Juliet (64 page)

Now for the first time, Umberto dared to speak out against their brutality, saying something to Cocco that could only mean,
come on, go easy on the girls
, but all he got for his trouble was an elbow in the chest that made him double over coughing. And when I paused to see if he was okay, two of Cocco’s henchmen took me by the shoulders and thrust me forward impatiently, their stony faces betraying no emotions whatsoever.

The only one they treated with any kind of respect was Friar Lorenzo, who was allowed to take his time and climb the gate with whatever dignity he had left.

“Why is he still blindfolded?” I whispered to Janice, as soon as the men let go of me.

“Because they’re going to let him live,” was her dismal reply.

“Shh!” hushed Umberto, making a face at us. “The less attention you two draw to yourselves, the better.”

Everything considered, that was a tall order. Neither Janice nor I had showered since the day before, let alone washed our hands, and I was still wearing the long, red dress from Eva Maria’s party, although, by now, it was a sorry sight. Earlier that day, Janice had suggested I put on some of the clothes from Mom’s wardrobe and lose the bodice-ripper look. Once I did, however, we had both found the smell of mothballs unbearable. And so here I was, trying to blend in, barefoot and grimy but still dressed for a ball.

We walked for a while in silence, following the bouncing headlamps as they ricocheted along black corridors and down several different staircases, led on by Cocco and one of his lackeys—a tall, jaundiced fellow whose gaunt face and hunched shoulders made me think of a turkey vulture. Every now and then the two of them would stop and orient themselves according to a large piece of paper, which I assumed was a map of the building. And whenever they did, someone would pull hard at my hair or my arm to make sure I stopped, too.

There were five men in front of us and five men behind us at all times, and if I tried to exchange glances with either Janice or Umberto, the guy behind me would dig the muzzle of his gun in between my shoulder
blades until I yelped with pain. Right next to me, Janice was getting the exact same treatment and, although I couldn’t look at her, I knew she was just as scared and furious as I was, and just as helpless to fight back.

Despite their tuxedos and gelled hair, there was a sharp, almost rancid odor about the men, which suggested that they, too, felt under pressure. Or maybe it was the building I could smell; the farther into the underground we went, the worse it became. To the eye, the whole place appeared very clean, even sterile, but as we descended into the network of narrow corridors beneath the basement, I couldn’t shake a feeling that—just on the other side of those dry, well-sealed walls—something putrid was slowly eating its way through the plaster.

When the men finally stopped, I had long since lost my sense of direction. It seemed to me that we must be at least fifty feet underground, but I was no longer sure we were directly beneath Santa Maria della Scala. Shivering now with cold, I picked up my frozen feet one by one, to press them briefly against my calves in an attempt at getting the blood flowing.

“Jules!” said Janice suddenly, interrupting my gymnastics. “Come on!”

I half expected someone to hit us both over the head to stop us from talking, but instead, the men pushed us forward until we were face-to-face with Cocco and the turkey vulture.

“E ora, ragazze?” said Cocco, blinding us both with his headlamp.

“What did he say?” hissed Janice, turning her head to avoid the beam.

“Something
girlfriend,”
I replied under my breath, not at all happy to have recognized the word.

“He said, ‘What now, ladies?’” interjected Umberto. “This is Santa Caterina’s room—where do we go from here?”

Only then did we notice that the turkey vulture was pointing a flashlight through a lattice gate in the wall, illuminating a small, monastic cell with a narrow bed and an altar. On the bed lay a recumbent statue of a woman—presumably Saint Catherine—and the wall behind her bed was painted blue and studded with golden stars.

“Uh,” said Janice, clearly as awestruck as I was to discover that we were actually here, by the chamber mentioned in Mom’s riddle, “‘hand me an iron crow.’”

“And then what?” asked Umberto, anxious to demonstrate to Cocco how useful we were.

Janice and I looked at each other, only too aware that Mom’s directions had ended just about there, with a merry, “and foot it girls!”

“Wait—” I suddenly remembered another little snippet. “Oh yes … ‘away with the cross’—”

“The cross?” Umberto looked mystified. “La croce—”

We all stretched to look into the chamber again, and just as Cocco was shoving us aside to see for himself, Janice nodded vigorously, trying to point with her nose. “There! Look! Under the altar!”

And indeed, beneath the altar was a large marble tile with a black cross on it, looking much like the door to a grave. Not wasting a moment, Cocco took a step back and aimed the submachine gun at the padlock that held the lattice door in place. Before anyone had time to run for cover, he blasted the whole thing open with a deafening salvo that took the gate right off its hinges.

“Oh,
Jesus!”
cried Janice, grimacing with pain. “I think that blew my eardrums. This guy is a total nutcase!”

Without a word, Cocco spun around and took her by the throat, squeezing so hard she nearly choked. It was all so fast that I hardly even saw what happened, until he suddenly let go of her and she dropped to her knees, gasping for air.

“Oh, Jan!” I cried, kneeling down next to her. “Are you okay?”

It took her a moment to find air for an answer. And when she finally did, her voice was trembling. “Note to self …” she muttered, blinking to clear her eyes, “the little charmer understands English.”

Moments later, the men were going at the cross under the altar with crowbars and drills, and when the tile finally came loose and fell out on the stone floor with a thud that threw up a cloud of dust, none of us was surprised to see that behind it was the entrance to a tunnel.

WHEN JANICE AND I
had crawled out of the sewer in the Campo three days earlier, we had promised each other never to go spelunking in the Bottini again. Yet here we were, making our way through a passage that was little more than a wormhole, in near darkness and without a blue sky beckoning us at the other end.

Before pushing us into the hole, Cocco had cut our hands free—not out of kindness, but because it was the only way of bringing us along. Fortunately,
he was still under the impression that he needed us in order to find Romeo and Giulietta’s grave; he didn’t know that the cross under the altar in Saint Catherine’s room had been the very last clue in Mom’s directions.

Inching along behind Janice, seeing nothing but her jeans and the random flicker of headlamps against the jagged surface of the tunnel, I wished I had been wearing pants, too. I kept getting caught in the long skirt of the dress, and the thin velvet did nothing to protect my scabby knees from the uneven sandstone. The only upside was that I was so numb with cold I could barely feel the pain.

When we finally came to the end of the tunnel, I was as relieved as the men to find that there was no boulder or pile of rubble blocking our way and forcing us to backtrack. Instead we came out into a wide-open cave, about twenty feet across and tall enough for everyone to stand upright.

“E ora?” said Cocco as soon as Janice and I were within earshot, and this time we did not need Umberto to translate.
What now?
was indeed the question.

“Oh, no!” Janice whispered, but only to me, “It’s a dead end!”

Behind us, the rest of the men were emerging from the tunnel, too, and one of them was Friar Lorenzo, who was eased out by the turkey vulture and some other guy with a ponytail, as if he were a prince being delivered by royal midwives. Someone had mercifully removed the blindfold before shoving the old monk into the hole, and now Friar Lorenzo stepped forward eagerly, eyes wide with amazement, as if he had completely forgotten the violent circumstances that had brought him here.

“What do we do?” Janice hissed, trying to catch Umberto’s eye. But he was busy brushing dust off his pants and didn’t pick up on the sudden tension. “How do you say
dead end
in Italian?”

Fortunately for us, Janice was wrong. As I looked around more carefully I saw that there were, in fact, two other exits to the cave, apart from the wormhole we had used to get in. One was in the ceiling, but it was a long, dark shaft, blocked at the top by what looked like a slab of concrete; even with a ladder it would have been impossible to reach. Most of all, it resembled an ancient garbage chute, and this impression was supported by the fact that the other exit was in the floor right beneath it. Or, at least, I assumed there was an opening beneath the rusty metal plate lying on the floor of the cave, well covered in dust and rubble. Anything dropped from
aloft would in theory—if both holes had been open—be able to plunge right through the cave without even pausing in between.

Seeing that Cocco was still looking at Janice and me for directions, I did the only logical thing, which was to point at the metal plate on the floor. “Search, seek,” I said, trying to fabricate a sufficiently oracular instruction, “look beneath your feet. For here lies Juliet.”

“Yes!” nodded Janice, tugging nervously at my arm. “Here lies Juliet.”

After glaring at Umberto for confirmation, Cocco had the men start working on the metal plate with crowbars, trying to loosen it and push it aside, and they went at it with so much vengeance that Friar Lorenzo retreated into a corner and began going through his rosary.

“Poor guy,” said Janice, biting her lip, “he’s totally off his rocker. I just hope—” She didn’t say it, but I knew what she was thinking, because I had long been thinking the same. It was only a matter of time before Cocco would realize that the old monk was nothing but deadweight. And when that happened, we would be helpless to save him.

Yes, our hands were now free, but we both knew that we were just as trapped as we had been before. As soon as the last man had come out of the tunnel, the guy with the ponytail had positioned himself right in front of the opening, making sure no one was stupid enough to try to leave. And so there was really only one way out of this cave for Janice and me—with or without Umberto and Friar Lorenzo—and that was down the drain with everybody else.

When the metal cover finally came off, it did indeed reveal an opening in the floor, big enough for a man to climb through. Stepping forward, Cocco pointed a torchlight into the hole, and after the briefest hesitation the other men did the same, mumbling among themselves with halfhearted enthusiasm. The smell coming from the blackness below was definitely foul, and Janice and I were not the only ones to hold our noses at first, but then, after a few moments, it was no longer unbearable. We were clearly getting a bit too familiar with the smell of rot.

Whatever Cocco saw down there, it merely made him shrug and say, “Un bel niente.”

“He says there is nothing,” translated Umberto, frowning.

“Well, what the hell did he expect?” sneered Janice. “A neon sign saying,
grave robbers this way?”

Her comment made me cringe, and when I saw the provoking glare
she shot Cocco, I was sure he would jump right over the hole in the floor and take her, once again, by the throat.

But he didn’t. Instead he looked at her in an uncanny, calculating way, and I suddenly understood that my clever sister had been feeling him out from the very beginning, trying to figure out how to bait and hook him. Why? Because he was our only ride out of there.

“Dai, dai!” was all he said, gesturing at his men to jump into the hole one after the other. Judging from the way they all braced themselves before doing so, and from the faint yelps coming from below as they hit the floor of the other cave, the drop was big enough to be a challenge, if not quite big enough to justify a rope.

When it became our turn, Janice stepped forward immediately, probably to demonstrate to Cocco that we were not afraid. And when he held out a hand to help her—maybe for the first time in his career—she spat in his palm before pushing off and disappearing through the hole. Amazingly, all he did was bare his teeth in a smile and say something to Umberto that I was happy not to understand.

Seeing that Janice was already waving at me from the cave below, and that the drop was no more than eight or nine feet, I, too, let myself fall into the forest of arms waiting to receive me. As they caught me and put me down on the floor, however, one of the men seemed to think he had now earned the right to grope me, and I struggled in vain to fight him off.

Laughing, he caught both my wrists and tried to engage the others in the fun, but just as I was beginning to panic, Janice came blasting to my rescue, cutting through the hands and arms and positioning herself between the men and me.

“You want some fun?” she asked them, her grimace one of disgust. “Is that what you want? Huh? Then why don’t you have some fun with me—” She started ripping open her own shirt with such fury that the men barely knew what to do. Transfixed by the sight of her bra they all started backing away, except the guy who had started it all. Still smirking, he reached out brazenly to touch her breasts, but was stopped by an earsplitting burst of gunshots that had us all jump with fear and bewilderment.

A split-second later, a rattling shower of crumbling sandstone threw everyone down on the floor, and as my head hit the ground and my mouth
and nostrils filled with dirt, I had a dizzying flashback to choking on tear gas in Rome and thinking I was going to die. For several minutes I was coughing so hard I nearly threw up, and I was not the only one. All around me, the men were down for the count, and so was Janice. The only consolation was that the floor of the cave was not hard at all, but oddly springy; had it been solid rock it might have knocked me out.

Eventually looking up through a haze of dust, I saw Cocco standing there, submachine gun in hand, waiting to see if anyone else felt like having fun. But no one did. It seemed his warning salvo had sent a vibration through the cave that had made parts of the ceiling fall down, and the men were too busy brushing rubble from their hair and clothes to challenge his resolve.