The Medusa Amulet (21 page)

“Because you told me you would be working here,” she said. “I needed a way back in.”

“Why didn’t you just ask me?”

“Because you didn’t know me.”

“And I do now?”

“We are getting there,” she said, with a half smile that, despite himself, he found beguiling.

Following the guard, they entered the long and elegant hall that was the library’s main reading room. Bay windows, framed by marble pilasters, lined one wall, throwing a bright but diffused light onto the red and white terra-cotta tiles—demonstrating the fundamental principles of geometry—embedded in the floor. Wooden desks lined both sides of the room under a high, beamed ceiling. An old woman, studying some ancient text with a magnifying glass, glanced up as they passed, then quickly buried herself again in her work.

At the end of the hall, the guard turned into a side corridor and rapped her knuckles on a frosted-glass panel. She opened the door, announced them, and before David could even see Dr. Valetta, he
heard the director say, “No, that woman is not allowed on the premises!”

“She’s working for Signor Franco,” the guard tried to explain.

David neatly stepped around her, where he saw the director, in a crisp tan suit with a pocket square, standing behind a desk. When David extended his hand, Dr. Valetta accepted it, all the while keeping a close eye on Olivia, who loitered near the door.

“Greetings, Mr. Franco. We’ve been expecting you. But how is it that you know Signorina Levi?”

“She’s volunteered to help me with my research,” David improvised. “She tells me she’s quite familiar with the Laurenziana’s collections.”

Dr. Valetta snorted. “That much is true. But I wouldn’t believe anything else she tells you. The signorina has her own ‘theories,’ and no amount of fact can ever dissuade her.”

“What?” Olivia broke in, unable to contain herself. “I have plenty of facts, and I’d have more if people like you weren’t forever standing in my way!”

David turned to her and said,
“Basta.”
What had he gotten himself into?

Subsiding, she said, “I will wait for you in the reading room,” and stalked out.

“Sorry about that,” David said to the director.

Valetta looked like he was still wondering what to do, then said, “You will have to be responsible for her, you know?”

“I will.”

Determinedly regaining his composure and pinching the crease of his trousers before resuming his own seat, Dr. Valetta invited him to sit down.

David took the chair opposite the desk, resting his valise against his leg. The walls of the office were lined with shelves of books, all perfectly arranged and aligned. More, David thought, for show than for use.

“And you are comfortable if we continue to speak in Italian?”

David nodded and said he preferred it.

“Good. I believe that you have done some research in our collections before?”

“I have. But it was some years ago.”

“Then permit me to remind you of our procedures.”

David listened attentively, in part to make up for Olivia’s transgressions, as the director explained that any manuscript or text that was requested had to be brought to the borrower’s assigned desk by a library attendant, and no more than three at any time. Any manuscript being returned also had to be given back to one of the attendants. Any portfolio or briefcase leaving the library had to be inspected by a security guard—assisted by a librarian—at the checkout station. No photographs were allowed, except by special permission. And, to avoid any ink spillage, no pens—only pencils—were allowed for note-taking.

“We have set aside an alcove for your exclusive use,” Dr. Valetta said, “for as long as you need it.”

“That’s very kind of you,” David said.

“And I have instructed the staff to be accommodating, if, say, you need more than the usual number of texts at a time.”

“Thank you again.”

Dr. Valetta lifted his hands and said, “Mrs. Van Owen has been very generous to us. We are only too happy to repay her in any way we can.”

Mrs. Van Owen. Was there anywhere, David thought, her reach did not extend? Any move he made that she did not anticipate? For a moment, he wondered if Olivia wasn’t one of her plants, sent to keep tabs on his progress.

After a few more minutes of chitchat, during which Valetta seemed to be probing into the focus of David’s research—a probing that he did his best to fend off—David stood up to excuse himself.

“I’m on the clock,” he said, wondering if the expression would make any sense in Italian. “I’d better get started.”

“Of course,” the director said, and ushered him out.

In the reading room, Olivia was seated next to the woman with the magnifying glass, pointing out something on the yellowed page she was studying. The woman looked rapt and appreciative, and David had the sense that, for all her eccentricity, Olivia Levi did indeed know her stuff.

A young librarian, in a red vest that David normally associated with car valets, showed them to an alcove with a massive desk, a pair of sturdy oak chairs, and a dual-headed banker’s lamp that cast a warm glow around the interior. A faded fresco of the Muses in a garden adorned the wall beneath the window. There was even a silver cup, holding a bunch of sharpened pencils, like arrows in a quiver, along with a pad of call slips.

Olivia threw her coat over the back of a chair and broke into a grin. She looked as if she’d won the lottery.

“So, you’re some kind of big deal, huh? A private alcove? An audience with the dictator himself? Who are you, really?”

David took off his own overcoat, placed the valise on the desk, and wondered about that himself. Up until now he’d been a Renaissance scholar working in obscurity in a private library in Chicago, but over the past few days he’d begun to feel like a secret agent. And now he had to think like one. He could either dismiss this young interloper, send her off to attend to her own “theories” and hope she didn’t create another row, or he could offer some hint about what had brought him there.

Plainly, she could see his quandary.

“You do not trust me,” she said. “That’s okay. But I would remind you of one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“It was you who found me in the Piazza della Signoria, not the other way around.”

“I’m not the one who tracked me to this library.”

“Okay,” she conceded, “so I did do that. But maybe I can help you.” She glanced at the closed valise with undisguised curiosity.
“Show me one thing, give me one clue, then see if I do not know what I am talking about.”

She waited, while David mulled over her offer. Then he opened the valise, took out a few of the papers, and placed them on the table.

Olivia lunged forward in her chair and bent low over the documents. Gradually, her expression became very serious, and, although none of the pages bore a signature anywhere, it was only a minute or two before she whispered, “Cellini.” Looking up, awestruck, she said, “These are from the hand of Benvenuto Cellini.”

Unless he was still being duped, she was darn good.

“Where in the world did you get them?”

“First you tell me how you knew that.”

“Please,” she said, with some disdain, “I am not an amateur in these matters. No one wrote quite like Cellini—in the Italian vernacular—and no one was so interested in these—how would you say?—dark matters.”

While it was still possible he was being gulled—that she had somehow known in advance what he was investigating—the possibility seemed increasingly remote. Could she really be such a fine actress? There was something in the expression on her face and in the tone of her voice—even in the undisguised scorn with which she had answered his last question—that persuaded him she was on the level.

And if that was true, then she could prove to be of inestimable value.

Slowly, David removed the rest of the papers from the valise—her eyes widened even more—and began to explain how they had been donated to the library by an anonymous (that much he kept to himself) patron. Olivia sat silently, riveted by each page, until she said, “But what is this?” Her fingers nimbly plucked from the stack the sketch of the Medusa’s head. “A preliminary study for his famous statue—where we met?” She gave him a quizzical smile.

“It’s possible.”

But on second thought, she shook her head, frowning. “No, that’s
wrong—it’s nothing like it, really. The Medusa in the piazza is defeated—this one is defiant.” Her eye fell on the empty oblong on the same page, the reverse view, and she looked puzzled. “It was a medallion?” she hazarded. “Unfinished?”

“No, it was a mirror, simply called
La Medusa
,” David said. “And I have reason to believe that it
was
finished.”

Olivia gave it some thought, before saying, “I know a great deal about Cellini, probably more than anyone in Italy—”

Despite himself, David had to chuckle; one thing she had was the artisan’s ego, that was for sure.

“—but I’ve never heard of this thing, this mirror, called
La Medusa.
”

“No one has,” David replied. “But it’s my job to find it.”

She flopped back in her chair, her arms hanging down in mock defeat. “And how do you propose to do that? Find something that has been missing for five hundred years?”

“I don’t honestly know,” David said. “But since the Laurenziana holds more of Cellini’s papers than anyplace on earth, this seemed like the right place to start looking.”

She cocked her head, uncertainly.

He took a pencil from the silver cup. “Do you have a better idea?”

Olivia studied him, then, leaning forward, said, “Does this mean you are offering me a job?”

Was he? He felt like a diver, standing on the edge of a cliff and about to jump into unknown waters. Should he step back before it was too late, or take the plunge? “Does this mean you are available if I did?”

“I’m not sure. I am very busy, with my tours, and my own research, and—”

“Fine,” David said, starting to fill out the call slip and calling her bluff. “It was nice meeting you.”

But her hand flicked out and stopped him. “Already,” she said, “you are hard to work for.” And then she laughed, and the sound of it made David laugh, too. “I want a raise!”

There was a shushing sound from someone in the main reading room, as Olivia snatched the call slip and read what David had been writing there. “The Codice Mediceo-Palatino?” she inquired.

“Yes,” he said, wondering if it would meet with her approval.

“A good place to start,” she said, nodding. Raising her hand to signal one of the library attendants, she added, “You may not be so bad, after all.”

Chapter 15

The wind off Lake Michigan howled around the walls of the Holy Name Cathedral, rippling the tarps where the ceiling was still being mended, and sending a cold draft into the side chapel where the private ceremony was being held. A blown-up photo of Randolph Van Owen at the wheel of his yacht had been mounted on an easel, with a caption providing his dates of birth and death.

Despite the prominence of the Van Owen name, and its long history in Chicago, Kathryn had arranged for this to be a small gathering—just Randolph’s sisters, their children, and a scattering of his friends from the yacht club. The young priest, Father Flanagan, was doing his best, but he was nervous and laboring hard to say something true and consoling about a man he’d never met. The Van Owenses had not been churchgoers, and it was clear that a lot of the priest’s eulogy had come from a quick search on Google.

Kathryn just wanted it to be over. She wished she had never had to set foot in Holy Name Cathedral again, and glancing at the confessionals on her way in, she had experienced a predictable pang. She had had to step over the very spot where the old priest, Father DiGennaro, had collapsed just a few nights before, the cell phone spilling from his hand. There was nothing to mark it now, nothing to alert anyone passing by that a man had died there. But then, she sometimes thought there was no place on earth that didn’t bear that
same stain; others might not see them, but she could, everywhere. Live long enough, she thought, and the whole world starts to look like a graveyard.

The onyx urn containing Randolph’s ashes rested on a marble pedestal, and from time to time the priest looked over at it with a show of deference, as if it contained some presence, some essence … - something other than what it did, which was purely dust and rubble. Kathryn had no illusions. For someone in her position, it would have been impossible to feel otherwise.

When the priest intoned his last prayer and the ceremony was over, Kathryn said good-bye to the other mourners from under her black veil. Randolph’s sisters, with whom she had never gotten along, trailed out, dragging their spoiled progeny, and the boating pals shook her hand, no doubt heading off to the yacht club to get drunk in his honor.

Father Flanagan came to her side, and after she had thanked him for his words, he said, “No, I must thank you.”

“For what?”

Gesturing upward, where the hats of the previous Cardinals had been reattached to the rafters and the ceiling work was again under way, he said, “I was told that you had made a very generous contribution to the church, to cover all the expenses of the roof repair.”