“Talking to some guy,” said Janice, stretching. “Some guy with a yellow flag. What’s up with the flag thing? Everybody has a flag here-”
Moments later, we were once again on the prowl, slithering along shopwindows and doorways to avoid detection, following our prey all the way down the road, past the Campo, and up towards Piazza Postierla. He had already stopped several times to greet people going the other way, but as the road became steeper, the number of friends increased.
“Honestly!” exclaimed Janice, when Alessandro stopped yet again to goochi-gooch a baby in a stroller. “Is this guy running for friggin’ mayor?”
“It’s called interhuman relationships,” I muttered, “you should try it.”
Janice rolled her eyes. “Why, listen to the social butterfly!”
I was brewing a retort when we both realized our target had disappeared.
“Oh no!” gasped Janice. “Where did he go?”
We hurried up to where we had last seen Alessandro before he vanished-practically across the street from Luigi’s hair salon-and here we discovered the entrance to the tiniest, darkest alley in all of Siena.
“Can you see him?” I whispered, hiding behind Janice.
“No, but it’s the only place he could have gone.” She took my hand and pulled me along. “Come!”
As we tiptoed down the covered alley, I could not help giggling. Here we were, sneaking around hand in hand the way we used to when we were children. Janice glanced at me sternly, worried about the noise, but when she saw the laughter in my face, she softened and started giggling, too.
“I can’t believe we are doing this!” I whispered. “It’s embarrassing!”
“Shh!” she hissed, “I think this is a bad neighborhood.” She nodded at the graffiti on one of the walls. “What’s a galleggiante? Sounds pretty obscene. And what the hell happened in ’92?”
At the bottom, the alley turned a sharp right, and we stood for a moment at the corner, listening for disappearing footsteps. Janice even stuck out her head to assess the situation, but she pulled it back again very quickly.
“Did he see you?” I whispered.
Janice drew in air. “Come!” She grabbed me by the arm and pulled me around the corner before I could protest. Fortunately, there was no sign of Alessandro, and we scampered on in nervous silence, until we suddenly caught sight of people guarding a horse at the far end of the narrow alley.
“Stop!” I pushed Janice up against a wall, hoping no one had spotted us. “This is no good. Those guys-”
“What are you dong?” Janice pushed away from the wall and continued down the alley towards the horse and its handlers. Seeing that, thankfully, Alessandro was not among them, I ran after her, pulling at her arm to make her stop.
“Are you crazy!” I hissed. “That’s gotta be a horse for the Palio, and those guys don’t want tourists running around-”
“Oh, I’m not a tourist,” said Janice, shaking off my hands and walking on, “I’m a journalist.”
“No! Jan! Wait!”
As she approached the men guarding the horse, I was filled with a strange mix of admiration and the desire to kill her. The last time I had felt quite like this was in ninth grade, when she had spontaneously picked up the phone and dialed the number of a boy in our class, merely because I had said I liked him.
Just then, someone opened a pair of shutters right above us and, as soon as I realized that it was Alessandro, I sprang back against the wall, pulling Janice with me, desperate that he shouldn’t see us there, sniffing around in his neighborhood like lovesick teenagers.
“Don’t look!” I hissed, still shell-shocked from the near miss. “I think he lives up there, on the third floor. Mission accomplished. Case closed. Time to go.”
“What do you mean, mission accomplished?” Janice leaned back to look up at Alessandro’s window, eyes gleaming. “We came here to find out what he’s up to. I say we stick around.” She tried the nearest door, and when it opened without a problem, she wiggled her eyebrows and stepped inside. “Come on!”
“Are you out of your mind?” I eyed the men nervously. They were all staring at us, clearly wondering who we were and what we were up to. “I am not setting foot in that building! That’s where he lives!”
“Fine by me.” Janice shrugged. “Stay here and loiter. I’m sure they won’t mind.”
AS IT TURNED OUT, we were not in a stairway. Walking along in the semidarkness behind Janice, I had been afraid she would race me all the way to the third floor, determined to kick in Alessandro’s door and bombard him with questions. But seeing that there were no stairs, I gradually started relaxing.
At the end of the long corridor a door was ajar, and we both stretched to see what was on the other side.
“Flags!” observed Janice, clearly disappointed. “More flags. Someone has a thing with yellow around here. And birds.”
“It’s a museum,” I said, spotting a few cencios hanging on the walls. “A contrada museum, just like Peppo’s. I wonder-”
“Cool!” Janice pushed open the door before I could protest. “Let’s see it. You always liked dusty old junk.”
“No! Please don’t-” I tried to hold her back, but she shook off my hand and walked boldly into the room. “Come back here! Jan!”
“What kind of man,” she mused, looking around at the displayed artifacts, “lives in a museum? It’s kind of creepy.”
“Not in,” I corrected her. “On top. And it’s not as if they have mummies here.”
“How do you know?” She tipped open the visor on a suit of armor, just to check. “Maybe they have horse-mummies. Maybe this is where they have those secret blood rituals and conjure the spirits of the dead.”
“Yeah.” I threw her a hairy eyeball from behind the door. “Thanks for getting to the bottom of that when you had the chance.”
“Hey!” She all but gave me the finger. “Peppo didn’t know any more than that, okay!”
I stood and watched her as she tiptoed around for another minute or so, pretending to be interested in the exhibition. We both knew she was only doing it to irritate me. “Okay,” I finally said, “have you seen enough flags now?” But instead of answering, Janice simply walked through a door into another room, leaving me to stand there, half hiding, all by myself.
It took me a while to find her; she was walking around in a tiny chapel with candles burning on the altar and magnificent oil paintings on every wall. “Wow!” she said when I joined her. “How would you like this for a living room? What do they do in here? Read entrails?”
“I hope they read yours! Do you mind if we leave now?”
But before she could give me a cheeky answer, we both heard footsteps. Nearly tripping over each other’s feet in our panic, we scrambled to get out of the chapel and find a place to hide in the next room.
“In here!” I pulled Janice into a corner behind a glass cabinet with beat-up riding helmets, and five seconds later an elderly woman walked right past us with an armful of folded-up yellow clothes. Behind her came a boy of eight or so, hands in his pockets, a scowl on his face. Though the woman walked straight through the room, unfortunately the boy stopped ten feet from the place where we were hiding, to look at antique swords on the wall.
Janice made a face, but neither of us dared to move an inch, let alone whisper, as we crouched in the corner like textbook evildoers. Luckily for us, the boy was too focused on his own mischief to pay much attention to anything else. Making sure his grandmother was good and gone, he stretched to lift a rapier off its hooks on the wall, and to assume a couple of fencing positions that were not half bad. He was so engrossed in his illicit project that he did not even hear someone else entering the room until it was too late.