something to be ashamed of, after he had been running around beside her stark naked all this time, “we were a couple. And she still loves me, I know she does.”
She stared at him, unable to take this in. She didn’t feel like laughing, but she laughed all the same. It sounded slightly crazy, but it felt good.
“Love?” she repeated. “So that’s what this is all about?”
He shook his head as he crouched in front of her until their faces were level. Her eyes traveled down. “You thought of everything, but not a pair of pants?”
“Sorry.” He stood up, glanced at the window, and went over to the workbench. A moment later he came back with a piece of cloth, spattered with varnish, knotted around his waist. “Better?”
She nodded.
“Valerie and I,” he started again, “were inseparable for almost a year. Then I made the mistake of introducing her to my family. I took her to parties with me, to the Dream Room and a few of the other Carnevare clubs. That’s how she met Michele.”
Rosa tried to forget about the murdered girl out in the snow for a moment. To forget about her own fear. She began to guess where this story was going. “Michele took her away from you,” she said, and only then did it finally sink in that they were talking about her Valerie. The Valerie who always steered clear of men. Who had never mentioned so much as a one-night stand, let alone a steady boyfriend.
“She fell for him.” Mattia sounded as if it still hurt to talk about it. “She’d have done anything and everything for him…. She did do anything and everything for him,” he corrected himself. He paused briefly, as if to choose his next words carefully. “She found out somehow or other. What he is, what we all are. I never told her; she must have watched him, or else she found something out by chance.”
“Mattia,” Rosa said imploringly, “why here and now? You could have asked me out for coffee to tell me this. Those people out there are going to kill us.”
“Valerie disappeared,” he said. “Sixteen months ago.”
Rosa jumped to her feet as if electrified. Her chilly skin was tingling all over from the warmth in the room. The question slipped out. “When, exactly?”
He bowed his head slightly as he looked intently at her. “Just after Halloween.”
She pressed her lips together and breathed out sharply through her nose.
Mattia went to the window again and watched the Panthera. As she waited impatiently for him to go on, she looked past him outside. All was still calm out there. Michele and the others were waiting for reinforcements to arrive with crowbars. Presumably a parks department official had already received a phone call to warn him, and to make sure that no security guards responded to an alarm from the boathouse.
“Well?” she asked.
“The last I heard, she was traveling in Europe.” He was still looking at the scene outside, and without doing so herself Rosa knew that he was staring at the girl’s corpse. “I don’t know if that’s the truth. It’s possible that Michele—”
“Killed her?” She went over to him. “Why?”
“To keep her quiet. The concordat was still in force at the time, and there was something that no one could know.” He turned his head and looked her in the eye. “I know what happened to you at that party. So does Michele.”
Her face was numb. She bit her lower lip, but didn’t feel it until she tasted blood.
“Michele?” she asked tonelessly.
Mattia nodded. “He was there,” he said. “Michele was one of them.”
THE TRANSFORMATION
ROSA WAS PERFECTLY CALM. Exhaustion that had nothing to do with her run came over her. Like the feeling when hysteria changes to dull indifference. She had passed the point of screaming and raging, and had reached a state when she felt nothing anymore.
“Who else?”
Mattia sighed. “The building where the party was held, Eighty-Five Charles Street…it’s in the West Village. Does that address mean anything to you?”
Her fists were clenched so hard that her fingernails dug deep into the palms of her hands. “Tell me names. One or two of them, any names you know.”
Something was happening outside. Mattia’s glance moved nervously from Rosa to the terrace. He cursed under his breath. “There’s a car coming, on the other side of the pond. Those are Michele’s men.”
“Mattia, damn it!” she shouted at him. Now, at last, she felt something again, and she welcomed that familiar but still strange