Arcadia Burns

APOLLONIO


“DID YOU KNOW?” SHE spat into the receiver. “Shit, of course you knew!”

At the other end of the line, Trevini sighed. “This is not a subject we ought to discuss over the telephone.”

“I want to know the truth. Now!” She had a date to meet Alessandro this evening, but instead of looking forward to it she had to grapple with this filth first.

“You’re being unreasonable. You’re letting yourself get carried away over something that—”

“That’s enough!” She jumped up from her swivel chair, went around the huge desk, and began pacing up and down the study. Her heavy metal-studded shoes hammered on the parquet flooring as if a military commando unit were storming the palazzo.

Far away in Taormina, the attorney let out a breath. “Wait.” Something clicked on the line, to be followed by a rushing sound, and then another click. “There, that’s better.”

“What?”

“I’ve switched on a distorting signal to keep you from informing on us all. You will never again—never!—try talking to me about such matters over the phone without previous warning.”

“What are those furs in the cellar? Why did my grandmother keep them together down there? Where do they come from? And why so many?”

“Costanza didn’t kill those people, Rosa. If that’s what has upset you so much. And if they can be described as people, indeed as human at all.”

“Don’t you consider me human, Avvocato Trevini?”

He laughed softly. “The fact is, I wish you were less human. More like your grandmother.”

“She was a monster!”

“A collector with discriminating taste.”

“Taste? Have you lost your mind? Those furs down there were once men and women! And there are a few hundred of them.”

“As I said: She didn’t kill them with her own hands. She didn’t even contract for their deaths.”

“Very reassuring.”

“We ought to—”

“Discuss this at your place? Forget it.”

“The bugging specialists at the public prosecutor’s office never take more than three or four minutes to crack a distortion signal. If they’re listening in now, we don’t have much time left.”

“Then press the button again.”

“You’re upset because—”

“Because I’ve found a f*cking mass grave in my basement!”

He seemed to be drinking something; she heard a faint clink. She was going to explode with rage any moment now. He was right about one thing. She had to calm down, control herself.

Reluctantly, she used the brief pause to go back to her chair at the desk. Florinda’s spacious study was strange to her. It had once been a living room in the palazzo, with walls paneled in dark wood and a view of the inner courtyard from a wrought-iron balcony. She felt small and out of place here.

There was a crackle and a rushing sound on the line again. Trevini had recoded the signal. Another three minutes.

“Well?” she asked.

“I don’t know much about it, believe me. Costanza had a weakness for furs of all kinds. The palazzo was full of them. As hearth rugs, runners, even curtains. She loved furs more than anything. Most of them disappeared after her death. Florinda got rid of them.”

“Florinda didn’t know about the freezer?”

“Yes, I think she did, but maybe her mind suppressed the truth.”

“Who else knows?” Suddenly she had an idea. “Is that why all the other clans hate the Alcantaras so much?”

“If the others had the faintest inkling of it, your family would have been wiped out decades ago. And none of this must ever be known, or the palazzo will go up in flames within a few hours—and all of us with it.”

She let her head drop back against the leather upholstery of the chair. “That means that you, and I, and Iole are the only people who know it exists?”

“Don’t say you told that irresponsible child about this!”

“Iole isn’t irresponsible. And she was the one who cracked the code to the lock of the freezer. She found the coats.”

“Good God in heaven!” His agitation lifted her mood slightly. She liked to shake his composure. “You must silence the girl.”

“Iole won’t tell anyone. Leave that to me.”

His snort was contemptuous. “And there’s also someone else.”

“Who?”

“A man called Apollonio. He supplied the furs to your grandmother. I didn’t know him, had never heard of him before. But soon after Costanza’s death he made contact with me and said that she died owing him money. Obviously she hadn’t yet paid him for his last delivery.”

“What did you do?”

“I transferred the sum to a numbered account for him, to keep his mouth shut. And then I called Davide.”

She pricked up her ears. “My father?”

“Of course.”

“But by then it had been ages since he’d had anything to do with the clan’s business affairs. I always hoped that one of these days he’d come back to take his rightful place as head of the family.”

Interesting. Sounded as if Trevini had disliked Florinda so much that he’d rather have discussed the subject with the disinherited Alcantara son than with her. “What did my father say?”

“He was quite upset.”

“I can imagine. I’m quite upset.”

“Davide wanted to know everything about this man Apollonio, and he said for me not to do anything for the time being.”

“Did you tell Florinda?”

“He expressly forbade me to do that, too.”

“And you were only too happy to do as he said, right?”

“Your aunt wasn’t as effective a head of the family as she thought. In addition, she was under the sway of Salvatore Pantaleone. Just as well that he is dead.”

Did Trevini know that Rosa was responsible for Pantaleone’s death? Impossible, really—but by now she was ready to believe him capable of anything.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “The signal…” That clicking and rushing on the line again. “Right,” he finally continued.

She tried to put her thoughts in order. There were two things that she had to find out more about. “Did my father give you any other instructions?”

“No. He asked me to let the matter rest, saying he would see to everything else personally.”

“When exactly was this?”

“Shortly before his death.”

The mysterious phone call that her mother had mentioned. Her father’s strange reaction to it. And then his hasty decision to leave his wife and his two daughters and go to Europe.

“It was you,” she whispered.

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“You were the reason he left. You called him, and after that he…” She stopped, and turned the swivel chair slowly in a circle.

“I don’t know what happened,” said Trevini. “But it seems that Apollonio was reason enough for him to become active again himself.”

“Tell me all about this man Apollonio. Every last thing.”

“As I said before, I don’t know much about him. In the first place, an attorney’s office in Rome got in touch on his behalf. I finally managed to speak to him myself, but never face-to-face, only by phone. I was aware of Costanza’s collection in the cellar—”

Why did he know?

“—and I had always assumed that I was the only person she had taken into her confidence. However, this Apollonio left me in no doubt that he knew all about it.”

“Did he try blackmailing you?”

“I had to believe him, like it or not, when he said that he had supplied the furs. And I thought it possible that the last payment hadn’t yet been made at the time of Costanza’s sudden death. He was threatening to make the whole thing public. That could have meant the end of the Alcantaras.”

“A breach of the concordat,” she murmured.

“Worse,” he told her. “Treachery.”

The word seemed to echo down the line for a moment. “TABULA?” she whispered tonelessly.

“Apollonio never mentioned that name. But yes, I do think there is some connection. TABULA carries out experiments on members of the dynasties. How else could he have come by the pelts of so many Arcadians?”

She remembered the video that Cesare Carnevare had shown her. Endless rows of cages, with Arcadians in their animal forms shut up inside them. Obviously the captives had lost the ability to turn back into human beings.

“As far as I know,” Trevini went on, “hardly anyone who was abducted and held by TABULA ever appeared again.”

“And you think these people are sick enough to skin their victims and sell the pelts? Sell them back to another Arcadian, of all people?” She instinctively thought of Alessandro. Of his silky black panther fur.

“Maybe there are other collectors. Or maybe not. I can’t answer that question.”

“Right,” she said, after a brief pause. “So this Apollonio got the furs from TABULA. He’s probably even a member of it himself. And my grandmother did business with him—with TABULA, the archenemy of all the Arcadian dynasties.”

“That was the danger I saw looming at the time. And I had to react.”

“Did my father know about it?”

“He drew exactly the same conclusions as you did just now.”

“You have no idea what he was planning to do?”

“None whatsoever. He expressly told me not to investigate the matter any farther. He was going to see to it all himself.”

“And he didn’t survive that.”

“It’s possible that he tracked down Apollonio. And that the meeting didn’t turn out well for him.” Trevini cleared his throat. “However, all this is pure speculation.”

“Do you think Florinda knew about it?”

“If so, she never mentioned the subject.”

But how else, if not from Florinda, could Zoe have known? What had the connection been between her father and TABULA—the link that Zoe had been talking about just before she died?

“Is that all?” asked Rosa.

“I respected your father’s wish. Apollonio was his business, not mine anymore.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

Trevini’s voice was icy. “You don’t like me. I can understand that. But don’t cast doubt on my loyalty. I haven’t worked for your family for thirty years only to have you insult me now.”

“Do you seriously call it loyalty to have kept something so important from Florinda?”

“What I do is done for the good of the clan. Your father, Rosa, might have been a good capo. That’s why I was on his side. The way things are now, however, there’s only one side in this family, and it’s yours. That ought to be enough to persuade you to trust me.”

“If I ask you to find out more about this Apollonio—to continue where you left off eleven years ago—will you do it?”

“I can’t promise you results, but yes, of course.”

“I’d be very grateful.” She managed to say it without grinding her teeth.

“We had better end this conversation now,” he said. “But one more thing: I hope you’re aware that you must not talk to anyone else, anyone at all, about what you found in the cellar.”

“By ‘anyone’ you mean Alessandro Carnevare.”

“Whatever you may think of him, whatever you feel for him—don’t trust him. This is not just about you, Rosa; it’s about the fate of your clan. Everything that Costanza and her predecessors built up.”

And it was about him, Trevini, as well. That was what he was saying.

She didn’t reply.

“Don’t make the mistake of seeing him as only a young man in love,” Trevini warned her, with a note in his voice that sent a shiver down her spine. “Alessandro Carnevare is much more than that. He’s ambitious. He is angry, and implacable. And he’s dangerous. Please keep that in mind, in everything you do.” He was silent for a moment, and then he said again, “Don’t mention any of this. You have to promise me that.”

She didn’t have to do any such thing.

“Please,” he said forcefully. “Not a word.”

Rosa ended the call.