Her Sugar Mask

Chapter Three — Opening the Door

Six days later she reached the foot of the mountain.

She had left the van on the beach at Cefalù, taken three buses, and walked the last nine kilometers. She had slept twice: once in an abandoned sheepfold, once under the porch of a church. She had eaten four apples, half a loaf of bread, and one tin of supermarket tuna.

She wrapped the silver knife in a sock and put it at the bottom of her bag.

Every sentence she said to herself was a short one. South. Not the main roads. Do not look at cameras. Do not say more than three sentences to anyone.

For six days the key had been in her pocket with a word cut into it, and she had not once asked herself why the word felt familiar.

On the afternoon of the sixth day she stood under a road sign.

SAN VITALE. Arrow pointing up. Four kilometers.

She lifted her head.

· · ·

The mountain was the kind of mountain the sun has bleached white. The road up was gravel, a wall on one side and a drop on the other.

She started walking.

For the first two kilometers she counted her steps. At the third she stopped.

The reason she stopped was not one she had expected.

It was an abandoned terrace, stone walls stacked to the ridge, laid one stone at a time centuries ago, wild fennel growing out of the seams. Nothing was planted now; the grass filled the terraces, and when the wind crossed them the whole hillside moved.

She stood there longer than she meant to. For three years she had looked at every place for three things: the exit, the cover, and whoever was watching. This was the first time in three years she was not looking for a way out.

She sat. The wall was warm. She drank, ate the tuna slowly because she had one working hand and did not want it finished, and for the first time in six days her head was empty. Ten minutes later she went on up.

· · ·

San Vitale was built on the side of the mountain. The houses were all the same sand-colored stone with faded red tiles on the roofs. In the middle of the town was a small square with a well in it, and three old women sitting on the edge of the well.

When she walked into the square, all three women stopped talking at the same moment.

One of them stood up.

She was perhaps seventy, very thin, in a black cardigan, her hair pinned into a knot at the back of her head. She walked up to Giulia and stood close.

"You're not from this town."

Giulia's heart missed half a beat.

"I came from the sea," she said.

"Which sea is that."

"I'm looking for work."

The old woman looked at her for a long time. She looked at Giulia's hands, at her shoes, at her bag.

"The way you lie," the old woman said, "reminds me of my second husband."

Giulia said nothing.

"He's buried on the hill behind," the old woman said. "Do you want to go and look at him?"

"No, thank you."

"I'm Nunzia. There's a house at that end of the square. It belongs to my son, and my son is in Germany. There's a bed in it. You can sleep there. The condition is that you work."

"Doing what."

"Cleaning a house up the mountain for a man who's here on holiday," Nunzia said. "Twice a week, Wednesday and Saturday. Thirty euro a time."

"What sort of man is he."

"A good one," Nunzia said. "There aren't many left. Don't scare him off."

· · ·

From the town to the house was another twenty minutes. The road got steeper. Olive trees on both sides, every trunk twisted, all of them old.

At the end of the road was a whitewashed stone house, two floors, a terrace facing the valley. There was a table on the terrace and a laptop on the table.

Giulia stood at the door.

She raised her hand to knock. Her hand stopped in the air and stayed there for two seconds.

She knocked.

A voice inside said something she could not make out. Then footsteps, coming from the back, quick.

The door opened.

He was barefoot. He wore a linen shirt open at the throat with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and the wet linen clung to the flat of his stomach where the water had not yet dried. In one hand he had an orange, half peeled, the rind hanging off it in one long yellow strip. His forearms were tan and corded, the kind a man gets from work and not from a gym, and the open shirt showed the line of his collarbone and the hollow at the base of his throat, where a drop of water had settled and not yet run.

He was a little over thirty. His hair was wet, as if he had just washed it, and it lay in a dark sweep back from a brow wider than she had expected, above eyes she would later have reason to remember.

He looked at her and smiled.

He spoke in Sicilian.

"You're twenty minutes late. I thought you weren't coming."

Giulia's heart moved, and she told herself it was the surprise and not the man, because a woman on the run does not notice a man's shoulders, and she had noticed his shoulders — broad and easy in the doorway, the way a doorframe is simpler to fill than a man has any right to be.

He thought she was local.

It was the second good thing that had happened to her in seven days. The first was Nunzia giving her work. The second was this man, this man who had just come out of the shower with half an orange in his hand, looking at her and seeing nothing but a late cleaner — and who, she registered against her will, was the most beautiful thing she had looked at in longer than she could count, which was exactly the kind of thought a woman in her position could not afford.

"The road is bad," she said in dialect.

He laughed.

"You're not from this town," he said.

"I told you," she said. "I came from the sea."

"Which sea."

"All seas look the same."

He looked at her. His eyes were light brown, almost yellow in the sun.

"All right," he said. "Come in."

· · ·

The house was cool inside. The stone walls were thick. Light came through the slats of the shutters in stripes and fell across the floor.

"Kitchen through there, living room here, bedrooms and the study upstairs," he said. "You don't need to touch the study. I do that myself."

He pointed.

"You have a hurt hand," he said.

Giulia moved her left hand half an inch behind her.

"I cut myself on a lemon."

"You don't cut a lemon there."

She did not answer.

He waited two seconds. He did not ask again.

"Water's in the fridge, help yourself," he said. "I'll be on the terrace. Call me if you need anything."

· · ·

She began to clean.

She started with the living room. She worked slowly, because she was looking.

One whole wall of the living room was books. She read the spines: half of them agricultural policy in Italian, half of them international relations in English. On the shelf there was one framed photograph, a man in his fifties in a suit, standing in front of a government building.

She turned the photograph around. Nothing was written on the back.

At the end of the corridor was the study. The door was open.

She walked to the doorway and looked in.

Three filing cabinets. Two locks, the kind with three number wheels.

On a desk sat a laptop. On the top right corner of the keyboard was a sticker: the flag of the European Union, and below it a string of digits.

She went in. She put her hand on the latch of the first cabinet.

Her fingers stopped there and stayed for half a second.

She took her hand away.

Not because she was frightened. Because she knew this: if she opened it, she would have to explain how she had opened it. And Rosa Amato could not open that lock.

She backed out and went to clean the kitchen.

· · ·

An hour later she rinsed the cloth and went out to the terrace.

He was there, sitting at the table with the laptop, his legs stretched out very straight. The orange was finished. The peel was piled in a small dish.

She stood in the doorway for a moment.

He was looking at a spreadsheet. From where she stood she could read the header: EU Rural Development Fund — Year 3 Allocation. A lot of numbers, in two columns. She looked for three seconds.

She saw three things. It was the third-year table. The right-hand column was eleven percent smaller than the left. And four cells in the right-hand column, which should not have been empty, were empty.

She moved her eyes away.

He looked up.

"Thirsty?"

"I'm working for you," she said. "I'm not a guest."

"Here's my rule," he said. "Guests pour their own water. People who work have to drink."

"What kind of rule is that."

"No kind. My father made it. He drinks eight glasses of water a day and he needs company."

She could not stop it. The corner of her mouth moved.

She turned her face away at once.

He poured a glass from the jug on the table, stood up, came over, and held it out to her.

She put out her left hand. Halfway there she changed to her right.

The movement was a beat slow.

He saw it.

He said nothing. He only pushed the glass half an inch further toward her, so that it was easier to take.

"What's your name," he asked.

"Rosa."

"Rosa," he repeated. "Like the song."

He started humming.

The tune was quiet and not quite right, the way someone hums a song they heard once in a bar and kept.

Giulia's face froze.

For half a second.

That was a Palermo tune. Not from these mountains. Not something they played anywhere tourists went. It was an old song, the kind her mother's generation hummed while they did the dishes.

He stopped.

"You've heard it?"

"No."

"You looked like you'd heard it."

"What did I look like?"

He thought about it.

"Like someone said your name behind your back."

She put the glass down.

"I have to go," she said.

"See you Wednesday."

"Saturday."

"Wednesday and Saturday," he said. "Don't be late again."

"I won't be late."

"You were twenty minutes late today."

"It was my first day."

"So tomorrow you have no excuse."

She looked at him.

She could not think of an answer. Nothing in three years had been like this. Nobody spoke to her the way he did, with no purpose inside the sentence and nothing waiting at the end of it.

"All right," she said.

Rosa. She would need a face to go with the name, and the face would be the easy part. A sweet one. The kind that hid a blade the way sugar hides a bitter pill, the way her family had hidden a m******e behind a christening lunch. She had worn one before, for three years, and she could wear it again — and the wearing was a mask, and the mask was sugar, and the sugar was hers to use.

· · ·

She went out of the yard. The stone steps were steep, rosemary growing on both sides, and she raised the smell of it as she passed.

She had gone down a dozen steps.

The window on the second floor was open. The sound of a fan came out of it, and then his voice.

He was on the telephone.

Not Italian.

English.

Giulia stopped on the steps.

His voice had changed. It was not the voice of the barefoot man with the orange. This voice was lower and faster, and the end of every word was cut off clean.

"No. Not a tourist."

She did not move.

"It's the thing I'm supposed to find within three months."

The fan went round once.

"I think I already found the way in."

Someone on the other end said something. She did not catch it.

Then he said one more thing.

"No, I'm not sure yet."

"But she's here."

· · ·

Giulia kept walking down.

Her step did not get faster. Her breathing did not change. Her face was in the sun and there was nothing on it.

When she reached the bottom of the mountain, her hand was shaking.

The right hand.

The one that was not hurt.