Juliet

IV.I

I WAS BACK IN MY CASTLE of whispering ghosts. As always, the dream had me walking through room after room, looking everywhere for the people I knew were there, trapped just like me. What was new was that this time, the gilded doors opened before me, even before I had touched them. It was as if the air was full of invisible hands, showing me the way and pulling me along. And so I walked on and on, through vast galleries and deserted ballrooms, forging into hitherto undiscovered parts of the castle, until at last I came to a large, fortified door. Could this be the way out?

I looked at the heavy iron mounting on the door and reached out to try the bolt. But before I had touched it, the door unlocked by itself and swung open, revealing an enormous, black void.

Stopping on the threshold, I squinted and tried to see something-anything-that might indicate whether I had, in fact, reached the world outside, or merely another room.

As I stood there, blind and blinking, an icy wind came at me from the darkness ahead, coiling around me and tugging at my arms and legs, upsetting my balance. When I grabbed the door frame for support, the wind grew in strength and started tearing at my hair and clothes, howling furiously as it worked to pull me over the edge. Its powers were so great that the door frame began to come apart, and the floor crumbled beneath me. Scrambling for safety I let go of the door frame and tried to run back to where I had come from, back into the interior of the castle, but an endless stream of invisible demons-hissing and sneering the Shakespeare quotations I knew so well-were swarming around me on all sides, eager to escape the castle at last and pull me along in their wake.

And so I fell down on the floor and started sliding backwards, desperately scratching for something solid to hold. Just as I was going over the edge, someone dressed in a black motorcycle suit came hurtling towards me to grab my arms and pull me up. “Romeo!” I yelled, reaching out for him, but when I looked up I saw that there was no face behind the visor of the helmet, just emptiness.

After that, I fell down, down, down… until I plunged into water. And I was once again back at the marina in Alexandria, Virginia, ten years old, drowning in a soup of seaweed and trash while Janice and her friends were standing on the pier, eating ice cream and crying with laughter.

Just as I came up for air, trying furiously to reach a mooring line, I woke up with a gasp to find myself lying on Maestro Lippi’s couch, a prickly blanket kicked into a knot around my legs, and Dante licking my hand.

“Good morning,” said the Maestro, placing a mug of coffee in front of me. “Dante doesn’t like Shakespeare. He is a very clever dog.”

WHEN I WALKED BACK to the hotel later that morning, a bright sun leading my way, the events of the night before seemed oddly unreal, as if it had all been a gigantic theater performance staged for someone else’s pleasure. My dinner with the Salimbenis, my flight through the dark streets, and my bizarre refuge in Maestro Lippi’s workshop… it was all the stuff that nightmares are made of, and the only proof that it had really happened seemed to be the dirt and scrapes on the soles of my feet.

But the bottom line was that it had happened, and the sooner I stopped lulling myself into a false sense of safety, the better. It was the second time I had been followed, and this time it was not just by some random thug in a tracksuit, but by a man on a motorcycle as well, whatever his motive. On top of that, there was the growing problem of Alessandro, who clearly knew all about my criminal record, and who would not hesitate to use it against me if I came anywhere near his precious godmother again.

These were all excellent reasons for getting the hell out of Dodge, but Julie Jacobs was not a quitter, nor-I could feel-was Giulietta Tolomei. There was, after all, a pretty substantial treasure at stake, assuming Maestro Lippi’s stories were true and I was ever able to find Juliet’s grave and get my hands on the statue with the sapphire eyes.

Or perhaps the statue was simply a legend. Perhaps in reality, it was the discovery that some wackos believed I was related to a Shakespearean heroine that was supposed to be the great reward awaiting me at the end of all my hardship. Aunt Rose had always complained that, even if I could memorize a play backwards and forwards, I did not truly care about literature, or about love, and she had maintained that one day I would see the big fat spotlight of truth shine upon the error of my ways.

One of my first memories of Aunt Rose had her seated at the big mahogany desk late at night, a single lamp burning, studying something through a magnifying glass. I still remember the feeling of the teddy-bear paw clutched in my hand, and the fear of being sent back to bed. She did not see me at first, but when she did, she started, as if I were some small ghost come to haunt her. The next thing I remember is being in her lap, looking out over a vast spread of paper.

“Look in here,” she had said, holding the magnifying glass for me. “This is our family tree, and here is your mother.”

I remember a rush of excitement followed by sour disappointment. It was not a picture of my mother at all, but a line of letters I had not yet learned to read. “What does it say?” I must have asked, for I remembered Aunt Rose’s answer only too well.

“It says,” she had said with an uncommon degree of theatrics, “dear Aunt Rose, please take good care of my little girl. She is very special. I miss her very much.” That was when, to my horror, I realized that she was crying. It was the first time I had seen an adult cry. Until then, it had never occurred to me that they could.

As Janice and I grew older, Aunt Rose would tell us the odd little thing about our mother, but never the grand picture. Once, after starting college and growing a bit of backbone, we had taken her out of the house on a particularly lovely day, and had sat her down on a chair in the garden-coffee and muffins within reach-before deliberately asking her to tell us the whole story. It was a rare moment of synergy between my sister and me. Together, we flooded her with questions: Apart from the fact that they had died in a car accident, what had our parents been like? And why didn’t we have any contact with people in Italy, when our passports said we were born there?

Aunt Rose had sat very quietly, listening to our rant without even touching the muffins, and when it was over, she had nodded. “You have a right to ask these questions, and one day, you will get your answers. But for now, you must be patient. It is for your own good that I have told you very little about your family.”

I never understood why it could be bad to know everything about one’s own family. Or at least just something. But I had respected Aunt Rose’s discomfort with the issue and postponed the inevitable conflict until later. One day I would sit her down and demand an explanation. One day she would tell me everything. Even when she turned eighty I kept assuming there would still come a day where she would answer all our questions. But now, of course, she never could.

DIRETTOR ROSSINI WAS on the phone in the back room when I entered the hotel, and I stopped for a moment, waiting for him to come out. Walking back from Maestro Lippi’s workshop, I had been mulling over the artist’s comments about his late-night visitor called Romeo, and had concluded it was high time I started looking into the Marescotti family and their possible, present-day descendants.

The first logical step, I figured, would be to ask Direttor Rossini for a local phone book, and I intended to do so right away. But after waiting for at least ten minutes, I eventually gave up and stretched across the counter to grab my room key from the wall.

Frustrated with myself for not having interrogated Maestro Lippi about the Marescottis while I had the chance, I walked slowly up the stairs, the cuts on the soles of my feet stinging with every step I took. It didn’t help that I wasn’t in the habit of wearing high-heeled shoes, especially considering the miles I had been logging over the last two days. As soon as I opened the door to my room, however, all my little aches were forgotten. For the place had been turned upside down, possibly even inside out.

Some very determined invader-if not a whole group-had literally pulled the doors off the wardrobe and the stuffing out of the pillows to find whatever they were looking for, and clothes, trinkets, and bathroom items were scattered everywhere; some of my new underwear was even hanging limply from the chandelier.

I had never actually seen a suitcase bomb go off, but this, I was sure, was what the site would look like afterwards.

“Miss Tolomei!” Panting heavily, Direttor Rossini finally caught up with me. “Contessa Salimbeni called to ask if you were feeling better, but-Santa Caterina!” As soon as he saw the devastation in my room, he forgot everything he had been meaning to say, and for a moment we both stood there, staring at it all in silent horror.

“Well,” I said, aware that I had an audience, “at least now I don’t have to unpack my suitcases.”

“This is terrible!” cried Direttor Rossini, less prepared to look at the upside. “Look at this! Now people will say the hotel is not safe! Oh, careful, don’t step in the glass.”

The floor was covered in glass from the balcony door. The intruder had clearly come for my mother’s box, which was-of course-gone, but the question was why he had proceeded to trash my room. Was there something other than the box that he had been after?

“Cavolo!” sighed Direttor Rossini. “Now I have to call the police, and they will come and take pictures, and the newspapers will write that Hotel Chiusarelli is not safe!”

“Wait!” I said. “Don’t call the police. There’s no need. We know what they came for.” I walked over to the desk where the box had stood. “They won’t be back. Bastards.”

“Oh!” Direttor Rossini suddenly lit up. “I forgot to tell you! Yesterday, I personally brought up your suitcases…”

“Yes, I see that.”

“… and I noticed that you had a very expensive antiquity on that table. So, I made myself the liberty of removing it from this room and putting it in the hotel safe. I hope you do not mind? Normally, I do not interfere-”

I was so relieved, I didn’t even think to bristle at his interference, or to marvel at his foresight. Instead, I grabbed his shoulders. “The box is still here?”

Sure enough, when I followed Direttor Rossini downstairs to his office, I found my mother’s box sitting very snugly in the hotel safe amongst accounting books and silver candelabra. “Bless you!” I said, meaning it, “this box is very special.”

“I know.” He nodded gravely. “My grandmother had one just like it. They don’t make them anymore. It is an old Sienese tradition. We call it the box of secrets, because they have hidden rooms. You can hide things from your parents. Or from your children. Or from anybody.”

“You mean… it has a secret compartment?”

“Yes!” Direttor Rossini took the box and began inspecting it. “I will show you. You have to be a Sienese to know how to find them; it is very sneaky. They are never in the same place. My grandmother’s was on the side, right here… but this is different. This is tricky. Let me see… not here… not here-” He inspected the box from all angles, enjoying the challenge. “She had a lock of hair, nothing else. I found it one day when she was sleeping. I never asked-aha!”

Somehow, Direttor Rossini had managed to locate and trigger the release mechanism to the secret compartment. He smiled in triumph as a quarter of the bottom fell out on the table, followed by a small, rectangular piece of card stock. Turning the box over, we both examined the secret compartment, but it had contained nothing except the card.

“Do you understand this?” I showed Direttor Rossini the letters and numbers that were typed on the card with an old-fashioned typewriter. “It looks like some kind of code.”

“This,” he said, taking it from me, “is an old-how do you say it?-index card. We used these before we had computers. It was before your time. Ah, the world has changed! I remember when-”

“Do you have any idea where it came from?”

“This? Maybe a library? I don’t know. I am not an expert. But”-he glanced at me to gauge whether I was worthy of this level of clearance-“I know someone who is.”

IT TOOK ME A while to find the tiny secondhand bookstore that Direttor Rossini had described, and once I did, it was-of course-closed for lunch. I tried to look through the windows to see if there was anyone inside, but saw nothing but books and more books.

Walking around the corner to Piazza del Duomo, I sat down to pass the time on the front steps of the Siena Cathedral. Despite the tourists milling in and out of the church doors, there was something tranquil about the whole place, something very grounded and eternal that made me feel that had I not been on a mission, I could have sat there forever, just like the building itself, and watched with a mix of nostalgia and compassion the perennial rebirth of mankind.

The most striking feature of the cathedral was the bell tower. It was not as tall as the Mangia Tower, Direttor Rossini’s virile lily in the Campo, but what made it the more remarkable of the two was the fact that it was zebra-striped. Slim, alternating layers of white and black stone continued all the way to the very top, like a biscuit staircase to Heaven, and I could not help but wonder about the symbolism of the pattern. Perhaps there was none. Perhaps the purpose had simply been to make it striking. Or perhaps it was a reflection of the Siena coat of arms, the Balzana-part black, part white, like a stemless wineglass half filled with the most stygian red wine-which I found equally perplexing.

Direttor Rossini had told me some story about Roman twins escaping their evil uncle on a black and a white horse, but I was not convinced this was the underlying narrative of the colors of the Balzana. It had to be something about contrasts. Something about the perilous art of uniting extremes and forcing compromises, or perhaps about acknowledging that life is a delicate balance of great forces, and that good would lose its potency if there was no evil left to fight in the world.

But I was no philosopher, and the sun was beginning to let me know that it was the hour when only mad dogs and Englishmen exposed themselves to its rays. Walking back around the corner I saw that the bookstore was still closed, and I sighed and looked at my watch, wondering where I should seek refuge until it suited Direttor Rossini’s mother’s childhood friend to return from lunch.

THE AIR IN THE SIENA CATHEDRAL was full of gold and shadows. Around me on all sides, massive black-and-white pillars held up a vast heaven sprinkled with little stars, and the mosaic floor was a giant jigsaw puzzle of symbols and legends that I somehow knew-as one knows the sounds of a foreign language-but did not understand.

The place was as different from the modern churches of my childhood as one religion from another, and yet I felt my heart responding to it with mystified recognition, as if I had been there before, looking for the same God, a long, long time ago. And it suddenly occurred to me that here, for the first time, I was standing in a building that resembled my dream castle of whispering ghosts. Perhaps, I thought, gaping up at the star-spangled dome in this silent forest of silver-birch columns, someone had brought me to this very cathedral when I was a baby, and I had somehow stored it in my memory without knowing what it was.

The only other time I had been in a church of this size was when Umberto had taken me to the Basilica of the National Shrine in Washington, playing hooky after a dentist appointment. I could not have been more than six or seven years old, but I vividly remembered him kneeling down next to me in the middle of the enormous floor and asking me, “Do you hear it?”

“Hear what?” I had asked, the little plastic bag with a new pink toothbrush clutched in my hand.

He had cocked his head playfully. “The angels. If you are very quiet, you can hear them giggle.”

“What are they laughing at?” I had wanted to know. “Us?”

“They take flying lessons here. There is no wind, only the breath of God.”

“Is that what makes them fly? The breath of God?”

“There is a trick to flying. The angels told me.” He had smiled at my wide-eyed awe. “You need to forget everything you know as a human being. When you are human, you discover that there is great power in hating the earth. And it can almost make you fly. But it never will.”

I had frowned, not quite understanding him. “So, what’s the trick?”

“Love the sky.”

While I was standing there, lost in the memory of Umberto’s rare, emotional gush, a group of British tourists came up behind me, their guide talking animatedly about the many failed attempts at finding and excavating the old cathedral crypt-allegedly in existence in the Middle Ages, but now apparently lost forever.

I listened for a while, amused by the sensationalist bent of the guide, before leaving the cathedral to the tourists and strolling down Via del Capitano to end up-much to my surprise-back in Piazza Postierla, right across from Malèna’s espresso bar.

The little square had been quite busy the other times I had been there, but today it was pleasantly calm, perhaps because it was siesta time and sizzling hot. A pedestal with a wolf and two suckling babes stood opposite a small water fountain with a fierce-looking metal bird hovering above it. Two children, a boy and a girl, were splashing water on each other and running to and fro, shrieking with laughter, while a row of old men sat in the shade not far away, hats on, jackets off, looking with mild eyes on their own immortality.

“Hello again!” said Malèna when she saw me entering the bar. “Luigi did a good job, no?”

“He’s a genius.” I walked up to her and leaned on the cool countertop, feeling strangely at home. “I’m never going to leave Siena for as long as he is here.”

She laughed out loud, a warm, knowing laughter that made me once again wonder about the secret ingredient in these women’s lives. Whatever it was, I was clearly missing it. It was so much more than just self-confidence; it seemed to be the ability to love oneself, enthusiastically and unsparingly, body and soul, naturally followed by the assumption that every man on the planet is dying to get in on the act.

“Here”-Malèna placed an espresso in front of me and added a biscotto with a little wink-“eat more. It gives you… you know, character.”

“Fierce-looking creature,” I said, referring to the fountain outside.

“What kind of bird is it?”

“It is our eagle, aquila in Italian. The fountain is our… oh, what is it?” She bit her lip, searching for the word. “Fonte battesimale… our font for baptism? Yes! This is where we bring our babies so they become aquilini, little eagles.”

“This is the Eagle contrada?” I glanced around at the other customers, suddenly all goose-bumpy. “Is it true that the eagle symbol originally came from the Marescotti family?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding, “but we didn’t invent it, of course. The eagle came originally from the Romans, and then Carlomagno took it over, and since the Marescottis were in his army, we had the right to use this imperial symbol. But nobody knows that anymore.”

I stared at her, almost certain she had referred to the Marescottis as if she was, in fact, one of them. But just as I opened my mouth to ask the question, the grinning face of a waiter came between us. “Only the people who are lucky enough to work here. We know everything about her big bird.”

“Just ignore him,” said Malèna, pretending to hit him over the head with a tray. “He is from Contrada della Torre-the Tower, you know.” She grimaced. “Always being funny.”

Just then, in the middle of the general amusement, something outside caught my eye. It was a black motorcycle and rider, visor closed, pausing briefly to look through the glass door before speeding up with a roar and disappearing.

“Ducati Monster S4,” the waiter recited, as if he had memorized the ad from a magazine, “a real street fighter. Liquid-cooled motor. She makes men dream of blood, and they wake up in a sweat and try to catch her. But she has no grab rails. So”-he patted his belly suggestively-“don’t invite a girl on board if you don’t have a six-pack antilock braking system.”

“Basta, basta, Dario!” scolded Malèna. “Tu parli di niente!”

“Do you know that guy?” I asked, trying to sound casual while feeling everything but.

“That guy?” She rolled her eyes, not impressed. “You know what they say… those who make a lot of noise, they are missing something down there.”

“I don’t make a lot of noise!” protested Dario.

“I was not talking about you, stupido! I was talking about the moscerino on the motorcycle.”

“Do you know who he is?” I asked again.

She shrugged. “I like men with cars. Men on motorcycles… they are playboys. You can put a girlfriend on a motorcycle, yes, but what about your children and your bridesmaids, and your mother-in-law?”

“Exactly my point,” said Dario, wiggling his eyebrows. “I am saving up for one.”

By now, several other customers were getting audibly impatient in the queue behind me, and although Malèna seemed quite comfortable ignoring them all for as long as she damn well wanted, I decided to postpone my questions about the Marescottis and their possible present-day descendants to some other time.

As I walked away from the bar, I kept looking around for the motorcycle, but it was nowhere to be seen. Of course, I could not be sure, but my intuition told me this was the same guy who had bullied me the night before, and, honestly, if he really was a playboy looking for someone to hug his abs, I could think of better ways to start that conversation.

WHEN THE OWNER of the bookstore finally came back from lunch, I was sitting on her front step, leaning against the door, very close to giving up on the whole thing. But my patience was rewarded, for the woman-a sweet old lady whose spindly frame seemed to be propelled into motion by little more than an enormous curiosity-took one look at the index card and nodded right away.

“Ah, yes,” she said in fluent English, not the least bit surprised, “this is from the university archive. The history collection. I think they still use the old catalogue. Let me see now-yes, see, this stands for Late Middle Ages. And this means local. And look”-she showed me the codes on the card-“this is the letter of the shelf, K, and this is the number of the drawer, 3-17b. But it doesn’t say what is in it. Anyway, that is what the code means.” Having solved the mystery so quickly, she looked up at me, hoping for another. “How did you get this card?”

“My mother-or rather, my father-I think he was a professor at the university. Professor Tolomei?”

The old woman lit up like a Christmas tree. “I remember him! I was his student! You know, he was the one who organized that whole collection. It was a mess. I spent two summers gluing numbers on drawers. But… I wonder why he took out this card. He was always so upset when people left the index cards lying around.”

THE UNIVERSITY OF SIENA was scattered all over town, but the history archive was no more than a brisk walk away, out towards the city gate called Porta Tufi. It took me a while to find the right building among the inconspicuous façades lining the road; in the end what gave it away as a place for education was the patchwork of socialist posters on the fence outside.

Hoping very much to blend in with the general student population, I entered through the door that the bookseller had described to me, and headed straight for the basement. Perhaps because it was still siesta-or perhaps because no one was around during the summer-I was able to get downstairs without meeting a single person; the whole place was blissfully cool and quiet. It was almost too easy.

With nothing but the index card to guide me, I walked through the archive several times, trying in vain to find the appropriate shelves. It was a separate collection, the bookseller had explained, and even back then, people had rarely used it. I had to find the remotest part of the archive, but this instruction was complicated by the fact that every part of the archive seemed remote to me. Furthermore, the shelves I was looking at did not have drawers; they were regular shelves with books, not artifacts. And there was no book labeled K 3-17b.

After walking around for at least twenty minutes, it finally occurred to me to try a door at the far end of the room. It was a sealed metal door, almost like the door to a bank vault, but it opened without a problem, revealing yet another-smaller-room with some sort of climate control that made the air smell very different, like chocolate chip mothballs.

Now, finally, my index card made sense. These shelves were indeed full of drawers, exactly the way the bookseller had described. And the collection was organized chronologically, starting in Etruscan times and ending-I guessed-at the year my father died. It was quite obvious that nobody ever used it, for there was a thick layer of dust everywhere, and when I tried to move the rolling ladder it resisted at first, because the metal wheels had rusted to the floor. When it finally moved, squealing in protest, it left behind little brown imprints on the gray linoleum.

I positioned the ladder by the shelf labeled K, and climbed up to take a closer look at row number 3, which consisted of a couple dozen medium-size drawers, all perfectly out of reach and out of mind, unless you had a ladder and knew precisely what you were looking for. At first, it felt as if drawer number 17b was locked, and only after I knocked on it with my fist several times did it come loose and allow me to pull it open. In all likelihood, no one else had opened that drawer since my father closed it decades ago.

Inside, I found a large package wrapped in airtight, brown plastic. Poking gently at it, I could feel that it contained some kind of spongy fabric, almost like a bag of foam from a textile store. Mystified, I took the package out of the drawer, climbed back down the ladder, and sat down on the bottom step to inspect my findings.

Rather than ripping open the whole thing, I stuck a fingernail into the plastic and made a small hole. As soon as the air seal was broken, the bag seemed to take a deep breath, and a corner of faded blue fabric peeked out. Making the hole a little bigger, I felt the fabric with my fingers. I was no expert, but I suspected it was silk and-despite its fine condition-very, very old.

Knowing full well that I was exposing something delicate to air and light at once, I eased the fabric out of the plastic and began unfolding it in my lap. When I did so, an object fell out and hit the linoleum floor with a metallic clang.

It was a large knife in a golden sheath, which had been hidden within the folds of the silk. As I picked it up, I noticed it had an eagle engraved on the hilt.

Sitting there, weighing this unexpected treasure in my hand, I suddenly heard a noise from the other part of the archive. Only too aware that I was trespassing in a facility that undoubtedly held many irreplaceable treasures, I rose with a guilty gasp and bundled up my loot as best I could. The last thing I wanted was to be discovered in the fancy, climate-controlled vault with canary feathers sticking out of my mouth.

As silently as possible, I slipped back into the main library, pulling the metal door almost shut behind me. Crouching behind the last row of bookcases, I listened intently. But the only sound I could hear was my own unsteady breath. All I had to do was to walk over to those stairs and leave the building as casually as I had entered it.

I was wrong. No sooner had I made the decision to move than I heard the sound of footsteps; not the footsteps of a librarian returning from siesta or a student looking for a book, but the ominous footsteps of someone who did not want me to hear him coming, someone whose errand in the archive was even more dubious than mine. Peeking out through the shelves I saw him coming my way-and yes, it was the same old scum who had followed me the night before-slithering from bookcase to bookcase, his eyes fixed on the metal door to the vault. But this time, he was carrying a gun.

It was only a matter of seconds before he would come to the place where I was hiding. Almost sick with fear, I wormed my way along the bookcase until I reached the far end of it. Here, a narrow aisle went along the wall all the way up to the librarian’s desk, and I tiptoed as far as I dared before drawing in my stomach and leaning against the narrow end piece of a bookcase, hoping very much to be exactly out of sight when the thug walked past me in the aisle at the other end.

As I stood there, too afraid to breathe, I had to fight the urge to run like hell. Forcing myself to stay absolutely still, I waited for a few extra seconds before I finally dared to stretch and look, and saw him slipping silently into the vault.

Peeling off my shoes with trembling fingers, I scurried all the way up the aisle, turned the corner by the librarian’s desk, and continued up the stairs three steps at a time without even pausing to look behind me.

Not until I was far away from the university premises and safely up some obscure little street did I dare to slow down and feel a kind of relief. But it was not a lasting feeling. In all likelihood, this was the guy who had trashed my hotel room, and the only upside to that was that I had not been asleep in my bed when he came.

PEPPO TOLOMEI WAS almost as surprised to see me as I was to find myself back so soon at the Owl Museum. “Giulietta!” he exclaimed, putting down a trophy and rag, “What is wrong? And what is that?”

We both looked at the messy bundle in my arms. “I have no idea,” I confessed. “But I think it belonged to my father.”

“Here-” He cleared a space on the table for me, and I put down the blue silk very gently, thus revealing the knife nested within.

“Do you have any idea,” I said, picking up the knife, “where this came from?”

But Peppo was not looking at the knife. Instead, he began unfolding the silk with reverent hands. Once it was spread out in its entirety, he took a step backwards, overwhelmed, and crossed himself. “Where on earth,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper, “did you find this?”

“Um… it was in my father’s collection at the university. It was wrapped around the knife. I didn’t realize it was something special.”

Peppo looked at me in surprise. “You don’t know what this is?”

I looked more closely at the blue silk. It was much longer than it was wide, almost like a banner, and a female figure had been painted on it, her hair bound by a halo and her hands raised in a blessing. Time had faded her colors, but the enchantment was still there. Even a philistine like myself could see that it was a picture of the Virgin Mary. “It’s a religious flag?”

“This,” said Peppo, straightening in respect, “is a cencio, the grand prize of the Palio. But it is very old. See the Roman numbers down in the corner? That is the year.” He leaned in once again to verify the numerals. “Yes! Santa Maria!” He turned towards me, eyes glowing. “Not only is this an antique cencio, it is the most legendary cencio there ever was! Everyone thought it was lost forever. But here it is! It is the cencio from the Palio of 1340. A great treasure! It was lined with little tails of… I don’t know the word in English. Look”-he pointed at the ragged edges of the fabric-“they were here and here. Not squirrels. Special squirrels. But now they are gone.”

“So,” I said, “what would this kind of thing be worth? In terms of money?”

“Money?” The concept was foreign to Peppo, who looked at me as if I had asked what Jesus charged per hour. “But this is the prize! It is very special… a great honor. Ever since the Middle Ages, the winner of the Palio would get a beautiful silk banner lined with expensive fur; the Romans called it a pallium, and this is why our race is called the Palio. Look”-he pointed his cane at some of the banners hanging on the walls around us-“every time our contrada wins the Palio, we get a new cencio for our collection. The oldest ones we have are two hundred years old.”

“So, you don’t have any other cencios from the fourteenth century?”

“Oh, no!” Peppo shook his head vigorously. “This is very, very special. You see, in the old days, the man who won the Palio would take the cencio and turn it into clothes and wear it on his body in triumph. That is why they are all lost.”

“Then it must be worth something,” I insisted. “If it’s so rare, I mean.”

“Money-money-money!” he gibed. “Money is not everything. Don’t you understand? This is about Siena history!”

My cousin’s enthusiasm stood in sharp contrast to my own state of mind. Apparently, this morning, I had risked my life for a rusty old knife and a faded flag. Yes, it was a cencio, and as such it was an invaluable, almost magical artifact to the Sienese, but, unless I was mistaken, a completely worthless old rag if I ever took it beyond the walls of Siena.

“What about the knife?” I said. “Have you ever seen that before?”

Peppo turned back to the table and picked up the knife. “This,” he said, pulling the rusty blade out of the sheath and examining it underneath the chandelier, “is a dagger. A very handy weapon.” He inspected the engraving very closely, nodding to himself as the whole thing-apparently-began to make sense. “An eagle. Of course. And it was hidden together with the cencio from 1340. To think I should live to see this. Why did he never show me? I suppose he knew what I would say. These are treasures that belong to all of Siena, not just to the Tolomeis.”

“Peppo,” I said, rubbing my forehead, “what am I supposed to do with this?”

He looked at me, his eyes oddly distant, as if he was partly present, partly in 1340. “Remember I told you that your parents believed Romeo and Juliet lived here, in Siena? Well, in 1340 there was a much-disputed Palio. They say the cencio disappeared-this cencio right here-and that a rider died during the race. They also say that Romeo rode in that Palio, and I think this is his dagger.”

Now, finally, my curiosity got the better of my disappointment. “Did he win?”

“I am not sure. Some say he was the one who died. But mark my words”-Peppo looked at me with narrow eyes-“the Marescottis would do anything to get their hands on this.”

“You mean, the Marescottis living in Siena now?”

Peppo shrugged. “Whatever you believe about the cencio, the dagger belonged to Romeo. See the engraving of the eagle right here on the hilt? Can you imagine what a treasure this would be to them?”

“I suppose I could return it-”

“No!” The giddy glee in my cousin’s eyes now gave way to other emotions, far less charming. “You must leave it here! This is a treasure that now belongs to all of Siena, not just to the aquilini or the Marescottis. You did very well to bring it here. We must discuss it with all the magistrates of all the contrade. They know best. And meanwhile, I will put it in our safe, away from light and air.” He began eagerly folding up the cencio. “I promise you, I will take very good care of it. Our safe is very safe.”

“But my parents left it for me-” I dared to object.

“Yes-yes-yes, but this is not something that should belong to any one person. Don’t worry, the magistrates will know what to do.”

“How about-”

Peppo looked at me sternly. “I am your godfather. Do you not trust me?”