Juliet (27 page)

As I descended into the basement the air got considerably cooler, and traces of the original building structure began to emerge as the walls became rough and worn around me. Back in the Middle Ages this foundation had carried a tall tower, perhaps as tall as the Mangia Tower in the Campo. The whole city had been full of these tower-houses; they had served as fortifications in times of unrest.

At the bottom of the stairs, a narrow corridor went off into the darkness, and ironclad doors on either side made the place feel like a dungeon. I was beginning to fear that I had taken a wrong turn somewhere along the way, when there was a sudden outburst of voices, followed by cheers, coming from behind a half-open door.

I approached the door with some apprehension. Whether or not Alessandro was actually down here, there would be a lot of explaining to do, and logic had never been my strong suit. Peeking inside, I could see a table full of metal parts and half-eaten sandwiches, a wall of rifles, and three men in T-shirts and uniform pants—one of them Alessandro—standing around a small television screen. At first I thought they were watching the input from a surveillance camera somewhere in the building, but when they all suddenly moaned and clutched their heads, I realized they were watching a soccer game.

When no one reacted to my initial knocking, I pushed through the door—just a little bit—and cleared my throat. Now finally, Alessandro turned his head to see who had the gall to interrupt the game, and when he saw me standing there, attempting a smile, he looked as if someone had knocked him over the head with a frying pan.

“Sorry to disturb,” I said, trying hard not to look like Bambi-on-stilts, although that was precisely how I felt. “Do you have a moment?”

Seconds later, the two other men had left the room, grabbing guns and uniform jackets as they went, half-eaten sandwiches wedged in their mouths.

“So,” said Alessandro, killing the soccer game and tossing aside the remote, “satisfy my curiosity.” He clearly did not think I needed the rest of the sentence, although the way he looked at me suggested that—notwithstanding the fact that I was a barnacle on the criminal underbelly of society—he was secretly pleased to see me.

I sat down on a vacant chair, looking around at the hardware on the walls. “Is this your office?”

“Yeah—” He pulled the dangling suspenders up on his shoulders and sat down on the other side of the table. “This is where we interrogate people. Americans mostly. It used to be a torture chamber.”

The dare in his eyes almost made me forget my general unease and the reason why I had come. “It suits you.”

“I thought so.” He put a heavy boot against the side of the table and tipped back to lean against the wall. “Okay, I am listening. You must have a very good reason for being here.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it reason.” I looked away, trying in vain to remember the official story I had rehearsed coming down the stairs. “Obviously, you think I’m a conniving bitch …”

“I’ve seen worse.”

“… and I haven’t exactly signed up for your fan club either.”

He smiled wryly. “Yet here you are.”

I folded my arms across my chest, choking back a nervous laugh. “I know you don’t believe I am Giulietta Tolomei, and you know what? I don’t care. But here is the bottom line”—I swallowed hard to steady my voice—“someone is trying to kill me.”

“You mean, apart from yourself?”

His sarcasm helped me regain my cool. “There’s some guy following
me,” I said, gruffly. “Nasty type. Tracksuit. Bona fide scum. I figured he was a friend of yours.”

Alessandro didn’t even flinch. “So, what do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know—” I searched for a spark of sympathy in his eyes. “Help me?”

There was a spark all right, but it was mostly one of triumph. “And remind me why I would do that?”

“Hey!” I exclaimed, genuinely upset with his attitude. “I’m … a maiden in distress!”

“And who am I, Zorro?”

I swallowed a groan, furious with myself for thinking he would care. “I thought Italian men were susceptible to female charms.”

He considered the idea. “We are. When we encounter them.”

“Okay,” I said, sucking in my fury, “fair enough. You want me to go to hell, and I will. I’ll go back to the States and never bother you or your fairy godmother again. But first, I want to find out who this guy is, and have someone bust his ass.”

“And that someone is me?”

I glared at him. “Maybe not. I just assumed someone like you wouldn’t want someone like him running loose in your precious Siena. But”—I made a move to get up—“I see that I got you all wrong.”

Now, finally, Alessandro leaned forward with mock concern and put his elbows on the table. “All right, Miss Tolomei, tell me why you think someone is trying to kill you.”

Never mind that I had nowhere else to go; I would have walked right out of there, had it not been for the fact that he had finally called me
Miss Tolomei
. “Well—” I moved uncomfortably on the edge of the seat. “How about this: He followed me through the streets, broke into my hotel room, and then, this morning, he came after me with a gun—”

“That,” said Alessandro, deploying a great deal of patience, “doesn’t mean he intends to kill you.” He paused to study my face, then frowned. “How do you expect me to help you, if you are not telling me the truth?”

“But I am! I swear!” I tried to think of some other way of convincing him, but my eyes were drawn to the tattoos on his right forearm, and my brain was busy processing the impulse. This was not the Alessandro I had expected to find coming into Palazzo Salimbeni. The Alessandro
I knew was polished and subtle, if not downright square-toed, and he certainly did not have a dragonfly—or whatever the heck it was—etched into his wrist.

If he could read my thoughts, he didn’t show it. “Not the whole truth. There are a lot of pieces missing in the puzzle.”

I snapped upright. “What makes you think there is a big picture?”

“There is always a big picture. So, tell me what he is after.”

I took a deep breath, only too aware that I had chosen to put myself in this situation, and that a more substantial explanation was due. “Okay,” I finally said, “I think he is after something that my mother left for me. Some family heirloom that my parents found years ago, and which she wanted me to have. So, she hid it in a place where only I could find it. Why? Because—whether you like it or not—I am Giulietta Tolomei.”

I looked at him defiantly and found him studying my face with something akin to a smile. “And have you found it?”

“I don’t think so. Not yet. All I’ve found is a rusty box full of paper, an old … banner, and some kind of dagger, and quite frankly, I don’t see—”

“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.