Arcadia Awakens by Kai Meyer Page A

smelled of musty rooms, warm plastic, and the dust motes hovering in the rays of sunlight that slanted in as if to support the glazed conservatory ceilings.
    A flight of stairs led to the upper floor. There was a new smell here—first like wax crayons, and the next moment, more intensely, of oil paint. They walked into Gaia Carnevare’s studio. After all the dazzling white, the colors in this room looked brighter.
    Here, too, the ceiling was made entirely of glass, and was the only surface not covered with pictures. Unframed canvases hung or were propped everywhere, covered with an inferno of brushstrokes and wild dabs of paint, explosions of color that at a second glance were faces. Distorted, twisted, disfigured faces.
    Rosa said nothing. She turned slowly on the spot and let her eyes wander over the paintings. There were pictures stacked one behind another all over the studio, five or eight or ten at a time; she could only guess how many of those disturbing grimaces were hidden behind the pictures in front.
    “Why’s all this still here?” she asked.
    “Cesare kept my father from taking them over to the castle. He didn’t want to have them around him.” Alessandro’s jaw muscles were working. “He hated her.”
    “And her pictures?”
    “Them, too.”
    Now she looked him in the eye for the first time since slapping him. “Did he do it? Did Cesare kill your mother?”
    “I think so, yes.”
    “And you’re looking for evidence here?”
    He went over to one of the paintings, a face with a mouth wrenched wide-open, red and black and dark violet. His fingertips gently stroked the surface. “I think she found out that Cesare had been deceiving my father. Cesare knew him better than anyone and was his closest adviser in everything—not just business. But Cesare also likes the old Cosa Nostra traditions. He insists that might is right, and as he sees it, power struggles should be carried out openly. These days the families work more and more like other business enterprises, they run scams just this side of the law, and their quarrels aren’t necessarily settled in shootouts between a few stupid, hired henchmen—but all that’s passed Cesare by. He can’t stand any kind of innovation, everything has to stay the way it always was. That’s why he wants the power in the Carnevare clan. He wants to keep what he calls the old values going. And I think that as he saw it, my father had gone too far off that track, with all the deals he did as cover, his facade of charity donations, fraternizing with politicians in Rome. Cesare’s been putting funds secretly aside to be ready for a change of power, and my father was blind to it and didn’t notice. Or maybe he just didn’t want to face facts.”
    “And your mother was different?”
    “She and Cesare hated each other from the beginning, even before she married my father. Later on she realized what Cesare was planning. She must have tried to warn my father, but when he wouldn’t listen to her she got more and more withdrawn, and she spent most of her time out here on the island.”
    Rosa was studying the distorted faces. “Doesn’t look like being on her own did her much good.”
    “That wasn’t enough for Cesare, anyway. He couldn’t let her know the truth.”
    “So he had her killed?”
    Alessandro’s eyes were narrowed, cold, frightening. “I think he did it with his own hands. Here or somewhere else. But he did kill her.” He walked slowly past more of the pictures, tracing the outlines of the brushstrokes. “My father must have known. Or at least guessed. I’m almost sure Cesare will have talked him into thinking that was the only way. Told him my mother was unhinged, would talk to the wrong people about the kind of business the Carnevares did. And I guess my father just—caved in.” Fists clenched, he swung around, and now there was such fury in his eyes that Rosa almost took a step back. But she stood her ground, feeling sure there was something