Arcadia Burns

COSTANZA’S LEGACY


ROSA FOUND IOLE IN the greenhouse. The glazed annex was like a long arm reaching out from the north wall of the Palazzo Alcantara. The walls and the vaulted ceiling were made of glass panes that creaked dangerously in high winds. Rust and verdigris covered the iron framework. Like everything else in the palazzo, the place was in urgent need of restoration.

“They like me,” said Iole proudly.

She had a snake draped around her neck like a shimmering stole. Iole was caressing its skull. The other end of the reptile was coiled around her waist. More snakes were winding around her feet, darting their tongues in and out and hissing.

Rosa closed the door of the greenhouse behind her and entered the sultry jungle inside. Palm trees, giant ferns, exotic shrubs, and climbing plants had merged into dense thickets over the years. The humid heat that clouded the glass with condensation took her breath away at first. But in a moment her body adjusted to it. In fact it felt like she could breathe freely in the palazzo for the first time in months. Part of her duties, those that had lent a leaden heaviness to the place, had been left behind with Trevini in Taormina. She felt better—but at the same time she was confronting new anxieties.

“Would you like to see it now?” asked Iole, carefully trying to lift the snake off her shoulders. The creatures were remarkably trusting. Iole was not a Lamia, indeed not an Arcadian at all, yet the reptiles accepted her as one of their own.

“Would I like to see what?” Rosa dismissed the image of the captive Valerie that had superimposed itself on Iole’s cheerful face.

“The freezer!” Iole made a reproachful pout. “Hello? The keypad working the door, remember? Days and days working away down in the dark cellar? Me, the genius with numbers!”

Rosa smiled, and helped her to put the snake down on the floor with the others. The sound of hissing and spitting came from all directions. More and more snakes came winding their way out of the undergrowth and formed a wide circle around Rosa, not as playful as they were with Iole but rather preserving a respectful distance.

Rosa took Iole’s hand. “Okay, let’s go. Can’t wait to see what you found.”

Iole beamed. “You really have time?”

“You act as if I never do.”

Iole’s mouth twisted, and she looked at Rosa as if to say: Well, think about it.

Rosa groaned guiltily and led Iole to the door. The snakes swiftly glided aside and formed an avenue for them. Rosa was glad when they had left the greenhouse and the latch clicked behind them. It wasn’t that she didn’t like to be near the snakes; it was more that she got slightly irritated finding, week after week, how she felt about being near them.

There were several ways into the palazzo cellar. They used a staircase behind a door in the kitchen, not far from the open range where whole pigs used to be roasted on spits.

The stairway was narrow, and clearly hadn’t been used for years. Iole went ahead, warning Rosa of cobwebs and any steps that were shorter than the others, obviously enjoying the role of guide. When she operated an old-fashioned rotary switch on the wall, round lamps in metal frames on the hall ceiling came on.

After the tropical climate of the greenhouse, it was definitely cold down here. A slight draft of air smelled of dank stone and mold.

“There’s something I have to ask you,” said Rosa as she followed Iole along the brickwork corridors. Iole liked to wear white—perhaps to declare her independence from Rosa’s habitual black—and had a strong aversion to anything too close-fitting. In the dim light, there was something fairy-like about the loose material of her dress wafting around her.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know if you’ll want to talk about it.”

Iole didn’t look back at her. “What it was like when I was being kept prisoner?”

Rosa sighed softly. “Yes. But something particular about it.”

“Ask away.”

“How did you feel about the men who were keeping you captive? Did you hate them, or were you angry or afraid of them? A mixture of all that? Or something different?”

Iole shook her head. Rosa could still see her only from behind. “I didn’t feel anything about them.”

“Nothing at all?”

“I didn’t think about them except when they came to bring me food or clothes. Or when they were taking me to a new hiding place. Otherwise I pretended they didn’t exist. Like when you dive into the water with your hands over your ears—you don’t hear anything. It works with feelings, too. Everything inside you closes up; it doesn’t let anything through. And then it’s like you’re deaf to feelings. You just don’t have them anymore.” She stopped and turned around. “Sounds a little crazy, right?” Rosa hugged her. “It doesn’t sound crazy at all.”

Raising her head from Rosa’s shoulder, Iole looked at her. “Why are you asking?”

“No reason.”

“That’s not true.” Iole tilted her head a little and stared at her, hard. “Are you keeping someone prisoner?”

“What makes you think that?”

“There was one of those men who brought me things, and he always seemed a little sad, like he was ashamed of himself. You look just the same.”

Rosa took a step back, shook her head, and ran her fingers through her hair. “Let’s keep going, okay?”

Iole shrugged. “You have to make sure the prisoner always has something to drink. And something to eat. Not too sweet, not too sour. And a TV set. Otherwise your prisoner goes soft in the head.”

Rosa didn’t know how well Trevini was looking after Valerie, but she was pretty sure there was no TV set in her cell. Oddly enough, it was that point that pricked her conscience.

Iole continued walking, and Rosa hurried to catch up with her. She had been down here once before, but none of it seemed familiar. The coarse brown masonry, the cobwebs over the electric bulbs in their metal holders, the cracked concrete underfoot, which had been laid down over even older floors—as if the palazzo were about to show its true face, one that had been hidden behind halfhearted renovations.

“It’s cold down here.” She folded her arms around her shoulders as she walked.

“It’ll be colder in a minute,” said Iole.

Soon they reached the space outside the freezer. They had been going for only a few minutes, but it felt to Rosa as if an hour had passed. Below the ceiling, neon tubes came alight, humming. The place was empty except for a metal box beside a heavy iron door.

“And you’ve been in there already?”

Iole nodded. “Sarcasmo was with me. He got excited when he smelled those things.”

“What things?”

“Wait and see.”

Iole opened the flap on the little metal box. Her feet crunched on crumbs of dog biscuit. Her fingers danced over an unilluminated keypad. The numbers on the display consisted of large lines in a style that must have been the latest in modern technology two decades ago.

A hydraulic mechanism hissed, as if the iron door were uttering a reluctant groan. Several locks opened with clicking sounds. It seemed an unusual security system for a freezer that would normally have held provisions and game animals killed in the hunt.

“Give me a hand, will you?” Iole was tugging at the enormous door handle.

Rosa still wasn’t sure that she really wanted to see what her grandmother had left here. But the adrenaline junkie in her surfaced. That did her good.

She pulled at the handle with Iole, and retreated, step by step, as the heavy door swung out into the corridor.

Darkness reigned beyond it. The cool air of the cellar retreated before a surge of Arctic cold.

“You do know I’m a vegetarian?” She peered past Iole into the darkness. “If there are ancient pig carcasses or something dangling from the ceiling in there—”

Iole vigorously shook her head. “No, much better than that.”

The neon tubes outside shed light into the freezer for only a few feet. To the right and left, it fell on something that looked like rows of cocoons lined up. They hung from the ceiling without touching the ground. An aisle ran between them.

“Wait.” Iole pressed a button next to the display on the keypad. More neon tubes lit up on the ceiling, crackling. Their light flickered on in a wave from the entrance to the depths of the freezer. The white light showed a long room, more like a tunnel than anything else. It was wide enough for not just one but three aisles between the hanging shapes.

Rosa went up to the steel doorway. Iole hurried past her, brought a metal doorstop out of the room, and wedged it under the open iron door. “There,” she said, pleased with herself.

Vapor rose as Rosa breathed out. “What are those things?”

Iole went ahead. “Come with me.”

Together they approached the nearest dangling forms, which Rosa now saw were fabric bags. Made of linen or cotton, and stuffed very full. Four rails ran under the ceiling, parallel to the side walls. Animal carcasses had probably once been hung in here. The idea turned her stomach.

She looked more closely at one of the bags.

The shapes of arms showed right and left inside the fabric.

No legs. No head.

Iole put out one hand and tapped the front fabric bag. The hook fastening it to the rail made a slight grinding sound, and the shapeless thing began swinging back and forth.

“Fine. Right,” said Rosa, working hard on sounding matter-of-fact. “Not dead bodies, are they?”

Iole grinned. “Depends how you look at it.” She ran both hands over the fabric, found a zipper, and pulled it down with a firm jerk.

Brown fur spilled out of the opening. Iole put one hand inside and stroked the fluffy surface.

“Fur coats,” she said. “A hundred and sixteen. I counted them.”

Rosa bent her head and tried to look between the rows at the opposite side of the tunnel-like cellar room. But the hanging linen cocoons seemed to be moving closer and closer together at the back, as if to bar her view of the far end of the freezer.

“My grandmother stored her fur coats down here?” she whispered.

“They keep better in the cold,” said Iole, pride in her voice. “I read that somewhere.” She took the fur at the front off the rail, removed it entirely from its bag, and rubbed her cheek against the garment, enjoying its softness.

Once again Rosa realized how cold she was. “Who needs a fur coat in Sicily? And who, for god’s sake, needs a hundred and sixteen of them?”

However, she could answer that question for herself. Cosa Nostra loved status symbols, from magnificent properties to fast cars to designer fashion. Many a Mafioso collected villas on the Riviera; others surrounded themselves with crowds of beautiful women. Costanza had obviously had a weakness for furs. Florinda had hated her, Rosa knew that much.

She pointed to the rows. “No black leather jackets, I suppose?”

“If you sell all those coats you can buy yourself a thousand leather jackets.”

“Then I’ll have all the animal-rights activists in Italy after me, not to mention the police.”

“I think they’re great!” Iole put the coat on. It was much too large for her; its hem fell in folds to the floor around her feet.

Rosa walked slowly past the linen bags. Four rows—that made it around thirty to each rail. They hung at intervals of a foot and a half. And it seemed that the freezer went on beyond the last fabric bags. She could see the neon lighting at the far end of the room.

“You put one on too,” said Iole. “Otherwise you’ll catch a chill.”

Rosa took one of the coats at random out of its stiff protective covering and slipped it on. The fur was soft and supple, but it wasn’t just because she was a vegetarian that she felt there was something unpleasant about the touch of it.

Slowly, she turned once in the middle of the linen bags. Her coat, too, dragged on the floor. “What am I going to do with all this stuff?”

“Bury it?”

“What’s beyond the coats at the far end?”

“Containers of some kind,” said Iole, shrugging her shoulders.

Rosa frowned and hurried down the narrow aisle between two rows. The broad fur shoulders of her coat brushed against some of the linen bags as she passed them, and set them rocking gently. When she looked back to see whether Iole was following, there was ghostly movement all around her. As if something alive were stirring inside the cocoons and might slip out any moment. Iole was having fun pushing more of them to make them swing, and Rosa had to stop herself from snapping at her. It wasn’t Iole’s fault that she was on edge.

At last she reached the end of the rows of coats. From a distance it looked as if the long room became narrower and narrower toward the end, but she had been wrong. What she had taken for more linen bags was really a large number of white, circular plastic containers built into a wall. Stacked one above another, they formed a rampart reaching almost from one side of the freezer to the other, right across the aisles. But still she had not reached the far side of the underground room. You could pass to the right and left of the wall of containers.

Iole emerged from the swinging coats behind her. “Containers. Like I said.”

“Do you know what’s in them?”

“No idea.”

“And behind them?”

“A safe on the back wall. That’s all.”

Rosa went up to the containers and saw, upon glancing through the spaces between them, that there was a second row behind them. She did a rough calculation of their number and counted at least forty containers, each a good two feet high and a foot and a half in diameter.

“Are you going to look inside?” asked Iole eagerly.

“In a minute.” Rosa walked on to peer around the corner of the wall. Once again she had been wrong. There were not two but four rows of the round plastic containers. Around eighty, then.

Once again she looked back at Iole, who was already coming to join her. “First the safe. What’s in it?”

“It’s locked.”

“That didn’t stop you from opening the door.”

“Locked with a key.”

“Didn’t you try to break it open?”

“I tried, but it was no good.”

“Let’s see.”

With a conspiratorial expression, Iole followed her. Nine feet of empty space lay between the last row of containers and the back of the room. In front of the wall stood a gray iron safe, as massive as a church altar.

Rosa investigated the lock. Nothing complicated. Costanza must have relied entirely on the number code at the entrance. She herself had broken into cars on the streets of Crown Heights, and she knew that this mechanism would be child’s play. “I need something sharp.”

Iole went back around the containers, and Rosa heard her doing something to the rustling linen bags. A little later she came back with a wire coat hanger.

It didn’t take Rosa more than a minute before there was a click inside the lock of the safe. “Voilà,” she said, stepping back, and she dropped the coat hanger, now bent out of shape, on the floor.

Iole was rocking excitedly from foot to foot.

The two doors of the safe squealed as Rosa pulled them apart.

Countless ampoules containing a yellowish liquid were lined up on five shelves inside the safe. There was no written label on any of them, just row upon row of the little thumb-size glass flasks.

Rosa took one out, and held it up to the light. The honey-colored contents were clear, and as fluid as water.

“What’s that supposed to be?” asked Iole.

“I have no idea.”

“Drugs of some kind?”

“She wouldn’t have kept those here in the palazzo. Far too dangerous. There are secret places to store drugs all over Sicily.”

Iole picked up one of the ampoules herself. “Maybe your grandmother used some kind of substance like that herself. Or Florinda.”

Rosa could exclude that possibility, at least for her aunt. But as for Costanza…she knew too little about her. However, none of this seemed to fit together. The collection of fur coats, these ampoules. The rows of containers.

She put the vial back on its shelf. “Let’s see what’s in these.” She went over to the rampart of containers and tried to lift one of them off the top row.

Iole hurried over. “Wait a minute. I’ll help you.”

Together they got the container down on the floor. It had a screw lid similar to a mason jar, secured all around with a broad strip of tape.

Rosa’s fingernails, painted with black nail polish, were too short to get the tape off. Iole did better. She ripped it off with a tearing sound, got her fingers entangled in it, and then had her work cut out to get the sticky stuff off her hand. Rosa helped her—impatiently, because she was burning with curiosity to open the lid.

Finally, with both hands, she unscrewed the top a quarter of the way to the left. There was a hissing sound like air coming out of a Tupperware container.

“Ugh,” said Iole, holding her nose.

Rosa breathed in through her mouth and then took the lid right off. The stench was appalling. She was prepared to see anything.

What she found was a dirty, sticky fur. For a moment she felt sure it was the corpse of an animal. The chill in the freezer and the airtight lid of the container had prevented decomposition inside it, but the smell of old blood rose from the contents.

Iole retched. “Gross.”

Reluctantly, Rosa put out a hand and touched the fur. It was a relief that nothing moved underneath it. Hesitantly, she grasped it with her other hand, got hold of the edge of the fur, and pulled it out at arm’s length, like an item of laundry.

It was not a corpse, but a sandy brown animal pelt. Dried blood and remnants of skin clung to the underside.

Iole was about to touch it, but withdrew her fingers just before they reached it. “Were they going to make more fur coats out of these?”

“Looks like it.”

“There are more in there.”

Rosa put the fur down on the floor, then lifted out a second, using only her fingertips, and spread it over the first. She had to bend so far over the container to get out the third that the stench almost made her throw up. There was yet another one at the very bottom, but she left that where it was.

“Four,” she said. “Multiplied by eighty.”

“That’s a lot,” said Iole. “How many do you need to make a coat?”

Rosa shrugged her shoulders, and looked at the ampoules full of yellow liquid again. Not necessarily drugs; there was another possibility. She went over to the cupboard, picked up one of the little glass tubes again, and peered at it more closely. Its metal seal had a round rubber center through which a needle could be pushed to draw the liquid up into a syringe. Or a needle for an injection.

“Look,” said Iole. “There are little labels on the furs.” Rosa’s stomach muscles cramped.

“It says something on them.”

Her hands trembling, Rosa began taking off the fur coat she was wearing. It seemed to be sticking to her body as if by suction.

“They’re names.”

The fur fell around Rosa on the floor. “Iole,” she managed to say in a toneless voice. “Take off that coat.”

But the girl was crouching over the furs, undeterred, reading out the labels. “Paolo Mancori…Barbara Gastaldi…Gianni Carnevare.”

“Iole. Take the thing off.” Rosa’s legs felt numb as she took a clumsy step away from the fur coat on the floor.

“Did you know any of them?” asked Iole.

Rosa went around behind her, and had to force herself to touch the fur to lift it off Iole.

“Hey!”

Rosa tugged the heavy coat off her, more energetically this time. “We’re getting out of this place.” In disgust, she flung the fur aside.

“But—”

Rosa hauled her to her feet, grabbed her by the shoulders, and looked hard into her eyes.

“These furs,” she said, “don’t come from animals.”

“They don’t?” asked Iole, her voice husky.

Rosa took her arm and led her around the containers, until they could see the rows of linen bags hanging in front of them, all the coats in their gray coverings.

“All of these,” she whispered, “were once Arcadians.”