by Anne Fortier
Fortunately, the drop was no more than ten feet or so. Less fortunate was my landing in a bed of roses. But I was too frantic to feel any real pain as I extracted myself from the thorny branches and picked up my bag; the scratches on my arms and legs were nothing compared to the pangs of defeat I couldn’t block out as I limped away from the best of nights and the worst of nights all at once.
Picking my way through the dewy darkness of the garden I eventually emerged from a clingy shrubbery into the dimly lit circle of the driveway. Standing there, clutching the bag against my chest, I now realized that there was no way I could get the Alfa Romeo out; it was trapped behind several black limos which could only belong to the Lorenzo Brotherhood. However little I liked the idea, it was beginning to look as if I would be walking all the way back to Siena.
While I stood there, smarting from my bad luck, I suddenly heard dogs barking madly somewhere behind me. Unzipping the bag, I quickly took out the gun—just in case—and began running down the gravel driveway, sending up gasping prayers to whatever guardian angel was on duty in the area that night. If I was lucky, I could make it out to the main road before they caught up with me, and hitch a ride with a passing car. Surely, if the driver thought my romantic dress-up was meant as an invitation, the gun would quickly set him straight.
The tall gate at the end of Castello Salimbeni’s driveway was, of course, closed, and I did not waste my time pressing the buttons to the intercom. Sticking my arm through the iron bars, I put down the gun carefully in the gravel on the other side, before throwing my bag over the gate. Only when it came down with a thud on the other side did it occur to me that the impact might have crushed the vial inside. But that should hardly be a concern; trapped between barking dogs and a tall gate, I was lucky if the vial was all that ended up in pieces tonight.
Then, finally, I grabbed the iron bars and began climbing. Not even halfway to the top, however, I heard running feet in the gravel behind me, and frantically tried to speed up my progress. But the metal was cold and slippery, and before I could pull myself up and out of reach, a hand closed firmly around my ankle. “Giulietta! Wait!” It was Alessandro.
I glared down at him, nearly blinded by fear and fury. “Let me go!” I cried, trying as hard as I could to kick his hand away. “You bastard! I hope you burn in hell! You and your bloody godmother!”
“Come down!” Alessandro was not open for negotiation. “Before you hurt yourself!”
I finally managed to get my foot free, and to hoist myself out of reach. “Yeah right! You asshole! I’d rather break my neck than play your sick games anymore!”
“Come down, now!” He climbed up behind me, this time to grab hold of my skirt. “And let me explain! Please!”
I groaned with frustration. I was frantic to get away, and what more could he possibly tell me now? But with him stubbornly holding on to the fabric of my dress, there was nothing I could do but hang there, fuming with desperation, while my arms and hands slowly started giving way.
“Giulietta. Please listen. I can explain everything—”
I suppose we were so focused on each other that neither of us noticed a third person emerging from the darkness on the other side of the gate, until she spoke. “Okay, Romeo, get your hands off my sister!”
“Janice!” I was so surprised to see her that I very nearly lost my grip.
“Just keep climbing!” Janice knelt down to pick up the gun in the gravel. “And you, mister, let’s see your flippers!”
She pointed the gun at Alessandro through the gate, and he let go of me right away. Janice had always been pretty forceful regardless of her accessories; with a gun in her hand she was the very embodiment of “No means no.”
“Careful!” Alessandro jumped off the gate and backed up a few steps, “That gun is loaded …”
“Of course it’s loaded!” snapped Janice. “Put your paws up, lover-boy!”
“… and it has a very light trigger pull.”
“Oh yeah? Well, so do I! But you know what? That’s your problem! You’re on the smoking end!”
Meanwhile, I was able to painfully work my way over the top of the gate, and as soon as I could, I let myself drop to the ground next to Janice with a howl of pain.
“Jesus, Jules! Are you okay? Here, take this—” Janice handed me the gun. “I’m gonna get our ride—no, you idiot! Point it at him!”
We stood there for only a few seconds, but it felt like time had stopped. Alessandro looked at me glumly through the gate while I did my best to point the gun at him, tears of confusion fogging my scope.
“Give me the book,” was all he said. “It’s what they want. They won’t let you go until they have it. Trust me. Please don’t—”
“Come on!” cried Janice, pulling up next to me on her motorcycle, gravel flying. “Get the bag and hop on!” Seeing my hesitation, she revved the engine impatiently. “Get your ass in gear, Miss Juliet, the party’s over!”
Moments later, we zoomed into the darkness on the Ducati Monster, and when I turned around to look one last time, Alessandro just stood there, leaning on the gate, like a man who has missed the most important flight of his life because of a silly miscalculation.
[ IX.I ]
Death lies on her like an untimely frost
Upon the sweetest flower of all the field
…
WE DROVE FOR AN ETERNITY along dark country roads, up hills and down hills, through valleys and sleeping villages. Janice never stopped to tell me where we were headed, and I didn’t care. It was enough that we were moving, and that I wouldn’t have to make any decisions for a while.
When we finally pulled into a bumpy driveway at the edge of a village, I was so tired I felt like curling up in the nearest flower bed and sleeping for a month. With nothing but the headlamp of the bike to guide us, we wound our way through a wilderness of shrubs and tall weeds before finally pulling up in front of a completely dark house.
Killing the engine, Janice took off her helmet, shook out her hair, and looked at me over her shoulder. “This is Mom’s house. Actually, now it’s ours.” She pulled a small flashlight out of her pocket. “There’s no power, so I got this.” Walking ahead of me up to a side door, she unlocked it and held it open for me. “Welcome home.”
A narrow hallway took us directly into a room that could only be a kitchen. Even in the darkness, the dirt and dust were tangible, and the air smelled musty, like wet clothes festering in a hamper. “I say we camp out here tonight,” Janice went on, lighting a few candles. “There’s no water, and everything is kinda dirty, but the upstairs is even worse. And the front door is totally stuck.”
“How on earth,” I said, briefly forgetting how tired and cold I was, “did you find this place?”
“It wasn’t easy.” Janice unzipped another pocket and took out a folded-up map. “After you and what’s-his-face took off yesterday, I went and bought this. Of course, try to find a street address in this country—” When I didn’t take the map to see for myself, she pointed the torch right at my face and shook her head. “Look at you, you’re a mess. And you know what? I knew this would happen! And I told you so! But you wouldn’t listen! It’s always like this—”
“Excuse me!” I glared at her, in no mood for her gloating. “You knew what, exactly, O crystal ball? That some esoteric cult would … drug me and—?”
Instead of shouting back at me as she was undoubtedly dying to do, Janice merely tapped my nose with the map and said, seriously, “I knew the Italian Stallion was bad news. And I told you so. Jules, I said, this guy—”
I pushed the map away and covered my face with my hands. “Please! I don’t want to talk about it. Right now.” When she kept pointing the flashlight at me, I reached out and pushed that away, too. “Stop it! I have a splitting headache!”
“Oh dear,” said Janice, in the sarcastic voice I knew so well. “Disaster narrowly avoided tonight in Tuscany … American virgitarian saved by sister … but suffers severe headache.�
��
“Yeah, go ahead,” I muttered, “just laugh at me. I deserve it.”
Expecting her to carry on, I was puzzled when she didn’t. Uncovering my face at last I found her staring at me, quizzically. Then her mouth fell open, and her eyes turned perfectly circular. “No! You slept with him, didn’t you?”
When there was no rebuttal, just tears, she sighed deeply and put her arms around me. “Well, you did say you would rather be screwed by him than by me.” She kissed me on the hair. “I hope it was worth it.”
CAMPING OUT ON moth-eaten coats and cushions on the kitchen floor, way too wound up to sleep, we lay for hours in the dwindling darkness, dissecting my escapade at Castello Salimbeni. Although Janice’s comments were peppered with the odd, knee-jerk buffoonery, we ended up agreeing on most things, except the issue of whether or not I should have—as Janice phrased it—made whoopee with the eagle boy.
“Well, that’s your opinion,” I had finally said, turning my back to her in an attempt at closing the subject, “but even if I had known everything I know now, I would still have done it.”
Janice’s only response had been a sour “Hallelujah! I’m glad you got something for our money.”
A little while later, still lying there with our backs turned to each other in stubborn silence, she suddenly sighed and muttered, “I miss Aunt Rose.”
Not really sure what she meant—these kinds of exclamations were completely unlike her—I very nearly made some snarky remark about her missing Aunt Rose because Aunt Rose would have agreed with her, and not with me, on the issue of me being a sap for accepting Eva Maria’s invitation. But instead, I heard myself simply saying, “Me, too.”
And that was it. Minutes later, her breathing slowed, and I knew she was asleep. As for me, alone with my thoughts at last, I wished more than ever that I could conk out just like her and fly away in a hazelnut shell, leaving behind my heavy heart.
THE NEXT MORNING—or rather, well past noon—we shared a bottle of water and a granola bar outside in the sun, sitting on the crumbly front step of the house, occasionally pinching each other to make sure we weren’t dreaming. Janice had had a hard time finding the house in the first place, she told me, and had it not been for friendly locals pointing her in the right direction, she might never have noticed the sleeping beauty of a building hiding in the wilderness that was once a driveway and front yard.
“I had a heck of a time just opening the gate,” she told me. “It was rusted shut. To say nothing of the door. I can’t believe that a house can sit like this, completely empty, for twenty years, without anybody moving in or taking over the property.”
“It’s Italy,” I said, shrugging. “Twenty years is nothing. Age is not an issue here. How can it be, when you’re surrounded by immortal spirits? We’re just lucky they let us hang around for a while, pretending we belong here.”
Janice snorted. “I bet immortality sucks. That’s why they like to play with juicy little mortals”—she grinned and ran her tongue suggestively along her upper lip—“like you.”
Seeing that I still couldn’t laugh, her smile became more sympathetic, almost genuine. “Look at you, you got away! Imagine what would have happened if they had caught you. They would have—I don’t know—” Even Janice had a hard time imagining the horror I would have been put through. “Just be happy your ol’ sis found you in time.”
Seeing her hopeful expression, I threw my arms around her and gave her a squeeze. “I am! Trust me. I just don’t understand—why did you come? It’s a hell of a drive to Castello Salimbeni from here. Why didn’t you just let me—”
Janice looked at me with raised eyebrows. “Are you kidding me? Those rat-bastards stole our book! It’s payback time! If you hadn’t come running out the driveway the way you did, ass on fire, I would have broken in and searched the whole goddamn castello.”
“Well, it’s your lucky day!” I got up and went into the kitchen to grab my overnight bag. “Voilà!” I threw the bag at Janice’s feet. “Don’t say I wasn’t working for the team.”
“You’re kidding!” She unzipped the bag eagerly, and started rifling through it. But after only a few seconds she recoiled in disgust. “Eew! What the hell is this?”
We both stared at her hands. They were smeared in blood or something very like it. “Jesus, Jules!” gasped Janice. “Did you murder someone? Eek! What is this?” She smelled her hands with great apprehension. “It’s blood, all right. Please don’t tell me it’s yours, because if it is, I’m gonna go back right now and turn that guy into a piece of modern art!”
For some reason, her belligerent grimace made me laugh, maybe because I was still so unused to her standing up for me like this.
“There we go!” she said, forgetting her anger as soon as she saw me smiling at last. “You had me scared there for a while. Don’t ever do that again.”
Together, we took my bag and turned it upside down. Out tumbled my clothes, as well as the volume of Romeo and Juliet, which had—fortunately—not suffered too much damage. The mysterious green vial, however, had been completely crushed, probably when I threw the bag over the gate during my escape.
“What is this?” Janice picked up a piece of the shattered glass and turned it over in her hand.
“That’s the vial,” I said, “that I told you about; the one Umberto gave to Alessandro, and which really pissed him off.”
“Huh.” Janice wiped her hands on the grass. “Well, at least now we know what was in it. Blood. Go figure. Maybe you were right and they were really all vampires. Maybe this was some kind of mid-morning snack—”
We sat for a moment, pondering the possibilities. At one point I gathered up the cencio and looked at it with regret. “Such a shame. How do you get blood off old silk?”
Janice picked up a corner, and we held out the cencio between us, looking at the damage. Admittedly, the vial was not the sole culprit, but I knew better than to tell her that.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God!” said Janice suddenly. “That’s the whole point: You don’t get the blood out. This is exactly what they wanted the cencio to look like. Don’t you see?”
She stared at me eagerly, but I must have looked blank. “It’s just like the old days,” she explained, “when the women would inspect the bridal sheet on the morning after the wedding! And I’ll bet you a kangaroo”—she picked up a couple pieces of the broken vial, including the cork stopper—“this is—or was—what we in the matchmaking community refer to as an insta-virgin. Not just blood, but blood mixed with other stuff. It’s a science, believe me.”
Seeing my expression, Janice burst out laughing. “Oh yes, it’s still going on. You don’t believe me? You think people only looked at sheets in the Middle Ages? Wrong! Lest we forget, some cultures still live in the Middle Ages. Think about it: If you’re going back to The-Middle-of-Nowherestan to be married off to some goatherd cousin, but—oops—you’ve already been fooling around with Tom, Harry, and Dick … what do you do? Chances are, your goatherd groom plus in-laws are not gonna be happy that someone else ate the cheese. Solution: You can get fixed in a private clinic. Get everything reinstalled and go through the whole goddamn thing once more, just to please the audience. Or you can simply bring a sneaky little bottle of this to the party. Much cheaper.”
“That,” I protested, “is so far out—”
“You know what I think?” Janice went on, eyes gleaming. “I think they set you up big-time. I think they drugged you—or at least tried to—and were hoping you would be totally out after tripping the light fantastic with Friar Lorenzo and the dream team, so that they could go ahead and fish out the cencio and smear it with this stuff, making it look like good old Romeo had been driving the love-bus into cherry-town.”
I winced, but Janice didn’t seem to notice. “The irony is, of course,” she continued, too absorbed in her own lewd logic to notice my extreme discomfort with the subject and her choice of words, “that they could have saved themselves the whole friggin’
trouble. ’Cause you two went ahead and stuffed the cannelloni anyway. Just like Romeo and Juliet. Shazam! From the ballroom to the balcony to the bed in fifty pages. Tell me, were you trying to break their record?”
She looked at me enthusiastically, clearly hoping for a pat on the head and a cookie for being such a clever girl.
“Is it humanly possible,” I moaned, “to be any more crass than you?”
Janice grinned as if this was the highest praise possible. “Probably not. If it’s poetry you want, crawl back to your bird man.”
I leaned back against the door frame and closed my eyes. Every time Janice referred to Alessandro, even in her unspeakably vulgar way, I had little flashbacks to the night before—some painful, some not—and they kept distracting me from present reality. But if I asked her to stop, she would most certainly do the exact opposite.
“What I don’t understand,” I said, determined to have us both move on and catch up with the big picture, “is why they had the vial in the first place. I mean, if they really wanted to end the curse on the Tolomeis and the Salimbenis, then presumably the last thing they would do would be to fake Romeo and Giulietta’s wedding night. Did they actually think they could fool the Virgin Mary?”
Janice pursed her lips. “You’re right. It doesn’t make sense.”
“As far as I can see,” I went on, “the only one who got fooled—apart from me—was Friar Lorenzo. Or rather, he would have been fooled, if they had used the stuff in the vial.”
“But why the hell would they want to dupe Friar Lorenzo?” Janice threw up her hands. “He’s just an old relic. Unless”—she looked at me, eyebrows raised—“Friar Lorenzo has access to something that they don’t. Something important. Something they want. Such as—?”
I snapped upright. “Romeo and Giulietta’s grave?”
We stared at each other. “I think,” said Janice, nodding slowly, “that’s the connection right there. When we talked about it that night at Maestro Lippi’s, I thought you were crazy. But maybe you’re right. Maybe part of the whole undo-your-sins thing involves the actual grave and the actual statue. How about this … after making sure Romeo and Giulietta finally get together, the Tolomeis and the Salimbenis have to go to the grave and kneel before the statue?”
