Arcadia Burns

THE HUNGRY MAN


COPPERY LIGHT FELL THROUGH the hospital windows. The morning sun was still low in the sky over the sea, shining on the paths and lawns of the grounds, edging the top of the cliffs with gold.

“What happened to Valerie?” Alessandro asked.

Rosa shook her head. “No trace of her. Maybe she made it out; maybe she’s lying under the ruins of the palazzo.” To be honest, she didn’t know the answer and didn’t care either way.

The doctors had put butterfly bandages over some of the injuries on Alessandro’s face, pulling the edges together. It would be some time before the swelling and abrasions disappeared entirely.

He looked at her intently. “You’re not going to rebuild the palazzo, are you?”

“I’m not even sure it would be a good idea to have the remains demolished. Maybe it’s best this way. Everything lying buried under tons and tons of stone and ash, all those dirty family secrets.”

Alessandro was sitting upright in bed, his expression impatient, his hair untidy. He had seemed as if he had been on hot coals ever since being brought here two days ago. The large dressing over his chest looked alarming, but the injuries under it would be healed in a few weeks’ time, the doctors said. Whatever they had thought when the heir to the Carnevare fortune was brought into their hospital, covered with bites and scratches, they kept it to themselves. In this place people knew how to keep their mouths shut, because silence was literally golden. The Carnevares were not the only clan to have their members regularly treated for injuries in this hospital.

Fundling was still lying in a coma one room away. Rosa had already been to see him this morning and had spent a long time holding his hand.

Only the day before, the doctors had been tranquilizing Alessandro with painkillers, but now he was fizzing with energy again. It was slightly uncanny to see how fast he recovered. Maybe there was something to the saying that a cat had nine lives, after all.

“What did you tell him when you phoned?” he asked. Rosa herself would rather not have talked about the Hungry Man for now.

“The truth. That it wasn’t the Carnevares who gave him away all those years ago.”

“And he believed you?”

“Looks like it.”

“Come on,” he said, “that wasn’t all. He called off the Hundinga immediately, no ifs, ands, or buts.”

Rosa went over to the window, looked out at the sunrise, and decided not to tell him everything. Not yet. “I told him about the recording di Santis made in the hotel,” she said as she turned back to him. “That’s the best evidence of Trevini’s guilt. I also reminded him of a couple of deals he and my grandmother had made together, decades ago, and how Trevini had turned them into a rope to hang him with. Maybe he wondered why I’d lay the blame on a member of my own family, but anyway, di Santis got the video to him the next day, as well as the copy of a document proving that thirty years ago Trevini was given immunity in return for collaborating with the public prosecutor’s office. He was the guilty party, not the Carnevares.”

“But your grandmother pulled the strings,” he said, concern in his voice. “By the Hungry Man’s logic, that would mean the Alcantaras are on his hit list now. Your family handed him over, and you are Costanza’s last direct descendant. So why has he left you alive?”

She wanted to avoid his penetrating glance, but she pulled herself together and even managed a smile. “Maybe he’s the first to notice that I am not the reincarnation of Costanza Alcantara.” She leaned over and gave him a kiss.

“There’s something you’re not telling me, though,” he observed.

“We agreed that we didn’t have to tell each other everything, right?”

He was about to run his hands nervously through his hair, but he swore and lowered his arms again when the recently stitched injuries under his armpits protested. “Bloody hell.”

“Does it hurt badly?”

Sighing, he shook his head. “How’s Iole doing?”

“She arrived in Portugal yesterday evening. She’s with her uncle.”

Alessandro’s eyes widened. “With Dallamano? That lunatic?”

“It doesn’t necessarily make him a lunatic that he wanted to kill you.”

“Thanks a lot.”

She kissed him again, a longer kiss this time.

“How did you manage to arrange that?” he asked, impressed. “The witness protection program—”

“Isn’t as watertight as it used to be. Dallamano testified against Cesare and your father, so they wanted to get rid of him like the rest of his family. But now that Cesare is dead, the situation isn’t quite as critical for Dallamano as it was before. The other clans have too much else on their minds to trouble themselves, in the name of a dead Carnevare, about something that happened years ago. At least, that’s how Judge Quattrini sees it. And he himself seems pretty happy that the security measures have been relaxed.”

With a groan, Alessandro let his head sink back against the pillow. “Quattrini! You’ve been talking to her again.”

“First thing yesterday morning, once the doctors finished checking me out. Quattrini was pretty curious about what happened at the palazzo. Annoyed, too, because she’d entrusted Iole to my care—and if you ask me, she was right. I’d never have forgiven myself if anything had happened to Iole.” She paused, thoughtfully, because the idea weighed more heavily on her mind than she liked to admit. “At least, she thought it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to get Iole away from me for a while. And since Dallamano is her only living relative, and he’s not in such extreme danger now, Quattrini agreed to send her to stay with him for a week or two.”

“Just like that,” he remarked skeptically.

“More or less.”

“By which you mean…?”

“I mean I…well, I had to give her something in return.”

“You can’t keep on going to the public prosecutor’s office every time it suits you and—”

“Lampedusa,” she interrupted him. “I gave her the Lampedusa racket on a silver platter. All the files that weren’t burned in the palazzo. Lampedusa, more than anything else, was the pet project of Florinda and Trevini. I never wanted anything to do with trafficking human beings.”

“But several of your firms and their managers depend on the Lampedusa racket. They’ll—”

“My managers—exactly,” she said coolly. “Which means that I tell them what’s what. None of them depend on Lampedusa to pay for their villas and yachts and Swiss boarding schools for their kids. And they got warning three hours before Quattrini’s people came knocking at the door. Most of them are probably in the South Seas by now, sipping cocktails.”

Alessandro slowly shook his head. “You can’t lead a clan that way.”

“At least I’m leading it now, instead of just sitting around waiting for people to give me stuff to sign. Many of them aren’t going to like it. But you of all people can hardly tell me I’m in the wrong.”

“I just don’t want you to end up like me—capo of a clan, but at the top of your own family’s hit list.”

“We can’t choose what we are—you told me that yourself.” She forced a grin. “Now be a good patient, drink your nice peppermint tea, eat your crackers, and watch bad game shows on TV.”

“You’re leaving already?”

“There’s something I still have to take care of.”

There was deep uneasiness in his eyes. “Don’t do this, Rosa.”

She went to the door.

Alessandro leaned forward in the bed, but his injuries would hardly allow him to stand up, let alone stop her. “Don’t make any kind of deal with him! Not with the Hungry Man!”

At first she wasn’t going to answer him, but at the door she turned around. Came back, kissed him once again, and said, very quietly, “Too late.”

The prison gate latched behind her with a steely clunk. Through the barred windows in the corridor, she could see the inner courtyard of the institution. No one appeared in the glare of the searchlights. Up on the walls, spiral coils of barbed wire shimmered against the black sky. It was just before ten in the evening, and official visiting hours had been over ages ago.

The taciturn prison officer who had taken her to the reception desk near the entrance made no secret of his disapproval. God knew what he took her for—maybe a prostitute summoned to the Hungry Man in his cell—but she didn’t care at the moment.

A lot depended on how she conducted this visit. Just the same, she was sure the prisoner would see at first glance how edgy she felt. The fact was that she was terrified of him. To most Arcadians, the Hungry Man was so much more than a capo dei capi who had been in prison for three decades. They genuinely thought he was the reincarnation of King Lycaon, and would lead them into a new age of glorious barbarism.

She had seen an old photograph of him, black and white, grainy. Even in the photo he hadn’t been a young man: He was gray at the temples, with shoulder-length hair and a full beard. The picture had been taken during his internment in Gela. His eyes had been in deep shadow, but from the corners of his mouth Rosa had been able to tell that he was smiling, in spite of the police officers posing beside him. Smiling as if they were the captives, not he.

She knew his real name, but within the dynasties no one used it. They all referred to him merely as the Hungry Man. If you believed his followers, he was both the past and the future of Arcadia. Or alternatively, thought Rosa, a megalomaniac Mafia boss who refused to admit that he, like countless other capi, had walked into a trap set by the state prosecutor’s office.

Rosa’s footsteps echoed back from the security barriers. She was wearing high-heeled boots and was dressed all in black, which made her look taller than she was. She had even put on makeup, for the first time since that night in the Village. She wanted to appear as sophisticated and adult as possible.

The warden stopped at a door, looked right and left, and then opened it. He stepped aside and gestured to Rosa. “Knock when you’re through with the visit.”

She walked into a visiting room with a partition dividing it. In the middle of the divider, halfway up, was a window like those at a bank counter. A white plastic chair stood in front of it.

The door was closed behind her, and now she was alone in her half of the room. It was only in this part that a lamp was on; everything was dark on the other side of the partition. The glass was tinted, and hardly any light came through it. Rosa adjusted to the idea that she wouldn’t be able to see the man she was visiting, while she herself would be on display to him in bright light.

“Sit down.”

It was the voice she had heard on the telephone. So hoarse that after those first words Rosa expected a cough, but it never came. Something was wrong with his larynx. Cancer, maybe. She found that idea encouraging to some extent.

Rosa sat down, crossed her legs, linked her hands in her lap. She didn’t want to start fidgeting with something, like the hem of her jacket or her hair.

“I respect courage when I see it,” he said. His voice came over a fist-size loudspeaker below the pane between them. Rosa resisted the impulse to squint in an effort to see more through the glass. All she could make out was a vague silhouette. He wasn’t sitting but standing there upright, motionless, looking down at her.

“Hiding behind tinted glass isn’t particularly courageous,” she heard herself saying.

“How old are you, Rosa?”

“Eighteen.”

“How old were you when your father died?”

“Is he dead, then?”

He didn’t answer that.

“I opened his tomb.” Well, really she had smashed a hole in the damn stone slab with a pickax, but it amounted to the same thing. “The casket was empty.”

“Why do you tell me that?”

“I don’t know anything about my family. Or not nearly enough. I thought I did know a few things, but most of them weren’t worth a damn. The fact is that I haven’t the faintest idea what my grandmother and my father were doing all those years.”

“And you think that clears you of all blame? Because that’s what you care about, isn’t it?”

“I wasn’t even born when Trevini and my grandmother made sure you went to prison. Even my father was still a child at the time.”

“And has young Carnevare made you happy?”

“Happiness is relative.”

“Nonsense!” he snapped back, but then he calmed down again. “Happiness is the opposite of unhappiness. Good luck versus bad luck. So tell me, Rosa: Has Alessandro Carnevare made you happy?”

“I’m happy when I’m with him.”

“Always?”

“Often.”

“Much has happened since you two got together. Not all of it good.”

She clenched one of the hands lying in her lap into a fist. “For me, it wasn’t such bad luck that the palazzo burned down. And I’d say my aunt’s death was her own fault.”

“How about your sister’s death?”

“Zoe lied to me. She spied on me for Florinda.”

“A good reason, no doubt, to wish her dead,” he commented sarcastically.

He was provoking her, and it infuriated her to be so easily manipulated. “I liked Zoe in spite of her failings. I loved her, even.”

“Ah, now we’re coming closer to the crux of it.”

“Zoe’s death wasn’t Alessandro’s fault.”

“But you see a connection. Of course you do. You’d have to be blind not to.”

She stood and moved very close to the pane, until the tip of her nose was almost touching the glass. “Could we leave out the psychological games?”

The silhouette in the dark came closer. The distance between them was less than a handbreadth, and yet she still couldn’t see his face through the tinted glass. The fact that his voice came over the loudspeaker level with her belly button also irritated her.

“Have you any idea,” he asked, “how your grandmother died?”

“In her bed. She was sick, had probably been sick for quite some time.”

“Florinda poisoned her.”

“So?”

“You have Costanza’s eyes.”

“And here was I thinking, just now, that we might be friends.”

“She looked very like you when she was young. She was a pretty girl, and later a very beautiful woman.”

In her heart she was grateful to him for infuriating her like this. It made it easier not to be overimpressed by his aura of superiority. “Why did you want me to come here?” she asked, to end the discussion of Costanza. “On the phone you said it was one of your conditions. So now I’m here. Why?”

“Because I wanted to see who you are. What you are.” With a muted sound, he placed the palm of his hand against the glass pane, spread his fingers, and pressed them against it. “How long has it been,” he asked, “since you learned about the Arcadian dynasties?”

“A few months.” She couldn’t help staring at his hand, the deep lines on it, the long, slender fingers.

“Your mother never told you?”

“I’d have thought she was crazy if she had.” As Rosa said that, she had to admit to herself that Gemma had been right there. And probably about some other things as well.

“What was it like when you shifted shape for the first time?”

“It felt…forbidden. Like a kid staying up late at night for the first time because there’s no one else home.”

“Isn’t it a shame that we have to hide something so wonderful from the world?”

“I guess it’s not so wonderful for the world.”

“There have always been hunters and hunted. Some who get what they want because they’re strong enough. And others who kneel to them. No civilization, no progress will change that. We didn’t make those laws; life itself did. What I stand for isn’t a step back. It’s the end of our self-denial. The end of a great lie.”

She was finding it increasingly difficult to resist his charisma. The labyrinth of lines on his hand, the forcefulness of his voice—it was like standing in front of an ancient temple, a place still awe-inspiring after thousands of years.

“We have lived in the shadows long enough, hiding what we really are from others,” he went on. “It’s time to be ourselves again. And that has already begun. You, too, are an element in that change, Rosa.”

“I am?”

“Lamias have always distinguished themselves from other Arcadians. That’s why there aren’t many of you left. You rebelled and followed your own aims. Guile and deceit were always your sharpest weapons.”

“I prefer more direct methods,” said Rosa, thinking of her stapler.

“You are snakes. Your venom works slowly and in secret. I should have guessed that I owed the last thirty years behind bars to Costanza. Instead I believed the faked evidence pointing to the Carnevares. Did you know that they were once my closest allies?”

She nodded.

“Today I have other faithful assistants out there. They’re more effective than the Carnevares ever were. I should be grateful to your grandmother. All that time in my cell has opened my eyes to new allies. I’ll soon be leaving this place, and I owe that to them.”

Rosa watched his fingers curl against the pane. The palm of his hand withdrew a fraction of an inch, looking darker, while his fingertips were a semicircle of pale points against the black background. Rosa couldn’t take her eyes off them.

“Is it true,” she asked, “that it was the Lamias who toppled Lycaon from the throne of Arcadia?”

The hand abruptly withdrew into the darkness. His whole outline was barely visible now. He must have stepped back. “I had reason enough to wish every one of you dead,” he said after a pause, without answering her question. “But I, too, have learned my lesson. I was wrong to let my wish for revenge on the Carnevares consume me. I want a new beginning, not retribution. The dynasties have played the part of gangsters for too long, regarding the business of their Cosa Nostra clans as more important than their origin and their destiny. If all that is to change, there must be new blood. New leaders who don’t care about controlling the drug market in Paris or real estate funds in Hong Kong. Join me, Rosa, and all the sins of your ancestors will be forgotten. And if young Carnevare learns that his Arcadian inheritance is more important than his position as capo of his clan, then he’s welcome to join us as well.” He paused for effect again, and then added, “Which is more than you can expect from the other clans. They all despise the pair of you for your relationship. And how long will it be before they find out about your connections with that judge?”

So he knew about Quattrini, too? She should have guessed.

“Sooner or later,” he said, “they will kill you and young Carnevare. A number of them would already like to; your own families are making plans to clear you out of their way. I, on the other hand, am offering you the future.”

“The Hundinga were trying to kill me,” she pointed out. “On your orders.”

“They were supposed to be observing you, instilling a spirit of respect in you,” he contradicted her. “There are always risks in letting dogs off the leash, and this time they went too far. That wasn’t my intention, and they’ve paid for it. Look at the newspapers. There’s been a helicopter crash off the coast.”

The longer he talked, the more he sounded like a feudal lord back in the Middle Ages. Without a shadow of doubt he was obsessed with King Lycaon, and whether his idea of Lycaon was a crazed delusion or just something spooky ultimately made no difference. As soon as he got out of here, he would be in command of the others all over again.

“I did what you wanted,” said Rosa. “I gave you evidence against Trevini. And I came here because you asked to talk to me. Will you leave Alessandro alone now?”

She had expected a long silence. Dramatic, to show her how small and weak she was compared to him. Instead, he simply said, “Of course.”

She pushed back the plastic chair and started for the door.

“Sometime,” he said, “I’ll be asking you a favor. Maybe a large and significant favor, maybe only a small one. But you will grant it.”

She kept her back to him, halfway to the door.

“You will grant me that favor, Rosa Alcantara. That is my condition.”

It would have been so easy to say no. She had never had difficulty in doing that before. Just a brief no, that was all. And then the lines would have been drawn. She on the good side, he on the bad one.

Except that it wasn’t so easy.

“Agreed,” she said.

She took the last few steps and knocked on the door, much too fast and hard, in time with her hammering heartbeat.

“Good-bye, Rosa. And don’t forget—”

Over her shoulder, she glanced at the black surface of the glass, in which all she saw now was her own reflection. She was looking into her own eyes.

“—I am not your enemy.”