Juliet (11 page)

“The … bubonic plague?”

“Yes, the big one. In 1348.” Peppo cleared his throat, not comfortable with the subject. “You see, your mother believed that there is an old curse that is still haunting the Tolomeis and the Salimbenis. And she was trying to find out how to stop it. She was obsessed with this idea. I wanted to believe her, but—” He pulled at his shirt collar as if he suddenly felt hot. “She was so determined. She was convinced that we were all cursed. Death. Destruction. Accidents. ‘A plague on both our houses’ … that is what she used to say.” He sighed deeply, reliving the pain of the past. “She always quoted Shakespeare. She took it very seriously …
Romeo and Juliet
. She thought that it had happened right here, in Siena. She had a theory—” Peppo shook his head dismissively. “She was obsessed with it. I don’t know. I am not a professor. All I know is that there was a man, Luciano Salimbeni, who wanted to find a treasure—”

I could not help myself, I had to ask, “What kind of treasure?”

“Who knows?” Peppo threw up his arms. “Your father spent all his time researching old legends. He was always talking about lost treasures. But your mother told me about something once—oh, what did she call it?—I think she called it Juliet’s Eyes. I don’t know what she meant, but I think it was very valuable, and I think it was what Luciano Salimbeni was after.”

I was dying to know more, but by now Peppo was looking very distressed, almost ill, and he swayed and grabbed my arm for balance. “If I were you,” he went on, “I would be very, very careful. And I would not trust anyone with the name of Salimbeni.” Seeing my expression, he frowned. “You think I am pazzo … crazy? Here we are, standing by the grave of a young woman who died before her time. She was your mother. Who am I to tell you who did this to her, and why?” His grip tightened. “She is dead. Your father is dead. That is all I know. But my old Tolomei heart tells me that you must be careful.”

…

WHEN WE WERE SENIORS
in high school, Janice and I had both volunteered for the annual play—as it so happened, it was
Romeo and Juliet
. After the tryouts Janice was cast as Juliet, while my role was to be a tree in the Capulet orchard. She, of course, spent more time on her nails than on memorizing the dialogue, and whenever we rehearsed the balcony scene, I would be the one to whisper the first words of her lines to her, being, after all, conveniently located onstage with branches for arms.

On opening night, however, she was particularly horrible to me—when we sat in makeup, she kept laughing at my brown face and pulling the leaves out of my hair, while she was being dolled up with blond braids and rosy cheeks—and by the time the balcony scene rolled around, I was in no mood to cover for her. In fact, I did quite the opposite. When Romeo said, “what shall I swear by?” I whispered, “three words!”

And Janice immediately said, “three words, dear Romeo, and good night indeed!” which threw Romeo off completely, and had the scene end in confusion.

Later, when I was posing as a candelabrum in Juliet’s bedroom, I made Janice wake up next to Romeo and say right off the bat, “hie hence, begone, away!” which did not set a very good tone for the rest of their tender scene. Needless to say, Janice was so furious she chased me through the entire school afterwards, swearing that she was going to shave off my eyebrows. It had been fun at first, but when, in the end, she locked herself in the school bathroom and cried for an hour, even I stopped laughing.

Long after midnight, when I sat in the living room talking with Aunt Rose, afraid of going to bed and submitting myself to sleep and Janice’s razor, Umberto came in with a glass of vin santo for us both. He did not say anything, just handed us the glasses, and Aunt Rose did not utter a word about my being too young to drink.

“You like that play?” she said instead. “You seem to know it by heart.”

“I don’t really like it a whole lot,” I confessed, shrugging and sipping my drink at the same time. “It’s just …
there
, stuck in my head.”

Aunt Rose nodded slowly, savoring the vin santo. “Your mother was the same way. She knew it by heart. It was … an obsession.”

I held my breath, not wanting to break her train of thought. I waited
for another glimpse of my mother, but it never came. Aunt Rose just looked up, frowning, to clear her throat and take another sip of wine. And that was it. That was one of the only things she ever told me about my mother without being prompted, and I never passed it on to Janice. Our mutual obsession with Shakespeare’s play was a little secret I shared with my mother and no one else, just like I never told anyone about my growing fear that, because my mother had died at twenty-five, I would, too.

AS SOON AS PEPPO
dropped me off in front of Hotel Chiusarelli, I went straight to the nearest Internet café and Googled
Luciano Salimbeni
. But it took me several verbal acrobatics to come up with a search combination that yielded anything remotely useful. Only after at least an hour and many, many frustrations with the Italian language, I was fairly confident of the following conclusions:

One: Luciano Salimbeni was dead.

Two: Luciano Salimbeni had been a bad guy, possibly even a mass murderer.

Three: Luciano and Eva Maria Salimbeni were somehow related.

Four: There had been something fishy about the car accident that had killed my mother, and Luciano Salimbeni had been wanted for questioning.

I printed out all the pages so that I could reread them later, in the company of my dictionary. This search had yielded little more than Peppo Tolomei had just told me this afternoon, but at least now I knew my elderly cousin had not merely invented the story; there really had been a dangerous Luciano Salimbeni at large in Siena some twenty years ago or so.

But the good news was that he was dead. In other words, he definitely could not be the tracksuit charmer who—maybe, maybe not—had stalked me the day before, after I left the bank in Palazzo Tolomei with my mother’s box.

As an afterthought, I Googled
Juliet’s Eyes
. Not surprisingly, none of the search results had anything to do with legendary treasures. Almost all were semischolarly discussions about the significance of eyes in Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
, and I dutifully read through a couple of passages from the play, trying to spot a secret message. One of them read:

Well, I thought to myself, if this evil Luciano Salimbeni had really killed my mother over a treasure called Juliet’s Eyes, then Romeo’s statement was true; whatever the nature of those mysterious eyes, they were potentially more dangerous than weapons, simple as that. In contrast, the second passage was a bit more complex than your average pickup line:

I mulled over the lines all the way down Via del Paradiso. Romeo was clearly trying to compliment Juliet by saying that her eyes were like sparkling stars, but he sure had a funny way of phrasing it. It was, in my opinion, not particularly smooth to woo a girl by envisioning what she would look like with her eyes gouged out.

But really, this poetry was a welcome diversion from the other facts I had learned that day. Both my parents had died in a terrible way, separately, and possibly even at the hands of a murderer. Even though I had left the cemetery hours ago, I was still struggling to process this horrendous discovery. On top of my shock and sorrow I also felt the little fleabites of fear, just as I had the day before, when I thought I was being followed after leaving the bank. But had Peppo been right in warning me? Could I possibly be in danger now, so many years later? If so, I could presumably pull myself back out of danger by going home to Virginia. But then, what if there really was a treasure? What if—somewhere in my mother’s box—there was a clue to finding Juliet’s Eyes, whatever they were.

Lost in speculation, I strolled into a secluded cloister garden off Piazza San Domenico. By now day was turning dusk, and I stood for a moment in the portico of a loggia, drinking in the last rays of sunshine while the evening shadows slowly crawled up my legs. I did not feel like going back to the hotel just yet, where Maestro Ambrogio’s journal was waiting to sweep me through another sleepless night in the year 1340.

As I stood there, absorbed in the twilight, my thoughts circling around my parents, I saw him for the first time—

The Maestro.

He was walking through the shadows of the opposite loggia, carrying an easel and several other items that kept slipping from his grip, forcing him to stop and redistribute the weight. At first I simply stared at him. It was impossible not to. He was unlike any other Italian I had ever met, with his long, gray hair, sagging cardigan, and open sandals; in fact, he looked most of all like a time traveler from Woodstock shuffling around in a world taken over by runway models.

He did not see me at first, and when I caught up with him and handed him a paintbrush he had dropped, he jumped with fear.

“Scusi,” I said, “but I think this is yours.”

He looked at the brush without recognition, and when he finally took it, he held it awkwardly, as if its purpose completely escaped him. Then he looked at me, still perplexed, and said, “Do I know you?”

Before I could answer, a smile spread over his face, and he exclaimed, “Of course I do! I remember you. You are—oh! Remind me … who are you?”

“Giulietta. Tolomei? But I don’t think—”

“Si-si-si! Of course! Where have you been?”

“I … just arrived.”

He grimaced at his own stupidity. “Of course you did! Never mind me. You just arrived. And here you are. Giulietta Tolomei. More beautiful than ever.” He smiled and shook his head. “I never understood this thing, time.”

“Well,” I said, somewhat weirded out, “are you gonna be okay?”

“Me? Oh! Yes, thank you. But … you must come and see me. I want to show you something. Do you know my workshop? It is in Via Santa Caterina. The blue door. You don’t have to knock, just come in.”

Only then did it occur to me that he had me pegged for a tourist and wanted to sell some souvenirs.
Yeah right, buddy
, I thought,
I’ll get right on that
.

WHEN I CALLED UMBERTO
later that night, he was deeply disturbed by my new insights into my parents’ deaths. “But are you sure?” he kept
saying, “are you sure this is true?” I told him that I was. Not only did everything point to the fact that there had been dark forces at play twenty years ago, but as far as I could see, those forces might still be lingering and on the prowl.

“Are you sure he was following you?” Umberto objected. “Maybe—”

“Umberto,” I interrupted him, “he was wearing a tracksuit.”

We both knew that in Umberto’s universe only a black-hearted villain would walk down a fashionable street dressed in sportswear.

“Well,” said Umberto, “maybe he just wanted to pick your pocket. He saw you leaving the bank, and he figured you had taken out money—”

“Yes, maybe. I sure don’t see why someone would steal this box. I can’t find anything in it to do with Juliet’s Eyes—”

“Juliet’s Eyes?”

“Yeah, that’s what Peppo said.” I sighed and threw myself down on the bed. “Apparently, that’s the treasure. But if you ask me, I think it’s all a big scam. I think Mom and Aunt Rose are sitting up in heaven, having a really good laugh right now. Anyway … what are you up to?”

We talked for at least another five minutes before I discovered that Umberto was no longer in Aunt Rose’s house, but at a hotel in New York, looking for work, whatever that meant. I had a hard time imagining him waiting tables in Manhattan, grating Parmesan cheese over other people’s pasta. He probably shared my sentiments, for he sounded tired and out of spirits, and I wanted so much to be able to tell him that I was on track to land a major fortune. But we both knew that, despite recovering my mother’s box, I had barely figured out where to start.

   [   II.III   ]

…

T
HE LETHAL STRIKE NEVER CAME
.

Instead, Friar Lorenzo—still kneeling in prayer before the brigand—heard a brief, frightful wheeze, followed by a tremor that rocked the whole cart, and the sound of a body tumbling to the ground. And then … silence. A brief glance with a half-open eye confirmed that, indeed, his intended killer was no longer looming over him, sword drawn, and Friar Lorenzo stretched nervously to see where the villain had disappeared so suddenly.

There he lay, broken and bloody on the bank of the ditch, the man who had—moments ago—been the cocksure captain of a band of highwaymen. How frail and human he looked now, thought Friar Lorenzo, with the point of a knife protruding from his chest, and with blood trickling from his demonic mouth and into an ear that had heard many sobbing prayers but never taken pity on a single one.