Juliet (7 page)

I took the key out of my handbag and put it on his desk, but Presidente Maconi merely glanced at it. After a moment’s awkward silence he got up and walked over to a window, hands behind his back, and looked out over the roofs of Siena with a frown.

“Your mother,” he finally said, “was a wise woman. And when God takes the wise to heaven, he leaves their wisdom behind, for us on earth. Their spirits live on, flying around us silently, like owls, with eyes that see in the night, when you and I see only darkness.” He paused to test a leaded pane that was coming loose. “In some ways, the owl would be a fitting symbol for all of Siena, not just for our contrada.”

“Because … all people in Siena are wise?” I proposed, not entirely sure what he was getting at.

“Because the owl has an ancient ancestor. To the Greeks, she was the goddess Athena. A virgin, but also a warrior. The Romans called her Minerva. In Roman times, there was a temple for her here in Siena. This is why it was always in our hearts to love the Virgin Mary, even in the ancient times, before Christ was born. To us, she was always here.”

“Presidente Maconi—”

“Miss Tolomei.” He turned to face me at last. “I am trying to figure out what your mother would have liked me to do. You are asking me to give you something that caused her a lot of grief. Would she really want me to let you have it?” He attempted a smile. “But then, it is not my decision, is it? She left it here—she did not destroy it—so she must have wanted me to pass it on to you, or to someone. The question is: Are you sure you want it?”

In the silence following his words, we both heard it clearly: the sound of a drop of water falling into the plastic bucket on a perfectly sunny day.

AFTER SUMMONING A
second key-holder, the somber Signor Virgilio, Presidente Maconi took me down a separate staircase—a spiral of ancient stone that must have been there since the palazzo was first built—into the deepest caverns of the bank. Now for the first time I became aware that there was a whole other world underneath Siena, a world of
caves and shadows that stood in sharp contrast to the world of light above.

“Welcome to the Bottini,” said Presidente Maconi as we walked through a grottolike passageway. “This is the old, underground aqueduct that was built a thousand years ago to lead water into the city of Siena. This is all sandstone, and even with the primitive tools they had back then, Sienese engineers were able to dig a vast network of tunnels that led fresh water to public fountains and even into the basement of some private houses. Now, of course, it is no longer used.”

“But people go down here anyway?” I asked, touching the rough sandstone wall.

“Oh, no!” Presidente Maconi was amused by my naïveté. “It is a dangerous place to be. You can easily get lost. Nobody knows all the Bottini. There are stories, many stories, about secret tunnels from here to there, but we don’t want people running around exploring them. The sandstone is porous, you see. It crumbles. And all of Siena is sitting on top.”

I pulled back my hand. “But this wall is … fortified?”

Presidente Maconi looked a bit sheepish. “No.”

“But it’s a bank. That seems … dangerous.”

“Once,” he replied, eyebrows up in disapproval, “someone tried to break in. Once. They dug a tunnel. It took them months.”

“Did they succeed?”

Presidente Maconi pointed at a security camera mounted high in an obscure corner. “When the alarm went off, they escaped through the tunnel, but at least they didn’t steal anything.”

“Who were they?” I asked. “Did you ever find out?”

He shrugged. “Some gangsters from Napoli. They never came back.”

When we finally arrived at the vault, Presidente Maconi and Signor Virgilio both had to swipe their key cards for the massive door to open.

“See?”—Presidente Maconi was proud of the feature—“not even the president can open this vault on his own. As they say, absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Inside the vault, safety-deposit boxes covered every wall from floor to ceiling. Most of them were small, but some were large enough to serve as a luggage locker at an airport. My mother’s box, as it turned out, was somewhere in between, and as soon as Presidente Maconi had pointed it
out to me and helped me insert the key, he and Signor Virgilio politely left the room. When, moments later, I heard a couple of matches striking, I knew they had seized the opportunity to take a smoking break in the corridor outside.

Since I first read Aunt Rose’s letter, I had entertained many different ideas of what my mother’s treasure might be, and had done my best to temper my expectations in order to avoid disappointment. But in my most unchecked fantasies I would find a magnificent golden box, locked and full of promise, not unlike the treasure chests that pirates dig up on desert islands.

My mother had left me just such a thing. It was a wooden box with golden ornamentation, and while it was not actually locked—there
was
no lock—the clasp was rusted shut, preventing me from doing much more than merely shaking it gently to try and determine its contents. It was about the size of a small toaster-oven, but surprisingly light, which immediately ruled out the possibility of gold and jewelry. But then, fortunes come in many substances and forms, and I was certainly not one to scoff at the prospect of three-digit paper money.

As we said goodbye, Presidente Maconi kept insisting on calling a taxi for me. But I told him I did not need one; the box fitted very nicely in one of my shopping bags, and Hotel Chiusarelli was, after all, nearby.

“I would be careful,” he said, “walking around with that. Your mother was always careful.”

“But who knows I’m here? And that I’ve got this?”

He shrugged. “The Salimbenis—”

I stared at him, not sure if he was really serious. “Don’t tell me the old family feud is still going on!”

Presidente Maconi looked away, uncomfortable with the subject. “A Salimbeni will always be a Salimbeni.”

Walking away from Palazzo Tolomei, I repeated that sentence to myself several times, wondering precisely what it meant. In the end I decided it was nothing more than what I ought to expect in this place; judging by Eva Maria’s stories about the fierce contrade rivalries in the modern Palio, the old family feuds from the Middle Ages were still going strong, even if the weapons had changed.

Mindful of my own Tolomei heritage, I put a little swagger in my gait as I walked past Palazzo Salimbeni for the second time that day, just to let
Alessandro know—should he happen to look out the window at that exact moment—that there was a new sheriff in town.

Just then, as I glanced over my shoulder to see if I had made myself absolutely clear, I noticed a man walking behind me. Somehow he didn’t fit the picture; the street was full of chirping tourists, mothers with strollers, and people in business suits, talking loudly into their cell phones at some invisible other. This man, by contrast, was wearing a mangy tracksuit and a pair of mirrored sunglasses that did nothing to conceal the fact that he had been looking straight at my bags.

Or was I imagining things? Had Presidente Maconi’s parting words ruffled my nerves? I paused in front of a shopwindow, hoping very much the man would pass me and continue on his way. But he didn’t. As soon as I stood still, he paused, too, pretending to look at a poster on a wall.

Now for the first time, I felt the little fleabites of fear, as Janice used to call them, and ran through my options in a couple of deep breaths. But there was really only one thing to do. If I kept walking, chances were he would eventually sidle up to me and snatch the bags right out of my hands, or, even worse, follow me to see where I was staying, and pay me a visit later.

Humming to myself I entered the store, and as soon as I was inside, I ran up to the clerk and asked if I could leave through the back entrance. Barely looking up from his motorcycle magazine, he simply pointed at a door at the other end of the room.

Ten seconds later I came shooting out into a narrow alley to nearly overturn a row of Vespas parked side by side. I had no idea where I was, but that didn’t matter. The important thing was that I still had my bags.

WHEN THE TAXI DROPPED
me off back at Hotel Chiusarelli, I would have happily paid anything for the trip. But when I overtipped the driver, he shook his head in protest and gave back most of it.

“Miss Tolomei!” Direttor Rossini came towards me with some alarm as soon as I entered the vestibule. “Where have you been? Captain Santini was just here. In uniform! What is going on?”

“Oh!” I tried to smile. “Maybe he came to invite me out for coffee?”

Direttor Rossini glared at me, his eyebrows suspended in a pointed arc of disapproval. “I do not think the captain was here with carnal intentions,
Miss Tolomei. I very much suggest you call him. Here—” He handed me a business card as if it was a holy wafer. “This is the number of his telephone, there, written on the back side, do you see? I suggest”—Direttor Rossini raised his voice as I continued past him down the hall—“you call him right now!”

It took me about an hour—and several trips to the hotel reception desk—to open my mother’s box. After trying every tool I had, such as the hotel key, my toothbrush, and the telephone receiver, I ran downstairs to borrow tweezers, then nail clippers, then a needle, and finally a screwdriver, only too aware that Direttor Rossini looked less and less friendly every time he saw me.

What finally did the trick was not actually opening the rusty clasp, but unscrewing the entire closing mechanism, which took me quite a while, since the screwdriver I had borrowed was too small. But I was fairly sure Direttor Rossini would explode if I showed up at his reception desk one more time.

Through all those efforts, my hopes and expectations for the contents of the box had grown steadily more wild, and once I was able to open the lid, I could barely breathe with anticipation. Seeing that it was so light, I had become convinced there was a fragile—and very costly—item in the box, but when I finally looked inside, I realized my mistake.

There was nothing fragile in the box; in fact, there was barely anything at all except paper. Boring paper at that. Not money or stocks or deeds or any other kind of securities, but letters in envelopes and different kinds of texts typed out on sheets that were either stapled together or rolled up with rotting rubber bands. The only actual objects in the box were a notebook with scribbles and doodles, a cheap paperback copy of Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
, and an old crucifix on a silver chain.

I inspected the crucifix for a while, wondering if perhaps it was extremely old and somehow valuable. But I doubted it. Even if it was an antique, it was still just made of silver, and as far as I could see, there was nothing special about it.

Same story with the paperback volume of
Romeo and Juliet
. I flipped through it several times, determined to see its value, but there was nothing about the book that struck me as the least bit promising, not even a single pencil-note in the margin.

The notebook, on the other hand, had some interesting drawings that
could—with a bit of goodwill—be interpreted as having to do with a treasure hunt. Or maybe they were just sketches from trips to museums and sculpture gardens. One sculpture in particular had caught my mother’s eye—if indeed this was her notebook, and these her drawings—and I could see why. It represented a man and a woman; the man was kneeling, holding a woman in his arms, and had her eyes not been open, I would have guessed she was asleep or even dead. There were at least twenty different drawings of this sculpture in the notebook, but many of them dwelled on details, such as facial features, and in all honesty, none of them made me any wiser as to why my mother had been so obsessed with it in the first place.

There were also sixteen private letters in the box, sitting on the bottom. Five were from Aunt Rose, begging my mother to give up her “silly ideas” and return home; four were also from Aunt Rose, but they were sent later, and my mother had never opened them. The rest were in Italian, sent to my mother from people I did not know.

At this point, there was nothing left in the box except the many typewritten texts. Some were creased and faded, others were newer and more crisp; most were in English, but one was in Italian. None of them appeared to be original texts, they were all—except the Italian one—translations that must have been typed out sometime within the last hundred years or so.

As I looked through the bunch, it gradually became clear to me that, in fact, there was rhyme and reason in the seeming madness, and once I had acknowledged as much, it did not take me long to spread out the texts on my bed in some kind of chronological order:

Once I had them laid out before me, however, it took me somewhat longer to make sense of the collection. The first four texts—all from the fourteenth century—were mysterious and often fragmented, while the later texts were clearer. But most important, the later texts had one thing in common; they were all versions of the story of Romeo and Juliet, culminating in the one that most people knew: Shakespeare’s
Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet
.

Although I had always considered myself a bit of an expert on that play, it came as a complete surprise to me to discover that the Bard had not, in fact, invented the story, but had merely piggybacked on previous writers. Granted, Shakespeare was a genius with words, and if he had not run the whole thing through his pentameter machine, it is doubtful whether it would ever have become widely known. But even so, it looked—in my humble opinion—as if it had already been a darn good story when it first landed on his desk. And interestingly enough, the earliest version of it—the one written by Masuccio Salernitano in 1476—was not set in Verona at all, but right here, in Siena.