by Anne Fortier
By the time I reached high school, I didn’t even bother to go to her for help, but ran straight out into the kitchen to complain to Umberto, who was—in my memory—always in the process of sharpening the knives, opera blaring. Whenever I defaulted to the old, “But it isn’t fair!” he would counter with, “Who told you life is fair?” and, when I finally calmed down, he would ask me, “So, what do you want me to do about it?”
As I grew older and wiser, I learned that the correct answer to his question was, “Nothing. I have to do it myself.” And it was true. I did not run to him because I really wanted him to take Janice to task—although that would have been nice—but because he was not afraid of telling me, in his way, that I was better than her, and that I deserved more from life. But, that said, it was up to me to get it. The only problem was, he never told me how.
All my life, it seemed, I had been running around with my tail between my legs, trying to dig up opportunities that Janice could not somehow steal or spoil, but no matter where I buried my treasures, she was always able to sniff them out and chew them up beyond recognition. If I had saved my new satin ballet shoes for the end-of-season recital, I would open the box only to discover that she had tried them on and left the ribbons in a tangle, and once, when I had spent weeks making a collage of figure skaters in art class, she had inserted a cutout of Big Bird from Sesame Street as soon as I brought it home.
It didn’t matter how far away I ran, or how much rot I rolled in to camouflage my scent, she would always come running, tongue hanging out, to bounce around me with playful mischief and leave a steaming number two right in the middle of my path.
As I stood there in the Mangia Tower, it all hit me at once—my countless reasons for hating Janice. It was as if someone had started a slide show of bad memories in my head, and I felt a surge of fury that I had never felt in the company of anyone else.
“Surprise!” she now said, dropping the leather suit and helmet and opening her arms for applause.
“What the hell,” I finally gasped, my voice shrill with anger, “do you think you are doing here? Was that you, chasing me around on that ridiculous bike? And the letter—” I pulled the handwritten note out of my purse, creased it into a ball and flung it at her. “How stupid do you think I am?”
Janice grinned, enjoying my fury. “Stupid enough to climb up the friggin’ tower! … Oh!” She made a grimace of faux sympathy that she had patented at the age of five. “Is that it? You weally fought I was Womeo?”
“Okay,” I said, trying to cut through her laughter, “so, you had your joke. I hope it was worth the flight. Now excuse me, I’d love to stay, but I’d rather go stick my head in a bidet.”
I tried to walk around her to get to the stairs, but she immediately backed up, blocking the door. “Oh, no you don’t!” she hissed, her expression shifting from fair to stormy. “Not until you give me my share!”
I started. “Excuse me?”
“No, not this time,” she said, her lower lip trembling as she tried on the role of the wounded party for a change. “I’m broke. Bankrupt.”
“So, call the millionaire help line!” I retorted, falling right back into our sister act. “I thought you recently inherited a fortune from someone? Someone we both know?”
“Oh, ha!” Janice wrung out a smile. “Yeah, that was priceless. Good old Aunt Rose and all her gazillions.”
“I have no idea,” I said, shaking my head, “what you are whining about. Last time I saw you, you had just won the lottery. If it’s more money you want, I’m the last person you should be talking to.” I made another push for the door, and this time, I was determined to get through. “Get-out-of-my-way,” I said. And amazingly, she did.
“Why look at you!” she jeered as I walked past her. If I hadn’t known better, I might have seen jealousy in her eyes. “The little runaway princess. How much of my inheritance have you blown on clothes? Huh?”
When I just kept walking without even pausing to reply, I could hear her scrambling to pick up her gear and follow me. All the way down the spiral staircase she was hot on my trail, yelling after me first in anger, then in frustration, and finally in something as unusual as desperation. “Wait!” she cried, using the crash helmet as a buffer against the brick wall. “We have to talk! Stop! Jules! Seriously!”
But I had no intention of stopping. If Janice really had something important to tell me, why had she not done so right away? Why the shenanigans with the motorcycle and the red ink? And why had she wasted our five minutes in the tower with her usual antics? If, as she had hinted in her little rant, she had already managed to squander Aunt Rose’s fortune, then I could certainly understand her frustration. But the way I saw it, that was, for dead sure, her own problem.
As soon as I reached the bottom of the tower I walked away from Palazzo Pubblico and crossed the Campo with firm strides, leaving Janice to her own mess. The Ducati Monster was parked right in front of the building, like a limo pulled up for the Oscars, and as far as I could see, at least three police officers were waiting impatiently—muscular arms akimbo, sunglasses on—for the return of its owner.
MALÈNA’S ESPRESSO BAR was the only place I could think of going where Janice wouldn’t immediately find me. If I went back to the hotel, I figured, she would show up within minutes to resume her figure eights beneath my balcony.
And so I practically ran all the way up to Piazza Postierla, turning every ten steps to make sure she wasn’t following, my throat still tight with anger. When I finally came shooting through the door of the bar, slamming it shut behind me, Malèna greeted me with a burst of laughter. “Dio mio! What are you doing here? You look like you are already drinking too much coffee.”
Seeing that I didn’t even have air to reply, she spun around to pour a tall glass of water from the tap. While I was drinking, she leaned on the counter with a look of barefaced curiosity. “Someone … giving you some trouble?” she suggested, her expression hinting that if that were the case, she had a few cousins—apart from Luigi the hairdresser—who would be more than happy to help me out.
“Well—” I said. But where to start? Looking around I was relieved to see that we were almost alone in the bar, and that the other customers were absorbed in conversations of their own. It occurred to me that here was the opportunity I had been hoping for ever since Malèna’s mention of the Marescotti family the day before.
“Did I hear you correctly—” I began, taking the plunge before I could change my mind. “Did you say your name was Marescotti?”
The question had Malèna break into an ebullient smile. “Certamente! I was born a Marescotti. Now I am married, but”—she pressed a hand to her heart—“I will always be a Marescotti in here. Did you see the palazzo?”
I nodded with polite vigor, thinking of the rather painful concert I had attended with Eva Maria and Alessandro two days earlier. “It’s beautiful. I was wondering—someone told me—” Grinding to a halt, I could feel embarrassment rising in my cheeks as I realized that, no matter how I phrased my follow-up question, I would be making an ass of myself.
Seeing my fluster, Malèna fished out a bottle of something homemade from beneath the counter—she didn’t even have to look—and poured a hearty slug into my water glass. “Here,” she said. “A Marescotti special. It will make you happy. Cin cin.”
“It’s ten o’clock in the morning,” I protested, feeling very little desire to taste the cloudy liquid, never mind its ancestry.
“Bah!” she shrugged. “Maybe in Firenze it is ten o’clock—”
After dutifully gulping down the foulest concoction I had tasted since Janice’s attempt at brewing beer in her bedroom closet—and hacking out a compliment, too—I at last felt I had earned the right to ask, “Are you related to a guy called Romeo Marescotti?”
The transformation in Malèna when she registered my question was almost uncanny. From being my best friend, leaning on her elbows to hear my troubles, she snapped upright with a gasp, and brusqu
ely corked the bottle. “Romeo Marescotti,” she said, taking away my empty glass and wiping the counter with a whiplash swipe of a tea towel, “is dead.” Only then did she meet my eyes, and where there had been kindness a moment ago, I saw only fear and suspicion. “He was my cousin. Why?”
“Oh!” The disappointment fell heavily through my body, leaving me oddly light-headed. Or maybe it was the drink. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have—” Now, I thought, was probably not the time to tell her that my cousin Peppo had suspected Romeo of being behind the museum break-in. “It’s just that Maestro Lippi, the artist—he says he knows him.”
Malèna snorted, but at least she looked relieved. “Maestro Lippi,” she whispered, circling a finger around her ear, “talks to ghosts. Don’t listen to him. He is …” She searched for an appropriate word, but found none.
“There’s also someone else,” I said, figuring I might as well have it all shot to pieces once and for all. “The Head of Security at Monte dei Paschi. Alessandro Santini. Do you know him?”
Malèna’s eyes widened briefly in surprise, then quickly narrowed. “Siena is a small place.” From the way she said it I knew there was a smelly rat buried somewhere in all this.
“Why,” I went on more quietly, hoping that my questions would not further rip open an old wound, “do you think anyone would go around saying that your cousin Romeo was still alive?”
“He said that?” Malèna studied my face intently, more incredulous than sad.
“It’s kind of a long story,” I said, “but the bottom line is that I was the one asking about Romeo. Because … I am Giulietta Tolomei.”
I was not expecting her to understand the implications of my name in conjunction with Romeo’s, but the shock on her face told me that she knew exactly who I was, ancestor and all. Once she had processed this little curveball, her reaction was very sweet; she reached out to pinch my nose.
“Il gran disegno,” she muttered. “I knew there was a reason you came to me.” Then she paused, as if there was something she wanted to say, but which she knew she shouldn’t. “Poor Giulietta,” she said instead, with a sympathetic smile, “I wish I could tell you he was alive, but … I can’t.”
…
WHEN I FINALLY LEFT the espresso bar, I had forgotten all about Janice. It was therefore an unpleasant surprise to find her waiting for me right outside, leaning comfortably against the wall like a cowgirl killing time until the saloon opens.
As soon as I saw her standing there, beaming with triumph because she had tracked me down, it all came back to me—motorcycle, letter, tower, argument—and I sighed loudly and started walking in the other direction, not really caring where I was headed as long as she didn’t follow.
“What is it with you and Yummy Mummy in there?” Janice was nearly tripping over her own feet to catch up. “Are you trying to make me jealous?”
I was so sick of her at this point that I stopped in the middle of Piazza Postierla and spun around to yell at her, “Do I really have to spell it out? I’m trying to get rid of you!”
During all our years together, I had said plenty of nasty things to my sister, and this was nowhere near the worst. But perhaps due to the unfamiliar turf it hit her right between the eyes, and for a brief moment she looked stunned, almost as if she was going to cry.
Turning away in disgust I resumed walking, laying some distance between us before—once again—she came stumbling along in my wake, her stiletto boots twisting this way and that on the irregular stone pavement.
“Okay!” she exclaimed, arms flapping for balance, “I’m sorry about the bike, okay? And I’m sorry about the letter. Okay? I didn’t know you’d take it that way.” Seeing that I neither replied nor slowed down, she moaned and kept going, still not quite able to catch me. “Listen, Jules, I know you’re pissed off. But we really have to talk. Remember Aunt Rose’s will? It was bo—ow!”
She must have twisted something, for when I turned around to look, Janice was sitting in the middle of the street, rubbing her ankle.
“What did you say?” I asked warily, walking back towards her a few steps. “About the will?”
“You heard me,” she said glumly, inspecting her broken boot heel, “the whole thing was bogus. I thought you were part of it, and that’s why I was lying low, trying to figure out what you were up to, but … I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.”
…
IT HAD NOT BEEN a good week for my evil twin. For starters, she told me, limping along with an arm around my neck, she had discovered that our family lawyer, Mr. Gallagher, was not, in fact, Mr. Gallagher. How? Well, the real Mr. Gallagher had shown up. Secondly, the will he had shown us after the funeral had been nothing but fiction. In reality, Aunt Rose had had nothing left to leave to anybody, and to be her heir would have meant inheriting nothing but debt. Thirdly, two police officers had arrived at the house the day after I left, and they had given Janice hell for removing the yellow tape. What yellow tape? Well, the tape they had wrapped around the building when they had discovered it was a crime scene.
“A crime scene?” Even though the sun was high in the sky, I felt a chill. “You mean, Aunt Rose was murdered?”
Janice shrugged as best she could, struggling to keep her balance. “God knows. Apparently, she was covered with bruises, even though supposedly she died in her sleep. Go figure.”
“Janice!” I barely knew what to say, except to chastise her for being so flippant. This unexpected news—that Aunt Rose might not have died peacefully, the way Umberto had described—closed around my throat like a noose, almost choking me.
“What?” she snapped, her voice thick with emotion. “Do you think it was fun sitting in that interrogation room all night and … answering questions about whether or not”—she could barely get out the words—“I really loved her?”
I looked at her profile, wondering when I had last seen my sister cry. With her mascara smeared and her clothes messed up from the fall, she actually seemed human, and almost likable, maybe because of the throbbing ankle, the grief, and all the disappointment. Suddenly realizing that, for a change, I would have to be the strong one, I took a better grip on her and tried to suppress all thoughts of poor old Aunt Rose for the time being. “I don’t get it! Where on earth was Umberto?”
“Ha!” The question gave Janice an opportunity to recover some of her zest. “You mean, Luciano?” She glanced at me to see if I was suitably shocked. “That’s right. Good old Birdie was a fugitive, a desperado, a gangster … take your pick. All these years, he’s been hiding out in our rose garden while the cops and the Mafia were looking for him. Apparently, they found him—his old Mob buddies—and he just”—with her free hand, she snapped her fingers in the air—“poof, gone!”
I stopped to catch my breath, swallowing hard to keep down Malèna’s Marescotti special that was supposed to make me happy but tasted like heartbreak. “His name wouldn’t happen to be … Luciano Salimbeni, would it?”
Janice was so flabbergasted by my insight that she completely forgot about not being able to put weight on her left foot. “My-my!” she exclaimed, removing her arm from my shoulder. “You do have a hand in this shit!”
AUNT ROSE USED TO say that she had hired Umberto for his cherry pie. And while this was true to a certain extent—he always did produce the most outrageous desserts—the fact was that she was helpless without him. He took care of everything, the kitchen, the garden, the general maintenance around the house, but even more admirably, he managed to convey a sense that his contribution was trifling in comparison with the enormous tasks undertaken by Aunt Rose herself. Such as arranging flowers for the dinner table. Or looking up troublesome words in the dictionary.
The true genius of Umberto was his ability to make us believe we were self-sustained. It was almost as if he had somehow failed in his endeavors if we were able to identify his touch in the blessings that came to us; he was like a year-round Santa Claus who only enjoyed giving presents to those so
undly asleep.
As with most things in our childhood, the original arrival of Umberto on the doorstep of our American lives was veiled in silence. Neither Janice nor I could remember a time when he had not been there. When we occasionally, under the scrutiny of a full moon, would lie in our beds and outdo each other in remembering our exotic infancies in Tuscany, Umberto was somehow always in the picture.
In a way I loved him more than I ever loved Aunt Rose, for he always took my side and called me his little princess. It was never explicit, but I am sure we all felt his disapproval of Janice’s deteriorating manners and his subtle support of me, whenever I chose not to emulate her naughtiness.
When Janice asked him for a good-night story, she would get a brief morality tale ending with someone’s head being chopped off; when I curled up on the bench in the kitchen, he would fetch the special cookies in the blue tin and tell me stories that went on forever, stories about knights and fair maidens, and buried treasures. And when I grew old enough to understand, he would assure me that Janice would be punished soon enough. Wherever she went in life, she would bring along with her an inescapable piece of Hell, for she herself was Hell, and in time, she would come to realize that she was her own worst punishment. I, on the other hand, was a princess, and one day—if only I made sure to stay away from corrupting influences and irreversible mistakes—I would meet a handsome prince and find my own magic kingdom.
How could I not love him?
IT WAS WAY PAST NOON when we had finally caught up on each other’s news. Janice told me everything the police had said about Umberto—or rather, Luciano Salimbeni—which wasn’t much, and in return I told her everything that had happened to me since arriving in Siena, which was a lot.
We ended up having lunch in Piazza del Mercato, with a view of Via dei Malcontenti and a deep, green valley. The waiter informed us that beyond the valley ran the gloomy one-way road Via di Porta Giustizia, at the end of which—in the old days—criminals were executed in public.