she considered leaving it at that, throwing away both cell phones, and never giving another thought to the second video.
But then she put the first phone down and took the second in both hands, as if she had to hold it tight to keep it from jumping out of her fingers. Its password, too, was written on the casing in blue felt pen.
Rosa had expected a suggestive background image, something to suit Michele the club owner, wild nights and every kind of excess. Instead, up came a picture of the cartoon cat Tom, holding Jerry in one hand and a knife in the other.
This phone, too, contained only one file. The thumbnail image in the videos folder was dark and blurred; nothing could be made out on it.
Rosa’s thumb hovered over the ok key.
Her hand wasn’t trembling anymore. Instead she felt paralyzed. Incapable of completing that last small movement.
She had thought about what she would see. She had imagined pictures of her own, of herself and Tano. His short dark hair. His smiling eyes behind the narrow frames of his glasses.
She remembered her first meeting with him in Sicily, at Baron Massimo Carnevare’s funeral. A little later, among lines of silent tombs, Alessandro had given her the tiny volume of Aesop’s Fables. After that she had met Tano twice more. Once on Isola Luna, the little volcanic island off the north coast of Sicily. And finally, for the last time, when he and his gang of bikers had encircled Rosa in the ruins of an ancient amphitheater and he was planning to tear her to pieces in his animal form as a powerful tiger. She had witnessed his transformation, and then his death. As if in slow motion, she saw the bullet shattering his face in her mind’s eye.
Rosa closed her eyelids, felt the key under her thumb. Had to summon all her strength to press down on it slowly, very slowly.
There was a crackle in the speaker of the cell phone. The display went dark, then light again. Reddish.
She was looking at her own face.
Looking into her own eyes, open wide and fully awake.
“I need you,” she whispered over the phone. “I want to be with you.”
She hated her voice, choked as it was with tears. Even hated herself for calling him.
“I’m going to get into my car,” she said quietly, “and come to you.”
“No, you’re not.” Alessandro’s voice took on that undertone with which he could nip any contradiction in the bud. The capo tone that he had inherited from his father. “You’re not driving anywhere in that state. I’ll be right there with you. An hour and a half, maybe I can make it sooner. I’m on my way.” She could hear his footsteps in the stone corridors of Castello Carnevare, fast and agitated. His haste gave him away. The calm determination in his voice was only for show.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I…I don’t want to be alone right now.”
Her lips touched the receiver of the phone. It was an old-fashioned one, with a curved receiver on a spiral cord.
“I’m leaving now,” she heard Alessandro say, not much later, and the engine of his Ferrari promptly roared.
“That’s nice of you.”
“I ought to have been there when you looked at the thing.”
He must have been burning with questions, but he held them back. She imagined his grim expression. This was going to be difficult for him, too, as she knew. But she wanted him to see it for himself, and then tell her that she wasn’t going out of her mind.
“Are you sure it’s genuine?” he asked a little later. There was a slight echo to his voice. He had switched on the hands-free headset in the car.
“What else would it be? Toy Story?”
“I mean, because Trevini sent it.”
“He couldn’t have faked this. Not even Trevini.”
“He only sent it to hurt you.” Alessandro didn’t try to conceal his fury with the attorney.
“Could be. But if I hadn’t seen it…”
“You’d be feeling better right now.”
“I can’t explain to you over the phone.”
The car engine hummed monotonously in the background. In her mind, she saw the Ferrari racing along lonely roads, past bleak, dark hills. “I don’t know if I should really look at it,” he said. “It’s too—”
“Intimate?” she snapped. “What’s on that video is about as intimate as a bolt fired into an animal’s head in a slaughterhouse.”
Once again he didn’t reply, probably because he guessed that whatever he said would be the wrong thing. She was sorry,