Hoping very much to blend in with the general student population, I entered through the door that the bookseller had described to me, and headed straight for the basement. Perhaps because it was still siesta-or perhaps because no one was around during the summer-I was able to get downstairs without meeting a single person; the whole place was blissfully cool and quiet. It was almost too easy.
With nothing but the index card to guide me, I walked through the archive several times, trying in vain to find the appropriate shelves. It was a separate collection, the bookseller had explained, and even back then, people had rarely used it. I had to find the remotest part of the archive, but this instruction was complicated by the fact that every part of the archive seemed remote to me. Furthermore, the shelves I was looking at did not have drawers; they were regular shelves with books, not artifacts. And there was no book labeled K 3-17b.
After walking around for at least twenty minutes, it finally occurred to me to try a door at the far end of the room. It was a sealed metal door, almost like the door to a bank vault, but it opened without a problem, revealing yet another-smaller-room with some sort of climate control that made the air smell very different, like chocolate chip mothballs.
Now, finally, my index card made sense. These shelves were indeed full of drawers, exactly the way the bookseller had described. And the collection was organized chronologically, starting in Etruscan times and ending-I guessed-at the year my father died. It was quite obvious that nobody ever used it, for there was a thick layer of dust everywhere, and when I tried to move the rolling ladder it resisted at first, because the metal wheels had rusted to the floor. When it finally moved, squealing in protest, it left behind little brown imprints on the gray linoleum.
I positioned the ladder by the shelf labeled K, and climbed up to take a closer look at row number 3, which consisted of a couple dozen medium-size drawers, all perfectly out of reach and out of mind, unless you had a ladder and knew precisely what you were looking for. At first, it felt as if drawer number 17b was locked, and only after I knocked on it with my fist several times did it come loose and allow me to pull it open. In all likelihood, no one else had opened that drawer since my father closed it decades ago.
Inside, I found a large package wrapped in airtight, brown plastic. Poking gently at it, I could feel that it contained some kind of spongy fabric, almost like a bag of foam from a textile store. Mystified, I took the package out of the drawer, climbed back down the ladder, and sat down on the bottom step to inspect my findings.
Rather than ripping open the whole thing, I stuck a fingernail into the plastic and made a small hole. As soon as the air seal was broken, the bag seemed to take a deep breath, and a corner of faded blue fabric peeked out. Making the hole a little bigger, I felt the fabric with my fingers. I was no expert, but I suspected it was silk and-despite its fine condition-very, very old.
Knowing full well that I was exposing something delicate to air and light at once, I eased the fabric out of the plastic and began unfolding it in my lap. When I did so, an object fell out and hit the linoleum floor with a metallic clang.
It was a large knife in a golden sheath, which had been hidden within the folds of the silk. As I picked it up, I noticed it had an eagle engraved on the hilt.
Sitting there, weighing this unexpected treasure in my hand, I suddenly heard a noise from the other part of the archive. Only too aware that I was trespassing in a facility that undoubtedly held many irreplaceable treasures, I rose with a guilty gasp and bundled up my loot as best I could. The last thing I wanted was to be discovered in the fancy, climate-controlled vault with canary feathers sticking out of my mouth.
As silently as possible, I slipped back into the main library, pulling the metal door almost shut behind me. Crouching behind the last row of bookcases, I listened intently. But the only sound I could hear was my own unsteady breath. All I had to do was to walk over to those stairs and leave the building as casually as I had entered it.
I was wrong. No sooner had I made the decision to move than I heard the sound of footsteps; not the footsteps of a librarian returning from siesta or a student looking for a book, but the ominous footsteps of someone who did not want me to hear him coming, someone whose errand in the archive was even more dubious than mine. Peeking out through the shelves I saw him coming my way-and yes, it was the same old scum who had followed me the night before-slithering from bookcase to bookcase, his eyes fixed on the metal door to the vault. But this time, he was carrying a gun.
It was only a matter of seconds before he would come to the place where I was hiding. Almost sick with fear, I wormed my way along the bookcase until I reached the far end of it. Here, a narrow aisle went along the wall all the way up to the librarian’s desk, and I tiptoed as far as I dared before drawing in my stomach and leaning against the narrow end piece of a bookcase, hoping very much to be exactly out of sight when the thug walked past me in the aisle at the other end.
As I stood there, too afraid to breathe, I had to fight the urge to run like hell. Forcing myself to stay absolutely still, I waited for a few extra seconds before I finally dared to stretch and look, and saw him slipping silently into the vault.
Peeling off my shoes with trembling fingers, I scurried all the way up the aisle, turned the corner by the librarian’s desk, and continued up the stairs three steps at a time without even pausing to look behind me.
Not until I was far away from the university premises and safely up some obscure little street did I dare to slow down and feel a kind of relief. But it was not a lasting feeling. In all likelihood, this was the guy who had trashed my hotel room, and the only upside to that was that I had not been asleep in my bed when he came.
PEPPO TOLOMEI WAS almost as surprised to see me as I was to find myself back so soon at the Owl Museum. “Giulietta!” he exclaimed, putting down a trophy and rag, “What is wrong? And what is that?”
We both looked at the messy bundle in my arms. “I have no idea,” I confessed. “But I think it belonged to my father.”
“Here-” He cleared a space on the table for me, and I put down the blue silk very gently, thus revealing the knife nested within.
“Do you have any idea,” I said, picking up the knife, “where this came from?”
But Peppo was not looking at the knife. Instead, he began unfolding the silk with reverent hands. Once it was spread out in its entirety, he took a step backwards, overwhelmed, and crossed himself. “Where on earth,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper, “did you find this?”
“Um… it was in my father’s collection at the university. It was wrapped around the knife. I didn’t realize it was something special.”
Peppo looked at me in surprise. “You don’t know what this is?”
I looked more closely at the blue silk. It was much longer than it was wide, almost like a banner, and a female figure had been painted on it, her hair bound by a halo and her hands raised in a blessing. Time had faded her colors, but the enchantment was still there. Even a philistine like myself could see that it was a picture of the Virgin Mary. “It’s a religious flag?”
“This,” said Peppo, straightening in respect, “is a cencio, the grand prize of the Palio. But it is very old. See the Roman numbers down in the corner? That is the year.” He leaned in once again to verify the numerals. “Yes! Santa Maria!” He turned towards me, eyes glowing. “Not only is this an antique cencio, it is the most legendary cencio there ever was! Everyone thought it was lost forever. But here it is! It is the cencio from the Palio of 1340. A great treasure! It was lined with little tails of… I don’t know the word in English. Look”-he pointed at the ragged edges of the fabric-“they were here and here. Not squirrels. Special squirrels. But now they are gone.”