Arcadia Burns

THE AVVOCATO


THE SUN WAS BLAZING above the sea, its rays sparkling on the rotor blades of the helicopter, which had come to a halt. It was standing on the landing pad below the hotel while its engines cooled off. The pilot sat in the cockpit, leafing through the Gazzetta dello Sport.

Rosa stood higher up, on the terrace of the Grand Hotel Jonio, her hands on the wrought-iron balustrade, looking down the steep coast at the gray-blue water. Far below, train tracks ran along a narrow strip of land between the rocks and the breaking waves. A small, red-roofed station building rose from the bleak rock. The old town center of Taormina lay on the plateau to the left of the hotel, six hundred feet above the sea and the railroad.

Rosa was wearing a three-quarter-length leather coat, black boots, and a close-fitting Trussardi dress. She had tied her blond hair back in a ponytail, hoping that it made her look sterner and older. If there was one thing she had learned from Florinda, it was to dress well for business meetings. She wanted Avvocato Trevini to see immediately that she was the head of her clan, not an intimidated girl who had let his video lure her here.

Behind her, she heard the sharp click of stiletto heels on the marble of the terrace. Rosa waited until the sound stopped directly behind her, then turned around.

“The avvocato will be here in a moment,” said the young woman who had come out of the hotel to join her. Contessa Cristina di Santis—Trevini’s new assistant, confidante, who knew what else?—was descended from the old Sicilian aristocracy, as Rosa’s secretary had found out for her. She had studied in Paris, London, and Milan, earning her doctoral and law degrees in record time. There was no di Santis clan in the Mafia these days; it had been almost entirely wiped out in the 1980s by the Corleonese. Its last few members had a good amount of wealth of their own, but no longer kept in active touch with Cosa Nostra.

With one exception. As Trevini’s assistant, Cristina di Santis accepted the rules of the Alcantara clan.

Rosa’s rules.

“The avvocato asks me to say he is very glad that you have come to see us, Signorina Alcantara,” said the young attorney formally. “He is extremely sorry that his state of health makes it necessary for him to keep you waiting for a few minutes.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Rosa untruthfully. The delay was nothing but an attempt at harassment. Trevini had been asking for weeks for an appointment with her, and now that she had come to Taormina, couldn’t he turn up on time?

“If I can offer you some refreshment—”

“Thank you.” Rosa did not take her eyes off the other young woman, deliberately leaving it to the contessa to guess whether she meant yes or no, and watching the way Cristina di Santis dealt with the uncertainty.

The contessa was half a head taller than she was, black-haired, slender, but with all the curves that Rosa lacked. Her raised left eyebrow suggested that she was sizing Rosa up. She seemed to be waiting to test Rosa seriously, and then she would show this stupid, full-of-herself American girl how contempt was expressed stylishly here in Europe.

None of this surprised Rosa. In a way, she could totally understand it. What did surprise her was the contessa’s reaction when the soft sound of rubber tires on stone announced the attorney’s arrival.

An expression of diligent civility appeared on the contessa’s face. Like a robot without any personality of its own; as if her emotions had suddenly been extinguished.

Careful not to show any irritation, Rosa turned to the old man in the wheelchair. This was the third time she had met the Alcantaras’ attorney, the gray eminence of the clan, and once again she thought that he was like a certain actor, though try as she might she couldn’t think of his name. She didn’t remember seeing him in any movie; she just had a sense of him staring down at her from a screen, larger than life. Not that there was anything about Trevini to intimidate anyone at first sight. He was an emaciated old man, he had been confined to a wheelchair since childhood, and he was blind in one eye. Threat and intimidation didn’t look like that in Mafia circles. Yet there was an aura that followed him, surrounded him, came into a room with him, and lingered in the air out on this terrace.

“Signorina Alcantara.” The corners of his mouth moved, merging with his countless wrinkles. “We meet again at last. I am so glad to see you.”

The wind off the sea swept Rosa’s ponytail forward over her shoulder, but the avvocato’s white hair was untouched by the draft. Maybe he had put gel on its few remaining strands to keep it in place. His lips were narrow and colorless, as if he were parting scar tissue when he smiled.

She went to meet him, with a surreptitious glance at her two bodyguards standing motionless in their black suits at the edge of the terrace. She was already regretting that she had let Alessandro persuade her to take the men with her.

She offered Trevini her hand. “Avvocato.”

“You received my message,” he said.

“You haven’t replied to my questions about that.”

“Because matters call for discussion face-to-face.”

She took this ploy with a good grace. “And that’s why I’m here.”

“Will you come a little way with me?” He steered the wheelchair along the balustrade of the terrace. The contessa was left behind.

Rosa walked beside the wheelchair for some twenty or thirty yards, until they were out of earshot of anyone else. “I haven’t seen much of my business managers and the other annoying people who usually harass me whenever they have the chance,” she said. “Since I came back from the States, they’ve left me alone. I assume I have you to thank for that.”

“I am sure that you value a little rest after such a strenuous journey.”

“What did you tell them? That from now on you would be making the decisions on all economic matters?”

“Is that what you’d prefer?”

She had some difficulty in not letting the milky membrane over his right eye distract her. “What do you think my grandmother would have done, in her time, if you had gone over her head like that?”

He smiled. “I certainly would not be here any longer.”

With a sigh, she grasped the balustrade and looked out at the sea. A few isolated yachts were cruising off the coast. Even in February, Taormina was not entirely free of tourists. There was hardly another place in Sicily as popular with foreign visitors as this town high above the water.

“I hate what you’re trying to do here, avvocato,” she said quietly. “I’m sure you think it’s stupid of me, but I just don’t like it. Not you, or your cheap tricks, or the whole damn thing.”

“But you have no objection to all that money, do you?”

Angrily, she spun around, and noticed at the same time that the movement had alerted her bodyguards. With a shake of her head, she let them know that everything was all right.

“Was that really necessary?” asked Trevini, glancing at the two men.

“You tell me.”

There was a touch of warmth in his smile. “What makes you think that I don’t wish you well?”

“I’m a nuisance to you, Avvocato Trevini. An annoying inheritance from my aunt, and you have to battle it as best you can.”

“Do I look to you as if I want to fight anyone?”

“Why did you send me that video?”

“As a warning. And before you misunderstand that, too: a warning not against me, but against the company you keep.”

She turned her face to the wind and closed her eyes for two or three seconds. “You know, I’m really sorry to hear that. My family is consumed by fear of the Carnevares. The women managing my companies in Milan, my so-called advisers, they all predict disaster after disaster. And a great many older men make a great many conjectures about my sex life. Maybe I should worry about that rather than my relationship with Alessandro Carnevare.”

There was a glint of mockery in Trevini’s one good eye. “I have never taken the slightest interest in what the Alcantara women do behind closed doors. I am concerned only with the business of the clan: its financial prosperity, profit margins.”

“But the responsibility is mine.” Big words, but she didn’t believe them herself.

“The Carnevares are not to be trusted. You ought never to forget that.”

“I’m not sleeping with the Carnevares, avvocato. Only with one of them.”

“That’s not what I’ve heard.”

She stared at him. She thought she was going to have to punch a defenseless old man in the face, here and now. With immense difficulty she controlled herself, understanding that provocation was one of his strongest weapons. The realization didn’t make what he had said any less hurtful, but it did lessen its poisonous sting.

“I know exactly what happened on that occasion,” he said. “At Eighty-Five Charles Street, wasn’t it? Michele and Tano Carnevare, along with a few others. It’s no secret, even if you may wish it were, Signorina Alcantara.” He slowly shook his head. “I wonder how you can still stay close to a Carnevare, that’s all.”

“I wasn’t raped by Alessandro,” she managed to say tonelessly.

“But he’s one of them, and he always will be. He was present that evening.”

For a moment, doubt entered her mind, and she hated herself for it. She was letting him force her on to the defensive. She couldn’t allow that.

“How did you get hold of that video?” There was cold fury in her voice, and a chill was spreading through her.

“You know me a little, Rosa.” He used her proper name for the first time, and although she didn’t like it, she didn’t tell him not to. That would have been admitting that she felt too young for the part she had to play. Let him call her what he wanted.

Cristina di Santis was watching them from the far end of the terrace.

“You know me,” Trevini repeated, as if that made it truer. “I would love to tell you about a clever plan that allowed me to acquire that video. But the truth is much more mundane. The cell phone with the video on it was delivered to you at a Palermo branch of the Alcantara bank. The employees there didn’t know quite what to do with it. Simply putting it in an envelope and mailing it to the other end of the island may not have struck them as entirely appropriate.” He shrugged his shoulders, which looked odd, because he had difficulty with certain movements. “Or else they felt it their duty to let someone who has been a buffer between the Alcantaras and the harsher side of life for thirty years see it first.”

She wondered whether she could manage to haul him out of his wheelchair and throw him over the balustrade. He couldn’t weigh much; he was only skin and bone under his elegant gray suit.

“That’s how I came by the recording. I saw you on it, Rosa, you and young Carnevare, and I thought it must have some deeper significance, or someone wouldn’t have been so anxious to get the video into your hands. So I had a few inquiries made of the New York police. It didn’t even take an hour for my capable contessa to find all the information.” He was beaming. “Ah, I love to call her that—my contessa…Well, be that as it may, an apparently unimportant snippet of film showing some party or other suddenly became a highly explosive pictorial record.”

Rosa glanced at his assistant again. She was standing motionless in her chic skirt suit and elegant high heels. One of the bodyguards was staring at her ass. Rosa decided to fire him.

“The next step was obvious,” said Trevini. “I had the person who handed in the cell phone tracked down.”

She was fighting against the cold again, and wondered what Alessandro would have done in her place.

“My people found her at a sleazy hotel. She was not in a good state, but she was still able to answer a few questions.”

“You talked to Valerie?”

“Of course.” Trevini was jubilant. “And so can you. You see, Rosa, Valerie Paige is here with us in Taormina.”