Arcadia Burns

THE ALCHEMISTS


IT WAS A MILD afternoon, and the air smelled of spring. Not unusual here at the end of February, as the taxi driver had explained in broken English as he drove Rosa away from the Lisbon airport. They had been on the road for an hour and a half, the last part of the way up the narrow, winding street leading into Sintra’s historic city center.

The colorful palace towering above the town was enthroned on a densely wooded mountain. The Rua Barbosa do Bocage, a little road in the eternal shade of mighty trees, wound its way around the sides. Rosa recognized the wall and the gate of Quinta da Regaleira. She and Alessandro had met Augusto Dallamano here last October, in the villa built by a Freemason and alchemist. Dallamano had taken Rosa ninety feet down into a shaft in the ground along a slippery spiral staircase, and there he had told her more about the statues on the seabed, the stone panthers and snakes that the Stabat Mater would later snap up from under their noses.

Today she passed the entrance to the Quinta without stopping. The taxi continued along the narrow street, past dense bushes and walls overgrown with moss, hiding behind them some of the oldest and most magnificent villas of Portugal.

After less than a mile the GPS announced that they had arrived. The driver stopped in front of a small gap in an ivy-covered wall. A steep path led uphill, turning left after a few steps. Heavy branches hung low above the path up, and weeds grew in the cracks of broken paving stones. The builder of this property might have wanted not to be found too easily, but he hadn’t counted on GPS.

The cabbie gesticulated and said something in Portuguese.

“This is it?” she asked.

He nodded and impatiently tapped the price on the meter. Rosa paid him and got out.

She put her bag over her shoulder and began to climb. A few overgrown stone statues stood on plinths to the right and left of the path; you could hardly see them under dense tendrils of climbing plants. In a few months’ time they would be entirely hidden under the leaves.

The upward path went around another bend before Rosa saw the three-story villa. She couldn’t help comparing it with the fairy-tale palace of Quinta da Regaleira on the other side of the mountain. This house was a cube, with dark yellow plaster facades, in the middle of a garden that had run wild. The tops of trees bent down close to the walls, and dried, brown, twining plants hung like curtains in the branches, keeping the sun away from the tall windows.

The flat roof of the house was dominated by a glazed dome with a stone balustrade around it. With its rusty metal framework and clouded panes, the dome reminded Rosa of the wrecked greenhouse. All at once, the thought of the burned-down palazzo made Rosa more melancholy than ever. For a moment she wondered whether they kept animals up here, too, but she immediately rejected the idea. This was only an old hothouse in the art nouveau style.

The front door of the villa was flung open, and Iole ran out. She was wearing one of the white summer dresses that she liked so much. Rosa had given up trying to break her of the habit. Maybe Signora Falchi would be more successful once Iole was back in Sicily.

They hugged each other, and Rosa was surprised but most of all glad to see how happy Iole looked. She herself had thought Augusto Dallamano a cold, surly man when she’d met him, but Iole seemed to feel at ease in his company.

“Are you okay?” Rosa asked, wrinkling her brow.

Iole nodded. “How’s Alessandro?”

“Getting on the nurses’ nerves.” She leaned forward, with a conspiratorial air. “He’s the worst patient in the world. But don’t tell him I said that.”

“On TV they’re the ones who always end up marrying the head nurse.”

“The head nurse in that hospital is at least sixty. And they’re discharging him tomorrow.” Rosa sighed. “Well, strictly speaking he’s discharging himself. I guess that once he’s gone, they’ll all get drunk and have a fireworks display to celebrate.”

Iole twirled around in a circle. “I could stay here forever and ever,” she cried enthusiastically.

“Signora Falchi would never go along with that. She may have survived the Hundinga, but this place would drive her to quit.”

Iole beamed. “It’s even nicer inside.”

She took Rosa’s hand and led her up the steps to the front door.

Late that afternoon, they were sitting with Augusto Dallamano in the villa’s conservatory, a rickety glazed annex built onto the back of the house. Outside, the garden came right up to the windows. Two armchairs and a sofa stood among towers of books. Rosa and Dallamano sat opposite each other, leaving the couch to Iole. She had an albino cat on her lap, snow white with red eyes. It was purring with pleasure as she stroked it.

Dallamano had come in only half an hour before. He was obviously doing research of some kind over in the Quinta da Regaleira. Rosa had known that he had started studying sculpture after finding the statues, a discovery that he and Iole’s father had made together six and a half years ago. Enough time for him to acquire a certain amount of knowledge. But she was surprised to find him devoting himself so enthusiastically to the mysteries of the Quinta. Dallamano was an academic—an engineer, if she remembered correctly—so he was no stranger to books. For Rosa, who had only just made it through the end of high school, it made more of an impression than she wanted to admit.

He still wore his dark hair shoulder length, and it was still untidy, but he no longer hid behind that bushy beard. Instead, his chin and cheeks were shaded with stubble. Last time she had met him, in the Initiation Well, he had been wearing a pin-striped suit; today he wore khaki cargo pants with a great many pockets, and a brown sweater. Both were covered with dust, and he had brushed off only the worst of it when he’d arrived.

He was leaning back in his armchair, chain-smoking. The ashtray stood on an unsteady pile of books beside the armrest. His dark, intent gaze was turned on Rosa through the clouds of cigarette smoke.

“Iole says she likes living with you,” he said, breaking the silence.

Rosa glanced doubtfully at Iole. It was only a few days ago that Val had been holding a pistol to her head.

Iole looked up from the white cat, gave Rosa a silent smile, and devoted herself to the animal again.

“I do my best,” said Rosa.

“She told me she has a private tutor. That’s good. Iole has a lot to catch up on.”

“She was extremely anxious to see you again, Signore Dallamano. You two must be very fond of each other.”

He held the cigarette motionless in his hand, and stared into the smoke curling up from the glowing tip. “My brother didn’t always leave himself as much time for his daughter as she needed. Someone had to look after her.”

Rosa remembered something that Iole had told her. “You taught her how to shoot. How old was she at the time—eight? Maybe nine?”

“I was a different man back then.” His mood of regret surprised her. “There are many things I wouldn’t do the same way now, and that’s only one of them.”

Iole cast Rosa a glance that wasn’t hard to interpret. It was her ability to handle a gun that had saved both their lives at the Gibellina monument.

“Why are you here?” he asked Rosa. “Iole flew to Portugal on her own. She could have found her way back without you as well.”

“Can’t you guess why I’m here?”

“More questions? About the statues in the Strait of Messina?” He inhaled smoke, and let it drift out through his lips with relish. “I’ve already told you and your Carnevare friend all I know.”

“The statues are gone,” she said. “Someone got to them before us.”

He took a deep breath, looking as if he wasn’t accustomed to doing so without added nicotine and tar. “Someone?”

“Evangelos Thanassis.”

“The shipowner?”

“The statues were taken on board one of his ships. The Stabat Mater. Does that name mean anything to you?”

“It’s a musical composition.”

Rosa nodded. “A medieval poem set to music. The first line runs, ‘Stabat mater dolorosa.’ The mother stood in sorrow.”

“A few years ago I’d have been impressed,” he said. “But these days knowledge has nothing to do with education, only with typing the right questions on a keyboard.”

Iole pricked up her ears. “That’s what Signora Falchi always says.”

“The woman obviously knows what she’s talking about.”

“The Stabat Mater is the flagship of Thanassis’s fleet of cruise ships,” Rosa went on, undeterred. “At least, she was before he withdrew from public life. Odd name for a pleasure ship, wouldn’t you say?”

“To the best of my knowledge, Thanassis is an odd character.”

“Did the Dallamanos ever have anything to do with him? I mean, your companies built harbors and so on.”

He shook his head. “Thanassis has enough firms of his own to do that for him.”

“What about TABULA? Does that mean anything to you?”

“Hermes Trismegistos,” he said, without even thinking about it.

Rosa nodded. “The emerald tablet.”

“Tabula Smaragdina Hermetis. What do the Hermetics have to do with a Greek shipowner?” He abruptly sat up and ground out his cigarette in the ashtray. “So that’s why you’re here? To ask me about that?”

“You knew so much before about the Quinta, and that crazy Freemason with his stone alphabet. Isn’t that what you said the Quinta itself was?”

“A stone alphabet of alchemy.”

The white cat yawned luxuriously, and Iole let it infect her with a yawn too. But Rosa wasn’t taken in by her show of indifference to the conversation. She knew Iole too well by now for that. The girl had her ears pricked up the whole time, and she usually drew the right conclusions from what she heard, remarkably quickly.

“You seem to be very busy with all these.” Rosa indicated the mountains of books in the conservatory.

“Most of them belong to my landlady. There’s much more material on the upper floors. She’s sublet the first floor here to me.”

Rosa’s suspicions were stirred. “Is she one of these Hermetics?”

“She’s all kinds of things. She doesn’t talk about herself much. But you’re not here on her account, are you? What exactly do you want to know?”

Rosa caught herself looking through the glazed roof of the conservatory up at the second floor. “There’s a group of people…an organization…They call themselves TABULA, and they probably take the name from the emerald tablet of this Hermes Trismegistos.”

“There are many such groups. Most of them consist of muddle-headed persons, esoterics and so forth, and these days they’re joined by all the crazy Dan Brown fans—would-be Freemasons making the Templars their hobby. Genuine alchemists are natural loners who hide themselves away in their laboratories. They were like that five hundred years ago, and it’s the same now.”

“They also hide themselves away behind books?” she asked, glancing at the room.

He lit another cigarette. “Of course.”

“I don’t think that TABULA really has anything to do with alchemy. The tablet is only some kind of symbol to them. These people are scientists. And they must have some rather prosperous patrons.”

“Evangelos Thanassis?”

“Could be. It’s only a suspicion so far, that’s all.”

“But there’s something you’re not telling me.”

Somewhere in the house a telephone rang loudly. The cat jumped off Iole’s lap in alarm, leaped up onto a tottering tower of books, and hopped off it again just before the pile collapsed in a cloud of dust.

Dallamano stood up with the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and bent over the chaos. The next moment he picked up the cat by the nape of its neck and carried it out of the conservatory and into the house. A little later they heard his voice on the phone, indistinctly.

Rosa turned to Iole. “How much does he know?” she whispered.

“About the dynasties? I haven’t told him anything.”

“You sure?”

“Rosa!”

“Sorry. It’s just that—”

Dallamano came back and stopped beside his armchair. “Scientists, then. Top-ranking people, I guess. At least they ought to be, if someone’s investing large sums of money in them. In them and in secrecy.”

“Sounds logical.”

“Nobel Prize winners?”

“How would I know?”

“If you have any idea what kind of research this organization is doing, then you’d better start by looking at the list of winners of the Nobel Prize for the last few decades. And it would also be a good idea to find out who was expected to win but didn’t. After that you could check who of those has carried out investigations into your subject. It’s possible that you might come upon a couple of people who could be involved with TABULA. Depending how much you really know, you might even find a name or two that you’ve heard before.”

“I’ll try that,” she said. “Thanks.”

Dallamano turned to Iole. “The taxi driver called. He’s waiting down on the road. If you two want to catch your flight, you’d better leave now.”

“If I do find out anything,” said Rosa as she got to her feet, “would you mind if we talked about it some more?”

“Of course I’d mind,” he snapped at her, then added in milder tones, “but that’s not going to stop you, is it? One of these days you’ll be at my door again to pester me. Just so long as that young Carnevare doesn’t turn up here.”

She smiled. “I’ll make sure of that.”

Outside, in the spacious entrance hall of the villa, Rosa’s eyes fell on a figure at the top of the stairs to the second floor.

“Olá,” she called.

“Olá,” the woman replied. She was delicately built, and at the most in her midtwenties. Her jeans and close-fitting blouse were black, like the long hair that fell smoothly over her shoulders. Rosa couldn’t see much more, but she noticed her strong, dark eyebrows.

The woman stood there at the top of the stairs, with one slender hand on the banister, and Rosa wondered whether she had overheard the conversation in the conservatory.

“Your landlady?” asked Rosa, turning to Dallamano as he picked up Iole’s bag to take it out to the taxi.

He nodded, and walked out with his niece. Rosa glanced up at the landing once again. The woman was gone. A door closed up above in the house.

“Coming?” called Iole from outside.

Rosa pulled herself together, hurried down the steps, and followed the two Dallamanos along the enchanted path to the road.