The Medusa Amulet

Part Two
Chapter 11

The moment the plane taxied up to the gate at Galileo Galilei Airport, David was out of his first-class seat and waiting in the aisle. Over his shoulder, he had the black leather valise in which he carried perfect copies of the Cellini papers and the all-important drawing of La Medusa. Too irreplaceable to travel with, the originals had been secreted, for safekeeping, in the upper regions of the Newberry book silo.

True to her word, Mrs. Van Owen-or her travel consultant-had made all the necessary arrangements virtually overnight. And while most people were still digesting their Christmas dinners, David was clearing Customs. A uniformed driver was waiting for him, and they drove straight to the Grand-an eighteenth-century palazzo that had been converted into one of Florence’s most luxurious hotels. An opulently furnished suite had been reserved in his name, the bedroom walls decorated with faded frescoes of a courtier and his lady wandering through a cypress grove filled with songbirds. The birds, and the grisaille tint with which they were rendered, were plainly a tribute to another of the city’s Renaissance masters, Paolo Uccello-whose last name, literally translated, meant “birds”-and it reminded David that he was back in his spiritual home, the cradle of Western art and culture.

Only now it was more than a vast, open-air museum. It was a vault that might hold the key to his sister’s very life.

And he couldn’t afford to waste a second of his time there.

It was a cold but sunny Sunday, and even though David had once lived and studied in Florence, he still had to reorient himself to the crooked, narrow streets, lined with ochre buildings several stories high. As a Fulbright scholar, he had walked these streets with a crumpled map, a Eurail pass, and maybe fifty bucks’ worth of lire in his pocket, and he found it strange to be navigating them again now, under such different circumstances. Several times he passed a cafe that he remembered having lingered in, or a gallery that he recalled visiting. Waiting for some traffic to pass-the Italians, he could see, still drove like madmen-he spotted the blue shutters of the little pensione he had once stayed in.

The Grand it was not.

Crossing the Ponte Vecchio, the old bridge with its ancient jumble of jewelers’ shops and tradesmen’s studios, he stopped to catch his breath and watch the Arno River, rushing below. In the summertime, the river was often reduced to a trickle, but at this time of year it was running high, its greenish water churning wildly under the graceful arches. Of all the city bridges, this had always been the most beautiful, and as a result it was the only one spared in the bombings of the Second World War. Hitler, who had always considered himself a connoisseur of art, had made a visit to Florence in 1938 and taken a special fancy to it. The Luftwaffe had subsequently been given his express orders to keep it safe.

It might be the only thing, David thought, which could ever be said to his credit.

The bridge was busy, but not so crazy as it was in the summertime, when hordes of tourists descended on its many shops. The Florentines themselves were a fairly sober and hardheaded lot, at least by Italian standards, and went about their business immune to the rich history in every corner of their hometown. On many of the older buildings, the Medici insignia-a triangle of colored balls-was still incised in the stone above the doorways, and in the main square of the town-the Piazza della Signoria-a plaque marked the very spot where the mad Dominican priest, Girolamo Savonarola, along with two of his followers, had been burned at the stake in 1498. For a few years, in his quest to purify Florence in the eyes of God, Savonarola had held the city in his grasp, murdering and mutilating his critics, pillaging the homes of the high and mighty, looking for anything of worldly value-from “sacrilegious” art to silver buckles and ivory buttons-to feed the flames of his bonfires… until the city had awakened, as if from a trance, and thrown off his spell with the same barbarity that he had exercised it.

David’s steps took him across the broad expanse of the city square, and toward its most remarkable site-the Loggia dei Lanzi, and its pantheon of statuary known the world over. Here, Cellini’s own masterpiece, the heroic bronze figure of Perseus, held aloft the severed head of the Medusa. Even the sunshine did nothing to detract from the sinister power of Cellini’s sculpture, from its indelible image of the nude warrior, clothed only in helmet and sandals, with his eyes still averted from the deadly visage of his prize, and his feet planted on her corpse. In an especially grim touch, the Gorgon’s blood spurted over the lip of the marble pedestal on which the entire statue was raised. As David approached, he saw a tour guide with a purple iris, the official flower of Florence, stuck in the lapel of her overcoat, leading a group of lackadaisical college students to the base of the Perseus. Several of them were carrying notebooks, and one held out a tiny recorder as she spoke.

“Can anyone tell me,” the guide prompted them, in heavily accented English, “who was this Perseus?” While the students all suddenly dropped their heads and waited, pens poised, David loitered on the fringe of the group. The guide-a slender young woman with black hair pulled back from her face and hastily tied in a ponytail with a thick blue rubber band-took note of him, but she didn’t seem to mind his listening in. Maybe she was glad to have someone who looked interested.

“A king?” one of the girls hazarded.

“That is close,” she said, “that is close. He was the grandson of a king.”

“So that makes him a prince, right?” the girl said, proudly, twirling her pen.

The guide made a wavering motion in the air with one hand. “It is not so simple,” she said. “I will explain.”

And as David hovered in the rear, the guide told the story of Danae, the most beautiful maiden in all of Greece, who was impregnated by Zeus, the king of the gods. “She lived in a palace, all of bronze, and Zeus came down to her as a shower of gold.”

“I’ve seen that painting,” another girl piped up, “the one by Rembrandt,” and the guide nodded encouragingly.

“Yes, you are right,” she said. “And this son, he was named Perseus. He grew up with his mother, on a far-off island, where the king fell in love with Danae, too, and wanted to marry her. But he did not want to keep her son around.”

“I know what that’s like,” one student joshed, and a couple of them snickered.

“And so he said to Perseus, ‘I want you to make me a special marriage present,’ and Perseus, who was very brave but also foolhardy, said, ‘I will give you anything you ask.’ And the king said, ‘Then you will get me the thing I want most-and that is the head of the Medusa.’”

This turn of events seemed to interest the students even more.

“But no one could kill the Medusa,” the guide went on, her voice rising, as if she wanted to make sure that even David could hear. “If you looked into the eyes of the Medusa, you would turn to stone.” The Notre Dame kid turned around and gave David a curious look. “The Gorgons were immortal, and the waters from their secret pool, if you could collect it without being killed, offered eternal life.”

David suddenly felt as if this woman with the iris in her lapel-a woman he had never even seen before-knew why he’d come to Florence and what he was looking for. He’d been in the city no more than a few hours, but he felt as if he’d already been exposed.

“I guess he did the job,” the Notre Damer said, “or this statue wouldn’t be here.”

“Yes, but how?” the guide said. “Do you know how he killed the Medusa without even looking at her?”

When there was no reply, she said, “He called upon his friends, the gods.”

“That would help,” another student said.

“Yes, it did. Do you know who is Hermes?”

“The guy on the FTD commercials,” Notre Dame said, but the reference seemed to baffle the guide.

“The messenger of the gods,” a girl put in. “He could fly, I think.”

“ Si, si,” the guide said, clapping her hands encouragingly, “and he gave a magic sword to Perseus, a sword that could cut off the head of the Gorgon. Another friend to Perseus was called Athena-”

“The goddess of wisdom,” the same girl volunteered, and the guide beamed at her.

“Yes, Athena, she gave him a shield, a very…” she searched for the word, then said, “ reflecting shield, like a mirror, so he would not have to look at her. Also, he had a hat, a helmet, that made him… invisible.”

And so, according to the myth, the heroic Perseus had journeyed to the distant isle where the three Gorgons lived and, using these strange gifts, had slain the one named Medusa. And, for allegorical reasons that art historians still liked to debate, the Duke de’Medici had commissioned this monument, this retelling of the ancient story, to be erected in the central square of Florence. Originally planned to stand only a couple of braccia high, Cellini had increased its proportions in the process of composition, and raised it on a tall marble base adorned with four niches, holding beautifully modeled figures of Zeus, Athena, Hermes, and the young Perseus with his mother. These figures were so stunning, in fact, that when Eleonora de Toledo, the duke’s wife, first saw them as freestanding sculptures, she insisted that they were too exquisitely wrought to be wasted on a pedestal, and announced that they would be better suited to her own apartments in the palace. Cellini, though grateful for the praise, was not about to shortchange his masterwork, so before she had time to claim them, he raced back and soldered them into their assigned niches, where they stood between the sculpture above and the four bronze plaques below, illustrating scenes from Perseus’s later adventures.

It was just such maneuvers, David reflected, that had made Cellini, in his own life, one of the most infuriating men in Europe. In the service of his art-and his ego-he was forever crossing swords with princes, popes, and noblemen. And when he wasn’t being celebrated for his achievements, he was being hauled into court, or hauled off to jail, on charges of everything from murder (he confessed to several, though claiming self-defense every time), to sodomy (not so uncommon a practice in those days), to failing to pay child support. (The Florentine courts were very progressive for their time.) Perhaps it was this selfsame transgressive nature-the willingness to act boldly, even in plain defiance of secular law and holy authority-that had first endeared him to David. As someone who lived his own life strictly by the rules-working hard, avoiding trouble, winning every academic prize within reach-David had been irresistibly drawn to this figure who took life by the reins and rode it anywhere he chose. Whose art, and writings (he had also authored treatises on goldsmithing and sculpture), revealed a mind that was always in quest of new knowledge, new techniques, new frontiers.

Judging from the Key to Life Eternal, he had even searched for a way to cross the line between life and death… and claimed to have found it. That was one aspect of his career which the Van Owen papers had revealed in a way that neither David, nor any other scholar, had ever known.

“And who can see the miracolo in the back?” the guide was now saying, crooking one finger at the students to draw them around to the rear of the statue. David, tagging along, knew what she was going to point out.

Nodding at David as if to give him permission to join the group, she was calling attention to the fantastically ornate helmet on Perseus’s head. Wings sprouted from either side of the visor, along with a crouching gargoyle on the top, but it was in back that Cellini had created his optical illusion. Hidden among the folds and curlicues of the helmet was a stern human face, with a long Roman nose, a lush moustache, and piercing eyes under arching brows. You could look at the back of the helmet and never see it there, but once it had been pointed out, you could never again miss it.

“There’s a face, looking out,” the girl with the twirling pen announced.

The guide clapped her hands together again. “That’s good. Very good. This, I think, is the face of Cellini himself.”

And David agreed. Not only was it just like Cellini to bring off such a stunt, the visage also bore a resemblance to the only known depiction of the artist, rendered by Vasari in later life. It was one further proof of his ingenuity, or, in the academic lingo that David had so come to detest, his “reverse iconography and intratextual complexity.”

Several of the students dutifully scribbled in their notebooks, and the guide, checking her watch, said, “Come, we must now look at the Palazzo Vecchio,” waving her hand at the massive and forbidding wall of the Medici palace that brooded over the square. With the students trudging after her, the guide, whose own enthusiasm never seemed to flag, cast a look back at David, who smiled and raised a hand in farewell. David mouthed the words, “ Grazie mille,” and the guide tilted her pretty head and said, “ Prego.”

An hour later, after completing his own tour of the piazza, David was sitting inside a nearby cafe, nursing a cup of cappuccino to stave off the jet lag and making some notes for the next day. The Biblioteca Laurenziana would open its doors at ten, and he planned to be the first one through them. There was a lot of work he wished to do in their archives, and he was drawing up a list of his priorities when, out of nowhere, a cyclone hit his table.

The opposite chair was yanked back, a body dropped into it, and a voice called out to a passing waiter, “ Due ova fritte, il pane tostato, ed un espresso. Pronto! ”

Glancing up, David saw the tour guide unbuttoning her overcoat and scanning the tabletop as if on the lookout for anything she could eat while waiting for her eggs and toast to get there.

“ Buon giorno,” David said, surprised but amused.

“ Buon giorno,” the guide replied. “ Lei parla l’Italiano? ”

“ Si,” David said, glad to start giving his rusty Italian a tryout. “ Ma sono fuori di pratica.” But I’m out of practice.

The guide nodded quickly three times, and said, “ Cio e buono.” That’s okay.

The waiter put a cup of espresso in front of her, and the guide downed half of it in one gulp, snapping her fingers before the waiter could get away and saying, “ Un altro.”

While the waiter went to get another, David introduced himself. “ Mi chiamo David Franco.”

“Olivia Levi,” the guide replied, taking the band from her ponytail and shaking her hair loose. Olivia-it was the perfect name for her, David thought. Eyes as black as olives, and skin the color of the espresso foam. “And, if you do not mind, we will speak English.”

David felt vaguely insulted. Was his Italian so bad that she’d given up already?

“It is for me,” Olivia said. “I must use it so that the studenti don’t have any reason to laugh when I talk.”

“I thought you did an exceptional job.”

Olivia blew a sigh of disgust. “That is all it is-a job. I must do it for the money. Everything,” she said, lifting her hands from the table in resignation, “I must do for the money.”

She had all the theatricality of the Italians, too, David thought. “Leading tour groups must keep you pretty busy. Especially in a place like Florence.”

“But it keeps me from my work. My serious work. I am not a guide; I am a writer.”

“Really?” David said intrigued. “What do you write about?”

“What do I write about?” she said, gesturing at the wonders of Florence surrounding them. “The greatest collection of art ever produced in one place, at one time. What other city can claim Michelangelo and Botticelli, Verrocchio and Masaccio, Leonardo and Ghiberti, Brunelleschi and Cellini? They were all here. Their work, it is still here. And I do not even mention yet Petrarch and Boccaccio and the immortal Dante!”

“But you Florentines gave Dante a pretty rough time,” David said with a smile. “Exiling him forever in 1302, as I recall.”

Olivia stopped dead and gave David a more appraising look, as if to acknowledge that this was someone who might know a little something, after all.

“Not my people. My people never had a say in anything. They lived on the Via Guidici.”

In other words, she was telling him that they lived in the Jewish quarter.

“Even Cosimo, who was supposed to be our friend, he closed the Jewish banks in 1570 and forced everyone, whether they liked it or not, to live in that damned ghetto.”

The waiter set a plate and another espresso down in front of Olivia, who lowered her head-the ringlets of her jet-black hair artfully framing her narrow face-and dug in unashamedly.

What amused David about the Florentines-and it was certainly true of Olivia just now-was the way that they spoke of their history almost in the present tense. Olivia dropped the name of Cosimo de’Medici, dead for five hundred years, like he was a personal acquaintance, and as if the removal of the Jews from much of Florence was something that happened just yesterday. In fact, David knew, the Florentine Jews had gradually regained many of their rights, and by 1800 had once again been allowed to live anywhere in the city that they chose. There was even a city ordinance on the books that prohibited malicious references to Jewry from the public stage. The ghetto was gradually eradicated-there was no trace of it remaining-though the undercurrent of anti-Semitism that ran through so much of Europe lingered long after.

An undercurrent that Hitler, in his own time, had brought roiling to the surface.

“Your family survived the war then?” David said hopefully.

Mopping up some yolk with the bread, Olivia said, “A few. Not so many. Many of them, I am told, were sent to Mauthausen.”

A concentration camp where thousands of Italian Jews were gassed.

“I’m sorry,” David said, and she shrugged her shoulders wearily.

“After all this time, what can you say? Many of the Italians, they hid the Jews in convents and cloisters. But the Pope? He did nothing. And the Fascists? They liked their brown shirts and their boots, and they liked killing shopkeepers and clerks; it was easy. But once that was done, so were they. They were cowards at heart.” She scraped the plate for the last of the eggs, as David pictured in his mind’s eye Mussolini hanging by his heels from a meat hook.

“Where do you live now?” David asked.

“You know the Giubbe Rosse, in the Piazza della Repubblica?”

“No, I don’t.”

She shrugged again and said, “It’s the best cafe in Firenze. I have an apartment next door to it.” Having cleaned every crumb from her plate, she leaned back in the chair and fumbled in her pocket for a pack of cigarettes. She held them out to David, who declined, then lighted one herself.

“But what are you?” Olivia asked. “You are American. But a tourist?”

David wasn’t sure if this was just polite conversation, or if he was being sized up as a potential customer.

“I’m actually here on some business.”

“You do not look like a businessman.”

David decided he’d take that as a compliment. “I’m researching something. I work in Chicago, at a library.”

“I have been to Chicago,” Olivia said triumphantly. “It was very cold. And I also lived in New York, for five years.” She spread her fingers to emphasize the point. “I was writing a dissertation, at Columbia.” She said it like Col om bia the country. “Now I work here.”

“On a book?” David asked.

A furtive look crossed the tour guide’s face. “A very big book,” she said. “A history-I cannot tell you more. I have been working on it for seven years.”

“So you must be nearly done?” David said encouragingly.

But Olivia shook her head and exhaled a cloud of smoke over one shoulder. “No. I have met with much resistance. And it will cause a lot of arguments.” Glancing at her watch, she said, “And now I must go. I have a private client for a tour. Where are you staying?”

“The Grand.”

“The Grand?” David could see another reappraisal going on in Olivia’s eyes. “And who is it you work for? What library is this?”

“The Newberry. It’s a private institution.”

“And are you going to work at the university here?”

“No, at the Biblioteca Laurenziana.”

It was as if David could actually hear the wheels spinning in her head, like a slot machine that was coming up all cherries. He expected another volley of questions, and was beginning to wonder if he should have been quite so forthcoming. Was it really just by chance that she had followed him to the cafe and joined him? Or was he being paranoid? Ever since that guy had tried to run him down in the street, he’d been uncharacteristically suspicious.

Olivia stood up, taking one last drag on her cigarette. “I will be late,” she said, dropping the butt in her empty espresso cup. “But I thank you for the meal.”

“You’re welcome,” David said.

“You may join another of my tours, anytime. Also for free.”

“Careful,” David replied, “I might take you up on that.”

She smiled and said, “It is possible I could teach you a thing or two.”

And then, as he pondered the full import of that, she hurried off across the square, the tails of her old coat flapping around her. He was still looking when she turned her head unexpectedly and caught him. Her laugh rang out across the piazza.