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“No, they didn’t.”
“They did. It was in the national newspaper. They found the corpses of at least a thousand cats in those burned-up forests.”
I didn’t have words, but Giusy did.
“They’ll get theirs. You don’t fuck with the cats here.”
As Giusy promised, the food began to appear. No one asked if we had preferences or nut allergies or gluten-free diets. I loved it. The waiter brought platters of anything he wanted from inside the kitchen, eggplant prepared three different ways, stuffed cuttlefish, and anchovies fried in crispy bread crumbs. A busiate pasta with boar ragù and black truffles, spaghetti with black squid ink and toasted almonds.
By the second carafe of house wine Giusy revealed that sometimes she steals little things from guest rooms, never anything valuable, just items that would be annoying for their owner when they went missing: earring backs, a tube of concealer, once a diaphragm. She sort of blushed when she said it but she also looked proud of herself.
“Why are you telling me this? I’m a guest, aren’t I? Now I know what happened if my birth control goes missing.”
“I thought you’d appreciate the story.”
She was right. I did.
“My favorite was a fancy face lotion that claimed to be the fountain of youth in a bottle. It had real flakes of gold in it. Made my cheeks as soft as a baby’s ass.” She reached out a hand to stroke my cheek. “You have beautiful skin. What do you use?”
I blushed and admitted I never used anything. I usually forgot to even wash my face before bed. “It’s from my work. I used to run a steak house. I’m a chef and a butcher. The fat and lanolin from slicing up the meat ends up all over any piece of my exposed skin when I’m breaking it down. Butchers tend to have glowy skin. I once apprenticed under a ninety-year-old Brazilian who was as well-preserved as a Kardashian.”
A platter of what looked like a deconstructed cannoli, a pyramid of cannoli shells separated by thin layers of amaretto cream and smothered in a dark chocolate sauce, had barely graced our table when a new guest pushed his way through the beaded entryway. He had to duck as he entered and shift his body sideways because his torso was as wide as two men. The man didn’t just fill the doorway, he filled the entire room.
The waiter led him to a table in the corner on the opposite side of the room from Giusy’s criminal cousin.
“Now, that’s who you need to talk to.” Giusy nodded in the man’s direction.
“Huh? About what?”
“He’s in charge of the local police.”
Her words startled me. I glanced nervously over at him.
“Why would I need to talk to the police?”
“Non solcare la fronte. Stringerai il tuo buco del culo.” Don’t furrow your brow. You’ll clench your asshole. No one wants to walk around with a clenched asshole.
I’d had too much wine and it was scrambling my thoughts. But when Giusy looked at me her gaze was sharp, like something inside her brain had just decided to wake up, and I grasped that I was much, much drunker than my host. I was a woman alone in a strange country without a full grip on all my faculties. I cursed myself for always making such bad decisions, while Giusy kept talking.
“You go over there and talk to that man.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
When she spoke again, I realized Giusy knew much more about me and why I’d come to Sicily than she’d previously let on.
“Who else are you going to ask about your great-grandmother Serafina’s murder?”
SIX
SERAFINA
1913
I clung to Cosi like my life depended on it. The little boy, completely unaware of my terror, was delighted that I had waded waist-deep into the ocean with him. I was ashamed I didn’t know how to swim and knew it was ridiculous, dangerous even, to take my boy into the sea. But I’d been promising him this for a year. Promising myself too.
When I cupped my hand over my eyes to blot out the sun, I could make out Cettina on the beach playing with Santo. My second son, the one I named after my father, who had passed away suddenly from a tremor of the heart earlier in the year, was nearly two. Cetti raised Santo’s pudgy hand in a salute, followed by a floppy wave.
“I see the fish, Mamma,” Cosi said, and giggled, his mouth in my ear.
