The Demon Catchers of Milan (17 page)

We stepped out under the great arching glass roof.

My enemy dropped from above.

FIFTEEN

Enter Signora Negroponte

I
knew my demon as surely as if he were in my bones again. I felt him plummet toward us. I said, “It’s too late.”

“I know,” said Lucifero. He showed his white teeth in a smile. He took my arm as he, too, looked upward.

Then somehow I was several feet away from him, staring while he opened his hands as if to catch what was flying down. For a moment, I saw everything around us with vivid clarity: the bright heights of the Galleria, the dark evening sky between the arches, the dimpled marble floor spreading away from us, interrupted here and there with circular mosaics. A cluster of shoppers turned to look at us, one holding a bag with Gucci limned in gold on it. I saw a trio of girls in identical jackets, and an older, square woman in an olive-green sweater with a gold brooch standing perfectly still, facing us both.

Lucifero kept looking up, smiling as if he were greeting an old friend. The next moment, the force that I could feel but could not see this time had dropped into him. His smile folded up as if someone had crumpled it from the inside.

I was on my knees, puking, a puddle of chocolate inside a larger puddle of spit on the marble floor.

“Get up, get up,” said a rasping voice. “You can’t help him this way.”

A strong hand yanked me to my feet. I stood facing the woman in the olive sweater.

“Do you know what’s happening?” she asked, glaring fiercely at me.

I knew that she knew even before I started to lie. She shook my shoulder.

“Don’t waste time pretending,” she snapped. “You do know, don’t you? Did you want this? Do you want to save him?”

I had no idea.

“I can hold him for a very short time. Very short. You are a Della Torre?”

I nodded.

“Good. Call them.
Now
. Tell them.”

I gaped. How did she know who I was?

She slapped my face.

“Call!” she said.

I stared at her. “I don’t have a cell phone!” I cried. She snorted and pulled out her own, thrusting it in my face, Emilio’s name blinking up at me from the screen. Her hand had many rings on it. I pressed the
CALL
button.

“Pronto. Chi parla?”
said Emilio’s calm voice on the other end of the airwaves.

“It’s Mia. Emilio. The Galleria,” I panted. “Lucifero. She said to come get you.”

“What? Who?”

“Lucifero,” I cried.

“Mia, calm down,” he told me sternly. “Now, is someone in trouble?”

“Yes. He, he’s got him. He’s got. I mean, he’s got Lucifero.”

“Your ‘he’? I’m in public.”

“Yes!”

“Got it. Now, you are where? In the Galleria?”

“Yes. There’s a woman, she says she can hold him for a short time.”

“She
what
? What does she look like?”

“Uh, older.” I tried to think. “Olive-green sweater. Square face …”

“I think I know. Wait with her. We’re coming.”

He hung up and an eternity began. Every heartbeat seemed to take an hour to arrive. The woman in the olive-green sweater stood near Lucifero, staring straight at him as he held terribly still, her purse on the ground beside her. I couldn’t see her hands, but she was obviously moving them, holding them low and close to her body. Lucifero’s face was changing shape as if fingers were pushing and pulling it from the inside. I knew the dreadful light that looked out of his eyes. He had wrapped his arms around himself, his teeth chattering, his eyes roving.

People were gathering around us. I started to hear a buzz of
questions—“Is he all right?”—“What do you think?”—“It has to be epilepsy. He’s going to fall down.”

He opened his arms and began screaming. Everyone backed up except for the woman in the olive sweater. And me.

Then I felt a wave of power burst away from Lucifero, and the woman rocked on her heels. Everyone around us began to back up in a hurry. She snatched up her purse, turned, grabbed me, and pulled me with her into the crowd. By now the noise had attracted three police officers. They looked like superheroes in formal dress, with their capes and white gloves. Near them, in a strange, still space of his own, a Catholic priest stood in his narrow, black robe and white collar.

“It’s not normal,” said a woman near us.

Her friend snorted. “Well, no, he’s crazy. Not normal.”

“No, I mean …”

I could see that many people were looking toward the priest, even while holding their Gucci shopping bags. Part of me wanted to yell,
This is the twenty-first century! We don’t have demons!

Which, of course, I, more than most people, knew wasn’t true.

The police didn’t even try to interfere when the priest came forward, removing the cross from around his neck. He walked straight up to Lucifero and pressed the cross to his forehead. I realized he was speaking Latin. Lucifero went on screaming, but his voice took a different, even more urgent tone.

That was where Emilio, Giuliano, Francesco, and Francesca found us. Nonno took me by the shoulder.

“There are many questions I will need to ask you, but not now. What happened?”

“We—we stood in the Galleria, and he came down from the roof, and Lucifero looked like he wanted him to come down. He held out his arms, he was smiling.…”

I heard a snort each from Emilio and Francesco. Giuliano just blinked. He shook his head.

“Idiota,”
he said. “And now, him,” he added, looking at the priest. “Difficult,” he said after another moment. He turned to all of us, and I understood his look as well as any of the others: do nothing foolish. It came to me clearly how much they stood to lose by practicing the family arts in public, in front of what looked to be a hundred people, and in front of a priest. But at the same time, I saw Lucifero, twisting in agony, screaming and spitting.

I wanted so badly to hate him. I could remember the smile on his face as he looked up. That wasn’t the face I saw now.

We kept stepping back, using the fading crowd as shelter, until there were too few people around us and Giuliano said, “Francesco, I need you to stay and see what happens. Try that café there, maybe—sit, watch.”

Francesco nodded and turned away as the rest of us headed for the great open arch.

“Some people were suggesting that they take him into the Duomo,” said Francesca.

“Madness,” said Emilio.

“I hope they won’t be that stupid,” Giuliano said. “With Father Agostino there, I don’t think they will.”

I could hear voices around us, various shoppers, already talking as if nothing had happened.

I asked in a small voice, “Will this be on the news tomorrow?”

The others looked at me and blinked.

Finally Giuliano said, “I doubt it. People don’t remember what they don’t understand, it seems. There might be something about a madman in the Galleria. In any case—Emilio, you’ll call Marco and make sure? There you are,” he added to someone standing in front of us—the woman in the olive sweater.

She looked at me.

“You didn’t move fast enough,” she said to me. “The old crow and the police were there too quick.”

I felt angry color rising in my cheeks.

“I called as fast as I could!”

She shrugged. “It still wasn’t fast enough,” she pointed out. “He would have been better off in your family’s hands.”

“What will happen to him now?” I asked.

“If he’s lucky, they’ll entrust him to the priest and not put him in jail. If we are all very unlucky, he will be put in jail. You were lucky,” she said, looking at me again. “You chose someone weak. That’s an uncommon thing for a Della Torre to do, you know. I am right, am I not—you are the young American cousin who must not step out into the street?”

“Uh, yes.”

We had reached the car. All my cousins were looking at me. I was in big trouble.

“Yes, we must talk about that,” said Giuliano in a grave voice. He turned to the woman. “But not now.”

Great, so I could writhe in terror awhile longer.

“In the meantime,” he added, “may I introduce to you Signora Marcella Negroponte.
La mia cugina di quarto grado
, Mia Dellatorri.”

I couldn’t quite follow the Italian for how we were related, but nobody else seemed confused.

“So pleased. We were supposed to meet this evening, anyway, you know,” said Signora Negroponte, and we shook hands as if she had never slapped me across the face. I wondered if Giuliano had said Mia Dellatorri or Mia Della Torre. I wanted to know: it mattered to me, now, whether he used the Old World name, or the one that had been misspelled in America. I wanted the old name.

I couldn’t believe it wasn’t time for supper when we got back. My blissful evening in the sheltered café had seemed so short, my terrifying evening in the open Galleria so long. Signora Negroponte crowded into Emilio’s Audi with Giuliano, Emilio, Francesca, and me. I felt the tears start in my eyes, and my hands shook as we slid smoothly back over the streets. I couldn’t stop shaking, but neither Nonno nor Francesca reached out to comfort me.

At the shop, two glasses stood on the table, one full, one empty to the dregs. The bottle of wine had aired for quite a long time now. Emilio brought down three more glasses as Giuliano said, “Let’s try it, anyway,” and poured for all of us.
I helped drag in the office chairs. We sat down around the desk.

“Now.” Giuliano looked at me. “Explain.”

He saw me glance at Signora Negroponte and added, “Anything you have to say, she ought to hear also.”

I just sat there with my mouth open. I had no idea what to say. There were so many reasons for why I had done what I’d done, and all of them seemed idiotic right then.

Giuliano slammed his hand down on the table and roared, “Explain!” We all shook. “Explain what you were doing out, alone, with a man who means us only harm! Explain!
Were you betraying the family?
”

That brought my voice back to me.

“No!” I cried. “No! I would never betray you! Never!”

I could feel the tears in my eyes again. I was not going to cry.

“I’ve been stuck in this house! I never get to do anything on my own! He was different, you didn’t see him.… He was …” I looked for a good word to describe what he’d been like. “He was nice,” I finished lamely.

They were all staring at me.

“You got mad at me, that one day when I didn’t like the crazy lady, and he came in, and he gave me coffee.…”

My voice dwindled away. I sounded like the fool I was.

“He said even people outside of Milan know you, know your work. That you are very great.”

I looked into Giuliano’s eyes. They stayed hard.

“He asked did I know about a brother named Martino, who
died thirteen years after the war? Did I know about a cousin named Roberto?”

Giuliano’s nostrils flared. I had no idea why I was telling him this stuff. It didn’t make much sense, and it certainly didn’t make my case for me.

“He said you were not perfect. But the thing was,” I added quickly as he opened his mouth to speak, “the thing was, he was different. I wanted to know what was going on. I wanted to know who he was, what his plans were. So he asked me out to coffee and I said yes. I don’t know why!”

My face was in my hands, and my hands were soaking wet. I sat up and looked at them, unable to figure out why they were wet.

“I don’t know why. I’m sorry, I don’t know why.”

In Francesca’s eyes, there was a kind of painful understanding; in Signora Negroponte’s, a hard look I couldn’t read; in Emilio’s, great sadness; in Giuliano’s, judgment.

But I did know why I did it. I didn’t really want to explain to them about the way he looked, the way I felt sitting across the table from him. So I clung to the other reason.

“I wanted to do something for the family. I sit inside, and I learn how to speak your language, and I study history, and I try to talk to the people who are already in my room—” Here Giuliano gave a start, and I wondered how I’d been finally able to tell him about them at last. Was it because everything else was coming out? “And nobody tells me anything, and I don’t get to do anything. It isn’t even safe for me to step outside, you
can’t imagine what it feels like—you can’t imagine. You say you can, but you can’t.”

“I think I might be able to,” said Giuliano in an even voice, if not a kind one, and I got a glimpse, as if I were looking over his shoulder and down the years, of soldiers marching past in the street.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and this time I knew that the drops falling on my hands were tears. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” said Francesca suddenly. “I’m furious. Not at you, Mia. Tell me,” she asked gently, “is this the first time anyone’s asked you out?”

All the others looked at her. It was plain that nobody else had thought to ask this.

“No. Kind of. Well, yes.”

“Whose fault is all this, really?” she said, looking first at her grandfather and then at her brother. “Not hers, perhaps.”

“Hmm, yes,” said Signora Negroponte at last. “Am I to understand that you have not taught her?”

“We can’t,” Emilio put in quickly. “You saw why, today. What came upon Lucifero has come upon her before. We can’t lose to that. We can’t let it know what we know. It has already learned too much, from others—” He stopped.

“I am not saying,” said Signora Negroponte, clearly trying to avoid a breach in the family by saying what she felt Francesca must wish to say, “that what Mia did today was not foolish in the extreme. It was.” She awarded me a severe look, but softened it as she added, “But her ignorance, that is more dangerous, isn’t
it? At every step of the rather confused narrative we have just had, ignorance has been the cause. Yes?”

Giuliano got up and paced to the window, one hand tapping against his trouser leg. I saw his face reflected in the glass above the flickering candles, frowning.

Francesca stood up and went to her grandfather, pausing before she touched his shoulder, her face no longer closed with anger but open, beseeching: “Nonno. Surely there are some things her demon already knows—from—” She stopped as Emilio had, her face convulsed with sorrow, and then she went on, “Could she at least learn those?”