“Then they’re here,” she said.
“Yes.” He went over to a large, paint-splashed draftsman’s desk covered with sketches on large sheets of paper, as if the artist had left the studio only a few minutes ago. He opened the only drawer in the desk, rummaged around in it, and finally brought something out.
A gleaming scalpel.
He turned it over.
She thought of the letter opener that she had taken from Florinda’s desk first thing in the morning. She’d left it down on the beach in her shoulder bag.
Alessandro’s hair looked nut-brown again, but his pupils still filled his entire eyes. He went over to one of the pictures and slit it from top to bottom. With a tearing sound, the painting gaped open. A bloodless wound split the distorted face.
He did the same to a second picture.
And a third.
Rosa watched, motionless, as he devastated picture after picture, each with a swift diagonal cut, and she thought instinctively that once, in the time of the great Mafia wars, these faces would have been real people, and the
capi
and their
soldati
would have dealt with them the same way. There was something of that in Alessandro Carnevare. An heir to those times, those men.
She had the same legacy herself. Like a gene firmly anchored inside her. She could sense something stirring. Something in her changing, trying to break out. An eerie fascination joined the tension she had felt just now and the anger that still seethed inside her.
Alessandro stopped and pointed to the open drawer. “There are more in there.”
She joined him, looked inside, and saw a muddle of brushes, spatulas, pencils—and blades. Hesitantly, she put out her hand. Took one out of the drawer. Weighed the cool metal in her fingers.
A scalpel just like his. Gaia Carnevare would have used them to scrape paint off canvases. Red paint, by the look of it.
“A single cut,” said Alessandro. “That should be enough to show whether there’s anything underneath.”
She went over to one of the pictures and put the blade against it. Slit open the screaming face. Only a picture. Only paint. She got goose bumps, but at the same time she couldn’t help smiling. A tingling ran through her knees, her thighs, her lower body. It reached her rib cage and leaped up into her skull like a flame.
The next picture. And then another.
Once she thought she heard a ringing sound, like tiny bells chiming. Not in her head. Somewhere in the house. But by now she was in a kind of frenzy, and Alessandro obviously felt the same. They were destroying his mother’s pictures in search of what might be hidden in them, or under them, or behind them. Cheeks, eyes, mouths gaped open. Where canvases had been stacked behind one another, more distorted faces came into view, more and more grimaces of fear, gaudily colored glimpses into the depths of Gaia Carnevare’s soul.
“Here we are,” said Alessandro.
And at that very moment Rosa’s blade, too, met a surface harder than canvas and paint, not behind the picture but
in
it.
Alessandro’s mother had stuck folders of hard plastic or very thin metal on the canvases, and then painted them over thickly with oil paint, weaving them into her visions and nightmares.
They found ten folders distributed among a hundred or more paintings. And there were documents in all the folders. Bank statements, balance sheets, photographs of Cesare Carnevare with men in dark suits. And sheets of paper handwritten in tiny letters, illegible except with a magnifying glass, probably written with the aid of one as well.
They stood there, breathless, in the middle of the devastation. Alessandro had the scalpel in one hand and the sheaf of papers in the other. Rosa’s breasts were rising and falling. Her black bikini top was stretched over them; she felt as if her whole body was in disorder.
Alessandro smiled, while tears glittered in his eyes. Sweat gleamed on his bare skin and the muscles of his forearms.
He took a step toward her, and she could see that he was going to kiss her.
She stepped back, shaking her head.
His smile faded slightly as the reality of their situation gradually made its way back into his mind, and hers as well, and they were both themselves again, realizing what the scene around them looked like, and what effect it would have on anyone unexpectedly coming through the door.
Once again Rosa heard the clear, glassy ringing sound.
Closer this time. Out on the stairs.
Alessandro stowed all the loose sheets of paper and the photographs away in one of the paint-stained plastic folders and held it to his chest with his left hand. He kept the knife in his right hand as he spun around in the direction of the door.
Rosa stole over to the entrance of the studio, clutching the handle of her scalpel, which was wet with sweat. With a swift movement she peered around the doorpost, glanced out into the corridor.
In front of all that brightly lit white stood a frail figure, looking lost.
A girl, younger than Rosa herself.
She wore a narrow metal ring on one ankle. A silver chain, pencil-thin, led across the floor and disappeared, tightly stretched, around the nearest corner.
When the girl moved to speak, the links of the chain rang faintly, like little bells.
“Have you come to kill me?”
H
ER NAME WAS
I
OLE
Dallamano. She spoke softly and slowly. She didn’t seem afraid of the scalpel in Rosa’s hand.
She was fifteen but looked younger, in spite of the shadows under her sad eyes. Her black hair was cut short. One of the men who regularly came here had done that, she said. Otherwise they hadn’t touched her. Every few months, when her hair was long again, one of them chopped it short. Iole had asked them why they didn’t cut her throat right away, but they never answered that question.
She told Rosa and Alessandro all this even before they reached the bottom of the stairs. Iole was barefoot and moved on the Plexiglas steps without a sound—except for the slight ringing of the chain around her ankle. It had to be eighty to a hundred yards or more long, enough for Iole to walk almost all over the house, but it was too short for her to reach the top of the stairs to the upper floor. Her freedom of movement ended a few yards short of the door to Gaia Carnevare’s studio.
Rosa followed Iole down the stairs as she talked. The silvery links of the chain dropped, clinking quietly, from step to step. Alessandro followed them, clutching the folder of documents firmly in both hands. They had left the scalpels up in the studio.
“How long have you been here?” asked Rosa as they reached the first floor. The stairs led to one of the sitting rooms.
“Over six months on the island,” said the girl. “Before that they hid me in other places. A remote farmhouse in the west, then somewhere up in the mountains. There are wolves there, they said.”
Rosa looked at Alessandro, whose expression was getting darker and darker. “I didn’t know anything about this,” he said, seeing the question in her eyes.
“It’s been six years,” said Iole. “Six years, two months. And seven days.”
Rosa swore quietly.
“They took me away from my parents’ house.” Iole looked at the floor. “They said everyone was dead there. My parents. Both my brothers, all my uncles and their families. All except one person.”
“There was a Dallamano clan in Syracuse,” Alessandro explained. “I don’t know what happened, but—”
Iole interrupted him. “My uncle Augusto … he was helping a judge. A woman judge. They said he’d betrayed the families. A lot of people were arrested because of him; some of them worked for the Carnevares. But the Carnevares think he knows even more—knows about them and their businesses. They took me prisoner to keep him from talking. If he does, they’ll kill me, they say. They think he knows that, and that’s why he won’t tell the police any more.”
Her voice made her sound younger than fifteen. It struck Rosa that Iole hadn’t been to school for over six years. She had a television set, she told them; she liked the cartoons best. Rosa wondered whether it was only her vocabulary that had suffered from being held hostage so long.
“By
they
you mean Cesare Carnevare and his men?” asked Rosa.
“Yes.” Iole dropped into one of the bowl-shaped orange plastic chairs, pulling the chain in after her and putting her arms around it. The metal links chinked softly again. “I’ve only seen Cesare three times since they took me. Once right at the beginning, then again in the mountains, and the last time was a few months ago. He came here looking for something.”
Alessandro pricked up his ears. “Do you know what?”
She shook her head. “But in the end he found a safe behind one of the pictures in the strawberry room.” She smiled apologetically. “I called it that because there’s a picture hanging there with a big red blotch that looks like a strawberry. I’ve given all the rooms names. And the animals outside the windows.”
Rosa gazed at the front of the room, which looked out on the rough surface of the lava slope and the inky blue sea. No animals anywhere in sight.
“What was in the safe?” asked Alessandro.
Rosa looked at him accusingly. He did seem to be sorry for Iole, but his wish for revenge on Cesare was stronger than any other feeling he might have. Rosa sensed his rage coming back. The strange, turbulent emotions that had come over them both in the studio were gradually disappearing. She had let herself be carried away, she’d lost control. That was bad.
Just as he’d used her, now all that really interested him about Iole was what she knew about his enemy, Cesare. Rosa stepped between him and the girl on the chain. “Leave her alone. We have to think how to get her out of here.”
He stared at her as if that were completely beside the point. Then he shook his head. “If Cesare finds out we’ve met her, he’ll know we found something.”
Rosa took a menacing step closer to him. “So we just leave without her? You can’t be serious!”
“Papers,” said Iole behind her back. “There were papers in the safe. And photos. Cesare looked rather pleased.”
Alessandro swore.
“They were useless,” said Rosa. Even before he looked at her in surprise, she realized she’d spoken without thinking properly, but in fact it was only logical. “Your mother didn’t even bother to hide them. I mean, in a
safe
? She probably wanted him to find something. So that he wouldn’t keep searching and find the important files—the folders hidden in the pictures. They were for you.”
Alessandro nodded. “Yes, that’s possible.”
“You have what you wanted now,” she said coolly. “So let’s make sure she doesn’t have to stay here any—”
“Of course!” Suddenly the grim determination she’d heard when he had the scalpel in his hand was back. “Tano will know about Iole. I’d better start with him.”
“It’s not so bad here,” said Iole. Her fingertips were circling one another in the air in front of her drawn-up knees, like a pianist’s fingers. “This is a lovely house. And it’s always light here in the daytime. It’s only at night, when the animals come—”
“I’ll see to it,” Alessandro interrupted her. “Rosa, you stay here with her.” He was hurrying out, but at the last minute realized that he was still holding the folder of documents. After a moment’s thought, he came back and handed it to Rosa. “Watch this, will you? Just while I get things sorted.”
She couldn’t figure him out at all. The only thing she did know was that he made her furious all the time, never mind what he did. First he used her, then he put on airs and left her standing. All the same, she was still supposed to do as he said.
You stay here with her.
And
Watch this
. She never did anything for other people. Not if she could help it. She had surprised herself by standing up for Iole.
“It’s all right, you run along after him,” said the girl, looking even smaller and more vulnerable, as if the horrible dish-shaped chair were holding her in a plastic fist. “Don’t worry about me.”
Run along after him?
Rosa almost choked as she got her breath back. Then she nodded briefly. “You wait—we’ll be back here soon, okay?”
“Are you really going to do it? Get me out of here?”
Rosa wanted to leave at once with the wretched folder, but she stopped for a moment, hesitated—then went up to Iole, stroked her hair, and said, “I promise. We’ll get you out of here just as soon as we possibly can.”