Arcadia Burns

HIS FACE


SHE DISCOVERED THE BRONZE panther by pure chance.

He was crouching on a hill in Central Park, his black eyes looking down on East Drive, one of the two streets running north to south through the park. From up there his view over the treetops must reach as far as the skyline of high-rise buildings on Fifth Avenue. Up there on his rock, surrounded by leafless tendrils of Virginia creeper, he seemed about to pounce.

Rosa sat down on a bench and examined the statue from a distance. Joggers and walkers passed by, and now and then one of the horse-drawn carriages driving tourists and amorous couples around the park. Icicles hung from the big cat’s jaws as if he were baring his teeth. But she could see only sadness in his dark eyes, nothing threatening.

She had grabbed her laptop from the hotel before coming here. She brushed the snow from the bench, but a chill still seeped through her jeans and tights.

The bronze panther looked as if he were watching her. She knew how that effect was achieved from the oil paintings in the Palazzo Alcantara. If she got up and walked a little ways away, the statue’s eyes would seem to follow her.

The laptop lay closed on her knees as she tapped Alessandro’s number into her phone. It would be just after nine in the evening in Italy now. She had once asked him what he did during the evenings they didn’t spend together. “Nothing,” he had said. “I sit there doing nothing.”

“You mean reading? Or watching TV?” Even as she said it, it struck her as such a boring question that she could have screamed at herself.

Alessandro shook his head. “If it’s hot, I go up on the battlements and look across the plain to the south. Over the hills on the horizon. When the sirocco blows, you can smell Africa.”

“Is that a panther thing?” She gestured clumsily. “I mean…like panthers. Jungles. Africa.”

“That’s where we come from. Originally, anyway.”

“I thought it was Arcadia.”

“The human part of us. But the origin of the other part, the roots of the Panthera, they’re somewhere in Africa.”

“How about snakes?”

“Same for snakes, I guess.”

“Will you show me? How to smell Africa up there on your battlements?”

“Sure.”

The panther on the rock looked as if he, too, were dreaming of somewhere far away.

The ringing of the phone brought her back out of her thoughts, and the next moment Alessandro’s voice mail kicked in. Rosa hesitated for a second, cleared her throat, smiled, and said, “I was just thinking of you. What you said about Africa. There’s a panther here with me. He’s made of metal, but I’d love to climb up and put my arms around him.”

Good God. That was easily the most ridiculous thing she’d ever said. In panic, she broke the connection, and realized at the same moment that it was too late. She couldn’t unsay what she’d said. Climb up and put my arms around him. She felt like crawling under the park bench.

But the panther kept looking down at her, and now his icicle teeth flashed in a sunbeam as if he were grinning at her, saying, Come on up here, then.

She let the cell phone drop to her lap, picked it up again, and buried it deep in her bag. Maybe he’d forget to listen to his messages. For about the next fifty years.

Almost automatically, she turned to her laptop. The casing felt icy. She desperately needed gloves and was annoyed with herself for not having bought a pair at Gothic Renaissance. Although black lace probably wouldn’t have been the best choice for this cold weather.

Her new emails wouldn’t all fit on a single screen. A handful were addressed directly to her—mostly from the men who had escorted her to the airport—but the majority she was only cc’d on. Correspondence between the managers of her companies, meaningless stuff to give the police surveillance experts something to do. Some of it seemed to be in a bewildering code, but really it was only randomly picked sequences of letters and numbers. Every minute that the anti-Mafia commission wasted trying to decipher the code was taking police attention away from other work.

The remaining messages were confined to the legal activities of the Alcantara companies, particularly the building of wind turbines all over Sicily and the delivering of wool blankets and food supplies to the refugee camp on Lampedusa.

One of the last emails, however, made her frown. It came from the Studio Legale Avv. Giuseppe L. Trevini. An attorney, Trevini had worked exclusively for the Alcantaras for many years, ever since Rosa’s grandmother had been head of the clan. Rosa had visited him three times in the last few months and realized that he knew every last detail of all the family’s dealings—legal and illegal. Whenever she had questions, he had told her, she could turn to him. Trevini was old-fashioned, cranky, but also crafty, and he was a technophobe. He had never sent her an email before. What he didn’t want to keep in the archives on paper, for reasons of security, he stored in his personal memory. She had never met anyone with such total recall. In spite of his close connection with the Alcantaras, she didn’t trust him. In the days just before she left, he had asked her no less than four times to visit him. But that would have meant going to Taormina. Trevini was in a wheelchair and refused to leave the grand hotel looking out on the bay where he had been living for decades.

So it was unusual for the attorney to send her an email. Even more startling, however, was the subject line: Alessandro Carnevare—important!

Avvocato Trevini had made no secret of his extreme disapproval of any relationship between an Alcantara woman and a Carnevare man. That was another reason why she felt uneasy as she opened the message.

Dear Signorina Alcantara, he wrote. As your family’s legal adviser for many years, I would like you to look at the attached video data file. In addition, I ask you again for a personal conversation. I am sure you will agree that the attachment and further material in my possession call for urgent consultation. On that occasion, I would like to introduce you to my new colleague, Contessa Avvocato Cristina di Santis. I remain, with the deepest respect for your family and in the hope of meeting you in the near future, yours sincerely, Avv. Giuseppe L. Trevini.

Rosa moved the cursor over the attachment icon and then stopped. She read that last sentence of his email again, annoyed. Deepest respect for your family. By which, of course, he meant Don’t forget where you belong, you stupid child.

With a snort of indignation, she clicked on the attachment and waited impatiently for the video to come up. The picture was no larger than the size of a pack of cigarettes, pixelated and much too dark. Metallic rushing sounds and distorted voices came from the speaker.

She was seeing a party, evidently filmed on a cell phone, with wobbly, indistinct images of laughing faces. The video panned across a large room. Scraps of conversation were barely audible; the sound was a blurred mixture of words, clinking glasses, and background music.

Now the camera was turned on a single person, and stayed there. Rosa was looking at her own face, shiny in the heat of the room. She was wearing makeup. In one hand she held a cocktail glass and a cigarette. She hadn’t smoked or drunk for almost a year and a half now. Not a drop of alcohol since that night.

A girl’s high-spirited voice asked how she was. The Rosa in the video grinned and shaped a word with her lips.

“What?” called the voice.

“B-A-T-H-R-O-O-M,” Rosa spelled out. “The bathroom. Coming with me?”

The answer couldn’t be heard, but the picture wobbled. A head was shaken. Rosa shrugged her shoulders, put her glass down on a buffet table, and walked out of the frame, listing heavily. She’d drunk a lot that evening.

The picture changed again. The camera panned over faces, lingering on them when it found a good-looking man. Now and then someone grinned into it; several greetings were called out to the girl holding the cell phone. “Hi, Valerie!”—“How’s it going?”—“Hey there, Val!”

Valerie Paige. Rosa hadn’t thought of her in months. How did Trevini come by a video made by Val of that party? He must have found out what had happened there. That was all she needed.

Valerie stopped again. She zoomed in and out a few times—more faces, most of them pixelated beyond all recognition. Then she concentrated on a group of young men in one corner of the room.

Five or six of them talking, three with their backs to the camera. One of them waved to Valerie and gave her an appreciative wolf whistle. Rosa had never seen him before. Val zoomed in again. Off camera she called, “Hey, Mark!” The others turned to her as well. One of them was looking straight into the camera, smiling.

The picture froze. The sound broke off.

The status bar showed that the file wasn’t finished yet, but the rest of it was occupied by the still of that one face. With that silent, frozen smile.

Trembling, Rosa enlarged the window until the young man’s features consisted of brownish rectangles. Then she minimized it right down again.

She could have spared herself the trouble. She’d recognized Alessandro even before he’d turned around. From the way he moved. From his unruly hair.

Muttering curses, she leaned against the back of the park bench. Above the lid of the laptop, the bronze panther, unmoving, was still staring at her, up on his rock framed by a background of bony branches.

Alessandro had been there. On the night it happened. In that apartment in the Village where Rosa had never been before, and would never be again.

His hair was shorter than today—a boarding-school haircut, he had once called it. The others with him had similar hairstyles.

Damn it, he had been there.

And had never said a single word about it.