass and saw their destination below. Exactly what she’d been looking for. Somewhere as isolated as possible.

The Palazzo Alcantara.

“W
ELCOME,” SAID THE TALL
woman as the sisters reached the side of the meadow where they had landed, and the sound of the helicopter blades died away behind them.

Against the background of the baroque house and its grounds, Florinda Alcantara looked like an apparition from bygone days. She was standing in the shade of a huge chestnut tree. There were dozens of them here, forming a dark rampart in front of the gnarled and twisted olive trees.

Florinda had the southern Italian features of her ancestors. Her high, dark brows made her look stern, although there was something very sensuous about her full lips. Her hair, which was black and pinned up on top of her head, had been tinted light blond. The dark roots were showing.

Her warm embrace came as a surprise. So did the kiss she dropped on Rosa’s forehead. “We’ve been looking forward to seeing you,” she said, and her beaming smile startled Rosa. When Florinda smiled, she looked kind and warmhearted. Only when her expression was serious was there an oppressive darkness to her gaze. Then it seemed as if she had a lot on her mind, and it had been troubling her for a long time.

On the way to the house, Rosa glanced back at the helicopter. Now she noticed that its paint was flaking in many places. The pilot was evidently concerned about a thin plume of smoke rising from the rear engine. He stood on the grass in front of it, legs planted apart, hands on his hips, assessing the damage. A little later she heard the sound of a hammer on metal.

The faded splendor of past centuries surrounded the Alcantara estate. The broad facade of the house cast its shadow on a graveled front courtyard with a large fountain rising in the middle of it. No water flowed from the mouths of the stone fauns. As she came closer, Rosa saw dozens of empty birds’ nests in the dry basin; someone must have removed them from the trees and collected them here.

Wrought-iron balconies dominated the front of the palazzo. The wall was adorned with elaborate stucco work. Statues of pale brown tuff stone watched over the front courtyard from niches. Most of the sculptures were damaged, and almost all were overgrown with moss and lichen.

Florinda led them through a tall, rounded arch. At the end of this tunnel gateway—some ten yards long, smelling of mildewed plaster, and surprisingly cool inside—lay a sunlit inner courtyard. There was a large flower bed in the middle of it, neglected and overgrown with weeds. The main part of the palazzo beyond the courtyard was taller than the other three wings, though it had the same kind of stucco ornamentation, iron balconies, and statues as on the outer facade. Two broad flights of stone steps, one on the left and one on the right, led up to the main entrance on the second floor. Part of the semicircular porch was open.

Florinda asked about Rosa’s flight, and the connection in Rome. She herself, she added, thought the whole procedure was an unreasonable imposition. Rosa agreed with her.

“Your sister says you’re a vegetarian,” said Florinda as she walked up the steps to the entrance with the two girls. The paint on the double door was flaking. A lizard scurried ahead of them over sun-baked stone and disappeared into the building.

“I’ve been a vegetarian for years.”

“I can’t remember hearing of any Alcantara who didn’t like meat.”

“Well, someone here doesn’t like birds.”

Florinda didn’t reply as she climbed the last step.

Zoe shot Rosa a sideways glance. “Florinda hates their twittering. The gardeners have instructions to take all the nests out of the trees, and then once a month they’re burnt in the basin of the fountain, so the flames can’t get out of control. Forest fires are always a danger in these parts—don’t let all the green around here fool you. The whole island is dry as a bone in summer, specially when the sirocco blows over the sea from Africa.”

“Sirocco?”

“Hot desert wind. It often brings sand from the Sahara with it.” She shrugged. “Doesn’t do the skin any good.”

“And the nests—”

“
Only
the nests,” her aunt interrupted her. “Not the birds.” She showed her winning smile again. “I’m not a monster.”

Now they were in the entrance hall, which was high ceilinged, dark, and again full of faded magnificence. Florinda excused herself, saying she had to see about preparations for supper. Obviously she did the cooking herself. On Sicily, Zoe explained, no one ate a hot meal before eight in the evening.

She took Rosa up a stone staircase with worn-down, carpeted steps, then through long corridors into the back part of the main house. They didn’t meet anyone else on the way.

“I thought there’d be servants here.”

“Not many,” said Zoe. “Florinda doesn’t like strangers around the house. It’s obviously always been like that with the Alcantaras, even when our grandparents and great-grandparents were alive. In the mornings a couple of women come in from the village near the mountain to do the cleaning, but they don’t sleep at the house. The two gardeners come for a few hours in the afternoon, but that’s hardly long enough to do more than the minimum necessary.”

“Like collecting birds’ nests?”

Zoe shrugged.

To Rosa’s surprise, her room turned out to be bright and sunny, large enough to be a stately hall anywhere else. It was empty except for a four-poster bed with elaborately carved bedposts and an antique chest of drawers with a marble top that made it a dressing table. A small room to one side appeared to be a walk-in closet. The walls of the bedroom were covered with old tapestries. A tapestry beside the door had come loose, revealing faded wall paintings underneath.

“I’ll unpack later,” said Rosa, throwing her traveling bag with a sweeping gesture into the small room, where it lay surrounded by walls of empty shelves and cupboards.

Zoe went on talking. About the cook who sometimes did the cooking on her own, but often just lent Florinda a hand. About the helicopter pilot, who lived in Piazza Armerina and was really a mechanic. And about the guards who patrolled the surrounding olive groves and pinewoods on Florinda’s orders.