Arcadia Burns (3 page)

I
T WAS A TRICK
. A lie. Some perverse ruse to make her feel insecure, distract her attention, keep her from messing up any of the Alcantara deals from which Trevini earned his money.

It wasn’t hard to see through his ploy. He wanted to unsettle her so that she’d be easier to manipulate. Most people thought the Mafia shot down anyone who stood in its path with a machine gun. That was nonsense; there were many other ways to get rid of them, and Avvocato Trevini knew them all. A man who had been working for the Cosa Nostra for decades, defending murderers, springing criminals from prison, discrediting public prosecutors—a man who had survived all the changes of leadership intact, and even the bloody street warfare of earlier years, knew what he was doing.

A video clip could be faked. How hard was it to replace one face with another? Trevini must know that she didn’t trust him. That, naturally, she would sooner believe Alessandro. All she had to do was call Alessandro, ask him, and the whole hoax would be exposed.

And yet Trevini had sent her the video.

She took her cell phone out of her bag and dialed Alessandro’s number for the second time that afternoon. The ring seemed louder and shriller this time. Voice mail again.

His smile was still caught on the monitor of the laptop, blurred like a half-forgotten memory. Had she seen him that evening? When Valerie thought a man looked sexy, it was her habit to point him out. Had she pointed him out to Rosa at the party? And more important, had
he
seen Rosa and failed to tell her later that he recognized her? Why had he kept quiet about it?

He hadn’t been straightforward with her once before: when he’d taken her to Isola Luna so that her presence would interfere with Tano’s plans to murder him. They hadn’t been a couple yet at the time. Did that make a difference?

She decided to send Trevini an email.

You’re fired
, she typed.
Get out of my life
.

She deleted that, and instead wrote:
You’ll be hearing from my contract killers. Shitty attorney. Shitty cripple. I hope you miss seeing a shitty staircase in your shitty hotel
.

It was almost poetry.

After a moment’s thought, she deleted that, too.
Dear Signore Trevini, I am not at home right now. I will be in touch about a date for a discussion in the next few days. Where did you get that video? And you mentioned other material; what kind of material is that? Sincerely, Rosa Alcantara
.

PS: I HOPE YOU CHOKE ON YOUR SHITTY LEGAL LIES IN YOUR SHITTY WHEELCHAIR, YOU MISERABLE BASTARD
.

She stared at the postscript, then deleted it letter by letter, very slowly. Finally she hit
SEND
and closed the laptop.

Her cell phone rang at the same moment. She saw
Alessandro’s name on the display, waited a few seconds, and then answered.

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Hi.”

“What are you doing there with that panther?”

Puzzled, she looked around her, and then remembered the voice mail.

“Where’ve you been?” she asked.

He hesitated briefly. “Discussions?” It sounded like a question, as if he couldn’t believe that she’d forgotten that. “Good to hear your voice.”

She hated herself a little for being unable to pretend better. For not managing to sound, at least for one or two minutes, as if everything were all right. Instead she said, “You were there.”

Another pause. “Where? What do you mean?”

“At that party. A year and a half ago in the Village. You were there.”

“What are you talking about?”

Relieved, she thought: Good. So it
was
a trick. All lies. He had no idea what she was asking him.

Only she didn’t say that. “I saw you. On a video. You were at the same party as me, on the same damn night.”

His reaction was calm. “When exactly was this?”

“October thirty-first. A Halloween party, but no costumes. Anyone who did come in costume had to strip down to their underwear and run right through the apartment.”

She heard him draw his breath in sharply. “
That
was the
party. Where they…It happened
there
?”

Suppose he was lying so as not to hurt her? Would she rather it was that way? She wanted to know the truth, never mind how bad or bewildering it was.

“Yes,” she said dully.

“I didn’t know. You never mentioned it.”

“Did you see me there?”

“No.” He almost sounded distressed, something she’d never heard in his voice before. She didn’t like it, and it only confused her even more. “No,” he repeated more firmly. “Of course not.”

“Are you sure?”

“Shit, Rosa…I had no idea! There were so many people around, and we went out to parties like that all the time. I went with friends from boarding school; we used to drive into different parts of the city. Including the Village. Someone always knew someone else, and there was always a party somewhere.”

That sounded plausible. And there was no reason at all to distrust him. She did love him.

Only there was an undertone, a slight hesitation in his voice that made her wonder.
Someone always knew someone else
.

“Did you know them?” she asked quietly. “The guys who did it?”

Now he understood. “You think I knew about it and never said anything? Never said anything all this time?”

“I don’t know what I think.” She couldn’t even feel her fingers on the cell phone now. The sun was shining over Central
Park, but a freezing wind was chasing down East Drive, making ice crystals swirl up in the air and getting under her clothes. “I don’t know anything anymore.”

“You don’t seriously think I’d cover up for someone like that, do you?” He sounded hurt, and she was sorry. “If I knew who the bastard was, I’d personally put a bullet between his eyes.”

She passed her free hand over her face. She still couldn’t think straight. “When I saw you on that video…well, I hadn’t expected that.”

“I wish I was there with you.”

“Not a good idea talking about something like this on the phone. I know.”

“No. I…I’m so sorry, Rosa. What can I say? I didn’t know.”

“You can’t help that.”

“I’ll get on a flight for New York. Tomorrow morning.”

“No, don’t be silly; I’ll cope. You can’t help me anyway. I’m too much of a coward even to speak to my mother. And now this…” She rubbed her knees together to warm them. “I just have to get over it and then everything will be okay.”

“No, it won’t,” he said firmly. “You don’t
sound
okay.”

“Let’s just call each other again later.”

“Don’t hang up now. Or I’ll fly out tonight.” With the Carnevares’ private jet on call, that wasn’t such an outlandish idea.

“Oh, really, Alessandro…don’t do that.” She had to pull herself together. It was a bad sign if the video could knock her
off balance like this. It meant that Trevini was right about her. “I’ll manage here on my own. Maybe I ought to just drop that business about my father and TABULA.” They both knew she wouldn’t. Not after her promise to Zoe when her sister was dying. “It’s odd to be back here. New York is…kind of different.”

“Of course it’s odd. You’re different now yourself.”

“Once I wouldn’t have lost control like this.”

“You haven’t lost control. You’re annoyed. Of course.” He cleared his throat, and she imagined him rubbing his nose as he sometimes did when he was thinking. “Who sent you this video?”

“Trevini.”

“The bastard.”

“He says—” she began, but she swallowed the rest of the sentence:
He says he has further material in his possession
. More evidence? Of what? “He didn’t tell me where he got it. But you can bet he will.”

“He’s the same as the others. They all hate that we—”

“I can ignore the others. But not Trevini. He’s the only one who knows absolutely everything about the way the Alcantaras earn their money.”

“He doesn’t like an eighteen-year-old girl having the authority to give him orders.”

“You can’t really blame him.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“He wants me to go and see him.”

“Maybe you’d better not.”

“He can’t do anything to me. It would be stupid of him to. My managers don’t trust him—none of them like him knowing so much. If he tried murdering me, he wouldn’t survive very long himself. The rest of them think I’m naive and out of my depth, but they believe that sooner or later they’ll be able to guide me in a direction that suits them. Trevini could never be
capo
; no one would accept him. Thirty or forty years of working for the Alcantaras still doesn’t make him one of us.”

“All the same, don’t go to see him. He’s planning something. Why else would he have sent you the video?”

She was beginning to calm down. “Does the name Cristina di Santis mean anything to you? Contessa di Santis?”

“Who’s she?”

“Trevini’s new colleague, he says. He wants me to meet her. It may not be important.”

“With the jet, I could be with you in ten hours.”

“No, you have to make sure your own people aren’t about to stab you in the back. I can deal with Trevini. And my mother, too.”

His long silence showed that he wasn’t convinced. “Who filmed this video?”

“A friend of mine…at least, she was at the time. Valerie Paige. She was the one who dragged me to the party.” She sensed that he was about to say something, but she kept talking. “It wasn’t the first time. She waited tables in a club; she was always getting invited somewhere, and sometimes I went with her.”

“And she filmed me?”

“Not just you. A whole crowd of people who were there. Later on someone froze the picture on your face. I assume that was Trevini’s doing.”

“How does a lawyer stuck in a wheelchair in Sicily come by a cell phone belonging to a New York waitress?”

“FedEx?”

“I mean it, Rosa.”

“I have no idea. And I don’t care. But it’s helped to talk to you about it…and Alessandro? I’m sorry that I…you know what I mean, right?”

“I care about you a lot,” he said gently.

“I care about you too. And I can’t wait to see you again. But not here in New York. I’ll be home in a few days. This is something I have to do on my own.” She hesitated for a moment. “And don’t get any ideas about speaking to Trevini yourself. This is my business. Okay?”

“But it’s just as much—”

“Please, Alessandro. They’ll never take me seriously if as soon as things get tricky I send a Carnevare, of all people, ahead of me. Anyway, you have enough trouble of your own.”

He didn’t contradict her. She wished she could kiss him for that.

“Call me every day, okay?”

“I will.”

They said good-bye. Rosa put her cell phone away and listened to the pleasant echo of his voice in her head. Her conversation with him, and the fact that they were so far apart, drained her even more than her failure to get in touch with her
mother. She longed for him, but when she was with him she couldn’t express her feelings the way she wanted. And it didn’t help that he certainly knew how she felt anyway. Yet she was surprised by her own desire to let him see her feelings; that wasn’t like her. So why this sudden need for communication? It was embarrassing. Or at least unusual.

Finally his voice in her head died away. She had silence back, in the middle of the noisiest city in the world. She was briefly tempted to watch the video again. But not here in the park, not in this cold, where she wouldn’t feel it if the
other
kind of cold began rising in her.

The bronze panther bared his icicle fangs. She didn’t think he looked like Alessandro anymore. As she set off, his moody gaze followed her.

If she wanted to find out how Trevini had come by that video, there was only one person she could ask.

R
OSA AND
V
ALERIE HAD
first met online in a community called the Suicide Queens; none of them were personally acquainted with any of the others. All they knew about one another was how they looked in various states ranging from wide awake, to out of it, to near death. The webcams were unforgiving when it came to recording their dying moments, which would be posted on the site.

All the members were girls and young women, although opinion was divided on the question of whether a woman named Lucille Seville had once been a man. At the very least, she wore a wig, which they knew because the paramedics accidentally knocked it off when they were taking her away.

The rules of the Suicide Queens were extremely simple. They took turns, one of them every evening. A greeting on camera to everyone who was logged in, then the presentation of the pills. Usually this introduction occurred in front of the bed or the sofa on which the rest of the drama was to unfold. The first points awarded by the other Queens were for the number of tablets. More points could be scored for powers of persuasion, which were on display during the emergency phone call. Some members of the club screamed and cried hysterically. Others kept perfectly calm and said only, “I’m going
to die very soon. Come and get me if you can.”

Valerie was one of the latter sort. She swallowed more sleeping pills than anyone else, and somehow or other she got hold of the really hard stuff. Her next step could only be rat poison. She washed the medication down with alcohol and kept her emergency call short. After that she lay on the bed, in full view of the community at home in front of their monitors, waiting for sleep to come. And for the paramedics. Sometimes they took only a few minutes, sometimes half an hour. Valerie claimed to have seen the light at the end of the tunnel a number of times already. She knew the movie of her life by heart, she said, because she’d seen it flash before her eyes so often.

No one could compare to Val. She took the most pills, stayed conscious longest, and at least once she hadn’t given the emergency services switchboard the number of her apartment. The paramedics had to go halfway around the block asking questions before they found it. Valerie almost died that night. But a week later she was sitting in front of her webcam again, back in the running—with the highest score since the founding of the Queens. Her smug demeanor told everyone that she thought the point of life was in the expectation of death.

Rosa had competed actively only once. She had spent days on Google, reading everything she could find out about committing suicide by taking sleeping pills, pages upon pages upon pages, until the idea almost took on its own kind of morbid romance.

She hadn’t even fallen asleep yet when the ambulance pulled up outside the door of her building. The only club member
with fewer points to her name was a punk from Jersey who claimed that aspirin had the same effect as zopiclone and tried to convince them that she had fallen into a coma after the fifth tablet. Rosa had not taken part again.

A week later she met Valerie at Club Exit on Greenpoint Avenue. Valerie spoke to her as easily and cheerfully as if they had met out shopping. Val was wearing a T-shirt that said
Your hardcore is my mainstream
. Rosa would never have recognized her on her own. The distorted perspective of the webcam, the pixels, the poor lighting had given her a ghostly look that did justice to the name of the Suicide Queens. In real life, however, Valerie was a pale teenager like Rosa herself, with a black bob that gave her the look of a 1920s silent movie star. Like Rosa, she was thin and heavily made up, and at their second outing, at the Three Kings, it was obvious that she also thought much like Rosa. After half a dozen meetings, some by chance, some planned, she admitted that her appearances on the Suicide Queens site were all a hoax. The pills were magnesium tablets, the bourbon was apple juice, the paramedics were friends from the apartment on the floor above hers.

Rosa was both fascinated and disappointed. “How about the Queens and their code of honor?”

Valerie stared at her, astonished. “But they’re
freaks
!” she blurted out, and that was that.

In the end, Rosa’s admiration for the way Valerie coolly fooled a bunch of idiots who were tired of life—including Rosa herself—won out. During the online chats, the others
were all eating out of Val’s hand and never thought of criticizing any of her absurd theories about life after death.

For Valerie it was all a big joke. Offline she laughed unkindly at the other Queens, and Rosa felt flattered because this strange girl trusted her. Of course she would never mention it to anyone; she’d had to promise that just once and never again. She had entered Valerie’s close circle—a circle that consisted of Valerie and Rosa. For the first time since Zoe had left for Sicily, she felt there was someone who took her seriously and accepted her. In spite of the differences between them, her sister had left a vacuum behind, and Valerie filled it with her bizarre charm and charisma.

After that, they danced together through the clubs, from Bushwick to Brighton Beach, they smoked pot under the Brooklyn Bridge, and they tried to think up ways of outdoing Valerie’s triumph over the Suicide Queens. Twice a week Valerie waited tables at a club in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, but she wouldn’t take Rosa with her. It was work for her, not play. Rosa respected that.

Valerie had an eye for cute boys, but all she ever did with them was drink and smoke. For Valerie, her attitude was nothing but a show, an illusion—an act she put on for the Suicide Queens as well as men. Even Rosa wasn’t quite sure whether she had ever met the real Valerie, or only the mask she wore for show.

The Halloween party in the Village had been one of thousands of parties thrown in New York that weekend, and what happened to Rosa could have happened to any girl. The drugs
in Rosa’s cocktail, the strangers who raped her—it was pure chance that it was her. There were probably several dozen such cases on the same night. She was nothing out of the ordinary; the police had no doubt of that. She’d been drinking; she was wearing a miniskirt. That was enough to make the rape an everyday event with an eleven-digit reference number in the files.

The party had been Valerie’s suggestion. Someone had given her the address while she was waitressing. She and Rosa took a taxi because the subway on Halloween would be hellish, and they began drinking in the back of the cab. All Rosa knew was that they were going to the Village, but she didn’t know the house, and she had no memory of the building where they got out. A typical brownstone: an old building with several floors. The police spoke to Valerie later, but she too said she couldn’t remember the address. Maybe that was the truth, maybe just another lie so she didn’t get a reputation for hanging out with the cops.

Not that it ultimately made any difference. After that evening Rosa didn’t want to see Valerie again, and for reasons that Rosa first put down to a guilty conscience, and later to indifference, Val herself never tried to get in touch. What had looked like a close friendship for a couple of months had really just been a kind of useful link between them based on Valerie’s idea of a good time, and the rape had put an end to any fun for one of them. In Valerie’s world of trendy clubs in Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan, there was no place for regret or for Rosa.

Sixteen months later Rosa didn’t know Valerie’s number by heart anymore, and the cell phone where it had been stored no longer existed. They had never met at home. There was no Valerie Paige listed, and the last name was far too common to be used as a starting point for inquiries.

In retrospect, it seemed odd that Valerie had disappeared from her life without a trace. Even the Suicide Queens weren’t to be found on the internet anymore, after one of the girls had taken the game too far. For her, there’d been no going back. Rosa did find hints in one forum that the community still existed on another server, under a new name, but there were no direct links, and no other clues to the new online identities of its members. Anyway, she doubted she would have found Valerie there; she had probably gotten tired of playing around with placebos and apple juice long ago, and was looking for her fun elsewhere.

When Trevini still hadn’t called by late that evening, Rosa took a cab to the Meatpacking District. She had never seen the club where Valerie waited tables, but she remembered its name: the Dream Room. She had found the address on the internet and was almost surprised to see that not everything connected with Valerie had vanished into thin air, leaving no trace.

She got out of the taxi just before midnight and joined the line waiting outside the club. It was on a side street and, like so many other buildings in this neighborhood, had once been a slaughterhouse, as an antiquated inscription on the dark brick
masonry of the second floor boasted. The neon sign of the Dream Room, however, looked almost modest. A few dozen people were waiting outside its steel door. Two burly doormen were checking the guests’ IDs. Rosa, in her short dress, black tights, and steel-capped boots, was let in easily enough. She hadn’t gone to much trouble with her outfit, but because her wild blond hair wouldn’t be tamed, and was in such contrast to her black clothes, she looked dressed up enough for Manhattan’s chic club scene. At least an Asian girl with pink hair extensions, on her way down the concrete steps, cast an envious glance at Rosa’s blond mane.

The interior designers of the Dream Room had removed the floor of the second story to make an enormously high-ceilinged chamber. From the stairs, all you saw was a wide, wavering surface—cloud cover made of dry ice concealed the view of the dance floor from above. Here and there the swathes of mist parted to reveal a milling throng of bodies. A continuous salvo of beats, somewhere between industrial and jungle music, boomed from unseen speakers.

Now Rosa could see how the Dream Room got its name. Thousands of dream catchers hung from the ceiling, high above the sea of dry ice. Someone must have bought up the entire stock of the souvenir shops on Indian reservations to get so many. The dream catchers dangled up there like mobiles made of wickerwork and feathers, strings of beads and horsehair, some right beneath the ceiling, others deep in the mist. There were dream catchers large and small, plain and extravagant, and they all shook, swinging and turning, from the
booming music from the loudspeakers.

Only now did she realize that she had stopped halfway down the stairs. Guests impatient to get in pushed past her, but a few others also stood there taking in the sight.

She tore herself away, walked down the remaining steps, and broke through the layer of dry ice. The scene below was equally eccentric. The floor was crisscrossed by a labyrinth of corridors, like trenches on a battlefield overhung by mist. They linked half a dozen dance floors together. Guests dressed to the nines pushed along the narrow aisles; physical contact was desirable and couldn’t be avoided anyway. Spotlights flickered above their heads. In the trenches themselves, diffuse strip lighting showed the way, and there were other dim lamps here and there, illuminating the corridors for only a few feet ahead. Most clubs tried to present their guests with a world of their own, but Rosa had never seen one that did it so effectively, and by such simple means, as the Dream Room.

Soon she too was making her way along the aisles, looking hard at the waitresses, but she didn’t see anyone at all like Valerie. She hadn’t really expected her to still be here, but maybe someone remembered her and would know where to find her. Trevini would certainly have some explanation ready of how he had come by Valerie’s video, but she doubted it would be the truth. It couldn’t hurt to find out as much about Valerie as possible on her own.

On the edge of one of the dance floors, she leaned over the bar and asked the bartender if he knew a girl called Valerie Paige. He shook his head. The same with her second and third
attempts. She was about to plunge back into the turmoil of the trenches when she stopped to watch a remarkable entrance.

The crowd gave way before a group of black-clad bodyguards. The men towered above most of the guests by a head, and beside the wraith-like emo girls and the heavily made-up Goths they looked like trolls. In their midst swooped a figure from another age. A young woman in her midtwenties, with raven-black hair, high cheekbones, and strikingly large eyes, came gliding out of the mist of dry ice onto the dance floor and immediately took possession of it. She was wearing a wide, black hoop skirt, floor-length and trimmed all around with lace at the hem. Entirely absorbed in herself, she swayed her slender torso above the huge skirt in fluid, circling movements. Her bodyguards shooed away any guests who came too close to her, but she seemed not to notice. If she was aware of the presence of other people, she didn’t let on in any way. Countless pairs of eyes were watching her, and hardly any of them showed less than awe and respect.

“Who’s that?” Rosa asked one of the waitresses, who looked at her with as much scorn as if she had been in St. Peter’s, in Rome, inquiring about the identity of the old man at the altar.

“Her name is Danai Thanassis,” said a male voice beside her. A slender young man, a little older than Rosa herself, leaned toward her. His girlfriend couldn’t take her eyes off the graceful dancer. “She’s from Europe. Former Yugoslavia or Greece, I think. Whenever she puts in an appearance, the world stops turning.” He sounded slightly injured, as if his
companion had dragged him here just so she could see the dancer make her entrance.

“So what is she? A pop star or something?”

He shook his head. “A millionaire’s rich daughter, they say.
Very
rich. And very strange.”

The circles made by the woman as she moved around the floor grew larger, forcing bystanders closer and closer to the walls. Some of them tried to retreat into nearby corridors but met a solid rampart of guests pushing forward to see Danai Thanassis and her fascinating dance.

Rosa noticed a man, accompanied by one of the doormen, making his way out of the crowd behind the bar. He looked Italian, or at least of Italian descent. He was talking to the staff, who gathered obsequiously around him. The owner of the club, or at least someone with a say in running it.