The Demon Catchers of Milan (19 page)

“I think I see,” I said, hoping that was true.

I waited for more until I realized she was finished. She changed the subject.

“Now, I spoke with Giuliano. Your family has been watching this demon for a very long time, as I think you know. Its nature is still unclear, for all that. It cannot be only a demon of place, no?”

She spoke as if I would know what she was talking about, and I really wanted to act as if I did. Once again, I felt horribly left out of all my family’s doings and all their knowledge. But I couldn’t fake it with her.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Well, because he came to you over the ocean, for one thing. He came to a place where your people have lived for little more than half a century, right?”

“No, America is a lot older than that.…”

“But your family’s roots there, they are hardly three generations deep.”

I wasn’t sure, but it was probably true, or close.

“We know he is a demon of family—your family.”

“I didn’t know that. Not really.”

“Well, you do now,” she said, irritatingly calm. “What I’m trying to work out is what the best protection might be. The usual forms have worked, but they are impractical. I mean, you have remained safe while you are inside your family’s house, guarded by its powerful wards, but you can’t stay there forever. You need something different. We may have to try a few things.
I wonder if the protections of place would work after all,” she finished.

With that, she opened her handbag and began taking out a series of small, everyday objects: acorns, rings, twigs, and bits of fabric, along with a couple of small pieces of jewelry that didn’t look even slightly interesting. While I sat still, watching her, her questions about the nature of my demon started me asking my own. Before, I had just wanted to know how to make it all stop; now I wanted to know where he came from, what laws governed him, what secrets he had that could help us defeat him.

“
Mia? Stai ascoltando?
—Are you listening?” said Signora Negroponte, and I realized she’d been speaking to me. She held out something to me, letting it fall into my hand: an acorn.

“From Lake Nemi,” she said, then added, “A lake near Rome. Sacred to Diana. Her oaks still grow near there.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Now,” said Signora Negroponte, “I want you to step outside the door to the shop, holding that in your hand, and wait. Do you remember what it felt like when he came for you before?”

“The first time?”

“Any time. When he came for that man, Lucifero, even.”

“Yes. I know exactly what it feels like,” I shivered. “Different each time, but not that different. The first time, that was a surprise.”

“But now, if he came for you, you would know in time to get back in the shop?”

“I think so,” I said, remembering how ambushed I’d felt
when he’d come near me on the plane. I had nearly opened the exit door and gone out to him; maybe what Lucifero had done made sense, in some crazy way. I thought about the time in the street, too, when all the voices had rushed at me and I had felt the cold pouring down my neck.

“Yes, I thought as much myself,” said Signora Negroponte. “So we will do it this way. Try the acorn, first, and then we’ll have a look at some other objects; we have many choices. The one that keeps him from coming for you is the one we want.”

I felt disappointed. This seemed more like a science experiment than a mysterious, powerful ritual. I got up and went into the shop. Signora Negroponte gathered up her various talismans and followed me, settling her purse and notebook before her on the desk. She looked up at me where I waited by the door.

“Right. Go,” she said.

My hand on the door handle felt clammy with sweat. I turned it, listening to the shop bells jingling, and stepped out into the quiet street.

For a full minute, nothing happened. Most of our neighbors had already gone to work; the first classes of the morning had already started at the Brera, and the delivery trucks had come and gone. I breathed frost on the air, making a mental note to go upstairs and get my coat if I was going to be doing this all morning, then realized the cold pouring down my back wasn’t the December air.

I felt pinned. Signora Negroponte must have seen the change in my expression because she jumped up and leaned out of the door, pulling me back inside.

I took a deep breath of beeswax and flame-smell. Sometimes it’s good to be stuck inside.

“Not that one, then,” she said, holding out her hand for the acorn.

“No.” I smiled, feeling slightly hysterical. The acorn jittered out of my palm and rattled across the floor, and I realized my hand was shaking.

She caught me with that hard gaze of hers.

“Can you try the next one?”

I looked straight back.

“Do I have a choice?”

She smiled.

“Anyway, I think I can get the hang of this,” I said, even though my voice faltered.

Thus began the strangest time yet in my new life. Signora Negroponte came over from Lucca once a week, for a couple of days at a time. We suspended my studies on those days, because I was just too tired to concentrate. Every morning, Signora Negroponte appeared shortly before the bells rang nine and politely refused coffee from Nonna. We began right away: I could put talismans in my pocket, hold them in my hand, wear them around my neck. Once there was a paste I had to smear over my heart. I would wait outside for the feeling of ice pouring down my back, or listen until the whispers began, and then I would dash inside, where she would make notes while I calmed down.

It was totally bizarre. I wondered if this was how all demon catchers through the centuries figured out what worked.

I know this sounds peculiar, but I think the demon kind of enjoyed it. Sometimes I could feel him immediately when I stepped outside, could tell he was waiting somewhere above, ready to test our latest defense.

The demon wasn’t the only one hanging out. Relatives kept showing up. Emilio brought us a beautiful picnic lunch from Peck, the amazing deli in the center of town, and sat eating rabbit and roasted onions with Signora Negroponte while I stood outside with a knotted hazel twig in my pocket, seriously considering running back in before I found out whether it worked, in case they decided not to leave me any. Égide stopped in late one afternoon with a loaf of bread, a lovely Crescenza cheese to spread on it, and a bottle of white wine. I could tell that he wasn’t sure what he thought of Signora Negroponte, and that he felt loyal to Nonna. In an effort to draw the signora into conversation—polite as always—he brought up the subject of magic from his native country, Rwanda, which she just as politely began to compare to Italian magic, and before they knew it they were pouring a second glass of wine, deep in discussion. Feeling that I could use a break from standing out in the Via Fiori waiting for a monstrous possessing spirit to land on my head, I didn’t distract them.

Anna Maria came by with chocolates from Hamburg, where she had been shooting the cover for some German fashion magazine. She touched each of the day’s charms with a well-manicured finger while teasing some poor guy on the phone. There was always some poor guy on the phone with her.

While Anna Maria talked, and Signora Negroponte wrote,
and I ate a chocolate very, very slowly, I watched Anna Maria absently line up our experiments in a row: a piece of stone chipped from the threshold of the street door to our apartment; a swatch of velvet cut from the inside hem of a dress Giuliano’s mother had worn, braided into one of Signora Negroponte’s knots; a hazel twig, also in a knot, which looked kind of heart-shaped; another hazel twig in a knot that looked like a figure eight on drugs; a big splinter of wood from our stairwell; a locket that had belonged to some long-dead relation whose name I had forgotten.

“No, I’m in Milan,” said Anna Maria to the poor guy, poking the locket into place. “I can’t.”

Another day, Uncle Matteo brought a basket with bread,
bresaola
, and a jar of a clear preserve with fruit in it that I thought was some kind of jam, so I spread it all over a piece of bread. Uncle Matteo and Signora Negroponte watched me and didn’t say anything while I bit into it.

“Hot mustard!” I yelped.

“A Piedmontese specialty,” Signora Negroponte told me, laughing. “You looked like you knew what you were doing.”

Uncle Matteo grunted and lit a cigarette. In between puffs, he said to me, “Mustard is good for the spirit. Bolsters you up.”

Then he smiled and patted me on the shoulder, and suddenly it struck me how everybody was feeding me and taking care of me, how everybody seemed to know, without saying a word about it directly, that this must be unbelievably hard and frightening for me to walk out each time, to go toward the terrible
thing that scared me so much I couldn’t even think about it. They were comforting me with food, same as my mom with chicken dumpling soup when I was sick, or hot chocolate when I was wrestling with an essay.

“You’ve got tears in your eyes,” said Signora Negroponte. “We have two more charms to try, but maybe we should stop for the day.”

“No—I can do more. I can. I just figured something out, that’s all.” I realized too late I could have blamed the tears on the mustard.

She smiled her hard smile, that really had so much softness in it, because it faced things as they were. She didn’t ask me what I’d figured out, which was kind of nice, because I was still treasuring it. Uncle Matteo just nodded and smoked his cigarette.

That night I woke up with my feet kicking like a person hanging, just as I used to do. I could hear someone growling to a tune, but it took me a minute to realize Gravel was singing a lullaby. When I was able to understand what the words were, they were awful, all about plagues and murders and starvation and prisoners of war. I wondered if I was still dreaming and made myself sit up.

“What in the ethers are you singing?” Pompous asked him.

“A lullaby. She’s having trouble sleeping.”

I could hear Pompous trying not to laugh. “That’s very nice, my dear, but really, I think those verses will just give her nightmares.”

Gravel sounded hurt when he replied, “I was just singing about all the things she doesn’t suffer from. I thought it would be comforting.”

“All this time around humans and you are still a nincompoop,” said Pompous.

“I learned from the best,” said Gravel.

I took a deep breath.

“Please don’t start arguing,” I said. “And thank you for the lullaby, Gravel, even if it wasn’t exactly something I could fall asleep to.”

I knew they would vanish again, and they did, but they left behind such a feeling of kindness that I actually slept through the rest of the night.

SEVENTEEN

The Festa di Sant’Ambrogio

T
he next day was Friday, the Festa di Sant’Ambrogio. Signora Negroponte worked with me until she went to catch her train to Lucca in the afternoon. Emilio came home early from work and sat with me in the shop, waiting for everyone to gather so we could go to the fair near the Castello Sforzesco, called the
fiera degli Oh-Bej Oh-Bej
, which odd name Signora Negroponte explained to me:
Oh-Bej
was
Oh bella!
in the local dialect of Lombardy. But my mind wasn’t on the festival when Emilio came home.

“The trouble with not telling me things the demon might learn,” I said to him, “is that I might work them out for myself anyway. You’re always telling me to do that. Can’t you tell me just a little about the candles or tell me if I’ve guessed right?”

He gave me an appraising look. “You are feistier than you used to be,” he told me. I grinned at him. I loved that word, feisty,
vivace
, even though Lucifero was the first person to use it to describe me. I thought it was a good word for me, even if I still felt scared a lot of the time.

He gestured to the candles, flickering on their shelves like an audience. “Tell me what you’ve guessed.”

“Well, I know you use them to trap demons. That’s why you don’t want us to blow them out with our breath. And Lucifero and his friend guessed the same thing, which is why they were so interested in them. But then,” I added, frowning, “if they imprison demons, is it safe to let the candle go out? And is it safe to leave them right in the store, in the windows?”

He nodded and smiled. “Already thinking like us,” he said. “I will answer your first question with two questions of my own: Is it the flame that imprisons the demon? And would it be practical to keep a bunch of eternal flames burning in a wooden-walled shop? I will answer your second question with a saying beloved in our family: the best place to hide things is in plain sight.”

That was plenty to chew on, right there. Besides, it occurred to me that if you needed to keep the demon inside the candle and keep the candle burning, you’d need a really big candle. “So why do they light them at all?” I asked him.

“Think about it some more, and tell me what you guess,” he said. I picked up an olive pit from my lunch plate and threw it at him.

“Ow!” he cried, laughing, and picked it up and threw it back. At that point, Uncle Matteo and Aunt Brigida arrived, so we didn’t get into an all-out olive-pit war.

Pretty much the entire crew gathered to go to the Castello Sforzesco, with me in my usual position in the middle. The fiera turned out to be a huge market full of stalls and street performers, people eating fire and telling fortunes. The air smelled of sugar and fried food. Nonna tucked a wad of euros in my pocket, instructing me to spend them, so I did, buying Christmas presents for my family. People were selling everything: lamps and marzipan and badly spelled English T-shirts and badges with the city coat of arms and wallets and rings and couches and roasted chestnuts. I got small things to send home because I was worried about the postage: for my sister, a badge and a ring with a glass eye in it; for my mom, a really pretty silver bracelet that looked like a band of flowers, which broke about two stalls later; for my dad, a leather wallet, because I couldn’t think of anything else to get him from the city his father had left behind.