Juliet (49 page)

   [   VII.I   ]

…

A
FTER MAESTRO LIPPI STOPPED READING
, we sat for a while in silence. I had originally pulled out the Italian text to get us off the topic of Alessandro being Romeo, but had I known it would take us to such dark places, I would have left it in my handbag.

“Poor Friar Lorenzo,” said Janice, emptying her wineglass, “no happy end for him.”

“I always thought Shakespeare let him off the hook too easily,” I said, trying to strike a lighter tone. “There he is, in
Romeo and Juliet
, walking around red-handed in the cemetery—bodies sprawled everywhere—even admitting that he was behind the whole double-crossing screw-up with the sleeping potion … and that’s it. You’d think the Capulets and the Montagues would at least
try
to hold him responsible.”

“Maybe they did,” said Janice, “later on. ‘Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished’ … sounds like the story wasn’t over just because the curtain dropped.”

“Clearly it wasn’t.” I glanced at the text Maestro Lippi had just read to us. “And according to Mom it still isn’t.”

“This,” said the Maestro, still frowning over the evil deeds of old man Salimbeni, “is very disturbing. If it is true that Friar Lorenzo wrote such a curse, with those exact words, then it would—in theory—go on forever, until”—he checked the text to get the wording straight—“‘you undo your
sins and kneel before the Virgin … and Giulietta wakes to behold her Romeo.’”

“Okay,” said Janice, never a great fan of superstitious mumbo jumbo, “so, I have two questions. One: who is this
you—
?”

“That’s obvious,” I interjected, “seeing that he is calling down ‘a plague on both your houses.’ He is obviously talking to Salimbeni and Tolomei, who were right there in the basement, torturing him. And since you and I are of the house of Tolomei, we’re cursed, too.”

“Listen to you!” snapped Janice. “Of the house of Tolomei! What difference does a name make?”

“Not just a name,” I said. “The genes
and
the name. Mom had the genes, and Dad had the name. Not much wiggle room for us.”

Janice was not happy with my logic, but what could she do? “Okay, fair enough,” she sighed. “Shakespeare was wrong. There never was a Mercutio, dying because of Romeo and calling down a plague on him and Tybalt; the curse came from Friar Lorenzo. Fine. But I have another question, and that is:
If
you actually believe in this curse, then what? How can anybody be stupid enough to think they can stop it? We’re not just talking repent here. We’re talking
un
-friggin
’-do
your sins! Well …
how?
Are we supposed to dig up old Salimbeni and make him change his mind and … and … and drag him to the cathedral so he can fall to his knees in front of the altar or whatever? Puh-leez!” She looked at us both belligerently, as if it was the Maestro and me who had brought this problem upon her. “Why don’t we just fly home and leave the stupid curse here in Italy? Why do we have to care?”

“Because Mom cared,” I said, simply. “This was what she wanted: to stick it out and end the curse. Now we have to do it for her. We owe her that.”

Janice pointed at me with the rosemary twig. “Allow me to quote myself: All we owe her is to stay alive.”

I touched the crucifix hanging around my neck. “That’s exactly what I mean. If we want to stay alive happily ever after, then—according to Mom—we
have
to end the curse. You and me, Giannozza. There’s no one else left to do it.”

The way she looked at me, I could see her coming around, realizing I was right, or, at least, telling a convincing story. But she didn’t like it. “This,” she said, “is so far out. But okay, let’s assume for a moment that
there really
is
a curse, and that—if we don’t stop it—it really
will
kill us, like it killed Mom and Dad. The question is still
how?
How do we stop it?”

I glanced at the Maestro. He had been unusually present-minded all evening—and still was—but even he didn’t have the answer to Janice’s question. “I don’t know,” I confessed. “But I suspect the golden statue plays a part. And maybe the dagger and the cencio, too, although I don’t see how.”

“Oh, well!” Janice threw up her hands. “Then we’re cooking! … Except that we have absolutely no clue where the statue is. The story just says that Salimbeni ‘made for them a most holy grave’ and posted guards at ‘the chapel,’ but that could mean anywhere! So … we don’t know where the statue is, and you lost the dagger and the cencio! I’m amazed you’ve managed to hang on to that crucifix, but I suspect that’s because it has no significance whatsoever!”

I looked at Maestro Lippi. “The book you had, which talked about Juliet’s Eyes and the grave … are you sure it didn’t say anything about where it is? When we talked about it, you just told me to go ask Romeo.”

“And did you?”

“No! Of course not!” I felt a surge of irritation, but knew that I could not reasonably blame the painter for my own blindness. “I didn’t even know he was Romeo until this afternoon.”

“Then why,” said Maestro Lippi, as if nothing could be more straightforward, “do you not ask him next time you see him?”

IT WAS MIDNIGHT BY
the time Janice and I returned to Hotel Chiusarelli. As soon as we entered the lobby, Direttor Rossini rose behind the reception counter and handed me a stack of folded-up notes. “Captain Santini called at five o’clock this afternoon,” he informed me, clearly blaming me for not being in my room, on tiptoes to take the call. “And many times since. Last time he called was”—he leaned forward to check the clock on the wall—“seventeen minutes ago.”

Walking up the stairs in silence, I saw Janice glaring at my handful of messages from Alessandro—evidence of his keen interest in my whereabouts. I began bracing myself for the inevitable next chapter in our ongoing discussion of his character and motives, but as soon as we entered
the room we were met by an unexpected breeze from the balcony door, which had sprung open by itself with no immediate signs of a break-in. Instantly apprehensive, however, I quickly checked that no papers were missing from Mom’s box; we had left it right there, sitting on the desk, since we were now convinced that it contained nothing like a treasure map.

“Please call me back—” sang Janice, leafing through Alessandro’s messages one by one. “Please call me back—Are you free for dinner?—Are you okay?—I’m sorry—Please call—By the way, I’m a cross-dresser—”

I scratched my head. “Did we not lock that balcony door before we left? I specifically remember locking it.”

“Is anything missing?” Janice tossed Alessandro’s messages on the bed in a way that had them scatter in all directions.

“No,” I said, “all the papers are there.”

“Plus,” she observed, wiggling out of her top in front of the window, “half the law enforcement in Siena is keeping an eye on your room.”

“Would you get away from there!” I cried, pulling her away.

Janice laughed delightedly. “Why? At least they’ll know it’s not a
man
you’re sleeping with!”

Just then, the phone rang.

“That guy,” sighed Janice, shaking her head, “is a nutcase. Mark my words.”

“Why?” I shot back, making a dash for the receiver. “Because he happens to like me?”

“Like
you?” Janice had clearly never heard anything so naïve in her entire life, and she embarked upon a long-drawn, snorting laugh, which only stopped when I threw a bed pillow at her.

“Hello?” I picked up the phone and carefully shielded the receiver from the noise of my sister stomping defiantly about the room, humming the sinister theme from a horror film.

It was Alessandro all right, concerned that something had happened to me, since I had not returned his calls. Now, of course, he acknowledged, it was too late to think about dinner, but could I at least tell him whether I was, in fact, planning to attend Eva Maria’s party tomorrow?

“Yes, Godmother …” mimicked Janice in the background, “whatever you say, Godmother—”

“I hadn’t actually—” I began, trying to remember all my excellent reasons for saying no to the invitation. But somehow they all seemed utterly groundless now that I knew he was Romeo. He and I were, after all, on the same team. Weren’t we? Maestro Ambrogio and Maestro Lippi would have agreed, and so would Shakespeare. Furthermore, I had never been completely convinced that it was really Alessandro who had broken into my hotel room. It certainly would not be the first time my sister had made a mistake. Or told me a lie.

“Come on,” he urged, in a voice that could talk a woman into anything, and probably had, many times, “it would mean a lot to her.”

Meanwhile, in the bathroom, Janice was wrestling loudly with the shower curtain, pretending—by the sound of it—to be stabbed to death.

“I don’t know,” I replied, trying to block out her shrieks, “everything is so … insane right now.”

“Maybe you need a weekend off?” Alessandro pointed out. “Eva Maria is counting on you. She has invited a lot of people. People who knew your parents.”

“Really?” I could feel curiosity tearing at my feeble resolve.

“I’ll pick you up at one o’clock, okay?” he said, choosing to interpret my hesitation as a yes. “And I promise, I’ll answer all your questions on the way.”

When Janice came back into the room, I was expecting a scene, but it never came.

“Do as you wish,” she merely said, shrugging as if she couldn’t care less, “but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“It’s so easy for you, isn’t it?” I sat down on the edge of the bed, suddenly exhausted. “You’re not Juliet.”

“And you’re not either,” said Janice, sitting down next to me. “You’re just a girl who had a weird mom. Like me. Look”—she put an arm around me—“I know you want to go to this party. So, go. I just wish—I hope you don’t take it too literally. The whole Romeo-and-Juliet thing. Shakespeare didn’t create you, and he doesn’t own you. You do.”

Later, we lay in bed together and looked through Mom’s notebook one more time. Now that we knew the story behind the statue, her drawings of a man holding a woman in his arms made perfect sense. But there was still nothing in the book that indicated the actual location of the grave.
Most of the pages were crisscrossed with sketches and doodles; only one page was unique in that it had a border of five-petal roses all around, and a very elegantly written quotation from
Romeo and Juliet:

As it turned out, it was the only explicit Shakespeare quotation in the entire notebook, and it made us both pause.

“That,” I said, “is Juliet’s mother talking about Paris. But it’s wrong. It’s not
your
fair volume or
my
eyes, it’s
this
fair volume and
his
eyes.”

“Maybe she got it wrong?” proposed Janice.

I glared at her. “Mom get Shakespeare wrong? I don’t think so. I think she did this on purpose. To send someone a message.”

Janice sat up. She had always loved riddles and secrets, and for the first time since Alessandro’s phone call she looked genuinely excited. “So, what’s the message? Someone is obviously obscured. But we can find him. Right?”

“She talks about a
volume,”
I said, “and a
margent
, which means
margin
. That sounds like a book to me.”

“Not just one book,” Janice pointed out, “but two books:
our
book, and
her
book. She calls her own book her
eyes
, which sounds to me a lot like a sketchbook”—she knocked on the page of the notebook—“as in
this
book. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“But there’s nothing written in the margin—” I started flipping through the notebook, and now, for the first time, we both noticed all the numbers that were jotted down—seemingly randomly—on the edges of the pages. “Oh my—you’re right! Why didn’t we see this before?”

“’Cause we weren’t looking,” said Janice, taking the book from me. “If these numbers do not refer to pages and lines, you can call me Ishmael.”

“But the pages and lines of what?” I asked.

The truth hit us both at the same time. If the notebook was
her
volume, then the paperback edition of
Romeo and Juliet
—the only other book in the box—would have to be
our
volume. And the page and line numbers would have to refer to select passages in Shakespeare’s play. How very appropriate.

We both scrambled to get to the box first. But neither of us found what we were looking for. Only then did it occur to us what had gone missing since we left the room that afternoon. The mangy old paperback was no longer there.

JANICE HAD ALWAYS
been a sound sleeper. It used to annoy me to no end that she could sleep through her alarm without even reaching out for the snooze button. After all, our rooms were right across the corridor from each other, and we always slept with our doors ajar. In her desperation, Aunt Rose went through every alarm clock in town in search of something that was monstrous enough to get my sister out of bed and off to school. She never succeeded. While I had a pink little Sleeping Beauty alarm on my bedstand until I left for college, Janice ended up with some industrial contraption—which Umberto had personally modified with a set of pliers at the kitchen counter—that sounded like an evacuation alarm from a nuclear power plant. And even so, the only one it woke up—usually with a yelp of terror—was me.