We sat for a moment in unhappy silence. Then Janice put down her wineglass and picked up a group photo taken in front of Castello Salimbeni. “So,” she said, at last, “does this mean your mobster queen is our … grandmother?” The photo showed Eva Maria juggling a large hat and two small dogs on a leash, Mom looking efficient with white slacks and a clipboard, Professor Tolomei frowning and saying something to the photographer, and a young Umberto off to a side, leaning against his Ferrari, arms crossed. “Whatever the hell it means,” she went on, before I could answer, “I hope I’ll never meet him again.”
We probably should have seen it coming, but didn’t. Too busy unraveling the knot that our lives had become, we had forgotten to pay attention to things that go bump in the night, or even to sit back and use our common sense for a moment.
Not until a voice spoke to us from the door to the office did we realize how moronic we had been, seeking refuge in Mom’s house.
“What a nice little family reunion,” said Umberto, stepping into the room ahead of two other men I’d never seen before. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”
“Umberto!” I exclaimed, jumping from the chair. “What on earth—”
“Julie! No!” Janice grabbed my arm and pulled me back down, her face contorted with fear.
Only now did I see it. Umberto’s hands were tied in the back, and one of the men was holding a gun to his head.
“My friend Cocco here,” said Umberto, able to maintain his cool despite the muzzle burrowing into his neck, “would like to know if you ladies are going to be of use to him, or not.”
[ IX.II ]
Her body sleeps in Capel’s monument,
And her immortal part with angels lives
…
WHEN I HAD LEFT SIENA with Alessandro the day before, I had not imagined I would be returning so soon, so dirty, and with my hands cuffed. And I had certainly not anticipated being accompanied by my sister, my father, and three thugs who looked as if they had been sprung from death row, not by paperwork, but by dynamite.
It was clear that, even though he knew them by name, Umberto was as much a hostage to these men as we were. They tossed him into the back of their van—a small flower delivery truck, most likely stolen—just as they did Janice and me, and we all fell hard on the metal floor. With our arms tied, there was little but a potpourri of rotting flower cuttings to block the fall.
“Hey!” protested Janice, “we’re your daughters, right? Tell them they can’t treat us like this. Honestly—Jules, say something to him.”
But I couldn’t think of anything to say. I felt as if the whole world had turned upside down around me—or maybe the world was right side up, and I was the one who had completely keeled over. Still struggling to process Umberto’s transformation from hero to villain, I now had to accept the fact that he was my father as well, which almost took me full circle and back to square one: I loved him, but I really shouldn’t.
Just as the villains pulled the doors closed behind us, I caught a glimpse of another victim they had already picked up somewhere en route. The man was propped up in a corner, gagged and blindfolded; had it not been for his clothes, I would never have recognized him. Now at last, the words came to me spontaneously. “Friar Lorenzo!” I cried. “My God! They’ve kidnapped Friar Lorenzo!”
Just then, the van jolted into action, and we spent the next few minutes sliding back and forth on the ridged floor, while the driver took us through the wilderness of Mom’s driveway.
As soon as things were smoother, Janice let out a deep, unhappy sigh. “Okay,” she said, loudly, into the darkness, “you win. The gems are yours … or, theirs. We don’t want them anyway. And we’ll help you. We’ll do anything. Anything they want. You’re our dad, right? We gotta stick together! There’s no need to … kill us. Is there?”
Her question was met by silence.
“Look,” Janice went on, her voice shaky with fear, “I hope they know they’ll never find that statue without us—”
Umberto still didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. Even though we had already told the bandits about the supposed secret entrance in Santa Maria della Scala, they clearly thought they might still need us to help them find the gems, or they surely wouldn’t have brought us along for the ride.
“What about Friar Lorenzo?” I asked.
Now at last, Umberto spoke. “What about him?”
“Come on,” said Janice, recovering some of her spirit, “do you really think the poor guy is going to be of any help whatsoever?”
“Oh, he’ll sing.”
When Umberto heard us both gasp at his indifference, he made a sound that could have been laughter, but probably wasn’t. “What the hell did you expect?” he grunted. “That they’d just … give up? You’re lucky we tried it the nice way first—”
“The nice way—?” cried Janice, but I managed to poke her with my knee and shut her up.
“Unfortunately,” Umberto went on, “our little Julie didn’t play her role.”
“It might have helped if I knew I had a role!” I pointed out, my throat so tight I could barely get the words out. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did it have to be like this? We could have gone treasure hunting years ago, together. It could have been … fun.”
“Oh, I see!” Umberto shifted around in the darkness, clearly as uncomfortable as we were. “You think this is what I want? Come back here, risk everything, play charades with old monks and get kicked around by these assholes, all to search for a couple rocks that probably disappeared hundreds of years ago? I don’t think you realize—” He sighed. “Of course you don’t. Why do you think I let Aunt Rose take you away and bring you up in the States? Huh? I’ll tell you why. Because they would have used you against me … to make me work for them again. There was only one solution: We had to disappear.”
“Are you talking about … the Mafia?” asked Janice.
Umberto laughed scornfully. “The Mafia! These people make the Mafia look like the Salvation Army. They recruited me when I needed money, and once you’re on the hook, you don’t get off. If you wiggle, the hook just goes deeper.”
I heard Janice take in air for a bitchy comment, but somehow managed to elbow her in the darkness and silence her yet again. Provoking Umberto and starting an argument was not the way to prepare for whatever lay ahead, I was sure of that much.
“So, let me guess,” I said, as calmly as I could, “the moment they don’t need us anymore … it’s over?”
Umberto hesitated. “Cocco owes me a favor. I spared his life once. I’m hoping he’ll return the favor.”
“So,” said Janice, “he’ll spare you. What about us?”
There was a long silence, or at least, it felt long. Only now, mixed in with the engine noise and general rattle, did I pick up the sound of someone praying. “And what,” I quickly added, “about Friar Lorenzo?”
“Let’s just hope,” replied Umberto at last, “that Cocco is feeling generous.”
“I don’t get it,” grumbled Janice. “Who are these guys anyway, and why are you letting them do this to us?”
“That,” said Umberto wearily, “is not exactly a bedtime story.”
“Well, this is not exactly a bedside,” Janice pointed out. “So, why don’t you tell us, dear father, what the hell went wrong in fairyland?”
Once he started talking, Umberto could not stop. It was as if he had been waiting to tell us his story all these years, and yet, now that he finally did, he clearly did not feel much relief, for his voice kept getting more and more bitter as he spoke.
His father, he told us, who had been known as Count Salimbeni, had always lamented the fact that his wife, Eva Maria, only ever bore him one child, and had set out to make sure the boy was never spoiled and always disciplined. Enrolled in a military academy against his will, Umberto had eventually run away to Naples to find a job and maybe go to university and study music, but he had quickly run out of money. So, he had started doing jobs that other people were
afraid to do, and he was good at it. Somehow, breaking the law came naturally to him, and it was not long before he owned ten tailored suits, a Ferrari, and a patrician apartment with no furniture. It was paradise.
When he finally went back to visit his parents at Castello Salimbeni, he pretended that he had become a stockbroker, and managed to persuade his father to forgive him for dropping out of the military academy. A few days later his parents hosted a big party, and among the guests were Professor Tolomei and his young American assistant, Diane.
Stealing her right off the dance floor, Umberto took Diane for a drive under the full moon, and that was the beginning of a long, beautiful summer. Soon, they were spending every weekend together, driving around Tuscany, and when he finally invited her to visit him in Naples, she said yes. There, over a bottle of wine in the best restaurant in town, he dared to tell her the truth about what he did for a living.
Diane was horrified. She did not want to listen to his explanations, or his apologies, and as soon as she was back in Siena she returned everything he had given her—jewelry, clothes, letters—and told him she never wanted to hear from him again.
After that, he did not see her for over a year, and when he did, he had a shock. Diane was walking across the Campo in Siena, pushing a stroller with twins, and someone told him she was now married to old Professor Tolomei. Umberto knew right away that he was the father of the twins, and when he walked up to Diane, she went pale and said, yes, he was their father, but she did not want her girls to be raised by a criminal.
Now Umberto did something horrible. He remembered that Diane had told him about Professor Tolomei’s research and a statue with gemstone eyes, and, because he was sick with jealousy, Umberto told the story to some people back in Naples. It was not long before his boss heard about it, too, and pressured him to look up Professor Tolomei and find out more, and so he did, with two other men. They waited until Diane and the twins were away from home before knocking on the door. The professor was very polite and invited them inside, but he soon turned hostile when he discovered why they had come.
Seeing that the professor was unwilling to speak, Umberto’s two partners began putting pressure on the old man, and he ended up having a heart attack and dying. Umberto, of course, was terrified about this, and tried to revive the professor, but it was all in vain. He now told the others he would meet them back in Naples, and as soon as they had left, he set fire to the house, hoping to burn all the professor’s research together with the body and put an end to the story of the golden statue.
After this tragedy, Umberto decided to break with his evil past, and to move back to Tuscany, living on the money he had made. Some months after the fire he looked up Diane and told her that he was now an honest man. At first, she didn’t believe him, and accused him of having had a hand in the suspicious fire that killed her husband. But Umberto was determined to win her over, and she eventually came around, even though she never fully believed in his innocence.
They lived together for two years, almost like a family, and Umberto even took Diane back to visit Castello Salimbeni. Of course, he never told his parents the truth about the twins, and his father was furious with him for not getting married and having children of his own. For who would inherit Castello Salimbeni, if Umberto did not have children?
It would have been a happy time, had not Diane become increasingly obsessed with what she called “the curse on both our houses.” She had told him about it when they first met, but he had not taken it seriously at the time. Now he had to finally accept the fact that this beautiful woman—the mother of his children—was by nature a very nervous and compulsive person, and that the pressure of motherhood only made it worse. Instead of children’s books, she would read Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to the little girls, over and over, until Umberto would come and gently take the book away. But no matter where he hid it, she would always find it again.
And when the twins were asleep, she would spend hours in solitude, trying to re-create Professor Tolomei’s research into family treasures and the location of Romeo and Giulietta’s grave. She was not interested in the gems; all she wanted was to save her daughters. She was convinced that, because the little girls had a Tolomei mother and a Salimbeni father, they would be doubly vulnerable to Friar Lorenzo’s curse.
Umberto did not even realize how close Diane was to figuring out the location of the grave when, one day, some of his old buddies from Naples showed up at the house and started asking questions. Knowing that these men were pure evil, Umberto told Diane to take the twins out back and hide, while he did his best to explain to the men that neither he nor she knew anything.
But when Diane heard them beating him up, she came back with a gun and told them to leave her family alone. Seeing that they did not listen, she tried to shoot them, but she was not used to the gun, and she missed. Instead, they shot and killed her. After that, the men told Umberto it was just the beginning; if he did not give them the four gemstones, they would come for his daughters next.
At this point in the story, Janice and I both burst out, simultaneously, “So, you didn’t kill Mom?”
“Of course not!” Umberto snapped. “How could you think that?”
“Maybe,” said Janice, all choked up, “because you’ve lied about everything else until now.”
Umberto sighed deeply and shifted around again, unable to find comfort. Frustrated and tired, he resumed his story and told us that, after the men had killed Diane and left the house, he was heartbroken and didn’t know what to do. The last thing he wanted was to call the police, or the priest, and risk some bureaucrats taking the girls away. So, he took Diane’s body and drove it to a deserted place, where he could push the car from a cliff to make it look as if she had died in a car accident. He even put some of the girls’ things in the car to make people think they had died, too. Then he took the girls and left them with their godparents, Peppo and Pia Tolomei, but drove away before they could ask him any questions.
“Wait!” exclaimed Janice. “What about the bullet wound? Wouldn’t the police notice that she was dead before the car crash?”
Umberto hesitated, then said reluctantly, “I torched the car. I didn’t think they would dig into it that much. Why would they? They get their paycheck anyway. But some smart-ass journalist started asking questions, and before I knew it they had me framed for all of it—the professor, the fire, your mother … even you two, for God’s sake.”
That same night, Umberto went on to tell us, he had called Aunt Rose in the States and pretended to be a police officer from Siena. He told her that her niece had died, and that the little girls were left with family, and he also told her they were not safe in Italy, and that she had better come and get them right away. After the phone call, he drove down to Naples and paid a visit to the men who had killed Diane, and to most of the other people who knew about the treasure. He did not even try to hide his identity. He wanted it to be a warning. The only one he didn’t kill was Cocco. He couldn’t bring himself to kill a boy of nineteen.
After that, he disappeared for many months, while the police were looking for him everywhere. In the end, he went to the States to find the girls and see that they were well. He did not have any specific plans; once he found out where they lived, he just hung around waiting for something to happen. A few days later he saw a woman walking about in the garden, trimming roses. Assuming it was Aunt Rose, he approached her and asked if she needed someone to help her with yard work. That was how it started. Six months later Umberto moved in full-time, agreeing to work for little more than house and board.
“I don’t believe it!” I burst out. “Did she never wonder how you just … happened to be in the neighborhood?”
“She was lonely,” Umberto muttered, clearly not proud of himself. “Too young to be a widow, but too old to be a mother. She was ready to believe anything.”
“And what about Eva Maria? Did she know where you were?”
“I stayed in touch with
her, but I never said where I was over the phone. And I never told her about you two.”
Umberto went on to explain that he had been afraid that if Eva Maria found out she had two granddaughters, she would insist they all move back to Italy again. He knew very well that he could never go back; people would recognize him, and the police would undoubtedly be on to him right away, despite his false name and passport. And even if she didn’t insist, he knew his mother well enough to fear that she would somehow contrive a way to see the girls, thereby compromising their safety. Failing that, Eva Maria would most certainly spend the rest of her life pining for the granddaughters she had never met, eventually die of a broken heart, and undoubtedly blame Umberto. So, for all those excellent reasons, he never told her.
As time went by, however, Umberto began to believe his evil past in Naples was buried for good. But that ended abruptly when, one day, he noticed a limousine coming up Aunt Rose’s driveway and stopping in front of the door. There were four men in the car, and he immediately recognized Cocco among them. He never found out how they had located him after all those years, but suspected they had bribed people in the intelligence community to trace Eva Maria’s phone calls.
The men told Umberto he still owed them something, and that he had to repay them, or they would track down his daughters and do unspeakable things to them. Umberto told them he had no money, but they just laughed at him and reminded him of the statue with the four gemstones that he had promised them a long time ago. When he tried to explain that it was impossible, and that he couldn’t go back to Italy, they just shrugged and said that it was too bad, because now they had to go looking for his daughters. So, in the end, Umberto agreed to try and find the gems, and they gave him three weeks to do it.
Before they left, they wanted to make sure he knew they were serious, and so they took him into the hall and started beating him up. While they were doing that, they knocked over the Venetian vase standing on the table beneath the chandelier, and it fell to the floor and smashed into pieces. The noise woke Aunt Rose from her nap, and she came out of her bedroom and—when she saw what was going on—started screaming from the top of the staircase. One of the men pulled out a gun and was going to shoot her, but Umberto managed to push the gun aside. Unfortunately, Aunt Rose was so frightened she lost her balance and fell halfway down the staircase. When the men had left and Umberto was finally able to get to her, she was already dead.