Juliet

VI.I

JANICE HAD NOT LIED when she said she was a good climber. For some reason, I had never put much faith in her postcards from exotic places, except when they spoke of disappointment and debauchery. I preferred to think of her lying dead drunk in a motel in Mexico rather than snorkeling around coral reefs in water so clean that you-as she had once scribbled, not to me, but to Aunt Rose-jump in like the dirty old sinner you are and come out feeling like Eve on her first morning in Paradise, before Adam shows up with newspaper and cigarettes.

Standing on my balcony, observing her efforts to climb up to me, I was struck by how much I had looked forward to my sister’s return. For after pacing up and down the floor of my room for at least an hour, I had come to the frustrating conclusion that I would never be able to make sense of the situation on my own.

It had always been like that. Whenever I would describe my problems to Aunt Rose as a child, she would fuss and fuss, but never solve anything, and in the end I would feel much worse than I had before. If a boy was bugging me at school, she would call the principal and all the teachers and demand that they call his parents. Janice, in contrast-accidentally overhearing our conversation-would merely shrug and say, “He has a crush on her. It’ll pass. What’s for dinner?” And she was always right, even though I hated to admit it.

In all likelihood, she was right now, too. It was not that I particularly liked her snarky comments about Alessandro and Eva Maria, but then, someone had to make them, and my own mind was clearly embroiled in a conflict of interest.

Panting with the ongoing effort of staying alive, Janice readily grasped the hand I held out for her and eventually managed to swing a leg over the railing. “Climbing…” she gasped, coming down like a sack of potatoes on the other side, “is such sweet sorrow!”

“Why,” I asked, as she sat gasping on the floor of the balcony, “did you not use the stairs?”

“Very funny!” she shot back. “Considering there’s a mass murderer out there who hates my guts!”

“Come on!” I said. “If Umberto had wanted to wring our necks he would have done it a long time ago.”

“You never know when these people will suddenly snap!” Janice finally got up, brushing off her clothes. “Especially now that we have Mom’s box. I say we get out of here prontissimo, and-” Only now did she actually look at my face and notice my red and puffy eyes. “Jesus, Jules!” she exclaimed. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said, dismissively. “I just finished reading about Romeo and Giulietta. Sorry to spoil the plot, but there’s no happy end. Nino tries to seduce her-or, rape her-and she kills herself with sleeping potion, just before Romeo comes blasting in to save her.”

“What the hell did you expect?” Janice went inside to wash her hands. “People like the Salimbenis don’t change. Not in a million years. It’s hardwired into their system. Evil with a smile. Nino… Alessandro… cut from the same cloth. You either kill them, or you let them kill you.”

“Eva Maria is not like that-” I began, but Janice wouldn’t let me finish.

“Oh, really?” she sneered from the bathroom. “Allow me to broaden your horizon. Eva Maria has been playing you since day one. Do you seriously think she was on that plane by accident?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” I gasped. “No one else knew I was arriving on that plane except-” I stopped.

“Precisely!” Janice tossed aside the towel and threw herself down on the bed. “They’re obviously working together, her and Umberto. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re brother and sister. That’s how the Mafia works, you know. It’s all about family, all about favors and covering each other’s ass-mind you, I’d love to cover your boyfriend’s ass, except I’m not sure I want to end up sleeping under a floor.”

“Oh, would you give it a break!”

“No, I won’t!” Janice was on a roll, feet in the air. “Cousin Peppo says that Eva Maria’s husband, Salimbeni, was a bastardo classico. He was definitely into some über-organized badass behavior with limos and guys in shiny suits and Sicilian ties, the whole scene. Some people think Eva Maria had her little sugar daddy put down so she could take over the biz and get rid of the limit on her credit card. And your Mister Candypants is obviously her favorite muscle, if not downright toy dawg. But now-ta-daa!-she’s sicced him on you, and the question is: Will he dig up a bone for her, or for you? Can the virgitarian turn the playboy from his wicked ways, or will the scary godmother prevail and steal back her family jewels as soon as you get your cute little hands on them?”

I just looked at her. “Are you finished?”

Janice blinked a couple of times, recovering from her solo flight of fancy. “Definitely. I’m so outta here. You?”

“Oh, crap!” I sat down next to her, suddenly exhausted. “Mom was trying to leave us a treasure. And we’ve screwed it up. I’ve screwed it up. Don’t I owe it to her to straighten things out?”

“The way I see it, all we owe her is to stay alive.” Janice dangled a pair of keys in front of me. “Let’s go home.”

“What are those for?”

“Mom’s old house. Peppo told me all about it. It’s southeast of here, in a place called Montepulciano. It’s been empty all these years.” She looked at me with guarded hopefulness. “Wanna come?”

I stared at her, amazed that she could bring herself to ask. “You really want me to come?”

Janice sat up. “Jules,” she said, with unusual sobriety, “I really want us both to get out of here. This is not just about a statue and some gemstones. There is something really spooky going on. Peppo told me about a secret society of people who believe there is a curse running in our family, and that they need to stop it. And guess who runs the whole show? Yes, your little mobster-queen. This is the same kind of sick stuff that Mom was into… something about secret blood rituals to conjure the spirits of the dead. Excuse me for not being enthusiastic.”

I got up and walked over to the window, frowning at my own reflection. “She has invited me to a party. At her place in Val d’Orcia.”

When Janice didn’t answer, I turned to see what was wrong. She was lying back on the bed, clutching her face. “God help us!” she moaned. “I don’t believe this! Let me guess: El Niño is going, too?”

I threw up my arms. “Come on, Jan! Don’t you want to get to the bottom of this? I do!”

“And you will!” Janice sprang from the bed and started stomping back and forth, fists clenched. “You’ll end up on the bottom of something, that’s for sure, with your heart broken and your feet in cement. I swear to God… if you do this, and you end up dead like all our ancestors that are supposedly buried under Eva Maria’s front steps, I will never speak to you again!”

She looked at me belligerently, and I stared back in disbelief. This was not the Janice I knew. The Janice I knew could not have cared less about my movements, or my fate, except to hope that I failed miserably in everything I set out to do. And the idea of me with my feet in cement would have made her slap her knees laughing, not bite her lip as if she was just about to cry.

“All right,” she said more calmly, when I remained silent, “go ahead, then, and get yourself killed in some… satanic ritual. See if I care.”

“I didn’t say I was going.”

She deflated a bit. “Oh! Well, in that case, I think it’s high time you and I had a gelato.”

WE SPENT A GOOD CHUNK of the afternoon sampling old and new flavors in Bar Nannini, an ice cream parlor conveniently located in Piazza Salimbeni. Not exactly reconciled, we had at least come to agree on two things: We knew far too little about Alessandro to be comfortable with him driving away with me tomorrow, and, secondly, gelato was better than sex.

“Just trust me on that one,” said Janice, winking to cheer me up.

For all her faults, my sister had always had tremendous perseverance, and she single-handedly kept watch for over an hour, while I was crouched on a bench in the far corner of the shop, mortified in advance at the idea of being discovered.

Suddenly, Janice pulled at me to get up. She didn’t say anything; she didn’t have to. Peeking out through the glass door together, we watched Alessandro as he crossed Piazza Salimbeni on foot and continued down the Corso.

“He’s going downtown!” observed Janice. “I knew it! Guys like that don’t live in the burbs. Or maybe”-she made eyes at me-“he’s going to meet his mistress.” We both stretched our necks to see better, but Alessandro was no longer visible. “Damn!”

We shot out of Bar Nannini and cantered down the street as best we could without attracting too much attention, which was always a challenge in Janice’s company. “Wait!” I grabbed her by the arm to slow her down. “I see him! He’s right-uh-oh!”

Just then, Alessandro stopped, and we both ducked into a doorway. “What’s he doing?” I hissed, too afraid of disclosure to see for myself.

“Talking to some guy,” said Janice, stretching. “Some guy with a yellow flag. What’s up with the flag thing? Everybody has a flag here-”

Moments later, we were once again on the prowl, slithering along shopwindows and doorways to avoid detection, following our prey all the way down the road, past the Campo, and up towards Piazza Postierla. He had already stopped several times to greet people going the other way, but as the road became steeper, the number of friends increased.

“Honestly!” exclaimed Janice, when Alessandro stopped yet again to goochi-gooch a baby in a stroller. “Is this guy running for friggin’ mayor?”

“It’s called interhuman relationships,” I muttered, “you should try it.”

Janice rolled her eyes. “Why, listen to the social butterfly!”

I was brewing a retort when we both realized our target had disappeared.

“Oh no!” gasped Janice. “Where did he go?”

We hurried up to where we had last seen Alessandro before he vanished-practically across the street from Luigi’s hair salon-and here we discovered the entrance to the tiniest, darkest alley in all of Siena.

“Can you see him?” I whispered, hiding behind Janice.

“No, but it’s the only place he could have gone.” She took my hand and pulled me along. “Come!”

As we tiptoed down the covered alley, I could not help giggling. Here we were, sneaking around hand in hand the way we used to when we were children. Janice glanced at me sternly, worried about the noise, but when she saw the laughter in my face, she softened and started giggling, too.

“I can’t believe we are doing this!” I whispered. “It’s embarrassing!”

“Shh!” she hissed, “I think this is a bad neighborhood.” She nodded at the graffiti on one of the walls. “What’s a galleggiante? Sounds pretty obscene. And what the hell happened in ’92?”

At the bottom, the alley turned a sharp right, and we stood for a moment at the corner, listening for disappearing footsteps. Janice even stuck out her head to assess the situation, but she pulled it back again very quickly.

“Did he see you?” I whispered.

Janice drew in air. “Come!” She grabbed me by the arm and pulled me around the corner before I could protest. Fortunately, there was no sign of Alessandro, and we scampered on in nervous silence, until we suddenly caught sight of people guarding a horse at the far end of the narrow alley.

“Stop!” I pushed Janice up against a wall, hoping no one had spotted us. “This is no good. Those guys-”

“What are you dong?” Janice pushed away from the wall and continued down the alley towards the horse and its handlers. Seeing that, thankfully, Alessandro was not among them, I ran after her, pulling at her arm to make her stop.

“Are you crazy!” I hissed. “That’s gotta be a horse for the Palio, and those guys don’t want tourists running around-”

“Oh, I’m not a tourist,” said Janice, shaking off my hands and walking on, “I’m a journalist.”

“No! Jan! Wait!”

As she approached the men guarding the horse, I was filled with a strange mix of admiration and the desire to kill her. The last time I had felt quite like this was in ninth grade, when she had spontaneously picked up the phone and dialed the number of a boy in our class, merely because I had said I liked him.

Just then, someone opened a pair of shutters right above us and, as soon as I realized that it was Alessandro, I sprang back against the wall, pulling Janice with me, desperate that he shouldn’t see us there, sniffing around in his neighborhood like lovesick teenagers.

“Don’t look!” I hissed, still shell-shocked from the near miss. “I think he lives up there, on the third floor. Mission accomplished. Case closed. Time to go.”

“What do you mean, mission accomplished?” Janice leaned back to look up at Alessandro’s window, eyes gleaming. “We came here to find out what he’s up to. I say we stick around.” She tried the nearest door, and when it opened without a problem, she wiggled her eyebrows and stepped inside. “Come on!”

“Are you out of your mind?” I eyed the men nervously. They were all staring at us, clearly wondering who we were and what we were up to. “I am not setting foot in that building! That’s where he lives!”

“Fine by me.” Janice shrugged. “Stay here and loiter. I’m sure they won’t mind.”

AS IT TURNED OUT, we were not in a stairway. Walking along in the semidarkness behind Janice, I had been afraid she would race me all the way to the third floor, determined to kick in Alessandro’s door and bombard him with questions. But seeing that there were no stairs, I gradually started relaxing.

At the end of the long corridor a door was ajar, and we both stretched to see what was on the other side.

“Flags!” observed Janice, clearly disappointed. “More flags. Someone has a thing with yellow around here. And birds.”

“It’s a museum,” I said, spotting a few cencios hanging on the walls. “A contrada museum, just like Peppo’s. I wonder-”

“Cool!” Janice pushed open the door before I could protest. “Let’s see it. You always liked dusty old junk.”

“No! Please don’t-” I tried to hold her back, but she shook off my hand and walked boldly into the room. “Come back here! Jan!”

“What kind of man,” she mused, looking around at the displayed artifacts, “lives in a museum? It’s kind of creepy.”

“Not in,” I corrected her. “On top. And it’s not as if they have mummies here.”

“How do you know?” She tipped open the visor on a suit of armor, just to check. “Maybe they have horse-mummies. Maybe this is where they have those secret blood rituals and conjure the spirits of the dead.”

“Yeah.” I threw her a hairy eyeball from behind the door. “Thanks for getting to the bottom of that when you had the chance.”

“Hey!” She all but gave me the finger. “Peppo didn’t know any more than that, okay!”

I stood and watched her as she tiptoed around for another minute or so, pretending to be interested in the exhibition. We both knew she was only doing it to irritate me. “Okay,” I finally said, “have you seen enough flags now?” But instead of answering, Janice simply walked through a door into another room, leaving me to stand there, half hiding, all by myself.

It took me a while to find her; she was walking around in a tiny chapel with candles burning on the altar and magnificent oil paintings on every wall. “Wow!” she said when I joined her. “How would you like this for a living room? What do they do in here? Read entrails?”

“I hope they read yours! Do you mind if we leave now?”

But before she could give me a cheeky answer, we both heard footsteps. Nearly tripping over each other’s feet in our panic, we scrambled to get out of the chapel and find a place to hide in the next room.

“In here!” I pulled Janice into a corner behind a glass cabinet with beat-up riding helmets, and five seconds later an elderly woman walked right past us with an armful of folded-up yellow clothes. Behind her came a boy of eight or so, hands in his pockets, a scowl on his face. Though the woman walked straight through the room, unfortunately the boy stopped ten feet from the place where we were hiding, to look at antique swords on the wall.

Janice made a face, but neither of us dared to move an inch, let alone whisper, as we crouched in the corner like textbook evildoers. Luckily for us, the boy was too focused on his own mischief to pay much attention to anything else. Making sure his grandmother was good and gone, he stretched to lift a rapier off its hooks on the wall, and to assume a couple of fencing positions that were not half bad. He was so engrossed in his illicit project that he did not even hear someone else entering the room until it was too late.

“No-no-no!” scolded Alessandro, crossing the floor and taking the rapier right out of the boy’s hand. But instead of putting the weapon back on the wall, as any responsible adult would do, he merely showed the boy the correct position and gave him the rapier right back. “Tocca a te!”

The weapon went back and forth a few times until finally Alessandro plucked another rapier from the wall and indulged the boy in a play-fight, which only ended when an impatient woman’s voice yelled, “Enrico! Dove sei?”

Within seconds, the weapons were back on the wall, and when Grandmother materialized in the doorway, both Alessandro and the boy were standing innocently with their hands behind their backs.

“Ah!” exclaimed the woman, delighted to see Alessandro and kissing him on both cheeks. “Romeo!”

She said a lot more than that, but I didn’t hear it. If Janice and I had not been standing so close, I might even have sunk to my knees, seeing that my legs had turned to soft-serve ice cream.

Alessandro was Romeo.

Of course he was. How could I have missed that? Was this not the Eagle Museum? Had I not already seen the truth in Malèna’s eyes?… And in his?

“Jesus, Jules,” grimaced Janice, without a sound, “get a grip!”

But there was nothing left for me to get a grip on. Everything I had thought I knew about Alessandro spun before my eyes like numbers on a roulette wheel, and I realized that-in every single conversation with him-I had put all my money on the wrong color.

He was not Paris, he was not Salimbeni, he was not even Nino. He had always been Romeo. Not Romeo the party-crashing playboy with the elf hat, but Romeo the exile, who had been banished long ago by gossip and superstition, and who had spent his whole life trying to become someone else. Romeo, he had said, was his rival. Romeo had evil hands, and people would like to think he was dead. Romeo was not the man I thought I knew; he would never make love to me in rhyming couplets. But then, Romeo was also the man who came to Maestro Lippi’s workshop late at night, to have a glass of wine and contemplate the portrait of Giulietta Tolomei. That, to me, said more than the finest poetry.

Even so, why had he never told me the truth? I had asked him about Romeo again and again, but each and every time he had replied as if we were talking about someone else. Someone it would be very bad for me to know.

I suddenly remembered him showing me the bullet hanging from a leather string around his neck, and Peppo telling me from his hospital bed that everybody thought Romeo had died. And I remembered the expression on Alessandro’s face when Peppo had talked about Romeo being born outside of marriage. Only now did I understand his anger towards my Tolomei family members, who-in their ignorance of his true identity-had taken such pleasure in treating him like a Salimbeni and thus an enemy.

Just like I had.

When everyone had finally left the room-Grandmother and Enrico in one direction, Alessandro in another-Janice took me by the shoulders, eyes blazing. “Would you pull yourself together already!”

But that was asking a lot. “Romeo!” I groaned, clutching my head. “How can he be Romeo? I’m such an idiot!”

“Yes you are, but that’s hardly news.” Janice was not in the mood to be nice. “We don’t know if he is Romeo. The Romeo. Maybe it’s just his middle name. Romeo is a completely common Italian name. And if he really is the Romeo-that doesn’t change anything. He’s still in cahoots with the Salimbenis! He still trashed your friggin’ hotel room!”

I swallowed a few times. “I don’t feel so good.”

“Well, let’s get the hell out of here.” Janice took my hand and pulled me along, thinking she was taking us towards the main entrance of the museum.

Instead, we ended up in a part of the exhibition we had not seen before; it was a dimly lit room with very old and worn cencios on the wall, sealed in glass cabinets. The place had the vibe of an ancestral shrine, and off to one side a curved staircase in darkened stone led steeply into the underground.

“What’s down there?” whispered Janice, stretching to see.

“Forget it!” I shot back, recovering some of my spirit. “We’re not getting trapped in some dungeon!”

But Fortuna clearly favored Janice’s boldness over my jitters, for the next thing I knew we heard voices again-coming at us, it seemed, from all sides-and we nearly fell down the stairs in our hurry to get out of sight. Panting with the fear of discovery we crouched at the bottom of the stairwell as the voices came closer and the footsteps eventually stopped right overhead. “Oh no,” I whispered, before Janice could slap a hand over my mouth, “it’s him!”

We looked at each other, eyes wide. At this point-quite literally squatting, as we were, in Alessandro’s basement-even Janice did not seem to embrace the prospect of a meeting.

Just then, the lights came on around us, and we saw Alessandro starting down the stairs, then stopping. “Ciao, Alessio, come stai-?” we heard him say, greeting someone else, and Janice and I glared at each other, acutely aware that our humiliation had been postponed, if only for a few minutes.

Looking around frantically to assess our options, we could see that we were truly trapped in a subterranean dead end, precisely as I had predicted we would be. Apart from three gaping holes in the wall-the black mouths of what could only be Bottini caves-there was no way of leaving the place other than going back upstairs, past Alessandro. And any attempt at entering the caves was made impossible by black iron grates covering the holes.

But you never say never to a Tolomei. Bristling at the idea of being trapped, we both got up and started examining the grates with trembling fingers. I was mostly trying to figure out if we would be able to squeeze through with brute force, while Janice expertly felt her way around every bolt, every hinge, clearly refusing to believe that the structures could not somehow be opened. To her, every wall had a door, every door had a key; in short, every jam had an eject button. All you had to do was dig in and find it.

“Psst!” She waved at me excitedly, demonstrating that, indeed, the third and last grate did swing open, just like a door, and without the slightest squeak at that. “Come on!”

We went as far into the cave as the lights allowed, then scrambled on a few more feet in absolute darkness, until we finally stopped. “If we had a flashlight-” began Janice. “Oh, shit!” We nearly banged our heads together when suddenly a beam of light came down the entire length of the cave to where we stood, stopping only inches before it hit us, and then retracting, like a wave rolling ashore and back out to sea.

Smarting from the close call, we stumbled farther into the cave until we found something resembling a niche that was big enough to swallow us both. “Is he coming? Is he coming?” hissed Janice, trapped behind me and unable to see. “Is it him?”

I stuck my head out briefly, then pulled it back in. “Yes, yes, and yes!”

It was hard to see anything other than the sharp flashlight bouncing to and fro, but at some point everything stabilized, and I dared to look out again. It was indeed Alessandro-or, I should say, some version of Romeo-and as far as I could see he had stopped in order to unlock a small door in the cave wall, holding the flashlight tightly under one arm.

“What’s he doing?” Janice wanted to know.

“It looks like some kind of safe-he’s taking something out. A box.”

Janice clawed me excitedly. “Maybe it’s the cencio!”

I looked again. “No, it’s too small. More like a cigar box.”

“I knew it! He’s a smoker.”

I watched Alessandro intently as he locked the safe and walked back towards the museum with the box. Moments later, the iron grate fell shut behind him with a clang that echoed through the Bottini-and our ears-for far too long.

“Oh no!” said Janice.

“Don’t tell me-!” I turned towards her, hoping she would quickly put my worry to rest. But even in the darkness I could see the frightened expression on her face.

“Well, I was wondering why it wasn’t locked before-” she said, defensively.

“But that didn’t stop you, did it!” I snapped. “And now we’re trapped!”

“Where’s your sense of adventure?” Janice always tried to make a virtue out of necessity, but this time she failed to convince even herself. “This is great! I always wanted to go spelunking. It’s gotta come out somewhere, right?” She looked at me, relieving her nerves by taunting me. “Or would wittle Wulietta wather be wescued by Womeo?”

UMBERTO HAD ONCE described the Roman catacombs to us, after we had spent a whole evening plaguing Aunt Rose with questions about Italy and why we couldn’t go. Giving us each a dish towel so we could make ourselves useful while he had his hands in the sink, he had explained how the early Christians had been assembling in secret caves underground in order to hold communion where no one could see them and report their activities to the heathen Emperor. Similarly, these early Christians had defied the Roman tradition of cremation by wrapping their dead in shrouds and bringing them down into the caves, laying the bodies on shelves in the rock wall and performing funerary rites that hinged on the hope of a second coming.

If we were really so keen on going to Italy, Umberto concluded, he would make sure to take us down into those caves first thing and show us all the interesting skeletons.

As Janice and I walked through the Bottini, stumbling in the dark and taking turns at leading the way, Umberto’s ghostly stories came back to me with a vengeance. Here we were-just like the people in his story-scrambling around underground to avoid detection, and like those early Christians, we also did not know exactly when and where we would eventually surface, if at all.

It helped a bit that we had the lighter for Janice’s once-a-week cigarette; every twenty steps or so we would stop and flick it on for a few seconds, just to make sure we were not about to plunge into a bottomless hole or-as Janice at one point whimpered, when the cave wall suddenly turned slimy-walk right into a massive spiderweb.

“Creepy-crawlies,” I said, taking the lighter away from her, “are the least of our concerns. Don’t use up the liquid. We could be spending the night down here.”

We walked for a while in silence-me in front, Janice right behind, mumbling something about spiders liking it humid-until my foot caught on protruding rock and I fell down on the uneven floor, hurting my knees and wrists so badly I could have cried, had I not been so anxious to check that the lighter was still intact.

“Are you okay?” asked Janice, her voice full of fear. “Can you walk? I don’t think I could carry you.”

“I’m fine!” I grunted, smelling blood on my fingers. “Your turn to go first. Here…” I fumbled the lighter into her hands. “Break a leg.”

With Janice in the lead, I was free to fall back and examine my scrapes-both physical and mental-as we inched further into the unknown. My knees were more or less in shreds, but that was nothing compared to the turmoil in my soul.

“Jan?” I touched my fingers to her back as we walked. “Do you think that maybe he didn’t tell me he was Romeo because he wanted me to fall in love with him for the right reasons, not just because of his name?”

I suppose I couldn’t blame her for moaning.

“Okay-” I went on, “so, he didn’t tell me he was Romeo because the last thing he needed was to have some pain-in-the-ass virgitarian cramp his incognito style?”

“Jules!” Janice was so focused on picking her way through the perilous blackness that she had little patience for my speculations. “Would you stop torturing yourself! And me! We don’t even know if he is Romeo. Mind you, even if he is, I’m still gonna turn his ass inside out for treating you like this.”

Despite her angry tone, I was once again astounded to hear her expressing concern for my feelings, and began to wonder if it was something new, or something I just hadn’t noticed before.

“The thing is,” I went on, “he never actually said he was a Salimbeni. It was always me-oops!” I nearly fell again, and clung to Janice until I had regained my balance.

“Let me guess,” she said, flicking on the lighter so I could see her raised eyebrows, “he also never said he had anything to do with the museum break-in?”

“That was Bruno Carrera!” I exclaimed. “Working for Umberto!”

“Oh no, Julie-Baby,” Janice mimicked, not sounding the least bit like Alessandro, “I didn’t steal Romeo’s cencio… why would I do that? To me, it’s just an old rag. But hey, let me take care of that sharp knife for you, so you don’t hurt yourself. What did you call it?… A dagger?”

“It wasn’t like that at all,” I muttered.

“Honey, he lied to you!” She flicked off the lighter at last and started walking again. “The sooner you can get that into your little Julie box, the better. Trust me, this guy has zero feelings for you whatsoever. It’s all just a big charade to get to the-ow!” By the sound of it, she hit her head on something, and once again, we stopped. “What the hell was that?” Janice flicked the lighter to check-she had to try three or four times before it finally came on-only to discover that I was crying.

Shocked by the unusual sight, she put her arms around me with clumsy tenderness. “I’m sorry, Jules. I’m just trying to save you from heartache.”

“I thought I didn’t have a heart?”

“Well”-she gave me a squeeze-“you seem to have grown one lately. Too bad, you were more fun without it.” Jiggling my chin with a sticky hand that still smelled like mocha-vanilla, she finally succeeded in making me laugh, and went on, more generously, “It’s my fault anyway. I should have seen it coming. He drives a goddamn Alfa Romeo for Christ’s sake!”

Had we not stopped right there, in the last, feeble flicker of the dying lighter, we might never have noticed the opening in the cave wall on our left. It was barely a foot and a half wide, but as far as I could see when I knelt down and stuck my head inside, it sloped upwards for at least thirty or forty feet-like an air duct in a pyramid-to end in a tiny seashell pattern of blue sky. I could even convince myself that I heard traffic noise.

“Hail Mary!” exclaimed Janice. “We’re back in business! You go first. Age before beauty.”

The pain and frustration of walking through the dark tunnel was nothing compared to the claustrophobia I felt crawling up the narrow shaft and the torment of scraping along on my raw knees and elbows. For every time I managed to pull myself up half a foot, painfully, by my toes and fingertips, I kept sliding back down several inches.

“Come on!” urged Janice, right behind me. “Let’s get moving!”

“Then why didn’t you go first?” I snapped back. “You’re the fancy-ass rock climber.”

“Here-” She placed a hand underneath my high-heeled sandal. “Push away on this.”

Slowly and agonizingly, we made our way up the shaft, and although it widened considerably at the very top, allowing Janice to crawl up beside me, it was still a revolting place to be.

“Eek!” she said, looking around at the junk that people had tossed in there through the grate. “This is disgusting. Is that… a cheeseburger?”

“Does it have cheese in it?”

“Hey, look!” She picked something up. “It’s a cell phone! Hang on-no, sorry. Out of battery.”

“If you are finished rifling through the garbage, can we move on?”

We elbowed our way through a mess too nasty for words before finally coming up to the vertical, artsy sewer cover separating us from the earth’s surface. “Where are we?” Janice pressed her nose against the bronze filigree, and we both looked out at the legs and feet walking by. “It’s some kind of piazza. But huge.”

“Holy cow!” I exclaimed, realizing that I had seen the place before, many times, but from very different angles. “I know exactly where we are. It’s the Campo.” I knocked on the sewer cover. “Ow! It’s pretty solid.”

“Hello? Hello?” Janice stretched to see better. “Can anyone hear me? Is anyone there?”

A few seconds later, an incredulous teenager with a snow cone and green lips came into view, stooping down to see us. “Ciao?” she said, smiling uncertainly, as if suspecting she was the victim of a prank. “I am Antonella.”

“Hi, Antonella,” I said, trying to make eye contact with her. “Do you speak English? We’re kind of trapped down here. Do you think you could… find someone who can help us out?”

Twenty deeply embarrassing minutes later, Antonella returned with a pair of naked feet in sandals.

“Maestro Lippi?” I was so astounded to see my friend, the painter, that my voice almost escaped me. “Hello? Do you remember me? I slept on your couch.”

“Of course I remember you!” he beamed. “How are you doing?”

“Uh-” I said, “do you think it would be possible to… remove this thing?” I wiggled my fingers through the sewer cover. “We’re kind of stuck down here. And-this is my sister, by the way.”

Maestro Lippi knelt down to see us better. “Did you two go somewhere you shouldn’t go?”

I smiled as timidly as I could. “I’m afraid we did.”

The Maestro frowned. “Did you find her grave? Did you steal her eyes? Did I not tell you to leave them where they are?”

“We didn’t do anything!” I glanced at Janice to make sure she, too, looked sufficiently innocent. “We got trapped, that’s all. Do you think we can somehow”-once again, I knocked on the sewer cover, and once again, it felt pretty rigid-“unscrew this thing?”

“Of course!” he said, without hesitation. “It is very easy.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure!” He got back on his feet. “I made it!”

DINNER THAT NIGHT was pasta primavera from a can, spruced up with a twig of rosemary from Maestro Lippi’s windowsill and accompanied by a box of Band-Aids for our bruises. There was barely room for the three of us at the table in his workshop, seeing that we were sharing the space with artwork and potted plants in different stages of demise, but even so, he and Janice were having a grand old time.

“You are very quiet,” observed the artist at one point, recovering from laughter and pouring more wine.

“Juliet had a little run-in with Romeo,” explained Janice, on my behalf. “He swore by the moon. Big mistake.”

“Ah!” said Maestro Lippi. “He came here last night. He was not happy. Now I understand why.”

“He came here last night?” I echoed.

“Yes,” nodded the Maestro. “He said you don’t look like the painting. You are much more beautiful. And much more-what was it he said?-oh, yes… lethal.” The Maestro grinned and raised his glass to me in playful communion.

“Did he happen to mention,” I said, failing to take the edge off my voice, “why he has been playing schizo games with me instead of telling me that he was Romeo all along? I thought he was someone else.”

Maestro Lippi looked surprised. “But didn’t you recognize him?”

“No!” I clutched my head in frustration. “I didn’t recognize him. And he sure as hell didn’t recognize me either!”

“What exactly can you tell us about this guy?” Janice asked the Maestro. “How many people are aware he is Romeo?”

“All I know,” said Maestro Lippi, shrugging, “is that he does not want to be called Romeo. Only his family calls him that. It is a big secret. I don’t know why. He wants to be called Alessandro Santini-”

I gasped. “You knew his name all along! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought you knew!” the Maestro shot back. “You are Juliet! Maybe you need glasses!”

“Excuse me,” said Janice, rubbing a scratch on her arm, “but how did you know he was Romeo?”

Maestro Lippi looked stunned. “I… I-”

She reached out to help herself to another Band-Aid. “Please don’t say you recognized him from a previous life.”

“No,” said the Maestro, frowning, “I recognized him from the fresco. In Palazzo Pubblico. And then I saw the Marescotti eagle on his arm”-he took me by the wrist and pointed at the underside of my forearm-“right here. Did you never notice that?”

For a few seconds I was back in the basement of Palazzo Salimbeni, trying to ignore Alessandro’s tattoos while we discussed the fact that I was being followed. Even then I had been aware that his were not-unlike Janice’s muffin-top tramp stamps-mere souvenirs from boozy spring breaks in Amsterdam, but it had not occurred to me that they held important clues to his identity. In fact, I had been too busy looking for diplomas and ancestors on his office wall to realize that here was a man who did not display his virtues in a silver frame, but carried them around on his body in whatever form they took.

“It’s not glasses she needs,” observed Janice, enjoying my cross-eyed introspection, “it’s a new brain.”

“Not to change the subject,” I said, picking up my handbag, “but would you mind translating something for us?” I handed Maestro Lippi the Italian text from our mother’s box, which I had been carrying around for days, hoping to stumble upon a willing translator. I had originally toyed with the idea of asking Alessandro, but something had held me back. “We think it might be important.”

The Maestro took the text and perused the headline and first few paragraphs. “This,” he said, a little surprised, “is a story. It is called La Maledizione sul Muro… The Curse on the Wall. It is quite long. Are you sure you want to hear it?”