But before she could give me a cheeky answer, we both heard footsteps. Nearly tripping over each other’s feet in our panic, we scrambled to get out of the chapel and find a place to hide in the next room.
“In here!” I pulled Janice into a corner behind a glass cabinet with beat-up riding helmets, and five seconds later an elderly woman walked right past us with an armful of folded-up yellow clothes. Behind her came a boy of eight or so, hands in his pockets, a scowl on his face. Though the woman walked straight through the room, unfortunately the boy stopped ten feet from the place where we were hiding, to look at antique swords on the wall.
Janice made a face, but neither of us dared to move an inch, let alone whisper, as we crouched in the corner like textbook evildoers. Luckily for us, the boy was too focused on his own mischief to pay much attention to anything else. Making sure his grandmother was good and gone, he stretched to lift a rapier off its hooks on the wall, and to assume a couple of fencing positions that were not half bad. He was so engrossed in his illicit project that he did not even hear someone else entering the room until it was too late.
“No-no-no!” scolded Alessandro, crossing the floor and taking the rapier right out of the boy’s hand. But instead of putting the weapon back on the wall, as any responsible adult would do, he merely showed the boy the correct position and gave him the rapier right back. “Tocca a te!”
The weapon went back and forth a few times until finally Alessandro plucked another rapier from the wall and indulged the boy in a play-fight, which only ended when an impatient woman’s voice yelled, “Enrico! Dove sei?”
Within seconds, the weapons were back on the wall, and when Grandmother materialized in the doorway, both Alessandro and the boy were standing innocently with their hands behind their backs.
“Ah!” exclaimed the woman, delighted to see Alessandro and kissing him on both cheeks. “Romeo!”
She said a lot more than that, but I didn’t hear it. If Janice and I had not been standing so close, I might even have sunk to my knees, seeing that my legs had turned to soft-serve ice cream.
Alessandro was Romeo.
Of course he was. How could I have missed that? Was this not the Eagle Museum? Had I not already seen the truth in Malèna’s eyes? … And in his?
“Jesus, Jules,” grimaced Janice, without a sound, “get a grip!”
But there was nothing left for me to get a grip on. Everything I had thought I knew about Alessandro spun before my eyes like numbers on a roulette wheel, and I realized that—in every single conversation with him—I had put all my money on the wrong color.
He was not Paris, he was not Salimbeni, he was not even Nino. He had always been Romeo. Not Romeo the party-crashing playboy with the elf hat, but Romeo the exile, who had been banished long ago by gossip and superstition, and who had spent his whole life trying to become someone else. Romeo, he had said, was his rival. Romeo had evil hands, and people would like to think he was dead. Romeo was not the man I thought I knew; he would never make love to me in rhyming couplets. But then, Romeo was also the man who came to Maestro Lippi’s workshop late at night, to have a glass of wine and contemplate the portrait of Giulietta Tolomei. That, to me, said more than the finest poetry.
Even so, why had he never told me the truth? I had asked him about Romeo again and again, but each and every time he had replied as if we were talking about someone else. Someone it would be very bad for me to know.
I suddenly remembered him showing me the bullet hanging from a leather string around his neck, and Peppo telling me from his hospital bed that everybody thought Romeo had died. And I remembered the expression on Alessandro’s face when Peppo had talked about Romeo being born outside of marriage. Only now did I understand his anger towards my Tolomei family members, who—in their ignorance of his true identity—had taken such pleasure in treating him like a Salimbeni and thus an enemy.
Just like I had.
When everyone had finally left the room—Grandmother and Enrico in one direction, Alessandro in another—Janice took me by the shoulders, eyes blazing. “Would you pull yourself together already!”
But that was asking a lot. “Romeo!” I groaned, clutching my head. “How can he be Romeo? I’m such an idiot!”
“Yes you are, but that’s hardly news.” Janice was not in the mood to be nice. “We don’t know if he is Romeo. The Romeo. Maybe it’s just his middle name. Romeo is a completely common Italian name. And if he really is the Romeo—that doesn’t change anything. He’s still in cahoots with the Salimbenis! He still trashed your friggin’ hotel room!”
I swallowed a few times. “I don’t feel so good.”
“Well, let’s get the hell out of here.” Janice took my hand and pulled me along, thinking she was taking us towards the main entrance of the museum.
Instead, we ended up in a part of the exhibition we had not seen before; it was a dimly lit room with very old and worn cencios on the wall, sealed in glass cabinets. The place had the vibe of an ancestral shrine, and off to one side a curved staircase in darkened stone led steeply into the underground.
“What’s down there?” whispered Janice, stretching to see.
“Forget it!” I shot back, recovering some of my spirit. “We’re not getting trapped in some dungeon!”
But Fortuna clearly favored Janice’s boldness over my jitters, for the next thing I knew we heard voices again—coming at us, it seemed, from all sides—and we nearly fell down the stairs in our hurry to get out of sight. Panting with the fear of discovery we crouched at the bottom of the stairwell as the voices came closer and the footsteps eventually stopped right overhead. “Oh no,” I whispered, before Janice could slap a hand over my mouth, “it’s him!”
We looked at each other, eyes wide. At this point—quite literally squatting, as we were, in Alessandro’s basement—even Janice did not seem to embrace the prospect of a meeting.
Just then, the lights came on around us, and we saw Alessandro starting down the stairs, then stopping. “Ciao, Alessio, come stai—?” we heard him say, greeting someone else, and Janice and I glared at each other, acutely aware that our humiliation had been postponed, if only for a few minutes.
Looking around frantically to assess our options, we could see that we were truly trapped in a subterranean dead end, precisely as I had predicted we would be. Apart from three gaping holes in the wall—the black mouths of what could only be Bottini caves—there was no way of leaving the place other than going back upstairs, past Alessandro. And any attempt at entering the caves was made impossible by black iron grates covering the holes.
But you never say never to a Tolomei. Bristling at the idea of being trapped, we both got up and started examining the grates with trembling fingers. I was mostly trying to figure out if we would be able to squeeze through with brute force, while Janice expertly felt her way around every bolt, every hinge, clearly refusing to believe that the structures could not somehow be opened. To her, every wall had a door, every door had a key; in short, every jam had an eject button. All you had to do was dig in and find it.
“Psst!” She waved at me excitedly, demonstrating that, indeed, the third and last grate did swing open, just like a door, and without the slightest squeak at that. “Come on!”
We went as far into the cave as the lights allowed, then scrambled on a few more feet in absolute darkness, until we finally stopped. “If we had a flashlight—” began Janice. “Oh, shit!” We nearly banged our heads together when suddenly a beam of light came down the entire length of the cave to where we stood, stopping only inches before it hit us, and then retracting, like a wave rolling ashore and back out to sea.
Smarting from the close call, we stumbled farther into the cave until we found something resembling a niche that was big enough to swallow us both. “Is he coming? Is he coming?” hissed Janice, trapped behind me and unable to see. “Is it him?”
I stuck my head out briefly, then pulled it back in. “Yes, yes, and yes!”
It was hard to see
anything other than the sharp flashlight bouncing to and fro, but at some point everything stabilized, and I dared to look out again. It was indeed Alessandro—or, I should say, some version of Romeo—and as far as I could see he had stopped in order to unlock a small door in the cave wall, holding the flashlight tightly under one arm.
“What’s he doing?” Janice wanted to know.
“It looks like some kind of safe—he’s taking something out. A box.”
Janice clawed me excitedly. “Maybe it’s the cencio!”
I looked again. “No, it’s too small. More like a cigar box.”
“I knew it! He’s a smoker.”
I watched Alessandro intently as he locked the safe and walked back towards the museum with the box. Moments later, the iron grate fell shut behind him with a clang that echoed through the Bottini—and our ears—for far too long.
“Oh no!” said Janice.
“Don’t tell me—!” I turned towards her, hoping she would quickly put my worry to rest. But even in the darkness I could see the frightened expression on her face.
“Well, I was wondering why it wasn’t locked before—” she said, defensively.
“But that didn’t stop you, did it!” I snapped. “And now we’re trapped!”
“Where’s your sense of adventure?” Janice always tried to make a virtue out of necessity, but this time she failed to convince even herself. “This is great! I always wanted to go spelunking. It’s gotta come out somewhere, right?” She looked at me, relieving her nerves by taunting me. “Or would wittle Wulietta wather be wescued by Womeo?”
UMBERTO HAD ONCE described the Roman catacombs to us, after we had spent a whole evening plaguing Aunt Rose with questions about Italy and why we couldn’t go. Giving us each a dish towel so we could make ourselves useful while he had his hands in the sink, he had explained how the early Christians had been assembling in secret caves underground in order to hold communion where no one could see them and report their activities to the heathen Emperor. Similarly, these early Christians had defied the Roman tradition of cremation by wrapping their dead in shrouds and bringing them down into the caves, laying the bodies on shelves in the rock wall and performing funerary rites that hinged on the hope of a second coming.
If we were really so keen on going to Italy, Umberto concluded, he would make sure to take us down into those caves first thing and show us all the interesting skeletons.
As Janice and I walked through the Bottini, stumbling in the dark and taking turns at leading the way, Umberto’s ghostly stories came back to me with a vengeance. Here we were—just like the people in his story—scrambling around underground to avoid detection, and like those early Christians, we also did not know exactly when and where we would eventually surface, if at all.
It helped a bit that we had the lighter for Janice’s once-a-week cigarette; every twenty steps or so we would stop and flick it on for a few seconds, just to make sure we were not about to plunge into a bottomless hole or—as Janice at one point whimpered, when the cave wall suddenly turned slimy—walk right into a massive spiderweb.
“Creepy-crawlies,” I said, taking the lighter away from her, “are the least of our concerns. Don’t use up the liquid. We could be spending the night down here.”
We walked for a while in silence—me in front, Janice right behind, mumbling something about spiders liking it humid—until my foot caught on protruding rock and I fell down on the uneven floor, hurting my knees and wrists so badly I could have cried, had I not been so anxious to check that the lighter was still intact.
“Are you okay?” asked Janice, her voice full of fear. “Can you walk? I don’t think I could carry you.”
“I’m fine!” I grunted, smelling blood on my fingers. “Your turn to go first. Here …” I fumbled the lighter into her hands. “Break a leg.”
With Janice in the lead, I was free to fall back and examine my scrapes—both physical and mental—as we inched further into the unknown. My knees were more or less in shreds, but that was nothing compared to the turmoil in my soul.
“Jan?” I touched my fingers to her back as we walked. “Do you think that maybe he didn’t tell me he was Romeo because he wanted me to fall in love with him for the right reasons, not just because of his name?”
I suppose I couldn’t blame her for moaning.
“Okay—” I went on, “so, he didn’t tell me he was Romeo because the last thing he needed was to have some pain-in-the-ass virgitarian cramp his incognito style?”
“Jules!” Janice was so focused on picking her way through the perilous blackness that she had little patience for my speculations. “Would you stop torturing yourself! And me! We don’t even know if he is Romeo. Mind you, even if he is, I’m still gonna turn his ass inside out for treating you like this.”
Despite her angry tone, I was once again astounded to hear her expressing concern for my feelings, and began to wonder if it was something new, or something I just hadn’t noticed before.
“The thing is,” I went on, “he never actually said he was a Salimbeni. It was always me—oops!” I nearly fell again, and clung to Janice until I had regained my balance.
“Let me guess,” she said, flicking on the lighter so I could see her raised eyebrows, “he also never said he had anything to do with the museum break-in?”
“That was Bruno Carrera!” I exclaimed. “Working for Umberto!”
“Oh no, Julie-Baby,” Janice mimicked, not sounding the least bit like Alessandro, “I didn’t steal Romeo’s cencio … why would I do that? To me, it’s just an old rag. But hey, let me take care of that sharp knife for you, so you don’t hurt yourself. What did you call it? … A dagger?”
“It wasn’t like that at all,” I muttered.
“Honey, he lied to you!” She flicked off the lighter at last and started walking again. “The sooner you can get that into your little Julie box, the better. Trust me, this guy has zero feelings for you whatsoever. It’s all just a big charade to get to the—ow!” By the sound of it, she hit her head on something, and once again, we stopped. “What the hell was that?” Janice flicked the lighter to check—she had to try three or four times before it finally came on—only to discover that I was crying.
Shocked by the unusual sight, she put her arms around me with clumsy tenderness. “I’m sorry, Jules. I’m just trying to save you from heartache.”
“I thought I didn’t have a heart?”
“Well”—she gave me a squeeze—“you seem to have grown one lately. Too bad, you were more fun without it.” Jiggling my chin with a sticky hand that still smelled like mocha-vanilla, she finally succeeded in making me laugh, and went on, more generously, “It’s my fault anyway. I should have seen it coming. He drives a goddamn Alfa Romeo for Christ’s sake!”
Had we not stopped right there, in the last, feeble flicker of the dying lighter, we might never have noticed the opening in the cave wall on our left. It was barely a foot and a half wide, but as far as I could see when I knelt down and stuck my head inside, it sloped upwards for at least thirty or forty feet—like an air duct in a pyramid—to end in a tiny seashell pattern of blue sky. I could even convince myself that I heard traffic noise.
“Hail Mary!” exclaimed Janice. “We’re back in business! You go first. Age before beauty.”
The pain and frustration of walking through the dark tunnel was nothing compared to the claustrophobia I felt crawling up the narrow shaft and the torment of scraping along on my raw knees and elbows. For every time I managed to pull myself up half a foot, painfully, by my toes and fingertips, I kept sliding back down several inches.
“Come on!” urged Janice, right behind me. “Let’s get moving!”
“Then why didn’t you go first?” I snapped back. “You’re the fancy-ass rock climber.”
“Here—” She placed a hand underneath my high-heeled sandal. “Push away on this.”
Slowly and agonizingly, we made our way up the shaft, and although it widened consid
erably at the very top, allowing Janice to crawl up beside me, it was still a revolting place to be.
“Eek!” she said, looking around at the junk that people had tossed in there through the grate. “This is disgusting. Is that … a cheeseburger?”
“Does it have cheese in it?”
“Hey, look!” She picked something up. “It’s a cell phone! Hang on—no, sorry. Out of battery.”
“If you are finished rifling through the garbage, can we move on?”
We elbowed our way through a mess too nasty for words before finally coming up to the vertical, artsy sewer cover separating us from the earth’s surface. “Where are we?” Janice pressed her nose against the bronze filigree, and we both looked out at the legs and feet walking by. “It’s some kind of piazza. But huge.”
“Holy cow!” I exclaimed, realizing that I had seen the place before, many times, but from very different angles. “I know exactly where we are. It’s the Campo.” I knocked on the sewer cover. “Ow! It’s pretty solid.”
“Hello? Hello?” Janice stretched to see better. “Can anyone hear me? Is anyone there?”
A few seconds later, an incredulous teenager with a snow cone and green lips came into view, stooping down to see us. “Ciao?” she said, smiling uncertainly, as if suspecting she was the victim of a prank. “I am Antonella.”
“Hi, Antonella,” I said, trying to make eye contact with her. “Do you speak English? We’re kind of trapped down here. Do you think you could … find someone who can help us out?”
Twenty deeply embarrassing minutes later, Antonella returned with a pair of naked feet in sandals.
“Maestro Lippi?” I was so astounded to see my friend, the painter, that my voice almost escaped me. “Hello? Do you remember me? I slept on your couch.”
“Of course I remember you!” he beamed. “How are you doing?”
“Uh—” I said, “do you think it would be possible to … remove this thing?” I wiggled my fingers through the sewer cover. “We’re kind of stuck down here. And—this is my sister, by the way.”
Maestro Lippi knelt down to see us better. “Did you two go somewhere you shouldn’t go?”