Arcadia Awakens by Kai Meyer Page B

else about him, trying to work it out. Something about his eyes. As if their pupils were suddenly widening. And for a brief, intriguing moment she thought his hair had changed color. Was darker, pitch-black. Maybe it was just the strange lighting up here.
    “My father went along with Cesare,” said Alessandro. “Went along with the murder of his own wife!”
    “But you’re only assuming that—aren’t you?”
    “She wrote things down. Put them together. It was what she always did.”
    “Like a letter, you mean? To you?”
    He shook his head. “She didn’t trust letters.”
    Rosa raised an eyebrow.
    “I know she wasn’t exactly clear in her mind!” he went on. “I know that, Rosa! But she wasn’t totally crazy, just … confused. There must be notes, diaries, something like that. I’m sure of it. And if there are—”
    “Then they’re here,” she said.
    “Yes.” He went over to a large, paint-splashed draftsman’s desk covered with sketches on large sheets of paper, as if the artist had left the studio only a few minutes ago. He opened the only drawer in the desk, rummaged around in it, and finally brought something out.
    A gleaming scalpel.
    He turned it over.
    She thought of the letter opener that she had taken from Florinda’s desk first thing in the morning. She’d left it down on the beach in her shoulder bag.
    Alessandro’s hair looked nut-brown again, but his pupils still filled his entire eyes. He went over to one of the pictures and slit it from top to bottom. With a tearing sound, the painting gaped open. A bloodless wound split the distorted face.
    He did the same to a second picture.
    And a third.
    Rosa watched, motionless, as he devastated picture after picture, each with a swift diagonal cut, and she thought instinctively that once, in the time of the great Mafia wars, these faces would have been real people, and the capi and their soldati would have dealt with them the same way. There was something of that in Alessandro Carnevare. An heir to those times, those men.
    She had the same legacy herself. Like a gene firmly anchored inside her. She could sense something stirring. Something in her changing, trying to break out. An eerie fascination joined the tension she had felt just now and the anger that still seethed inside her.
    Alessandro stopped and pointed to the open drawer. “There are more in there.”
    She joined him, looked inside, and saw a muddle of brushes, spatulas, pencils—and blades. Hesitantly, she put out her hand. Took one out of the drawer. Weighed the cool metal in her fingers.
    A scalpel just like his. Gaia Carnevare would have used them to scrape paint off canvases. Red paint, by the look of it.
    “A single cut,” said Alessandro. “That should be enough to show whether there’s anything underneath.”
    She went over to one of the pictures and put the blade against it. Slit open the screaming face. Only a picture. Only paint. She got goose bumps, but at the same time she couldn’t help smiling. A tingling ran through her knees, her thighs, her lower body. It reached her rib cage and leaped up into her skull like a flame.
    The next picture. And then another.
    Once she thought she heard a ringing sound, like tiny bells chiming. Not in her head. Somewhere in the house. But by now she was in a kind of frenzy, and Alessandro obviously felt the same. They were destroying his mother’s pictures in search of what might be hidden in them, or under them, or behind them. Cheeks, eyes, mouths gaped open. Where canvases had been stacked behind one another, more distorted faces came into view, more and more grimaces of fear, gaudily colored glimpses into the depths of Gaia Carnevare’s soul.
    “Here we are,” said Alessandro.
    And at that very moment Rosa’s blade, too, met a surface harder than canvas and paint, not behind the picture but in it.
    Alessandro’s mother had stuck folders of hard plastic or very thin metal on the canvases, and then painted them over