The Medusa Amulet (29 page)

He pictured a parade of knights on horseback, crossing the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, with Hitler himself leading the procession. Torches were lighted all along the way, and in the fiery glow David saw his sister, standing on the other side of the bridge. Why was she there? Her hair was still gone, and she was dressed in a blue hospital gown. She was watching the knights, a look of horror on her face, and David was trying to run to her. But the horses were in the way and though he kept shouting her name, she could not hear him. The horses and riders kept nudging her closer and closer to the edge of the bridge. She was about to fall off! David was pushing his way through the knights—Nazi pennants were flying from their lances—but he couldn’t make any progress. Someone, or something—a horse’s muzzle?—was nudging his arm … moving it, very gently, to one side.

“Sarah,” he cried again, “Sarah.”

And his arm was moved again.

He opened one eye. A corner of the pillow stuck up in front of it. But something was stretching over him, reaching into that space between his body and the wall.

He closed his eye, trying to get back to the bridge, trying to get back to his sister before she plummeted over the edge.

But the knights on horseback still blocked the way.

His arm was lifted, and once more he opened his eye. A tiny light, as bright and sharp as a pinprick, was focused on the wall. It
reminded him of the light the optometrist used when testing his eyes.

But now the light was directed elsewhere. It was pointed at something under his arm. Something black and firm and smooth as leather.

The valise.

His eye opened wider, and his whole body tensed.

Thick fingers were groping for the handle, and suddenly David knew this was no dream. He could even hear the low breathing of the intruder.

His own arm pressed down on the valise, while he swung himself up in the bed. His head hit the ceiling, and he kicked out a leg that collided with something. He heard a muffled oath, and he shoved the valise out of reach against the wall.

He was suddenly as awake as he’d ever been, and in the dim confines of the cabin he could just make out a bald head and ice blue eyes. He kicked again, and this time his foot caught the man on the chin and sent him crashing backwards onto the floor.

Olivia woke up, shouting his name, but David was already leaping down from the bunk and on top of his assailant. The man’s hands flew up against David’s chest, so powerfully that David was thrown back against the bed, and there was a cry from the cabin next door and the thump of some other passenger banging on the wall.

“David!” Olivia screamed, “look out!” and that’s when he saw the glint of what looked like a knife.

There was nowhere to run and nothing to protect himself with except his duffel. He grabbed the bag and held it to his chest. The first blow was absorbed by the thick canvas, and the blade got stuck in the fabric before it could be pulled loose.

He pressed himself back against the window—railway lights flashing brightly through the glass—bracing himself for another attack when the door to the cabin was yanked open and a steward and a security guard barged in, throwing on the lights and shouting in Italian and French to stop right now! The guard, a burly guy wielding a
baton, pushed the bald man away, and said, “What the hell is going on in here?”

“He broke in!” Olivia cried.

But the bald man, an agile and alert fighter a few seconds before, suddenly weaved on his feet and assumed an expression of drunken confusion.

“Broke in?” he slurred. “This is my cabin. Who’re they?”

“Who are any of you?” the guard said, demanding to see their passports and tickets.

“He’s got a knife!” Olivia said.

But the man shook his head and said, “What knife? I have a flashlight. I don’t see so well at night.” He held out a silver penlight, then dug around in his pockets to produce a train ticket.

David, his breath only beginning to return to normal, felt a crushing weight in the back of his head, like the worst hangover he’d ever had. The schnapps hadn’t helped. It had a medicinal aftertaste he still couldn’t shake.

The guard showed the steward the ticket, and the steward, after giving the man a long, hard stare, said, “You are in the next car.”

“I am?” the bald man said, putting a hand against the baggage rack as if to steady himself. “Who says so?”

He was doing a good imitation, David thought, of a bumptious drunk.

“I say so,” the steward said, taking him by the arm and steering him out of the cabin. Dragging his feet, the man let himself be led away. “Those people are in my cabin!” he shouted from the corridor, and the steward said, “Keep your voice down, people are sleeping.”

The security guard gave them back their passports and tickets and said, “He wouldn’t have gotten in if you’d locked your door properly.”

David was about to retort that they had; but given the state he was in, he couldn’t be sure.

The guard looked them both over, as if wondering why they were sleeping in their clothes, and in separate bunks, then shook his head,
said,
“Buona notte,”
and pulled the door firmly closed. Through the glass panel, he gestured for David to flip the inner lock and draw down the blind.

David did both, before turning to Olivia, who wavered on her feet for a second before slumping on to the edge of the lower bunk. Holding her head down but pushing her hair back off of her face, she said, “This is not what I expected for tonight.” She looked down at her own clothes as if surprised that she was still in them.

“I had something else in mind myself.”

The rattling of the train was suddenly muffled as it hurtled through a tunnel in the French countryside.

“So, what do you think?” Olivia said. “Just a thief, and not a very good one?”

“Possibly,” David said. He had been pondering the very same question, as much as his aching head would allow him to, but from the look on Olivia’s face, she had come to the same conclusion he had. He double-checked the lock on the door and resolved to stay awake the rest of the way to Paris.

Chapter 20

In the winter of 1785, the frost lay on the valley of the Loire like a wrinkled white sheet. The apple orchards were barren, the fields deserted, and the post road, such as it was, had become a twisted ribbon of ice and snow. Anxious as the passengers were to reach the Chateau Perdu before dark, there was only so much the driver of the carriage could do. If he urged the horses on too fast, they could slip on the ice and break a leg, or a wheel could catch in a rut and snap loose from its axle. That had happened once already, and it was only with the help of the two armed guards—one riding in front of the carriage and one behind—that they’d been able to mend it well enough to continue on their way at all.

Charles Auguste Boehmer, official jeweler to the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, was beginning to regret having made the journey at all. Perhaps he and his partner, Paul Bassenge, reclining in the seat opposite, could have persuaded the queen to order the marquis to come to Versailles instead. It would have been so much easier, and, given the nature of what they were carrying, so much safer. But he knew that the Marquis di Sant’Angelo did only as he pleased, and it did not please him these days to come to Versailles. Boehmer suspected it was the presence at court of the infamous magician and mesmerist Count Cagliostro that was keeping him away. Boehmer had no use for the count, either, but so long as the man provided
amusement to the queen and her retinue, he was sure to remain a fixture there.

At a crossroads, the carriage ground to a halt, and Boehmer, throwing his scarf around his neck, stuck his head out the window. The withered carcass of a cow was lying in the middle of the road, and three peasants, wrapped in rags, were hacking away at it with an assortment of knives and hatchets. They looked up at the coach—and its mounted guards—with barely concealed hostility. The whole countryside was starving—the winter had been especially harsh—and Boehmer knew that the rage, which had been simmering in France for years, might boil over into an outright rebellion any day.

He marveled that the king and queen were so blind to it.

“Pardonne, monsieur,”
Boehmer said to the one in the red stocking cap, who had stood up with his hatchet in his hand, “but can you tell us which of these roads leads to the Chateau Perdu?”

The man didn’t answer, but clomped instead, in his heavy wooden shoes, toward the carriage; he conspicuously admired its fine lacquered sheen and the pair of well-tended, black horses that drew it. The horses’ breath clouded in the air as they nervously pawed the icy road. Boehmer instinctively drew his head, like a turtle, farther into the cabin, and one of the armed riders spurred his mount closer to the coach.

“You have business with the marquis?” the man said, more insolently than he would ever have dared in years gone by.

“Official business of the court,” Boehmer said, to put the peasant on his guard.

The man stood on his tiptoes to survey the inside of the carriage, where Boehmer sat with a cashmere rug across his lap and Bassenge was filling his pipe with tobacco. The man nodded, as if this explained the armed riders, and said, “He is expecting you?”

“I don’t see where that’s any of your business,” Boehmer said, in a voice that he tried to make more forceful than he felt.

“The marquis makes it my business. He likes his privacy, and I help him to keep it.”

Bassenge, putting his pipe on the seat, seemed to divine what was going on before his partner did. Taking several francs from his pocket, he leaned toward the window and handed them to the man with the hatchet. “We thank you for your help, citizen.”

The man took the coins, rolled them around in his closed fist, then said, “Take the turn to the left. About three more kilometers. You’ll see the gatehouse.” Glancing up at the darkening sky, he said, “But I’d hurry if I were you.”

Boehmer did not know what precisely the vague threat implied, but he did not care to find out. “If you and your friends can clear the road, we would be grateful.”

“You would?” the man replied, and Bassenge, shaking his head at Boehmer’s slow-wittedness, again handed out a few more francs.

When the carcass had been dragged off the road, and the carriage was again on its way, Bassenge, a tall lean man with a sepulchral voice, chuckled. “To think that you still don’t understand what greases the wheels.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Money, my dear fellow. Money greases the wheels of the world.”

And Boehmer knew he was right. All his life, Boehmer had made it his business to be polite and amiable, open and fair, with everyone he met, and he still found it strange to live in a country where such suspicion and enmity prevailed. Like his partner, Bassenge, he had always been an outsider—a Swiss Jew now living in a French and Christian land—but through his skills and diplomacy, he had procured the office of Crown Jeweller, and he was allowed as many privileges at court as anyone of his background could ever hope to achieve.

As the carriage rattled on, it passed through a tiny town—no more than a tavern, a sawyer’s, and a deserted blacksmith’s shop—then over a millrace, where the wheel stood still in the frozen water, and on again into the deepening woods, which pressed closer to the carriage on both sides. Often, twisted boughs scratched the sides of the carriage, like plaintive bony fingers, and the wheels screeched as
they caught in the icy ruts. The Chateau Perdu—the lost castle—was aptly named, he thought. Though he had never been there before—in fact, he knew no one who had—he was aware that it had been built nearly three hundred years before, by a Norman knight fresh from looting the Holy Land. Hidden away in the most remote corner of a vast estate, and perched on a cliff overlooking the Loire, it had been situated like a fortress, not a palace, and over the years, it had acquired an unsavory reputation—with rumors of terrible and sacrilegious deeds being performed there. Eventually, it had fallen into ruin.

And now it was inhabited by the mysterious Italian nobleman, the Marquis di Sant’Angelo.

As the carriage slowed, Boehmer looked out the window again and saw a stone gatehouse, with a lantern burning inside. A lame old man hobbled out, spoke with the rider in front, then unlocked the gates, and the carriage passed through. There was still no sign of the chateau, only a dense thicket of leafless trees all around, their trunks so closely spaced that they seemed to be fighting for their own room to grow. The twilight sky was filled with crows, swooping and cawing overhead like a flock of heralds. At several junctures the snow was so deep the carriage had to slow to a crawl, lest it fall into an unseen hole. More than once Boehmer saw dark shapes moving swiftly through the woods, tracking the humans’ progress with glinting yellow eyes. What, he wondered, could even the wolves find to eat in such a desolate landscape?

The road slowly rose, the trees began to fall away, and here, where the wind had blown the snow away, the wheels of the carriage were able to bite into the hard-packed dirt and gravel. Boehmer was looking out again, and Bassenge, puffing on his pipe said, “See anything yet?”