The Medusa Amulet

Chapter 32

The papers from his valise were pretty much ruined. The only good news David could think of was that the originals were still safe and sound at the Newberry.

Still, the marquis had laid the documents out on his desk in the center of his salon with all the care and respect one would accord a newly discovered codex by Leonardo. They lay atop a layer of soft, absorbent linen, and even now he was dabbing at their edges with a dry sponge.

The pages of the manuscript, La Chiave Alla Vita Eterna, might as well have been glued together; they would have to be dried out slowly over the next few days, their leaves delicately separated by scalpels and tweezers.

But it was the sketch of La Medusa that had immediately drawn Sant’Angelo’s full attention. Professor Vernet at the Mineralogical Museum had said the marquis was an expert in these matters, and the fact that he had instantly focused on this remarkable sketch only confirmed it. He was smoothing out its wrinkles as tenderly as a father would handle his infant child.

The man himself was like no one David had ever met. He wore an imperious expression and, beneath a prominently hooked nose, a luxuriant dark moustache. To David, he looked like a throwback to some earlier era. And despite his pronounced limp, he bore a powerful physical presence. Still wearing his formal clothes, the black tie dangling loose around his neck, he brooded over the papers. His pleated white shirt was fastened, David could not help but notice, with glittering sapphire studs and matching cuff links.

“In future,” he said, “you should really keep things like this out of the water.”

“In future,” David replied, “I hope to avoid being shot at.”

David had filled him in quickly on how they had come to show up at his door, soaking wet and out of breath, but when Sant’Angelo had asked who would be chasing him so intently, and why, David had been unable to supply the answer.

“They wanted that,” Olivia had jumped in, gesturing at the drawing.

“This?” Sant’Angelo said. “It’s just a sketch-and a copy at that.”

“They want the actual object, the looking glass,” she said, glancing at David to make sure he was okay with her being so forthcoming.

David nodded his acquiescence. Like Olivia, he was sitting in silk pajamas and a velvet robe supplied from the marquis’s own wardrobe. They had changed in a sumptuous bedroom suite upstairs and come down to steaming cups of hot chocolate.

“A little mirror, made out of what?” Sant’Angelo said skeptically. “Silver?”

“But by a great master’s hand,” David replied.

The marquis nodded. “Ah, so you do know. Cellini’s hand is always unmistakable, is it not?”

David shouldn’t have been surprised. He had the sense that this man knew far more than he was letting on.

“I have a client, and she has commissioned me to find it,” David said. “At any cost.” As a dealer in these things, the marquis would surely be intrigued by that mention of a commission.

“She has, has she? May I ask her name?”

“I’m not at liberty to divulge that,” David said, feeling that it was best to keep at least one or two cards close to his vest, especially with someone as cagey as Sant’Angelo.

The marquis nodded, no doubt accustomed to people keeping the names of their employers to themselves. But he wasn’t nearly done with his questions-and David wasn’t done with him, either. It was all a matter, David knew, of who divulged what and in what order.

“But what brought you to me in the first place?” Sant’Angelo said, leaning back in his chair, his fingers steepled in front of him.

David saw no harm in answering this one directly, telling him about some of their discoveries at the Mineralogical Museum. “Cagliostro seemed obsessed with someone by the name of Sant’Angelo, then, there it was-your name, in gold leaf, on the plaque listing the Board of Governors.”

The marquis acknowledged as much.

“So I have to ask,” David said. “Your family has apparently been in Paris for many generations, and working in this trade. Did one of your ancestors come into possession of La Medusa?”

Sant’Angelo didn’t even hesitate. “Yes.”

Olivia nearly leapt out of her chair, and David felt like the wind had been knocked out of him. Here was the most concrete proof yet that the thing had existed, not to mention some indication of where it had been. He was almost afraid to speak again.

“You don’t, by any chance, have it in your possession now?”

“No.”

“But you know where it is?” Olivia said, perched on the front of her chair.

This question, however, did give Sant’Angelo pause. “Yes,” he finally admitted.

David hastily drained his china cup, then placed it on a corner of the desk, well away from the drying papers. “Where?” he asked. “Where is it now?”

But Sant’Angelo clearly had given as much as he was prepared to give; now it was his turn, and he leveled his gaze at David.

“First, tell me why you-or your client, excuse me-wants it so badly.”

“It’s extremely valuable, as you know anything from the hand of Cellini would be.”

The marquis waved the comment away like a buzzing fly. “If you don’t speak honestly, we are done here.”

“Tell him,” Olivia said.

But David was hesitant, afraid that once he launched into the whole story, Sant’Angelo might think him as mad as his mysterious client.

The marquis waited.

“She believes that the Medusa holds a secret power.”

“Of what?”

And when David paused again, Olivia said, “Immortality.”

But if he thought the marquis would react badly, he was again mistaken. He sat stock-still, absolutely inscrutable.

“And you?” he said to David. “What do you think? Do you think it holds the power of immortality?”

“I have to.”

This response did surprise him. “You have to? Why?”

“A life is at stake.”

“Your client’s?”

“My sister’s.”

As the marquis listened raptly, David poured out the rest of the story. Hang the consequences, he thought. He didn’t have time-more importantly, Sarah didn’t have time-for him to play games. As he recounted the furious search he had so far undertaken, Olivia occasionally broke in with various asides, but if David worried that her mentions of the Third Reich, and Hitler’s own fascination with occult objects like La Medusa, would distract Sant’Angelo, or put him off in some way, he soon saw that he should have no fear on that score. Indeed, there was no part of the story that seemed to unduly surprise, appall, or even astound him. He was either the most trusting man in the world, or he knew that what they were saying was true. Though how it could be the latter was still a total puzzle to David.

When the narrative had finally drawn to a close, Sant’Angelo had a faraway look in his eye, and when he got up from his chair and walked, slowly, leaning on his cane, to the fireplace, he put one hand on the mantel and stood there, staring into the flames. He spoke without turning around.

“I once knew a woman,” he said, “years ago, and in another country. She was lost at sea, or so I was told.”

The logs crackled in the grate, an orange spark exploding onto the fire screen.

“To my knowledge, she’s the only one in the world who would know-and believe in-the power of La Medusa.”

David and Olivia exchanged a glance, but kept silent.

“She was very beautiful-famous for it, in fact.”

David felt a little chill run down his spine.

“There were painters who tried to convey her beauty on canvas, but none of their works have survived. And though sculptors tried their hand at it, too, marble and bronze were ill suited to capture her most remarkable feature.”

“What was that?” David asked, knowing in his very bones what Sant’Angelo was about to say.

“The color of her eyes,” he said, turning from the fire to look at David. “They were violet.”

David knew that the expression on his face had just told the marquis exactly what he wanted to know.

“It would not be safe for you to go back to your hotel tonight,” the marquis said. “You will stay here, and in the morning I will tell you where to find what you’re looking for.”

Then he turned back to the fire, his head down and his ebony cane glowing like a branding iron.

In their room upstairs, unseen hands had turned the bedclothes down, drawn the curtains, and turned the lamps low. For David, it was hard to believe that just the night before he had been defending his life in a cramped train compartment, and now he was ensconced in the luxurious bedroom of a Parisian town house… with Olivia, in a pair of vastly oversized pajamas, climbing up into the four-poster bed.

Pulling the down-filled duvet up to her chest, then patting the mattress, she said, “It is big enough for two, you know.”

David took off his robe, tossed it on a chair, then sat down on top of the duvet.

“Do you think he meant it?” David asked. “That he knows where to find La Medusa?”

“I do,” Olivia said. “But I know it will have to wait till morning.” She pushed the pillows to one side and shoved the coverlet farther down.

David had not been able to check in with Gary or Sarah for the past twenty-four hours, and now that his phone had been blown to pieces and Olivia’s drowned in the lake, he looked around for a phone in the room.

“There’s no phone in here,” Olivia said, reading his mind. “I checked.”

“Maybe I should find one downstairs,” he said, starting to get up, but Olivia drew him down again.

“David, it can wait for a few hours. She was doing all right the last time you called, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Then stop thinking about it just for one night. Think about yourself,” she said, drawing closer. “Think about us.”

She reached up with one hand and took off his glasses. She laid them on the bedside table and turned the lamp off. The only light in the room filtered through a crack in the curtains, which opened onto the street… and the boating park beyond.

“Can you still see me?” she joked.

“Sort of.”

She leaned forward, kissing him. “Now do you know where I am?”

“I have a very good idea.”

She laughed and slunk down into the bed.

“Come find me.”

David lifted the duvet enough to scoot himself under it and felt the warmth of Olivia’s body against him. Her eyes were shining in the dark, her black hair was spread out on the plump white pillow. Propped on one elbow, he bent his head to kiss her.

“Umm,” she said, “you taste like hot chocolate.”

“I thought that was you.” He kissed her again. “Yep, it’s you.” He reached around her slender waist, pulling her closer. Her own arms went up and around his neck.

“Maybe that day, when you wandered into the piazza?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Maybe that was fate.”

David, who would never have even considered such a thing a few weeks earlier, did not dismiss it. His world had been cracked wide open and suddenly allowed for a million possibilities.

If Olivia was his fate, he thought, as their bodies came together under the coverlet with a natural but urgent ease, he was all for it.