silently in the background, they gradually pulled the casket forward until the end stuck a foot and a half out of the wall compartment.
“That’ll do,” said Rosa.
Iole nodded and stepped back.
Out of the corner of her eye, Rosa saw Signora Falchi down on the floor beside the door. For a moment she was afraid that the tutor was going to faint, but she was wrong. Instead the woman frowned, leaned back against the wall as she sat there, and drew up her knees. “Nothing I can do about it,” she said, sighing. “I’ll just wait here until it’s over, if I may.”
Sweating now, Rosa raised the pickax. She hit the oak lid of the casket three times, until a hole the size of a human head gaped in the wood, and the pickax stuck in as far as it would go. With a gasp, she pulled the tool out, let it drop, and bent over the hole.
“Let’s just hope,” remarked Signora Falchi on the other side of the chapel, “that it really is the foot end you have there.”
Rosa peered over the splintered edge of the hole. Iole’s hand reached for hers and held it tightly.
“Makes no difference,” she said a moment later, straightening her back and standing erect as she breathed deeply in and out.
Iole looked at her, and then she too peered inside the casket.
“Oh,” she said.
Rosa squeezed her hand once more, then let go. She walked out of the chapel, stopped, and drew fresh air into her lungs. It smelled of the pine trees growing farther up the slope, of grass, and of the salty wind blowing over the hills from the distant sea.
Behind her in the chapel, she heard the sound of the tutor’s footsteps as she took her turn glancing inside the casket.
Iole came out onto the porch and stopped a little way behind Rosa.
“Where is he, then?” she asked.
Rosa shrugged her shoulders, and went back into the house in silence.
THE WHITE TELEPHONE
ROSA WAS STANDING ON the balcony of the study with its wrought-iron balustrade, looking out over the inner courtyard and the rooftops to the peak of the mountain, when the telephone rang.
It wasn’t the phone on her desk. This one had a ringtone unlike any that she had yet heard in the palazzo.
The muted, almost inaudible sound came from the wall paneling on the west side of the room. It was a genuine ring, very old-fashioned, not a trendy modern tone. She’d never heard it except in old movies and as a ringtone to download on a cell phone. But something told her that there was no cell phone concealed in the wall.
After a minute, during which she groped around more and more frantically for hidden mechanisms, the sound stopped. She cursed quietly, but she didn’t give up. Finally she tried the obvious and, sure enough, found a panel at chest height that could be slid aside with the palm of her hand. It disappeared behind the panel next to it with a faint sound. A secret door came into view lower down on the wall.
Behind it, the phone began to ring again.
The door wasn’t locked. Ducking low, Rosa slipped through it and found herself in a tiny room less than six feet square. It contained a high-backed armchair and a round table, on which an old-fashioned, snow-white telephone stood. It had a round dial and an enormously heavy receiver. The casing of the phone looked like ivory or mother-of-pearl.
She picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Good day.”
“Trevini?” She dropped into the chair. “What kind of a phone is this?”
“One so outmoded that Judge Quattrini’s people and everyone else who’d like to listen in have forgotten how to bug it. Officially the cable network we’re using doesn’t exist anymore. But certain persons in, let’s say, high places made sure, when the system was modernized a few decades ago, that parts of it were left in place all over Sicily. The authorities know nothing about it. Or if they do, they would be greatly disappointed if they tried tapping into it with their ultramodern digital stuff.”
“Why didn’t you say anything about this before?”
“To find out how much you know about the secrets of the palazzo.” Which told her that there must certainly be others that he wasn’t telling her about. Demonstrating his superiority, the bastard.
“What do you want?”
“I want to help you.”
“Sure you do.”
“No, listen, Rosa. This is something you ought to take seriously.”
She shifted in the uncomfortable chair. Traces of dust were left on her