“TELL ME WHERE YOU PUT THEM!” he screamed, shaking her like a rag doll.
“Vincenzo, basta! La stai terrorizzando!”5 The woman’s and the girl’s eyes met. Beatrice felt sick with betrayal as she stared silently at her Italian teacher. A dozen questions flooded her mind, but she couldn’t form words to a single one.
“Bene!”6 bellowed the man called Vincenzo. “She should be terrified! That’s what she deserves for meddling in other people’s affairs.” He glanced nervously at his wristwatch. To Beatrice he added snidely, “Stick to your dollies, little girl. This is a matter for adults.”
Beatrice burned with indignation. “I have no idea where these turtles are or why they’re so important,” she lied. “But even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you!” she snapped, shocked at her own audacity.
“Oh, really?” Vincenzo crooned sarcastically. “Then how do you explain this?” He popped open a slick laptop computer. The screen flickered to life and Beatrice could see herself in grainy black and white. She was in the secret room, fumbling with a flashlight and shaking cobwebs from her hair. The flashlight went out but Beatrice’s movements were still visible. Night-vision surveillance cameras!
Vincenzo slammed the computer shut and crossed back to where she sat. He checked his watch again, although less than a minute had passed. Beatrice inched away from him, rubbing her shoulders where he’d grasped her.
“Now, leettle girl,” he said through clenched teeth, “you will tell me what you did with those turtles, or I will throw you back down into the ruins, where you will die of suffocation and starvation. I guarantee no one will ever find you.”
The hairs on the back of Beatrice’s neck stood on end. With a lump in her throat, she decided to throw caution to the wind; she hadn’t gotten this far by playing it safe.
“Even if I told you, you’d probably throw me down there anyway, so I don’t really have anything to lose, do I?”
Vincenzo issued a guttural growl. “Ugo!” he barked. “Vieni qui.”7
The beefy thing she’d seen on her first visit to the palace plodded across the room. Ugo was an ogre with massive arms and a half circle of black hair around the back of his head. He stood at Vincenzo’s side and stared Beatrice down. Two beady black eyes glittered under a solitary eyebrow that wriggled across his forehead like a big, fat caterpillar.
“Now, leettle girl,” Vincenzo continued, “before I lose my temper—”
“Too late,” quipped Beatrice.
“Do not interrupt me, you intolerable girl! This is not a game,” said Vincenzo, raising his hand as if to slap her.
Beatrice stared up at him, refusing to cower.
Instead, Vincenzo ran a finger under his collar and checked his watch for the umpteenth time, sweat glistening on his forehead. “You will tell me where you hid those turtles,” he said desperately, “or my associate Ugo here will help you remember.” Ugo smirked.
Beatrice gulped nervously but decided to call their bluff. “You can do what you like with me,” she said defiantly, her eyes darkening, “but I’ll never let you sell those turtles to some French billionaire!”
Vincenzo’s mouth dropped open. “How did you . . .” He stopped midsentence and spun around on Ginevra. “What have you told this child?”
“Nothing!” Ginevra garbled, bafflement scribbled across her forehead. “I have told her nothing. I cannot imagine how she knows thees!”
“That explains how she got inside. I should have known you would turn on me and try to steal the turtles for yourself. But to recruit the assistance of a child!”
“Thees is preposterous! She has nothing to do with thees. . . .” Her voice rose an octave as she switched to Italian.
And that’s when Beatrice got her second brilliant idea of the night.
“Ginevra, why don’t you tell them the truth?” Beatrice shouted. Vincenzo’s head swiveled around. “Tell them how you planned to steal the turtles for yourself! That’s right,” she said to Vincenzo’s gaping face, “if you want to find them so badly, ask her. She told me where to hide them!”
“She ees lying!” Ginevra protested.
“Think about it,” Beatrice continued. “She’s my Italian teacher; I live just across the square. Don’t you think it’s a bit too much of a coincidence?”
“She ees making thees all up!” Ginevra’s voice was high-pitched and desperate.
“Come on! How else would I have known exactly where the turtles were hidden?”
Vincenzo’s eyes were black as murder. As he opened his mouth to emit what was sure to be a nasty stream of abuse, a metallic ring pealed out. He took another frantic look at his watch, then whipped out a squealing cell phone.
Before answering, he addressed Ugo. “Controlla la bambina!”8 he commanded. Then, turning a pair of grim eyes on Ginevra, he added, “Controlla tutte e due. Non perderle di vista!”9 He strode out of the library and slammed the door.
Ugo crossed his arms over his chest with a sneer, clearly relishing his job as watchdog. Luckily, he didn’t seem to understand English.
Ginevra turned on Beatrice, her usually laughing eyes as cold as ice. “How dare you lie about me like that?”
“How dare you conspire with these thugs to steal art?” Beatrice continued.
“You wouldn’t understand.” Ginevra turned away haughtily. “Besides,” she huffed, “I don’t have to explain myself to a child!”
A child. So that was how she saw her. Someone whose opinion didn’t matter, who could be lied to and dismissed. Rage and indignation began to build up inside of her, until she could hold them in no longer.
“Maybe you don’t have to explain yourself to me, but you’ll have to explain yourself to the police! As soon as I get out of here, I’m going straight to the cops to tell them you’re an art thief masquerading as an art history student.”
“Eet’s not like that. You don’t know the whole story.”
“There’s no possible excuse for stealing art.”
“What do you know about eet, you naive leettle reech girl!”
“Rich girl?” said Beatrice, aghast. “We’re not rich.”
“Oh, no?” Ginevra scoffed. “You leeve in a penthouse in Piazza Mattei. You are reech enough, cara mia.”
“Even if I were, what does that have to do with anything?”
Ginevra looked at Beatrice for a long moment. Then, with a sigh, she sunk into a leather armchair. She drew her arms around herself, shivering slightly despite the sweltering night.
“My father was an art dealer, so were his father and his grandfather, back five generations. My father was training me to take over one day; I was to be the first woman to run the family business.” Her voice rang with pride. “I studied art history. My dream was to turn our leettle business into an important gallery and auction house.
“Six months ago, my father told me he had secured an important client. A member of an old noble Roman family needed to sell hees entire art collection, queeckly. Massive gambling debts. We were to organize an auction of the works. But before the contract was signed, my father had a heart attack. He died instantly.
“My world was turned upside down. Just like his client, my father had also been secretly in debt. His body wasn’t cold before his creditors came calling. Unfortunately, we do not have a palace and a private art collection to save us,” she said with a dry little laugh. “I went to appraise the Mattei collection in my father’s place, hoping that if I could just keep that one client, we might be able to hold on to the business. But although Vincenzo’s collection was vast, eet was not valuable enough to cover all of his debts.” She paused, her look of anguish suddenly replaced with a gleam of mischief. “The turtles on the fountain right outside, however, were.”
“But those turtles don’t belong to the Mattei family!” Beatrice burst out. “They belong to the city of Rome!”
“An eensignificant detail.” Conceit shone in Ginevra’s eyes at the brilliant plan she had hatched. “Suddenly I saw a way out.
Together, Vincenzo and I devised a plan to steal the turtles. I planned the particulars and found an unscrupulous buyer through my father’s contacts, as well as an artist to re-create believable replicas. Vincenzo took care of the negotiations and hired a thief to do the dirty work. We planned to split the money fifty-fifty. Vincenzo would get to keep hees palace and art collection, and my family would be saved.”
Beatrice felt a mixture of anger, betrayal, and sympathy for the woman who’d been her first Italian teacher, and—she had thought—her friend. She was the first person to pronounce her name in the deliciously Italian way, the first to help her understand this crazy, beautiful language. But none of that made up for the fact that she was a thief, and an unrepentant one at that.
Beatrice gritted her teeth. “If you think you can make me feel sorry for you, you’re dreaming. I’m not going to let you get away with this.”
Ginevra’s eyes hardened into puddles of black ice. “I am sorry to hear that. If that ees truly the case, I am afraid you are unlikelee to leave thees palace alive.”
Thirty
DÉJÀ VU WITH A TWIST
Beatrice and Ginevra were glaring at each other unblinking when the library door flung open and Vincenzo marched back in.
“Still scheming, I see?”
Ginevra leaped to her feet. “Tell heem you were lying!”
Beatrice’s gaze slid from Ginevra’s furious eyes to Vincenzo’s menacing ones. She took a deep breath. “Everything I said was true.”
Ginevra shot her a look of pure hate and the temperature in the room seemed to drop by twenty degrees. Vincenzo and Ginevra began a shouting match in Italian, with Ugo interjecting every so often. With her captors’ attention distracted, Beatrice took the opportunity to plan her escape.
Unfortunately, the three coconspirators were blocking the doorway. Perhaps a window? Moving as little as possible, Beatrice peeked over her shoulder to see if she could fit out of one of them.
Through the gauzy curtains she could make out the piazza. Glancing back at Ginevra and the two men, still in heated debate, she decided to make a run for it. She slipped off the couch and hurried to the window. Just as she ducked behind the curtain, she stopped short. She stared down into the piazza, unable to believe her eyes.
Clang!
She felt like she was reliving a nightmare, or having some kind of freaky déjà vu.
Clang!
Once again, the same lanky thief was standing on the lip of the fountain, using a crowbar to remove one of the turtles. But this time he wasn’t alone.
A second figure crouched in the shadows on the opposite side of the fountain: watching, waiting, by the look of it ready to pounce. Beatrice couldn’t make out his face, but the messy head of curls was unmistakable.
Marco! Her stomach did a somersault. What was he doing risking his neck for a bunch of fakes? Except Marco never believed they were fakes. She reached for the window latch, but it was useless—it was far too high to jump.
It all happened in the space of an instant. Marco sprang from his hiding place. As nimble as a tightrope walker, he hopped over the fountain railing and yanked the thief’s leg, sending him tumbling from his perch. The thief landed in the fountain and the turtle he had just detached flew out of his grasp. Marco dived for the delicate bronze sculpture but he was too late: it collided with the cobblestones with an almighty crash.
The thief righted himself and lunged at Marco. Beatrice clamped her hand over her mouth to keep from screaming. She didn’t notice the arguing behind her cease or the heavy footsteps as Vincenzo approached.
“Trying to escape, you leettle red devil?” He seized her. Then he noticed the scene outside and stopped in his tracks. “Oh, cavolo!”1 He pushed Beatrice aside and flew out of the room.
Ginevra and Ugo ran to the window in time to see Marco and the thief taking swipes at each other. “Oddio!”2 exclaimed Ginevra. “Who ees that? Another blasted American brat?”
“He’s as Roman as you are and he doesn’t want you and your thug partner destroying that fountain any more than I do!”
“Why cannot you mind your own beezness?”
Beatrice didn’t bother answering. She had to help Marco.
She watched from the window as Vincenzo strode into the piazza below. He made straight for Marco, who was scrambling to gather the other turtles. Catching him off guard, Vincenzo grabbed his arm, spun him around, and punched him square in the jaw. Marco toppled over and the turtles came crashing down with him. Beatrice didn’t wait to see what would happen next.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Ginevra shouted as Beatrice raced to the door that was now unguarded. Ugo, distracted by the commotion outside, was too slow to catch her as she sprinted out of the library.
She flew down the portrait gallery with Ugo the ogre in hot pursuit. She rounded the corner into the grand hall and sped down the stairs to where the door to the courtyard had been left wide open. At the bottom of the steps she slammed into Vincenzo, who was carrying a writhing Marco over his shoulder. They tumbled over backward.
As Marco scrambled to his feet, Ugo pounced, snatching him up as if he were no bigger than a puppet. Meanwhile Vincenzo grabbed Beatrice’s arms and wrenched them behind her back. “Let go of me, you evil art thief!”
Marco did a double take. “What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?” she demanded back.
But their captors gave them no time to catch up. Instead they dragged them into the library, where Ginevra was waiting with a rope, a sneer of triumph twitching on her lips. Ugo placed Marco back on his feet but kept his meaty arms wrapped around him tight.
Despite being squeezed like a tube of toothpaste, Marco was grinning ear to ear. He looked Beatrice up and down. “You’re a mess!” he said with a wry smile. “What exactly have you been up to?”
“Don’t ask,” Beatrice groaned. “You don’t look so hot yourself.” Marco’s lip was bleeding and his jaw was already turning purple from Vincenzo’s punch.
“Legali!”3 Vincenzo ordered.
Ugo pinned them back-to-back with hands the size of baseball mitts while Ginevra tied them together. As Beatrice fumed at the rough treatment, Marco found her hand and squeezed it. A knot of guilt took form in the pit of her stomach and soon she was up to her neck in regret. Why had she jumped to conclusions, just because he hadn’t agreed with her? Her instincts may have been spot-on about things, but they were useless when it came to people.
Once their bonds were so tight they could barely move, Vincenzo marched ominously toward them. Beatrice winced inwardly but put on a brave face. She refused to let him know he scared her.
“Why didn’t you tell me what you were planning?” Marco whispered. “We could have worked together!”
“I tried, but you wouldn’t listen!” she hissed back.
“Silence!” commanded Vincenzo. “You will speak when I tell you, and not before. Now, young man, I don’t know how you’re involved in this, but I’ll deal with you later. First, Signorina Beatrice,” he mocked, “you will tell me what you know and how you know it.”
“I told you, from Ginevra.”
“Stop lying!” he barked, but she could tell he wasn’t convinced. “You tell me the truth right now, leettle girl.” He wagged a finger in front of her nose. “How did you get into the ruins, and where have you hidden those turtles? Cooperate, and we may let you live. Stay silent and you and your friend will suffer a fate worse than death.” He jerked his head toward Ugo, who rolled up his shirtsleeves with a beastly smile. He cracked his hairy knuckles and advanced with slow heavy steps until he was towering over them. Time and Beatrice’s brilliant ideas were running out.
Marco was being awfully quiet, she thought resentfully. He was making slight, repetitive movements, probably attempting to cut their ropes somehow, Beatrice assumed. Not a bad idea, but even unbound, how would they escape with Ugo the guard dog panting over them?
“So, what’s it going to be?”
Vincenzo snapped. “Are you going to be a good leettle girl and tell me what I want to know, or—”
His pocket rang furiously, causing him to leave his threat unfinished. He dug out his phone and frowned. “Sì?”
A voice shouted indistinct words from the other end of the line and the color drained from Vincenzo’s face. He turned away, whispering frantically into the phone.
Beatrice squirmed, trying in vain to slip her hands out of the ropes. Ugo chuckled at her futile efforts. He was so close she could smell his rotten breath.
Vincenzo thrust his phone back into his pocket, his face pasty and strained. “Controllali bene,”4 he said to Ugo sharply. “Torno subito.”5 He walked out of the library as if he were on the way to his own execution.
Less than a minute later, several sets of footsteps beat down the hallway. Vincenzo walked in first, wearing a look of pure panic. Behind him marched Monsieur Cambriolage, impeccably dressed as always, flanked by two bearlike thugs who made Ugo look like a runt by comparison.
One of the thugs had Luca, the scrawny thief, by the scruff of his neck. He looked even more dejected than Vincenzo. The other one was carrying four bronze turtles as if they were no heavier than plastic toys.
“What is ze meaning of zis?” roared Cambriolage, taking one of the turtles from thug number two. The turtle was covered in scratches and its head was smashed in. “Zese are damaged goods! I paid you a fortune for zese sculptures and you deliver zem in zis condition?”
He grabbed a second turtle with its foot bent backward and deep gashes across the shell. “I demand ze money back, immediately!”
He glanced at Beatrice and Marco, bound together on the couch. “Don’t tell me you traffic in children as well!” His lip curled in disgust. Then he took a second look at Beatrice. “You!” he spat, a spark of recognition now glinting in his eyes. “First I meet you at ze auction viewing in zis very palace, zen I see you in ze embassy wiz Mademoiselle Ginevra, and now ’ere? Who are you, and ’ow are you mixed up in all of zis?”
“At the embassy? With Ginevra? So you are in this together!” Vincenzo spat at Ginevra. She opened her mouth to protest, but he grabbed her wrist and silenced her with a murderous look. “Ci penso a te dopo,”6 he hissed in her ear.
Midnight in the Piazza Page 15