Arcadia Burns

THE VIDEO


THE LIBRARY PROMISED SECURITY. The shelves along the walls rose fifteen feet high, to the ceiling. Thousands of yellowed books stood there, often in double rows, one behind the other, and even the last spare bit of space was full of volumes stacked horizontally. If you took one out, you often came upon patches of mold. Like all the rooms in the palazzo, this one suffered from the damp masonry.

But Rosa wasn’t interested in the books, only in the atmosphere that they created. The room made her feel like she could creep away to hide here, unobserved, undisturbed.

The paper blanked out all sounds. Nothing existed outside your own thoughts.

She sat in a creaking leather armchair with her knees drawn up. Curtains hid the tall windows; the fiery-red evening sky glowed through patches where the fabric had worn thin. An old-fashioned lamp with a fringed shade threw off mustard-colored light.

She crouched there with the cell phones that Trevini had sent her, one in each hand.

She switched on the right-hand phone. Someone had written the password on the edge in waterproof felt pen, in a neat girlish hand. Someone who knew how to crack these things. Probably Contessa di Santis.

On the display, an atomic mushroom cloud above a desert appeared. Valerie’s cell phone, no doubt about it. So Rosa would begin with the video of the party. She knew most of that one already, and breathed a sigh of relief.

Only a single video file had been stored. Trevini and the Contessa had prepared everything meticulously in advance.

So once again she watched the wobbly film of the party, saw herself put a glass down on a table and walk away, saw all the laughing people greeting one another, Alessandro among them. But this time the picture didn’t freeze on him. The camera panned around, zoomed at random through the crowd, to the sound of Valerie’s intoxicated giggles. Suddenly Rosa came back into the frame, glass in hand. Laughing, she said something to Valerie behind the camera, then drank half the contents of her glass. Put it down. Drank again. Swayed in time to the muted music coming from the overloaded loudspeaker.

The film suddenly stopped.

Rosa’s hand was shaking. She hadn’t noticed before, because the picture was so unsteady. Once again she considered leaving it at that, throwing away both cell phones, and never giving another thought to the second video.

But then she put the first phone down and took the second in both hands, as if she had to hold it tight to keep it from jumping out of her fingers. Its password, too, was written on the casing in blue felt pen.

Rosa had expected a suggestive background image, something to suit Michele the club owner, wild nights and every kind of excess. Instead, up came a picture of the cartoon cat Tom, holding Jerry in one hand and a knife in the other.

This phone, too, contained only one file. The thumbnail image in the videos folder was dark and blurred; nothing could be made out on it.

Rosa’s thumb hovered over the ok key.

Her hand wasn’t trembling anymore. Instead she felt paralyzed. Incapable of completing that last small movement.

She had thought about what she would see. She had imagined pictures of her own, of herself and Tano. His short dark hair. His smiling eyes behind the narrow frames of his glasses.

She remembered her first meeting with him in Sicily, at Baron Massimo Carnevare’s funeral. A little later, among lines of silent tombs, Alessandro had given her the tiny volume of Aesop’s Fables. After that she had met Tano twice more. Once on Isola Luna, the little volcanic island off the north coast of Sicily. And finally, for the last time, when he and his gang of bikers had encircled Rosa in the ruins of an ancient amphitheater and he was planning to tear her to pieces in his animal form as a powerful tiger. She had witnessed his transformation, and then his death. As if in slow motion, she saw the bullet shattering his face in her mind’s eye.

Rosa closed her eyelids, felt the key under her thumb. Had to summon all her strength to press down on it slowly, very slowly.

There was a crackle in the speaker of the cell phone. The display went dark, then light again. Reddish.

She was looking at her own face.

Looking into her own eyes, open wide and fully awake.

“I need you,” she whispered over the phone. “I want to be with you.”

She hated her voice, choked as it was with tears. Even hated herself for calling him.

“I’m going to get into my car,” she said quietly, “and come to you.”

“No, you’re not.” Alessandro’s voice took on that undertone with which he could nip any contradiction in the bud. The capo tone that he had inherited from his father. “You’re not driving anywhere in that state. I’ll be right there with you. An hour and a half, maybe I can make it sooner. I’m on my way.” She could hear his footsteps in the stone corridors of Castello Carnevare, fast and agitated. His haste gave him away. The calm determination in his voice was only for show.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I…I don’t want to be alone right now.”

Her lips touched the receiver of the phone. It was an old-fashioned one, with a curved receiver on a spiral cord.

“I’m leaving now,” she heard Alessandro say, not much later, and the engine of his Ferrari promptly roared.

“That’s nice of you.”

“I ought to have been there when you looked at the thing.”

He must have been burning with questions, but he held them back. She imagined his grim expression. This was going to be difficult for him, too, as she knew. But she wanted him to see it for himself, and then tell her that she wasn’t going out of her mind.

“Are you sure it’s genuine?” he asked a little later. There was a slight echo to his voice. He had switched on the hands-free headset in the car.

“What else would it be? Toy Story?”

“I mean, because Trevini sent it.”

“He couldn’t have faked this. Not even Trevini.”

“He only sent it to hurt you.” Alessandro didn’t try to conceal his fury with the attorney.

“Could be. But if I hadn’t seen it…”

“You’d be feeling better right now.”

“I can’t explain to you over the phone.”

The car engine hummed monotonously in the background. In her mind, she saw the Ferrari racing along lonely roads, past bleak, dark hills. “I don’t know if I should really look at it,” he said. “It’s too—”

“Intimate?” she snapped. “What’s on that video is about as intimate as a bolt fired into an animal’s head in a slaughterhouse.”

Once again he didn’t reply, probably because he guessed that whatever he said would be the wrong thing. She was sorry, but she wasn’t making any headway against her temper. If she weren’t so furious, she’d be howling.

She wasn’t ashamed to let him see her nakedness. Or her vulnerability, or the sense of being handed over to the mercy of others that she’d seen in her own eyes. Until now, she’d assumed that she had been unconscious through the entire rape. But that wasn’t so. She had just forgotten. The drugs in her cocktail had wiped out her memory of it, but she had been awake at the time. She had gone through the whole thing conscious, every damn second of it.

“I’m getting on the expressway now,” said Alessandro. “Be with you in less than an hour.”

She was still huddled motionless in the armchair, doubled up and hugging her knees to her chest. Her tears ran down her chin and dripped on her black top. “Keep talking, will you?” she asked him softly. “Say something, just so I can hear your voice.”

“Trevini’s going to be sorry for this. Trevini and Michele.”

She shook her head, thought for a moment, and then said, “I’m grateful to Trevini.”

“He only wanted to hurt you.”

“He made sure that I knew the truth.”

“But—”

“Tell me what you’ve been doing today,” she interrupted him. “All about your day. Your boring meetings, lunch. What your advisers said. Anything.”

He gave in, and his voice merged with the soft, monotonous noise of the car engine. She listened, let his words lull her, and got through the next hour that way.

Alessandro’s face might have been turned to stone. His skin looked dull and almost waxen. The flicker of the video was reflected in his eyes as Rosa paced up and down the library, biting her nails.

He didn’t say a word all through it. He had wanted to mute the sound, but a shake of Rosa’s head had stopped him. She had to hear when the moment she was waiting for came.

Distorted voices in the background merged with the rushing sound of the cell phone’s weak microphone. The pictures had etched themselves on Rosa’s retina; she had no defense against them. A fire was burning in the hearth of the room where it all took place. Probably the living room of Tano’s apartment on Charles Street, one or two floors above the scene of the party. Several people were present, but they were visible only as outlines in the dimly lit background. Michele had been filming with the cell phone; his voice was the most distinct. He had trained the camera on a broad sofa, a kind of divan with a dark cover. Cushions were scattered everywhere. Tano had swept most of them aside.

To take her mind off it, Rosa stopped in front of one of the bookcases, closed her eyes, and ran her hand over the crumbling backs of the tomes. She took out a volume, opened it in the middle, and held it under her nose. The book should have smelled better, of glue and paper, of printer’s ink. But she could smell only the dampness that had crept in between the pages.

Suddenly, among all the sounds from the video, she recognized her own voice. Alessandro looked at her and muted the video.

“No one should have to listen to this,” he said hoarsely. “Not me, most certainly not you.”

“Yes,” she protested, putting the book back on its shelf and hurrying over to him. “We’re nearly there.”

“Where?”

“You’ll see for yourself in a minute.”

Reluctantly, he looked back at the display. Because she was so insistent, he turned up the sound slightly, but his expression showed how much he disliked it.

His eyes were shining more than ever, she noticed now. She turned away to hide her own tears.

Tano could be heard more clearly now. For a moment nothing else seemed to exist, only his voice—the voice of a dead man—

His tiger face exploded. The bullet from Lilia’s pistol blew it apart like a head of cabbage.

A dead man who was still alive and well in this video.

A doorbell rang. Almost at once, it rang again. Someone put the cell phone down in a hurry. It went on filming from a fixed position.

Voices in the background, then Michele’s. “Good evening, Mr. Apollonio.”

Rosa looked at Alessandro, whose expression was still full of distaste, even revulsion.

“Ah, the gentlemen of the Carnevare clan,” said a harsh voice. “A real family party. Have you finished?”

Tano swore.

The newcomer’s tone became sharper. “You’re not being paid to have a good time.”

Alessandro glanced at Rosa, seemed about to say something, but was at a loss for words.

“You have to watch!” Her voice almost broke. “Look at his face!”

He was at the point of flinging the cell phone across the library, but then he looked down.

“No sign of Apollonio,” he said, with difficulty. “Michele put the phone down. All you can see is a bit of the sofa.”

“Apollonio comes into the frame in a minute.”

Now Tano was speaking again. When one of the bystanders made a stupid remark, the visitor lost his temper. “Get out of here! All of you, except you two.” By that he must have meant Tano and Michele.

Soon after that, a door slammed.

Rosa walked behind the armchair where Alessandro was sitting and leaned over his shoulder. For the first time since he had started watching the video, she too looked at the display.

“Press Pause,” she said. “Wait…now!”

Alessandro stopped the film. A blurred red and yellow patch of color, a figure, a face, all extremely indistinct. It could be anyone.

Rosa hurried in front of the chair and sat on its arm, next to Alessandro. “Let me have it.”

She took the cell phone from his hand and pressed PAUSE and PLAY three or four times in quick succession. Finally the picture, while still blurred, was clear enough for Apollonio’s features to be made out.

She gave the phone back to Alessandro, jumped up, stood in front of him, wrapped her arms around her upper body, and rocked back and forth nervously on the balls of her feet.

He held the display closer to his eyes, then farther away. She could tell that he still had no idea who the man in the video was.

“You don’t recognize him,” she murmured, disappointed.

“Maybe the picture isn’t clear enough.”

The photo album that she had looked at and opened before he arrived was lying on a table. Breathlessly, she brought it over and put it on his lap. She pressed her forefinger down hard on a photo stuck into it.

“Is that the same man?”

The anxious lines on Alessandro’s forehead deepened. The shadows around his eyes grew darker. “Looks like it.”

“Apollonio,” she said. Her astonishment and disbelief were back.

“Rosa,” asked Alessandro, hesitantly, “who on earth is this?”

Her mouth was dry; her tongue stuck to the roof. All the same, she managed to get the words out, quietly, in the faltering voice of a stranger.

“That man,” she said, “is my father.”