“Jules!” said Janice suddenly, interrupting my gymnastics. “Come on!”
I half expected someone to hit us both over the head to stop us from talking, but instead, the men pushed us forward until we were face-to-face with Cocco and the turkey vulture.
“E ora, ragazze?” said Cocco, blinding us both with his headlamp.
“What did he say?” hissed Janice, turning her head to avoid the beam.
“Something girlfriend,” I replied under my breath, not at all happy to have recognized the word.
“He said, ‘What now, ladies?’” interjected Umberto. “This is Santa Caterina’s room—where do we go from here?”
Only then did we notice that the turkey vulture was pointing a flashlight through a lattice gate in the wall, illuminating a small, monastic cell with a narrow bed and an altar. On the bed lay a recumbent statue of a woman—presumably Saint Catherine—and the wall behind her bed was painted blue and studded with golden stars.
“Uh,” said Janice, clearly as awestruck as I was to discover that we were actually here, by the chamber mentioned in Mom’s riddle, “‘hand me an iron crow.’”
“And then what?” asked Umberto, anxious to demonstrate to Cocco how useful we were.
Janice and I looked at each other, only too aware that Mom’s directions had ended just about there, with a merry, “and foot it girls!”
“Wait—” I suddenly remembered another little snippet. “Oh yes … ‘away with the cross’—”
“The cross?” Umberto looked mystified. “La croce—”
We all stretched to look into the chamber again, and just as Cocco was shoving us aside to see for himself, Janice nodded vigorously, trying to point with her nose. “There! Look! Under the altar!”
And indeed, beneath the altar was a large marble tile with a black cross on it, looking much like the door to a grave. Not wasting a moment, Cocco took a step back and aimed the submachine gun at the padlock that held the lattice door in place. Before anyone had time to run for cover, he blasted the whole thing open with a deafening salvo that took the gate right off its hinges.
“Oh, Jesus!” cried Janice, grimacing with pain. “I think that blew my eardrums. This guy is a total nutcase!”
Without a word, Cocco spun around and took her by the throat, squeezing so hard she nearly choked. It was all so fast that I hardly even saw what happened, until he suddenly let go of her and she dropped to her knees, gasping for air.
“Oh, Jan!” I cried, kneeling down next to her. “Are you okay?”
It took her a moment to find air for an answer. And when she finally did, her voice was trembling. “Note to self …” she muttered, blinking to clear her eyes, “the little charmer understands English.”
Moments later, the men were going at the cross under the altar with crowbars and drills, and when the tile finally came loose and fell out on the stone floor with a thud that threw up a cloud of dust, none of us was surprised to see that behind it was the entrance to a tunnel.
WHEN JANICE AND I had crawled out of the sewer in the Campo three days earlier, we had promised each other never to go spelunking in the Bottini again. Yet here we were, making our way through a passage that was little more than a wormhole, in near darkness and without a blue sky beckoning us at the other end.
Before pushing us into the hole, Cocco had cut our hands free—not out of kindness, but because it was the only way of bringing us along. Fortunately, he was still under the impression that he needed us in order to find Romeo and Giulietta’s grave; he didn’t know that the cross under the altar in Saint Catherine’s room had been the very last clue in Mom’s directions.
Inching along behind Janice, seeing nothing but her jeans and the random flicker of headlamps against the jagged surface of the tunnel, I wished I had been wearing pants, too. I kept getting caught in the long skirt of the dress, and the thin velvet did nothing to protect my scabby knees from the uneven sandstone. The only upside was that I was so numb with cold I could barely feel the pain.
When we finally came to the end of the tunnel, I was as relieved as the men to find that there was no boulder or pile of rubble blocking our way and forcing us to backtrack. Instead we came out into a wide-open cave, about twenty feet across and tall enough for everyone to stand upright.
“E ora?” said Cocco as soon as Janice and I were within earshot, and this time we did not need Umberto to translate. What now? was indeed the question.
“Oh, no!” Janice whispered, but only to me, “It’s a dead end!”
Behind us, the rest of the men were emerging from the tunnel, too, and one of them was Friar Lorenzo, who was eased out by the turkey vulture and some other guy with a ponytail, as if he were a prince being delivered by royal midwives. Someone had mercifully removed the blindfold before shoving the old monk into the hole, and now Friar Lorenzo stepped forward eagerly, eyes wide with amazement, as if he had completely forgotten the violent circumstances that had brought him here.
“What do we do?” Janice hissed, trying to catch Umberto’s eye. But he was busy brushing dust off his pants and didn’t pick up on the sudden tension. “How do you say dead end in Italian?”
Fortunately for us, Janice was wrong. As I looked around more carefully I saw that there were, in fact, two other exits to the cave, apart from the wormhole we had used to get in. One was in the ceiling, but it was a long, dark shaft, blocked at the top by what looked like a slab of concrete; even with a ladder it would have been impossible to reach. Most of all, it resembled an ancient garbage chute, and this impression was supported by the fact that the other exit was in the floor right beneath it. Or, at least, I assumed there was an opening beneath the rusty metal plate lying on the floor of the cave, well covered in dust and rubble. Anything dropped from aloft would in theory—if both holes had been open—be able to plunge right through the cave without even pausing in between.
Seeing that Cocco was still looking at Janice and me for directions, I did the only logical thing, which was to point at the metal plate on the floor. “Search, seek,” I said, trying to fabricate a sufficiently oracular instruction, “look beneath your feet. For here lies Juliet.”
“Yes!” nodded Janice, tugging nervously at my arm. “Here lies Juliet.”
After glaring at Umberto for confirmation, Cocco had the men start working on the metal plate with crowbars, trying to loosen it and push it aside, and they went at it with so much vengeance that Friar Lorenzo retreated into a corner and began going through his rosary.
“Poor guy,” said Janice, biting her lip, “he’s totally off his rocker. I just hope—” She didn’t say it, but I knew what she was thinking, because I had long been thinking the same. It was only a matter of time before Cocco would realize that the old monk was nothing but deadweight. And when that happened, we would be helpless to save him.
Yes, our hands were now free, but we both knew that we were just as trapped as we had been before. As soon as the last man had come out of the tunnel, the guy with the ponytail had positioned himself right in front of the opening, making sure no one was stupid enough to try to leave. And so there was really only one way out of this cave for Janice and me—with or without Umberto and Friar Lorenzo—and that was down the drain with everybody else.
When the metal cover finally came off, it did indeed reveal an opening in the floor, big enough for a man to climb through. Stepping forward, Cocco pointed a torchlight into the hole, and after the briefest hesitation the other men did the same, mumbling among themselves with halfhearted enthusiasm. The smell coming from the blackness below was definitely foul, and Janice and I were not the only ones to hold our noses at first, but then, after a few moments, it was no longer unbearable. We were clearly getting a bit too familiar with the smell of rot.
Whatever Cocco saw down there, it merely made him shrug and say, “Un bel niente.”
“He says there is nothing,” translated Umberto, frowning.
“Well, what the hell did he expect?” sn
eered Janice. “A neon sign saying, grave robbers this way?”
Her comment made me cringe, and when I saw the provoking glare she shot Cocco, I was sure he would jump right over the hole in the floor and take her, once again, by the throat.
But he didn’t. Instead he looked at her in an uncanny, calculating way, and I suddenly understood that my clever sister had been feeling him out from the very beginning, trying to figure out how to bait and hook him. Why? Because he was our only ride out of there.
“Dai, dai!” was all he said, gesturing at his men to jump into the hole one after the other. Judging from the way they all braced themselves before doing so, and from the faint yelps coming from below as they hit the floor of the other cave, the drop was big enough to be a challenge, if not quite big enough to justify a rope.
When it became our turn, Janice stepped forward immediately, probably to demonstrate to Cocco that we were not afraid. And when he held out a hand to help her—maybe for the first time in his career—she spat in his palm before pushing off and disappearing through the hole. Amazingly, all he did was bare his teeth in a smile and say something to Umberto that I was happy not to understand.
Seeing that Janice was already waving at me from the cave below, and that the drop was no more than eight or nine feet, I, too, let myself fall into the forest of arms waiting to receive me. As they caught me and put me down on the floor, however, one of the men seemed to think he had now earned the right to grope me, and I struggled in vain to fight him off.
Laughing, he caught both my wrists and tried to engage the others in the fun, but just as I was beginning to panic, Janice came blasting to my rescue, cutting through the hands and arms and positioning herself between the men and me.
“You want some fun?” she asked them, her grimace one of disgust. “Is that what you want? Huh? Then why don’t you have some fun with me—” She started ripping open her own shirt with such fury that the men barely knew what to do. Transfixed by the sight of her bra they all started backing away, except the guy who had started it all. Still smirking, he reached out brazenly to touch her breasts, but was stopped by an earsplitting burst of gunshots that had us all jump with fear and bewilderment.
A split-second later, a rattling shower of crumbling sandstone threw everyone down on the floor, and as my head hit the ground and my mouth and nostrils filled with dirt, I had a dizzying flashback to choking on tear gas in Rome and thinking I was going to die. For several minutes I was coughing so hard I nearly threw up, and I was not the only one. All around me, the men were down for the count, and so was Janice. The only consolation was that the floor of the cave was not hard at all, but oddly springy; had it been solid rock it might have knocked me out.
Eventually looking up through a haze of dust, I saw Cocco standing there, submachine gun in hand, waiting to see if anyone else felt like having fun. But no one did. It seemed his warning salvo had sent a vibration through the cave that had made parts of the ceiling fall down, and the men were too busy brushing rubble from their hair and clothes to challenge his resolve.
Apparently satisfied with the effect, Cocco pointed two fingers at Janice and said, in a tone no one could ignore, “La stronza è mia!” Not entirely sure what a stronza was, I was nevertheless fairly certain of the general message: No one was to ravage my sister, except him.
Getting back on my feet I noticed that I was trembling all over, unable to control my nerves. And when Janice came up to me, throwing her arms around my neck, I could feel her shaking, too.
“You’re crazy,” I said, squeezing her hard. “These guys are not like the dupes you usually operate. Evil doesn’t come with a manual.”
Janice snorted. “All men come with a manual. Just give me time. Little Cocco-nut is going to fly us out of here first class.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” I muttered, watching as the men lowered a very nervous Friar Lorenzo from the cave above. “I think our lives are pretty cheap to these people.”
“Then why,” said Janice, disentangling herself, “don’t you just lie down and die right now? It’s much easier that way, right?”
“I’m just trying to be rational—” I began, but she wouldn’t let me go on.
“You’ve never done a rational thing in your life!” She closed her ripped shirt with a tight knot. “Why start now?”
As she stomped away from me, I very nearly did sit down and give up. To think it was all my own doing—this whole nightmare of a treasure hunt—and that it could have been avoided, had I trusted Alessandro and not run away from Castello Salimbeni the way I did. If only I had stayed where I was, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, and, most important, doing nothing, I might still have been there now, once again asleep in my canopy bed with his arms around me.
But my destiny had demanded otherwise. And so here I was instead, in the bowels of nowhere, filthy beyond recognition and watching passively while a homicidal freak with a submachine gun was screaming at my father and my sister to tell him where to go next in this cave with no exits.
Knowing very well that I couldn’t just stand there doing nothing when they so desperately needed my help, I reached down to pick up a flashlight that had been dropped on the floor. Only then did I notice something sticking out of the dirt right in front of me. In the pale light of the beam it looked like a large, cracked seashell but, obviously, it couldn’t be. The ocean was nearly fifty miles away. I knelt down to take a closer look, and my pulse quickened when I realized that I was looking at part of a human skull.
After the initial fright, I was surprised the discovery did not upset me more than it did. But then, I thought, considering Mom’s directions, the sight of human remains was merely to be expected; we were, after all, looking for a grave. And so I began digging into the porous floor with my hands to see if the rest of the skeleton was there, and it did not take me long to determine that, indeed, it was. But it was not alone.
Right beneath the surface—a mix of earth and ashes, by the feel of it—the bottom of the cave was filled with tightly packed, randomly interlocking human bones.
[ IX.III ]
A grave? O no, a lantern, slaughter’d youth.
For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes
This vault a feasting presence, full of light
…
MY MACABRE DISCOVERY HAD everyone recoiling in revulsion, and Janice nearly threw up when she saw what I had found.
“Oh, my God!” she gagged. “It’s a mass grave!” Stumbling backwards, she pressed her sleeve tightly against her mouth and nose. “Of all the disgusting places—we’re in a plague pit! Full of microbes. We’re all going to die!”
Her panic sent a ripple of fear through the men as well, and Cocco had to yell at the top of his lungs to calm everybody down. The only one who did not appear too frazzled was Friar Lorenzo, who merely bent his head and started praying, presumably for the souls of the departed, of whom—depending on the actual depth of the cave—there must be hundreds, if not thousands.
But Cocco was in no mood for prayers. Forcing the monk aside with the butt of his gun, he pointed straight at me and barked something nasty.
“He wants to know where to go from here,” Umberto translated, his voice a calm counterweight to Cocco’s hysteria. “He says you told him Giulietta was buried in this cave.”
“I didn’t say that—” I protested, knowing full well that it was precisely what I had said. “Mom says … go through the door, and here lies Juliet.”
“Where door?” Cocco wanted to know, glaring demonstratively this way and that. “Me, I see no door!”
“You know,” I lied, “the door that is here. Somewhere.”
Cocco rolled his eyes and growled something dismissive before stomping off.
“He doesn’t believe it,” said Umberto, grimly. “He thinks you set him up. Now he is going to talk to Friar Lorenzo.”
Janice and I watched with growing alarm as the men surrounded the monk and started bombarding him with question
s. Dumbstruck with fear, he tried to listen to them all at once, but after a while he simply closed his eyes and covered his ears.
“Stupido!” sneered Cocco, reaching out for the old man.
“No!” exclaimed Janice, rushing forward and grabbing Cocco by the elbow to prevent him from hurting Friar Lorenzo. “Let me try! Please!”
For a few chilling seconds, it looked as if my sister had overestimated her own power over the crook. Judging by the way Cocco stared at his own elbow—still with her hands wrapped around it—he could barely fathom that she had actually had the gall to restrain him.
Probably realizing her own mistake, Janice quickly let go of Cocco’s arm and dropped to her knees to hug his legs in submission, and after another few baffled moments Cocco finally threw up his hands with a grin and said something to his comrades that sounded like, Women! What is a man to do?
And so, thanks to Janice, we were allowed to talk to Friar Lorenzo without interference, while Cocco and his men fired up a pack of cigarettes and started kicking around a human skull as if it were a soccer ball.
Positioning ourselves so that Friar Lorenzo couldn’t see their obscene game, we asked him—through Umberto—if he had any idea how to get to Romeo and Giulietta’s grave from where we were. But as soon as he understood the question, the monk gave a brisk answer and shook his head dismissively.
“He says,” translated Umberto, “that he does not want to show these evil men where the grave is. He knows they will desecrate it. And he says he is not afraid of dying.”
“God help us!” muttered Janice under her breath. Then she put a hand on Friar Lorenzo’s arm and said, “We understand. But you see, they will kill us, too. And then they will go back up there, and kidnap more people, and kill them as well. Priests, women, innocent people. It will never end, until someone takes them to that grave.”
Friar Lorenzo pondered Umberto’s translation for a while. Then he pointed at me and asked a question that sounded strangely accusatory.
“He asks if your husband knows where you are,” said Umberto, looking almost bemused despite the circumstances. “He thinks you are very foolish to be here, surrounded by these bad men, when you should be at home, doing your duty.”