The Good Left Undone(11)

“No.”

“Good.” She nodded. “If we are to find the treasure, no one must know we are looking for it.”

“I understand.” Silvio never knew which part of the time he spent with Domenica Cabrelli was make-believe and which part was actual fact. Was there a treasure? Who were the “no ones” exactly? Silvio had no idea.

Domenica rolled up the map and, using it to point, picked a spot on a dune at the far end of the beach. “Follow me.” She began to trudge up the long beach in the direction of Pineta di Ponente. “The fate of all things rests upon us.”

“How could that be true?” Silvio walked beside her.

“Because it does.”

“But the fate of all things? You’re not the Creator.” They had studied God’s will in catechism in preparation for the sacrament of confirmation. Silvio noticed that Domenica was often inspired to act in real life in direct opposition to whatever dogma they had been learning in school.

“Didn’t Don Fernando tell us that we were authorized to baptize someone who needed the sacrament if no priest were available?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t make you a priest.”

“He gave us permission to baptize the unchristened. We are holy enough to do it! A sacrament is an outward sign of inward grace. Everyone has inward grace. Even me. Even you.”

“I wouldn’t baptize anyone. I would run for the priest. The nuns taught us to get a priest. You have to do it over again if there’s no priest.”

“Listen to the good nuns of San Paolino, but don’t believe everything they tell you.”

“Says who?”

“Papa. I wasn’t supposed to be listening, but I heard him say it to my mother, so it must be true.”

Silvio didn’t have a father, so he was at a disadvantage to counter the point. There were times he wished he could say, My papa said, just to challenge her.

“When my parents whisper, I make sure I’m close enough to hear what they’re saying. I watch them when they divide the purse and pay attention when they discuss the priest. I stay inside when they have company and stay close to Papa when he talks to customers in the shop. When we have company, the guests always bring lemons or tomatoes, but they also bring stories from Lucca. You cannot believe what goes on there. There’s the man who brings pigs’ feet from Lazio. He knows where the money in the poor box at San Sebastiano goes. And there’s Signora Vanucci, who gives my mother sugar when she has extra, but she is also looking for business. Signora has so many stories.”

“The matchmaker?”

“That’s her! She marries off nice men with clubfeet to women who are past the age of courting and won’t get asked for their hand in marriage otherwise. But I wouldn’t know that if I didn’t listen to her long stories. She told Mama if she were young, she would not be a matchmaker. She would seek her fortune and make it her life’s work to hunt for buried treasure. That’s how I found out about the loot from Capri.” Domenica made a circle in the air with the map. “Signora Vanucci found the story had some truth to it. That’s good enough for me.”

“What if we don’t find it?”

“We’ll find it.”

“Don’t you worry someone else got to it first?”

“Anyone who finds treasure brags about it.”

Silvio wondered how Domenica knew things for certain. “I haven’t heard a word about the treasure, so maybe—” he reasoned aloud.

“Because it hasn’t been found! There’s your proof!” Domenica was impatient and couldn’t get the words out fast enough to explain the urgency of this mission to her friend. “When the pearls and the diamonds were stolen on Capri by pirates before the Great War, first they went to Sardinia to hide them. Then Ischia. Then Elba. They stopped in Ustica. Corsica. Finally they came ashore right here, on this beach. They hid the jewels here. It’s for certain. Many people in Viareggio saw the pirates come and go. When they left, the pirates got back on their ship to sail to Greece to steal more, but they were all killed off the coast of Malta in a bloody battle unlike any the people there had ever seen! Throats were slashed! Brains were bludgeoned! The priest lost both arms!”

“All right, all right.” Silvio wiped the sweat from his face on his sleeve.

“But the treasure survived! Because it’s here. Hidden in Viareggio, the best place to hide what must not be found except by the people doing the hiding because we have the dunes, the forests, the canals, the marble mountains! Trails and paths and secret roads that lead to grottoes! Don’t forget. Napoleon himself put his sister here and no one knew!”

“Princess Borghese of Tuscany. My great-grandfather groomed her horse.”

“Okay, so the locals knew. It doesn’t matter,” Domenica assured him. “The law says, if the missing treasure is not claimed by the owners within three years, whomever finds the lost treasure on Italian soil owns it outright. That could be us. It will be us!”

“But this beach goes on for miles. There are hundreds of coves,” Silvio complained. “The dunes have two sides, like the mountains. They could have buried it anywhere. And what if they escaped into the forest or up into the Alpi Apuane? What if they left it up there somewhere? How will we know where to dig? It’s impossible.”