Signor Morello was a born storyteller. The irresistible pull of his voice drew Beatrice in like the moon pulls at the tide. “The bride’s father, not about to wed his daughter to a penniless gambler, announced that the wedding was off. Not willing to lose all of his property and his bride, Muzio made one final attempt to salvage his fortune. He wagered his only remaining possession, the family palace, against what he had already lost—including his bride—on an impossible feat: that he could build a fountain in front of his palace in a single night.”
Beatrice drew in her breath.
“Certain it was a ridiculous bluff,” said Signor Morello, “the bride’s father accepted the bet. How could he have known that the fountain had already been built and was sitting in a courtyard of the palace, waiting to be assembled? Even the water pipes had been laid under the cobblestones!
“Muzio invited the unsuspecting nobleman to dine at his palace that night, and during the long feast, technicians were hurriedly assembling the fountain. Just as dawn was breaking, the duke threw open the dining room windows to reveal the fountain, exclaiming, ‘See what a Mattei can do—even penniless!’”
Signor Morello’s dramatic final words reverberated through the shop, and Beatrice had the urge to applaud, as if he’d just delivered Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy. Despite Marco’s deliberately casual pose, she could tell he was as captivated as she was.
“So did he get his bride back?” Beatrice couldn’t resist asking.
“It would appear so. He didn’t lose the palace, anyway. At least not yet,” he added to himself, smiling as if at a private joke.
Beatrice’s insides fluttered but her rational side told her that legends couldn’t always be trusted. Not sure she wanted to hear the answer, she asked, “Is it a true story? I mean, do you think it actually happened?” She desperately wanted the legend to be real. She loved fact more than fiction. History, rather than make-believe.
“Ah, figliola mia,3 who can tell?”
“It sounds pretty far-fetched to me,” Marco pronounced.
“You’ll have to forgive my son; he’s a hopeless skeptic. He believes nothing he hears and only half of what he sees.” After a thoughtful pause, he continued. “It is true, legends are sometimes merely that: myth. Charming stories invented to explain unusual circumstances.”
Beatrice’s excitement deflated.
“On the other hand,” he said, gazing at her from under heavy lids, “these stories had to come from somewhere. Every legend has some nugget of truth.”
A tingle ran down Beatrice’s spine and she shot Marco an exultant look, her mind alight with the flame of possibility.
For the rest of the day, she could think of nothing else. Over dinner, she recounted the legend to her father, and later, in her bedroom, she could barely concentrate on her Italian homework. The words Muzio and Mattei and tartarughe swam on the blank page in front of her. As she scrubbed the day’s grime from her freckled face, she repeated the legend over and over in her head until the words and images had seeped into her skin, her blood, the very marrow of her bones, and, eventually, her dreams.
Eight
A MAN IN BLACK AND A REAPPEARING ACT
Clang!
Beatrice awoke with a start.
She had dreamed she’d fallen into the Turtle Fountain. She was riding on the back of one of the dolphins, chasing the bronze boys through cascades and torrents. Duke Muzio had gambled away his fortune again, and the fountain was being destroyed. It was being hacked to pieces!
Clang!
Beatrice sat bolt upright, her heart thumping. It was just a crazy dream. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling something was amiss. She listened intently but couldn’t hear a thing, not the vroom of passing scooters or the laughter of people wandering through the square.
Clang!
The sound from her dream. Was she imagining it? Her head was still foggy with sleep. Either that or she was still dreaming.
Clang!
She slid out of bed and crept through the dark room. Hidden from view behind the shutters, she peered down onto the piazza below.
Her eyes widened. The square was dimly lit, but there was no mistaking what she saw. A man dressed in black from head to foot—his face hidden under a ski mask—perched on the fountain’s edge. He held an unwieldy object under his left arm, and in his right hand a crowbar.
For a moment Beatrice stood frozen, her mind unable to process what she was seeing. It wasn’t until the man hopped down, his sneakers hitting the cobblestones with a squish, that Beatrice snapped back to reality. A gush of horror flooded her as she realized that instead of four, just one bronze turtle sat atop the fountain. She now recognized the object tucked under the man’s arm: one of the turtles! The other two were nowhere in sight.
The man slipped the turtle into a bag and hurried over to a beat-up red motor scooter parked at the edge of the square. He strapped the bundle onto the back. A moment later he again waded into the fountain, hoisted himself up, and raised his weapon against the last remaining turtle.
Clang!
Beatrice tried to scream, but—like in a dream—her voice stuck in her throat.
The next thing she knew she was racing down the hallway. She hadn’t run to her father’s room in the middle of the night for years, but this was an emergency.
“Dad, Dad!” she shouted as she ran to his bed.
He sat up instantly. “What is it, Beatrice? What’s happened?”
“The turtles! They’re being stolen!” she blurted.
“What turtles?”
“I saw someone stealing the turtles off the fountain!”
“What?” He rubbed his eyes.
“I had a dream that the fountain was being destroyed . . . and I heard this terrible clanging noise . . . and when I woke up, there was a man in a mask, stealing the turtles right off it! Dad, he’s down there now, we have to do something!”
“Beatrice,” he said patiently, suppressing a yawn, “it was just a dream—”
“No, it wasn’t! I saw it. It was real.”
“Beatrice, sweet pea, go back to bed.”
“No, Dad, I’m telling you: I saw the turtles being stolen! Look for yourself!” She gestured to the shuttered windows, but his bedroom was on the opposite side of the building.
“Beatrice . . .” The patience in his voice was wearing thin.
“Please, come look from my room!” Panic rose from her stomach until she could taste it. “You have to believe me!”
With an exasperated sigh, he eased himself out of bed. The time it took him to don his robe and slippers felt like an eternity. With every tick of his alarm clock, the turtles slipped farther away.
Beatrice dragged her sleepy father into her bedroom and over to the window. As she pushed open the shutters she dreaded what she’d see.
A single streetlamp cast a murky light on the piazza. There was no sign of the thief or his scooter. The fountain gurgled away as it always did, and perched on top, as if nothing had happened, were four bronze turtles.
“But . . . ,” she sputtered.
“Beatrice!” Her father’s patience snapped. “What’s gotten into you tonight?”
“I saw it, I swear!” But though she wouldn’t have admitted it, doubt was creeping in.
“No more nonsense!” he said sternly. “It was a nightmare, that’s all. Go back to bed. We’ll talk about this in the morning.”
He seldom raised his voice so she knew he’d heard enough. Anything else she said would be pointless. He closed her shutters with a bang and waited as she padded back to bed. Then he leaned down to kiss her forehead. “Try to get some rest now, okay?”
“But I . . . ,” Beatrice mumbled uselessly.
“Good night,” he said with finality and closed the door behind him.
As she lay in the dark, images spun round and round her mind: the turtles, the man in black, the red scooter. She couldn’t have just dreamed it all. She’d seen it. . . . She knew she’d seen
it happen. . . .
Or had she?
She should have been relieved the fountain was undamaged, but her mind was a haze of confusion and doubt. She was about to pull the covers over her head, but a thought wouldn’t stop poking at her brain: It didn’t feel like a dream.
Unable to resist just one more look, she tore out of bed, strode to the window, and peeked through the shutters. There they were: four undeniably solid turtles. Had she imagined the whole thing? Would she have to doubt her sanity now, along with everything else?
Then she noticed something small and black, floating in the lowest basin of the fountain.
Without giving herself time for second thoughts, she donned her bathrobe and flip-flops and tiptoed to the front door. By morning it would be too late; any possible clues might be swept away. She had to investigate now.
As she eased back the bolt, she tried not to imagine her father’s fury if he found out what she was up to. She held her breath and pulled the door open a crack, exhaling only after she’d soundlessly scampered through. She left the door ajar and crept down the stairs and out into the piazza. Besides the sloshing of the fountain, the night was completely silent. Not a soul was about. And just as she’d noticed from her window, a black object was floating in the water. She reached over the fountain’s edge and gingerly fished it out.
A glove! Surely one of the pair the man had been wearing. She knew it: it hadn’t been a dream! But that didn’t explain why the turtles had suddenly reappeared. Why in the world would someone risk hacking them off, only to put them right back on again?
She wrung out the glove and stuffed it into her bathrobe pocket, then proceeded to search for more clues. She circled the fountain three times, checking every crevice and cranny, every inch of the marble border. Nothing.
A street sweeper rumbled around the corner, making its nightly cleanup trip through the neighborhood. Beatrice hurried back to her building and flew up the stairs, her mind whirring with possibilities. Something odd was going on, but it didn’t make a scrap of sense. She was about to ease open her door when she heard a sinister creak behind her.
She whipped around. A shadowy figure lurked in the doorway of the apartment opposite, staring out with shrewd eyes that were lit from within.
Beatrice swallowed hard, silently instructing herself she didn’t believe in ghosts. “He-hello?” Her voice quavered.
A tiny dog with fluffy white fur poked its head between the apparition’s slippered feet, growling like an angry powder puff. Beatrice’s eyes traveled back up the length of the figure to find a woman’s halo of hair, just as white as her dog’s. She sighed with relief. It wasn’t a ghost—just her next-door neighbor. “I hope I didn’t disturb you, ma’am,” she whispered.
“Buonanotte, signorina,”1 said the old woman with an unreadable gleam in her eye. Then the door creaked shut.
Nine
THE BERNINI CONNECTION
The next morning, Beatrice could barely concentrate on her Italian lesson. She was tempted to tell her teacher what she’d witnessed, to confide in someone. But she resisted—what if Ginevra didn’t believe her? How embarrassing if, like her father, her tutor thought she was making it all up.
When at last the lesson was over, she raced back to her room and locked the door. Now, where had she left her nighttime discovery? She eyed her bathrobe with a bubble of excitement in her belly. Snatching it up, she noticed the entire pocket was damp from where the wet glove had spent the night. She pulled it out by one of its soggy fingertips.
What had seemed like such a thrilling clue last night was, in the harsh light of day, just a smelly old glove. A glove that proved nothing. Who would believe her story about a turtle thief when the turtles were still there, sitting atop the fountain for all to see? She barely believed herself.
Standing there with a wet glove in her hand, she suddenly felt like a silly little girl. What made her think she’d be able to figure out what had happened?
And what had really happened anyway? There was probably a perfectly logical explanation. Maybe the man she saw was a city maintenance worker, taking the turtles down to be cleaned. The idea that there might be some mystery behind what she witnessed was childish and far-fetched. Time to grow up and stop imagining things, she chided herself, flinging the glove into the trash.
Still, questions kept niggling at her brain: if the man was simply cleaning the fountain, why in the middle of the night? And why would he wear a mask? And what about the glove? Someone on authorized business wouldn’t have been in such a hurry that he’d drop his glove and not have time to retrieve it.
Drawn to the window by an invisible force, Beatrice gazed down at the turtles as if they might come to life and tell her what had happened. As always, their bronze shells glinted in the late July sun, but something wasn’t right. She squinted down at them; something about their position seemed off.
She dug out her half-finished sketch, remembering how the turtles had seemed to balance half-suspended on the edge of the basin. Unwilling to rely on either her memory or her amateur drawing, she opened her guidebook to a photo of the fountain.
She grabbed her binoculars and studied the turtles through the tiny lenses, comparing them to the ones in the photograph. Was it her imagination, or did they now rest on the brim more securely? She’d have to get a closer look.
Outside, humidity hung heavy in the air, making Beatrice’s clothes stick to her skin and her hair frizz out like a great burning bush. She smoothed it down distractedly as she approached the fountain. Circling slowly, she scrutinized each turtle in turn, all the while consulting the photo in the guidebook.
It was barely perceptible—she’d probably never have noticed if she hadn’t been sketching them the day before—but the turtles had been moved. Why someone would risk pulling them off just to change their position she couldn’t fathom. But there was no longer any doubt: the turtles had been tampered with.
Could it have been some elaborate prank? An attempted robbery gone wrong?
She sat on a bench and closed her eyes. She replayed exactly what she’d witnessed the night before, reconstructing the scene behind her eyelids. She followed the movements of the man in black with her mind’s eye as he teetered on the edge of the fountain, the ungainly turtle under his arm.
Curiously, her mind lingered on a trivial detail: the soggy squish of his sneakers as they hit the cobblestones. Why did that ordinary sound seem so oddly significant? A reedy voice interrupted her thoughts.
“Buongiorno, signorina.”
Beatrice’s eyes flew open. An elderly woman stood at her side, dressed in a neat maroon suit, her white hair coiffed to perfection. If it hadn’t been for the small white dog beside her, Beatrice would never have recognized her as the ghostly figure she’d encountered the night before.
“Buongiorno, signora,” she said politely. “Io mi chiamo Beatrice.” At this real-life use of her newly acquired Italian skills, a gush of pride pooled in her belly.
“Piacere. I am Mirella Costaguti,” said the old lady imperiously in subtly accented English. “It appears we are neighbors.”
Beatrice blushed. It must have seemed pretty odd for a thirteen-year-old girl to be out and about in a bathrobe in the middle of the night. Would Signora Costaguti say something to Beatrice’s father?
As Beatrice tried to come up with a plausible explanation for her nighttime wanderings, Signora Costaguti observed, “You seem quite taken with this fountain.”
“Yes,” Beatrice breathed, “I love it, especially . . . especially the turtles,” she added, half to herself.
“You have a good eye. Della Porta was an excellent fountain designer, but Bernini was a genius.”
“Bernini?” The name sounded vaguely familiar but she couldn’t place it.
“Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the sculptor, of course.” She looked appalled that Beatrice didn’t know of him. “He is one of the greatest artists of the Baroque period, one of the greatest artists of all time! His artis
tic expression, his creativity, his technical ability, they are virtually unrivaled. The Apollo and Daphne, the Fountain of the Four Rivers, so many masterpieces—all priceless.”
“Bernini made these turtles?”
“That is correct. They were not part of Della Porta’s original design, but added by Bernini almost a century later, when the fountain was restored.”
Something clicked inside Beatrice’s mind, like a key turning in a lock. It all made sense. The turtles were not just adorable—they were the work of one of the most important sculptors in history. Sculptures by such a famous artist, even small ones, must be worth a fortune. No wonder someone was trying to steal them! And if they had failed the first time, they’d definitely try again.
“Well, it was a pleasure to meet you, cara,” Signora Costaguti said stiffly, “but I’m afraid I must be going.”
“Um, you—you won’t mention to my father . . . ,” Beatrice faltered “. . . about last night?”
“Last night? Whatever do you mean?” Signora Costaguti’s face was blank, but a knowing spark shone in her eye. “Andiamo, Artemisia,”1 she cooed to her dog, and they disappeared down a narrow street.
Ten
AN UNLIKELY ALLY
Beatrice circled the fountain, reveling in her secret knowledge. How many people looked at this fountain every day? She alone knew it had been tampered with. And now she knew why: the turtles were worth a fortune.
As she digested this new piece of information, her eyes roamed the square. They hovered on the palazzo opposite her building, the white one with the walled-up window, the window that had given her such a fright her first night in Rome.
Her first night in Rome . . . That’s where she’d heard that squishing sound! In a flash it came back to her. She’d completely forgotten about the man she’d seen lurking in the piazza on her first jet-lagged night in Rome. His sneakers had made a squish-squish noise, just like those of the masked man last night. Such an ordinary noise, it could have been made by any number of sneakers—it didn’t mean a thing by itself. But the man she’d seen from her window that first night had been tall and lanky, just like the one who’d attacked the fountain.
Midnight in the Piazza Page 4