The doctors had put butterfly bandages over some of the injuries on Alessandro’s face, pulling the edges together. It would be some time before the swelling and abrasions disappeared entirely.
He looked at her intently. “You’re not going to rebuild the palazzo, are you?”
“I’m not even sure it would be a good idea to have the remains demolished. Maybe it’s best this way. Everything lying buried under tons and tons of stone and ash, all those dirty family secrets.”
Alessandro was sitting upright in bed, his expression impatient, his hair untidy. He had seemed as if he had been on hot coals ever since being brought here two days ago. The large dressing over his chest looked alarming, but the injuries under it would be healed in a few weeks’ time, the doctors said. Whatever they had thought when the heir to the Carnevare fortune was brought into their hospital, covered with bites and scratches, they kept it to themselves. In this place people knew how to keep their mouths shut, because silence was literally golden. The Carnevares were not the only clan to have their members regularly treated for injuries in this hospital.
Fundling was still lying in a coma one room away. Rosa had already been to see him this morning and had spent a long time holding his hand.
Only the day before, the doctors had been tranquilizing Alessandro with painkillers, but now he was fizzing with energy again. It was slightly uncanny to see how fast he recovered. Maybe there was something to the saying that a cat had nine lives, after all.
“What did you tell him when you phoned?” he asked. Rosa herself would rather not have talked about the Hungry Man for now.
“The truth. That it wasn’t the Carnevares who gave him away all those years ago.”
“And he believed you?”
“Looks like it.”
“Come on,” he said, “that wasn’t all. He called off the Hundinga immediately, no ifs, ands, or buts.”
Rosa went over to the window, looked out at the sunrise, and decided not to tell him everything. Not yet. “I told him about the recording di Santis made in the hotel,” she said as she turned back to him. “That’s the best evidence of Trevini’s guilt. I also reminded him of a couple of deals he and my grandmother had made together, decades ago, and how Trevini had turned them into a rope to hang him with. Maybe he wondered why I’d lay the blame on a member of my own family, but anyway, di Santis got the video to him the next day, as well as the copy of a document proving that thirty years ago Trevini was given immunity in return for collaborating with the public prosecutor’s office. He was the guilty party, not the Carnevares.”
“But your grandmother pulled the strings,” he said, concern in his voice. “By the Hungry Man’s logic, that would mean the Alcantaras are on his hit list now. Your family handed him over, and you are Costanza’s last direct descendant. So why has he left you alive?”
She wanted to avoid his penetrating glance, but she pulled herself together and even managed a smile. “Maybe he’s the first to notice that I am not the reincarnation of Costanza Alcantara.” She leaned over and gave him a kiss.
“There’s something you’re not telling me, though,” he observed.
“We agreed that we didn’t have to tell each other everything, right?”
He was about to run his hands nervously through his hair, but he swore and lowered his arms again when the recently stitched injuries under his armpits protested. “Bloody hell.”
“Does it hurt badly?”
Sighing, he shook his head. “How’s Iole doing?”
“She arrived in Portugal yesterday evening. She’s with her uncle.”
Alessandro’s eyes widened. “With Dallamano? That lunatic?”
“It doesn’t necessarily make him a lunatic that he wanted to kill you.”
“Thanks a lot.”
She kissed him again, a longer kiss this time.
“How did you manage to arrange that?” he asked, impressed. “The witness protection program—”
“Isn’t as watertight as it used to be. Dallamano testified against Cesare and your father, so they wanted to get rid of him like the rest of his family. But now that Cesare is dead, the situation isn’t quite as critical for Dallamano as it was before. The other clans have too much else on their minds to trouble themselves, in the name of a dead Carnevare, about something that happened years ago. At least, that’s how Judge Quattrini sees it. And he himself seems pretty happy that the security measures have been relaxed.”