Arcadia Burns

A PACT


ROSA BREATHED IN THE fresh air as if she couldn’t get enough of it. A cool breeze off the sea was blowing in her face, but she couldn’t shake the smell of the hotel basement.

She closed her eyes, but the sun was still burning bright red through her eyelids. Forcing herself not to show any weakness, she looked ahead again, and was irritated to see Contessa di Santis coming toward her on the terrace with a concerned expression.

“Everything all right, Signorina Alcantara?”

“Fine.”

“You look pale.”

“I have a fair complexion. Always did.”

The assistant nodded understandingly. “We can’t choose what we’re born with, can we?”

Before Rosa could reply, di Santis turned to Trevini, who was guiding his wheelchair out of the hotel lounge and into the open air. Rosa thought this would be a good moment to throttle him from behind.

“Can I bring you anything?” asked the assistant. “Drinks? A little snack from the kitchen?”

Trevini shook his head. “Leave us alone, please.”

Di Santis looked back over her shoulder, almost reproachfully. As she did so, her left eyebrow rose higher and higher, until Rosa began to fear that it might disappear right into her hairline.

“As you wish,” said the assistant, stalking away into the lounge. Rosa signaled to the two bodyguards to go into the building as well. Di Santis could not refrain from saying, “Please come with me, gentlemen. Maybe I can do something for you.”

Trevini moved his wheelchair past Rosa and over to the balustrade. His good eye wandered over the water in the distance. “We’re all inclined to take ourselves too seriously, don’t you agree? To think of all that this sea has known in its time! Ancient Greece, Rome, Carthage, the early Mesopotamian tribes. Ur and Babylon, the biblical peoples. And here we are discussing a single life, just one unimportant human being.”

“You move me deeply, avvocato, you really do. But I didn’t come here for a history lesson or to look at the beautiful view.”

“Without the sea I couldn’t live here,” he continued, undeterred. “It’s one of the reasons why I never leave this hotel.”

“What are the others?”

“I’m too old to take risks.” He put his fingertips to his temples. “What I have in here, in my head, is the only capital I have. Did you know that I don’t even own a computer? And no cabinets full of files.” Of course she knew; it was the first thing she had heard about Trevini. “I keep everything that matters in my mind, as I have for years. No evidence, no trails. I was born with an extraordinary memory, and I imagine it’s only right that I pay for it with certain deficiencies in other respects.”

She was watching him as he spoke. But he was still staring out over the Mediterranean, into that breathtaking blue space.

“I’m sure you have wondered why I appointed the contessa my assistant,” he went on. “She has top qualifications and references, she is easy on the eye—but none of that explains why she is really here. The truth of it is that she has the same qualities as me. I have spent a long time looking for someone who can compete with me in that respect. She is young, enormously ambitious, and she is certainly a complex character. I suffer from that more than anyone.” The twinkle in his eyes ought to have seemed insinuating, but instead it looked almost friendly. “Above all, however, she has a remarkable ability to absorb facts. She hears something, sees something, and after that it’s stored in her head as if it were on a hard disk. I have to resign myself to being less unique than I have always thought. That young lady is perfect.”

Rosa sighed. “At least as far as her bra size is concerned, right?”

“I’m sorry,” he said in kindly tones. “You don’t have to like the contessa, Rosa. I’m not even sure that I do. But think of her as your personal security copy of me. Just in case something happens to me one of these days.”

“She’s been initiated into everything? Every deal? Every transaction?”

“I took the liberty of revealing them to her. We sit together and I tell her the facts. Hour after hour, day after day. The contessa stores it all in her mind. I’ve tested her more than once. She’s fantastic. She remembers everything. And with her excellent education, she’s in a position to make judgments that surprise even me.”

“How nice to know that in the future I won’t have only you to deal with, but also”—here she glanced into the lounge and saw di Santis flirting with the bodyguards—“but also the contessa.”

“Life is a never-ending series of tribulations, my dear.”

“If you call me that again, I’ll push you over the railing.”

He laughed. “Mutual respect is a wonderful thing. But that’s not what brought you here. The video interested you, but that wasn’t all, am I right?”

The strong breeze off the sea had loosened several strands of hair from the clip she wore, and they were blowing around her face. “I’ll make you an offer, avvocato. We can beat around the bush for hours, but we both know what the end result will be. We depend on each other. I don’t like you at all—well, maybe I like you a little better than I like your contessa in there. She’s probably unbeatable at sprinting in high heels.”

He laughed heartily at that. Ah, so this was the way to get at him. Just tell him the truth.

“You depend on me as much as I depend on you,” she said, slightly relieved that now she could fall back on the speech she had prepared in advance. “I don’t know anything about the business affairs of the Alcantaras, and I need someone to keep all that at a distance from me. As you’ve obviously already begun to do. On the other hand, you could never be capo of the Alcantaras, because you don’t belong to the family. My relatives in Milan and Rome would never accept someone like you as head of the clan. As a lawyer who can spring them from prison, and as a miraculous human calculator and financial genius—no problem there; they love you for that. But you’re not an Alcantara, and you never will be.”

He was observing her very closely now. “What are you suggesting?”

“I am the head of the clan, and nothing will change that. I’m beginning to feel at home here on the island. I represent what this family stands for, and I am now the public face of the clan, whether the others like it or not.”

She had learned it by heart, but she thought it sounded good.

“Why are you doing this to yourself?” he asked. “Why don’t you just take a large sum of money and your new boyfriend and go off to live happily ever after somewhere at the other end of the world?”

“Because no one—not you, not those idiots in Palermo and Rome—none of you trust me to do anything. Because everyone’s just waiting for me to mess it all up.”

“That,” he said, smiling again, “that’s an unorthodox view of the situation. But I understand what you’re getting at.”

“I’m accepting my inheritance, avvocato. I will lead the Alcantaras.”

“And you think you can do it?”

She gave him a sweet smile. “This is where you come in. You do what you’ve been doing all these decades—you remain the genius in the background. The one who pulls the wires. Lord God Almighty of Taormina. I can butter you up as much as you want. I know how to pay compliments, I promise you I do.”

He sighed. “I think I understand you, too. You represent the clan; I do the work.”

“That’s the plan.”

He breathed in and out deeply. “I’m an old man.”

“What do you need? Another nurse like your protégée there? With longer legs, bigger breasts?”

“I can be very obstinate. Pigheaded. Difficult to deal with.”

“But you have the contessa. You can always take it out on her.”

He smiled. “You have no right of veto. No say in business affairs.”

“Forget it. I do.”

“We play the game like that or not at all.”

She shook her head. “You obviously don’t understand yet, avvocato. I make the rules. You throw the dice and see that they always come up sixes.”

He blinked, maybe because she was standing in front of the sun. Or because his expression had become a little more forced than ever. “What do you want, Rosa?”

“I’m no Mother Teresa. I know what I’m getting into. But there will be rules. No arms deals. No drugs.”

He laughed at her, just as she had planned. “Then how are we to earn money? With ringtones?”

“With what’s been most profitable to us over the last few years—the subsidies from Rome and Brussels that you fixed. Money for wind turbines that don’t generate any power, for instance.”

“It can’t be done without the arms deals,” he said categorically. “You may have to look around for someone else.”

Rosa had seen that coming, and realized that she had to make some concessions. “Where do the arms go?”

“Africa. South America. Southeast Asia. Most of the stuff comes from Russia, but some of it from the USA, Germany, France. Where do you suppose that helicopter of yours was made? It certainly isn’t branded ‘Made in Italy.’”

“How about the drugs?”

“That trade’s not what it once was. Too much competition from Russia and the Balkans. My heart’s not set on it. But you can never be one hundred percent sure it’s not going on, with some of the soldati doing deals of their own.”

“If that happens, I should hear about it.”

“You won’t make friends that way.”

“I know.” She smiled. “That’s why I want you to do it for me.”

“You think you’re making it easier for yourself, but you’ll soon see it’s exactly the opposite. It’s not the law you want to guard against; it’s your own people.”

“Then I’d better begin with you, right?”

“I swore to your grandmother, on oath, that my life belongs to this family. And I’m a man of my word.”

“You haven’t done badly up until now.”

“And as we happen to be discussing it, I have one condition. Lampedusa.”

“Florinda’s favorite project?”

“Some of her signatures still have to be honored. I have, shall we say, a personal interest in the business with the refugees on that island. We can forget about the drugs, we can reduce the arms deals, but Lampedusa must stay as it is. You will not place any obstacles in my way in that respect.”

Reluctantly, she nodded.

“We’re of the same mind, then?” he asked.

“I don’t think we’ll ever be of the same mind, avvocato. But we have a deal.” A pact is more like it, she thought, grinding her teeth.

He offered Rosa his hand, and she shook it without hesitating.

As she left, she gave Contessa di Santis a charming smile, and as they said good-bye to each other, she held the contessa’s hand a little too long. On the way back to the helicopter Rosa threw the diamond ring she had been holding in her clenched fist into the sea.