“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?” sneered 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?”