far Rosa hadn’t seriously regretted hiring her.
“Iole is a clever girl,” said the tutor. “She just has to give herself—and me—a chance.”
Rosa nodded, and headed down to the vaulted cellar.
“They smell of vanilla! And mango! And amber! And snowflakes!”
“So what do snowflakes smell like?”
“I’ve never smelled one. I’ve never seen a real snowflake. Only on TV.”
“Amber, then?”
“Like honey. Honey with raspberries!” Iole laughed happily, took Rosa’s hands, and, doing a silly dance, swung her around in a circle. “They smell so good! And there are so many different kinds! And if you order five hundred they cost hardly anything!”
“You ordered five hundred scented candles?”
“Only in that one shop.” Iole let go of Rosa but kept dancing in a circle by herself. She had often done that for hours, all alone and chained at the ankle, when she was the Carnevares’ hostage.
Rosa groaned. “How many stores did you order from?”
“All of the ones that had great offers!” she gushed, and looked at Rosa out of her pretty eyes as if she couldn’t imagine that her friend wouldn’t understand. “That’s why they have them on sale, see? So that everyone can buy them cheap. Even people who don’t earn much money. It’s so, so great!”
“And what exactly do you do with all those candles?”
“I light a different one every hour. Signora Falchi likes the place to smell good, too.”
“That’s not true.”
But Iole was already changing the subject, as she turned a final pirouette and came to a halt, swaying slightly. “Alessandro called.”
Rosa chewed a fingernail. “So?”
“Don’t you want to know what he wanted?”
“You’re about to tell me anyway.”
Iole lowered her voice conspiratorially. “He asked me how I was.”
“That’s nice of him.”
“I think he still worries about me.”
“Alessandro worries about a lot of things.”
“But he likes me.”
Rosa smiled, took Iole by the shoulders, and held her close. “Of course he does. Everyone likes you. Including Signora Falchi. Or she would if she saw more of you.”
The dank smell of the cellar clung to Iole’s short black hair. She must have been down here for some time.
“But he likes you best of all,” said Iole.
“Maybe.”
“You know he does!”
“Can we talk about something else?”
“He’s had Fundling moved. To a hospital near the sea.”
Rosa felt guilty for not having asked about Fundling herself. He’d been in a coma ever since the exchange of gunfire at the Gibellina monument. The doctors had removed the bullet from his head, but four months later he still hadn’t regained consciousness. Alessandro paid all his bills, and he had made the decision, some weeks ago, to have Fundling taken from the public hospital to an expensive private sanatorium. Rosa still wasn’t sure why. Alessandro said very little about it, but she sensed that he felt responsible for Fundling, maybe because of the crucial role Fundling had played in opposing Cesare Carnevare, the murderer of Alessandro’s parents.
Iole picked up a lock of Rosa’s hair and smelled it, as if that were the most natural thing in the world to do. “Have you asked the judge yet?”
“I’ll talk to her when…as soon as I see her.”
“She must let me go! I’d love to see Uncle Augusto again.”
Augusto Dallamano was Iole’s last living relation. Six and a half years before, the rest of her family had been murdered by the Carnevares. Iole herself had been held hostage—until Rosa and Alessandro had freed her. She’d been pestering Rosa for weeks to be allowed to visit her uncle. But that was far from easy to arrange.
“Uncle Augusto taught me how to shoot,” announced Iole.
“Terrific.”
“With an automatic pistol. And a shotgun, too.”
“How old were you then?”
Iole frowned, and counted silently. “Eight?”
Rosa groaned.
Dallamano was living, with a new identity, under the witness protection program of the state prosecutor’s office. Rosa had met him once, in Sintra, near Lisbon, and in the park of the Quinta da Regaleira he had answered some of her questions about the mysterious find made by the Dallamanos on their diving expeditions in the Strait of Messina.
“The judge isn’t very happy with me right now, did you know that?” Rosa guessed that her explanations would simply bounce off Iole. She had missed six years with other human beings, six years of contact with the outside world. It was easy to like her, but sometimes she could rile you, without knowing what she had done wrong. She had quit therapy after the first session, and Rosa could understand that. Her own experience with psychotherapy had not been a good one.
“Judge Quattrini never gives you anything