The Demon Catchers of Milan (18 page)

I saw his face change in the window. He turned and took her hand, and I knew there would be peace.

Signora Negroponte laughed shortly. “Out of the mouths of babes and lawyers,” she said.

When Giuliano came and sat down again, he leaned across and cuffed me under the chin. He didn’t look any less angry, and the cuff kind of hurt, so his next words surprised me.

“I accept your apology, and I, I am sorry, too. But now, you must not keep things back from us. Not anymore. You see now how unsafe it is. So. Tell us from the beginning.”

He poured me more wine, and Francesca slipped up the street to bring back a tray of various panini, olives, and caper berries. I told them all I could; I couldn’t help leaving out some details, like the way he looked at me. They guessed, anyway, not the least Emilio, who smiled faintly.

“They sent for me, you see,” said Signora Negroponte. “So
that we could find a way to make it safe for you to walk in the street.”

By then I felt brave enough to ask, “What is it you do? Are you a demon catcher, too?”

She laughed her hard laugh again. “No, no. Though my work brings me to the same places often enough. I untie knots. I also tie them.”

I didn’t know what to make of that.

“Which do you think this will need?” asked Giuliano thoughtfully. “A knot, or the untying of one?”

“I’m not sure,” she said, and looked at me in a way I was used to by this time, as if I were as easy to see through as the window of our shop, faded lettering and all. She leaned back in her chair. “It’s been a long afternoon.”

“So it has,” Giuliano said. “There will be plenty of time to talk after dinner.”

Emilio and Signora Negroponte stayed for dinner.

“I don’t want to discuss this while we eat,” commanded Giuliano. “It’ll ruin our digestion.”

I think mine was already ruined. Nonna served us a wild mushroom risotto, one of my favorite dishes, but I couldn’t really taste it.

“These must be close to the last of the season,” said Signora Negroponte. “This is delicious.”

“They are the last,” said Nonna. I seemed to be the only one who noticed the coolness in her voice or the way Giuliano looked relieved to step out of the room when Francesco called.
He came back quickly and said only, “The Ospedale San Giuseppe,” to which everyone nodded. I didn’t dare ask what he meant.

They let me go to sleep after dinner. I went to my room and bawled for an hour, for Lucifero, and for myself; but then I slept.

SIXTEEN

Signora Negroponte and I Start to Untie a Knot

W
hen I came into the kitchen for breakfast, Francesco was there, cleaning up a bowl of coffee he had knocked over and apologizing to Nonna. After I had had a few sips of my own coffee, he said, “I just stopped by to tell you what’s happened to your friend.”

“He’s not my friend,” I said quickly.

“Yes, I wouldn’t think so. You said he smiled when the enemy came down toward him?”

“Yes, smiled like a welcome.”

Nonna slammed dishes into the drainer behind him, before turning and catching my eye and giving a derisive snort to tell me what she thought of Satanists.

“Wow,” said Francesco. “I wonder how he knew it was there.”

“I don’t know. He knew at the same time I did. But, you know, later, everybody seemed to know. In the crowd.”

“Well,” said Francesco, “we’re certainly learning a bit about his nature.”

“Yeah, thanks. I think I’ve already figured out the guy is a jerk.”

“No, I mean the demon. Each one is so different. Sometimes, especially with the powerful ones who keep coming back, you really need to pay attention to everything they do, to learn them. So that someday you can stop them. As you can imagine, it doesn’t always happen right away.”

“It can take generations,” put in Nonna, sitting down.

“Centuries,” said Francesco, nodding respectfully.

“Oh, great,” I said.

“Well, not everything can happen in a minute, like your empty vee,” said Nonna. “Demons can be like wine, Giuliano says.”

(
Empty vee?
I was puzzled by the almost English sound for a second, until I realized she meant MTV.)

“Yes.” Francesco laughed. “It’s a good metaphor. Lots of demons come about because somebody crushes something, over and over, and then leaves it to rot in a tight place.…”

Even though it all made me feel sick, and I was kind of irritated by Nonna’s comment about MTV (I mean, who watches that?), I was fascinated.

“Really? Like wine?”

“In some ways,” said Francesco.

At Francesco’s “leaving it to rot,” for one second, I could feel the tail end of a memory—but all I could keep hold of was the smell of dust on a hot hillside and then the scent of cinnamon.

I asked, “How do you get it out of the tight place?”

“That’s the trick, isn’t it?” agreed Francesco as Nonna nodded vigorously. “It’s not like just drawing a cork from a bottle, or pulling out the bung in a barrel, is it? You have to get it out, in the air, have a look at it—but at the same time, as you already know, it’s terribly dangerous, and you could lose everything, not just your life, but who you are. It could overrun you, a flood, a river of bad wine.…” He added, “You saw. At Signora Galeazzo’s. We look for the way to let it out safely. Without being destroyed or letting it destroy the person it has taken over. They are kind of the bottle, the barrel—not quite.” He ran his fingers through his mad, curly hair. “Ah! Metaphors only go so far.”

Nonna asked him, “What time is your lecture?”

“Nine—oh, no, is that the time? Mia, the news about Lucifero: they put him in a locked ward at the Ospedale San Giuseppe, and Father Agostino, the priest we saw at the Galleria, worked on him all night. The demon went from him at sunrise. He’s in a coma. My contact says that the demon was angry with his choice.”

We both felt a warning stillness from Nonna. Francesco seemed to ask permission with his eyes to go on. After a moment she relented. “She should know,” she said, shrugging.

“He says the demon wanted you, which of course we know. But that Lucifero invited him in. And the demon found
Lucifero too weak. So,” he said, looking at my face, “it’s quite a compliment, Mia. This demon wants someone strong, and it wants you.”

“I could really do without the compliment,” I said, laughing weakly.

“I know,” he said, standing up. He squeezed my shoulder reassuringly before kissing Nonna and me both good-bye on our cheeks and darting down the stairs, knocking a book off a shelf on his way.

Nonna and I sat back down at the table, swirling our coffee in our bowls, as had become our habit. I felt the air fill with unspoken words, and it seemed as if a few might actually spill over and get spoken after all, when we heard a step on the shop stairs, and Signora Negroponte came into the kitchen. Nonna stood up immediately. They looked at each other coolly, and I remembered how last night at dinner they had hardly said a word to each other.

“Good morning, Signora Negroponte.”

“Good morning, Signora Della Torre.”

“Can I get you a coffee?”

“No, thank you. I was looking for your cousin here. May I borrow her?”

“If you wish.”

“Have a good morning, Nonna,” I said as warmly as I could. “Thank you so much for breakfast.”

She smiled at me with real friendliness and waved me away.

Signora Negroponte took me into the office behind the shop
and sat me down at the table, covered in papers. She cleared a space in the sea of receipts and notes, and I saw the color of the tabletop for the first time, a dark, close-grained oak, like the desk in the shop.

“So,” she said, “you will have heard the news about that which troubles you. Your moment of freedom from it has gone by.”

The dark wood grain fascinated me.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be free of it,” I said.

She laughed. “The blind pessimism of youth,” she said, but somehow I didn’t feel offended. “On the bright side, this means we can start trying to find out how to protect you out in the open.

“Let’s have a look at you,” she added, sitting across from me and tipping up my chin.

“So young,” was her next comment.

This morning she was dressed in a well-cut, moss-green tweed jacket and skirt, with the white cuffs of a silk shirt peeping out, and a silk scarf in a complicated knot at her throat, pinned to her jacket with a brooch that looked like it had been woven out of brass. She smelled like someone’s rich grandmother, though I wondered if she would be a little young to be a grandmother. I found myself staring at the knot in her scarf.

“Yes, the knot,” she said, following my eyes and smiling her hard smile. “I untie them and tie them.”

She let the silence in the room broaden and deepen. Outside, through the shop door, I heard the bells of Santa Maria del Carmine ring the hour.

“Can I ask you a question?” I said.

“Of course,” she replied, but there was no promise in her voice that she would answer it.

“How come I’m safe in the house and on my balcony, but not safe in the street—and yet again, safe in restaurants, cafés, even Emilio’s car? How does that work?”

She laughed her grating laugh at so many questions; then her eyes narrowed as she thought about what to say.

“You do
think
, don’t you? Something the demon probably already knows.…” she said, musing. “Tell me, Mia. How long have you been here?”

“About three months.”

She blinked. “Your Italian is very good, for three months.”

“Thank you.” I laughed. “They won’t let me speak anything else. I’m pretty sure they don’t even approve of me writing e-mails or talking on the phone with my family.”

The hard smile again. “I don’t know that they disapprove or approve. Half of them have never studied another tongue. Only those serious in your family’s profession have done so—and they are not so interested in English. Except perhaps Emilio.”

“He has beautiful English,” I said.

“He has beautiful everything,” she said. We both laughed.

“But you have not been in Italy long. It takes time to know a place. A lifetime is best. Most of us don’t even have that in one place, these days. I don’t know what it’s like in America, but in Italy everyone’s moving around, Sicilians coming to Turin to work in the factories, farmers moving from the plain to Milan.
And yet, here place still matters—maybe because it has mattered for so long. For millennia, we have worshipped the gods of the places in which we live. You study art history, don’t you?”

“A little.”

“Yes, Signora Laura would see to that,” she said cryptically, looking out beyond the walls at some place or time I could not see. “So you will have noticed that the statues have place-names. The Nike of Samothrace. The Venus of Mílos. Even the great gods were local, and the local gods became great. There are saints, saints of the cities. You know your saint here, in Milan, Sant’Ambrogio. His festival is coming up the week after next.”

I had read about him, but I couldn’t really see what she was getting at yet.

“Even in the times when we forgot the saints and the gods, we still called ourselves by the places we came from. If you talk to people here, I think you’ll find that they won’t say, ‘I’m Italian.’ They’ll tell you they come from Florence, or the Abruzzi, or Lucca, like me. Our gods belong to a place also. We are all bound to one another, the land, the gods, the people.”

I thought of the shoppers, holding their bags, looking at the priest. This world was such a strange place, if it had both gods and cell phones in it.

“Your family belongs, not just to Milan, but to this house. The first time I ever walked into this shop, I knew it. I could feel the centuries. Giuliano owns this, perhaps; but it owns him as well.”

She seemed to like saying Giuliano’s name. I thought of
his embarrassment the night before and wondered what had happened to make Nonna Laura and Signora Negroponte so cold to each other: I could begin to guess, but it seemed so unlikely—after all, all three of them were so
old
.

“His ancestors,” she went on, “they each guarded this place in their time. There are other places, too. This city has burned to the ground more than once, little one, and each time a Della Torre was among those who shoveled the ash and relaid the stone.

“Where your family lives, they guard. They have set the wards upon this house and renewed them year upon year, century upon century. As long as your feet touch the cement on your balcony, you are even safe in the air above the courtyard. Some of your ancestors have stayed, as well, committing some part of their spirit to these walls.”

I remembered Pompous and Gravel. Again, I wondered how it was I could think about them now, outside my room. I meant to ask. Signora Negroponte continued talking.

“Therefore, you are safe two ways. You are safe because of how well guarded this house is. You are also safe because of your blood, because your family chooses to guard you. But of course you must be careful. For it doesn’t matter how well warded a house is, little one—if someone of the house invites a being, woman, man, demon—into it, there is nothing in the world that can stop that being from crossing the threshold. This is another ancient truth. Your demon knows it, and you should know it.” She laughed shortly. “Francesca said a wise thing yesterday.
Giuliano should listen to her more often, and so should her brother.”

That was something to think about.

“So what about the restaurants and cafés?” I asked.

“The same thing, more or less. There is a law that prevails over households, do you see? A very similar law prevails over places where people are offered food and shelter, even if food and shelter are given in exchange for silver.”

“But there’s no law in the streets,” I put in, slowly comprehending.

“Oh, no, there’s a law,” she replied gravely. “One of the oldest laws. Roads were magic, they always have been, because journeys are magic.”

I can see what she means
, I thought; my own journey to Milan had seemed pretty magical.

“It’s a different law, the law of the road, different from the law of shelter and household, do you see? The gods of the house, they are
lares
, hearth gods. The god of the road is Mercury, the prince of thieves, the lord of messengers. A road may take you where you want to go—but it will take everyone else, too. No one needs an invitation, no one can be refused: that’s the strength of roads and, at the same time, their weakness. Placing household protections on a road, it would be like trying to place wards on a river. You might succeed, for a time, but sooner or later all things are washed away in a river, and sooner or later all things on a road move on. It is a weakness, as I said, but it is also a strength. Yes?”