The Medusa Amulet

Chapter 38

Entering the salle d’armes, David felt as if he were surrounded.

All along both walls, gleaming in the moonlight, there were standing suits of armor, some holding pikes or lances or swords. A battle-axe and a mace were crossed above the great stone hearth, a crossbow and arrows above the door. It was an amazing display, David thought, enough to rival any museum’s collection.

As quietly as he could, he followed Ascanio, who knew the chateau well, out into a vast entry hall with a grand escalier. The marble stairs swept upward like a pair of angel’s wings, and Ascanio, like David dressed all in black, moved stealthily up the right-hand side.

But they had gone only a few steps, shielded by the balustrade, when they suddenly heard footsteps on the floor above, and the clicking of a woman’s heels. If she chose to come down their side of the steps, there’d be nothing they could do to avoid exposure. Hunching down low, they waited, until they heard her call out, “Monsieur Rigaud? Ou etes-vous? ”

But thankfully she did not start down the steps. Instead, a voice answered her from somewhere on the same floor.

“ Je suis ici, Madame Linz.” A man was approaching her.

David wished that he could simply melt away into the marble stairs he was flattened against.

“That business in Paris then?” the woman was saying. “It’s all taken care of?”

“Yes, I took care of it myself,” he said, though David thought he detected the slightest lack of conviction in his tone.

“You’re sure?” she said.

So she’d noticed it, too.

“Quite, Madame. I have already given a full account to Monsieur Linz.”

Through the balustrade, David could just catch a glimpse of this man Rigaud, with close-cropped hair, dyed an unnatural shade of blond, and an erect, military bearing.

She scoffed. “You can tell him whatever you want. But you had better not ever lie to me.” She took a step away, and David saw that she was young and pretty. “You’ve made the rounds?”

“I have.”

“It’s been a long day, and Auguste’s stomach is bothering him again. We are going to bed.”

“I hope he feels better in the morning.”

“Leave a note for the cook, will you? He’d like cream of wheat for breakfast.”

“I’ll let her know.”

“Good night then,” she said, the sound of her heels clicking away.

“Sleep well, Madame,” he replied, before returning to wherever he’d been.

David realized that he had not taken a breath the whole time. He took one now, and after a few seconds, Ascanio gestured toward the top of the stairs. There, they saw light spilling from a doorway at the far end of the hall, and Ascanio quickly led David in the other direction and up another staircase.

This floor was as gloomy as the rest. Wall sconces, with dim bulbs, provided the only light, and there were cords and wires running along the baseboards of the hallways and salons they moved through. It was as if the place hadn’t been renovated in sixty years. But everywhere David looked, he caught glimpses of old oil paintings hanging forlornly over velvet sofas, and antique sculptures tucked into forgotten corners. It was a total hodgepodge-in one room alone, he saw what appeared to be an Italian fresco, a Ming vase, a Durer etching, and a framed Egyptian papyrus. Who was this Auguste Linz?

Again, they rose, checking every room but encountering no one else. Ascanio, crooking one finger, led David into a salon, where he closed the door quietly behind him. Only then did he take out his flashlight and shine it around the room. At first, David didn’t understand what he was seeing-images were repeated, fractured, distorted-but then he saw that the salon had five sides, and they were all mirrored. An unlighted crystal chandelier hung directly above an ornate desk covered with papers and books and a bronze bust of the composer Richard Wagner. Ascanio stopped to train the flashlight beam on the blotter, where a notebook was open. In it, Linz had been scrawling something in a crabbed hand, in German, but so forcefully that the pen had indented every letter.

“This was once the marquis’s private study,” Ascanio whispered, taking a few seconds to absorb the room, as if for the first and the last time, but David’s attention was riveted on the notebook. Though his command of German was poor, and the handwriting hard to decipher, one thing jumped out at him as if it were in letters a foot high.

It was his own name.

“No,” David urged, as Ascanio started to move the flashlight beam away. “Look!”

He pointed to his name, and from what little he could read at a glance, he saw something about a search- die Suche -and an Italienisch Madchen, no doubt referring to Olivia.

“We don’t have time!” Ascanio said. “Come on!”

But David wasn’t about to leave this behind. He slipped the journal into his backpack before turning to see Ascanio probing the edges of one of the floor-length mirrors with his fingertips.

Rigaud was almost done with his exercises, and admiring his own bulging biceps-he could not understand how other men his age could let themselves get so badly out of shape-when Ali offered him the hash pipe again.

“If you want to relax,” Ali said, lying on the bed in nothing but an unbuttoned pair of jeans, “this will do a better job than that.” The pale scar on his throat looked whiter in the lamplight.

Rigaud did two more reps with the barbells before placing them back on the rubber mat in the corner of the room. Straightening up, he put his hands to the small of his back, where the T-shirt was stuck to his body, and wearily exhaled.

Ali took a hit off the pipe, then through clenched teeth said, “You still look pissed.”

“She talks to me like I’m some gaddamned butler,” Rigaud said, sitting down beside him on the bed. “She forgets I was a captain in the French army.”

He took the pipe, held a lighted match to the bowl, and inhaled deeply.

“Screw her,” Ali said, putting a consoling hand on his arm. “You don’t work for Ava. You work for her husband.”

Rigaud nodded, knowing he was right. But it was still hard to take. He had accepted this job because it felt like a cause, a mission, but over the years he had begun to have his doubts. What was he really doing? Whatever powers he once thought had been at Linz’s command, they seemed to have deserted him. He was a frustrated, impotent man-in every sense, if Rigaud could judge from Ava’s mood-and the tasks he set for Rigaud were increasingly redundant and defensive. Rigaud longed to go on the offensive for a change; but every time he even suggested as much to Linz, however obliquely, the man flew off the handle and went into one of his foaming, arm-waving, apoplectic fits. If he didn’t know better, Rigaud might have thought he was going to keel over on the spot.

Ali was rubbing his shoulders, and Rigaud took another long drag on the pipe. He kept his windows open to let out the smoke and the aroma. Linz, he knew, would not approve. But the master suite was far off, at the top of the eastern turret. And good God, why was someone of his age, and former rank, having to worry about such stuff? “Lie back,” Ali was saying. “I’ll give you a massage.”

“I still have work to do.”

“So do I,” Ali said, rising up on his knees and kneading the kinks in his back.

Putting the hash pipe on the bedside table and pulling off his sweaty T-shirt, Rigaud rolled over onto the bed. The hash was very pure, and all the trials of the recent days-most notably dispatching Julius Jantzen-began to recede. It was highly annoying that a man like Ernst Escher was still running loose, but the Turks would eventually track him down again. They weren’t good for much-and Rigaud had often argued with Linz to replace them with a more professional bunch-but Linz liked them for their single-mindedness and overall lack of curiosity. Even Rigaud appreciated their unslakable taste for revenge.

Ali’s fingers were working their magic on the knots in his back and shoulders and Rigaud allowed himself to drift away. Soft music was playing, that Eastern stuff that Ali liked, but right then it sounded good even to Rigaud. He remembered that he had to tell the cook, who arrived with the other servants at six in morning; that Linz wanted cream of wheat for breakfast. But then, just as promptly, he forgot all about it.