Arcadia Falls Read online

  CONTENTS

  Scars

  A Farewell

  The Warehouse of Saints

  Harpies

  In the Mountains

  The Gaia

  Ambushed

  The Gaps in the Crowd

  The Gift

  The Hotel Paradiso

  The Law of Silence

  The Sisters

  Breaking Waves

  Sigismondis

  The Antiquarian Bookseller

  Breaking In

  The Arcadian Inheritance

  Florinda’s Fear

  In the Tunnel

  The Stabat Mater

  Hybrids

  The Anger of the Gods

  Snake and Panther

  The Concordat

  Bait

  Storming the Bunker

  Arachnid

  The Shrine

  A Sea of Shards

  The Parting

  Inconsolable

  Sinners

  The Temptation

  Massacre

  Graveyard Country

  The Base

  Stuffed Animals

  Twins

  Father and Daughter

  Nathaniel

  Sinking the Ship

  A Royal Tomb

  The Ceremony

  Ruins

  Lycaon

  Crete

  One Day

  About the Author

  Books by Kai Meyer

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  SCARS

  “IF WE WERE SCARS, our memories would be the stitches holding us together. You couldn’t cut them apart, and if you did, it would tear you in two.”

  “But my memories hurt,” she said. “I want to forget. There’s so much I just want to forget.”

  “How are you going to do that? Everything that’s happened to you is still happening today. Once something has begun, it doesn’t end. There, in your head, it never ends.”

  A FAREWELL

  FUNDLING’S FUNERAL.

  It was too hot for a Wednesday in March, the wind too sandy, the sun too bright. The hilly, caramel-colored landscape flickered, as if the procession of black figures had strayed into a mirage.

  Rosa was trying to block out her surroundings. And all sensations except for the feel of Alessandro’s hand in hers. He was crossing the graveyard beside her. She felt his closeness in every pore.

  The only trees among the graves were cypresses. The vaults of rich landowners rose along the broad main avenue, the families who had once ruled this country like kings. Now everything here belonged to the Carnevares. Their vault was the largest and most magnificent of all. Its door was wide open.

  Rosa and Alessandro walked right behind the casket and its six silent pallbearers. She had chosen to wear a plain, dark dress that fit closely over her hips, lacy stockings, and flats. Alessandro’s black suit made him look older than he was, though a shirt and tie suited him better than most other boys she knew. It probably helped that everything he wore was custom made.

  At the head of the short funeral procession—apart from the two of them, there were only a few of the domestic staff of Castello Carnevare, people who had known Fundling since he was a little boy—the priest entered the shade of the porch. The pallbearers raised the casket by its gold handles to slide it into an opening in the wall. Fundling was not a member of the Carnevare family by birth, only a foundling of unknown origin. But Alessandro had made sure that every last honor was shown to him, as if they had been real brothers.

  Iole also entered the funeral chapel with Rosa and Alessandro. She had exchanged the summery white that she usually liked to wear for a dark skirt suit. A strange girl, too eccentric for her fifteen years, Iole was getting prettier every day. Her short black hair framed delicate features, and her huge eyes were black as coal. Lost in thought, she was drawing a little heart with the toe of her shoe in the dust on the marble floor.

  The priest began his funeral oration.

  Rosa had known for days that this time would come. This standing and waiting for the moment when the finality of what had happened couldn’t be denied any longer. She wanted to be angry with the doctors who hadn’t realized that Fundling might come out of his coma and have enough strength to leave his bed without help. With the nurses who hadn’t kept watch on him carefully enough. Even with the men who had finally found him, not far from the hospital but deep enough in a crevice in the rocks for the search to have lasted two whole days.

  She would have liked to talk to Alessandro now. All at once she was afraid she might never hear him again, because everything seemed so transient, so impermanent. Wasn’t this more proof of that? She had only recently lost her sister, Zoe, and her aunt Florinda. And now Fundling too. Who was going to guarantee that Alessandro wouldn’t be next? And here they stood wasting time.

  The priest said a last prayer in front of the burial place in the wall. Then they came forward, one by one, to say good-bye.

  Rosa’s turn came directly after Alessandro’s. She tried to remember something that linked her to Fundling, a moment, something personal that he had said to her.

  All that occurred to her was a remark she had never understood: Have you ever wondered who’s in the gaps in the crowd?

  Why did she think of that, of all things, just now? Why not think of his smile—had she ever seen him smile?—or his sad brown eyes?

  They’re always there. Around us, but invisible. It’s only in a crowd that they’re visible.

  She pressed her fingertips to her lips and touched the cool wood of the casket. That felt like the right thing to do. A little clumsy, but right.

  Iole laid a photograph of Sarcasmo, Fundling’s black mongrel dog, on the casket’s lid. Then she rubbed the back of her hand over her eyes and left the chapel with Rosa and Alessandro. After a moment’s hesitation, Rosa put her arm around the girl. Iole rested her head on Rosa’s shoulder. The fabric of Rosa’s black dress felt moist and warm under Iole’s cheek.

  Alessandro’s hand clutched Rosa’s a little more firmly. “Over there.” He was looking to his left and nodded at three figures standing in the shade of a cypress well away from the others. “Are they out of their minds, showing up here?”

  Through the stone forest of crosses above tombs and statues, Rosa saw a small woman whose short hair barely reached the collar of her beige coat. Something flashed on her breast. Rosa remembered a locket. She had never seen Judge Quattrini without it.

  Across the distance between them, the judge returned her glance. She was flanked by her two assistants and bodyguards, Antonio Festa and Stefania Moranelli. They both wore their leather jackets open, and anyone could see the straps of their shoulder holsters.

  “What do they think they’re doing here?” Fine black hairs were rising from Alessandro’s collar and up to his throat.

  “They’re just here to watch.” Rosa hoped she wasn’t wrong. When they had gone to the hospital morgue to identify Fundling’s body, there had been a fierce argument between him and the judge. She knew exactly how Fundling had died, he had told Quattrini angrily. So what was the point of an autopsy? “Taking him apart like a boiled chicken,” he had said.

  The top part of Fundling’s wound had been visible under the edge of the sheet that the forensic team had used to cover him. They had opened his rib cage and then stitched it up again. Yet it was obvious what had happened. Fundling had dragged himself out of the hospital—no one knew exactly how he had managed to do that, after lying in a coma for five months—and had fallen into a crevice in the rocks. Police officers had—finally—found him there.

  Rosa had listened to Alessandro and the judge shouting, then she went away without a word. He had caught up with her in the pa
rking lot, still in such a furious rage that the argument went on there, without Quattrini. He and Rosa never yelled at each other. But they knew each other’s tones of voice well enough to know when a difference of opinion threatened to turn into a serious problem.

  By now that confrontation was forgotten. But it didn’t look as if he could accept the fact that Quattrini and her assistants, of all people, were turning up at Fundling’s funeral.

  Just when he was about to go over to the judge, Rosa held him back. “Don’t do it.”

  “I’m the capo of the Carnevares. My people wouldn’t expect me to put up with this.”

  “If you want to impress them, get a bigger hat than theirs or something like that. But don’t get yourself in trouble for anything as silly as this.”

  Iole confronted the pair of them. “Stop fighting or I’ll pretend to faint. Maybe I’ll scream a bit, too.” Dark tracks of mascara were drying on her cheeks.

  Rosa put her arms around Iole.

  Sighing slightly, Alessandro ruffled Iole’s hair, dropped a kiss on the nape of Rosa’s neck, and took her hand again. “Let’s get out of here.” Panther fur was receding under his clothes.

  A little later they reached the graveyard gate. Several vehicles were parked on the small lawn. A dusty track wound its way down the hill. The delicate fragrance of lavender rose from the valley.

  The Alcantara helicopter stood a little way from the cars. It had flown Iole in from Isola Luna. She was now living on the bleak volcanic island with Rosa; her tutor, Raffaela Falchi; and the clan’s lawyer, Cristina di Santis. The young attorney had taken over the work of the late Avvocato Trevini with zest. After the destruction of the Palazzo Alcantara, Rosa could have chosen one of the many luxurious villas among her family’s vast real estate holdings, but she liked the island. It had also been a present to her from Alessandro. He spent a great deal of time with her there; they saw each other more often now than they had in the past.

  Rosa gently took Iole’s shoulders. “Will you be all right?”

  The girl nodded. “I’ll be giving Sarcasmo lots of hugs.”

  Rosa kissed her forehead. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  Iole nodded and then walked over to the chopper. The pilot put his newspaper down and started the engine. He waved good-bye to Rosa.

  Hand in hand, she and Alessandro watched as the helicopter took off and eventually dwindled to a tiny dot in the cloudless sky. More mourners were leaving the graveyard. There was no sign of the judge. Had she and her assistants disappeared through a side entrance?

  “I searched Fundling’s room,” said Alessandro abruptly.

  During the months Fundling had spent in a coma, Alessandro hadn’t touched his things, and Fundling’s room at Castello Carnevare had remained locked.

  “There was all kinds of weird stuff in there. I put it in a box in the trunk.” They had decided to disappear for a day right after the funeral, get away from the clans and all their businesses, maybe stay in a beach hotel in the southeast of Sicily: go on a diving expedition, dine at sunset with a view of the sea and the vague sense that Africa was there to the south.

  Slowly, they walked back to their cars. Rosa’s anthracite-colored Maybach gleamed in front of the dusty panorama of hills—she never touched her father’s Maserati these days, although like all the other Alcantara vehicles it had survived the palazzo fire intact.

  She had left the windows down; no one was stupid enough to steal a car belonging to the head of a clan. And if anyone wanted to put an untimely end to her with a car bomb, closed windows weren’t going to stop him.

  Her glance fell on the driver’s seat. A crumpled note lay on the black leather.

  “Is that from her?” Alessandro breathed out sharply. It sounded like the snarl of a beast of prey.

  Rosa took the piece of paper out of the car, closed her fist around it, and walked behind the vehicle so that it would screen her from the eyes of the people on the grass. Most of them seemed to be in a hurry to leave.

  She smoothed out the note and skimmed the few words.

  “What does she want?” he asked as she put the note away.

  “A meeting with us.”

  “No way.”

  Her chin jutted out stubbornly. “Is that an order?”

  “Just common sense.”

  “If she showed up here in person, it must be important.” He was about to interrupt her, but she laid a finger on his lips. “She knows something.”

  “That’s why she’s a judge. She knows a lot about Cosa Nostra.”

  “I don’t mean that. Her note gives the name of a place and says she wants to speak to us. And then the word Arcadia. With a question mark.”

  He looked darkly past her toward the graveyard.

  “She didn’t hear about that from me,” said Rosa.

  “I know she didn’t.”

  “Or—” She fell silent, biting her lower lip.

  “What?”

  “The Hungry Man. When I went to see him in prison . . . The rumor is, he’s not being closely guarded—on instructions from very high places. But maybe she’s overridden those instructions. She could have been listening in on our conversation.”

  Alessandro rubbed the bridge of his nose. Even before he could reply, she came to a decision.

  “I’ll talk to her.”

  “Not again.”

  “And you, too.”

  He snorted scornfully.

  “She knows about it,” she whispered insistently. “About us, about the dynasties. Don’t you want to hear what she has to say?”

  He clenched his fist and slammed it into the roof of the car. Under his breath, he let out an impressive series of curses.

  “San Leo,” she said. “Is that a village? She wants to meet us at the church.”

  “There’s a San Leo up in the Monti Nebrodi. It’s two hours’ drive from here. An hour and a half if we step on it.”

  “Who’s driving?”

  “Which of us drives faster?”

  She kissed him, bent down into her car once more, took her iPod out of its holder, and emerged back into the open air.

  “Your car,” she said. “But my music.”

  THE WAREHOUSE OF SAINTS

  THEY HAD LEFT THE little town of Cesarò far in the distance and were following the winding road higher into the Nebrodi Mountains, when Rosa remembered Fundling’s things in the trunk.

  Fever Ray’s “Keep the Streets Empty for Me” was booming around the interior of the black Porsche Cayenne. The bass didn’t have to be quite so low to drown out the quiet purring of the engine.

  I’m laying down, eating snow

  My fur is hot, my tongue is cold.

  Rosa adjusted the volume. “What exactly is in that box?”

  Alessandro looked in the rearview mirror longer than was really necessary on the lonely mountain road. There was no one following them.

  “In all these years I haven’t seen Fundling with a book in his hand more than once or twice,” he said. “I always assumed reading didn’t appeal to him. He tinkered with cars a lot, repaired things—practical stuff. I never thought someone like Fundling took any interest in books.”

  “And now you’ve found a library in his room?”

  He shook his head. “A handful of books, yes, but that’s not it. Fundling collected stacks of catalogs. Lists from antiquarian booksellers all over Italy. Not glossy brochures from mail-order companies, but photocopied price lists, even a couple of handwritten ones. He must have written to dozens of small businesses to ask them to send him their lists.”

  “So he was looking for something. A particular book. Or several.”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Do you know what he was after?”

  “No idea. I packed up most of his papers and brought them with me. I thought we could check it out together when we have time. As I was flipping through the papers, I noticed that he’d put checks beside a lot of titles, circled some of them several times. Maybe t
here’s some kind of system behind it, and we’ll find out what sort of books in particular he was after.”

  “Not books full of pictures of cars?”

  “Definitely not. I brought the few books he did have lying around, along with the papers. They’re nonfiction about ancient catastrophes. The fall of Pompeii, the end of Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  Their glances met before he had to look forward again at the next hairpin turn. “Atlantis?” she asked.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “That too.”

  “You once told me Atlantis was another name for Arcadia.”

  “I said that’s what a lot of people believe. But there’s no evidence. Atlantis could be all kinds of things. No one really knows anything about it. And even if Arcadia and Atlantis were one and the same place, what difference would that make today? And why would someone like Fundling be interested? He wasn’t an Arcadian himself.”

  She hadn’t met Fundling many times. He was odd, and somehow attractive at the same time. He was good-looking, in a dark, almost Asian way, but in Sicily, with its many North African immigrants, that was nothing unusual. It certainly wasn’t what gave Fundling his special aura.

  The road ran along a steep slope. Chestnut trees and gnarled holm oaks clung to the rocks, and woods of beech and maple grew in the valleys below. Again and again trazzere, dusty cattle tracks, branched off the paved main road and disappeared into ravines, or led by a winding route to remote farms. Trying to summon help here if you had an accident was not a pleasant idea. Too many bad films.

  “You don’t have to drive so fast,” she said, as he cut one of the hairpin turns again. “We can keep her waiting if she gets there before us.”

  “I want to get it over with, and then never have anything to do with Quattrini again. If any of the other families find out we’ve been meeting her, we’re dead.”

  Of course, omertà. The law of silence. Rosa concentrated on a random point in the mountainous landscape. “Who cares? They wouldn’t be the first to want us out of the way.”

  Alessandro slowed down on a short stretch of straight road. To their right, the slope fell steeply away. There was no guardrail, only knee-high blocks of stone at intervals of a few yards apart. Farther down, Rosa saw an illegal garbage dump, one of thousands all over Sicily. The mountain farmers probably got rid of their trash there when, yet again, no sanitation truck made its way into this barren wasteland.