Juliet (22 page)

“I do not want a reward,” Romeo said, his manly face giving in to the stubborn squint of boyhood, “I just want
her
. It moves me little what people know or think. If you do not bless my intention to marry her—”

Comandante Marescotti held up a gloved hand to prevent his son from speaking words that, once heard, could never be unsaid. “Do not threaten me with measures that would hurt you more than me. And let me not see you like this, acting beneath your age, or I shall withdraw my permission for you to ride in the Palio. Even the games of men—nay, especially the games—require the decorum of men. So, too, with marriage. I have never betrothed you to anyone …”

“And for that alone I love my father!”

“… because I traced the outline of your character from the earliest age. Had I been an evil man, with some enemy due for punishment, I might have considered stealing away his only daughter and letting you make
worms’ meat out of her heart. But I am not such a man. I have waited with great perseverance for you to shed your inconstant self and be satisfied with one pursuit at a time.”

Romeo looked crestfallen. But the potion of love was still tingling sweet upon his tongue, and a smile could not be restrained long. His joy broke away like a colt from its handlers, and galloped across his face on unfamiliar legs. “But Father, I have!” was his giddy reply. “Constancy is my true nature! I shall never look at another woman for the rest of my days, or rather, I shall look, but they shall be to me like chairs, or tables. Not that I intend to sit, of course, or eat off them, but in the sense that they are but furniture. Or perhaps I should say that they are to her what the moon is to the sun—”

“Do not compare her with the sun,” warned Comandante Marescotti, and walked over to the straw puppet to retrieve his arrows. “You always preferred the company of the moon.”

“Because I was living in eternal night! Surely, the moon must be the sovereign of a wretch who has never beheld the sun. But morning has broken, Father, draped in the golds and reds of marriage, and it is the dawn of my soul!”

“But the sun retires,” reasoned Comandante Marescotti, “every night.”

“And I shall retire, too!” Romeo clenched a fistful of arrows against his heart. “And leave the dark to owls and nightingales. I shall embrace the bright hours with industry, and prey no more on wholesome sleep.”

“Make no promises about the dark hours,” said Comandante Marescotti, placing a hand on his son’s shoulder at last. “If your wife is but half the creature you have laid her out to be, there will be much preying, and little sleep.”

   [   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?”