Midnight in the Piazza by Tiffany Parks

Author:Tiffany Parks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

Nineteen

APPOINTMENT ON VIA GIULIA

The next morning Beatrice could barely sit still during her lesson. She was both thrilled and petrified at the prospect of lying in wait for a thief and his accomplices.

Ginevra, back to her cool and collected self, was teaching her to conjugate regular verbs. Ordinarily Beatrice would have jumped at the chance to learn something so advanced, but today she had other things on her mind. The unrelenting heat didn’t help. It seemed to get hotter every day, if that were possible.

Once the lesson was finally over, she took a cool shower and had to skip lunch to make her appointment with Marco at a quarter to one. They set off for Via Giulia, crossing Via Arenula, the western boundary of the Ghetto. Beatrice felt a tingle of guilt for leaving the neighborhood against her father’s orders, mixed with a zap of excitement that she was traipsing around Rome on the trail of an international art thief. Could this really be her life?

After a short walk, they reached Via Giulia. The street stretched out before them, long and straight, an unexpected thoroughfare in a city full of narrow, meandering alleys. They walked a ways in silence until Beatrice piped up, “Hey, I forgot to tell you something.”

“What?”

“Well, I was doing a little research the other night, and I read that the Mattei Palace was built directly on top of the ruins of an ancient site, the Theater of Balbus.”

“That’s interesting, I guess. But what does it mean for us?”

“Don’t you see? The ruins are right under the palace! I looked it up in my guidebook, but they’re closed to the public. Caterina’s secret room has got to be down there somewhere.”

Marco’s eyes widened. “Yes! It has to be!”

Beatrice did a double take. He agreed with her—it was a miracle.

“Now it makes sense why she wrote—” He stopped short.

“Why she wrote what?”

“Hang on,” he said, “if the ruins are closed to the public, how are we supposed to get in?”

“Who knows? I had a hard enough time getting into the palace during the public auction viewing. What were you about to say?”

“Nothing important,” he said dismissively. “Even if we did manage to get into the ruins,” he continued, the cynical note creeping back into his voice, “I doubt we’d find anything.”

Beatrice opened her mouth to disagree but Marco yammered on. “And even if the secret room is in the ruins like you say, that doesn’t mean anything’s hidden there. I bet no one’s been down there in centuries.”

A nasty mix of suspicion and outrage gurgled in Beatrice’s belly. She was about to object to his line of reasoning when she noticed the building numbers were now in the 90s. They had to be close, so she decided not to press the point.

The palaces on Via Giulia were colossal, some stretching the entire length of the block. Number 98 was an imposing gray stone structure with a white marble bench running along the length of it. It was just about one o’clock and there was nothing to do but sit and wait.

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