by Anne Fortier
“But the curse said kneel before the Virgin.”
“So?” Janice shrugged. “Obviously the statue is somewhere close to a statue of the Virgin Mary—the problem is that they don’t know the exact location. Only Friar Lorenzo does. And that’s why they need him.”
We sat for a while in silence, running through the math.
“You know,” I eventually said, fondling the cencio, “I don’t think he knew.”
“Who?”
I glanced at her, heat rising in my cheeks. “You know … him.”
“Oh, come on, Jules!” moaned Janice. “Stop defending the creep. You saw him with Umberto, and”—she tried to soften the edge in her voice, but this was new to her, and she wasn’t very good at it—“he did chase you out the driveway and tell you to give him the book. Of course he knew.”
“But if you are right,” I said, feeling an absurd urge to push back and defend Alessandro, “about all this, then he would have followed the plan and not—you know.”
“Engaged in physical relations?” Janice suggested primly.
“Exactly,” I nodded. “Plus, he would not have been so surprised when Umberto gave him the vial. In fact, he would already have had the vial.”
“Honey!” Janice looked at me over the rim of imaginary glasses, “he broke into your hotel room, he lied to you, and he stole Mom’s book and gave it to Umberto. The guy is scum. And I don’t care if he has all the balls and whistles and knows how to use them, he’s still—excuse my French—a shyster. And as for your oh-so-friendly mobster queen—”
“Speaking of lying to me and breaking into my hotel room,” I said, staring right back at her, “why did you tell me he had trashed my hotel room when it was you all along?”
Janice gasped. “What?”
“Are you going to deny it?” I went on. “That you broke into my room and blamed Alessandro?”
“Hey!” she cried. “He broke in, too, okay! I am your sister! I have a right to know what’s going on—” She stopped herself and looked sheepish. “How did you know?”
“Because he saw you. He thought you were me, crawling down from my own balcony.”
“He thought—?” Janice gaped in disbelief. “Now I’m insulted! Honestly!”
“Janice,” I sighed, frustrated with her for sliding right back into her old sassiness, pulling me along. “You lied to me. Why? After everything that has happened, I would totally understand if you had broken into my room. You thought I was scamming you out of a fortune.”
“Really?” Janice looked at me with budding hope.
I shrugged. “Why don’t we try honesty for a change?”
Swift recoveries were my sister’s specialty. “Excellent,” she smirked, “honesty it is. And now, if you don’t mind”—she wiggled her eyebrows—“I have a few more questions about last night.”
AFTER GETTING SOME provisions from the village store, we spent the rest of the afternoon poking around in the house trying to recognize our childhood things. But it didn’t help that everything was covered in dust and mold, that every piece of textile had holes from some kind of animal, and that there was mouse shit in every possible—and impossible—crevice. Upstairs, the cobwebs were as thick as shower curtains, and when we opened the second-floor shutters to let in some light, more than half of them fell right off their hinges.
“Whoops!” said Janice when a shutter came crashing down on the front step, two feet from the Ducati. “I guess it’s time to date a carpenter.”
“How about a plumber?” I proposed, peeling spiderwebs from my hair. “Or an electrician?”
“You date the electrician,” she shot back. “You need some wiring done.”
The high point came when we discovered the wobbly chess table, hidden in a corner behind a mangy sofa.
“I told you, didn’t I?” Janice beamed, rocking it gently, just to make sure. “It was right here all along.”
By sunset, we had made so much progress mucking out that we decided to move our camp upstairs to what had once been an office. Sitting across from each other at an old writing desk, we had a candlelit dinner consisting of bread, cheese, and red wine, while we tried to figure out what to do next. Neither of us had any desire to return to Siena just yet, but at the same time, we both knew that our current situation was not sustainable. In order to get the house back in some kind of livable shape, we would need to invest a lot of time and money in red tape and handymen, and even if we succeeded, how would we live? We would be like fugitives, digging ourselves further and further into debt, and we would always be wondering when our past would catch up with us.
“The way I see it,” said Janice, pouring more wine, “we either stay here—which we can’t—or we go back to the States—which would be pathetic—or we go treasure hunting and see what happens.”
“I think you’re forgetting that the book in itself is useless,” I pointed out. “We need Mom’s sketchbook to figure out the secret code.”
“Which is precisely,” said Janice, reaching into her handbag, “why I brought it. Ta-daa!” She put the sketchbook on the desk in front of me. “Any further questions?”
I laughed out loud. “You know, I think I love you.”
Janice worked hard not to smile. “Easy now. We don’t want you to pull something.”
Once we had the two books side by side, it did not take us long to crack the code, which was, in fact, not even really a code, merely a cunningly hidden list of page, line, and word numbers. While Janice read out the numbers scribbled in the margins of the sketchbook, I leafed through the volume of Romeo and Juliet and read out the bits and pieces of the message our mother had wanted us to find. It went like this:
MY LOVE
THIS PRECIOUS BOOK
LOCKS IN THE GOLDEN STORY
OF
THE DEAREST
STONE
AS FAR AS THE VAST SHORE WASH’D WITH THE FARTHEST SEA
I SHOULD ADVENTURE FOR SUCH MERCHANDISE
GO WITH
ROMEO’S
GHOSTLY CONFESSOR
SACRIFIC’D SOME HOUR BEFORE HIS TIME
SEARCH, SEEK
WITH INSTRUMENTS
FIT TO OPEN THESE DEAD MEN’S TOMBS
IT NEEDS MUST BE BY STEALTH
HERE LIES JULIET
LIKE A POOR PRISONER
MANY HUNDRED YEARS
UNDER
QUEEN
MARIA
WHERE
LITTLE STARS
MAKE THE FACE OF HEAVEN SO FINE
GET THEE HENCE TO
SAINT
MARIA
LADDER
AMONG A SISTERHOOD OF HOLY NUNS
A HOUSE WHERE THE INFECTIOUS PESTILENCE DID REIGN
SEAL’D UP THE DOORS
MISTRESS
SAINT
GOOSE
VISITING THE SICK
CHAMBER
BED
THIS HOLY SHRINE
IS
THE STONY ENTRANCE
TO THE
ANCIENT VAULT
O LET US HENCE
GET ME AN IRON CROW
AWAY WITH THE
CROSS
AND FOOT IT GIRLS!
When we had come to the end of the long message, we sat back and looked at each other in bewilderment, our initial enthusiasm on hold.
“Okay, so I have two questions,” said Janice. “One: Why the hell didn’t we do this before? And two: What was Mom smoking?” She glared at me and reached out for her wineglass. “Sure, I get that she hid her secret code in ‘this precious book,’ and that it is somehow a treasure map to find Juliet’s grave and ‘the dearest stone,’ but … where are we supposed to go digging? What’s up with the pestilence and the crowbar?”
“I have a feeling,” I said, leafing back and forth to reread a few passages, “that she is talking about the Siena Cathedral. ‘Queen Maria’ … that can only mean the Virgin Mary. And the bit about the little stars making the face of heaven so fin
e sounds to me like the inside of the cathedral dome. It is painted blue with little golden stars on it.” I looked up at her, suddenly excited. “Suppose that’s where the grave is? Remember, Maestro Lippi said that Salimbeni buried Romeo and Giulietta in a ‘most holy place’; what could be more holy than a cathedral?”
“Makes sense to me,” agreed Janice, “but what about the whole pestilence thing and the ‘sisterhood of holy nuns’? That doesn’t sound like it has anything to do with the cathedral.”
“‘Saint Maria, ladder’—” I mumbled, riffling through the book once more, “‘a house where the infectious pestilence did reign … seal’d up the doors … mistress saint … goose … visiting the sick’ … and blah-blah-blah.” I let the book fall shut and leaned back on the chair, trying to remember the story Alessandro had told me about Comandante Marescotti and the Plague. “Okay, I know it sounds crazy, but”—I hesitated and looked at Janice, whose eyes were wide and full of faith in my riddle-solving skills—“during the bubonic plague, which was only a few years after Romeo and Giulietta died, they had so many corpses lying around that they couldn’t bury them all. So, in Santa Maria della Scala—I think scala means ladder—the enormous hospital facing the cathedral, where ‘a sisterhood of holy nuns’ took care of the sick during the ‘infectious pestilence’ … well, they simply stuffed the dead into a wall and sealed it off.”
Janice made a face. “Eek.”
“So,” I went on, “it seems to me that we’re looking for a ‘chamber’ with a ‘bed’ inside that hospital, Santa Maria della Scala—”
“… in which slept the ‘mistress’ of the ‘saint’ of geese,” proposed Janice. “Whoever he is.”
“Or,” I said, “the ‘mistress saint’ of Siena, born in the contrada of the ‘goose,’ Saint Catherine—”
Janice whistled. “Go, girl!”
“… who, incidentally, had a bedroom in Santa Maria della Scala, where she slept when she worked late hours ‘visiting the sick.’ Don’t you remember? It was in the story Maestro Lippi read to us. I’ll bet you a sapphire and an emerald that this is where we’ll find the ‘stony entrance to the ancient vault.’”
“Whoa, wait!” said Janice. “Now I’m confused. First, it’s the cathedral, then it’s Saint Catherine’s room at the hospital, but now it’s an ‘ancient vault’? Which is it?”
I pondered the question for a moment, trying to recall the voice of the sensationalist British tour guide I had overheard in the Siena Cathedral a few days earlier. “Apparently,” I finally said, “in the Middle Ages there used to be a crypt underneath the cathedral. But it disappeared during the time of the Plague, and they’ve never been able to find it since. Of course, it’s hard for the archaeologists to do anything around here, since all the buildings are protected. Anyway, some people think it’s just a legend—”
“I don’t!” said Janice, jumping at the idea. “This has to be it. Romeo and Giulietta are buried in the crypt underneath the cathedral. It makes sense. If you were Salimbeni, isn’t that exactly where you would have put the shrine? And since the whole place—I assume—is consecrated to the Virgin Mary … Voilà!”
“Voilà what?”
Janice held out her arms as if she was going to bless me. “If you kneel in the cathedral crypt, you ‘kneel before the Virgin,’ just like the curse says! Don’t you see? It has to be the place!”
“But if that’s the case,” I said, “we’ll need to do a lot of digging to get there. People have been looking everywhere for this crypt.”
“Not,” said Janice, pushing the book towards me again, “if Mom has found a secret entrance from that old hospital, Santa Maria della Scala. Read it again, I’m sure I’m right.”
We went through the message once more, and this time, the whole thing suddenly made sense. Yes, we were definitely talking about an ‘ancient vault’ underneath the cathedral, and yes, the ‘stony entrance’ was to be found in Saint Catherine’s room at Santa Maria della Scala, right across the piazza from the church.
“Holy crap!” Janice sat back, overwhelmed. “If it’s this easy, then why didn’t Mom go tomb raiding herself?”
Just then, one of our candle stumps extinguished itself with a small puff, and although we still had other candles left, the shadows of the room suddenly seemed to close in on us from all sides.
“She knew she was in danger,” I replied, my voice oddly hollow in the darkness, “and that’s why she did what she did, and put the code in the book, the book in the box, and the box in the bank.”
“So,” said Janice, trying to hit a bushy-tailed note, “now that we’ve solved the riddle, what’s preventing us from—”
“Breaking into a protected building and wrecking Saint Catherine’s cell with a crowbar?” I made a face. “Gee, I don’t know!”
“Seriously. It’s what Mom would want us to do. Isn’t it?”
“It’s not that simple.” I poked at the book, trying to remember the exact words in the message. “Mom tells us to ‘go with Romeo’s ghostly confessor … sacrificed before his time.’ Who is that? That’s Friar Lorenzo. Obviously not the real one, but maybe his new … incarnation. And I bet that means we were right: The old guy knows something about the location of the crypt and the grave—something crucial, which even Mom couldn’t figure out.”
“So, what are you suggesting?” Janice wanted to know. “That we kidnap Friar Lorenzo and interrogate him under a hundred-watt bulb? Look, maybe you got it wrong. Let’s do this one more time, separately, and see if we get the same result—” She began opening the drawers in the desk one by one. “Come on! There’s gotta be some pens kicking around here somewhere! … Wait! Hang on!” She stuck her whole head into the bottom drawer, struggling to liberate something that was trapped in the woodwork. When she finally got it loose, she sat up triumphantly, her hair tumbling over her face. “Will you look at that! A letter!”
But it was not a letter. It was a blank envelope full of photographs.
…
BY THE TIME we had finished looking at Mom’s photographs, Janice declared that we needed at least one more bottle of vino to get through the night without going totally insane. While she went downstairs to get it, I turned to the photos again, putting them out on the desk side by side, my hands still shaking from the shock, hoping I could somehow make them tell a different story.
But there could only be one interpretation of Mom’s exploits in Italy; no matter how we sliced it, the main characters and the conclusion remained the same: Diane Lloyd had gone to Italy, had started working for Professor Tolomei, had met a young playboy in a yellow Ferrari, had become pregnant, had married Professor Tolomei, had given birth to twin girls, had survived a house fire that had killed her elderly husband, and had proceeded to hook up once again with the young playboy, who, in every single photo, looked so happy with the twins—that is, with us—that we both agreed he must be our real father.
That playboy was Umberto.
“This is so unreal!” wheezed Janice, returning with bottle and corkscrew. “All these years. Pretending to be a butler and never saying a word. It’s too friggin’ weird.”
“Although,” I said, picking up one of the photos of him with us, “he always was our dad. Even if we didn’t call him that. He was always—” But I couldn’t go on.
Only now did I look up and see that Janice was crying, too, although she was wiping away her tears angrily, not wanting Umberto to have that satisfaction. “What a scumbag!” she said. “Forcing us to live his lie all these years. And now suddenly—” She broke off with a grunt, as the wine cork broke in half.
“Well,” I said, “at least it explains why he knew about the golden statue. He obviously got all that from Mom. And if they really were … you know, together, he must have known about the box of papers in the bank as well. Which explains why he would write a fake letter to me from Aunt Rose, telling me to go to Siena and speak to Presidente Maconi in Palazzo Tolomei in the first place. He obviously got that na
me from Mom.”
“But all this time!” Janice spilled some wine on the table as she hurriedly filled up our glasses, and a few drops fell on the photos. “Why didn’t he do it years ago? Why didn’t he explain all this to Aunt Rose while she was still alive—?”
“Yeah right!” I quickly wiped the wine from the photos. “Of course he couldn’t tell her the truth. She would have called the police right away.” Pretending to be Umberto, I said in a deep voice, “By the way, Rosie-doll, my real name is Luciano Salimbeni—yes, the man who killed Diane and who is wanted by the Italian authorities. If you had ever bothered to visit Diane in Italy—bless her heart—you’d have met me a hundred times.”
“But what a life!” Janice interjected. “Look at this—” She pointed at the photos of Umberto and the Ferrari, parked on some scenic spot overlooking a Tuscan valley and smiling into the camera with the eyes of a lover. “He had it all. And then … he becomes a servant in Aunt Rose’s house.”
“Mind you,” I said, “he was a fugitive. Aless—someone told me he was one of the most wanted criminals in Italy. Lucky for him he wasn’t in jail. Or dead. At least, working for Aunt Rose, he could watch us growing up in some kind of freedom.”
“I still don’t believe it!” Janice shook her head dismissively. “Yes, Mom is pregnant in her wedding photo, but that happens to a lot of women. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that the groom is not the father.”
“Jan!” I pushed a few of the wedding photos towards her. “Professor Tolomei was old enough to be her grandfather. Put yourself in Mom’s shoes for a second.” Seeing that she was determined to disagree with me, I grabbed her by the arm and pulled her closer. “Come on, it’s the only explanation. Look at him—” I picked up one of many photos of Umberto lying on a blanket in the grass with Janice and me crawling all over him. “He loves us.” As soon as I said the words, I felt a lump in my throat and had to swallow to keep down the tears. “Crap!” I whimpered, “I don’t think I can take much more of this.”
