The Medusa Amulet (26 page)

“Don’t we have enough to do already?” David asked.

“I wasn’t going to get another chance.”

“To do what?”

“To prove that the Nazis had a special place in their hearts for Florence … and why.”

On the one hand, David was surprised that this was where she had been going, but on the other, it suddenly made perfect sense and brought together many separate strands of her research and proclivities.

“The Nazis not only looted Florence of its art,” she said, as they walked toward the Piazza San Marco, “they also pillaged its books
and libraries and monasteries, searching for secrets that would add to their power.”

“Like ancient Egyptian rites?”

“Don’t laugh,” she warned. “Hitler
believed
in the occult. His top officers
believed
. The Third Reich was as mystical as it was military. No one must ever forget that.”

But much as David would have liked to stop and explore her theories further, right now he was trying to focus on their next move. “Where did you park your car?” he asked.

“I didn’t. It’s out of gas.”

He lifted his arm and waved for the first cab coming by.

“Where are we going?”

“To your place.”

Olivia looked surprised but not displeased.

“You have to pack a bag.”

“Why?” she asked. “Where do you think we are going?”

“To Paris.”

A white Fiat taxi cut across three lanes and jolted to a stop. She slid over in the backseat, David joined her, and the cabbie took off for the Piazza della Repubblica, the tinny sound of ABBA emanating from his radio. After a minute or two, Olivia couldn’t contain herself any longer and said, “What is in Paris that is so important?”

He opened his valise as the cab hung a sharp left, throwing her up against his shoulder, and showed her the facsimile pages from the Medici records. As she scanned the pages, he explained in a low voice how he had come across them, and why he was so sure it was
La Medusa
they referred to.

Olivia’s dark eyes absorbed every word and notation before she nodded solemnly, and said, “Then it does exist.”

“Or at least it did.”

“But what if, as you said, it’s just a copy?”

“Without the original to compare it to, who’s to say? I was sent to find it, and that’s what I intend to do.” What he did not say was what he felt in his heart, as surely as he could feel it beating. This was the
real Medusa, and returning with it to Mrs. Van Owen would seal their bargain. He believed in it, like so much else now, because he had to. For his own sake, and Sarah’s.

“If it went to France,” she said, thinking aloud, “then it would have become a part of the crown jewels.”

“Exactly,” David replied. “Until the Revolution.”

“When it was turned over to the citizens of the French Republic.”

With Olivia, David never had to finish a thought. As the cab beat a path through the swarming, horn-blaring traffic, Olivia stared silently out her window and David, his mind going a mile a minute, was trying to organize the next leg of his journey and wondering how fast he could get it done. Taking out his phone, he quickly began scanning for flights to Paris. Cost was no object, but timing might be. Olivia would have to collect a few things, he would have to go back to the Grand for his own belongings, and then they’d need to get to the airport.

“How long do you expect me to stay on this job?” Olivia said.

“As long as it takes,” David said, concentrating chiefly on his cell-phone screen. Alitalia had a flight at three that they might be able to make if they hurried.

“But why,” she said, with an uncharacteristic hesitancy, “do you want me?”

“My French is really rusty,” David replied, before thinking.

And he could all but feel her fold in on herself.

And what made it worse was, it wasn’t even true. He just didn’t know how to tell her what he was really feeling and thinking. Here he was, on a desperate mission to save his sister, and he hadn’t confessed even that to her yet. He had so much to tell her that he didn’t know where, or when, to start. And in the back of a hurtling cab, it seemed like the worst possible time.

“Olivia,” he tried to begin, “I do need your help with this work. If anybody can help me cut through the thicket of the French archives and bureaucracy, it will be you.”

“So that’s the reason?” she said. “You just need me to help you with your … quest?”

God, he had gotten off on the wrong foot again. His French wasn’t nearly as rusty as some of his other skills.

The taxi had stopped at a busy crosswalk, but the driver, fed up with the unimpeded flow of pedestrians, leaned on his horn again and to a chorus of jeers, plowed through a narrow opening and sped on. Normally, David would have been appalled at such recklessness, but today he was thrilled.

“And this person you work for—” Olivia ventured.

“Mrs. Van Owen. A widow, in Chicago.” He knew he was painting a more staid portrait than was warranted. “Very rich. She’ll continue to pay for everything.”

“You say she is willing to do anything to get this
Medusa.
”

“Yes.”

“But you?” She looked at him intently now. “Why do you want to find it so much?”

“I’ll get a big promotion,” he said, not wanting to get into the whole story yet.
Not here, not now
. “And I’ll be well paid.”

She frowned, and, shaking her head, said, “No, no, no.”

Not for the first time, he felt like she could see right through him.

“You are not someone who works for money.”

“I’m not?” Pretending otherwise.

“No, you are like me. We don’t care about money,” she said. “We only care about knowledge, and truth. If we cared about money, we would do some other kind of work than this. We would be bankers.” She said that last word as if she were saying swine.

Overall, he took her point.

“No, what we do,” she concluded, “we do for love. There is some love at the root of this—always—and it is personal, too. That is what is pushing you.”

It was as if she’d shot an arrow right into his heart. He longed to tell her about the real stakes he was playing for—he ached to unburden himself of the truth about his sister and the strange promise of his mysterious benefactor—but he was afraid he would sound crazy. Even to someone as open-minded as Olivia.

“If we are going to do this thing together,” Olivia said, “from now on you are going to have to tell me only the truth.” As the cab slowed down to check the street addresses, she pressed him. “Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“On the right,” Olivia said to the driver. “Next door to the café.”

They got out of the cab, went inside, and climbed three stories of rickety steps with worn carpeting; it made his own place, David thought, look pretty good by comparison. On the third floor, Olivia stopped at a door decorated with a postcard of the Laocoön and put the key in the lock. Something seemed to surprise her, as if the lock had already been turned; but she opened it and stepped inside.

Even with the curtains drawn, David could see the chaos. And when Olivia flicked on the lights and saw her books strewn across the floor and a wooden perch of some kind toppled over, she said, “Oh my God.”

It was plain she’d been burglarized, but it wasn’t so plain that the thieves were gone.

“Hold on,” David said, stepping in front of her and moving cautiously toward the next room. As he approached the half-open door, he thought he heard some commotion inside, and was about to back off when something gray suddenly flew smack into his face, wings fluttering wildly, before careening off into the living room.

“Glaucus!” Olivia cried.

And then David heard another noise—a muffled groan—from the bedroom. He pushed the door wider with one finger and saw a man with a gag in his mouth, half-on and half-off the bed. His hands dangled above his head, tied with a phone cord to the bedstead. Dried blood was caked all over his face and neck.

As David rushed to his aid, Olivia appeared in the bedroom doorway, and said in horror, “Giorgio?”

By the time the ambulance had come and gone, and the police had finished interviewing Olivia, it was too late to make any of the flights
David had hoped for. As far as the carabinieri were concerned, it had simply been a break-in, and the old boyfriend had come back to collect his stuff at just the wrong time. Olivia said she was missing some cheap jewelry, but that was about it. “I’m just glad he didn’t take any of my books,” she told the cops. “They’re the only valuable things in here.”

For much of the time, David had sat outside on the stoop, thinking and keeping his own counsel. It didn’t seem to have occurred, even to Olivia, that this could be anything more than a burglary gone awry. But to David, who had been nearly run over at the skating rink, it seemed like some very odd things had been happening since he’d gotten mixed up with Mrs. Van Owen. And was this one of them? Or was the strain on his nerves just getting to him? He checked his watch again, recalculating how quickly he could be on his way to Paris.

And when the last police car pulled away, Olivia settled down beside him and said, “Giorgio and I broke up a few months ago. He’d been on a sabbatical in Greece.”

“Then you’re okay?” David said, draping an arm consolingly around her shoulders.

She sighed, and fumblingly lighted a cigarette.

“You don’t need to stay here to look after Giorgio?”

“Him?” She blew out a cloud of smoke in disgust. “Let his new girlfriend do that.”

David felt like an immense weight had been removed from his heart. He was ashamed to admit it, even to himself, but ever since Giorgio had turned up in the apartment, he had been wondering where things stood between Giorgio and Olivia. What if she was still in love with him? “So,” he said, “does this mean you would still consider going to Paris? There’s a TVG, leaving in ninety minutes. We could still make it.”

But Olivia didn’t answer at first; in fact, it was several seconds before he realized that she was shaking, then quietly sobbing. He hugged her tighter, as the shock of what had just happened at her place sank in. The police were gone, her apartment had been ransacked,
her old boyfriend was on the way to the hospital. David, who was so good when it came to talking about an edition of Dante, was again at a loss for words. The lighted cigarette hung, neglected, from her fingertips, before it finally tumbled onto the broken steps. But when she lifted her dark eyes, wet with tears, to his own, he knew—for once in his life he knew—that words weren’t what was called for. He pulled her closer and touched his lips to hers. There was no response, and her lips were cool. Her eyes remained open and inquisitive.

“I need you,” he said.

“Because I speak French better than you?” she said, with a troubled, uncertain smile. Her shoulders were still quivering.

“Je vous aide,”
he said flawlessly,
“parce que je t’adore.”

And now, when he kissed her again, her shoulders were still, and her lips were warm. And they clung to each other, sitting in the middle of the broken steps, saying nothing. For David, burying his face in her dark hair, feeling her arms wrapped around him, it was the sweetest respite he had known for a very long time, and he wished that they could have stayed that way all night.

Chapter 18

Cellini watched from the shadows as the catafalque was carried across the piazza. Four members of the Accademia, of which he had been a founder, bore it on their shoulders, followed by a throng of black-clad mourners. The doors of the ancient Basilica della Santissima Annunziata, in which the tomb was waiting, were held open by a quartet of friars.

He touched the silver garland around his temple to make sure that he was still well concealed by its powers.

Inserting himself into the crowd, unseen and unnoticed, he passed under the narrow archway and into the celebrated Chiostrino dei Voti, or Cloister of the Votives. For centuries, pilgrims to the church, who had come to see its marvelous fresco of the Annunciation, had left their own wax candles and figurines—often of themselves—as offerings here. On that night, February 15, 1571, the whole motley collection, in white and yellow and brown wax, was lighted, along with a hundred torches in the basilica beyond.