The Medusa Amulet

Chapter 16

A butcher shop. As far as Ernst Escher was concerned, that was what the place looked like. And not for the first time, he wondered if he was being paid enough for this job.

Julius Jantzen, in a surgical mask and blood-spattered apron, was just depositing one of the last severed feet into the acid bath. Disposing of three bodies, from the hair on the head to the last toenail, wasn’t easy, and Escher and Jantzen had been hard at it for almost two days. Julius had wanted to smuggle the bodies out of the apartment and dump them into the Arno, or even somewhere in the surrounding countryside; but Escher knew from experience that bodies had a way of turning up. Rivers were dredged, fields were tilled, even asphalt parking lots were sometimes broken up for a new development. No, as he had patiently explained to Julius while mopping up the blood in his foyer, it was always best to get rid of the evidence, right then and there.

And who could ask for a better place to do it than Julius’s private lab?

Escher had gone out and picked up a hatchet, a bone saw, a steel mallet, gallon jugs of chemical supplies, and everything else necessary for the destruction, decomposition, and disposal of human remains. On the way back from his last trip, he had stopped to pick up several packs of good, German beer-Lowenbrau-so that he wouldn’t have to drink any more of that Italian swill. It would be thirsty work, of that he had no doubt.

Even though Jantzen was the doctor, Escher quickly discovered he had no stomach for the dirty work. It was Escher who’d had to lift each of the three Turks onto the examining table and start chopping with the axe and the saw. The human body was neatly divisible into six pieces-the arms, the legs, the head, and the torso-but after smashing the jaw, for instance, the delicate work was extracting every last tooth and making sure it was properly pulverized.

While Escher took care of the butchery, he left the acid immersions, incinerations, and flushing of the remains to Jantzen, who several times stopped to throw up into his surgical sink.

“Good God,” Escher asked him at one point, “how did you ever get through medical school?”

“I hadn’t murdered the cadavers.”

“And you didn’t murder these. I did. Or would you rather I’d have let them kill us?”

“Ahmet wouldn’t have killed anyone; he was just hopped up and looking for a quick score.”

“And that’s what you think?” Escher said.

“Why? What else could it have been?”

“I think he was here to see me,” Escher said, smashing the skull on the table with the mallet, “and got a bit distracted.” Softened by the sulfuric acid, the head squashed like a pumpkin. “Never send a junkie to do a job. That’s what I always say.”

Every few hours, Escher went out for a meal-the place run by the Spaniards at the corner really was as good as Julius had claimed-but usually he went alone. A couple of times, he brought something home for Jantzen, and though he’d never planned on staying the night, much less two, in such a dump, there was so much work to do he hadn’t bothered to find a hotel. He’d simply commandeered the bed.

As for keeping tabs on David Franco, he knew what he was up to-nosing around the Laurenziana library. The moment he’d disappeared inside, Escher had put in a call to Schillinger-the man did know everyone-and within minutes, the library’s director, a Dr. Valetta, had gotten in touch and promised to keep him posted on David’s doings. Fortunately, no one, to Escher’s knowledge, knew anything about this little Turkish incident, and he certainly had no intention of mentioning it to anyone.

He wished he could be so sure of Jantzen.

His cell phone rang in his breast pocket, and he had to snap off his latex gloves to answer it. It was Valetta himself, true to his word.

“He’s gone, but she’s here,” he whispered, as if afraid of being overheard in his own office.

“Where has he gone?”

“How should I know? But Olivia Levi is working alone, in the main reading room. Right now. You said you wanted to know when she was accounted for.”

“All right, all right,” he said, “thanks for the word.”

Turning to look over his shoulder, he saw Jantzen holding the hand hose and washing some ashes and bone dust down the sink. Every few hours, just for safety’s sake, they poured in some drain cleaner, too.

“You feel like an outing?” he called out.

Jantzen turned to look at him, a numb expression in his eyes. His whole body, haggard enough to begin with, looked stooped and defeated. Why, Escher wondered, didn’t he just prescribe himself some uppers?

“Come on,” Escher said, tossing his gloves onto the blood-soaked table. “I’ll buy you a gelato.”

Passing through the courtyard, a squirrelly young man appeared out of nowhere, wringing his hands, and said, “Dr. Jantzen? Dr. Jantzen? I need to see you, sir.”

Another one of his friend’s fine clientele, Escher thought.

“Not now, Giovanni,” Julius said.

“But I need to see you,” he pleaded, clearly strung out on some substance and plucking at Julius’s sleeve.

“He said not now,” Escher intervened, and the man, after taking one look into his hard blue eyes, fell back, silent, nearly toppling into the stagnant fountain.

Julius’s car-a Volvo, exactly as Escher might have guessed-was parked outside the tobacconist’s, and as Escher waited for him to unlock the doors, he couldn’t help but notice that there were several people inside the shop, jabbering excitedly, and a dark, beetle-browed woman, in a headscarf, with a couple of children clinging to her coat. More Turks. As Escher slung his satchel onto the floor of the front seat of the car and got in, the woman in the headscarf came to the shop window, looking fixedly at him, and then-making the bell above the door jingle-came bustling out.

“Drive,” Escher said, as Julius started the car.

The woman was shouting in bad Italian-something about her husband not coming home-but Escher’s window was up, and when she rapped her knuckles on the glass, her rings clattering, he gave her a level stare but said nothing. The children capered about in the street, as if to impede their escape, but Escher said, “Run them over, if you have to.”

“For God’s sake, Ernst…”

But Escher leaned over and blasted the horn, and the kids jumped out of the way.

The woman spat on the window, and for the rest of the ride-maybe ten minutes in slow, thick traffic-the spittle clung like glue to the glass. Escher told Julius where to go, and once they’d reached the Piazza della Repubblica and found one of the very rare parking spots, he picked his satchel up off the floor and got out.

It was a brisk, sunny morning, and Escher mounted the steps of the apartment building two at a time, with Julius lingering behind. First, he rang the buzzer, to make sure no one else was home-just because Olivia was accounted for didn’t mean she had no roommates-and when there was no answer, he rang all the others, until someone buzzed him in. When he heard a door open down the hall, he called out, “Delivery for Levi!” and swiftly climbed to the third floor, with Julius close behind.

The door itself, decorated with a postcard of some ancient sculpture, was easy work-Escher could pick any lock, and this wasn’t even a good one-and the curtains were drawn. The place was like a cave. Sweet Jesus, Escher thought, don’t any of the Florentines live in decent places? He finally located the light switch, turned it on, and found himself staring into a pair of big, blinking eyes.

An owl, with one mangled wing, was perched on a rickety stand. It was free to fly, if it could, and hooted several times at the intruders.

“This city is pazzo ”-crazy-Escher said.

The rest of the apartment was also strange. Every sofa and chair, every table and counter, was covered with books and papers. There were cinder-block shelves groaning under the weight of crumbling encyclopedias. The bedroom in back looked like no more than an annex to the library in front. Escher could barely make out the bed.

But it was all in keeping with what Dr. Valetta had reported about Olivia Levi; despite her good looks, he had warned Escher, she was not empty-headed. She was smart. Very smart. She had graduated at the top of her class from the University of Bologna, Italy’s oldest and most prestigious school, then traveled to the States to do further research in New York. She had written some provocative papers, published in academic journals that almost no one ever read, and was apparently working on some secret magnum opus while she supported herself leading tour groups around the city. Judging from the look of the place, tour guides didn’t get paid all that well.

“So, what are we doing here?” Julius asked.

“You’re standing at the window, keeping an eye out for any unexpected visitors.”

“All right,” Julius said, dutifully taking up his post where he could peek out between the drawn drapes. “But what are you doing?”

“I’m looking for library cards,” Escher said, sounding as puzzled as he felt.

“What?”

“I’m looking for call slips, or copies of them, from the Lauren-ziana.” Even Escher didn’t know why these could possibly be of importance to anyone.

But he had more general orders, too. Among other things, he was to scour the premises for anything that looked like a mirror, or a Gorgon, or a drawing of a mirror or a Gorgon. He was to keep an eye out for any book about Benvenuto Cellini, or black magic, or stregheria, the Sicilian strain of witchcraft, or for anything that struck him as occult or unexplainable-most notably, anything that connected such stuff to the Nazi high command during the Second World War. He was to photograph, or take notes on, any such material, and if it seemed particularly unique and rare, simply steal it. It was for Schillinger, whose sanity Escher had begun to doubt, and Dr. Valetta, whom he had only spoken to on the phone, to decide what was significant. Like any soldier in the trenches, he worried about the wisdom of his generals.

But Olivia’s apartment presented him with a more immediate problem. Even the most cursory review of her books and papers revealed dozens of titles-in French and German, English and Italian-on all of those topics and more. Ernst Escher was no scholar, and even though he had a degree in computer science from a technical college in Lausanne-you had to have a bachelor’s, even to be considered for the Swiss Guard-he could see that this woman had an extraordinarily wide, and bizarre, range of interests. Above her desk she had framed photographs of Mussolini hanging by his heels in 1945, a map of the lost continent of Atlantis, and finally, an official portrait of Mme. Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy. Escher hardly knew where to start.

The owl hooted and stretched its wings.

He began by combing through every desk and dresser drawer in search of the library slips. But he already knew that if they were this important to someone else, Olivia Levi might know that, too, and she would not have left them carelessly about.

Taking his camera from the pocket of his windbreaker, he spent the next hour, as Jantzen kept watch, laboriously photographing her bookshelves, being careful to disturb them as little as possible (though they were such a mess, how would she ever know?) and making sure that all the titles on the spines were legible. Then he took several shots of her desk, where he did have to rearrange several papers to be sure every word on them would be legible. The ones on top had to do with the collaborationist Vichy regime in France. Why was someone like this worrying her pretty head with ancient crap like that? She could have found a rich husband by now and be living la dolce vita, as the locals liked to call it. The older Escher got-and he had turned thirty-five on the plane trip to Florence-the less he understood people. Life was a fucked-up affair, and as far as he could tell, the point was to just get through it with the maximum amount of pleasure and a minimum of pain… even if that meant inflicting a little damage on other people along the way. If you didn’t watch out for yourself, no one else would do it for you.

“Anything happening?” he asked Jantzen as he loaded another flash card into his camera.

“Someone’s locking a bike right outside,” Julius said from the window. “A young guy.”

“Is he tall, with brown hair and glasses?”

“No, he’s got black hair, no glasses, definitely Italian.”

At least it wasn’t David Franco. And he might be coming to any of the apartments in the building. Escher listened for the buzzer, but nothing rang. He noticed a box of books that he’d overlooked under the desk, and was debating whether or not to drag it out when Jantzen urgently whispered, “Someone’s coming.”

Escher heard it, too, now, the trudge of steps approaching. Jantzen ducked behind the curtains, and Escher swiftly turned out the lights, opened a closet, shoved some clothes to one side and squashed himself inside. The closet was so full the door wouldn’t close entirely, and through the crack he heard the rattle of keys, then saw a guy in jeans and a ski jacket, poking his head in.

“Olivia?” he said. “You home?”

Turning on the light, he ventured into the room, a pair of bicycle saddlebags slung over one shoulder.

“Don’t get mad-it’s just me. Giorgio. Anybody here?”

The owl hooted and ruffled its wings.

“Hey there, Glaucus, I’ve missed you. You miss me?”

He dropped his bags on the floor and his coat on the couch, then sauntered into the kitchen, where Escher could hear a kettle being filled. He had keys, but he wasn’t expected-or perhaps even permitted, which would explain his not ringing the buzzer, and his timid entry. Escher pegged him for an old boyfriend-and when he came back into the front room and started sorting through a pile of CDs on the stereo, and tossing some into his saddlebags, Escher figured he knew what was going on. The old beau had come back, on the sly, to retrieve some of his stuff.

Escher had been in this very spot himself, more than once, but he’d always left a present behind to show he’d been there. Once, it had been a dead rat in the microwave, and oh, what he would have given to see his ex’s reaction to that!

The kettle boiled, and Giorgio went to make his instant coffee, or tea. Escher feared that Julius would give himself away, but so far it looked like the boyfriend had no desire to open the curtains either.

And Escher didn’t believe he would stick around in the apartment long.

But what if there was something he wanted in the closet?

Escher ran his eye over the clothes. As far as he could tell, they were all dresses and other women’s things. It was only when he looked down that he saw the hiking boots, shoved almost all the way to the back-and they were plainly a man’s.

The boyfriend came back, and although Escher couldn’t see him, he heard him sit down in the desk chair and rummage around in the drawers. Then, he hit the play button on her answering machine and listened to her messages. Escher had planned to do that himself.

But how long was he going to take? Standing in the musty closet was growing uncomfortable, and it was only a matter of time before Jantzen gave himself away somehow.

“You hungry?” Giorgio was saying to the damn owl, and he’d gotten up to feed it something.

Then, as Escher listened carefully, he heard him closing the straps on his saddlebags-was he finally done?-before snapping his fingers, as if he’d forgotten something. It was unmistakable-he was coming to the closet, probably for those fucking boots.

The door opened, and since the boyfriend was already looking down, Escher was able to head butt him, like a piledriver, without much trouble. But because of the bad angle, he ended up catching him not just on the forehead but the bridge of the nose, too. The guy stumbled back, stunned, not knowing what had just hit him, when Escher stepped out of the closet and cracked him under the chin with a swift uppercut.

He was actually lifted off his feet before going down hard, smacking his head for good measure on the edge of a low table. He was unconscious, the blood streaming from his broken nose and split lip, when Julius popped out from behind the drapes and said, “What the hell just happened?”

Escher was already going through his pockets, taking his wallet-he had a faculty card that identified him as Giorgio Capaldi, an assistant history professor-and his BlackBerry.

“Is he dead?” Julius gasped, coming no closer.

“No. But he’s going to have a very bad headache when he comes to.”

Dragging the body into the bedroom, Escher hoisted it onto the bed, then cut the cord on the bedside phone and used it to tie his wrists.

“Make yourself useful,” he said to Julius, who was watching slack-jawed from the doorway. “Find me a scarf, or some stockings.” He tied the remaining length of cord to the iron bedstead.

Julius found a silk scarf, and Escher stuck it into the boyfriend’s mouth before knotting the ends behind his head. Then, almost tenderly, he lifted the man’s head and rested it on the pillow.

“That should do it.”

Turning, he ripped open the bedside table, spilling the contents onto the floor. On the dresser, he opened the jewel box and threw the worthless costume jewelry around the room. But just to make things seem convincing, he stuck a couple of necklaces and earrings in his pants pocket.

Jantzen stood mute, as if transfixed, until Escher said, “Let’s go,” and pushed him back toward the front door. On the way, he swept a few things onto the floor and kicked the owl’s perch over. The bird hopped onto a stack of books, hooting and fluttering.

At the top of the landing, he listened for any noise, then gently closed the door behind him and led Julius back down. To add insult to injury, they found a parking ticket on the Volvo.

“I’m not paying that,” Jantzen protested, finally finding his voice again.

“Good,” Escher said, tearing it up. “Neither am I.”