The men told Umberto he still owed them something, and that he had to repay them, or they would track down his daughters and do unspeakable things to them. Umberto told them he had no money, but they just laughed at him and reminded him of the statue with the four gemstones that he had promised them a long time ago. When he tried to explain that it was impossible, and that he couldn’t go back to Italy, they just shrugged and said that it was too bad, because now they had to go looking for his daughters. So, in the end, Umberto agreed to try and find the gems, and they gave him three weeks to do it.
Before they left, they wanted to make sure he knew they were serious, and so they took him into the hall and started beating him up. While they were doing that, they knocked over the Venetian vase standing on the table beneath the chandelier, and it fell to the floor and smashed into pieces. The noise woke Aunt Rose from her nap, and she came out of her bedroom and-when she saw what was going on-started screaming from the top of the staircase. One of the men pulled out a gun and was going to shoot her, but Umberto managed to push the gun aside. Unfortunately, Aunt Rose was so frightened she lost her balance and fell halfway down the staircase. When the men had left and Umberto was finally able to get to her, she was already dead.
“Poor Aunt Rose!” I exclaimed. “You told me she died peacefully, in her sleep.”
“Well, I lied,” said Umberto, his voice thick. “The truth is, she died because of me. Would you have liked me to say that?”
“I would have liked,” I replied, “for you to tell us the truth. If you had only done that years ago”-I paused to take a deep breath, my throat still tight with emotion-“perhaps we could have avoided all this.”
“Maybe. But that’s too late now. I didn’t want you to know-I wanted you to be happy… to live the way normal people do.”
Umberto went on to tell us that on the night after Aunt Rose died, he had called Eva Maria in Italy and told her everything. He even told her she had two granddaughters. He also asked her if there was any chance she could help him pay off the thugs. But she told him she could not liquidate that much money in three weeks. At first, she wanted to involve the police and her godson, Alessandro, but Umberto knew better. There was only one way out of this squeeze: Do as the assholes said and find the bloody rocks.
In the end, Eva Maria agreed to help him, and promised that she would try to trick the Lorenzo Brotherhood in Viterbo into helping her. Her only condition was that, when it was all over, she could finally get to know her granddaughters, and that they would never know about their father’s crimes. With this, Umberto agreed. He had never wanted the girls to know about his evil past, and for that reason he did not even want them to know who he really was. He was sure that if they learned he was their father, they would discover everything else, too.
“But that’s ridiculous!” I protested. “If you had told us the truth, we would have understood.”
“Would you?” said Umberto. “I’m not so sure.”
“Well,” Janice cut in, “we’ll never know now, will we?”
Ignoring her comment, Umberto told us that, on the very next day, Eva Maria had gone to Viterbo to talk to Friar Lorenzo, and through this conversation she had found out what was needed in order for the monks to help her find Romeo and Giulietta’s grave. Friar Lorenzo had told her she must host a ceremony to “undo the sins” of the Salimbenis and the Tolomeis, and had promised that, once she had done this, he would take her and the other penitents to the grave, to kneel before the mercy of the Virgin.
The only problem was that Friar Lorenzo was not entirely sure how to find the place. He knew there was a secret entrance somewhere in Siena, and he knew where to go from there, but he didn’t know where exactly that entrance was located. Once, he told Eva Maria, a young woman by the name of Diane Tolomei had visited him and told him she had figured out where the entrance was, but she wouldn’t tell him, because she was afraid the wrong people might find the statue and ruin it.
She had also told him she had found the cencio from 1340, and that she was going to do an experiment. She wanted to have her little girl, Giulietta, lie down on it together with a boy named Romeo, and she very much hoped this would somehow help undo the sins of the past. Friar Lorenzo was not so sure it would really work, but he was ready to give it a try. They agreed that Diane should come back a few weeks later, so they could set out to find the grave together. But sadly, she never came.
When Eva Maria told Umberto all this, he began to hope their plan could really work. For he knew Diane had kept a box of important documents in the bank in Palazzo Tolomei, and he was sure that among the papers would be a clue to the secret entrance to the grave.
“Believe me,” said Umberto, perhaps feeling my bad vibes, “the last thing I wanted was to involve you in all this. But with only two weeks left-”
“And so you set me up,” I concluded, feeling a whole new kind of anger towards him, “and let me think this was all Aunt Rose’s doing.”
“What about me?” Janice chimed in. “He let me think I’d inherited a fortune!”
“Tough shit!” Umberto shot back. “Be happy you’re still alive!”
“I suppose I wasn’t any good in your little scheme,” Janice went on, in her most cranky voice. “Jules was always the brainy one.”
“Oh, would you stop it!” I cried. “I am Giulietta, and I am the one who was in danger-”
“Enough!” barked Umberto. “Trust me, I would have liked nothing more than to keep you both out of this. But there was no other way. So, I had an old pal keep an eye on Julie to make sure she was safe-”
“You mean Bruno?” I gasped. “I thought he was trying to kill me!”
“He was there to protect you,” Umberto contradicted me. “Unfortunately, he thought he could make a quick buck on the side.” He sighed. “Bruno was a mistake.”
“So you had him… silenced?” I wanted to know.
“No need. Bruno knew too much about too many. People like that don’t last long in the clink.” Not at all comfortable with the issue, Umberto went on to conclude that, on the whole, everything had gone according to plan once Eva Maria had been convinced I was really her granddaughter and not just some actress he had hired for the job, to lure her into helping him. She was so suspicious she even had Alessandro break into my hotel room to get a DNA sample. But once she had the proof she wanted, she immediately set about planning the party.
Remembering everything Friar Lorenzo had told her, Eva Maria asked Alessandro to bring Romeo’s dagger and Giulietta’s ring to Castello Salimbeni, but she didn’t tell him why. She knew that if he had the smallest inkling of what was going on, he would ruin everything by bringing in the Carabinieri. In fact, Eva Maria would have liked nothing more than to keep her godson out of her plans entirely, but since he was, in fact, Romeo Marescotti, she needed him to-unwittingly-play his part in front of Friar Lorenzo.
In hindsight, admitted Umberto, it would have been better if Eva Maria had let me in on her plans, or at least part of them. But that was only because things went wrong. If I had done what I was supposed to do-drink her wine, go to bed, and fall asleep-everything would have been so smooth.
“Wait!” I said. “Are you saying she drugged me?”
Umberto hesitated. “Just a little bit. For your own safety.”
“I can’t believe it! She is my grandmother!”
“If it’s any consolation, she wasn’t happy about it. But I told her it was the only way we could avoid getting you involved. You and Alessandro. Unfortunately, it looks like he didn’t drink it either.”