Chapter 24
Luca
They start with the floors.
Matej’s logic is straightforward: if someone hid something on this property before the war, before the border moved, before everything changed hands — they hid it where it was dry, accessible, and close to the house.
It could be a door, a chest, a cabinet built into a wall.
They don’t know what they’re looking for, only what’s on the keys.
So: the house first. Then the outbuildings. Then they would think again.
Luca does not point out that this logic could apply to approximately every structure on the property. He picks up a crowbar and follows Matej inside.
The floorboards in the back room are original: wide planks, uneven, worn smooth in the middle where generations of feet have crossed them. Matej lifts the first one without ceremony. Underneath: packed earth, a smell of cold and time, three very old nails and nothing else.
“Nothing,” Luca says.
“Nothing,” Matej confirms. He replaces the board. Moves to the next one.
They work through the room, board after board of packed earth and cold air, and the nothing comes quickly, and it is easier than it sounds. This is the kind of looking that has its own logic.
“We’re looking for buried treasure,” Luca says. He is on his hands and knees by the far wall. “I want to say that out loud.”
“You can say it out loud.”
“We’re looking for buried treasure,” he says again. He replaces a plank. “This is a fact of my current life.”
“An unpublished fact, ideally,” Matej says, from the other end of the room. “For now.”
Luca smiles at the floor.
The room has good light in the morning — Luca has noticed this — and the low November sun cuts across the floor at an angle that makes the grain of the wood visible, the variations in colour where the boards have aged differently, darker at the edges where the light never reached.
On the wall above the window: a photograph in a frame gone slightly green at the corners.
Two men and a woman, summer, somewhere on this property — he can see the same stone wall in the background that runs along the yard now.
The men are wearing the kind of clothes that date themselves immediately. One of them is holding a wine bottle.
Luca looks at it.
“My grandfather,” Matej says, without looking up from the floor. “And his brother. I don’t know who the woman is.”
“Which one is the grandfather?”
“The shorter one.”
Luca looks at the shorter one. Something in the jaw — he can see it, now that he’s looking. The same line. The same stillness, even in a photograph.
He goes back to the floor.
By midday they have covered the back room, the hallway, and most of the kitchen. Packed earth, old nails, one ceramic shard that Matej turns over in his hands before setting aside. In the kitchen, wedged between two joists, a small glass bottle, brown, no label, empty.
“Medicine,” Matej says. “Or something stronger.”
“Your family or the previous one?”
Matej considers this with genuine uncertainty. “Hard to say.”
He sets it on the windowsill.
The stable is next, off the back of the house.
It smells of stone and something faintly animal, though there have been no animals in it for years.
The straw on the floor is old enough to have compressed into something almost solid.
Along the far wall: old tools. A scythe with a handle worn to silk.
A leather harness, stiff and cracked, hanging from a nail.
And in the corner, half-buried under a piece of canvas: a wooden crate with the side staved in.
Luca lifts the canvas. The crate isn’t quite empty: a single bottle lies on its side in the straw, unlabelled, the glass clouded, flat-shouldered and short-necked. And stencilled on the surviving side of the crate in faded ink, a partial word — he can make out the first three letters. FER.
He stares at it. Three letters and the rest gone. They catch on something in him and then don’t — no name to attach them to, nothing they unlock. Just an old word on an old crate, in a stable that has held a lot of old things.
Then a voice from the other end of the stable, and Luca lets the canvas fall back.
“Anything?” Matej asks.
“Old crate. Nothing in it.”
Not quite true. He moves on.
The hayloft above the stable requires a ladder that Matej tests carefully before trusting his weight to it. Luca goes up second, into a space that smells of dust and dry wood and something very old.
The light comes through gaps in the roof boards. In the corner, draped in cobwebs substantial enough to have architectural ambitions: a broken piece of machinery, some kind of belt tensioner, long past use.
And in the rafters, lodged between two beams where the roof meets the wall: bones.
Luca sees them before Matej does. Small. A sheep, maybe, or a goat. A skull, narrow and pale, and a few long bones tucked in beside it. Old. Very old. Someone had put them up there on purpose, which was somehow worse than if they’d just fallen there.
“Matej.”
“Mm.”
“There is a skull in your roof.”
Matej looks up. Looks at the bones. His face does the thing where a fact rearranges itself into a category he already has. “Ah,” he says, and goes back to working the loft.
“Ah. You said ah.”
“Old practice. You put bones in the roof when you build — or rebuild. For the house.” A small shrug. “For luck.”
“A sheep’s skull. For luck.”
“Yes.”
“In the roof.”
“Where else would you put it.”
“I don’t know, Matej. I had assumed not the roof.” He looks back up at the rafters. “What else am I going to find up here. Whole cows? Is this your secret steppe burial site? Did the Mongols summer in the Karst?”
“The Mongols didn’t come this far west.”
“You spent an entire morning once telling me about Mongol cavalry. Don’t think I didn’t notice you’ve now defended their honour and avoided the question.”
Matej says nothing, which from Matej is a confession.
Luca looks at the skull. The skull, being a skull, declines to explain itself. He gets out his phone, holds it up towards the rafters — no signal, of course — and lowers it again with the grief of a man who wanted to look something up and can’t.
“Did your family put it there?”
“Probably my grandfather. The whole roof needed work when they came here.” He says it as though a sheep’s skull in the roof is simply one of the facts of having a roof. “You wouldn’t think about it.”
“I am thinking about it. I’m thinking about very little else.” He is, in fact, already scanning the other beams to see what else is up there.
“There’s a jaw by the chimney.”
Luca looks at him. “You’re enjoying this.”
“There’s nothing else up here,” Matej says, which is not a denial.
They go back down the ladder.
The barn takes the rest of the afternoon.
It is larger than it looks from outside; the Karst stone walls make everything seem smaller than it is.
Along one wall: Matej’s tools, organized with the same quiet precision as everything else he owns.
Along the other: things that have no current purpose but haven’t been thrown away.
An old wooden plough. Two empty metal drums. A stack of fence posts gone soft with rot.
And in the corner, under a canvas that is newer than everything around it: a road bicycle. Carbon frame. Race geometry. The kind of machine that costs more than most cars.
Luca stops.
Matej has already moved past it, is checking behind the plough. He doesn’t look back.
Luca does not say anything about the bicycle. He looks at it for three seconds — the dust on the frame, the canvas pulled to cover it but not quite — and then he moves on.
Matej has tried both keys against the old lock on the barn door, more out of thoroughness than hope. Wrong size, wrong shape. Neither of them says anything about it.
They find nothing in the barn.
By evening they are at the kitchen table with the unlabeled bottle from the cellar between them and the tiredness that comes from physical work and no result.
“Fanika,” Luca says. “She was born after the war. But she might have heard something.”
Matej turns his glass. “We’ll ask her.”
It’s the we that Luca notices. Not for his benefit. Just there, in the sentence, as the bones are in the roof.
Fanika is in her yard when they arrive the next day, doing something to a fence post that clearly requires more force than the tool she’s using. She looks up when she hears them, assesses the situation in approximately one second, and goes back to the fence post.
“Matej.”
“Fanika.”
She works the post for another moment. Then she sets the tool down and looks at Luca, her opinion already formed, now checking it against the evidence.
“You’re still here,” she says. Not unfriendly. Just accurate.
“I’m still here,” Luca confirms.
Her face moves — brief, contained. She picks up the tool again. “Coffee.”
It is not a question.
Her kitchen smells of bread and something slow and alive. The sourdough starter sits on the counter in a ceramic bowl, covered with a cloth. Fanika puts the coffee on without asking about preferences.
They sit.
The keys come out after the coffee.
Matej sets them on the table. Fanika picks up Luca’s key — the one with the Ferrante crest — and holds it in the light from the window. Her face does not change.
“Ferrante,” she says.
“Yes,” Luca says.
She sets the key down. Sits.
She says nothing. Just looks at the keys on the table, sorting through some large, disorganized drawer in her memory.
“I was born in 1958,” she says finally. “The war was over. The border was already where it is. I never knew them.”
“But you’ve heard things,” Matej says. Not a question — he knows her.
“Things.” She wraps both hands around her cup.
“There was a story. When I was small. That somewhere on the old properties — not just yours, several — there were things put away. Before everything changed. Valuables, people said. Or equipment. Something worth keeping.” She pauses.
“No one knew where exactly. It was the kind of story that gets told without the useful part.”
“The useful part being where,” Luca says.