by Anne Fortier
“Aspetta!” Alessandro held up a hand to make me slow down. “What kind of paper, what kind of banner?”
“Stories, letters. Silly stuff. Don’t get me started. And the banner, apparently, is a cencio from 1340. I found it wrapped around a dagger, like this, in a drawer—”
“Wait! Are you saying you found the cencio from 1340?”
I was surprised to see him reacting even more strongly to this news than my cousin Peppo had. “Yes, I think so. Apparently it is very special. And the dagger—”
“Where is it?”
“In a secure place. I left it at the Owl Museum.” Seeing that he did not follow, I added, “My cousin, Peppo Tolomei, is the curator. He told me he would take care of it for me.”
Alessandro groaned and ran both hands through his hair.
“What?” I said. “Was that not a good idea?”
“Merda!” He got up, reached into a drawer to pull out a handgun, and slipped it into the holster in his belt. “Come on, let’s go!”
“Wait! What’s going on?” I got up reluctantly. “You’re not suggesting we go see my cousin with that … gun?”
“No, it’s not a suggestion. Come on!”
As we hurried down the corridor, he glanced at my feet. “Can you run in those things?”
“Look,” I said, struggling to keep up, “I just wanna make one thing absolutely clear. I don’t believe in guns. I just want peace. Okay?”
Alessandro stopped in the middle of the corridor, took out the gun, and wrapped my hand around it before I realized what he was doing. “Can you feel that? That’s a gun. It exists. And there are a lot of people out there who do believe in it. So, excuse me for taking care of them so you can have your peace.”
WE LEFT THE BANK through a back entrance and ran all the way down a street that was open to motorized traffic. This was not the way I knew, but sure enough, it brought us right to Piazzetta del Castellare. Alessandro took out the gun as we approached the door of the Owl Museum, but I pretended not to notice.
“Stay behind me,” he said, “and if things go bad, lie down on the floor and cover your head.” Not waiting for me to respond, he put a finger on his lips and slowly opened the door.
I dutifully entered the museum a few steps behind him. There was no question in my mind that he was overreacting, but I was going to let him reach that conclusion on his own. As it was, the whole building was completely silent, and there was no evidence of criminal activity. We walked through several rooms, gun first, but in the end I stopped. “Okay, listen—” But Alessandro immediately put a hand to my mouth to silence me, and as we stood there, both tense, I heard it, too: the sound of someone moaning.
Moving faster through the remaining rooms, we soon circled in on the sound, and once Alessandro had made sure it was not an ambush, we rushed inside to find Peppo lying on the floor of his own office, bruised but alive.
“Oh, Peppo!” I cried, trying to help him. “Are you okay?”
“No!” he shot back. “Of course I am not okay! I think I fell. I can’t use my leg.”
“Hold on—” I looked around to see where he had put his crutch, and my eyes fell on a safe in the corner, open and empty. “Did you see the man who did this?”
“What man?” Peppo tried to sit up, but winced in pain. “Oh, my head! I need my pills. Salvatore! Oh no, wait. It is Salvatore’s day off—what day is it?”
“Non ti muovere!” Alessandro knelt down and spent a moment examining Peppo’s legs. “I think his tibia is broken. I will call an ambulance.”
“Wait! No!” Peppo evidently did not want an ambulance. “I was just going to close the safe. Do you hear me? I must close the safe.”
“Let’s worry about the safe later,” I said.
“The dagger … it is in the boardroom. I was looking it up in a book. It must go in the safe, too. It is evil!”
Alessandro and I exchanged glances. Now was not the time to tell Peppo that it was far too late to close the safe. Clearly, the cencio was gone, as was every other treasure that my cousin had been safeguarding. But maybe the thief had not noticed the dagger. And so I got up and walked into the boardroom, and sure enough, Romeo’s dagger was lying right there on the table, next to a collector’s guide to medieval weaponry.
The dagger clutched in my hand, I returned to Peppo’s office just as Alessandro was calling an ambulance.
“Ah yes,” said my cousin, seeing the dagger, “there it is. Put it in the safe, quickly. It brings bad luck. See what happened to me. The book says it has the spirit of the devil in it.”
PEPPO HAD SUFFERED a minor concussion and a broken bone, but the doctor insisted on keeping him at the hospital overnight, hooked up to various machines, just in case. Unfortunately, she also insisted on telling him precisely what had happened to him.
“She says someone hit him over the head and stole everything in the safe,” Alessandro whispered to me, translating the spirited conversation between the doctor and her cranky patient, “and he says that he wants to speak to the real doctor, and that no one would hit him over the head in his own museum.”
“Giulietta!” exclaimed Peppo, when he had finally succeeded in driving out the doctor, “What do you make of this? The nurse says someone broke into the museum!”
“I’m afraid it’s true,” I said, taking his hand. “I’m so sorry. This is all my fault. If I hadn’t—”
“And who is that?” Peppo eyed Alessandro suspiciously. “Is he here to write a report? Tell him I didn’t see anything.”
“This is Captain Santini,” I explained. “He was the one who saved you, remember? If it wasn’t for him, you’d still be … in a lot of pain.”
“Huh.” Peppo was not ready to quit his belligerent mood just yet. “I’ve seen him before. He’s a Salimbeni. Didn’t I tell you to stay away from those people?”
“Shh! Please!” I tried to hush him up as best I could, but I knew Alessandro had heard every word. “You need to rest.”
“No, I don’t! I need to speak with Salvatore. We must find out who did this. There were many treasures in that safe.”
“I fear the thief was after the cencio and the dagger,” I said. “If I hadn’t brought those to you, none of this would have happened.”
Peppo looked perplexed. “But who would—oh!” His eyes became oddly distant as he stared into some nebulous past. “Of course! Why didn’t I think of this? But would he really do that?”
“Who are you talking about?” I squeezed his hand, trying to make him stay focused. “Do you know who did this to you?”
Peppo grabbed my wrist and looked at me with feverish intensity. “He always said that he would come back. Patrizio, your father. He always said that one day, Romeo would return and take it all back … his life … his love … everything we took from him.”
“Peppo,” I said, stroking his arm, “I think you should try to sleep.” Out of the corner of my eye I could see Alessandro weighing Romeo’s dagger in his hand, frowning as if he could sense its hidden powers.
“Romeo,” Peppo went on, more drowsily now as the sedative finally began to take effect, “Romeo Marescotti. Well, you can’t be a ghost forever. Maybe this is his revenge. On all of us. For how we treated his mother. He was—how do you say—un figlio illegittimo? … Capitano?”
“Born outside of marriage,” said Alessandro, joining us at last.
“Sì, sì!” nodded Peppo. “Born outside of marriage! It was a big scandal. Oh, she was such a beautiful girl—so, he threw them out—”
“Who?” I asked.
“Marescotti. The grandfather. He was a very old-fashioned man. But very handsome. I still remember the comparsa of ’65—it was Aceto’s first victory you know—ah, Topolone, a fine horse. They don’t make them like that anymore—back then, they didn’t twist their ankles and get disqualified, and we didn’t need all sorts of veterinarians and mayors to tell us we couldn’t run … oof!” He shook his head in disgust.
“Peppo?” I pat
ted his hand. “You were talking about the Marescottis. Romeo, remember?”
“Oh, yes! They said the boy had evil hands. Everything he touched … it broke. The horses lost. People died. That’s what they say. Because he was named after Romeo, you see. He came from that line. It’s in the blood … trouble. Everything had to be fast and noisy—he couldn’t sit still. Always scooters, always motorcycles—”
“You knew him?”
“No, I just know what people say. They never came back. Him and his mother. Nobody ever saw them again. They say he grew up wild, in Rome, and that he became a criminal and killed people. They say—they say he died. In Nassiriyah. With a different name.”
I turned to glance at Alessandro, and he met my stare, his eyes unusually dark. “Where is Nassiriyah?” I whispered. “Do you know?” For some reason, the question made him glower, but he did not have time to reply before Peppo sighed deeply and went on, “In my opinion, it’s just a legend. People like legends. And tragedies. And conspiracies. It’s very quiet here in the winter.”
“So, you don’t believe it?”
Peppo sighed again, his eyelids getting heavy. “How do I know what I believe anymore? Oh, why do they not send a doctor?”
Just then, the door burst open, and the entire Tolomei family came pouring into the room to surround their fallen hero with wails and lamentations. They had obviously been given an overview of the situation by the doctor, for Peppo’s wife, Pia, gave me the hairy eyeball as she pushed me aside and took my place next to her husband, and no one expressed anything that could possibly be construed as gratitude. To complete my humiliation, old Nonna Tolomei doddered through the door just as I was eyeing my escape, and there was no doubt in her mind that the perpetrator in this whole business was not the thief, but me.
“Tu!” she growled, aiming an accusatory finger at my heart, “Bastarda!”
She said plenty more, but I did not understand it. Transfixed by her fury like a deer before an oncoming train, I just stood there, unable to move, until Alessandro—fed up with the family fun—grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me through the door to safety.
“Phew!” I gasped. “That’s one angry lady. Can you believe she’s my aunt? What did she say?”
“Never mind,” said Alessandro, walking down the hospital hallway with the expression of someone who wished he had a spare hand grenade.
“She called you a Salimbeni!” I said, proud to have understood that much.
“She did. And it was not a compliment.”
“What did she call me? I didn’t catch that one.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does.” I stopped in the middle of the hallway. “What did she call me?”
Alessandro looked at me, his eyes suddenly tender. “She said, ‘Bastard child. You’re not one of us.’”
“Oh.” I paused to swallow the words. “I guess nobody believes I am really Giulietta Tolomei. Maybe I deserve this. Maybe this is some special kind of hell reserved for people like me.”
“I believe you.”
I looked at him, surprised. “Really? That’s new. When did that happen?”
He shrugged and started walking. “When I saw you standing in my door.”
I did not know how to respond to his sudden kindness, and so we walked the rest of the way in silence, down the stairs and out the front door of the hospital, to emerge in that smooth, golden light that marks the end of day and the beginning of something far less predictable.
“So, Giulietta,” said Alessandro, turning towards me, hands on his hips, “anything else I should know?”
“Well,” I said, squinting against the light, “there’s also a guy on a motorcycle—”
“Santa Maria!”
“But he’s different. He just … follows me around. I don’t know what he wants—”
Alessandro rolled his eyes. “You don’t know what he wants! Do you want me to tell you what he wants?”
“No, it’s okay.” I adjusted my dress. “It’s not really an issue. But this other guy—tracksuit guy—he broke into my hotel room. And so … I think maybe I should change hotels.”
“You think so?” Alessandro was not impressed. “I’ll tell you what, the first thing we’re going to do is go to the police—”
“No, not the police!”
“They’re the only ones who can tell you who did that to Peppo. I don’t have access to the crime register from Monte dei Paschi. Don’t worry, I’ll come with you. I know these guys.”
“Yeah, right!” I all but poked him in the chest. “This is just a cunning way of having me end up in jail.”
He held out his hands. “If I wanted you in jail, I wouldn’t really have to be cunning about it, would I?”
“Hey, listen!” I stood as tall as I could. “I still don’t appreciate your power games!”
My posture made him smile. “Then why do you keep playing?”
THE SIENA POLICE headquarters was a very quiet place. At ten to seven at some point in the past, the clock on the wall had run down its battery, and as I sat there that evening, dutifully scrolling through page after page of digitized bad guys, I began to feel the same way myself. The more I looked at the faces on the computer screen, the more I realized that, to be honest, I had no idea what my stalker looked like up close. The first time I had seen the creep, he had been wearing sunglasses. The second time it had been too bloody dark to see much, and the third time—this very afternoon—I had been too focused on the gun in his hand to dwell on the finer details of his mug.
“I’m sorry”—I turned to Alessandro, who had sat very patiently next to me, elbows on his knees, waiting for my eureka moment—“but I don’t recognize anyone.” I smiled apologetically at the female officer in charge of the computer, knowing full well that I was wasting everyone’s time. “Mi dispiace.”
“It’s okay,” she said, smiling at me because I was a Tolomei, “it won’t take long before we have matched the prints.”
The first thing Alessandro had done when we arrived at the police station was to report the break-in at the Owl Museum. Two patrol cars had been dispatched immediately, and the four officers had been only too thrilled that a case of actual crime had come their way. If the thug had been dumb enough to leave any traces of himself at the museum—fingerprints especially—it was only a matter of time before we would know who he was, provided, of course, that he had been arrested before.
“While we wait,” I said, “do you think we should look up Romeo Marescotti?”
Alessandro frowned. “You really believe what Peppo said?”
“Why not? Maybe it’s him. Maybe it was him all along.”
“In a tracksuit? I don’t think so.”
“Why not? Do you know him?”
Alessandro took in air. “Yes, and he’s not in that computer. I already looked.”
I stared at him, too amazed to speak. Before I could question him further, two police officers entered the room, one of them carrying a laptop, which he placed in front of me. Neither of them spoke English, so Alessandro had to translate what they were saying to me. “They found a fingerprint at the museum,” he explained, “and they want you to take a look at some pictures to see if anyone looks familiar.”
I turned to look at the screen. It had a lineup of five male faces, each of which looked out at me with a mix of apathy and disgust. After a moment, I said, “I can’t be a hundred percent, but if you want to know which one looks most like the guy who followed me, I’d have to say number four.”
After a brief conversation with the officers, Alessandro nodded. “That’s the man who broke into the museum. Now they want to know why he broke into the museum, and why he has been following you around.”
“How about telling me who he is?” I looked around at the grave faces. “Is he some kind of … murderer?”
“His name is Bruno Carrera. He’s been involved in organized crime in the past, and he’s been linked to some very bad people. He disappeared f
or a while, but now—” Alessandro nodded at the screen. “He is back.”
I looked at the photo again. Bruno Carrera was definitely past his prime. Strange that he would come out of retirement in order to steal a piece of old silk with no commercial value whatsoever. “Just out of curiosity,” I said without thinking, “was he ever connected to a man called Luciano Salimbeni?”
The officers exchanged glances.
“Very smooth,” whispered Alessandro, meaning the exact opposite. “I thought you didn’t want to answer any questions.”
I looked up and saw the officers studying me with renewed interest. They were clearly wondering what exactly I was doing in Siena, and how much crucial information I had yet to disclose about the museum break-in.
“La signorina conosce Luciano Salimbeni?” one of them asked Alessandro.
“Tell them that my cousin Peppo told me about Luciano Salimbeni,” I said. “Apparently he was after some of our family heirlooms twenty years ago. It has the benefit of being true.”
Alessandro made my case as best he could, but the police officers were not satisfied and kept asking for more details. It was an odd power struggle, for they obviously respected him very much, and yet there was something about me and my story that just didn’t fit. At one point they both left the room, and I turned to Alessandro, mystified. “Is that it? Can we go now?”
“You really think,” he said, wearily, “they’ll let you go before you explain to them why your family is involved with one of Italy’s most wanted criminals?”
“Involved? All I said was that Peppo had a suspicion—”
“Giulietta”—Alessandro leaned towards me, not wanting anyone else to overhear us—“why didn’t you tell me about all this?”
Before I could reply, the officers returned with a printout of Bruno Carrera’s file, asking Alessandro to question me about a specific passage.
“It seems you’re right,” he said, skimming through the text. “Bruno used to do odd jobs for Luciano Salimbeni. He was arrested once, and told them some story about a statue with golden eyes—” He looked at me, trying to gauge my honesty. “Do you know anything about that?”
