The Demon Catchers of Milan (6 page)

“Still a little fiend-ridden,” he said as calmly as a doctor, and I shivered. “Plus some jet lag. You’ll need a few days to get over that. The rest, just be patient. It takes a while. I’ve brought you some books,” he added, and they spilled out of his satchel onto the desk. “Mostly history, in Italian and English, and a guidebook or two so you can get to know the city. Grandfather wants you to read all you can, and we will start you on other studies soon. But for now, get through these.”

I stared at the pile. Some were brand-new, with shining covers in red and yellow and orange, and others were old and battered, bound in leather or cloth and lettered in gold.

“Okay,” I said.

“The history is important,” he said, watching me.

“Okay,” I repeated.

He gave me an impatient look.

“In any case,” he went on, “we will have to wait some time
before we can let you out of the house on your own. For now you can go around with us. We need to determine the best ways of keeping you safe, and you must rest and recover also. Plus you must get to know the city. So this will help you pass the time.”

I wondered how long I would be stuck in the house. Maybe they had a TV. They had to have a TV, right?

“Sure,” I said. “Cool. But, um, is there anything else to do around the house? I mean …”

This time he glared at me. He seemed to have a number of things he wanted to say, but he didn’t say any of them. Instead he said, “Is that what you’re wearing to dinner?”

I looked down at my jeans and T-shirt, totally at a loss.

“What’s wrong with them?” I asked.

“Well, we’re going out,” he answered as if a whole bunch of things should have been obvious that weren’t.

“We’re going out?”

“Nobody told you? Of course we are. We’re celebrating the return of our cousin.”

The thought of more family to meet, after the hazy introductions last night, and of having to speak Italian with strangers, made me want to stick my head in a bucket.

“Which cousin?” I asked, trying not to sound exhausted.

Emilio blinked. Then he burst out laughing.

“You!” he said.

My turn to blink. I felt so dumb.

“So we will be going out at 7:30,” he said, still chuckling, and patted me on the shoulder, “and in Milan, we dress up to
go out, especially to a nice place. So, a skirt and blouse, or a dress, and some good shoes. If you need to bathe, the towels are—oh, I see, my sister left you one.”

At home, my bedtime was ten. My stomach was already growling, partly because it was confused and partly because it was used to dinner at six. When Emilio left me, saying that I could get in some reading before dinner, I sat down on the bed again and stared at nothing.

Emilio knocked again, then stuck his head back in.

“Grandfather’s on the computer right now, but tomorrow I’ll get you a password and everything, so you can e-mail home. We should be able to get an Internet phone service set up, too, Skype probably. It might take a little longer.”

I tried to picture Giuliano in front of a computer. He belonged in the old candle shop in the flickering light, quiet, sturdy and, above all, old school. I tried to picture him Googling demons. It didn’t work.

I took a shower (
C
is for
calda!)
, then tried to figure out which of my clothes would make me blend in the most. I laid out skirts and shirts, and my one dress, running back and forth into the hall to look in the full-length mirror. Someone was carrying on a conversation, and I found myself trying to catch their words as I scrubbed at a spot on my one good pair of dress shoes. I couldn’t tell if they were in the apartment behind us, although sometimes they sounded like they were coming from the bookshelf, sometimes by the window.

A woman spoke most of the time. She sounded pretty
uptight and pompous. Someone else answered her in a gravelly male voice that made me feel cold. It sounded almost familiar. I listened hard over the sound of my heart pounding in my ears. I reminded myself that the Della Torres had said the house was well guarded from the demon. No, I decided at last, it wasn’t the demon’s voice, but it did sound an awful lot like him. Trying to make out their words, I leaned closer to the wall.

“She shouldn’t wear that yellow shirt,” said the woman. “It’s so bright, yes, but with her skin it makes her look like a jaundice patient. I hope she tries the dark blue.”

There was a yellow shirt lying among the choices on the bed, and a dark blue one, too. Could they see me? Where were they? I spent the next ten minutes investigating the wall to see if there were any peepholes, like in some horrible gas station bathroom on the highway. There weren’t. As an experiment, I picked up the blue shirt.

“Yes, and that simple skirt, the one without the frills—very tidy. I really prefer more lace, and the whole business of raising the hem above the ankles is quite tawdry, but it will do.”

“I like the white skirt,” said the gravelly voice.

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’ve never worn a stitch of clothing in your whole life, so you can have no opinion.”

The one with the gravelly voice wandered around naked? Who were these people?

“I’ve been around you long enough to have opinions,” answered Gravel Voice, which was just about what I was thinking. Pompous Voice ignored this.

I smoothed out the skirt she liked, which I had never worn with the dark blue blouse. I couldn’t see how they would work together, but somehow her advice seemed worth listening to.

“Now, for shoes, are those all she has? Oh, dear. They might do in America, poor thing, but she is in Milan now. She must talk to them about shoes. For tonight, let’s just pray to the Heavenly Queen that no one will look down. And jewelry: let’s see. That plain gold chain, and the small cross. Nothing else for a girl so young.”

With this strange help, I chose my outfit, but I carried all the clothes to the bathroom to change, just in case they could see me. When I stepped in front of the hall mirror again, I was surprised to see how nice I looked. So was Emilio, I’m afraid, when he came upstairs from the shop.

“Ready? Oh, you are. Very nice.”

I saw him glance down at my shoes and start to shrug. I wondered if he could tell I had had help. As I followed him downstairs into the candle shop, a thought came forward. The voices hadn’t been from an apartment behind me. They had been in the room. Of course.

SIX

La Famiglia

T
he tiny shop was crowded, and everyone seemed to feel they had been introduced last night, when they came to the airport, so nobody gave me their name when they said hello. As we passed into the street, I tried to get them all straight: Giuliano and his wife, Laura, and Emilio; then a woman a little older than Emilio, with sleek, dark brown hair drawn up into an elegant chignon. She talked so familiarly to Emilio that I thought, with glum shock, that she must be his curlfrond/girlfriend, Alba—until the tall, dignified, African-looking man standing next to her kissed her on the cheek and took her arm in his as we started to walk away.

I caught up with Emilio and whispered, “I know I met all these people last night, but …”

He smiled.

“My sister,” he said in a low voice, jerking his head toward the woman with the chignon. “Francesca.”

“A model? She’s so cool-looking.”

“A model?” He seemed to think the question was hilarious. “No. A lawyer. The first woman in her firm. Do not tell her she looks like a model; she won’t like that. The man walking with her is Égide.”

I tried out the name in my mind, the way Emilio pronounced it:
Eh-gheed
, with a very soft
G
sound; it seemed kind of romantic. Later I learned that it was a French word for
shield
.

He paused.

“Our grandparents weren’t very happy about him when he appeared,” said Emilio. “We have some friends who still don’t approve. But my sister doesn’t care. And she always gets her way.”

“My sister always gets her way, too,” I told him.

“She looks like the type. It’s impressive, but irritating, isn’t it?”

“Yes!”

“But, Égide. A good man: Francesca doesn’t choose any other kind. We had a good father.” He paused and then added, “And a mother more than wise enough to pick him.”

The way his voice softened and warmed made me want to ask him about his parents, but I didn’t want to upset him. I could see there was a story there, and somehow, even before Emilio mentioned them, I had known I wouldn’t be meeting them tonight.

Behind Francesca and Égide was a gawky guy with a huge nose and frizzy curls, whom I recognized as the driver from the night before. He was walking with a girl who was obviously his sister—a fascinating example of how the same features can be goofy or gorgeous, since on her the huge nose looked aristocratic, and the same gene that made him skinny made her slender and graceful. I really wanted to talk to her, since she looked almost my own age, but she obviously didn’t want to be here, and ignored her brother and everyone else while texting rapidly on her phone, her perfect nails flashing.

“Anna Maria is the model,” Emilio added, pointing a thumb at the girl on the phone. “She’s only three years older than you, you know. That’s her brother, Francesco, next to her.”

Giuliano followed them, deep in conversation with a younger copy of himself—a man with dark hair starting to go gray, but just as sturdy and energetic. Beside this Giuliano-copy was a slender, big-nosed woman, who also whipped out her cell phone the moment we began walking.

“Those people walking with Grandfather are Uncle Matteo and Aunt Brigida. They are actually my great-uncle and great-aunt; Uncle Matteo is Grandfather’s youngest brother.”

“So was my grandfather the middle brother?” I asked.

“No, actually not. Your grandfather is—was—my grandfather’s first cousin. Your grandfather’s father died early in World War Two, and his mother, she died of grief afterward. He was raised by his uncle and aunt, Nonno’s parents. We were all neighbors; the kids were already growing up like brothers.”

This family seemed complicated. Back home, things were
simple: father, mother, sister, grandfather, and grandmother. Oh, and a few uncles and aunts. And their kids. And … oh.

Emilio started to tell me about my grandfather’s family, who had lived a couple of streets away, actually in an apartment downstairs from the one he, Emilio, rented with Francesco. My great-grandfather had inherited the whole building, but the family had had to sell it in order to support his orphaned son.

Looking at these people, I thought how strange it was that I shared genes with all of them and had never met or even heard of them before. I noticed, too, that my grandfather seemed to flicker like a shadow from face to face. Uncle Matteo had his dark, thick eyebrows, and even drew them together in exactly the same way when he was thinking; Giuliano had the same eyebrows, too, though they were finer and grayer. When Anna Maria got a funny text on her phone, she laughed with a single, sharp bark, just like my grandfather had. Giuliano’s face had the same expression when he was in repose: sad, a little angry, but with a measure of peace as well. I had always wondered how a face could spell out so many differing emotions at once, using the same alphabet of muscle and nerve.

I tried to pay attention to Emilio’s story so that I could repeat it to Gina, but the sounds that had been scraping around the edge of my hearing grew too loud: a terrible clamor of voices snarling overhead, one of which I already knew too well. The horror snicked into my skin. A breath of freezing air spread between my shoulder blades, as if a path had been opened for frost to spill down into my body.

“Mia?” Emilio asked from somewhere over me. I looked up. I was squatting on the ground. I couldn’t figure out how I had gotten there, but I knew I had to try to work my fingers in between the cobblestones. I had to keep hold of this world.

“Nonno!” he said, turning to his grandfather, but already Giuliano had seen, and when I could raise my eyes I could see various pairs of Della Torre legs rearranging themselves around me. I thought they wanted to hide my bizarre behavior from passersby. Probably this was true, but it took me a moment to notice that all of them also seemed to have a job to do. Some were looking up, some out. Some were speaking softly under their breath. Anna Maria had hurriedly put away her cell phone, but I caught a nod between her and Uncle Matteo, and saw her pull her phone out again and begin talking nonchalantly to no one. Laura and Francesca had drifted to the edges of the cluster, while Égide and Brigida stood quite close to me.

I heard myself saying to the ground, “He’s coming back, he’s coming back, he’s coming back,” like some choking mantra.

Above me, the shouting, snarling voices, threaded through with the deep, gravelly voice I feared the most, were joined by others, some high and light, some low and fierce, rising to a pitch so loud I thought everyone on the street would cover their ears; yet people just walked past, carrying their shopping. They didn’t even seem to see me, on my hands and knees in the middle of a fashionable Milanese street. The circle of family tightened above me; I heard Giuliano chanting the way he had on the plane.

Then that was all the sound there was, just the noise of people’s shoes, clattering by on the street. The terrible, invading voices were gone. In the silence, I realized I was glad that I had recognized only one of the voices; the people who had been talking in my room back at the apartment hadn’t been among those snarling overhead.

I glanced up, still squatting where I was. Emilio was looking up into the evening sky between the buildings. He looked down at me.

“We drove them off, for now,” he said in English.

He and Égide helped me to my feet. Égide asked if I was all right—I didn’t need to know the words to understand them.

“Sì, sì, grazie,”
I said.

“You are all right?” Emilio asked. “We didn’t expect that so soon, or we would have been even better prepared. But we did expect it.”

Still fighting back the nauseating fear, I thought but managed not to say,
I wish someone had told
me
what to expect
. Instead I just walked on with Emilio, Francesca, and Égide close by to make sure I kept my feet.