Arcadia Burns

THE PRISONER


AT THE END OF a long trek through the basement, some way from the hotel laundry room and wine cellar, Trevini braked his wheelchair in front of an iron door with a bolted and shuttered peephole in it.

“The management was kind enough to outfit this for my purposes,” he explained.

Rosa couldn’t tear her eyes away from the closed peephole. “Good service.”

“I’ve been living in my suite here for thirty-four years. One can expect a little more than fresh orange juice for breakfast.”

She went past him to the door and pushed aside the bolt over the peephole. Before she opened the viewing window itself, she turned to the attorney again. “Was this what you meant by ‘further material’?”

“You’ll see. I didn’t promise more than I could deliver.”

With an abrupt movement, she opened the viewing window.

The interior of the cell was decorated with shiny, moisture-repellent paint in the unhealthy green of hospital walls. There was a mattress on a concrete base, with a crumpled quilt and a pillow showing traces of blood.

On the ground in front of it, knees drawn up and empty-eyed, sat a thin figure in torn jeans and a creased T-shirt so dirty that you couldn’t make out the logo of the band on it. Valerie’s dark hair was short and untidy; she had probably cut it herself. Her face was emaciated, and the dark rings under her eyes could have been drawn on with finger paint. She had been biting her lips again and again; that was probably where the blood on the pillow had come from.

Without turning to Trevini behind her, Rosa asked, “You haven’t been torturing her, have you?”

“She was questioned. But she has no physical injuries to show for it. She was a wreck already.”

Valerie’s arms were covered with tattoos, all dating from the last sixteen months. She’d had piercings when Rosa knew her before, but now she had several rings in each ear and half a dozen silver pins on her eyebrows, nose, and chin. Whatever she saw at this moment with her bloodshot eyes wasn’t anything that was actually in the cell with her.

“Drugs?”

“Sedatives. She’s had injections on her arms, between her toes, and under her tongue, but they’re not our doing. When my people found her, she’d been pumped full of chemicals. I’ve no idea what your friend has gone through, but I don’t imagine she remembers much of it. Or at least not any of it from the recent past.”

Valerie must have been able to hear the voices on the other side of the door, but she showed no reaction.

“Valerie?” Rosa stood on tiptoe so that her face filled the viewing window. “It’s me. Rosa.”

Not even a twitch.

Rosa took a step back and looked at the lock of the door. “Open that.”

“Are you sure?”

“Damn it, will you just open that door?”

The avvocato took out a key and handed it to her. “Here you are.”

She put it in the lock, but before she turned it, Trevini said, “There’s just one thing we ought to be clear about.”

“What?”

“Everything else is up to you and you alone. She’s your prisoner now, not mine.”

Once again she turned to the door, taking a deep breath. The smell of laundry detergent wafted through the hotel basement, and machinery was throbbing in the distance. The pipes under the hall ceiling gurgled.

“Make up your mind,” said Trevini. “About what happens to her. Do you want to ask her more questions? Let her go? Dispose of the problem entirely?”

She couldn’t look at him. She hated him with all her heart, and even more she hated the fact that he was telling the truth. Now that she had seen the captive in the basement with her own eyes, she couldn’t act as if she didn’t know about her. Trevini was on her payroll; the Alcantara clan also financed his assistant and the men who had caught Valerie and questioned her. Rosa felt bile rising in her.

“You understand what I’m telling you.” Trevini found her sore spot and probed it. “If you want to get rid of the girl in there, it will be done. No one will know. She treated you badly. Who could blame you for holding a grudge against her?”

She half turned to Trevini, closed the shutter over the peephole with her other hand, and asked, “What did she tell you?”

“I’m glad to see I’ve been able to arouse your curiosity after all.”

She had come in order to offer him a proposition. Now she was glad that she hadn’t mentioned it yet. Seething inside, she realized that it was in her power to dispose of him entirely. He knew it, and yet he was playing games with her. Because they depended on each other. Without him and his knowledge of three decades of the Alcantara businesses, she would never survive a tug-of-war for leadership of the clan. And without Rosa, he was just an ordinary attorney whom the rising generation of capodecini would be only too happy to replace with a modern legal office in Palermo.

But did she really want to be in a position in which she had to make decisions like this about the life or death of a young drug addict?

“You’re sorry for her,” Trevini remarked. “You ought not to be. Michele Carnevare told her to take you to that party. And she obeyed him. That’s the truth of the matter. She wormed herself into your confidence, Rosa, only to lead you like a lamb to the slaughter.”

“Maybe she didn’t know what Michele planned to do.” She could hardly believe that she, of all people, had suggested such a flimsy reason for Valerie’s innocence.

“That’s possible.” Trevini wheeled his chair a little closer, until the footrests almost touched her shins. “Maybe, as you say, she didn’t know. Does that make it any better? Isn’t ignorance the oldest and hoariest of excuses?”

Mattia had said that Valerie had flown to Europe to ask Rosa to forgive her. She had promised to pass along his message if she met her, and in return he had saved Rosa’s life. Would she really sentence Valerie to death now?

She turned the key and pushed the door open.

Trevini laughed softly. Or was it only the gurgling of the water pipes?

“Valerie.” She stopped in the middle of the cell, a few feet from the despondent figure on the floor. Valerie’s eyes went straight through her. Rosa resisted the urge to turn around and look behind her.

“Valerie, can you hear me?”

No reaction.

Rosa took another step forward and crouched down. Their faces were level now. She hadn’t mourned their friendship over the last year, and she certainly didn’t mourn it now. Her mind was full of accusations instead. Anger. How practical it would have been to feel nothing but indifference today. Instead, rage seethed inside her.

Hesitantly, she followed Valerie’s gaze and looked over her shoulder.

Only the bare wall.

“It’s up to you,” she thought she heard Trevini say. Or was that a voice from her memory?

A drop of blood was running down Valerie’s chin. She had taken her lower lip between her teeth and bitten it again. But her eyes were as fixed as ever.

Why didn’t Rosa feel sorry for her? Was this the inheritance that she had claimed here in Sicily? The cold-blooded nature of her grandmother, and Florinda after her?

She stood up and left the cell, too quickly, too obviously in flight. Trevini was bound to register that, and when she forced herself to look at him again, his smile was the smile of an understanding schoolmaster.

“I can teach you,” he said. “Everything you need to know.”

She left the door unlocked and dropped the key in his lap. “Keep her here for now. I spent a year in hell on her account; a few more days won’t make any difference to Val.”

“And then what, if I may ask? What’s to become of her later, after another week or another month?” He weighed the key in his hand as if it were much heavier than before. “You could give her her freedom. You could be gracious and generous. What does your conscience tell you, Rosa Alcantara? And what does your blood tell you?”

She left him behind her and walked quickly down the corridor in the direction of the elevator.

He called after her, “You asked me just now what Costanza would have done.”

“I am not my grandmother.”

“But you must learn to be like her. You want a life here on the island? You want young Carnevare? Then you must be harder than any of the others, more cruel than your enemies. Costanza knew that. And you will soon understand it as well.”

“I’ll see you on the terrace,” she called back over her shoulder. “We’ll discuss it further there.” Not down here. Not in the dark.

But the darkness followed her up into the daylight.