Juliet

IX.II

WHEN I HAD LEFT SIENA with Alessandro the day before, I had not imagined I would be returning so soon, so dirty, and with my hands cuffed. And I had certainly not anticipated being accompanied by my sister, my father, and three thugs who looked as if they had been sprung from death row, not by paperwork, but by dynamite.

It was clear that, even though he knew them by name, Umberto was as much a hostage to these men as we were. They tossed him into the back of their van-a small flower delivery truck, most likely stolen-just as they did Janice and me, and we all fell hard on the metal floor. With our arms tied, there was little but a potpourri of rotting flower cuttings to block the fall.

“Hey!” protested Janice, “we’re your daughters, right? Tell them they can’t treat us like this. Honestly-Jules, say something to him.”

But I couldn’t think of anything to say. I felt as if the whole world had turned upside down around me-or maybe the world was right side up, and I was the one who had completely keeled over. Still struggling to process Umberto’s transformation from hero to villain, I now had to accept the fact that he was my father as well, which almost took me full circle and back to square one: I loved him, but I really shouldn’t.

Just as the villains pulled the doors closed behind us, I caught a glimpse of another victim they had already picked up somewhere en route. The man was propped up in a corner, gagged and blindfolded; had it not been for his clothes, I would never have recognized him. Now at last, the words came to me spontaneously. “Friar Lorenzo!” I cried. “My God! They’ve kidnapped Friar Lorenzo!”

Just then, the van jolted into action, and we spent the next few minutes sliding back and forth on the ridged floor, while the driver took us through the wilderness of Mom’s driveway.

As soon as things were smoother, Janice let out a deep, unhappy sigh. “Okay,” she said, loudly, into the darkness, “you win. The gems are yours… or, theirs. We don’t want them anyway. And we’ll help you. We’ll do anything. Anything they want. You’re our dad, right? We gotta stick together! There’s no need to… kill us. Is there?”

Her question was met by silence.

“Look,” Janice went on, her voice shaky with fear, “I hope they know they’ll never find that statue without us-”

Umberto still didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. Even though we had already told the bandits about the supposed secret entrance in Santa Maria della Scala, they clearly thought they might still need us to help them find the gems, or they surely wouldn’t have brought us along for the ride.

“What about Friar Lorenzo?” I asked.

Now at last, Umberto spoke. “What about him?”

“Come on,” said Janice, recovering some of her spirit, “do you really think the poor guy is going to be of any help whatsoever?”

“Oh, he’ll sing.”

When Umberto heard us both gasp at his indifference, he made a sound that could have been laughter, but probably wasn’t. “What the hell did you expect?” he grunted. “That they’d just… give up? You’re lucky we tried it the nice way first-”

“The nice way-?” cried Janice, but I managed to poke her with my knee and shut her up.

“Unfortunately,” Umberto went on, “our little Julie didn’t play her role.”

“It might have helped if I knew I had a role!” I pointed out, my throat so tight I could barely get the words out. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did it have to be like this? We could have gone treasure hunting years ago, together. It could have been… fun.”

“Oh, I see!” Umberto shifted around in the darkness, clearly as uncomfortable as we were. “You think this is what I want? Come back here, risk everything, play charades with old monks and get kicked around by these assholes, all to search for a couple rocks that probably disappeared hundreds of years ago? I don’t think you realize-” He sighed. “Of course you don’t. Why do you think I let Aunt Rose take you away and bring you up in the States? Huh? I’ll tell you why. Because they would have used you against me… to make me work for them again. There was only one solution: We had to disappear.”

“Are you talking about… the Mafia?” asked Janice.

Umberto laughed scornfully. “The Mafia! These people make the Mafia look like the Salvation Army. They recruited me when I needed money, and once you’re on the hook, you don’t get off. If you wiggle, the hook just goes deeper.”

I heard Janice take in air for a bitchy comment, but somehow managed to elbow her in the darkness and silence her yet again. Provoking Umberto and starting an argument was not the way to prepare for whatever lay ahead, I was sure of that much.

“So, let me guess,” I said, as calmly as I could, “the moment they don’t need us anymore… it’s over?”

Umberto hesitated. “Cocco owes me a favor. I spared his life once. I’m hoping he’ll return the favor.”

“So,” said Janice, “he’ll spare you. What about us?”

There was a long silence, or at least, it felt long. Only now, mixed in with the engine noise and general rattle, did I pick up the sound of someone praying. “And what,” I quickly added, “about Friar Lorenzo?”

“Let’s just hope,” replied Umberto at last, “that Cocco is feeling generous.”

“I don’t get it,” grumbled Janice. “Who are these guys anyway, and why are you letting them do this to us?”

“That,” said Umberto wearily, “is not exactly a bedtime story.”

“Well, this is not exactly a bedside,” Janice pointed out. “So, why don’t you tell us, dear father, what the hell went wrong in fairyland?”

Once he started talking, Umberto could not stop. It was as if he had been waiting to tell us his story all these years, and yet, now that he finally did, he clearly did not feel much relief, for his voice kept getting more and more bitter as he spoke.

His father, he told us, who had been known as Count Salimbeni, had always lamented the fact that his wife, Eva Maria, only ever bore him one child, and had set out to make sure the boy was never spoiled and always disciplined. Enrolled in a military academy against his will, Umberto had eventually run away to Naples to find a job and maybe go to university and study music, but he had quickly run out of money. So, he had started doing jobs that other people were afraid to do, and he was good at it. Somehow, breaking the law came naturally to him, and it was not long before he owned ten tailored suits, a Ferrari, and a patrician apartment with no furniture. It was paradise.

When he finally went back to visit his parents at Castello Salimbeni, he pretended that he had become a stockbroker, and managed to persuade his father to forgive him for dropping out of the military academy. A few days later his parents hosted a big party, and among the guests were Professor Tolomei and his young American assistant, Diane.

Stealing her right off the dance floor, Umberto took Diane for a drive under the full moon, and that was the beginning of a long, beautiful summer. Soon, they were spending every weekend together, driving around Tuscany, and when he finally invited her to visit him in Naples, she said yes. There, over a bottle of wine in the best restaurant in town, he dared to tell her the truth about what he did for a living.

Diane was horrified. She did not want to listen to his explanations, or his apologies, and as soon as she was back in Siena she returned everything he had given her-jewelry, clothes, letters-and told him she never wanted to hear from him again.

After that, he did not see her for over a year, and when he did, he had a shock. Diane was walking across the Campo in Siena, pushing a stroller with twins, and someone told him she was now married to old Professor Tolomei. Umberto knew right away that he was the father of the twins, and when he walked up to Diane, she went pale and said, yes, he was their father, but she did not want her girls to be raised by a criminal.

Now Umberto did something horrible. He remembered that Diane had told him about Professor Tolomei’s research and a statue with gemstone eyes, and, because he was sick with jealousy, Umberto told the story to some people back in Naples. It was not long before his boss heard about it, too, and pressured him to look up Professor Tolomei and find out more, and so he did, with two other men. They waited until Diane and the twins were away from home before knocking on the door. The professor was very polite and invited them inside, but he soon turned hostile when he discovered why they had come.

Seeing that the professor was unwilling to speak, Umberto’s two partners began putting pressure on the old man, and he ended up having a heart attack and dying. Umberto, of course, was terrified about this, and tried to revive the professor, but it was all in vain. He now told the others he would meet them back in Naples, and as soon as they had left, he set fire to the house, hoping to burn all the professor’s research together with the body and put an end to the story of the golden statue.

After this tragedy, Umberto decided to break with his evil past, and to move back to Tuscany, living on the money he had made. Some months after the fire he looked up Diane and told her that he was now an honest man. At first, she didn’t believe him, and accused him of having had a hand in the suspicious fire that killed her husband. But Umberto was determined to win her over, and she eventually came around, even though she never fully believed in his innocence.

They lived together for two years, almost like a family, and Umberto even took Diane back to visit Castello Salimbeni. Of course, he never told his parents the truth about the twins, and his father was furious with him for not getting married and having children of his own. For who would inherit Castello Salimbeni, if Umberto did not have children?

It would have been a happy time, had not Diane become increasingly obsessed with what she called “the curse on both our houses.” She had told him about it when they first met, but he had not taken it seriously at the time. Now he had to finally accept the fact that this beautiful woman-the mother of his children-was by nature a very nervous and compulsive person, and that the pressure of motherhood only made it worse. Instead of children’s books, she would read Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to the little girls, over and over, until Umberto would come and gently take the book away. But no matter where he hid it, she would always find it again.

And when the twins were asleep, she would spend hours in solitude, trying to re-create Professor Tolomei’s research into family treasures and the location of Romeo and Giulietta’s grave. She was not interested in the gems; all she wanted was to save her daughters. She was convinced that, because the little girls had a Tolomei mother and a Salimbeni father, they would be doubly vulnerable to Friar Lorenzo’s curse.

Umberto did not even realize how close Diane was to figuring out the location of the grave when, one day, some of his old buddies from Naples showed up at the house and started asking questions. Knowing that these men were pure evil, Umberto told Diane to take the twins out back and hide, while he did his best to explain to the men that neither he nor she knew anything.

But when Diane heard them beating him up, she came back with a gun and told them to leave her family alone. Seeing that they did not listen, she tried to shoot them, but she was not used to the gun, and she missed. Instead, they shot and killed her. After that, the men told Umberto it was just the beginning; if he did not give them the four gemstones, they would come for his daughters next.

At this point in the story, Janice and I both burst out, simultaneously, “So, you didn’t kill Mom?”

“Of course not!” Umberto snapped. “How could you think that?”

“Maybe,” said Janice, all choked up, “because you’ve lied about everything else until now.”

Umberto sighed deeply and shifted around again, unable to find comfort. Frustrated and tired, he resumed his story and told us that, after the men had killed Diane and left the house, he was heartbroken and didn’t know what to do. The last thing he wanted was to call the police, or the priest, and risk some bureaucrats taking the girls away. So, he took Diane’s body and drove it to a deserted place, where he could push the car from a cliff to make it look as if she had died in a car accident. He even put some of the girls’ things in the car to make people think they had died, too. Then he took the girls and left them with their godparents, Peppo and Pia Tolomei, but drove away before they could ask him any questions.

“Wait!” exclaimed Janice. “What about the bullet wound? Wouldn’t the police notice that she was dead before the car crash?”

Umberto hesitated, then said reluctantly, “I torched the car. I didn’t think they would dig into it that much. Why would they? They get their paycheck anyway. But some smart-ass journalist started asking questions, and before I knew it they had me framed for all of it-the professor, the fire, your mother… even you two, for God’s sake.”

That same night, Umberto went on to tell us, he had called Aunt Rose in the States and pretended to be a police officer from Siena. He told her that her niece had died, and that the little girls were left with family, and he also told her they were not safe in Italy, and that she had better come and get them right away. After the phone call, he drove down to Naples and paid a visit to the men who had killed Diane, and to most of the other people who knew about the treasure. He did not even try to hide his identity. He wanted it to be a warning. The only one he didn’t kill was Cocco. He couldn’t bring himself to kill a boy of nineteen.

After that, he disappeared for many months, while the police were looking for him everywhere. In the end, he went to the States to find the girls and see that they were well. He did not have any specific plans; once he found out where they lived, he just hung around waiting for something to happen. A few days later he saw a woman walking about in the garden, trimming roses. Assuming it was Aunt Rose, he approached her and asked if she needed someone to help her with yard work. That was how it started. Six months later Umberto moved in full-time, agreeing to work for little more than house and board.

“I don’t believe it!” I burst out. “Did she never wonder how you just… happened to be in the neighborhood?”

“She was lonely,” Umberto muttered, clearly not proud of himself. “Too young to be a widow, but too old to be a mother. She was ready to believe anything.”

“And what about Eva Maria? Did she know where you were?”

“I stayed in touch with her, but I never said where I was over the phone. And I never told her about you two.”

Umberto went on to explain that he had been afraid that if Eva Maria found out she had two granddaughters, she would insist they all move back to Italy again. He knew very well that he could never go back; people would recognize him, and the police would undoubtedly be on to him right away, despite his false name and passport. And even if she didn’t insist, he knew his mother well enough to fear that she would somehow contrive a way to see the girls, thereby compromising their safety. Failing that, Eva Maria would most certainly spend the rest of her life pining for the granddaughters she had never met, eventually die of a broken heart, and undoubtedly blame Umberto. So, for all those excellent reasons, he never told her.

As time went by, however, Umberto began to believe his evil past in Naples was buried for good. But that ended abruptly when, one day, he noticed a limousine coming up Aunt Rose’s driveway and stopping in front of the door. There were four men in the car, and he immediately recognized Cocco among them. He never found out how they had located him after all those years, but suspected they had bribed people in the intelligence community to trace Eva Maria’s phone calls.

The men told Umberto he still owed them something, and that he had to repay them, or they would track down his daughters and do unspeakable things to them. Umberto told them he had no money, but they just laughed at him and reminded him of the statue with the four gemstones that he had promised them a long time ago. When he tried to explain that it was impossible, and that he couldn’t go back to Italy, they just shrugged and said that it was too bad, because now they had to go looking for his daughters. So, in the end, Umberto agreed to try and find the gems, and they gave him three weeks to do it.

Before they left, they wanted to make sure he knew they were serious, and so they took him into the hall and started beating him up. While they were doing that, they knocked over the Venetian vase standing on the table beneath the chandelier, and it fell to the floor and smashed into pieces. The noise woke Aunt Rose from her nap, and she came out of her bedroom and-when she saw what was going on-started screaming from the top of the staircase. One of the men pulled out a gun and was going to shoot her, but Umberto managed to push the gun aside. Unfortunately, Aunt Rose was so frightened she lost her balance and fell halfway down the staircase. When the men had left and Umberto was finally able to get to her, she was already dead.

“Poor Aunt Rose!” I exclaimed. “You told me she died peacefully, in her sleep.”

“Well, I lied,” said Umberto, his voice thick. “The truth is, she died because of me. Would you have liked me to say that?”

“I would have liked,” I replied, “for you to tell us the truth. If you had only done that years ago”-I paused to take a deep breath, my throat still tight with emotion-“perhaps we could have avoided all this.”

“Maybe. But that’s too late now. I didn’t want you to know-I wanted you to be happy… to live the way normal people do.”

Umberto went on to tell us that on the night after Aunt Rose died, he had called Eva Maria in Italy and told her everything. He even told her she had two granddaughters. He also asked her if there was any chance she could help him pay off the thugs. But she told him she could not liquidate that much money in three weeks. At first, she wanted to involve the police and her godson, Alessandro, but Umberto knew better. There was only one way out of this squeeze: Do as the assholes said and find the bloody rocks.

In the end, Eva Maria agreed to help him, and promised that she would try to trick the Lorenzo Brotherhood in Viterbo into helping her. Her only condition was that, when it was all over, she could finally get to know her granddaughters, and that they would never know about their father’s crimes. With this, Umberto agreed. He had never wanted the girls to know about his evil past, and for that reason he did not even want them to know who he really was. He was sure that if they learned he was their father, they would discover everything else, too.

“But that’s ridiculous!” I protested. “If you had told us the truth, we would have understood.”

“Would you?” said Umberto. “I’m not so sure.”

“Well,” Janice cut in, “we’ll never know now, will we?”

Ignoring her comment, Umberto told us that, on the very next day, Eva Maria had gone to Viterbo to talk to Friar Lorenzo, and through this conversation she had found out what was needed in order for the monks to help her find Romeo and Giulietta’s grave. Friar Lorenzo had told her she must host a ceremony to “undo the sins” of the Salimbenis and the Tolomeis, and had promised that, once she had done this, he would take her and the other penitents to the grave, to kneel before the mercy of the Virgin.

The only problem was that Friar Lorenzo was not entirely sure how to find the place. He knew there was a secret entrance somewhere in Siena, and he knew where to go from there, but he didn’t know where exactly that entrance was located. Once, he told Eva Maria, a young woman by the name of Diane Tolomei had visited him and told him she had figured out where the entrance was, but she wouldn’t tell him, because she was afraid the wrong people might find the statue and ruin it.

She had also told him she had found the cencio from 1340, and that she was going to do an experiment. She wanted to have her little girl, Giulietta, lie down on it together with a boy named Romeo, and she very much hoped this would somehow help undo the sins of the past. Friar Lorenzo was not so sure it would really work, but he was ready to give it a try. They agreed that Diane should come back a few weeks later, so they could set out to find the grave together. But sadly, she never came.

When Eva Maria told Umberto all this, he began to hope their plan could really work. For he knew Diane had kept a box of important documents in the bank in Palazzo Tolomei, and he was sure that among the papers would be a clue to the secret entrance to the grave.

“Believe me,” said Umberto, perhaps feeling my bad vibes, “the last thing I wanted was to involve you in all this. But with only two weeks left-”

“And so you set me up,” I concluded, feeling a whole new kind of anger towards him, “and let me think this was all Aunt Rose’s doing.”

“What about me?” Janice chimed in. “He let me think I’d inherited a fortune!”

“Tough shit!” Umberto shot back. “Be happy you’re still alive!”

“I suppose I wasn’t any good in your little scheme,” Janice went on, in her most cranky voice. “Jules was always the brainy one.”

“Oh, would you stop it!” I cried. “I am Giulietta, and I am the one who was in danger-”

“Enough!” barked Umberto. “Trust me, I would have liked nothing more than to keep you both out of this. But there was no other way. So, I had an old pal keep an eye on Julie to make sure she was safe-”

“You mean Bruno?” I gasped. “I thought he was trying to kill me!”

“He was there to protect you,” Umberto contradicted me. “Unfortunately, he thought he could make a quick buck on the side.” He sighed. “Bruno was a mistake.”

“So you had him… silenced?” I wanted to know.

“No need. Bruno knew too much about too many. People like that don’t last long in the clink.” Not at all comfortable with the issue, Umberto went on to conclude that, on the whole, everything had gone according to plan once Eva Maria had been convinced I was really her granddaughter and not just some actress he had hired for the job, to lure her into helping him. She was so suspicious she even had Alessandro break into my hotel room to get a DNA sample. But once she had the proof she wanted, she immediately set about planning the party.

Remembering everything Friar Lorenzo had told her, Eva Maria asked Alessandro to bring Romeo’s dagger and Giulietta’s ring to Castello Salimbeni, but she didn’t tell him why. She knew that if he had the smallest inkling of what was going on, he would ruin everything by bringing in the Carabinieri. In fact, Eva Maria would have liked nothing more than to keep her godson out of her plans entirely, but since he was, in fact, Romeo Marescotti, she needed him to-unwittingly-play his part in front of Friar Lorenzo.

In hindsight, admitted Umberto, it would have been better if Eva Maria had let me in on her plans, or at least part of them. But that was only because things went wrong. If I had done what I was supposed to do-drink her wine, go to bed, and fall asleep-everything would have been so smooth.

“Wait!” I said. “Are you saying she drugged me?”

Umberto hesitated. “Just a little bit. For your own safety.”

“I can’t believe it! She is my grandmother!”

“If it’s any consolation, she wasn’t happy about it. But I told her it was the only way we could avoid getting you involved. You and Alessandro. Unfortunately, it looks like he didn’t drink it either.”

“But wait a minute!” I objected. “He stole Mom’s book from my hotel room and gave it to you last night! I saw it with my own eyes!”

“You’re wrong!” Umberto was clearly annoyed with me for contradicting him, and possibly a little shocked that I had witnessed his secret meeting with Alessandro. “He was only a courier. Someone in Siena gave him the book yesterday morning and asked him to pass it on to Eva Maria. He obviously didn’t know it was stolen, or he would have-”

“Wait!” said Janice. “This is too stupid. Whoever the thief was, why the heck didn’t he steal the whole box? Why just the paperback?”

Umberto hesitated, then said, quietly, “Because your mother told me the code was in the book. She told me that if anything happened to her-” He couldn’t go on.

We were all silent for a while, until Janice sighed and said, “Well, I think you owe Jules an apology-”

“Jan!” I interrupted her. “Let’s not go there.”

“But look what happened to you-” she insisted.

“That was my own fault!” I shot back. “I was the one who-” But I barely knew how to go on.

Umberto grunted. “I can’t believe the two of you! Did I teach you nothing? You have known him for a week-but there you were! And weren’t you two cute!”

“You spied on us?” I felt an explosion of embarrassment. “That is just so-”

“I needed to get the cencio!” Umberto pointed out. “Everything would have been so easy, if it hadn’t been for you two-”

“While we’re on the subject,” Janice cut him off, “how much did Alessandro know about all this?”

Umberto snorted. “Clearly, he knew enough! He knew that Julie was Eva Maria’s granddaughter, but that Eva Maria wanted to tell her in person. That’s it. As I said, we couldn’t risk getting the police involved. And so Eva Maria didn’t tell him about the ceremony with the ring and the dagger until just before it took place, and, believe me, he was not happy to have been kept in the dark. But he agreed to do it anyway, because she told him it was important for her, and for you, to have a ceremony that would-supposedly-end the family curse.” Umberto paused, then said, more gently, “It’s too bad things had to end like this.”

“Who says this is the end?” snapped Janice.

Umberto didn’t say it, but I am sure we both knew what he was thinking: Oh it’s the end, all right.

As we lay there in bitter silence, I could feel the blackness closing in on me from all sides, seeping into my body through countless little wounds and filling me to the brim with despair. The fear I had known before, when Bruno Carrera was chasing me, or when Janice and I had been trapped in the Bottini, had been nothing compared to what I felt now, torn by regret and knowing that it was far too late for me to set things straight.

“Just out of curiosity,” muttered Janice, her mind clearly wandering along different paths than mine, although perhaps just as desolate, “did you ever actually love her? Mom, I mean?”

When Umberto didn’t answer right away, she added, more hesitantly, “And did she… love you?”

Umberto sighed. “She loved to hate me. That was her greatest thrill. She said it was in our genes to fight, and that she wouldn’t have it otherwise. She used to call me…” He paused to steady his voice. “Nino.”

WHEN THE VAN finally stopped, I had almost forgotten where we were going, and why. But as soon as the doors swung open to reveal the silhouettes of Cocco and his cronies against the backdrop of a moonlit Siena Cathedral, it all came back to me like a kick to the stomach.

The men pulled us out of the truck by the ankles as if we were nothing but luggage, before climbing in to get Friar Lorenzo. It happened so fast that I barely registered the pain of banging along over the ridged floor, and both Janice and I staggered when they put us down, neither of us quite ready to stand upright after lying so long in the darkness.

“Hey look!” hissed Janice, a spark of hope in her voice. “Musicians!”

She was right. Three other cars were parked a stone’s throw from the van, and half a dozen men wearing tuxedos were standing around with cello and violin cases, smoking and joking. I felt a twitch of relief at the sight, but as soon as Cocco walked towards them, hand raised in a greeting, I understood that these men had not come to play music; they were part of his gang from Naples.

When the men caught sight of Janice and me, they were quick to show their appreciation. Not the least bit concerned about the noise they were making, they began catcalling and whistling, trying to make us look at them. Umberto did not even try to shut down the fun; there was no question that he-and we-were simply lucky to still be alive. Only when the men saw Friar Lorenzo emerging from the van did their glee give way to something resembling uneasiness, and they all bent over to pick up their instrument cases the way schoolboys grab their bags at the arrival of a teacher.

To everyone else in the piazza that night-and there were quite a few, mostly tourists and teenagers-we must have looked like your average group of locals returning from some festivity to do with the Palio. Cocco’s men never stopped chatting and laughing, and in the center of the group Janice and I walked obediently along, each of us draped with a large contrada flag that elegantly concealed the ropes and the switchblade knives pressed against our ribs.

As we approached the main entrance of Santa Maria della Scala, I suddenly caught sight of Maestro Lippi, walking along carrying an easel, undoubtedly preoccupied with otherworldly matters. Not daring to call out and get his attention, I stared at him with as much intensity as I could muster, hoping to reach him in some spiritual way. But when the artist finally glanced in our direction, his eyes merely brushed over us without any recognition, and I deflated with disappointment.

Just then, the bells of the cathedral rang midnight. It had been a hot night so far, still and muggy, and somewhere in the distance, a thunderstorm was brewing. As we came up to the forbidding front door of the old hospital, the first gusts of wind came sweeping across the piazza, turning up every piece of garbage in their way, like invisible demons searching for something, or someone.

Wasting no time, Cocco broke out a cell phone and made a call; seconds later, the two small lights on either side of the door went out, and it was as if the entire building complex exhaled with a deep sigh. With no further ado, he proceeded to take a large, cast-iron key out of his pocket, stick it into the keyhole beneath the massive door handle, and unlock the whole thing with a loud clang.

Only now, as we were about to enter the building, did it occur to me that Santa Maria della Scala was one of the last places in Siena I felt like exploring in the middle of the night, knife against my ribs or no. Although the building had, according to Umberto, been turned into a museum many years ago, it still had a history of sickness and death. Even to someone who didn’t want to believe in ghosts, there were plenty of other things to worry about, starting with dormant plague germs. But it didn’t really matter what I felt like; I had long since lost control over my own fate.

When Cocco opened the door, I was half expecting a rush of fleeting shadows and a smell of decay, but there was nothing but cool darkness on the other side. Even so, both Janice and I hesitated on the threshold, and only when the men yanked at us did we reluctantly stumble forward, into the unknown.

Once everyone was inside and the door securely closed behind us, a host of small lights came on as the men put on headlamps and clicked open their musical instrument cases. Nested in the foam were torchlights, weapons, and power tools, and as soon as everything was assembled, the cases were kicked aside.

“Andiamo!” said Cocco, waving with a submachine gun to make us all straddle the thigh-high security gate. Our hands still tied in the back, Janice and I had a hard time getting over it, and the men eventually grabbed us by the arms and hauled us over, ignoring our cries of pain as our shins scraped against the metal bars.

Now for the first time, Umberto dared to speak out against their brutality, saying something to Cocco that could only mean, come on, go easy on the girls, but all he got for his trouble was an elbow in the chest that made him double over coughing. And when I paused to see if he was okay, two of Cocco’s henchmen took me by the shoulders and thrust me forward impatiently, their stony faces betraying no emotions whatsoever.

The only one they treated with any kind of respect was Friar Lorenzo, who was allowed to take his time and climb the gate with whatever dignity he had left.

“Why is he still blindfolded?” I whispered to Janice, as soon as the men let go of me.

“Because they’re going to let him live,” was her dismal reply.

“Shh!” hushed Umberto, making a face at us. “The less attention you two draw to yourselves, the better.”

Everything considered, that was a tall order. Neither Janice nor I had showered since the day before, let alone washed our hands, and I was still wearing the long, red dress from Eva Maria’s party, although, by now, it was a sorry sight. Earlier that day, Janice had suggested I put on some of the clothes from Mom’s wardrobe and lose the bodice-ripper look. Once I did, however, we had both found the smell of mothballs unbearable. And so here I was, trying to blend in, barefoot and grimy but still dressed for a ball.

We walked for a while in silence, following the bouncing headlamps as they ricocheted along black corridors and down several different staircases, led on by Cocco and one of his lackeys-a tall, jaundiced fellow whose gaunt face and hunched shoulders made me think of a turkey vulture. Every now and then the two of them would stop and orient themselves according to a large piece of paper, which I assumed was a map of the building. And whenever they did, someone would pull hard at my hair or my arm to make sure I stopped, too.

There were five men in front of us and five men behind us at all times, and if I tried to exchange glances with either Janice or Umberto, the guy behind me would dig the muzzle of his gun in between my shoulder blades until I yelped with pain. Right next to me, Janice was getting the exact same treatment and, although I couldn’t look at her, I knew she was just as scared and furious as I was, and just as helpless to fight back.

Despite their tuxedos and gelled hair, there was a sharp, almost rancid odor about the men, which suggested that they, too, felt under pressure. Or maybe it was the building I could smell; the farther into the underground we went, the worse it became. To the eye, the whole place appeared very clean, even sterile, but as we descended into the network of narrow corridors beneath the basement, I couldn’t shake a feeling that-just on the other side of those dry, well-sealed walls-something putrid was slowly eating its way through the plaster.

When the men finally stopped, I had long since lost my sense of direction. It seemed to me that we must be at least fifty feet underground, but I was no longer sure we were directly beneath Santa Maria della Scala. Shivering now with cold, I picked up my frozen feet one by one, to press them briefly against my calves in an attempt at getting the blood flowing.

“Jules!” said Janice suddenly, interrupting my gymnastics. “Come on!”

I half expected someone to hit us both over the head to stop us from talking, but instead, the men pushed us forward until we were face-to-face with Cocco and the turkey vulture.

“E ora, ragazze?” said Cocco, blinding us both with his headlamp.

“What did he say?” hissed Janice, turning her head to avoid the beam.

“Something girlfriend,” I replied under my breath, not at all happy to have recognized the word.

“He said, ‘What now, ladies?’” interjected Umberto. “This is Santa Caterina’s room-where do we go from here?”

Only then did we notice that the turkey vulture was pointing a flashlight through a lattice gate in the wall, illuminating a small, monastic cell with a narrow bed and an altar. On the bed lay a recumbent statue of a woman-presumably Saint Catherine-and the wall behind her bed was painted blue and studded with golden stars.

“Uh,” said Janice, clearly as awestruck as I was to discover that we were actually here, by the chamber mentioned in Mom’s riddle, “‘hand me an iron crow.’”

“And then what?” asked Umberto, anxious to demonstrate to Cocco how useful we were.

Janice and I looked at each other, only too aware that Mom’s directions had ended just about there, with a merry, “and foot it girls!”

“Wait-” I suddenly remembered another little snippet. “Oh yes… ‘away with the cross’-”

“The cross?” Umberto looked mystified. “La croce-”

We all stretched to look into the chamber again, and just as Cocco was shoving us aside to see for himself, Janice nodded vigorously, trying to point with her nose. “There! Look! Under the altar!”

And indeed, beneath the altar was a large marble tile with a black cross on it, looking much like the door to a grave. Not wasting a moment, Cocco took a step back and aimed the submachine gun at the padlock that held the lattice door in place. Before anyone had time to run for cover, he blasted the whole thing open with a deafening salvo that took the gate right off its hinges.

“Oh, Jesus!” cried Janice, grimacing with pain. “I think that blew my eardrums. This guy is a total nutcase!”

Without a word, Cocco spun around and took her by the throat, squeezing so hard she nearly choked. It was all so fast that I hardly even saw what happened, until he suddenly let go of her and she dropped to her knees, gasping for air.

“Oh, Jan!” I cried, kneeling down next to her. “Are you okay?”

It took her a moment to find air for an answer. And when she finally did, her voice was trembling. “Note to self…” she muttered, blinking to clear her eyes, “the little charmer understands English.”

Moments later, the men were going at the cross under the altar with crowbars and drills, and when the tile finally came loose and fell out on the stone floor with a thud that threw up a cloud of dust, none of us was surprised to see that behind it was the entrance to a tunnel.

WHEN JANICE AND I had crawled out of the sewer in the Campo three days earlier, we had promised each other never to go spelunking in the Bottini again. Yet here we were, making our way through a passage that was little more than a wormhole, in near darkness and without a blue sky beckoning us at the other end.

Before pushing us into the hole, Cocco had cut our hands free-not out of kindness, but because it was the only way of bringing us along. Fortunately, he was still under the impression that he needed us in order to find Romeo and Giulietta’s grave; he didn’t know that the cross under the altar in Saint Catherine’s room had been the very last clue in Mom’s directions.

Inching along behind Janice, seeing nothing but her jeans and the random flicker of headlamps against the jagged surface of the tunnel, I wished I had been wearing pants, too. I kept getting caught in the long skirt of the dress, and the thin velvet did nothing to protect my scabby knees from the uneven sandstone. The only upside was that I was so numb with cold I could barely feel the pain.

When we finally came to the end of the tunnel, I was as relieved as the men to find that there was no boulder or pile of rubble blocking our way and forcing us to backtrack. Instead we came out into a wide-open cave, about twenty feet across and tall enough for everyone to stand upright.

“E ora?” said Cocco as soon as Janice and I were within earshot, and this time we did not need Umberto to translate. What now? was indeed the question.

“Oh, no!” Janice whispered, but only to me, “It’s a dead end!”

Behind us, the rest of the men were emerging from the tunnel, too, and one of them was Friar Lorenzo, who was eased out by the turkey vulture and some other guy with a ponytail, as if he were a prince being delivered by royal midwives. Someone had mercifully removed the blindfold before shoving the old monk into the hole, and now Friar Lorenzo stepped forward eagerly, eyes wide with amazement, as if he had completely forgotten the violent circumstances that had brought him here.

“What do we do?” Janice hissed, trying to catch Umberto’s eye. But he was busy brushing dust off his pants and didn’t pick up on the sudden tension. “How do you say dead end in Italian?”

Fortunately for us, Janice was wrong. As I looked around more carefully I saw that there were, in fact, two other exits to the cave, apart from the wormhole we had used to get in. One was in the ceiling, but it was a long, dark shaft, blocked at the top by what looked like a slab of concrete; even with a ladder it would have been impossible to reach. Most of all, it resembled an ancient garbage chute, and this impression was supported by the fact that the other exit was in the floor right beneath it. Or, at least, I assumed there was an opening beneath the rusty metal plate lying on the floor of the cave, well covered in dust and rubble. Anything dropped from aloft would in theory-if both holes had been open-be able to plunge right through the cave without even pausing in between.

Seeing that Cocco was still looking at Janice and me for directions, I did the only logical thing, which was to point at the metal plate on the floor. “Search, seek,” I said, trying to fabricate a sufficiently oracular instruction, “look beneath your feet. For here lies Juliet.”

“Yes!” nodded Janice, tugging nervously at my arm. “Here lies Juliet.”

After glaring at Umberto for confirmation, Cocco had the men start working on the metal plate with crowbars, trying to loosen it and push it aside, and they went at it with so much vengeance that Friar Lorenzo retreated into a corner and began going through his rosary.

“Poor guy,” said Janice, biting her lip, “he’s totally off his rocker. I just hope-” She didn’t say it, but I knew what she was thinking, because I had long been thinking the same. It was only a matter of time before Cocco would realize that the old monk was nothing but deadweight. And when that happened, we would be helpless to save him.

Yes, our hands were now free, but we both knew that we were just as trapped as we had been before. As soon as the last man had come out of the tunnel, the guy with the ponytail had positioned himself right in front of the opening, making sure no one was stupid enough to try to leave. And so there was really only one way out of this cave for Janice and me-with or without Umberto and Friar Lorenzo-and that was down the drain with everybody else.

When the metal cover finally came off, it did indeed reveal an opening in the floor, big enough for a man to climb through. Stepping forward, Cocco pointed a torchlight into the hole, and after the briefest hesitation the other men did the same, mumbling among themselves with halfhearted enthusiasm. The smell coming from the blackness below was definitely foul, and Janice and I were not the only ones to hold our noses at first, but then, after a few moments, it was no longer unbearable. We were clearly getting a bit too familiar with the smell of rot.

Whatever Cocco saw down there, it merely made him shrug and say, “Un bel niente.”

“He says there is nothing,” translated Umberto, frowning.

“Well, what the hell did he expect?” sneered Janice. “A neon sign saying, grave robbers this way?”

Her comment made me cringe, and when I saw the provoking glare she shot Cocco, I was sure he would jump right over the hole in the floor and take her, once again, by the throat.

But he didn’t. Instead he looked at her in an uncanny, calculating way, and I suddenly understood that my clever sister had been feeling him out from the very beginning, trying to figure out how to bait and hook him. Why? Because he was our only ride out of there.

“Dai, dai!” was all he said, gesturing at his men to jump into the hole one after the other. Judging from the way they all braced themselves before doing so, and from the faint yelps coming from below as they hit the floor of the other cave, the drop was big enough to be a challenge, if not quite big enough to justify a rope.

When it became our turn, Janice stepped forward immediately, probably to demonstrate to Cocco that we were not afraid. And when he held out a hand to help her-maybe for the first time in his career-she spat in his palm before pushing off and disappearing through the hole. Amazingly, all he did was bare his teeth in a smile and say something to Umberto that I was happy not to understand.

Seeing that Janice was already waving at me from the cave below, and that the drop was no more than eight or nine feet, I, too, let myself fall into the forest of arms waiting to receive me. As they caught me and put me down on the floor, however, one of the men seemed to think he had now earned the right to grope me, and I struggled in vain to fight him off.

Laughing, he caught both my wrists and tried to engage the others in the fun, but just as I was beginning to panic, Janice came blasting to my rescue, cutting through the hands and arms and positioning herself between the men and me.

“You want some fun?” she asked them, her grimace one of disgust. “Is that what you want? Huh? Then why don’t you have some fun with me-” She started ripping open her own shirt with such fury that the men barely knew what to do. Transfixed by the sight of her bra they all started backing away, except the guy who had started it all. Still smirking, he reached out brazenly to touch her breasts, but was stopped by an earsplitting burst of gunshots that had us all jump with fear and bewilderment.

A split-second later, a rattling shower of crumbling sandstone threw everyone down on the floor, and as my head hit the ground and my mouth and nostrils filled with dirt, I had a dizzying flashback to choking on tear gas in Rome and thinking I was going to die. For several minutes I was coughing so hard I nearly threw up, and I was not the only one. All around me, the men were down for the count, and so was Janice. The only consolation was that the floor of the cave was not hard at all, but oddly springy; had it been solid rock it might have knocked me out.

Eventually looking up through a haze of dust, I saw Cocco standing there, submachine gun in hand, waiting to see if anyone else felt like having fun. But no one did. It seemed his warning salvo had sent a vibration through the cave that had made parts of the ceiling fall down, and the men were too busy brushing rubble from their hair and clothes to challenge his resolve.

Apparently satisfied with the effect, Cocco pointed two fingers at Janice and said, in a tone no one could ignore, “La stronza è mia!” Not entirely sure what a stronza was, I was nevertheless fairly certain of the general message: No one was to ravage my sister, except him.

Getting back on my feet I noticed that I was trembling all over, unable to control my nerves. And when Janice came up to me, throwing her arms around my neck, I could feel her shaking, too.

“You’re crazy,” I said, squeezing her hard. “These guys are not like the dupes you usually operate. Evil doesn’t come with a manual.”

Janice snorted. “All men come with a manual. Just give me time. Little Cocco-nut is going to fly us out of here first class.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” I muttered, watching as the men lowered a very nervous Friar Lorenzo from the cave above. “I think our lives are pretty cheap to these people.”

“Then why,” said Janice, disentangling herself, “don’t you just lie down and die right now? It’s much easier that way, right?”

“I’m just trying to be rational-” I began, but she wouldn’t let me go on.

“You’ve never done a rational thing in your life!” She closed her ripped shirt with a tight knot. “Why start now?”

As she stomped away from me, I very nearly did sit down and give up. To think it was all my own doing-this whole nightmare of a treasure hunt-and that it could have been avoided, had I trusted Alessandro and not run away from Castello Salimbeni the way I did. If only I had stayed where I was, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, and, most important, doing nothing, I might still have been there now, once again asleep in my canopy bed with his arms around me.

But my destiny had demanded otherwise. And so here I was instead, in the bowels of nowhere, filthy beyond recognition and watching passively while a homicidal freak with a submachine gun was screaming at my father and my sister to tell him where to go next in this cave with no exits.

Knowing very well that I couldn’t just stand there doing nothing when they so desperately needed my help, I reached down to pick up a flashlight that had been dropped on the floor. Only then did I notice something sticking out of the dirt right in front of me. In the pale light of the beam it looked like a large, cracked seashell but, obviously, it couldn’t be. The ocean was nearly fifty miles away. I knelt down to take a closer look, and my pulse quickened when I realized that I was looking at part of a human skull.

After the initial fright, I was surprised the discovery did not upset me more than it did. But then, I thought, considering Mom’s directions, the sight of human remains was merely to be expected; we were, after all, looking for a grave. And so I began digging into the porous floor with my hands to see if the rest of the skeleton was there, and it did not take me long to determine that, indeed, it was. But it was not alone.

Right beneath the surface-a mix of earth and ashes, by the feel of it-the bottom of the cave was filled with tightly packed, randomly interlocking human bones.