Juliet (60 page)

“What is this?” Janice picked up a piece of the shattered glass and turned it over in her hand.

“That’s the vial,” I said, “that I told you about; the one Umberto gave to Alessandro, and which really pissed him off.”

“Huh.” Janice wiped her hands on the grass. “Well, at least now we know what was in it. Blood. Go figure. Maybe you were right and they were really all vampires. Maybe this was some kind of mid-morning snack—”

We sat for a moment, pondering the possibilities. At one point I gathered up the cencio and looked at it with regret. “Such a shame. How do you get blood off old silk?”

Janice picked up a corner, and we held out the cencio between us, looking at the damage. Admittedly, the vial was not the sole culprit, but I knew better than to tell her that.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God!” said Janice suddenly. “That’s the whole point: You don’t get the blood out. This is exactly what they wanted the cencio to look like. Don’t you see?”

She stared at me eagerly, but I must have looked blank. “It’s just like the old days,” she explained, “when the women would inspect the bridal sheet on the morning after the wedding! And I’ll bet you a kangaroo”—she picked up a couple pieces of the broken vial, including the cork stopper—“this is—or
was
—what we in the matchmaking community refer to as an
insta-virgin
. Not just blood, but blood mixed with other stuff. It’s a science, believe me.”

Seeing my expression, Janice burst out laughing. “Oh yes, it’s still going on. You don’t believe me? You think people only looked at sheets in the Middle Ages? Wrong! Lest we forget, some cultures still live in the Middle Ages. Think about it: If you’re going back to The-Middle-of-Nowherestan to be married off to some goatherd cousin, but—oops—you’ve already been fooling around with Tom, Harry, and Dick … what do you do? Chances are, your goatherd groom plus in-laws are not gonna be happy that someone else ate the cheese. Solution: You can get fixed in a private clinic. Get everything reinstalled and go through the whole goddamn thing once more, just to please the audience.
Or
you can simply bring a sneaky little bottle of
this
to the party. Much cheaper.”

“That,” I protested, “is so far out—”

“You know what I think?” Janice went on, eyes gleaming. “I think they set you up big-time. I think they drugged you—or at least tried to—and
were hoping you would be totally out after tripping the light fantastic with Friar Lorenzo and the dream team,
so that
they could go ahead and fish out the cencio and smear it with this stuff, making it look like good old Romeo had been driving the love-bus into cherry-town.”

I winced, but Janice didn’t seem to notice. “The irony is, of course,” she continued, too absorbed in her own lewd logic to notice my extreme discomfort with the subject and her choice of words, “that they could have saved themselves the whole friggin’ trouble. ’Cause you two went ahead and stuffed the cannelloni anyway. Just like Romeo and Juliet. Shazam! From the ballroom to the balcony to the bed in fifty pages. Tell me, were you trying to break their record?”

She looked at me enthusiastically, clearly hoping for a pat on the head and a cookie for being such a clever girl.

“Is it humanly possible,” I moaned, “to be any more crass than you?”

Janice grinned as if this was the highest praise possible. “Probably not. If it’s poetry you want, crawl back to your bird man.”

I leaned back against the door frame and closed my eyes. Every time Janice referred to Alessandro, even in her unspeakably vulgar way, I had little flashbacks to the night before—some painful, some not—and they kept distracting me from present reality. But if I asked her to stop, she would most certainly do the exact opposite.

“What I don’t understand,” I said, determined to have us both move on and catch up with the big picture, “is why they had the vial in the first place. I mean, if they really wanted to end the curse on the Tolomeis and the Salimbenis, then presumably the last thing they would do would be to
fake
Romeo and Giulietta’s wedding night. Did they actually think they could fool the Virgin Mary?”

Janice pursed her lips. “You’re right. It doesn’t make sense.”

“As far as I can see,” I went on, “the only one who got fooled—apart from me—was Friar Lorenzo. Or rather, he
would
have been fooled,
if
they had used the stuff in the vial.”

“But why the hell would they want to dupe Friar Lorenzo?” Janice threw up her hands. “He’s just an old relic. Unless”—she looked at me, eyebrows raised—“Friar Lorenzo has access to something that they don’t. Something important. Something they want. Such as—?”

I snapped upright. “Romeo and Giulietta’s grave?”

We stared at each other. “I think,” said Janice, nodding slowly, “that’s
the connection right there. When we talked about it that night at Maestro Lippi’s, I thought you were crazy. But maybe you’re right. Maybe part of the whole undo-your-sins thing involves the actual grave and the actual statue. How about this … after making sure Romeo and Giulietta
finally
get together, the Tolomeis and the Salimbenis have to go to the grave and kneel before the statue?”

“But the curse said
kneel before the Virgin
.”

“So?” Janice shrugged. “Obviously the statue is somewhere close to a statue of the Virgin Mary—the problem is that
they
don’t know the exact location. Only Friar Lorenzo does. And that’s why they need him.”

We sat for a while in silence, running through the math.

“You know,” I eventually said, fondling the cencio, “I don’t think he knew.”

“Who?”

I glanced at her, heat rising in my cheeks. “You know …
him.”

“Oh, come on, Jules!” moaned Janice. “Stop defending the creep. You saw him with Umberto, and”—she tried to soften the edge in her voice, but this was new to her, and she wasn’t very good at it—“he
did
chase you out the driveway and tell you to give him the book. Of course he knew.”

“But if you are right,” I said, feeling an absurd urge to push back and defend Alessandro, “about all this, then he would have followed the plan and not—you know.”

“Engaged in physical relations?” Janice suggested primly.

“Exactly,” I nodded. “Plus, he would not have been so surprised when Umberto gave him the vial. In fact, he would already have
had
the vial.”

“Honey!” Janice looked at me over the rim of imaginary glasses, “he broke into your hotel room, he lied to you, and he stole Mom’s book and gave it to Umberto. The guy is scum. And I don’t care if he has all the balls and whistles and knows how to use them, he’s still—excuse my French—a shyster. And as for your oh-so-friendly mobster queen—”

“Speaking of lying to me and breaking into my hotel room,” I said, staring right back at her, “why did you tell me he had trashed my hotel room when it was you all along?”

Janice gasped.
“What?”

“Are you going to deny it?” I went on. “That you broke into my room and blamed Alessandro?”

“Hey!” she cried. “He broke in, too, okay! I am your sister! I have a right to know what’s going on—” She stopped herself and looked sheepish. “How did you know?”

“Because he saw you. He thought you were me, crawling down from my own balcony.”

“He thought—?” Janice gaped in disbelief.
“Now
I’m insulted! Honestly!”

“Janice,” I sighed, frustrated with her for sliding right back into her old sassiness, pulling me along. “You lied to me. Why? After everything that has happened, I would totally understand if you had broken into my room. You thought I was scamming you out of a fortune.”

“Really?” Janice looked at me with budding hope.

I shrugged. “Why don’t we try honesty for a change?”

Swift recoveries were my sister’s specialty. “Excellent,” she smirked, “honesty it is. And now, if you don’t mind”—she wiggled her eyebrows—“I have a few more questions about last night.”

AFTER GETTING SOME
provisions from the village store, we spent the rest of the afternoon poking around in the house trying to recognize our childhood things. But it didn’t help that everything was covered in dust and mold, that every piece of textile had holes from some kind of animal, and that there was mouse shit in every possible—and impossible—crevice. Upstairs, the cobwebs were as thick as shower curtains, and when we opened the second-floor shutters to let in some light, more than half of them fell right off their hinges.

“Whoops!” said Janice when a shutter came crashing down on the front step, two feet from the Ducati. “I guess it’s time to date a carpenter.”

“How about a plumber?” I proposed, peeling spiderwebs from my hair. “Or an electrician?”

“You date the electrician,” she shot back. “You need some wiring done.”

The high point came when we discovered the wobbly chess table, hidden in a corner behind a mangy sofa.

“I told you, didn’t I?” Janice beamed, rocking it gently, just to make sure. “It was right here all along.”

By sunset, we had made so much progress mucking out that we decided to move our camp upstairs to what had once been an office. Sitting across from each other at an old writing desk, we had a candlelit dinner consisting of bread, cheese, and red wine, while we tried to figure out what to do next. Neither of us had any desire to return to Siena just yet, but at the same time, we both knew that our current situation was not sustainable. In order to get the house back in some kind of livable shape, we would need to invest a lot of time and money in red tape and handymen, and even if we succeeded, how would we live? We would be like fugitives, digging ourselves further and further into debt, and we would always be wondering when our past would catch up with us.

“The way I see it,” said Janice, pouring more wine, “we either stay here—which we can’t—or we go back to the States—which would be pathetic—or we go treasure hunting and see what happens.”

“I think you’re forgetting that the book in itself is useless,” I pointed out. “We need Mom’s sketchbook to figure out the secret code.”

“Which is precisely,” said Janice, reaching into her handbag, “why I brought it. Ta-daa!” She put the sketchbook on the desk in front of me. “Any further questions?”

I laughed out loud. “You know, I think I love you.”

Janice worked hard not to smile. “Easy now. We don’t want you to pull something.”

Once we had the two books side by side, it did not take us long to crack the code, which was, in fact, not even really a code, merely a cunningly hidden list of page, line, and word numbers. While Janice read out the numbers scribbled in the margins of the sketchbook, I leafed through the volume of
Romeo and Juliet
and read out the bits and pieces of the message our mother had wanted us to find. It went like this:

When we had come to the end of the long message, we sat back and looked at each other in bewilderment, our initial enthusiasm on hold.

“Okay, so I have two questions,” said Janice. “One: Why the hell didn’t we do this before? And two: What was Mom smoking?” She glared at me and reached out for her wineglass. “Sure, I get that she hid her secret code in ‘this precious book,’ and that it is somehow a treasure map to find Juliet’s grave and ‘the dearest stone,’ but … where are we supposed to go digging? What’s up with the pestilence and the crowbar?”

“I have a feeling,” I said, leafing back and forth to reread a few passages, “that she is talking about the Siena Cathedral. ‘Queen Maria’ … that can only mean the Virgin Mary. And the bit about the little stars making the face of heaven so fine sounds to me like the inside of the cathedral dome. It is painted blue with little golden stars on it.” I looked up at her, suddenly excited. “Suppose that’s where the grave is? Remember, Maestro Lippi said that Salimbeni buried Romeo and Giulietta in a ‘most holy place’; what could be more holy than a cathedral?”

“Makes sense to me,” agreed Janice, “but what about the whole pestilence thing and the ‘sisterhood of holy nuns’? That doesn’t sound like it has anything to do with the cathedral.”

“‘Saint Maria, ladder’—” I mumbled, riffling through the book once more, “‘a house where the infectious pestilence did reign … seal’d up the doors … mistress saint … goose … visiting the sick’ … and blah-blah-blah.” I let the book fall shut and leaned back on the chair, trying to remember the story Alessandro had told me about Comandante Marescotti and the Plague. “Okay, I know it sounds crazy, but”—I hesitated and looked at Janice, whose eyes were wide and full of faith in my riddle-solving skills—“during the bubonic plague, which was only a few years after Romeo and Giulietta died, they had so many corpses lying around that they couldn’t bury them all. So, in Santa Maria della Scala—I think
scala
means ladder—the enormous hospital facing the cathedral, where ‘a sisterhood of holy nuns’ took care of the sick during the ‘infectious
pestilence’ … well, they simply stuffed the dead into a wall and sealed it off.”