Broad flights of steps on all four sides led down to the spacious pool. It was about nine feet deep in the middle. The water must have been drained away long ago; it didn’t even smell damp anymore.
Trevini’s wheelchair lay, toppled over, in the dry pool. The avvocato himself was crouching several feet away from it at the foot of one of the flights of steps. He must have crawled over to it on his belly. Now he was sitting there, exhausted, half propped on the bottom step, his useless legs twisted. His elegant suit was crumpled, his sparse gray hair drenched with sweat.
Rosa’s eyes narrowed as she looked at the contessa again. “Explain.”
Di Santis didn’t move a muscle. “It’s in your own interests.”
Rosa’s hand slipped into her bag. Her fingers closed around the handle of the staple gun.
“You came to ask him questions,” said di Santis. “This could be your last chance.”
At the bottom of the swimming pool, the old man laboriously raised his head. “Rosa…this is lunacy…”
“What’s going on?” she hissed at the contessa. “Who are you? And what are you up to?”
The young attorney took a deep breath. “I’d hoped to have more time. I would have liked to learn even more from him.”
“He trusted you.”
“It was more difficult than I’d expected. He is a stubborn old man, but after a while he warmed to me. The time came when he couldn’t wait to pour his heart out to me day after day.”
Down in the pool below, Trevini moved. “She knows everything, Rosa. About your family, about Costanza…Kill her, before she sells her knowledge to the enemies of the Alcantaras.”
“Looks like you did that already, Trevini,” Rosa replied coldly.
“Once again,” the contessa told Rosa, “I am not your enemy.”
The handle of the staple gun was slowly warming up in Rosa’s hand. “Those men out there in the lobby—”
“Are being well paid for preferring me to their former employer.”
“She’s out of her mind!” Trevini screamed.
Rosa looked at the contessa. “I don’t think so.”
“Think of it as a kind of job application,” said di Santis, in the composed way that Rosa both disliked and admired. “When all this is over, you’re going to need a new legal adviser, Signorina Alcantara. Someone in a position to carry on with the avvocato’s business in a way that suits you.”
“So that’s what you’re after?” asked Rosa, astonished. “You want to succeed him as legal adviser?”
Di Santis shook her head, amused. “First and foremost it’s a case of reparations. Revenge would be a crude way to put it.”
“Revenge for what?”
“My family was once a highly respected Cosa Nostra clan. Landed property, factories, all kinds of business firms—the di Santis clan had more than enough of all that. My grandfather was one of the most powerful capi in the west of the island. Until he made the mistake of quarreling with the Corleonese bosses.”
Rosa knew about that. The capos from the small town of Corleone had waged bloody war in the eighties against anyone who disputed their claim to dominance of the Sicilian Mafia. Massacres and bombs had assassinated whole families. For years no one could do anything against the will of the Corleonese, and it was generally known that the di Santis family had been among those on their hit list. Only the contessa and a handful of her relations had survived. Since then, it was said, the remaining members of the clan had retired from the Mafia business.
“For years no one knew for sure who had handed my family over to them.” Cristina di Santis walked over to the edge of the top step. For the first time her smooth, serene facial expression changed. The glance she cast at the helpless Trevini was one of deep contempt. “The avvocato has worked for your clan for decades, Signorina Alcantara, and very conscientiously, too. That didn’t stop him from running his own businesses on the side, and during the course of it, unfortunately, my father and brother got in his way. He started the rumor that my family was secretly scheming against the Corleone Mafia: He forged documents, he bribed two state prosecutors—and from then on it all gathered speed. He had only to lean back and wait until the murderers from Corleone had wiped out a large part of our family at a wedding party. Men, women, almost a dozen children. I was a small child at the time; I’d been left at home with my nursemaid, that’s the only reason