“No-no-no!” scolded Alessandro, crossing the floor and taking the rapier right out of the boy’s hand. But instead of putting the weapon back on the wall, as any responsible adult would do, he merely showed the boy the correct position and gave him the rapier right back. “Tocca a te!”
The weapon went back and forth a few times until finally Alessandro plucked another rapier from the wall and indulged the boy in a play-fight, which only ended when an impatient woman’s voice yelled, “Enrico! Dove sei?”
Within seconds, the weapons were back on the wall, and when Grandmother materialized in the doorway, both Alessandro and the boy were standing innocently with their hands behind their backs.
“Ah!” exclaimed the woman, delighted to see Alessandro and kissing him on both cheeks. “Romeo!”
She said a lot more than that, but I didn’t hear it. If Janice and I had not been standing so close, I might even have sunk to my knees, seeing that my legs had turned to soft-serve ice cream.
Alessandro was Romeo.
Of course he was. How could I have missed that? Was this not the Eagle Museum? Had I not already seen the truth in Malèna’s eyes?… And in his?
“Jesus, Jules,” grimaced Janice, without a sound, “get a grip!”
But there was nothing left for me to get a grip on. Everything I had thought I knew about Alessandro spun before my eyes like numbers on a roulette wheel, and I realized that-in every single conversation with him-I had put all my money on the wrong color.
He was not Paris, he was not Salimbeni, he was not even Nino. He had always been Romeo. Not Romeo the party-crashing playboy with the elf hat, but Romeo the exile, who had been banished long ago by gossip and superstition, and who had spent his whole life trying to become someone else. Romeo, he had said, was his rival. Romeo had evil hands, and people would like to think he was dead. Romeo was not the man I thought I knew; he would never make love to me in rhyming couplets. But then, Romeo was also the man who came to Maestro Lippi’s workshop late at night, to have a glass of wine and contemplate the portrait of Giulietta Tolomei. That, to me, said more than the finest poetry.
Even so, why had he never told me the truth? I had asked him about Romeo again and again, but each and every time he had replied as if we were talking about someone else. Someone it would be very bad for me to know.
I suddenly remembered him showing me the bullet hanging from a leather string around his neck, and Peppo telling me from his hospital bed that everybody thought Romeo had died. And I remembered the expression on Alessandro’s face when Peppo had talked about Romeo being born outside of marriage. Only now did I understand his anger towards my Tolomei family members, who-in their ignorance of his true identity-had taken such pleasure in treating him like a Salimbeni and thus an enemy.
Just like I had.
When everyone had finally left the room-Grandmother and Enrico in one direction, Alessandro in another-Janice took me by the shoulders, eyes blazing. “Would you pull yourself together already!”
But that was asking a lot. “Romeo!” I groaned, clutching my head. “How can he be Romeo? I’m such an idiot!”
“Yes you are, but that’s hardly news.” Janice was not in the mood to be nice. “We don’t know if he is Romeo. The Romeo. Maybe it’s just his middle name. Romeo is a completely common Italian name. And if he really is the Romeo-that doesn’t change anything. He’s still in cahoots with the Salimbenis! He still trashed your friggin’ hotel room!”
I swallowed a few times. “I don’t feel so good.”
“Well, let’s get the hell out of here.” Janice took my hand and pulled me along, thinking she was taking us towards the main entrance of the museum.
Instead, we ended up in a part of the exhibition we had not seen before; it was a dimly lit room with very old and worn cencios on the wall, sealed in glass cabinets. The place had the vibe of an ancestral shrine, and off to one side a curved staircase in darkened stone led steeply into the underground.
“What’s down there?” whispered Janice, stretching to see.
“Forget it!” I shot back, recovering some of my spirit. “We’re not getting trapped in some dungeon!”
But Fortuna clearly favored Janice’s boldness over my jitters, for the next thing I knew we heard voices again-coming at us, it seemed, from all sides-and we nearly fell down the stairs in our hurry to get out of sight. Panting with the fear of discovery we crouched at the bottom of the stairwell as the voices came closer and the footsteps eventually stopped right overhead. “Oh no,” I whispered, before Janice could slap a hand over my mouth, “it’s him!”
We looked at each other, eyes wide. At this point-quite literally squatting, as we were, in Alessandro’s basement-even Janice did not seem to embrace the prospect of a meeting.
Just then, the lights came on around us, and we saw Alessandro starting down the stairs, then stopping. “Ciao, Alessio, come stai-?” we heard him say, greeting someone else, and Janice and I glared at each other, acutely aware that our humiliation had been postponed, if only for a few minutes.
Looking around frantically to assess our options, we could see that we were truly trapped in a subterranean dead end, precisely as I had predicted we would be. Apart from three gaping holes in the wall-the black mouths of what could only be Bottini caves-there was no way of leaving the place other than going back upstairs, past Alessandro. And any attempt at entering the caves was made impossible by black iron grates covering the holes.
But you never say never to a Tolomei. Bristling at the idea of being trapped, we both got up and started examining the grates with trembling fingers. I was mostly trying to figure out if we would be able to squeeze through with brute force, while Janice expertly felt her way around every bolt, every hinge, clearly refusing to believe that the structures could not somehow be opened. To her, every wall had a door, every door had a key; in short, every jam had an eject button. All you had to do was dig in and find it.
“Psst!” She waved at me excitedly, demonstrating that, indeed, the third and last grate did swing open, just like a door, and without the slightest squeak at that. “Come on!”
We went as far into the cave as the lights allowed, then scrambled on a few more feet in absolute darkness, until we finally stopped. “If we had a flashlight-” began Janice. “Oh, shit!” We nearly banged our heads together when suddenly a beam of light came down the entire length of the cave to where we stood, stopping only inches before it hit us, and then retracting, like a wave rolling ashore and back out to sea.
Smarting from the close call, we stumbled farther into the cave until we found something resembling a niche that was big enough to swallow us both. “Is he coming? Is he coming?” hissed Janice, trapped behind me and unable to see. “Is it him?”
I stuck my head out briefly, then pulled it back in. “Yes, yes, and yes!”
It was hard to see anything other than the sharp flashlight bouncing to and fro, but at some point everything stabilized, and I dared to look out again. It was indeed Alessandro-or, I should say, some version of Romeo-and as far as I could see he had stopped in order to unlock a small door in the cave wall, holding the flashlight tightly under one arm.
“What’s he doing?” Janice wanted to know.
“It looks like some kind of safe-he’s taking something out. A box.”
Janice clawed me excitedly. “Maybe it’s the cencio!”
I looked again. “No, it’s too small. More like a cigar box.”
“I knew it! He’s a smoker.”
I watched Alessandro intently as he locked the safe and walked back towards the museum with the box. Moments later, the iron grate fell shut behind him with a clang that echoed through the Bottini-and our ears-for far too long.