Juliet Read online

  I HAD MY FIRST MEAL since arriving in Siena at a bustling pizzeria called Cavallino Bianco. While I sat there pretending to read the Italian dictionary I had just bought, I began to realize that it would take more than just a borrowed suit and a few handy phrases to level with the locals. These women around me, I suspected, sneaking peeks at their smiles and exuberant gestures as they bantered with the handsome waiter Giulio, possessed something I had never had, some ability I could not put my finger on, but which must be a crucial element in that elusive state of mind, happiness.

  Strolling on, feeling more klutzy and displaced than ever, I had a stand-up espresso in a bar in Piazza Postierla and asked the buxom barista if she could recommend a cheap clothes store in the neighborhood. After all, Eva Maria’s suitcase had—fortunately—not contained any underwear. Completely ignoring her other customers the barista looked me over skeptically and said, “You want everything new, no? New hair, new clothes?”

  “Well—”

  “Don’t worry, my cousin is the best hairdresser in Siena—maybe in the world. He will make you beautiful. Come!”

  After taking me by the arm and insisting that I call her Malèna, the barista walked me down to see her cousin Luigi right away, even though it was clearly coffee rush hour, and customers were yelling after her in exasperation as we went. She just shrugged and laughed, knowing full well that they would all still fawn over her when she came back, maybe even a little bit more than before, now that they had tasted life without her.

  Luigi was sweeping up hair from the floor when we entered his salon. He was no older than me, but had the penetrating eye of a Michelangelo. When he fixed that eye on me, however, he was not impressed.

  “Ciao, caro,” said Malèna and gave him a drive-thru peck on both cheeks, “this is Giulietta. She needs un makeover totale.”

  “Just the ends, actually,” I interjected. “A couple inches.”

  It took a major argument in Italian—which I was more than relieved to not understand—before Malèna had persuaded Luigi to take on my sorry case. But once he did, he took the challenge very seriously. As soon as Malèna had left the salon, he sat me down on a barber chair and looked at my reflection in the mirror, turning me this way and that to check all the angles. Then he pulled the elastic bands from my braids and threw them directly into the trash bin with an expression of disgust.

  “Bene …” he finally said, fluffing up my hair and looking at me once again in the mirror, a little less critically than before. “Not too bad, no?”

  WHEN I WALKED BACK to Palazzo Tolomei two hours later, I had sunk myself further into debt, but it was worth every nonexistent penny. Eva Maria’s red-and-black suit lay neatly folded on the bottom of a shopping bag, matching shoes on top, and I was wearing one of five new outfits that had all been approved by Luigi and his uncle, Paolo, who happened to own a clothes store just around the corner. Uncle Paolo—who did not speak a word of English, but who knew everything there was to know about fashion—had knocked 30 percent off my entire purchase as long as I promised never to wear my ladybug costume again.

  I had protested at first, explaining that my luggage was due to arrive any moment, but in the end the temptation had been too great. So what if my suitcases were waiting for me when I returned to the hotel? There was nothing in them I could ever wear in Siena anyway, perhaps with the exception of the shoes Umberto had given me for Christmas, and which I had never even tried on.

  As I walked away from the store, I glanced at myself in every shopwindow I passed. Why had I never done this before? Ever since high school I had cut my own hair—just the ends—with a pair of kitchen scissors every two years or so. It took me about five minutes, and, honestly, I thought, who could tell the difference? Well, I could certainly see the difference now. Somehow, Luigi had managed to bring my boring old hair to life, and it was already thriving in its new freedom, flowing in the breeze as I walked and framing my face as if it was a face worth framing.

  When I was a child, Aunt Rose had taken me to the village barber whenever it occurred to her. But she had been wise enough never to take Janice and me at the same time. Only once did we end up in the salon chairs side by side, and as we sat there, pulling faces at each other in the big mirrors, the old barber had held up our ponytails and said, “Look! This one has bear-hair and the other has princess-hair.”

  Aunt Rose had not replied. She had just sat there, silently, and waited for him to finish. Once he was finished, she had paid him and thanked him in that clipped voice of hers. Then she had hauled us both out the door as if it were we, and not the barber, who had misbehaved. Ever since that day, Janice had never missed an opportunity to compliment me on my beary, beary lovely hair.

  The memory nearly made me cry. Here I was, all dolled up, while Aunt Rose was in a place where she could no longer appreciate that I had finally stepped out of my macramé cocoon. It would have made her so happy to see me like this—just once—but I had been too busy making sure Janice never did.

  PRESIDENTE MACONI WAS a courtly man in his sixties, dressed in a subdued suit and tie and astoundingly successful in combing the long hairs from one side of his head across the crown to the other. As a result, he carried himself with rigid dignity, but there was genuine warmth in his eyes that instantly annulled the ridiculous.

  “Miss Tolomei?” He came across the floor of the bank to shake my hand heartily, as if we were old friends. “This is an unexpected delight.”

  As we walked together up the stairs, Presidente Maconi went on to apologize in flawless English for the uneven walls and warped floors. Even the most modern interior design, he explained with a smile, was helpless against a building that was almost eight hundred years old.

  After a day of constant language malfunctions it was a relief to finally meet someone fluent in my own tongue. A touch of a British accent suggested that Presidente Maconi had lived in England for a while—perhaps he had gone to school there—which might explain why my mother had chosen him as her financial advisor in the first place.

  His office was on the top floor, and from the mullioned windows he had a perfect view of the church of San Cristoforo and several other spectacular buildings in the neighborhood. Stepping forward, however, I nearly stumbled over a plastic bucket sitting in the middle of a large Persian rug, and after ensuring that my health was intact, Presidente Maconi very carefully placed the bucket precisely where it had stood before I kicked it.

  “There is a leak in the roof,” he explained, looking up at the cracked plaster ceiling, “but we cannot find it. It is very strange—even when it is not raining, water comes dripping down.” He shrugged and motioned for me to sit down on one of two artfully carved mahogany chairs facing his desk. “The old president used to say that the building was crying. He knew your father, by the way.”

  Sitting down behind the desk, Presidente Maconi leaned back as far as the leather chair would allow and put his fingertips together. “So, Miss Tolomei, how may I help you?”

  For some reason, the question took me by surprise. I had been so focused on getting here in the first place, I had given little thought to the next step. I suppose the Francesco Maconi who had—until now—lived quite comfortably in my imagination knew very well that I had come for my mother’s treasure, and he had been waiting impatiently these many, many years to finally hand it off to its rightful heir.

  The real Francesco Maconi, however, was not that accommodating. I started explaining why I had come, and he listened to me in silence, nodding occasionally. When I eventually stopped talking, he looked at me pensively, his face betraying no conclusion either way.

  “And so I was wondering,” I went on, realizing that I had forgotten the most important part, “if you could take me to her safety-deposit box?”

  I took the key out of my handbag and put it on his desk, but Presidente Maconi merely glanced at it. After a moment’s awkward silence he got up and walked over to a window, hands behind his back, and looked out over the roofs
of Siena with a frown.

  “Your mother,” he finally said, “was a wise woman. And when God takes the wise to heaven, he leaves their wisdom behind, for us on earth. Their spirits live on, flying around us silently, like owls, with eyes that see in the night, when you and I see only darkness.” He paused to test a leaded pane that was coming loose. “In some ways, the owl would be a fitting symbol for all of Siena, not just for our contrada.”

  “Because … all people in Siena are wise?” I proposed, not entirely sure what he was getting at.

  “Because the owl has an ancient ancestor. To the Greeks, she was the goddess Athena. A virgin, but also a warrior. The Romans called her Minerva. In Roman times, there was a temple for her here in Siena. This is why it was always in our hearts to love the Virgin Mary, even in the ancient times, before Christ was born. To us, she was always here.”

  “Presidente Maconi—”

  “Miss Tolomei.” He turned to face me at last. “I am trying to figure out what your mother would have liked me to do. You are asking me to give you something that caused her a lot of grief. Would she really want me to let you have it?” He attempted a smile. “But then, it is not my decision, is it? She left it here—she did not destroy it—so she must have wanted me to pass it on to you, or to someone. The question is: Are you sure you want it?”

  In the silence following his words, we both heard it clearly: the sound of a drop of water falling into the plastic bucket on a perfectly sunny day.

  AFTER SUMMONING A second key-holder, the somber Signor Virgilio, Presidente Maconi took me down a separate staircase—a spiral of ancient stone that must have been there since the palazzo was first built—into the deepest caverns of the bank. Now for the first time I became aware that there was a whole other world underneath Siena, a world of caves and shadows that stood in sharp contrast to the world of light above.

  “Welcome to the Bottini,” said Presidente Maconi as we walked through a grottolike passageway. “This is the old, underground aqueduct that was built a thousand years ago to lead water into the city of Siena. This is all sandstone, and even with the primitive tools they had back then, Sienese engineers were able to dig a vast network of tunnels that led fresh water to public fountains and even into the basement of some private houses. Now, of course, it is no longer used.”

  “But people go down here anyway?” I asked, touching the rough sandstone wall.

  “Oh, no!” Presidente Maconi was amused by my naïveté. “It is a dangerous place to be. You can easily get lost. Nobody knows all the Bottini. There are stories, many stories, about secret tunnels from here to there, but we don’t want people running around exploring them. The sandstone is porous, you see. It crumbles. And all of Siena is sitting on top.”

  I pulled back my hand. “But this wall is … fortified?”

  Presidente Maconi looked a bit sheepish. “No.”

  “But it’s a bank. That seems … dangerous.”

  “Once,” he replied, eyebrows up in disapproval, “someone tried to break in. Once. They dug a tunnel. It took them months.”

  “Did they succeed?”

  Presidente Maconi pointed at a security camera mounted high in an obscure corner. “When the alarm went off, they escaped through the tunnel, but at least they didn’t steal anything.”

  “Who were they?” I asked. “Did you ever find out?”

  He shrugged. “Some gangsters from Napoli. They never came back.”

  When we finally arrived at the vault, Presidente Maconi and Signor Virgilio both had to swipe their key cards for the massive door to open.

  “See?”—Presidente Maconi was proud of the feature—“not even the president can open this vault on his own. As they say, absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

  Inside the vault, safety-deposit boxes covered every wall from floor to ceiling. Most of them were small, but some were large enough to serve as a luggage locker at an airport. My mother’s box, as it turned out, was somewhere in between, and as soon as Presidente Maconi had pointed it out to me and helped me insert the key, he and Signor Virgilio politely left the room. When, moments later, I heard a couple of matches striking, I knew they had seized the opportunity to take a smoking break in the corridor outside.

  Since I first read Aunt Rose’s letter, I had entertained many different ideas of what my mother’s treasure might be, and had done my best to temper my expectations in order to avoid disappointment. But in my most unchecked fantasies I would find a magnificent golden box, locked and full of promise, not unlike the treasure chests that pirates dig up on desert islands.

  My mother had left me just such a thing. It was a wooden box with golden ornamentation, and while it was not actually locked—there was no lock—the clasp was rusted shut, preventing me from doing much more than merely shaking it gently to try and determine its contents. It was about the size of a small toaster-oven, but surprisingly light, which immediately ruled out the possibility of gold and jewelry. But then, fortunes come in many substances and forms, and I was certainly not one to scoff at the prospect of three-digit paper money.

  As we said goodbye, Presidente Maconi kept insisting on calling a taxi for me. But I told him I did not need one; the box fitted very nicely in one of my shopping bags, and Hotel Chiusarelli was, after all, nearby.

  “I would be careful,” he said, “walking around with that. Your mother was always careful.”

  “But who knows I’m here? And that I’ve got this?”

  He shrugged. “The Salimbenis—”

  I stared at him, not sure if he was really serious. “Don’t tell me the old family feud is still going on!”

  Presidente Maconi looked away, uncomfortable with the subject. “A Salimbeni will always be a Salimbeni.”

  Walking away from Palazzo Tolomei, I repeated that sentence to myself several times, wondering precisely what it meant. In the end I decided it was nothing more than what I ought to expect in this place; judging by Eva Maria’s stories about the fierce contrade rivalries in the modern Palio, the old family feuds from the Middle Ages were still going strong, even if the weapons had changed.

  Mindful of my own Tolomei heritage, I put a little swagger in my gait as I walked past Palazzo Salimbeni for the second time that day, just to let Alessandro know—should he happen to look out the window at that exact moment—that there was a new sheriff in town.

  Just then, as I glanced over my shoulder to see if I had made myself absolutely clear, I noticed a man walking behind me. Somehow he didn’t fit the picture; the street was full of chirping tourists, mothers with strollers, and people in business suits, talking loudly into their cell phones at some invisible other. This man, by contrast, was wearing a mangy tracksuit and a pair of mirrored sunglasses that did nothing to conceal the fact that he had been looking straight at my bags.

  Or was I imagining things? Had Presidente Maconi’s parting words ruffled my nerves? I paused in front of a shopwindow, hoping very much the man would pass me and continue on his way. But he didn’t. As soon as I stood still, he paused, too, pretending to look at a poster on a wall.

  Now for the first time, I felt the little fleabites of fear, as Janice used to call them, and ran through my options in a couple of deep breaths. But there was really only one thing to do. If I kept walking, chances were he would eventually sidle up to me and snatch the bags right out of my hands, or, even worse, follow me to see where I was staying, and pay me a visit later.

  Humming to myself I entered the store, and as soon as I was inside, I ran up to the clerk and asked if I could leave through the back entrance. Barely looking up from his motorcycle magazine, he simply pointed at a door at the other end of the room.

  Ten seconds later I came shooting out into a narrow alley to nearly overturn a row of Vespas parked side by side. I had no idea where I was, but that didn’t matter. The important thing was that I still had my bags.

  WHEN THE TAXI DROPPED me off back at Hotel Chiusarelli, I would have happily paid anything for the t
rip. But when I overtipped the driver, he shook his head in protest and gave back most of it.

  “Miss Tolomei!” Direttor Rossini came towards me with some alarm as soon as I entered the vestibule. “Where have you been? Captain Santini was just here. In uniform! What is going on?”

  “Oh!” I tried to smile. “Maybe he came to invite me out for coffee?”

  Direttor Rossini glared at me, his eyebrows suspended in a pointed arc of disapproval. “I do not think the captain was here with carnal intentions, Miss Tolomei. I very much suggest you call him. Here—” He handed me a business card as if it was a holy wafer. “This is the number of his telephone, there, written on the back side, do you see? I suggest”—Direttor Rossini raised his voice as I continued past him down the hall—“you call him right now!”

  It took me about an hour—and several trips to the hotel reception desk—to open my mother’s box. After trying every tool I had, such as the hotel key, my toothbrush, and the telephone receiver, I ran downstairs to borrow tweezers, then nail clippers, then a needle, and finally a screwdriver, only too aware that Direttor Rossini looked less and less friendly every time he saw me.

  What finally did the trick was not actually opening the rusty clasp, but unscrewing the entire closing mechanism, which took me quite a while, since the screwdriver I had borrowed was too small. But I was fairly sure Direttor Rossini would explode if I showed up at his reception desk one more time.

  Through all those efforts, my hopes and expectations for the contents of the box had grown steadily more wild, and once I was able to open the lid, I could barely breathe with anticipation. Seeing that it was so light, I had become convinced there was a fragile—and very costly—item in the box, but when I finally looked inside, I realized my mistake.