“Oh no!” said Janice.
“Don’t tell me-!” I turned towards her, hoping she would quickly put my worry to rest. But even in the darkness I could see the frightened expression on her face.
“Well, I was wondering why it wasn’t locked before-” she said, defensively.
“But that didn’t stop you, did it!” I snapped. “And now we’re trapped!”
“Where’s your sense of adventure?” Janice always tried to make a virtue out of necessity, but this time she failed to convince even herself. “This is great! I always wanted to go spelunking. It’s gotta come out somewhere, right?” She looked at me, relieving her nerves by taunting me. “Or would wittle Wulietta wather be wescued by Womeo?”
UMBERTO HAD ONCE described the Roman catacombs to us, after we had spent a whole evening plaguing Aunt Rose with questions about Italy and why we couldn’t go. Giving us each a dish towel so we could make ourselves useful while he had his hands in the sink, he had explained how the early Christians had been assembling in secret caves underground in order to hold communion where no one could see them and report their activities to the heathen Emperor. Similarly, these early Christians had defied the Roman tradition of cremation by wrapping their dead in shrouds and bringing them down into the caves, laying the bodies on shelves in the rock wall and performing funerary rites that hinged on the hope of a second coming.
If we were really so keen on going to Italy, Umberto concluded, he would make sure to take us down into those caves first thing and show us all the interesting skeletons.
As Janice and I walked through the Bottini, stumbling in the dark and taking turns at leading the way, Umberto’s ghostly stories came back to me with a vengeance. Here we were-just like the people in his story-scrambling around underground to avoid detection, and like those early Christians, we also did not know exactly when and where we would eventually surface, if at all.
It helped a bit that we had the lighter for Janice’s once-a-week cigarette; every twenty steps or so we would stop and flick it on for a few seconds, just to make sure we were not about to plunge into a bottomless hole or-as Janice at one point whimpered, when the cave wall suddenly turned slimy-walk right into a massive spiderweb.
“Creepy-crawlies,” I said, taking the lighter away from her, “are the least of our concerns. Don’t use up the liquid. We could be spending the night down here.”
We walked for a while in silence-me in front, Janice right behind, mumbling something about spiders liking it humid-until my foot caught on protruding rock and I fell down on the uneven floor, hurting my knees and wrists so badly I could have cried, had I not been so anxious to check that the lighter was still intact.
“Are you okay?” asked Janice, her voice full of fear. “Can you walk? I don’t think I could carry you.”
“I’m fine!” I grunted, smelling blood on my fingers. “Your turn to go first. Here…” I fumbled the lighter into her hands. “Break a leg.”
With Janice in the lead, I was free to fall back and examine my scrapes-both physical and mental-as we inched further into the unknown. My knees were more or less in shreds, but that was nothing compared to the turmoil in my soul.
“Jan?” I touched my fingers to her back as we walked. “Do you think that maybe he didn’t tell me he was Romeo because he wanted me to fall in love with him for the right reasons, not just because of his name?”
I suppose I couldn’t blame her for moaning.
“Okay-” I went on, “so, he didn’t tell me he was Romeo because the last thing he needed was to have some pain-in-the-ass virgitarian cramp his incognito style?”
“Jules!” Janice was so focused on picking her way through the perilous blackness that she had little patience for my speculations. “Would you stop torturing yourself! And me! We don’t even know if he is Romeo. Mind you, even if he is, I’m still gonna turn his ass inside out for treating you like this.”
Despite her angry tone, I was once again astounded to hear her expressing concern for my feelings, and began to wonder if it was something new, or something I just hadn’t noticed before.
“The thing is,” I went on, “he never actually said he was a Salimbeni. It was always me-oops!” I nearly fell again, and clung to Janice until I had regained my balance.
“Let me guess,” she said, flicking on the lighter so I could see her raised eyebrows, “he also never said he had anything to do with the museum break-in?”
“That was Bruno Carrera!” I exclaimed. “Working for Umberto!”
“Oh no, Julie-Baby,” Janice mimicked, not sounding the least bit like Alessandro, “I didn’t steal Romeo’s cencio… why would I do that? To me, it’s just an old rag. But hey, let me take care of that sharp knife for you, so you don’t hurt yourself. What did you call it?… A dagger?”
“It wasn’t like that at all,” I muttered.
“Honey, he lied to you!” She flicked off the lighter at last and started walking again. “The sooner you can get that into your little Julie box, the better. Trust me, this guy has zero feelings for you whatsoever. It’s all just a big charade to get to the-ow!” By the sound of it, she hit her head on something, and once again, we stopped. “What the hell was that?” Janice flicked the lighter to check-she had to try three or four times before it finally came on-only to discover that I was crying.
Shocked by the unusual sight, she put her arms around me with clumsy tenderness. “I’m sorry, Jules. I’m just trying to save you from heartache.”
“I thought I didn’t have a heart?”
“Well”-she gave me a squeeze-“you seem to have grown one lately. Too bad, you were more fun without it.” Jiggling my chin with a sticky hand that still smelled like mocha-vanilla, she finally succeeded in making me laugh, and went on, more generously, “It’s my fault anyway. I should have seen it coming. He drives a goddamn Alfa Romeo for Christ’s sake!”
Had we not stopped right there, in the last, feeble flicker of the dying lighter, we might never have noticed the opening in the cave wall on our left. It was barely a foot and a half wide, but as far as I could see when I knelt down and stuck my head inside, it sloped upwards for at least thirty or forty feet-like an air duct in a pyramid-to end in a tiny seashell pattern of blue sky. I could even convince myself that I heard traffic noise.
“Hail Mary!” exclaimed Janice. “We’re back in business! You go first. Age before beauty.”
The pain and frustration of walking through the dark tunnel was nothing compared to the claustrophobia I felt crawling up the narrow shaft and the torment of scraping along on my raw knees and elbows. For every time I managed to pull myself up half a foot, painfully, by my toes and fingertips, I kept sliding back down several inches.
“Come on!” urged Janice, right behind me. “Let’s get moving!”
“Then why didn’t you go first?” I snapped back. “You’re the fancy-ass rock climber.”
“Here-” She placed a hand underneath my high-heeled sandal. “Push away on this.”
Slowly and agonizingly, we made our way up the shaft, and although it widened considerably at the very top, allowing Janice to crawl up beside me, it was still a revolting place to be.
“Eek!” she said, looking around at the junk that people had tossed in there through the grate. “This is disgusting. Is that… a cheeseburger?”
“Does it have cheese in it?”
“Hey, look!” She picked something up. “It’s a cell phone! Hang on-no, sorry. Out of battery.”
“If you are finished rifling through the garbage, can we move on?”
We elbowed our way through a mess too nasty for words before finally coming up to the vertical, artsy sewer cover separating us from the earth’s surface. “Where are we?” Janice pressed her nose against the bronze filigree, and we both looked out at the legs and feet walking by. “It’s some kind of piazza. But huge.”