The Demon Catchers of Milan (12 page)

“
Basta
,
basta
, I didn’t mean it,” he said, waving his hands to placate her.

I wondered why anybody with a glamorous job like hers would want to bother doing her family’s work as well. I knew I wanted to do it, though I wasn’t sure why exactly, but I couldn’t see why Anna Maria felt so passionately about it. It didn’t seem quite the profession for somebody who had to keep their nails perfect, not to mention their hair and skin and all that. But then my thoughts drifted back to the spirit, the woman who had come so far. Had she made the painful journey back here for nothing? What would happen to her now? Were there thousands like her, their rage and grief unnassuaged? Did each body I had seen lying on that stretch
of earth house an angry spirit? What about all the other holocausts?

I thought about these things all the way home, too tired to try to ask them out loud. We took a long time stumbling home. Sometimes I could hear whispers above me in the alleyways and streets, but I was too tired to care how vulnerable I might be.

I think Giuliano steered me to the door of my room; I remember opening it and falling into bed. Only as I slid into sleep did I realize that we had never learned the spirit’s name.

TEN

How Little We Know

I
didn’t want to get out of bed the next morning. Granted, half my time in Milan, I didn’t want to get out of bed; sometimes I still woke up with my feet kicking together. This morning, I felt like I had a legitimate excuse.

“I’ve only had three hours of sleep,” I complained to Nonna Laura as she opened the shutters in my room with fierce, bearish bustle.

“You can nap later,” she replied. “You need to get up, eat something, feel the sun on you. It’s very important after a night like that. Everyone else is already up and out.”

I groaned, pushed my way out of the covers, and squinted at the window. “There is no sun,” I complained.

Laura put her hands on her hips and glared at me.

“Call on the brave blood of your ancestors, stop whining, and get out of bed, Mia,” she said shortly, and walked out of the room. I heard her rattling pots in the kitchen like an angry poltergeist.

I waited for Pompous and Gravel to agree with her, but they weren’t around. As I dressed, I grumbled to myself. Laura didn’t get it. She hadn’t looked out over the plain of frozen bodies. She hadn’t been there, listening to that woman. I sat down on the bed for a minute, thinking about how someone could really make someone else walk into a gas chamber and die there.

Neither of us said anything about it when I came into the kitchen a few minutes later, more or less washed and dressed. When I looked at Laura, I thought about how she must have lived through that war as a child, she must have heard about the boxcars, known about the Jews, maybe even had friends who were taken away. Maybe she did have some idea.

I watched the frown lines on her seamed face. My head still hurt, like the time I snuck two whole beers at a Fourth of July picnic when I was twelve. She set coffee, pastries, soft cheese, olives, honey, jam, and a sliced pear in front of me. I’d forgotten that I’d missed dinner, along with everyone else who had gone to Signora Galeazzo’s house.

“Thank you so much,” I said, right at the same time that my stomach spoke for itself, and we both laughed. “Thank you so much” in Italian is
grazie mille
, “a thousand thanks,” a courtly expression among many courtly expressions in my new language. I was getting used to sounding (at least to myself) like
a Shakespearean actor whenever we went to the grocery store. I was starting to like it. She nodded shortly. By now I knew her well enough to know she felt the matter was settled.

She sat down across from me with the last of her own coffee and hot milk in her bowl.

“Where is everyone?” I asked. “Did Emilio make it to work?”

“He always makes a point of going in after an exorcism, if it’s a weekday, obviously. I think that’s too much, myself, and so does Giuliano, but Emilio is very like his father.”

“Can I ask—” I began. “I don’t want to—”

“You can ask about Emilio’s father, Mia.”

“Thank you, Nonna. What was he like?”

She pushed her bowl around in a small circle, watching the coffee swirl, like a sibyl who could see the past in a bowl of water.

“Luciano was—he was one of those children a mother longs for and yet is afraid to give birth to, one of the kissed children—kissed by the Virgin. He was a sweet, easy baby, and he grew up into a man who did everything well.”

I watched her face soften and thought I knew what she meant. I had a sister like that, one of the kissed children. Yes, that’s exactly what Gina was.

“But he took our duties, our family duties, very seriously. He pushed too hard.”

She looked at me for a while then, and I had the usual, frustrating sensation that like every other Della Torre, she was waiting for me to hear what she
hadn’t
said. I took a wild guess.

“I will try not to push too hard, Nonna,” I said.

She nodded, approving, and everything was all right, if just for a moment. It seemed to me that I’d lifted part of a burden off her shoulders, though I couldn’t quite see how; I only knew it had to do with the sadness in her eyes when she spoke of her son. Maybe that’s why I remember the rest of the day as full of sunlight, even though it was dank and overcast outside. Just one day of sunlight.

Giuliano had taken to marking a spot in my books he thought I should reach, but in so casual a way that I didn’t resent it, and that day I got even farther, easily. When I shut the last book, I slipped down to the shop, where I found Giuliano sweeping the floor. I took the broom from him and picked up where he had left off.

“It’s good to see you up after last night,” he said. “How are you doing? How did you find it?”

I paused, leaning on the broom.

“Amazing,” I said, meeting his eyes. “Scary, but … amazing.”

I thought maybe he looked pleased; it was hard to tell.

“Ah,” he said. “Well.”

“I have a lot of questions,” I ventured.

He took a seat at the desk. “Ask them,” he said, “and I will see which ones I can answer.”

“Well,” I began, “are demons really just angry ghosts? Is the demon that attacked me a spirit who is just really angry about something?”

Giuliano gave me the same measuring look Emilio had
when I had asked him questions on the way to the Galeazzo house. It looked to me like both of them had to think how much information they wanted to give me, just as they had considered every answer to my parents and sister and me back in Center Plains.

Finally he replied, “When we use the word
demon
in this family, we are generally referring to any spirit or emanation that takes over bodies. There are so many kinds, Mia. Some are just sad or angry ghosts of human beings—and sometimes these are not just one spirit, but more than one, twined together by the pain of the events that connected them.

“Other demons arise out of human emotions. Some areas of Italy and Crete, for example, have trouble with demons that arise out of vendettas: nurse that kind of anger for a couple of centuries, and you get trouble. Some demons, we don’t know where they come from at all. Living in our modern cities, we forget there’s a whole world out there, full of beings we don’t understand, both corporeal and incorporeal. How many people really understand a bear or a wolf? You know that wolves have come back to our forests here in Italy? Or perhaps never left? So, we guess there also are other creatures, beings we can hardly imagine or understand.

“The Della Torres deal mostly with the kind of demons that arise from human beings in Milan. We are of this city. Sometimes we get called into cases elsewhere, but not very often.” He frowned for a moment. “But in answer to your question, there are many kinds, and we don’t know even close to everything about them.”

“It seems bizarre to me that we can’t know everything. Haven’t Della Torres been studying these things for centuries?”

“Over a millennium, actually.” He added dryly, “Some subjects take more time than others—to know them completely.”

Was he mocking me, I wondered. His voice changed, and he went on, “In my experience, every possession is a voyage into the unknown. We have our notes, we have our rituals, but what we find when we arrive face-to-face with a demon, whether purely evil or simply angry, may not be in any notebook or aided by any chant. It may be something we have never faced before.”

Francesco had said something like that, though less poetically. My thoughts returned again to the woman who had spoken through Signora Galeazzo’s throat.

“But a lot of them, they’re not just evil—instead, they need our help?” I asked.

Giuliano looked at me with a light in his eyes I hadn’t seen before. He smiled at me.

“You might be very good at this,” he said.

I looked down. “Thank you,” I said, even though what I really wanted to say was
I think I’ve been waiting to hear that my whole life
. I finished sweeping the corners, putting extra work into them, then put the broom away and sat down.

“That woman, that spirit, last night,” I asked Giuliano, “is she gone, not just gone from Signora Galeazzo? Or is she like my demon? Will she come back?”

“She’s gone.”

“I thought so,” I said. “It felt like it. But I couldn’t be sure.”

“Well, we’re never sure, not completely,” he replied calmly.
“Our ancestors were wrong too many times for us to be completely sure, ever. But yes, I am as sure as I can be that she is gone.”

“Where did she go?”

He knit his eyebrows together like my grandfather used to. “Full of questions this afternoon.”

I smiled at him.

“That one,” he went on, “I don’t know the answer to. I don’t know if anyone truly does. We know they go on a journey, the same one you and I will take, one day. Where do you think it goes?”

He looked thoughtfully into my eyes.

“I don’t know,” I faltered. “Heaven, maybe. But I don’t feel sure about that.”

He smiled.

“Enough. We had a long night, we deserve a moment of rest from these thoughts. Would you like a coffee?”

He went up and got us coffees from Nonna Laura, and we sat over our cups for the rest of the afternoon, greeting Sandro the Sicilian, and Beppo from up the street, and Signora Strachetti from the butcher’s, as well as an actual legitimate customer who just wanted candles, one of two or three I’d seen since my arrival. Giuliano gestured graciously at the shelves, explaining that these were only display models, and he would be happy to send his assistant (me) for fresh ones. He did have to come back and show me the correct boxes to take ordinary candles from; I stored up more questions to ask him later.

All the neighbors drank coffee with us, until it got close to wine-pouring time, at which point we all switched over. Emilio showed up six minutes after, of course, looking as fresh as if he’d had a full night’s sleep, and stayed for dinner.

After we ate, I came back down to the shop. For a second, I thought it was empty, but then I saw Emilio sitting at the table, a glass of wine and a book in front of him.

Something made me stay where I was in the dark office. He didn’t seem to have heard me.

He turned a page, reading on, self-contained in the small pool of light from the lamp and a couple of candles.

He took a sip of wine and stared off into the distance, obviously thinking about what he’d just read, completely lost in his thoughts. No, people say that, they say “lost in his thoughts,” but really, he looked
found
in his thoughts.

He didn’t glow like Apollo. He looked a lot more like his grandfather, the family features exposed now: I could see the generous Della Torre mouth, the high cheekbones, the far-seeing eyes with their amused expression. He looked both older, because he did not look like a god, and younger, because he sat still, relaxed, open.

What would it be like to lose my dad, as he had? And not just lose him, but lose him to the very forces my family struggled with? He had been through so much, yet it didn’t really seem to have touched him, as far as I could tell.

I noticed something else. I didn’t feel all melty looking at him this way. He looked like a regular cousin, somebody I
could be friends with; he looked almost ordinary, an unusual thing for a Della Torre, I thought.

I looked at him so long that I thought he must surely feel my gaze, first because he was a demon catcher and second because he was human. But he did not, and it frightened me to see him so vulnerable.

I wanted to protect him. I wanted to leave him this moment of peace. Besides, I admitted to myself, I did not want to watch him close up, to lose this image of him as a different man entirely, at peace with himself and the world.

I slipped away upstairs.

ELEVEN

In Which I Meet More Gorgeous Italian Men

I
f I’d still been in the States, I would’ve noticed the way the last two weeks of October slipped away after Signora Galeazzo’s exorcism, because Gina and I would have gone to get pumpkins with Mom, and we would both be planning our costumes and hoping to get invited to parties. Then Halloween would have come and gone, and dorky-looking cartoon turkeys and Pilgrims would have started to appear in shop windows.

In Milan, the air got colder, and the fall fashion shows finished up. People brought out elegant, sleek winter coats and exceedingly tasteful scarves.

Hi, Gina,

I never said thank-you for that e-mail. Tell Mom thanks
for the package, and thank Dad for remembering that Almond Roca is my favorite. I let everybody try a piece last night, and for once nobody said, “Oh, but blah blah blah from the Abruzzi is so much better,” so I think it was a hit.

It was really hard to Skype with you guys the other day. Just the sound of everybody in the background made me so homesick. I am psyched that Luke the Duke came over, though! “Not that into me.” Whatever! I’m glad he’s coming over for Thanksgiving. I can’t believe it’s almost that time of year. Have I really been here that long? It seems longer, and shorter, at the same time.