Midnight in the Piazza

by Tiffany Parks

  He turned back to Cambriolage. “Monsieur, these impudent children are the cause of the damage of the turtles. But believe me, they will soon regret it.”

  Beatrice couldn’t believe Vincenzo was blaming them. As if they were the criminals!

  “He’s lying!” she shouted. “And those aren’t Bernini’s turtles! They’re fakes, just like you suspected! He’s been fooling you all along!”

  Vincenzo’s mouth hung open as his night went from bad to worse.

  “Sacré bleu!” Cambriolage stared down at the turtle in his hands. “But how on earth do you know zis? Explain yourself, girl!”

  “Untie us and I’ll tell you everything.”

  Cambriolage shouted to one of his men, who flicked out a knife and sliced them free. So much for Marco’s valiant effort, Beatrice thought, rubbing her rope-burned wrists.

  “You’re going to take the word of a delinquent foreign child? Over a member of the Italian aristocracy?” sputtered Vincenzo.

  “Aristocracy? Pshaw! Money talks, my friend, not titles! Ah, mon Dieu,” he lamented, “this is what I get for working with amateurs!” He turned to Beatrice, “You were saying, ma’moiselle?”

  Everyone turned to Beatrice. Vincenzo’s face was a mask of dread.

  Just as she opened her mouth to speak, not sure whether to tell the truth or a lie, a police siren wailed from the piazza outside. Everyone froze. Vincenzo’s look of dread turned to terror and Monsieur Cambriolage no longer looked quite so confident himself.

  The siren stopped and a voice boomed over a loud speaker, shouting orders from the square. Everyone exchanged horror-filled looks and after one tense moment, panic erupted. Ginevra yanked her arm free from Vincenzo’s grasp. Vincenzo barked at Ugo. One of the French thugs looked for a place to hide the damaged turtles while Cambriolage screamed at Vincenzo, demanding his client’s money back. Luca the scrawny thief searched for a way to escape, but the other henchman refused to let go of his collar.

  In all the confusion, no one noticed the quiet Italian boy sneak out to let the police in. Beatrice wasn’t far behind, and they got to the front door just as the police began to kick it in.

  Thirty-One

  THE FOUR PROTECTORS

  It had been a busy night for the local police station. First they’d gotten an emergency call that a thirteen-year-old girl had gone missing in the vicinity of Piazza Mattei. As they prepared to investigate, they received another call but could hear only muffled voices. Threatening muffled voices.

  When Beatrice thought Marco was trying to cut their ropes, he’d actually been using his cell phone behind his back, calling the police and recording the incriminating conversation. Once the police had traced the call to the Mattei Palace, a squad car was dispatched within minutes. When the officers arrived in the piazza to find the turtles missing from the fountain, they knew they were in for a long night.

  Meanwhile, across town, Mr. Archer got a worrying call of his own. After reluctantly leaving his daughter at the concert, he’d asked Signora Costaguti to keep her eye out and make sure she got home safely. But midnight came and went with no sign of Beatrice. Mirella alerted him, and he called the police and rushed home. But the sharp old signora had her own ideas about where Beatrice might be. When the police eventually called to tell Mr. Archer his daughter had been identified inside the Mattei Palace, Mirella wasn’t surprised in the least, and she insisted on accompanying him to the palace across the square.

  When Augustus Archer stepped into the library, his usually smiling face was haggard with worry. Beatrice barreled straight for him and pitched herself into his arms. She hadn’t realized until that moment how close she’d come to never seeing him again. She squeezed until she felt like her arms would fall off, and he squeezed back just as hard.

  Once they’d released each other from their epic hug, Mr. Archer’s gaze swept the room. As he took in the half-dozen people in handcuffs, the damaged sculptures, the police officers, and the boy with a bloody lip, the relieved smile slid from his face. “Beatrice Archer, what the devil is going on?”

  Since the police wanted to hear the exact same information, Marco translated as Beatrice haltingly told her story. She described how she’d witnessed the turtles being stolen Monday night, and how no one had believed her. Here she shot her dad a pointed look. “But just minutes after they were ripped off the fountain, the turtles reappeared—like magic! I wouldn’t have believed it myself if I hadn’t gone down to the piazza to search for clues.”

  “You did what?” her father shouted.

  She tried to look remorseful but couldn’t quite manage it. “If I hadn’t done what I did, the turtles would’ve been lost forever!” In a tumble of words, it all came out. Beatrice described her first visit to the palace, and the conversation she’d overheard between Vincenzo and Monsieur Cambriolage right in this library, and how she’d concluded that the turtles on the fountain had been replaced with fakes.

  “Vincenzo had gambled away his entire fortune and was up to his eyebrows in debt,” Beatrice explained. “Instead of selling off his possessions to cover his losses, he decided to hock a set of priceless sculptures that didn’t even belong to him.”

  “Era tutta l’idea sua!”1 shouted Vincenzo, jumping to his feet and aiming an accusing finger at Ginevra. He spewed a barrage of Italian words. One of the officers scribbled furiously in a notebook while another fingered the damaged turtles. They looked thoroughly baffled by the bizarre case.

  “But these aren’t the real turtles!” Beatrice blurted, sensing they’d failed to grasp the crucial point.

  This pronouncement triggered a burst of confusion from the police and grumbling from the French contingent. “Je le savais.2 You lying swindler!” Cambriolage muttered to Vincenzo, as if he weren’t in enough trouble himself.

  Ginevra seemed only too willing to pay her ex-partner back for his betrayal with a disclosure of her own. “Vincenzo planned to sell Cambriolage the fake turtles and keep the originals for heemself,” she announced. “He wanted—what is the Eenglish expression?—to eat hees cake and to have it too.”

  As Vincenzo shot Ginevra a look of pure venom, Beatrice was flooded with vindication. The last piece of the puzzle snapped sublimely into place and she couldn’t help throwing Marco a satisfied little smirk.

  “But he didn’t do it just to fatten his art collection.”

  Every head in the room swiveled around to the unexpected source of this revelation. Old Signora Costaguti had lived in Piazza Mattei longer than any other person alive. She knew all the history of the neighborhood, and most of its secrets. Like the Matteis, the Costagutis were an old Roman family that had been around for centuries. Stories, scandals, and legends were passed down through the generations. Mirella had heard them all.

  She began to explain, in her raspy but commanding voice, how the Matteis had been cursed back in the sixteenth century. “No one knows exactly who cursed them,” she said. Beatrice and Marco exchanged a meaningful look. “But it is believed to have happened during the time of Muzio Mattei, the ruthless duke who first controlled the gates of the Ghetto, the one who commissioned the fountain.

  “After the peak of Mattei power in the seventeenth century,” Mirella continued, “the curse began to be fulfilled, and the family started losing not only their wealth, but their social standing as well. A later duke, living about a century after Muzio, commissioned Gian Lorenzo Bernini to create four bronze turtles to adorn the fountain, but they weren’t just for decoration. Turtles, in many cultures, symbolize protection and shelter. They were added to ward off the curse, you see, to protect the four branches of the Mattei family, and their four neighboring palaces.”

  Beatrice’s jaw dropped; the connection between past and present was deeper than she could have imagined. “But it didn’t do any good!” she couldn’t help but interject. “Vincenzo is the only surviving descendant of the family, and three of the four palaces were sold ages ago.”

  “You are correct.” Mirell
a smiled. “The ultimate fulfillment of the curse is being ushered in during his own lifetime. The last remaining descendant is bankrupt and childless. Once he is gone and the last palace sold, the family will be extinct.”

  Vincenzo sat glowering, looking less than pleased to be the topic of conversation.

  “So,” Beatrice reasoned, the entire picture coming into focus at last, “even though he was desperate for cash, he was too superstitious to let the turtles out of family hands. So he decided to have them stolen . . . twice. First the real ones, which he hid away in the ruins under the palace and replaced before anyone would notice they’d been taken. And then the fake ones, to a rich foreign buyer who’d never know the difference. That way, Vincenzo could pay all his debts, and keep the palace and its contents . . . including Bernini’s turtles!”

  If the police hadn’t been satisfied with Beatrice’s story, they had Marco’s cell phone recording to back it up. The threatening voices of Vincenzo and Cambriolage screeched out of the phone and it was promptly confiscated as evidence.

  “You might want to take a look at Monsieur Cambriolage’s phone too,” Beatrice suggested knowingly. “I think you’ll find some very interesting information on it.”

  “The child is making zings up!” scoffed the Frenchman, but his face had gone white.

  “I picked his phone up by accident at the French embassy,” Beatrice explained, slightly bending the truth. “I took it back right away, of course,” she added with a look that was at once innocent and mischievous, “although I couldn’t help but notice a recent text message with a list of works of art, many of which have gone missing lately. Somehow I don’t think it’s just a coincidence.”

  After Marco translated this last bit, an officer searched Cambriolage’s pockets, quickly confiscating the phone in question. The vicious look the Frenchman turned on Beatrice was a far cry from his jovial manner of a week before. Never in her life had so many different people looked like they wanted to throttle her. It made her stomach turn.

  So she was relieved when the police began rounding up the suspects and leading them out to the waiting squad cars. Vincenzo threw her one last poisonous look as he was shoved out the door. Ugo put his head down and went quietly, like someone familiar with being in handcuffs. The thick-necked French thugs and Luca the scrawny thief were jostled out next, each hollering in his respective language. Cambriolage just shook his head, as if it were all so terribly inconvenient and, thanks to the police, he was going to miss his evening cognac.

  Ginevra was the last to go, looking scornful and tragic. She held Beatrice’s gaze as a young cop escorted her out. “I was a victim of circumstance,” she declared. “You’ll see. I’ll prove my innocence.”

  Beatrice stared after her former teacher with a combination of anger and pity until the chief investigator interrupted her thoughts, asking where they could find the real turtles.

  She had imagined opening the secret passageway so many times that she didn’t even have to think. She strode to the corner of the library, behind a massive antique globe. She scoured the shelves but it didn’t take long to find the slim copy of Aristotle. As confidently as if she’d done it dozens of times before, she tugged the volume beside it, and just like Caterina had described in the diary, a section of the shelves swung open. The officers, Marco, Mr. Archer, even old Signora Costaguti, stared into the cavernous opening in stunned silence.

  Beatrice described to the officers as best she could the location of the tunnel where she’d been forced to abandon the turtles. “But you might want to bring some pretty powerful lamps and a pair of sniffer dogs while you’re at it. It’s a pitch-black maze down there.”

  Then, inevitably, came the question Beatrice had been dreading: “How did you know where to find them?” Marco translated, shooting her a warning look.

  Beatrice paused. She couldn’t reveal she’d stolen a four-hundred-year-old diary and found a hand-drawn treasure map. Not only did it sound incredibly far-fetched—the kind of thing grown-ups never believe—but the last thing she wanted was to get in trouble, especially now that she was practically a hero.

  Everyone stared at her expectantly. Finally, Marco broke the silence.

  “I helped her,” he said.

  Beatrice whipped her head around. She wasn’t sure whether to be grateful he was protecting her, or resentful he was taking the credit.

  “You see,” he began, “my father owns an antique shop, and we have documents on all the palaces in town, especially the ones built on top of ruins. We found an old map of the ancient theater under the Mattei Palace, and Beatrice guessed the turtles were down there. I never thought she’d go looking for them, though!”

  Beatrice let out a silent sigh of relief when Marco’s explanation seemed to satisfy the police. Her father’s narrowed eyes, however, said he knew it wasn’t the whole story, and he’d be expecting the full version later.

  The chief investigator and Marco exchanged a few words. “He wants to know if we have any idea who Cambriolage was working for,” Marco translated. “He says that if all these thefts really are connected, they have the chance to uncover the biggest art crime ring in decades.”

  “Oh, I don’t think that’ll be too hard to figure out,” Beatrice drawled.

  Eyebrows raised all around.

  “Well,” she said slowly, as if she were helping a group of three-year-olds work out two plus two, “who works in the biggest, most luxurious palace in Rome?”

  Blank stares.

  “A palace designed by Michelangelo with frescoes by Carracci . . . ?”

  “Palazzo Farnese! The—the French ambassador?” said her father, aghast.

  Beatrice nodded, unable to suppress a grin. “And I know for a fact that he’s behind not just this, but several recent disappearances around the city.”

  “And how did you discover all this?”

  She couldn’t tell whether her dad was impressed or appalled.

  “More important,” interrupted the investigator, by way of his young interpreter, “how do you intend to prove it?”

  In lieu of an answer, she looked pointedly at Cambriolage’s phone.

  Really, what would they do without her?

  Thirty-Two

  UNEXPECTED GIFTS

  Beatrice and Marco were holed up in the café on Via del Portico d’Ottavia, waiting out a sudden rainstorm. It had made a mess of Beatrice’s white canvas sandals, but she was grateful all the same for a bit of relief from the heat.

  They scoured the papers for mention of their nighttime adventures, but couldn’t find a single word. It must’ve happened too late to make the morning press. Still, the neighborhood was abuzz with talk of the dreadful act of vandalism that had occurred in the piazza.

  Despite sleeping like the dead until well past noon, Beatrice’s insides still fizzed with leftover adrenaline. She couldn’t resist rehashing the night’s events with Marco, but there was something between them that remained unspoken.

  Beatrice plucked up the courage to broach the subject. “Marco?”

  “Yeah?” He looked up from the paper.

  “Well, I just wanted to say that . . . I mean, you should know that . . . I’m sorry I suspected you.”

  “I was wondering when you’d say that!”

  “Well, I am sorry!” She crossed her arms in a huff.

  “Hey, I was only joking,” he said, cracking a dimpled grin.

  Beatrice smiled too, relieved he didn’t hold it against her.

  “I understand; you barely knew me. And I’m sorry I didn’t believe you about the fakes. I guess I just thought I knew better, being Roman and all.”

  She cocked her left eyebrow, a hint of a smile on her lips. “I guess I showed you.”

  “And to think, all along, your Italian teacher was behind the whole thing.”

  “I know. She’s so passionate about art; it’s hard to believe she would conspire to steal it.” She shook her head with a despondent smile. “Now I really have no hope of
learning Italian before school starts.”

  “I can teach you,” Marco suggested, as if he were offering to do nothing more time-consuming than tie her shoe.

  “Yeah, right.” She chuckled. Her eyes flicked over to his, but he wasn’t laughing. “You’d do that?”

  “Sure, why not?” He shrugged. “I mean, I’ve been speaking Italian since birth; how hard can it be to teach someone else?”

  “I warn you: I’m a very slow learner.”

  “Somehow I doubt that.”

  Beatrice wasn’t positive, but she thought, just maybe, she detected a trace of admiration.

  “I still can’t believe you broke into that palace on your own. Weren’t you scared you’d get caught?”

  “Of course I was scared, but I didn’t have a choice. By the way, thanks for covering for me. I didn’t know how the police would react if they knew I’d taken the diary.”

  “No worries. So, are you going to keep it?”

  “No. I ended up telling my dad the whole story. He’s taking it back today.”

  “That’s a bummer.”

  “Well, I did always say I was just borrowing it. It doesn’t belong to me, and if I kept it, I wouldn’t be any better than them, would I?”

  “Beatrice, it’s a diary, not a priceless work of art.”

  “I know. But it’s not mine,” she said simply. Then an impish look spread across her face. “I did save one thing, though. Such a teeny, tiny, little thing, I don’t think anyone will ever notice.”

  She reached into her bag and pulled out an old yellowed document in a protective plastic sleeve.

  “Wow, what is that? The map?” Marco eyed it eagerly.

  Beatrice nodded as she unfolded it slowly, enjoying his anticipation. She spread it out on the table and Marco bent to study it.

  “This is so awesome!” he said.