Juliet Read online

  “Your family, the Tolomeis,” Eva Maria went on, oblivious to the bad vibes, “was one of the richest, most powerful families in all of Siena history. They were private bankers, you see, and they were always at war with us, the Salimbenis, to prove who had more influence in the city. Their feud was so bad that they burnt down each other’s houses—and killed each other’s children in their beds—back in the Middle Ages.”

  “They were enemies?” I asked, stupidly.

  “Oh yes! The worst kind! Do you believe in destiny?” Eva Maria put a hand on top of mine and gave it a squeeze. “I do. Our two households, the Tolomeis and the Salimbenis, had an ancient grudge, a bloody grudge … If we were in the Middle Ages, we would be at each other’s throats. Like the Capulets and the Montagues in Romeo and Juliet.” She looked at me meaningfully. “Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Siena, where we lay our scene—do you know that play?” When I merely nodded, too overwhelmed to speak, she patted my hand reassuringly. “Don’t worry, I am confident that you and I, with our new friendship, will at last bury their strife. And this is why”—she turned abruptly in her seat—“Sandro! I am counting on you to make sure Giulietta is safe in Siena. Did you hear me?”

  “Miss Tolomei,” replied Alessandro, looking at the road ahead, “will never be safe anywhere. From anyone.”

  “What kind of talk is that?” scolded Eva Maria. “She is a Tolomei; it is our duty to protect her.”

  Alessandro glanced at me in the mirror, and I got the impression that he could see far more of me than I could see of him. “Maybe she doesn’t want our protection.” From the way he said it I knew it was a challenge, and I also knew that—despite his accent—he was eminently at home in my language. Which meant that he had other reasons for being monosyllabic with me.

  “I sure appreciate this ride,” I said, deploying my cutest smile. “But I am sure Siena is very safe.”

  He acknowledged the compliment with a slight nod. “What brings you over here? Business or pleasure?”

  “Well … pleasure, I suppose.”

  Eva Maria clapped her hands excitedly. “Then we will have to make sure you are not disappointed! Alessandro knows all the secrets of Siena. Don’t you, caro? He will show you places, wonderful places that you would never find on your own. Oh, you will have fun!”

  I opened my mouth, but had no idea what to say. So I closed it again. It was quite evident from his frown that showing me around Siena would rank very low on Alessandro’s agenda for the week.

  “Sandro!” Eva Maria went on, her voice turning sharp. “You will make sure Giulietta has fun, no?”

  “I can imagine no greater felicity,” replied Alessandro, turning on the car radio.

  “See?” Eva Maria pinched my flushed cheek. “What did Shakespeare know? Now we are friends.”

  Outside, the world was a vineyard, and the sky was suspended over the landscape like a protective blue cape. It was where I was born, and yet I suddenly felt like a stranger—an intruder—who had snuck in through the back door to find and claim something that had never belonged to me.

  IT WAS A RELIEF when we finally pulled up in front of Hotel Chiusarelli. Eva Maria had been more than kind throughout the trip, telling me this and that about Siena, but you can only make so much polite conversation after losing a night’s sleep and all your luggage in one fell swoop.

  Everything I owned had been in those two suitcases. I had basically packed up my entire childhood right after Aunt Rose’s funeral, and had left the house in a taxi around midnight with Janice’s triumphant laughter still ringing in my ears. There had been all sorts of clothes, books, and silly knickknacks, but now they were in Verona, and I was here, stuck in Siena with little more than a toothbrush, half a granola bar, and a pair of earplugs.

  After pulling up at the curb in front of the hotel and dutifully opening the car door for me, Alessandro escorted me all the way into the vestibule. He obviously didn’t want to, and I obviously didn’t appreciate the gesture, but Eva Maria was watching us both from the backseat of the car, and by now I knew that she was a woman who was used to having things her way.

  “Please,” said Alessandro, holding the door open. “After you.”

  There was nothing else to do but enter Hotel Chiusarelli. The building greeted me with cool serenity, its ceiling held high by marble columns, and only very faintly, from somewhere below us, could I discern the sound of people singing while throwing pots and pans around.

  “Buongiorno!” An august man in a three-piece suit rose behind the reception counter, a brass nametag informing me that his name was Direttor Rossini. “Benvenu—ah!” He interrupted himself when he saw Alessandro. “Benvenuto, Capitano.”

  I put my hands flat on the green marble with what I hoped was a winning smile. “Hi. I am Giulietta Tolomei. I have a reservation. Excuse me for a second—” I turned towards Alessandro. “So, this is it. I am safely here.”

  “I am very sorry, Signorina,” said Direttor Rossini, “but I do not have a reservation in your name.”

  “Oh! I was sure—is that a problem?”

  “It is the Palio!” He threw up his arms in exasperation. “The hotel is complete! But”—he tapped at the computer screen—“I have here a credit card number with the name Julie Jacobs. Reservation for one person for one week. To arrive today from America. Can this be you?”

  I glanced at Alessandro. He returned my stare with perfect indifference. “Yes, that’s me,” I said.

  Direttor Rossini looked surprised. “You are Julie Jacobs? And Giulietta Tolomei?”

  “Well … yes.”

  “But—” Direttor Rossini took a little side step to better see Alessandro, his eyebrows describing a polite question mark. “C’è un problema?”

  “Nessun problema,” replied Alessandro, looking at us both with what could only be a deliberate non-expression. “Miss Jacobs. Enjoy your stay in Siena.”

  Within the blink of an eye Eva Maria’s godson was gone, and I was left with Direttor Rossini and an uncomfortable silence. Only when I had filled out every single form he put in front of me did the hotel director finally allow himself to smile. “So … you are a friend of Captain Santini?”

  I looked behind me. “You mean, the man who was just here? No, we’re not friends. Is that his name? Santini?”

  Direttor Rossini clearly found me lacking in understanding. “His name is Captain Santini. He is the—what do you say—Head of Security at Monte dei Paschi. In Palazzo Salimbeni.”

  I must have looked stricken, because Direttor Rossini hastened to comfort me. “Don’t worry, we don’t have criminals in Siena. She is a very peaceful city. Once there was a criminal here”—he chuckled to himself as he rang for the bellboy—“but we took care of him!”

  For hours I had looked forward to collapsing on a bed. But now, when I finally could, rather than lying down I found myself pacing up and down the floor of my hotel room, chewing on the possibility that Alessandro Santini would run a search on my name and truffle out my dark past. The very last thing I needed now was for someone in Siena to pull up the old Julie Jacobs file, discover my Roman debacle, and put an untimely end to my treasure hunt.

  A bit later, when I called Umberto to tell him I had arrived safely, he must have heard it in my voice, because he instantly knew something had gone wrong.

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” I said. “Just some Armani stiff who discovered I have two names.”

  “But he is an Italian,” was Umberto’s sensible reply. “He doesn’t care if you break some law a little bit, as long as you wear beautiful shoes. Are you wearing beautiful shoes? Are you wearing the shoes I gave you? … Principessa?”

  I looked down at my flip-flops. “I guess I’m toast.”

  CRAWLING INTO BED that night, I slipped right into a recurring dream that I had not had for several months, but which had been a part of my life since childhood. The dream had me walking through a magnificent castle with mosaic floors and cathedral ceilings held up b
y massive marble pillars, pushing open one gilded door after the other and wondering where everyone was. The only light came from narrow stained-glass windows high, high over my head, and the colored beams did little to illuminate the dark corners around me.

  As I walked through those vast rooms, I felt like a child lost in the woods, and it frustrated me that I could sense the presence of others, but that they never showed themselves to me. When I stood still, I could hear them whispering and fluttering about like ghosts, but if they were indeed ethereal beings, they were still trapped just like me, looking for a way out.

  Only when I read the play in high school had I discovered that what these invisible demons were whispering were fragments from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—not the way actors would recite the lines onstage, but mumbled with quiet intensity, like a spell. Or a curse.

  [ I.III ]

  Within this three hours

  will fair Juliet wake

  …

  IT TOOK THE BELLS OF the basilica across the piazza to finally stir me from sleep. Two minutes later Direttor Rossini knocked on my door as if he knew I could not possibly have slept through the racket. “Excuse me!” Without waiting for an invitation, he lugged a large suitcase into my room and placed it on the empty baggage stand. “This came for you last night.”

  “Wait!” I let go of the door and gathered the hotel bathrobe around me as tightly as I could. “That is not my suitcase.”

  “I know.” He pulled the foulard from his breast pocket and wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. “It is from Contessa Salimbeni. Here, she left a note for you.”

  I took the note. “What exactly is a contessa?”

  “Normally,” said Direttor Rossini with some dignity, “I do not carry luggage. But since it was Contessa Salimbeni—”

  “She is lending me her clothes?” I stared at Eva Maria’s brief handwritten note in disbelief. “And shoes?”

  “Until your own luggage arrives. It is now in Frittoli.”

  In her exquisite handwriting, Eva Maria anticipated that her clothes might not fit me perfectly. But, she concluded, it was better than running around naked.

  As I examined the specimens in the suitcase one by one, I was happy Janice could not see me. Our childhood home had not been big enough for two fashionistas, and so I—much to Umberto’s chagrin—had embarked upon a career of being everything but. In school, Janice got her compliments from friends whose lives were headlined by designer names, while any admiration I got came from girls who had bummed a ride to the charity store, but who hadn’t had the vision to buy what I bought, or the courage to put it together. It was not that I disliked fancy clothes, it was just that I wouldn’t give Janice the satisfaction of appearing to care about my looks. For no matter what I did to myself, she could always outdo me.

  By the time we left college, I had become my own image: a dandelion in the flower bed of society. Kinda cute, but still a weed. When Aunt Rose had put our graduation photos side by side on the grand piano, she had smiled sadly and observed that, of all those many classes I had taken, I seemed to have graduated with the best results as the perfect anti-Janice.

  Eva Maria’s designer clothes were, in other words, definitely not my style. But what were my options? Following my telephone conversation with Umberto the night before, I had decided to retire my flip-flops for the time being and pay a little more attention to my bella figura. After all, the last thing I needed now was for Francesco Maconi, my mother’s financial advisor, to think I was someone not to be trusted.

  And so I tried on Eva Maria’s outfits one by one, turning this way and that before the wardrobe mirror, until I found the least outrageous one—a foxy little skirt and jacket, fire-engine red with big black polka dots—that made me look as if I had just emerged from a Jaguar with four pieces of perfectly matched luggage and a small dog called Bijou. But most important, it made me look as if I ate hidden heirlooms—and financial advisors—for breakfast.

  And by the way, it had matching shoes.

  IN ORDER TO GET to Palazzo Tolomei, Direttor Rossini had explained, I must choose to either go up Via del Paradiso or down Via della Sapienza. They were both practically closed to traffic—as were most streets in downtown Siena—but Sapienza, he advised, could be a bit of a challenge, and all in all, Paradiso was probably the safer route.

  As I walked down Via della Sapienza the façades of ancient houses closed in on me from all sides, and I was soon trapped in a labyrinth of centuries past, following the logic of an earlier way of life. Above me a ribbon of blue sky was crisscrossed by banners, their bold colors strangely vivid among the medieval brick, but apart from that—and the odd pair of jeans drying from a window—there was almost nothing that committed this place to modernity.

  The world had developed around it, but Siena didn’t care. Direttor Rossini had told me that, for the Sienese, the golden age had been the late Middle Ages, and as I walked, I could see that he was right; the city clung to its medieval self with a stubborn disregard for the attractions of progress. There were touches of the Renaissance here and there, but overall, the hotel director had sniggered, Siena had been too wise to be seduced by the charms of history’s playboys, those so-called masters, who turned houses into layer cakes.

  As a result, the most beautiful thing about Siena was her integrity; even now, in a world that had stopped caring, she was still Sena Vetus Civitas Virginis, or, in my own language, Old Siena, City of the Virgin. And for that reason alone, Direttor Rossini had concluded, all fingers planted on the green marble counter, it was the only place on the planet worth living in.

  “So, where else have you lived?” I had asked him, innocently.

  “I was in Rome for two days,” he had replied with dignity. “Who needs to see more? When you take a bite of a bad apple, do you keep eating?”

  From my immersion in the silent alleys I eventually surfaced in a bustling, pedestrian street. According to my directions it was called the Corso, and Direttor Rossini had explained that it was famous for the many old banks that used to serve foreigners traveling the old pilgrim route, which had gone straight through town. Over the centuries, millions of people had journeyed through Siena, and many foreign treasures and currencies had changed hands. The steady stream of modern-day tourists, in other words, was nothing but the continuation of an old, profitable tradition.

  That was how my family, the Tolomeis, had grown rich, Direttor Rossini had pointed out, and how their rivals, the Salimbenis, had grown even richer. They had been tradesmen and bankers, and their fortified palazzos had flanked this very road—Siena’s main thoroughfare—with impossibly tall towers that had kept growing and growing until, at last, they had both come crashing down.

  As I walked past Palazzo Salimbeni I looked in vain for remnants of the old tower. It was still an impressive building with quite the Draculean front door, but it was no longer the fortification it had once been. Somewhere in that building, I thought as I scurried by, collar up, Eva Maria’s godson, Alessandro, had his office. Hopefully he was not—just now—scrolling through some crime register to find the dark secret behind Julie Jacobs.

  Farther down the road, but not much, stood Palazzo Tolomei, the ancient dwelling of my own ancestors. Looking up at the splendid medieval façade, I suddenly felt proud to be connected to the people who had once lived in this remarkable building. As far as I could see, not much had changed since the fourteenth century; the only thing suggesting that the mighty Tolomeis had moved out and a modern bank had moved in were the marketing posters hanging in the deep-set windows, their colorful promises sliced by iron bars.

  The inside of the building was no less stern than the outside. A security guard stepped forward to hold the door for me as I entered, as gallantly as the semiautomatic rifle in his arms would allow, but I was too busy looking around to be bothered by his uniformed attention. Six titanic pillars in red brick held the ceiling high, high above mankind, and although there were counters and chairs and people w
alking around on the vast stone floor, these took up so little of the room that the white lion heads protruding from the ancient walls seemed entirely unaware that humans were present.

  “Sì?” The teller looked at me over the rim of glasses so fashionably slim they could not possibly transmit more than a wafer-thin slice of reality.

  I leaned forward a bit, in the interest of privacy. “Would it be possible to talk to Signor Francesco Maconi?”

  The teller actually managed to focus on me through her glasses, but she did not appear convinced by what she saw. “There is no Signor Francesco here,” she said firmly, in a very heavy accent.

  “No Francesco Maconi?”

  At this point, the teller found it necessary to take off her glasses entirely, fold them carefully on the counter, and look at me with that supremely kind smile people fix on you just before they stick a syringe in your neck. “No.”

  “But I know he used to work here—” I did not get any further before the woman’s colleague from the booth next door leaned in on the conversation, whispering something in Italian. At first, my unfriendly teller dismissed the other with an angry wave, but after a while she began to reconsider.

  “Excuse me,” she said eventually, leaning forward to get my attention, “but do you mean Presidente Maconi?”

  I felt a jolt of excitement. “Did he work here twenty years ago?”

  She looked horrified. “Presidente Maconi was always here!”

  “And would it be possible to speak with him?” I smiled sweetly, although she did not deserve it. “He is an old friend of my mother’s, Diane Tolomei. I am Giulietta Tolomei.”

  Both women stared at me as if I were a spirit conjured up before their very eyes. Without another word, the teller who had originally dismissed me now fumbled her glasses back on her nose, made a phone call, and had a brief conversation in humble, underdog Italian. When it was over she put down the receiver reverently, and turned towards me with something akin to a smile. “He will see you right after lunch, at three o’clock.”