Juliet. Anne Fortier
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it occurred to her. But she had been wise enough never to take Janice and me at the same time. Only once did we end up in the salon chairs side by side, and as we sat there, pulling faces at each other in the big mirrors, the old barber had held up our ponytails and said, ‘Look! This one has bear-hair and the other has princess-hair.’
Aunt Rose had not replied. She had just sat there, silently, and waited for him to finish. Once he was finished, she had paid him and thanked him in that clipped voice of hers. Then she had hauled us both out the door as if it were we, and not the barber, who had misbehaved. Ever since that day, Janice had never missed an opportunity to compliment me on my beary, beary lovely hair.
The memory nearly made me cry. Here I was, all dolled up, while Aunt Rose was in a place where she could no longer appreciate that I had finally stepped out of my macramé cocoon. It would have made her so happy to see me like this–just once–but I had been too busy making sure Janice never did.
Presidente Maconi was a courtly man in his sixties, dressed in a subdued suit and tie and astoundingly successful in combing the long hairs from one side of his head across the crown to the other. As a result, he carried himself with rigid dignity, but there was genuine warmth in his eyes that instantly put me at ease.
‘Miss Tolomei?’ He came across the floor of the bank to shake my hand heartily, as if we were old friends. ‘This is an unexpected delight.’
As we walked together up the stairs, Presidente Maconi went on to apologize in flawless English for the uneven walls and warped floors. Even the most modern interior design, he explained with a smile, was helpless against a building that was almost eight hundred years old.
After a day of constant language malfunctions it was a relief to finally meet someone fluent in my own tongue. A touch of a British accent suggested that Presidente Maconi had lived in England for a while–perhaps he had gone to school there–which might explain why my mother had chosen him as her financial advisor in the first place.
His office was on the top floor, and from the mullioned windows he had a perfect view of the church of San Cristoforo and several other spectacular buildings in the neighbourhood. Stepping forward, however, I nearly stumbled over a plastic bucket sitting in the middle of a large Persian rug and, after checking that my health was intact, Presidente Maconi very carefully placed the bucket precisely where it had stood before I kicked it.
‘There is a leak in the roof,’ he explained, looking up at the cracked plaster ceiling, ‘but we cannot find it. It is very strange–even when it is not raining, water comes dripping down.’ He shrugged and motioned for me to sit down on one of two artfully carved mahogany chairs facing his desk. ‘The old president used to say that the building was crying. He knew your father, by the way.’
Sitting down behind the desk, Presidente Maconi leaned back as far as the leather chair would allow and put his fingertips together. ‘So, Miss Tolomei, how may I help you?’
For some reason, the question took me by surprise. I had been so focused on getting here in the first place, I had given little thought to the next step. I suppose the Francesco Maconi who had until now lived quite comfortably in my imagination knew very well that I had come for my mother’s treasure, and he had been waiting impatiently these many, many years to finally hand it over to its rightful heir.
The real Francesco Maconi, however, was not that accommodating. I started explaining why I had come, and he listened to me in silence, nodding occasionally. When I eventually stopped talking, he looked at me pensively, his face betraying no conclusion either way.
‘And so I was wondering,’ I went on, realizing that I had forgotten the most important part, ‘if you could take me to her safety deposit box?’
I took the key out of my handbag and put it on his desk, but Presidente Maconi merely glanced at it. After a moment’s awkward silence he got up and walked over to a window, hands behind his back, and looked out over the roofs of Siena with a frown.
‘Your mother,’ he finally said, ‘was a wise woman. And when God takes the wise to heaven, he leaves their wisdom behind, for us on earth. Their spirits live on, flying around us silently, like owls, with eyes that see in the night, when you and I see only darkness.’ He paused to test a leaded pane that was coming loose. ‘In some ways, the owl would be a fitting symbol for all of Siena, not just for our contrada.’
‘Because…all people in Siena are wise?’ I proposed, not entirely sure what he was getting at.
‘Because the owl has an ancient ancestor. To the Greeks, she was the goddess Athena. A virgin, but also a warrior. The Romans called her Minerva. In Roman times, there was a temple for her here in Siena. This is why it was always in our hearts to love the Virgin Mary, even in the ancient times, before Christ was born. To us, she was always here.’
‘Presidente Maconi…’
‘Miss Tolomei.’ He turned to face me at last. ‘I am trying to work out what your mother would have liked me to do. You are asking me to give you something that caused her a lot of grief. Would she really want me to let you have it?’ He attempted a smile. ‘But then, it is not my decision, is it? She left it here–she did not destroy it–so she must have wanted me to pass it on to you, or to someone. The question is: are you sure you want it?’
In the silence following his words, we both heard it clearly: the sound of a drop of water falling into the plastic bucket on a perfectly sunny day.
After summoning a second key-holder, the sombre Signor Virgilio, Presidente Maconi took me down a separate staircase–a spiral of ancient stone that must have been there since the palazzo was first built–into the deepest caverns of the bank. Now for the first time I became aware that there was a whole other world underneath Siena; a world of caves and shadows that stood in sharp contrast to the world of light above.
‘Welcome to the Bottini,’ said Presidente Maconi as we walked through a grotto-like passageway. ‘This is the old underground aqueduct that was built a thousand years ago to lead water into the city of Siena. This is all sandstone, and even with the primitive tools they had back then, Sienese engineers were able to dig a vast network of tunnels that fed fresh water to public fountains and even into the basement of some private houses. Now of course, it is no longer used.’
‘But people go down here anyway?’ I asked, touching the rough sandstone wall.
‘Oh, no!’ Presidente Maconi was amused by my naïveté. ‘It is a dangerous place to be. You can easily get lost. Nobody knows all the Bottini. There are stories, many stories, about secret tunnels from here to there, but we don’t want people running around exploring them. The sandstone is porous, you see. It crumbles. And all of Siena is sitting on top.’
I pulled back my hand. ‘But this wall is…fortified?’
Presidente Maconi looked a bit sheepish. ‘No.’
‘But it’s a bank. That seems…dangerous.’
‘Once someone tried to break in,’ he replied, eyebrows up in disapproval. ‘Once. They dug a tunnel. It took them months.’
‘Did they succeed?’
Presidente Maconi pointed at a security camera mounted high in an obscure corner. ‘When the alarm went off, they escaped through the tunnel, but at least they didn’t steal anything.’
‘Who were they?’ I asked. ‘Did you ever find out?’
He shrugged. ‘Some gangsters from Napoli. They never came back.’
When we finally arrived at the vault, Presidente Maconi and Signor Virgilio both had to swipe their key cards for the massive door to open.
‘See?’–Presidente Maconi was proud of the feature–‘not even the president can open this vault on his own. As they say, absolute power corrupts absolutely.’
Inside the vault, safety deposit boxes covered every wall from floor to ceiling. Most of them were small, but