Juliet (6 page)

And by the way, it had matching shoes.

IN ORDER TO GET
to Palazzo Tolomei, Direttor Rossini had explained, I must choose to either go up Via del Paradiso or down Via della Sapienza. They were both practically closed to traffic—as were most streets in downtown Siena—but Sapienza, he advised, could be a bit of a challenge, and all in all, Paradiso was probably the safer route.

As I walked down Via della Sapienza the façades of ancient houses closed in on me from all sides, and I was soon trapped in a labyrinth of centuries past, following the logic of an earlier way of life. Above me a ribbon of blue sky was crisscrossed by banners, their bold colors strangely
vivid among the medieval brick, but apart from that—and the odd pair of jeans drying from a window—there was almost nothing that committed this place to modernity.

The world had developed around it, but Siena didn’t care. Direttor Rossini had told me that, for the Sienese, the golden age had been the late Middle Ages, and as I walked, I could see that he was right; the city clung to its medieval self with a stubborn disregard for the attractions of progress. There were touches of the Renaissance here and there, but overall, the hotel director had sniggered, Siena had been too wise to be seduced by the charms of history’s playboys, those so-called masters, who turned houses into layer cakes.

As a result, the most beautiful thing about Siena was her integrity; even now, in a world that had stopped caring, she was still Sena Vetus Civitas Virginis, or, in my own language, Old Siena, City of the Virgin. And for that reason alone, Direttor Rossini had concluded, all fingers planted on the green marble counter, it was the only place on the planet worth living in.

“So, where else have you lived?” I had asked him, innocently.

“I was in Rome for two days,” he had replied with dignity. “Who needs to see more? When you take a bite of a bad apple, do you keep eating?”

From my immersion in the silent alleys I eventually surfaced in a bustling, pedestrian street. According to my directions it was called the Corso, and Direttor Rossini had explained that it was famous for the many old banks that used to serve foreigners traveling the old pilgrim route, which had gone straight through town. Over the centuries, millions of people had journeyed through Siena, and many foreign treasures and currencies had changed hands. The steady stream of modern-day tourists, in other words, was nothing but the continuation of an old, profitable tradition.

That was how my family, the Tolomeis, had grown rich, Direttor Rossini had pointed out, and how their rivals, the Salimbenis, had grown even richer. They had been tradesmen and bankers, and their fortified palazzos had flanked this very road—Siena’s main thoroughfare—with impossibly tall towers that had kept growing and growing until, at last, they had both come crashing down.

As I walked past Palazzo Salimbeni I looked in vain for remnants of
the old tower. It was still an impressive building with quite the Draculean front door, but it was no longer the fortification it had once been. Somewhere in that building, I thought as I scurried by, collar up, Eva Maria’s godson, Alessandro, had his office. Hopefully he was not—just now—scrolling through some crime register to find the dark secret behind Julie Jacobs.

Farther down the road, but not much, stood Palazzo Tolomei, the ancient dwelling of my own ancestors. Looking up at the splendid medieval façade, I suddenly felt proud to be connected to the people who had once lived in this remarkable building. As far as I could see, not much had changed since the fourteenth century; the only thing suggesting that the mighty Tolomeis had moved out and a modern bank had moved in were the marketing posters hanging in the deep-set windows, their colorful promises sliced by iron bars.

The inside of the building was no less stern than the outside. A security guard stepped forward to hold the door for me as I entered, as gallantly as the semiautomatic rifle in his arms would allow, but I was too busy looking around to be bothered by his uniformed attention. Six titanic pillars in red brick held the ceiling high, high above mankind, and although there were counters and chairs and people walking around on the vast stone floor, these took up so little of the room that the white lion heads protruding from the ancient walls seemed entirely unaware that humans were present.

“Sì?” The teller looked at me over the rim of glasses so fashionably slim they could not possibly transmit more than a wafer-thin slice of reality.

I leaned forward a bit, in the interest of privacy. “Would it be possible to talk to Signor Francesco Maconi?”

The teller actually managed to focus on me through her glasses, but she did not appear convinced by what she saw. “There is no Signor Francesco here,” she said firmly, in a very heavy accent.

“No Francesco Maconi?”

At this point, the teller found it necessary to take off her glasses entirely, fold them carefully on the counter, and look at me with that supremely kind smile people fix on you just before they stick a syringe in your neck. “No.”

“But I know he used to work here—” I did not get any further before
the woman’s colleague from the booth next door leaned in on the conversation, whispering something in Italian. At first, my unfriendly teller dismissed the other with an angry wave, but after a while she began to reconsider.

“Excuse me,” she said eventually, leaning forward to get my attention, “but do you mean
Presidente
Maconi?”

I felt a jolt of excitement. “Did he work here twenty years ago?”

She looked horrified. “Presidente Maconi was always here!”

“And would it be possible to speak with him?” I smiled sweetly, although she did not deserve it. “He is an old friend of my mother’s, Diane Tolomei. I am Giulietta Tolomei.”

Both women stared at me as if I were a spirit conjured up before their very eyes. Without another word, the teller who had originally dismissed me now fumbled her glasses back on her nose, made a phone call, and had a brief conversation in humble, underdog Italian. When it was over she put down the receiver reverently, and turned towards me with something akin to a smile. “He will see you right after lunch, at three o’clock.”

I HAD MY FIRST MEAL
since arriving in Siena at a bustling pizzeria called Cavallino Bianco. While I sat there pretending to read the Italian dictionary I had just bought, I began to realize that it would take more than just a borrowed suit and a few handy phrases to level with the locals. These women around me, I suspected, sneaking peeks at their smiles and exuberant gestures as they bantered with the handsome waiter Giulio, possessed something I had never had, some ability I could not put my finger on, but which must be a crucial element in that elusive state of mind, happiness.

Strolling on, feeling more klutzy and displaced than ever, I had a stand-up espresso in a bar in Piazza Postierla and asked the buxom barista if she could recommend a cheap clothes store in the neighborhood. After all, Eva Maria’s suitcase had—fortunately—not contained any underwear. Completely ignoring her other customers the barista looked me over skeptically and said, “You want everything new, no? New hair, new clothes?”

“Well—”

“Don’t worry, my cousin is the best hairdresser in Siena—maybe in the world. He will make you beautiful. Come!”

After taking me by the arm and insisting that I call her Malèna, the barista walked me down to see her cousin Luigi right away, even though it was clearly coffee rush hour, and customers were yelling after her in exasperation as we went. She just shrugged and laughed, knowing full well that they would all still fawn over her when she came back, maybe even a little bit more than before, now that they had tasted life without her.

Luigi was sweeping up hair from the floor when we entered his salon. He was no older than me, but had the penetrating eye of a Michelangelo. When he fixed that eye on me, however, he was not impressed.

“Ciao, caro,” said Malèna and gave him a drive-thru peck on both cheeks, “this is Giulietta. She needs un makeover totale.”

“Just the ends, actually,” I interjected. “A couple inches.”

It took a major argument in Italian—which I was more than relieved to not understand—before Malèna had persuaded Luigi to take on my sorry case. But once he did, he took the challenge very seriously. As soon as Malèna had left the salon, he sat me down on a barber chair and looked at my reflection in the mirror, turning me this way and that to check all the angles. Then he pulled the elastic bands from my braids and threw them directly into the trash bin with an expression of disgust.

“Bene …” he finally said, fluffing up my hair and looking at me once again in the mirror, a little less critically than before. “Not too bad, no?”

WHEN I WALKED BACK
to Palazzo Tolomei two hours later, I had sunk myself further into debt, but it was worth every nonexistent penny. Eva Maria’s red-and-black suit lay neatly folded on the bottom of a shopping bag, matching shoes on top, and I was wearing one of five new outfits that had all been approved by Luigi and his uncle, Paolo, who happened to own a clothes store just around the corner. Uncle Paolo—who did not speak a word of English, but who knew everything there was to know about fashion—had knocked 30 percent off my entire purchase as long as I promised never to wear my ladybug costume again.

I had protested at first, explaining that my luggage was due to arrive
any moment, but in the end the temptation had been too great. So what if my suitcases were waiting for me when I returned to the hotel? There was nothing in them I could ever wear in Siena anyway, perhaps with the exception of the shoes Umberto had given me for Christmas, and which I had never even tried on.

As I walked away from the store, I glanced at myself in every shopwindow I passed. Why had I never done this before? Ever since high school I had cut my own hair—just the ends—with a pair of kitchen scissors every two years or so. It took me about five minutes, and, honestly, I thought, who could tell the difference? Well, I could certainly see the difference now. Somehow, Luigi had managed to bring my boring old hair to life, and it was already thriving in its new freedom, flowing in the breeze as I walked and framing my face as if it was a face worth framing.

When I was a child, Aunt Rose had taken me to the village barber whenever it occurred to her. But she had been wise enough never to take Janice and me at the same time. Only once did we end up in the salon chairs side by side, and as we sat there, pulling faces at each other in the big mirrors, the old barber had held up our ponytails and said, “Look! This one has bear-hair and the other has princess-hair.”

Aunt Rose had not replied. She had just sat there, silently, and waited for him to finish. Once he was finished, she had paid him and thanked him in that clipped voice of hers. Then she had hauled us both out the door as if it were we, and not the barber, who had misbehaved. Ever since that day, Janice had never missed an opportunity to compliment me on my beary, beary lovely hair.

The memory nearly made me cry. Here I was, all dolled up, while Aunt Rose was in a place where she could no longer appreciate that I had finally stepped out of my macramé cocoon. It would have made her so happy to see me like this—just once—but I had been too busy making sure Janice never did.

PRESIDENTE MACONI WAS
a courtly man in his sixties, dressed in a subdued suit and tie and astoundingly successful in combing the long hairs from one side of his head across the crown to the other. As a result, he carried himself with rigid dignity, but there was genuine warmth in his eyes that instantly annulled the ridiculous.

“Miss Tolomei?” He came across the floor of the bank to shake my hand heartily, as if we were old friends. “This is an unexpected delight.”

As we walked together up the stairs, Presidente Maconi went on to apologize in flawless English for the uneven walls and warped floors. Even the most modern interior design, he explained with a smile, was helpless against a building that was almost eight hundred years old.

After a day of constant language malfunctions it was a relief to finally meet someone fluent in my own tongue. A touch of a British accent suggested that Presidente Maconi had lived in England for a while—perhaps he had gone to school there—which might explain why my mother had chosen him as her financial advisor in the first place.

His office was on the top floor, and from the mullioned windows he had a perfect view of the church of San Cristoforo and several other spectacular buildings in the neighborhood. Stepping forward, however, I nearly stumbled over a plastic bucket sitting in the middle of a large Persian rug, and after ensuring that my health was intact, Presidente Maconi very carefully placed the bucket precisely where it had stood before I kicked it.

“There is a leak in the roof,” he explained, looking up at the cracked plaster ceiling, “but we cannot find it. It is very strange—even when it is not raining, water comes dripping down.” He shrugged and motioned for me to sit down on one of two artfully carved mahogany chairs facing his desk. “The old president used to say that the building was crying. He knew your father, by the way.”

Sitting down behind the desk, Presidente Maconi leaned back as far as the leather chair would allow and put his fingertips together. “So, Miss Tolomei, how may I help you?”

For some reason, the question took me by surprise. I had been so focused on getting here in the first place, I had given little thought to the next step. I suppose the Francesco Maconi who had—until now—lived quite comfortably in my imagination knew very well that I had come for my mother’s treasure, and he had been waiting impatiently these many, many years to finally hand it off to its rightful heir.

The real Francesco Maconi, however, was not that accommodating. I started explaining why I had come, and he listened to me in silence, nodding occasionally. When I eventually stopped talking, he looked at me pensively, his face betraying no conclusion either way.

“And so I was wondering,” I went on, realizing that I had forgotten the most important part, “if you could take me to her safety-deposit box?”