The Medusa Amulet (19 page)

The one with the knife kicked the door closed while the one with the gun pointed it at Escher, who held up his hands to show he wasn’t armed, and ordered him to move away from the bag.

Escher backed off, and the gunman knelt by it, quickly groping through the things inside.

“You can keep the cigarettes,” Escher said, “if you get out now.”

“Shut up,” the man said before giving up on the bag and kicking it
aside. Escher figured the Turks must have thought he was making a delivery.

“You’ve made a mistake,” Escher said, and the gunman fired a warning shot into the sofa pillow, six inches from his arm. A plume of feathers erupted into the air.

“Ahmet, put the gun down,” Jantzen pleaded, still on the floor.

So he knows him
, Escher thought.
A customer. But how much does this customer know?

“In back,” Ahmet said, gesturing with the gun toward the hallway—and the armoire.

Too much.

Jantzen got to his feet, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth, and both he and Escher were herded toward the wardrobe.

Ahmet and the others let Jantzen push the clothes to one side, slide the panel back, and step through. Jantzen flicked the lights on, and Escher moved calmly but deliberately toward the Glock 9 on the counter.

“What are you doing there?” Ahmet said, his view blocked by Escher’s back. “Stop now, or I will shoot you.”

Escher discreetly picked up the gun, turned slowly with his head cocked to one side as if to signal acquiescence, and shot Ahmet point-blank in the chest. He dropped to his knees, mouth gaping, and the other two looked stunned. Escher took advantage of their shock to shoot the one in the sweatshirt, too, the bullet whipping his head back against a metal rack; but Jantzen was in the way of the third one, who hurled his knife wildly, then rushed from the room, screaming.

“Get out of the way,” Escher said, pushing past Jantzen, whose own eyes were bugging out of his head, and followed the last one out into the apartment. He was already at the door, struggling to turn a lock and get it open, when Escher said, “Hold on, I’m not going to hurt you.”

The man turned his head, his face twisted in fear, and Escher said, “Step away from the door.”

His fingers fumbled at the lock again, and the door was just starting
to open when Escher shot him. The bullet caught him in the shoulder, but the man barely reacted. Escher had to leap at him, grab hold of his sleeve, and pull him back into the room.

“No, no, don’t shoot!” the man shouted, putting his hands together and crumpling to his knees. “Don’t shoot me!”

But Escher knew that some things, once begun, had to be finished.

He pressed the gun to the kneeling man’s forehead, fired, and let him drop to the floor like a sack of potatoes.

He heard Jantzen throwing up in the hallway.

That would be just one more thing to clean up, he thought.

Wedging the gun under his belt, he stepped away from the body. Christ, what a mess. He considered calling his boss, the fancy ex-ambassador, but he knew he had a reputation already for a certain hotheadedness. And for all he knew, it was Schillinger who was responsible for this whole fiasco. Had he sent Escher off to Italy in secret, on his own initiative? An initiative that had conflicted with someone else’s greater plan?

The pool of blood was widening, and he had to step back again.

If that was the case, then Escher was caught in the gears of a colossal case of miscommunication—a place he always hated to be.

Or was it only what it seemed? A drug robbery gone wrong? Given Julius’s clientele, that wasn’t so hard to believe, either.

Now he regretted having been quite so hasty. If one of the Turks had been kept alive, he might have been able to get some answers out of him. Next time he’d have to remind himself to be more patient.

“Julius,” he called out, rolling up his sleeves.

“What?” Jantzen replied, still doubled over and averting his gaze from the door.

“You ever going to stop puking?”

Jantzen replied with another dry heave before croaking, “What … the hell … do we do now?”

“Well,” Escher said, putting aside his deeper ruminations, “I’d say we start with a mop and a pail. You do have them, don’t you?”

Chapter 13

Cellini could tell from the slant of fading sunlight on the wall of the dungeon that it was almost time for his single meal of the day. He slumped in the corner, watching idly as a pair of tarantulas mated in the straw spilling from his mattress. He had grown used to them, along with the rats and other vermin that inhabited his tiny cell. After months of imprisonment, he might have missed them if they’d gone.

There was a shuffling tread outside, a clanging of keys, and the wooden door creaked open. While the guard stood outside with a drawn sword, the jailer, in clothes almost as soiled as the rags Cellini wore, carefully placed a pewter bowl filled with the usual cold gruel on the floor.

“Eat well,” he said, stopping to admire the rough sketches that Cellini had scrawled on the wall with cinders and chalk. The centerpiece depicted Christ among a host of angels.

While he gazed with amazement, Cellini’s own glance went to the door, and specifically its hinges. He had worked on loosening the real ones and replacing them with facsimiles made out of candle wax and rust since the day he arrived, and he was close to completing his task. When he had been taken to the Castel St. Angelo, he had declared no prison could hold him, and he hoped to prove it soon.

“Oh, and the Duke of Castro asked me to add this, since it’s a feast
day today,” the jailer said, pulling a hunk of fresh bread from his pocket and dropping it beside the bowl.

“Tell Signor Luigi—the duke, I mean—that I look forward to thanking him soon, in person.”

“Benvenuto, Benvenuto,” the jailer said, shaking his head. “Why do you make things so hard on yourself? A man who can draw like that,” he said, gesturing at the sketches, “can do anything. Tell the duke what he wants to know, beg forgiveness of the Pope, and you’ll be a free man again.”

“I can’t confess to what I didn’t do. I can’t give back gold and jewels that I never stole.”

The jailer, a simple soul, shrugged his shoulders. “These things are too much for me to understand.”

He turned around and shuffled out, the door slamming closed behind him. The artificial hinges held, and despite himself, Cellini eagerly scuttled toward the food, dipping the bread in the cold slop and shoving it into his mouth with trembling fingers. A rat in the corner watched greedily.

It was only as he scraped up the last of the gruel with his tin spoon that he felt something crunch between his teeth, and he stopped chewing. Studying the bottom of the bowl, he saw an almost invisible shard glistening there, and his heart suddenly sank as the truth of what had just happened dawned on him.

He had been poisoned … and by a common enough method among princes and noblemen.

A powdered gem—a diamond—had been introduced into his food. Unlike other pulverized stones, the diamond kept its sharp edges and, instead of passing harmlessly through the body, its tiny pieces—no matter how fine—clung to the intestines and pierced the linings. The result was not only a slow and agonizing death, but one that could be confused with a host of natural afflictions. The duke, who had no doubt hatched the plan, could never be held accountable by his father that way.

Cellini keeled over, his forehead touching the damp floor, reciting
a
Miserere
under his breath. It was just a matter of time—hours, or maybe a day or two—before he would begin to feel the effects.

But what then?

The shock of the thought actually brought him back up. What would happen to a man such as he, a man who had manufactured
La Medusa
and gazed into its magical depths? He would not die; he could not die.

But would he, then, be destined to suffer forever?

Suddenly, he had to wonder if his adventures in sorcery were not the making of his own doom. Hadn’t Dr. Strozzi warned him?

But when had he ever listened to warnings?

The bulrushes, they had been one thing. The ones that had clung to his clothes in his escape from the Gorgon’s pool, he had gathered in a bunch—not an easy task, as they continually appeared and vanished and reappeared—before swiftly twining them together and dipping the garland in a bath of molten silver. Settled upon the brow, like the laurel wreath upon the head of Dante, the finished piece granted the wearer the gift of invisibility.

By the standards of his trade, it was a comparatively simple procedure.

But the looking glass was quite another matter. When he had made it, he had been so intent on its creation that he had hardly stopped to think through its myriad implications. He had focused all his skills, all his cunning, on replicating the fearsome visage of the Gorgon he had slain. Countless hours had been spent in his studio, the midnight oil burning in the lamp, as he made models, then casts, for the front of the mirror. And though glassmaking had not been among his many talents, he had apprenticed himself for weeks to a master blower, who had taught him how to make the beveled glass in back.

And when he thought he had acquired the requisite skills, he made one mirror—just as he had told the Pope—as a gift for the Medici duchess, Eleonora de Toledo. (He was forever having to find ways to stay in her good graces.) To add some luster to its burnished niello finish, he had placed two rubies in the Gorgon’s eyes.

And then, satisfied that he could accomplish the work, he had cast another.

This one was for himself, to achieve his lifelong dream.

This one was to award himself the gift of the gods themselves … the gift of everlasting life.

He had consulted Strozzi’s books, he had pored over the grimoires from France and England, Portugal and Spain, and then, with the greatest care he had ever mustered, he had opened the flask containing the pale green water he had salvaged from the infernal pool. The waters of immortality that had returned with him, trapped in his boots.

With the mirror laid facedown on his workbench, he had poured the glistening liquid into the hollow of its back. The droplets swished and hissed in the tiny, lead-lined basin, moving and coagulating like mercury. It was almost as if they were struggling to get out, but Cellini quickly fixed the glass into place and sealed the edges tight. Under his breath, he recited the Latin incantation from Strozzi’s book, the final benediction that would complete his task and forever empower his creation.

“
Aequora of infinitio
,

Beatus per radiant luna
,

Una subsisto estus of vicis
,

Quod tribuo immortalis beneficium.”

And then, for good measure, he recited his own translation, in the vernacular tongue he preferred.

“The waters of eternity,

Blessed by the radiant moon,

Together stop the tide of time

And grant the immortal boon.”

With the talisman made, only one step remained—to see if it would work. If it did, then anyone catching the moonlight in its glass,
along with his own reflection, would find himself frozen in time forever, as unchanging as the image trapped in the glass.

Had anyone, Cellini wondered, ever accomplished so much as he? Could any artisan, in his own age or the ages to come, boast of such achievements?

He had sat back on his workbench, the lantern light reflected in the glass of
La Medusa
and felt … what? Exultation? Yes, but mixed with the bitter rue that came from knowing he could never trumpet it to the skies.

What he had done, no man could ever know.

If the Holy Roman Church were to learn of it, he would be burned at the stake. If kings and princes knew, he would be captured, imprisoned, and the fruits of his labor stolen. A race of immortal men, no doubt as corrupt and venal as their mortal counterparts, would spring up to overtake the world. No, the only sensible course was to keep
La Medusa
close and secret, its powers bestowed only on its creator, and on whatever worthy soul that creator chose to favor.

The lantern had sputtered, its last drops of oil consumed, and gone out. The workshop had been bathed in the light of the winter moon, full and white and cold as a glacier.

Cellini had slipped the chain onto the amulet, then looped it around his neck. Tiptoeing past Ascanio and the other apprentices, fast asleep downstairs, he stepped into the silent courtyard behind his house. Walls of stone rose on all sides. But high above, like a gleaming coin, the moon hung in a starry sky. His nervous breath fogged in the air.

Was he prepared to put his work to the ultimate test? Was he ready to accept any outcome, whether it be everlasting life … or sudden death? No grimoire guaranteed its results.

A shiver rippled down his spine, inspired by the chilly air, or the anticipation. With numbed fingers, he lifted
La Medusa
, the snarling face glaring into his own … and deliberately turned it over. The curvature of the glass twinkled in the moonlight.