As soon as I recognized him, I was filled by an intense, giddy joy. But before I could share my discovery with Janice, there was an ominous rumble somewhere above us, which rose to a maddening crescendo as one of the pillars supporting the vaulted ceiling came crashing down, right on top of the surviving bandits, slamming them with several tons of stone.
The trembling echoes of the collapsing column spread through the entire web of Bottini caves surrounding us on all sides. It seemed the chaos in the crypt had set off a vibration in the underground that felt very much like an earthquake, and I saw Umberto jumping to his feet, waving at Janice and me to get up, too.
“Come on!” he urged us, looking nervously at the pillars around us. “I don’t think we have much time.”
Scurrying across the floor, we narrowly missed a shower of rubble spilling out of the ruptured ceiling, and when a falling star hit me right on the temple, I very nearly blacked out. Pausing briefly to regain my balance, I saw Alessandro coming towards me, striding over the debris and ignoring the warning remarks from the other police officers. He didn’t say anything, but then, he didn’t have to. His eyes said everything I could ever hope to hear.
I would have walked right into his embrace had I not, just then, heard a faint cry behind me.
“Friar Lorenzo!” I gasped, suddenly realizing that we had forgotten all about the monk. Spinning around, I caught sight of his crouched form somewhere in the middle of the devastation, and before Alessandro could prevent me, I ran back the way I had come, anxious to get to the old man before some flying chunk of masonry beat me to it.
Alessandro would most certainly have stopped me, had not another column come crashing down between us in a cloud of dust, immediately followed by a downpour of crumbled plaster. And this time, the impact of the pillar broke open the floor right next to me, revealing that, beneath the stone tiles, there were no wooden rafters, no slab of concrete, just a big, dark void.
Petrified at the sight, I stopped right there, afraid to go on. Behind me I heard Alessandro yelling at me to come back, but before I could even turn around, the part of the floor on which I was standing began to separate from the surrounding structure. The next thing I knew, the floor was no longer there, and I plunged straight into nothingness, too stunned to scream, feeling as if the very glue of the world had evaporated, and all that was left in this new chaos were bits and pieces, me, and gravity.
How far did I fall? I feel like saying that I fell through time itself, through lives, deaths, and centuries past, but in terms of actual measurement the drop was no more than twenty feet. At least, that is what they say. They also say that, fortunately for me, it was neither rocks nor demons that caught me as I came tumbling into the underworld. It was the ancient river that wakes you from dreams, and which few people have ever been allowed to find.
Her name is Diana.
THEY SAY THAT AS soon as I fell over the edge of the crumbling floor, Alessandro jumped in after me, not even stopping to take off his gear. When he plunged into the cool water he was dragged down by the weight of it all-the vest, the boots, the gun-and it took him a moment to come up for air. Struggling against the swift current, he managed to pull out a flashlight and eventually find my limp body stuck on a protruding rock.
Yelling at the other police officers to hurry, Alessandro had them lower a rope and haul us both back up to the cathedral crypt. Deaf to everybody and everything, he put me down on the floor in the middle of the debris, forced the water from my lungs, and began reviving me.
Standing there, watching his efforts, Janice did not fully understand the seriousness of the situation until she looked up and saw the other men exchanging grim glances. They all knew what Alessandro would not yet accept: that I was dead. Only then did she feel the tears coming, and once they had started, there was no stopping them.
In the end Alessandro gave up trying to revive me and merely held me, as if he would never let go of me again. He stroked my cheek and talked to me, saying things he should have said while I was still alive, not caring who could hear him. At that moment, Janice says, we looked very much like the statue of Romeo and Giulietta, except that my eyes were closed, and Alessandro’s face was torn with grief.
Seeing that even he had lost hope, my sister pulled away from the police officers holding her and ran over to Friar Lorenzo, grabbing the monk by the shoulders.
“Why are you not praying?” she cried, shaking the old man. “Pray to the Virgin Mary, and tell her-” Realizing that he didn’t understand her, Janice stepped away from the monk, looked up at the shattered ceiling, and screamed at the top of her lungs, “Make her live! I know you can do it! Let her live!”
When there was no answer, my sister sank to her knees at last, crying hysterically. And there was not a man in the crowd who dared to touch her.
Just then, Alessandro felt something. It was no more than a quiver, and maybe it was him and not me, but it was enough to give him hope. Cradling my head in his hands he spoke to me again, tenderly at first, then impatiently.
“Look at me!” he begged. “Look at me, Giulietta!”
They say that when I finally heard him, I did not cough, or gasp, or groan. I just opened my eyes and looked at him. And once I began to understand what was going on around me, apparently I smiled and whispered, “Shakespeare won’t like it.”
All this was told to me later; I remember almost none of it. I don’t even remember Friar Lorenzo kneeling down to kiss me on the forehead, or Janice dancing around like a whirling dervish, kissing all the laughing police officers in turn. All I remember are the eyes of the man who had refused to lose me again, and who had wrested me from the clutches of the Bard so we could finally write our own happy end.
X
… and all these woes shall serve
For sweet discourses in our times to come
MAESTRO LIPPI WAS AT A loss to understand why I could not sit still. Here we were at last, he behind an easel and me looking my very best, framed by wildflowers and bathed in the golden light of a late summer sun. All he needed was ten more minutes, and the portrait would be done.
“Please!” he said, waving the palette. “Don’t move!”
“But Maestro,” I protested, “I really, really have to go.”
“Bah!” He disappeared once more behind the canvas. “These things never start on time.”
Behind me, from the monastery on the hilltop, the bells had long since stopped ringing, and when I twisted around to look one more time, I saw a figure in a fluttering dress come running down the sloping lawn towards us.
“Jesus, Jules!” gasped Janice, too out of breath to give me the full brunt of her disapproval. “Someone’s gonna blow a fuse if you don’t get your ass up there right now!”
“I know, but-” I glanced at Maestro Lippi, loath to disrupt his work. After all, Janice and I both owed him our lives.
There was no getting around the fact that our ordeal in the cathedral crypt might have ended very differently, had not the Maestro-in a moment of uncharacteristic clarity-recognized the two of us as we walked across Piazza del Duomo that night, surrounded by musicians and wrapped in contrada flags. He had seen us before we saw him, but as soon as he realized that we were wearing flags from the contrada of the Unicorn-the great rival of our own contrada, the Owl-he had known something was horribly wrong.
Rushing back to his workshop, he had called the police right away. As it turned out, Alessandro was already at the police station, interrogating two ne’er-do-wells from Naples who had tried to kill him and broken their arms in the process.