The Medusa Amulet

Chapter 43

When the Marquis di Sant’Angelo burst into the hospital room, trailed by a nurse pulling on his sleeve, Ascanio was just awakening from the anesthesia.

“You are all right?” the marquis said, leaning over his bedside. He had certainly seen him looking better, but he had also seen him looking worse.

“Monsieur,” the nurse was complaining, “these are not visiting hours, and the patient is still in recovery. You may come back when -”

But Sant’Angelo brushed her aside and clutched his dear friend’s hand. One leg was in a formidable cast, but all in all, Ascanio looked as if he would come through the ordeal intact.

“I’ll be fine,” Ascanio said, groggily, as he squeezed the marquis’s hand to reassure him. “But a fine pair we’ll make,” he added, gesturing at the marquis’s ebony walking stick. “A couple of gimps.”

“Not for long,” Sant’Angelo said. “The doctors tell me they got the bullet out fine, and you’ll be walking perfectly well in a few months.”

Ascanio nodded, and the nurse, after checking his blood pressure and offering him a sip of water through a straw, left the room, throwing one more murderous glance at the marquis.

Opening his fur-collared coat, Sant’Angelo drew a chair to the bedside, and said, “Tell me what happened.”

“David didn’t tell you already?”

“Franco? He told me nothing. He called, said you were here, and hung up before I could ask him a thing. I thought he would be here, in fact.” A look crossed Ascanio’s face that worried the marquis. “What did he not want me to know?” Sant’Angelo said.

Ascanio pointed a finger at the water, and the marquis held the straw to his lips again. And then, haltingly, Ascanio told the story of their assault on the chateau, of their final battle with Linz, and the ensuing fire and destruction. But when he was done, the marquis was still awaiting the one piece of information Ascanio had seemed to scrupulously elide. He only hoped it was an effect of the anesthesia.

“ La Medusa,” he prompted, his eyes actually flitting about the room. “Where is La Medusa?”

Ascanio looked away, and Sant’Angelo pulled his chair so close to the bed it was scraping the rail.

“Where is La Medusa?” he said, his voice taking on an edge of steel. “And where, for that matter, is David Franco?” He hardly needed a map anymore to put the two missing pieces together.

And that was when Ascanio told him that David had made off with it. “I was in no condition to chase after him,” Ascanio pleaded. “They dropped me at the hospital, and that girl drove them off like a bat out of Hell.”

Hell, Sant’Angelo thought, was where he’d send them, if he didn’t get back what belonged to him. Hadn’t he told this Franco everything he needed to know? Hadn’t he revealed to him secrets that he had told no other man? And this was how he was to be repaid?

“He’s on his way home,” Ascanio said. “To save that sister of his! I’m sure of it.”

Sant’Angelo was sure of it, too. He had foreseen something like this happening. It was why he’d had one of his minions trace the call David had made from his home, and cross-check the name of hospice patients in that immediate vicinity. David’s sister, he’d learned, was named Sarah Henderson, and she was in a place called Evanston, just outside Chicago. In spite of everything the marquis had done for him, it was clear to Sant’Angelo that David had more important priorities right now than returning his property to him. First, there was his sister. Not unexpected. And ultimately, there was his loyalty to the woman who had sent him on this mission to begin with.

Plainly, the librarian was not as innocent as he’d seemed. That, or he had had some iron injected into him by recent events. Either way, Sant’Angelo had to grudgingly admire the man’s nerve.

But the time had come for the marquis to put aside all subterfuge. At long last, he had done away with his nemesis at the chateau-that black stain on the soul of the world-and now it was time for him to reclaim what was due him- La Medusa, and his long-lost love in the bargain.

“Tomorrow,” Ascanio was saying. “I’ll be able to go after him tomorrow!” He actually tried to rise in the bed, as if he could throw off the traction wires holding the leg in place and the IV line connected to his arm.

The marquis put a hand on his shoulder and pressed him back against the pillows.

“Rest,” he said. “You’ve done well. I can take care of things now.” And then, jabbing his cane at the floor as if he were impaling an enemy with each strike, he stalked out of the room, nearly knocking over the nurse, who had returned to chase him out.

Not two hours later, he was on his own private plane, taking off, in the teeth of an oncoming storm, for the United States. His pilot had begged him to reconsider, but when the marquis offered the flight crew a ten-thousand-euro bonus, all complaints ceased and a new flight plan was entered that would take them over Halifax and around the worst of the weather.

The marquis sat back in his plush leather seat, staring out the port-hole window and wondering just how far behind this Franco he was. He understood why the man was in such a hurry, but the marquis had never intended for La Medusa to slip from his grasp again. Nor had he intended for it to be used, willy-nilly, by whoever found it. Only he, the marquis, and his faithful servant Ascanio, were to possess its powerful secret. Look whose vile hands it had fallen into for decades.

No, the marquis would not rest until it was back in his own safekeeping, and this time for good.

The plane hit a patch of turbulence, and the pilot came on to apologize. “Sorry, sir, but we may have to divert another hundred miles or so north.”

To the marquis, it felt as if Nature itself were trying to thwart him.

But then, to calm himself, he remembered the way David’s eyes had battened on the bust atop his mantel. Caterina, he was all but sure, lived on-and in the most unlikely place of all.

That the great, and only, true love of his own long life, could have been swimming beside him through the sea of time-and without his ever knowing it-was almost too much to bear. The thought of the years that they might have passed together, sharing this strange fate, tugged at his heart; but the prospect of amending it was enough to fill him with a purpose and hope he had not felt for centuries.

When he had first perfected La Medusa, crafting the mirror from such unholy stuff, he had never suspected the toll it might exact. He was a young man then, and what did he know of life? All he wanted was eternity… and it never occurred to him that eternity could be the loneliest destination of all. He could not have guessed what it would feel like to walk among mortal people, to form attachments and forge relationships, in the full knowledge that your friends and loved ones would wither and die before your eyes-if you lingered long enough to witness it-while you soldiered on. He remembered the many occasions he had seen puzzlement, then a kind of fear, gradually creep into his friends’ and lovers’ eyes, as they noted how time had continued to ravage them while sparing Sant’Angelo entirely. And he had known, on those occasions, that it was time yet again to move on, to start over, to begin the slow withdrawal of his affections. Burdened with a secret no one other than Ascanio could believe or understand, he had become a nomad among men, a traveler in the solitary regions of infinite time.

The flight attendant was at his elbow, asking if he would like something to eat or drink. He requested she bring him his customary hot chocolate.

The storm was battering at the plane, and the pilot was still trying to maneuver around it.

Sipping the soothing chocolate, he put his head back and stared out at the red lights flashing on the wing, and the blowing snow and sleet glazing the window. There was so much he missed, from open and honest love to the skills his hands had once possessed. The greatest artisan in the world. At one time, there was no one who could have challenged him for that distinction. His works had been the marvel of their day, and he had lived to see some of them-not many, but enough-endure. What he had not understood, however-and wasn’t that the way of all magic?-was the price.

Eternal life, but at the cost of his genius.

It might just as well have been buried in the basilica, along with the pauper who occupied his tomb to this day.

He had imagined himself creating miraculous works forever, refining his talents, perfecting his arts.

But that, he had learned, was not the way it worked.

Only Providence knew how long you had been allotted, and once you had exceeded that secret span, you lived on sufferance. You became a walking shadow of your former self, bereft of all the gifts that had made life sweet and fruitful and worth prizing in the first place.

Cellini, the cleverest man of his day, had been outwitted.

The plane, buffeted by another strong gust of wind, banked its wings, and the chocolate lapped into his saucer. The attendant, on unsteady feet herself, brought him a fresh cup and another linen napkin.

The artisan who had never made an untrue object in his life had been lured into a trap of his own design. With greater skill than even a Leonardo or Michelangelo, he had fashioned for himself a destiny with no purpose, no shape, and no end.