Since first reading Aunt Rose’s letter, I had entertained many different ideas of what my mother’s treasure might be, and had done my best to temper my expectations in order to avoid disappointment. But in my most unchecked fantasies I would find a magnificent golden box, locked and full of promise, not unlike the treasure chests that pirates dig up on desert islands.
My mother had left me just such a thing. It was a wooden box with golden ornamentation, and while it was not actually locked–there was no lock–the clasp was rusted shut, preventing me from doing much more than merely shaking it gently to try and determine its contents. It was about the size of a small toaster-oven, but surprisingly light, which immediately ruled out the possibility of gold and jewellery. But then, fortunes come in many substances and forms, and I was certainly not one to scoff at the prospect of high denomination paper money.
As we said goodbye, Presidente Maconi kept insisting on calling a taxi for me. But I told him I did not need one; the box fitted very nicely in one of my shopping bags, and Hotel Chiusarelli was, after all, nearby.
‘I would be careful,’ he said, ‘walking around with that. Your mother was always careful.’
‘But who knows I’m here? And that I’ve got this?’
He shrugged. ‘The Salimbenis.’
I stared at him, not sure if he was really serious. ‘Don’t tell me the old family feud is still going on!’
Presidente Maconi looked away, uncomfortable with the subject. ‘A Salimbeni will always be a Salimbeni.’
Walking away from Palazzo Tolomei, I repeated that sentence to myself several times, wondering precisely what it meant. In the end I decided that it was nothing more than what I ought to expect in this place; judging by Eva Maria’s stories about the fierce contrade rivalries in the modern Palio, the old family feuds from the Middle Ages were still going strong, even if the weapons had changed.
Mindful of my own Tolomei heritage, I put a little swagger in my gait as I walked past Palazzo Salimbeni for the second time that day, just to let Alessandro know–should he happen to look out the window at that exact moment–that there was a new sheriff in town.
Just then, as I glanced over my shoulder to see if I had made myself absolutely clear, I noticed a man walking behind me. Somehow he didn’t fit the scene; the street was full of chattering tourists, mothers with strollers, and people in business suits, talking loudly into their mobile phones at some invisible other. This man, by contrast, was wearing a shabby tracksuit and a pair of mirrored sunglasses that did nothing to conceal the fact that he had been looking straight at my bags.
Or was I imagining things? Had Presidente Maconi’s parting words ruffled my nerves? I paused in front of a shop window, hoping very much that the man would pass me and continue on his way. But he didn’t. As soon as I stood still, he paused, too, pretending to look at a poster on a wall.
Now for the first time, I felt the little fleabites of fear, as Janice used to call them, and ran through my options in a couple of deep breaths. But there was really only one thing to do. If I kept walking, the chances were he would eventually sidle up to me and snatch the bags right out of my hand, or, even worse, follow me to see where I was staying, and pay me a visit later.
Humming to myself I entered the store, and as soon as I was inside, I ran up to the clerk and asked if I could leave through the back entrance. Barely looking up from his motorcycle magazine, he simply pointed at a door at the other end of the room.
Ten seconds later I came shooting out into a narrow alley to nearly overturn a row of Vespas parked side by side. I had no idea where I was, but that didn’t matter. The important thing was that I still had my bags.
When the taxi dropped me off back at Hotel Chiusarelli, I would have happily paid anything for the trip. But when I overtipped the driver, he shook his head in protest and gave back most of it.
‘Miss Tolomei!’ Direttore Rossini came towards me with some alarm as soon as I entered the vestibule. ‘Where have you been? Captain Santini was just here. In uniform! What is going on?’
‘Oh!’ I tried to smile. ‘Maybe he came to invite me out for coffee?’
Direttore Rossini glared at me, his eyebrows suspended in a pointed arc of disapproval. ‘I do not think the captain was here with carnal intentions, Miss Tolomei. I very much suggest you call him. Here.’ He handed me a business card as if it was a holy wafer. ‘This is the number of his telephone, there, written on the back, do you see? I suggest’–Direttore Rossini raised his voice as I continued past him down the hall–‘you call him right now!’
It took me about an hour, and several trips to the hotel reception desk, to open my mother’s box. After trying every tool I had, such as the hotel key, my toothbrush, and the telephone receiver, I ran downstairs to borrow tweezers, then nail clippers, then a needle, and finally a screwdriver, only too aware that Direttore Rossini looked less and less friendly every time he saw me.
What finally did the trick was not actually opening the rusty clasp, but unscrewing the entire closing mechanism, which took me quite a while, since the screwdriver I had borrowed was too small. But I was fairly sure Direttore Rossini would explode if I showed up at his reception desk one more time.
Through all those efforts, my hopes and expectations for the contents of the box had grown increasingly more wild, and once I was able to open the lid, I could barely breathe with anticipation. Seeing that it was so light, I had become convinced there was a fragile–and very costly–item in the box, but when I finally looked inside, I realized my mistake.
There was nothing fragile in the box; in fact, there was barely anything at all except paper. Boring paper at that. Not money or stocks or deeds or any other kind of securities, but letters in envelopes and different kinds of texts typed out on sheets that were either stapled together or rolled up with rotting rubber bands. The only actual objects in the box were a notebook with scribbles and doodles, a cheap paperback copy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and an old crucifix on a silver chain.
I inspected the crucifix for a while, wondering if perhaps it was extremely old and somehow valuable. But I doubted it. Even if it was an antique, it was still just made of silver, and as far as I could see, there was nothing special about it.
Same story with the paperback volume of Romeo and Juliet. I flipped through it several times, determined to see its value, but there was nothing about the book that struck me as the least bit promising, not even a single pencil-note in the margin.
The notebook, on the other hand, had some interesting drawings that could, with a bit of goodwill, be interpreted as having something to do with a treasure hunt. Or maybe they were just sketches from trips to museums and sculpture gardens. One sculpture in particular had caught my mother’s eye–if indeed this was her notebook, and these her drawings–and I could see why. It represented a man and a woman; the man was kneeling, holding a woman in his arms, and had her eyes not been open, I would have guessed she was asleep or even dead. There were at least twenty different drawings of this sculpture in the notebook, but many of them dwelled on details, such as facial features, and in all honesty, none of them made me any wiser as to why my mother had been so obsessed with it in the first place.
There were also sixteen private letters in the box, sitting on the bottom. Five were from Aunt Rose, begging my mother to give up her ‘silly ideas’ and return home; four were also from Aunt Rose, but they were sent later, and my mother had never opened them. The rest were in Italian, sent to my mother from people I did not know.
At this point, there was nothing left in the box except the many typewritten documents. Some were creased and faded, others were newer and more crisp; most were in English, but one was in Italian. None of them appeared to be originals,