Juliet (40 page)

“I shall endeavor to give satisfaction,” said Nino, sarcastically.

Seeing that his son was being flippant, Salimbeni held up a warning
finger. “But God help you if you let her out of your sight. No one else may touch her but you. I do not want to show off a bastard.”

Nino sighed. “Very well. I will play Paris and take your wife, old man. Oh, wait. She is not actually your wife, is she?”

The slap on the face did not come as a surprise to Nino; he was asking for it. “That’s right,” he said, backing away, “hit me every time I tell the truth, and reward me whenever I do wrong. Just tell me what you want—kill a rival, kill a friend, kill a maidenhead—and I’ll do it. But don’t ask me to respect you afterwards.”

AS MAESTRO AMBROGIO
walked back to his workshop later that night, he could not stop thinking of the conversation he had overheard. How could there be such perversity at large in the world, let alone in his own city? And why did no one move to stop it? He suddenly felt old and obsolete, and began to wish he had never gone to Palazzo Salimbeni in the first place and never overheard those wicked plans.

When he arrived at his workshop, he found the blue door unlocked. Hesitating on the threshold, he wondered briefly whether he had forgotten to lock it when he left, but when he could not hear Dante barking, he began to fear a break-in. “Hello?” He pushed open the door and stepped inside fearfully, confused by the burning lamps. “Who is here?”

Almost immediately, someone pulled him away from the door and closed it firmly behind him. When he turned to face his adversary, however, he saw that it was no malevolent stranger, but Romeo Marescotti. And right next to him stood Friar Lorenzo with Dante in his arms, holding the dog’s mouth closed.

“Heaven be praised!” exclaimed Maestro Ambrogio, looking at the youngsters and marveling at their full beards. “Back from foreign lands at last?”

“Not so foreign,” said Romeo, limping slightly as he walked over to the table to sit down. “We’ve been in a monastery not far from here.”

“Both of you?” asked the painter, dumbfounded.

“Lorenzo,” said Romeo, grimacing as he stretched out his leg, “saved my life. They left me for dead—the Salimbenis, in the cemetery—but he found me and brought me back to life. These past months—I should have been dead, but for him.”

“God,” said Friar Lorenzo, putting down the dog at last, “wanted you to live. And he wanted me to help you.”

“God,” said Romeo, retrieving a bit of his former mischief, “wants a lot from us, doesn’t he?”

“You could not,” said Maestro Ambrogio, looking around for wine and cups, “have returned at a better time. For I have just heard—”

“We have heard it, too,” Romeo cut him off, “but I don’t care. I am not leaving her with him. Lorenzo wanted me to wait until I had recovered fully, but I am not sure I ever will. We have men and horses. Giulietta’s sister, Monna Giannozza, wants her out of Salimbeni’s clutches as much as we do.” The young man leaned back on his chair, slightly out of breath from talking. “Now, you’re the master of frescoes, so you know all the houses. I need you to paint me a map of Palazzo Salimbeni—”

“Pardon me,” said Maestro Ambrogio, shaking his head in bewilderment, “but what exactly is it that you have heard?”

Romeo and Friar Lorenzo glanced at each other.

“I understood,” said the monk, defensively, “that Giulietta was married to Salimbeni some weeks ago. Is this not true?”

“And that is really,” asked the painter, “all you have heard?”

Once again, the young men looked at each other.

“What is it, Maestro?” Romeo frowned in anticipation. “Don’t tell me she is already carrying his child?”

“Heavens, no!” laughed the painter, suddenly giddy. “Quite the opposite.”

Romeo looked at him with narrow eyes. “I am aware that she has known him for three weeks now”—he swallowed with difficulty, as if the words were making him sick—“but I am hoping she has not yet grown too fond of his embraces.”

“My dearest friends,” said Maestro Ambrogio, locating a bottle at last, “brace yourselves for a most unusual story.”

   [   V.IV   ]

…

I
T WAS DAWN BY THE TIME
Janice and I finally fell asleep in my hotel room, both of us collapsing on a bed of documents, our heads spinning with family lore. We had spent all night going back and forth between now and 1340, and by the time our eyes finally fell shut, Janice knew almost as much about the Tolomeis, the Salimbenis, the Marescottis, and their Shakespearean alter egos as I did. I had shown her every scrap of paper in our mother’s box, including the mangy volume of
Romeo and Juliet
and the notebook full of sketches. Amazingly, she had not disputed my taking the silver crucifix and wearing it around my neck; she was more interested in our family tree and in tracing her own ancestry back to Giulietta’s sister, Giannozza.

“Look,” she had pointed out, scrolling down the long document, “there are Giuliettas and Giannozzas all over the place!”

“Originally, they were twins,” I had explained, pointing out a passage in one of Giulietta’s last letters to her sister, “see? She writes, ‘You have often said that you are four minutes younger, but four centuries older, than me. I now understand what you mean.’”

“Creepers!” Janice had stuck her nose in the family tree once more. “Maybe these are all twins! Maybe it’s a gene that runs in our family.”

But apart from the fact that our medieval namesakes had been twins, too, it was hard for us to find many other similarities between their lives and ours. They had lived in an age where women were the silent victims
of men’s mistakes; we, it would seem, were free to make our own and to shout about it as loudly as we pleased.

Only when we had read on—together—in Maestro Ambrogio’s journal had the two very different worlds finally fused in a language we could both understand, namely that of money. Salimbeni had given Giulietta a bridal crown with four supersized gemstones—two sapphires and two emeralds—and those were supposedly the stones that would later end up in the statue by her grave. But we had fallen asleep before we got that far.

After only the barest bones of sleep, I was woken up by the telephone.

“Miss Tolomei,” chirped Direttor Rossini, enjoying the role of early bird, “are you upright?”

“I am now.” I grimaced to see the face of my wristwatch. It was nine o’clock. “What’s wrong?”

“Captain Santini is here to see you. What should I tell him?”

“Uh—” I looked around at the mess. Janice was still snoring soundly beside me. “I’ll be down in five minutes.”

My hair still dripping from a drive-thru shower, I ran downstairs as fast as I could to find Alessandro sitting on a bench in the front garden, playing absentmindedly with a flower from the magnolia tree. The sight of him filled me with warm expectation, but as soon as he looked up to meet my eyes, I was reminded of the photos of him breaking into my hotel room, and the happy tickle immediately turned into stings of doubt.

“Top of the morning,” I said, not quite meaning it. “Any news about Bruno?”

“I came by yesterday,” he replied, looking at me pensively, “but you weren’t here.”

“I wasn’t?” I did my best to sound surprised. In my frenzy of meeting motorcycle Romeo in the Mangia Tower the day before, I had completely forgotten my appointment with Alessandro. “That’s strange. Oh, well—so what did Bruno say?”

“Not much.” Alessandro tossed aside the flower and stood up. “He’s dead.”

I gasped. “That was sudden! What happened?”

As we strolled through town together, Alessandro explained that Bruno Carrera—the man who had broken into my cousin Peppo’s museum—had been found dead in his cell the morning after his arrest. It was hard to
say whether it was suicide or whether someone on the inside had been paid to silence him, but, Alessandro pointed out, it requires quite a bit of expertise—if not downright magic—to hang yourself from your frayed old shoelaces without breaking them in the fall.

“So, you’re saying he was murdered?” Despite his character, behavior, and gun, I felt sorry for the guy. “I guess someone didn’t want him to talk.”

Alessandro looked at me as if he suspected I knew more than I let on. “That is what it looks like.”

FONTEBRANDA WAS AN
old public fountain—thanks to plumbing it was no longer used—which sat at the bottom of a sloping maze of city streets in a large open area. It was a detached, loggialike building in ancient, reddish brick, and leading down to it were broad stairs grown over with weeds.

Sitting down on the edge next to Alessandro, I looked around at the crystal-green water in the large stone basin and the kaleidoscope of light reflected onto the walls and vaulted ceiling above.

“You know,” I said, having a hard time accepting all this beauty, “your ancestor was a real piece of shit!”

He laughed in surprise, an unhappy laughter. “I hope you are not judging me by my ancestors. And I hope you are not judging yourself by yours either.”

How about
, I thought to myself as I leaned down to run my fingers through the water,
judging you by a photo on my sister’s cell phone?
But instead, I said, “That dagger—you can keep it. I don’t think Romeo would ever want it back.” I looked up at him, needing very much to hold someone responsible for Messer Salimbeni’s crimes. “Peppo was right, it has the spirit of the devil in it. But so do some people.”

We sat for a moment in silence, Alessandro smiling at my frown. “Come on,” he finally said, “you are alive! Look! The sun is shining. This is the time to be here, when the light comes through the arches and hits the water. Later in the day, Fontebranda becomes dark and cold, like a grotto. You would not recognize it.”

“What a strange thing,” I muttered, “that a place can change so much in a few hours.”

If he suspected I was referring to him, he didn’t show it. “Everything has a shadow-side. In my opinion, that is what makes life interesting.”

Despite my general gloom, I couldn’t help smiling at his logic. “Should I be frightened?”

“Well—” He took off his jacket and leaned back against the wall of the arch, a challenge in his eyes. “The old people will tell you that Fontebranda holds special powers.”

“Go on. I will let you know when I am sufficiently spooked.”

“Take off your shoes.”

Much against my will, I burst out laughing. “Okay, I’m spooked.”

“Come on, you’ll like it.” I watched him as he took off his own shoes and socks, rolled up his pant legs, and stuck his feet into the water.

“Don’t you have to work today?” I asked, staring at his dangling legs.

Alessandro shrugged. “The bank is over five hundred years old. I think it can survive without me for an hour.”

“So,” I said, folding my arms across my chest, “tell me about those special powers.”

He thought for a moment, then said, “I believe there are two kinds of madness in this world. Creative madness and destructive madness. The water from Fontebranda, it is believed, will make you mad, pazzo, but in a good way. It is hard to explain. For almost a thousand years, men and women have been drinking this water and have been filled with pazzia. Some have become poets, and some have become saints; the most famous of them all, of course, is Santa Caterina, who grew up right here, around the corner, in Oca, the contrada of the Goose.”

I was not in the mood to agree with anything he said, or allow him to distract me with fairy tales, and so I made a point of shaking my head. “This whole saint thing—women starving themselves and getting burned on the stake—how can you call that creative? It’s just plain insanity.”

“I think that, to most people,” he countered, still smiling, “throwing rocks at the Roman police would be insanity, too.” He laughed at my expression. “Especially when you won’t even put your feet in this nice fountain.”

“All I am saying,” I said, taking off my shoes, “is that it depends on your perspective. What seems perfectly creative to you might, in fact, be destructive to me.” I stuck my feet tentatively into the water. “I think it all comes down to what you believe in. Or … whose side you are on.”

I could not interpret his smile. “Are you telling me,” he said, looking at my wiggling toes, “that I need to rethink my theory?”

“I think you should always rethink your theories. If you don’t, they stop being theories. They become something else”—I waved my hands menacingly in the air—“they become dragons beneath your tower, letting no one in and no one out.”

He glanced at me, probably wondering why I continued to be so prickly this morning. “Did you know that here, the dragon is a symbol of virginity and protection?”

I looked away. “How ironic. In China, the dragon represents the bridegroom, the very enemy of virginity.”

For a while, neither of us spoke. The water in Fontebranda rippled quietly, projecting its lustrous beams onto the vaulted ceiling with the patient confidence of an immortal spirit, and for an instant, I almost felt I could be a poet. “So,” I said, shaking the idea before it took root, “do you believe it? That Fontebranda makes you pazzo?”