safe in his office, but Tano had a key of his own. I found it among his things.”
“Michele injected me with a dose of it that night in Central Park. He said the stuff came from Tano.” Rosa took one of the vials out of his hand. “May I?” She placed it beside the others in the metal cupboard. Outwardly there was no visible difference. A yellow fluid in a transparent vial.
“There’s a laboratory that used to work for Florinda,” she said. “It supplied immunizations for the refugees she trafficked into Europe from Lampedusa. We should be able to find out from that lab if it’s the same serum.”
“Yes, probably.”
“You think so, too?”
He nodded thoughtfully.
She took Alessandro’s ampoule off the shelf again, went over to the containers, and looked back at the rows of furs in their linen bags. “If they wanted to take their furs, they had to make sure that they didn’t—”
“Change back into human form,” he quietly ended her sentence. “They had to see that they stayed in animal shape even after death.” He seemed pale, but perhaps it was the chill in here. “The video that Cesare showed us, all the Arcadians in cages and unable to change back again…he said that was the doing of TABULA.”
“Trevini claims that a man called Apollonio supplied furs to my grandmother. Does that name mean anything to you?”
“Never heard it before.”
“He thinks this Apollonio may have been one of the members of TABULA himself. Or was at least in close contact with them. Could be that TABULA sold the skins of the Arcadians they’d abducted for their experiments to Costanza through Apollonio. Anyway, I guess she also got the serum from him.”
“But if it comes from TABULA…” Alessandro began. He stopped, then asked, “Do you think Tano got it from them as well?”
“Cesare hated TABULA,” she said doubtfully.
Alessandro gave a bitter laugh. “He was terrified of the organization. All the same, I wouldn’t put it past Tano to be making deals behind his father’s back.”
Rosa leaned against the ice-cold plastic containers. “Let’s assume that Tano really was secretly in touch with TABULA. Then he could have gotten the serum from them and passed some of it on to Cesare and maybe also to Michele. You said you thought it came from a dealer. But suppose, instead, he was the dealer himself. Suppose Tano sold the serum under the table to Arcadians like Michele, so that they’d be able to stop their own transformations—and other people’s.”
“It’s possible.”
“Did he ask you for money? For the serum that you took to the States with you?” Alessandro shook his head. “I just had to promise not to tell Cesare about them. Or my parents.”
“And did you do as he asked?”
“Sure. Tano was the first person to tell me about the transformations. I was actually grateful to him at the time.” He obviously wasn’t happy with the memory. “I really wish I could…wash myself clean of them all. Can you understand that? Tano, Cesare, my father…all the lies, all the things they did. I wish there were some way simply to eradicate it all.”
“I feel the same way. Florinda lied to me; even Zoe did. You and I have been used for other people’s purposes all along. And it never stops.”
He put his arms around her again. “If it gets to be too much…if we can’t take any more of it…we can get out of here. And then I won’t mind what becomes of all this in Sicily. None of it matters as much as you.”
His kiss warmed her, even in the chilly air of the freezer. They held each other close, she smelled his hair, his skin, and at that moment she’d have gone anywhere with him, even to the end of the world. Corny and sentimental, sure, but right now that was what she needed. The biggest, stickiest, sweetest helping of corny sentimentality since the invention of dessert. She wouldn’t have minded if it rained rose petals, or if Iole came out from behind the containers playing a violin. Plenty of time for indigestion tomorrow.
Only now did she realize that she was still holding the serum he had brought with him. Slowly, she raised the vial to face level, and as she paused for breath, she glanced at the syringes in the cupboard. His eyes followed hers, and then the corners of his mouth twitched.
She could feel her pulse beating faster in her throat. “Well, it must have its uses, right?”