Arcadia Burns Read Online Free Page A

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 inthe 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’dlove 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 activitiesof 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