Juliet by Anne Fortier Page A

Salimbeni was after.”
    I was dying to know more, but by now Peppo was looking very distressed, almost ill, and he swayed and grabbed my arm for balance. “If I were you,” he went on, “I would be very, very careful. And I would not trust anyone with the name of Salimbeni.” Seeing my expression, he frowned. “You think I am pazzo … crazy? Here we are, standing by the grave of a young woman who died before her time. She was your mother. Who am I to tell you who did this to her, and why?” His grip tightened. “She is dead. Your father is dead. That is all I know. But my old Tolomei heart tells me that you must be careful.”
    …
    WHEN WE WERE SENIORS in high school, Janice and I had both volunteered for the annual play—as it so happened, it was
Romeo and Juliet
. After the tryouts Janice was cast as Juliet, while my role was to be a tree in the Capulet orchard. She, of course, spent more time on her nails than on memorizing the dialogue, and whenever we rehearsed the balcony scene, I would be the one to whisper the first words of her lines to her, being, after all, conveniently located onstage with branches for arms.
    On opening night, however, she was particularly horrible to me—when we sat in makeup, she kept laughing at my brown face and pulling the leaves out of my hair, while she was being dolled up with blond braids and rosy cheeks—and by the time the balcony scene rolled around, I was in no mood to cover for her. In fact, I did quite the opposite. When Romeo said, “what shall I swear by?” I whispered, “three words!”
    And Janice immediately said, “three words, dear Romeo, and good night indeed!” which threw Romeo off completely, and had the scene end in confusion.
    Later, when I was posing as a candelabrum in Juliet’s bedroom, I made Janice wake up next to Romeo and say right off the bat, “hie hence, begone, away!” which did not set a very good tone for the rest of their tender scene. Needless to say, Janice was so furious she chased me through the entire school afterwards, swearing that she was going to shave off my eyebrows. It had been fun at first, but when, in the end, she locked herself in the school bathroom and cried for an hour, even I stopped laughing.
    Long after midnight, when I sat in the living room talking with Aunt Rose, afraid of going to bed and submitting myself to sleep and Janice’s razor, Umberto came in with a glass of vin santo for us both. He did not say anything, just handed us the glasses, and Aunt Rose did not utter a word about my being too young to drink.
    “You like that play?” she said instead. “You seem to know it by heart.”
    “I don’t really like it a whole lot,” I confessed, shrugging and sipping my drink at the same time. “It’s just …
there
, stuck in my head.”
    Aunt Rose nodded slowly, savoring the vin santo. “Your mother was the same way. She knew it by heart. It was … an obsession.”
    I held my breath, not wanting to break her train of thought. I waitedfor another glimpse of my mother, but it never came. Aunt Rose just looked up, frowning, to clear her throat and take another sip of wine. And that was it. That was one of the only things she ever told me about my mother without being prompted, and I never passed it on to Janice. Our mutual obsession with Shakespeare’s play was a little secret I shared with my mother and no one else, just like I never told anyone about my growing fear that, because my mother had died at twenty-five, I would, too.
    AS SOON AS PEPPO dropped me off in front of Hotel Chiusarelli, I went straight to the nearest Internet café and Googled
Luciano Salimbeni
. But it took me several verbal acrobatics to come up with a search combination that yielded anything remotely useful. Only after at least an hour and many, many frustrations with the Italian language, I was fairly confident of the following conclusions:
    One: Luciano Salimbeni was dead.
    Two: Luciano Salimbeni had been a bad guy, possibly