gaze was turned on Rosa through the clouds of cigarette smoke.
“Iole says she likes living with you,” he said, breaking the silence.
Rosa glanced doubtfully at Iole. It was only a few days ago that Val had been holding a pistol to her head.
Iole looked up from the white cat, gave Rosa a silent smile, and devoted herself to the animal again.
“I do my best,” said Rosa.
“She told me she has a private tutor. That’s good. Iole has a lot to catch up on.”
“She was extremely anxious to see you again, Signore Dallamano. You two must be very fond of each other.”
He held the cigarette motionless in his hand, and stared into the smoke curling up from the glowing tip. “My brother didn’t always leave himself as much time for his daughter as she needed. Someone had to look after her.”
Rosa remembered something that Iole had told her. “You taught her how to shoot. How old was she at the time—eight? Maybe nine?”
“I was a different man back then.” His mood of regret surprised her. “There are many things I wouldn’t do the same way now, and that’s only one of them.”
Iole cast Rosa a glance that wasn’t hard to interpret. It was her ability to handle a gun that had saved both their lives at the Gibellina monument.
“Why are you here?” he asked Rosa. “Iole flew to Portugal on her own. She could have found her way back without you as well.”
“Can’t you guess why I’m here?”
“More questions? About the statues in the Strait of Messina?” He inhaled smoke, and let it drift out through his lips with relish. “I’ve already told you and your Carnevare friend all I know.”
“The statues are gone,” she said. “Someone got to them before us.”
He took a deep breath, looking as if he wasn’t accustomed to doing so without added nicotine and tar. “Someone?”
“Evangelos Thanassis.”
“The shipowner?”
“The statues were taken on board one of his ships. The Stabat Mater. Does that name mean anything to you?”
“It’s a musical composition.”
Rosa nodded. “A medieval poem set to music. The first line runs, ‘Stabat mater dolorosa.’ The mother stood in sorrow.”
“A few years ago I’d have been impressed,” he said. “But these days knowledge has nothing to do with education, only with typing the right questions on a keyboard.”
Iole pricked up her ears. “That’s what Signora Falchi always says.”
“The woman obviously knows what she’s talking about.”
“The Stabat Mater is the flagship of Thanassis’s fleet of cruise ships,” Rosa went on, undeterred. “At least, she was before he withdrew from public life. Odd name for a pleasure ship, wouldn’t you say?”
“To the best of my knowledge, Thanassis is an odd character.”
“Did the Dallamanos ever have anything to do with him? I mean, your companies built harbors and so on.”
He shook his head. “Thanassis has enough firms of his own to do that for him.”
“What about TABULA? Does that mean anything to you?”
“Hermes Trismegistos,” he said, without even thinking about it.
Rosa nodded. “The emerald tablet.”
“Tabula Smaragdina Hermetis. What do the Hermetics have to do with a Greek shipowner?” He abruptly sat up and ground out his cigarette in the ashtray. “So that’s why you’re here? To ask me about that?”
“You knew so much before about the Quinta, and that crazy Freemason with his stone alphabet. Isn’t that what you said the Quinta itself was?”
“A stone alphabet of alchemy.”
The white cat yawned luxuriously, and Iole let it infect her with a yawn too. But Rosa wasn’t taken in by her show of indifference to the conversation. She knew Iole too well by now for that. The girl had her ears pricked up the whole time, and she usually drew the right conclusions from what she heard, remarkably quickly.
“You seem to be very busy with all these.” Rosa indicated the mountains of books in the conservatory.
“Most of them belong to my landlady. There’s much more material on the upper floors. She’s sublet the first floor here to me.”
Rosa’s suspicions were stirred. “Is she one of these Hermetics?”
“She’s all kinds of things. She doesn’t talk about herself much. But you’re not here on her account, are you? What exactly do you want to know?”
Rosa caught herself looking through the glazed roof of the conservatory up at the second floor. “There’s a group of people…an organization…They call themselves TABULA, and they probably take the name from the emerald tablet of this Hermes Trismegistos.”
“There are many such groups. Most of them consist of muddle-headed persons, esoterics and so forth, and these days they’re joined by