The Medusa Amulet

Chapter 36

The moment Ascanio swept the car across the traffic lanes, and gunned it down the exit ramp, Olivia had let out an involuntary scream and David clutched the walnut trim on the dashboard so hard his knuckles turned white.

“Are you crazy?” Olivia cried.

But Ascanio was looking in the rearview mirror as the car descended the ramp, and at the bottom he stopped abruptly, letting the car idle there. It was a lonely spot, with brown farmland and a white farmhouse off in the distance, and it took David a few seconds just to release his grip on the dashboard.

“I had to be sure we had no company,” Ascanio said.

“Well, I think we’ve settled that question,” Olivia said. “But next time, could you at least give us some warning?” She muttered an oath in Italian, and Ascanio smiled.

Then, he turned the wheel to the right, toward the town called Cinq Tours. The road there, part of the Route Nationale system, was older and narrower, and it meandered through scenic but now-barren fields and forests. In a grove of old oaks, David saw a pack of wild boars, pawing and snuffling at the hard ground.

“A local specialty,” Ascanio observed with a tilt of his chin. “In his day, the marquis was a very good hunter.”

“But not so much anymore, I’d guess.” David had been wondering how to ask the indelicate question, but this was as good, or bad, a time as any. “How were his legs injured? In an accident?”

Ascanio waited for a tractor to lumber over an old stone bridge, then maneuvered around it. “An accident of history,” he replied. “It happened during the war.”

The war. David almost laughed at the absurdity of it. Which one? It could be almost any war at all, from the Napoleonic campaigns to the Second World War. The marquis might have been a field marshal at Waterloo, and Ascanio his aide-de-camp. It was an alternate reality that David was working in, but since that was also the only reality in which some hope for his sister survived, he was not about to challenge it.

A few kilometers on, they came to a cobblestoned town square, with a white stone cross in its center, a few shops, and an inn-L’Auberge Sur le Carre-bearing the green and white Logis de France imprimatur. Ascanio parked the car right outside, close to a lone gas pump.

“We can get something to eat here,” he said. “They do a good rabbit-and-mushroom stew.”

But David didn’t want to wait, much less for rabbit stew. “Why don’t we just keep going?” he said. “It can’t be much farther to the chateau.” He still had every intention of getting on a plane to the States that same night.

Ascanio opened his door and got out. Poking his head back in, he said, “We have to wait till it gets dark, anyway. And I like stew.”

Slamming the door shut and heading into the inn, he left them, still in their seat belts, in the car. David turned around and Olivia, un-snapping her belt, said, “He’s right. We have to eat. Come on.”

They found Ascanio in a wooden booth in back. Only one other table was occupied, by a couple of farmers in overalls. The owner, a cheerful, chubby woman wearing a soup-stained apron, brought them a bottle of the local wine and took their orders-three rabbit stews.

By the time she returned with the food, Ascanio had already taken out some papers, a map among them, and was explaining the rest of the plan first laid out by the marquis. Glancing down as she made room for the plates, the woman said, “Do you need directions?” But Ascanio, laying his hand across a rough diagram, said, “ Non, merci. We have a GPS in the car.”

She flicked a hand at the notion. “My husband has one of those, too, and it never works right.” She looked to make sure they had everything they needed, then said, “ Bon appetit,” and went to get the farmers another round.

David ate, with no more relish than a machine taking on fuel, and listened as Ascanio further elaborated on the deeds that lay before them. For David-a man who was given to rumination, a man who spent most of his working hours in the company of old books, a man whose biggest challenge was usually determining the arcane meaning of an obscure quotation-this had all been a rude and rough awakening. He felt like a spy might feel on assuming a new identity.

But there was also something-how could he put it?- invigorating in it. Something that stirred his blood and energized his will. In the modern world, action-physical action-was so seldom taken. Disputes were resolved in courtrooms and arguments in therapy sessions. The focus was always on emotions and interrelationships and reaching consensus.

But with Ascanio and Sant’Angelo, David felt none of that. He was dealing with the certainties of another age. In Cellini’s day, a difference of opinion led straight to a brawl. An insult could result in a sword fight to the death. According to his own autobiography, Cellini had killed three men in duels, and countless others in battle. Had it not been for his present infirmity, David was sure he would have been participating in the assault that lay ahead.

When Ascanio had shown them the diagram of the chateau, expertly done in the marquis’s own hand, and outlined the course of action he was proposing, it was like listening to a fantastic tale out of the Arabian Nights. But this was a tale in which David and Olivia were to play a vital part! It was only when Ascanio told Olivia, while mopping up the last of his stew, that she would have to stay back with the car while he and David went to reclaim the Medusa that she objected.

“Without my help, you would not even be here! Who was it who knew enough to follow the trail of Cagliostro? This is just the same old paternalistic bullshit. Who has more of a right than I do to join this fight?”

But an angry look crossed Ascanio’s face. He rolled up the map and papers, threw a wad of bills on the table, and said, “Come with me.”

He strode out into the square and stopped in front of the white marble cross. David and Olivia quickly caught up, and even though it was getting late in the day and the light was starting to fade, David was able to read the plaque that said the monument had been erected to commemorate the villagers executed, on this very spot, by the Nazis on June 20, 1940.

“The marquis himself donated this monument.”

There were perhaps a dozen names inscribed on its column.

“They were the household staff of the chateau. They were killed in retribution for the marquis’s escape.” His finger ran along the letters of one name-Mademoiselle Celeste Guyot.

“I never had the heart to tell him,” Ascanio said, “but it should have said Madame.”

“She was married?” David asked.

“The night before,” Ascanio replied, and from the expression on his face-great sorrow and implacable rage-David did not have to ask who her husband had been. Nor did Olivia contest his instructions again.

Ascanio went to the gas pump, slipped in a credit card, and refueled the car. Then he filled a couple of gallon jugs, and put them in the boot, too. David didn’t ask why. He drove the Maserati out of the square, where amber-colored lights were just coming on in some of the storefronts, then out onto the road leading to the Chateau Perdu.

The road was so narrow it essentially became a single, unlighted country lane. Posts with red reflectors atop them were positioned every fifty yards or so, but often they were obscured by the overgrown shrubbery and trees. For the first time, David began to see how aptly the chateau had been named-this was a lost region, a place that showed no other signs of human habitation. For the next few kilometers, nothing but dark woods lined both sides of the road. The moon hung low in the sky, peeking out from behind a scrim of fast-moving clouds.

“The gatehouse,” Ascanio finally said, dimming the headlights, and David, peering through the side window, detected a stone house, covered with vines, squatting like a toadstool among the overhanging trees. No lights were on inside, and it looked as if it had been untenanted for years. Ascanio drove past slowly, long enough for David and Olivia to take in the high iron gates, and a driveway on the other side that disappeared into the blackness.

“So where’s the chateau?” Olivia said, and Ascanio replied, “Right where it’s been for eight hundred years. On the cliffs.”

Only when they were well past the gates did Ascanio turn the headlights back on. A rubblestone wall, five or six feet high, ran for a long distance along one side of the road, and even when it ended, massive old oaks formed an impenetrable barrier.

“How do we get back there?” David said, and Ascanio pointed to a break in the trees, where a rusty chain had been looped around two trunks, along with a sign that read PRIVATE PROPERTY-NO TRESPASSING. To David’s surprise, he nosed the grill of the Maserati up to the chain and pressed on the gas. There was a screeching sound of metal on metal, a crack and a pop and a flash of white light as one of the headlights blew out, and the chain snapped in two.

With only one light remaining, he maneuvered the car along a bumpy, overgrown track that wound through the trees before eventually opening up to a view of the river. There was an old, cracked, concrete loading dock, and a long wharf beyond that extending into the rolling waters of the Loire. To David, it looked as if this place, too, had been unused for many years.

The moment Ascanio stopped the car and turned off the engine, they were swallowed up by the night. The boot of the car popped open, and Ascanio got out without a word and began to hand David his supplies-a backpack loaded with gear, a flashlight, and one of the plastic jugs of gasoline. He pulled a matching pack over his own shoulders and, like some pirate, he took the harpe -the short sword with its fearsome notched end-and slung it, still in its scabbard, onto his belt. Grabbing the other gasoline jug, he said to Olivia, “Turn the car around, then just wait for us. If we’re not back in a few hours, drive back to Paris.”

“I’m not leaving you here!”

“You won’t be,” he said. “We’ll be dead.”

David’s blood froze in his veins at the casual manner in which Ascanio said it, but he felt as if it were a test, too. Ascanio looked at him, waiting to see him quail, but David would not. He hadn’t come this far to give up now.

Not when Sarah’s life hung in the balance.

Ascanio said, “Come on then,” and took off into the trees. Olivia plucked at David’s sleeve, kissed him hard on the lips, and said, “I will be here.”

David turned, and lugging the plastic jug, picked his way with the flashlight through the dense forest. All he could see of Ascanio was the other flashlight beam, held close to the ground, and he had to struggle just to catch up. There was still no sign of a chateau, but Ascanio was leading them down toward the riverbank. There, they marched along, while the ground began to rise above them into sheer cliffs. David’s boots squelched in the muddy soil, and the gas sloshed in the jug. After several minutes, the clouds passed away from the moon, and high above them, David could see, like the fingers of a giant grasping hand, five black towers.

“I see it,” David said, and Ascanio simply nodded. Waving his flashlight back and forth across the base of the cliff, he revealed a series of caves and crevices worn into the limestone over many millennia.

“Look for five vertical cuts,” he said, making a slicing motion with the hand holding the flashlight.

David trained his beam, too, onto the cliffs and stepping carefully over the rocks and rubble, was the first to find the deep incisions, like hashmarks, chiseled above a cave entrance no bigger than a wagon wheel.

Ascanio shifted his backpack higher onto his shoulders, ducked his head, and vanished into the hole. David quickly followed and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, with steps only four or five inches wide, carved out of the stone. Ascanio was already wending his way up them; David could see the glow of his flashlight, and loose pebbles and dirt skittered down from above. David had to keep his head bent low, his shoulders tucked in, and his feet positioned sideways on the steps in order to get up them. It would have been a difficult climb under any circumstances, but because he was toting the jug in one hand and the flashlight in the other, it became a precarious balancing act, too. One missed step and he could find himself tumbling headlong all the way down the winding passageway.

The air was damp and foul, and every breath felt as if it were being inhaled underwater. Ascanio was coughing, too, but the light from his beam continued to ascend. They were burrowing up through the earth, and by the time Ascanio had stopped and David had managed to catch up to him at the very top, they were both short of breath and drenched with moisture. Ascanio’s flashlight and jug lay on the ground, and he gestured at a round slab of stone.

“We have to move that,” he said, so David put his things down, too. They were in a space only a few feet square, and it took a minute just to figure out how to divide the labor. As Ascanio pushed on one edge of the slab, David pulled on its upper rim. It rocked a few inches, then settled back into its age-old groove.

“Again,” Ascanio said, and that time the slab rolled to one side, just enough for Ascanio to slip through. The scabbard of his sword scraped against the stone. “Quick,” he said, extending his arm back through, “hand me my pack.” David did, then handed his own through, too, before scrunching down, as if trying to worm through a rubber tire, and into a rocky tunnel. A string of lightbulbs, all of them off, dangled along the roof. Ascanio was already removing the cap of his jug, and motioning David to move past him.

As soon as David had, Ascanio bent over and, walking backwards, began sloshing the gasoline in a long trail along behind them. They moved steadily down the tunnel, David leading the way now, until Ascanio’s jug was empty. They were standing above an iron grate, and when David directed his flashlight beam into it, he could see a steep fall, and hear, at the bottom, the ebb and flow of river water.

Ascanio tossed his own empty jug aside, opened David’s, and they continued on, with Ascanio dribbling gas behind them all the way. Wine racks rose on either side, until they came to some steps leading into an old-fashioned scullery; beyond that, in the kitchen, they could hear the sound of a radio playing. Ascanio put a finger to his lips as he reached up with the harpe and cut the cord that connected the light-bulbs strung the length of the tunnel.

Then, creeping behind the last of the racks, they peered out between the bottles to see a woman with her gray hair in a long plait bustling about the kitchen, tidying up. She wiped the counter clean, put some stray dishes in the dishwasher, then turned it on.

Surveying her domain before closing up for the night, she said, “ Que faites-vous vers le haut la?”-What are you doing up there?-to a kitten with its paws up on the center table. She flicked off the radio, put on her overcoat, and deposited the kitten into one of her voluminous side pockets. Then, tying a scarf under her chin, she left, leaving the room illuminated only by a night-light above the stove and the red glow from a wall clock advertising Cinzano.

The clock continued to tick, the freezers-two of them-hummed, and the dishwasher gently rattled its plates, but there was no sign of further activity. Finally, Ascanio crept out from behind the rack, and after glancing out the kitchen door, came back and began to shake the remaining drops of gasoline onto the floor. When the jug was empty, he tossed it out of sight under the sinks. He stashed his flashlight in his backpack, then, gripping the hilt of the harpe, he whispered to David, “ La Medusa? ” It was as if he was asking him if he wanted a beer.

“Yes,” David said, relieved to discover that his own voice was firm and determined. He wiped the grime from his glasses and looped the wire sidepieces firmly back behind his ears. “ La Medusa.”