The Medusa Amulet

Chapter 7

David was poring over the lab reports when he suddenly became aware that he was being watched.

The moment the analyses had arrived by special courier, he had raced into the Newberry’s book silo-a large research space containing the Newberry’s precious collections of codices, maps, and manuscripts-to comb through them. Microscopic samples of the ink and paper had been sent off to Arlington, Virginia, where the FBI submitted its own materials, and from what he had ascertained so far, everything about the documents given to him by Mrs. Van Owen checked out. In terms of age and provenance, they were completely authentic. And he’d have been delighted to bring her that news himself if she had not already been standing on the steel catwalk above him, studying him like a bug in a jar.

He had not heard her come in, nor did he know how long she had been silently observing, but the hairs on the back of his neck prickled nonetheless.

“What are you reading?” she asked, her voice muffled and absorbed by the thousands of volumes stored in the cylindrical shelves that rose all around them.

“Ink and paper analyses from the sketch of La Medusa,” he said, waving one hand over the cluttered desktop.

“I told you there was no need to waste time on that.”

With one gloved hand on the railing, she descended the stairs. She was dressed all in black, as appeared to be her custom, and as she left the gloom of the stacks and entered the pool of light in which David was working, several pieces of diamond jewelry sparkled at her throat and ears. The heady scent of her perfume filled the air as she drew out a chair and sat down, crossing her legs, enhanced by a pair of sheer black stockings and sharply pointed heels.

David doubted that the book silo had ever seen anyone quite like her.

“So tell me what you’ve learned.”

For a moment, David could think of almost nothing other than her dark, but oddly forbidding, beauty.

With languid fingers, she turned a page around, glanced at the heading, and said, “Iron-gall extracts?”

“It’s a good way of dating ancient inks,” David said, still trying to recover. “The Egyptians started using ink on papyrus around 2500 B. C, and the Romans used sepia-the black pigment secreted by the cuttlefish.” He was babbling, he knew, but decided to go with it until he’d fully regained his composure. “But by the time of the Renaissance, iron-gall extracts, which were made by mixing bark and tree galls with other ingredients, had pretty much replaced them.” He expounded further on the tests that had been done on the ink and the paper, while Mrs. Van Owen appeared to be listening with half an ear. “There’s an unusually high degree of logwood extract in these tannins, and that will help us to track down other documents Cellini might have written, or sketches he might have made, from the same period. And those, in turn, may provide some clues as to the present-day whereabouts of the Medusa.”

What he didn’t say was that he thought it all was highly unlikely; he still wasn’t convinced that the thing had ever even existed. Cellini was famous for his plans that never came to pass and his designs that never reached fruition. It wasn’t for want of trying, but the man led an eventful life, in a turbulent time, and when he wasn’t running from a pope, he was dodging a king. His commissions were major undertakings-fountains for the gardens at Fontainebleau, or twelve life-sized silver figurines of the gods-but he seldom lived in one place, under one prince’s patronage, long enough to see things through. (Of the twelve figurines, only one-Jupiter-was ever made, and it, like so much of Cellini’s work, had been lost, destroyed, or melted down over the centuries.) It was a miracle that his bronze statue of Perseus slaying the Medusa, which had taken shape over a period of nine years, had ever been completed at all, much less survived to become one of the greatest masterpieces of Western art.

“And where are these other documents you would need to consult?” she asked, though he felt, from her tone of voice, that she was simply leading him along.

“Most of them?” he said. “They’re housed in the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence.”

“So?”

He paused, unsure what she was getting at. She leaned back in her chair, falling out of the penumbra of light, but her eyes glowing all the same. “So why are you here,” she elaborated, “and not in Italy?”

The question took him off guard on several scores, chief among them the implication that he was working exclusively for her.

“I have a job, right here,” he fumbled.

“You are officially on sabbatical now.”

David almost laughed. “I’m afraid that only Dr. Armbruster can make that decision.”

“I’ve just spoken to her, and she has.”

David was dumbfounded. And if he was thinking about how his absence might affect his chances of getting the job as Director of Acquisitions, Mrs. Van Owen had anticipated him there, too.

“If you were to succeed at something like this-something that would bring such credit to the institution-I don’t see how she could not reward you with the directorship. She doesn’t see how she could refuse it, either.”

David felt as if his whole world was being turned upside down. Suddenly, he wasn’t working for the Newberry but for this very rich and very strange lady in black, whose money and power seemed to bend everyone’s wills to her own. Now, his very career seemed to depend upon carrying out her orders. He wanted to call Dr. Armbruster’s office and see if any of it was true.

“Go ahead,” Mrs. Van Owen said, guessing his thoughts. “Call her and see. I can wait.”

The offer alone was enough to convince David she was telling the truth. “But are you aware,” he said, scrambling, “that the Newberry’s budget doesn’t allow for-”

“I thought I made this plain,” she interrupted, a note of exasperation in her voice. “Money is not an issue. I will pay any and all expenses, without limit. Your boss has no objection to your leaving as soon as possible. If you’re successful, the library will profit-enormously-and so will you.” She took a gold Cartier pen from her tiny clutch purse, and on the back of a card embossed with her name, wrote something down. She laid the pen on the table and flicked the card in his direction.

“That’s our private contract,” she said.

David picked it up and saw, just above her signature, “One million dollars.”

He did not know what to make of it-it was as if he were looking at an Egyptian hieroglyphic. When he looked up again, she was staring fixedly into his eyes.

“I know you need that money,” she said. “If not for you, then for your sister.”

Up until then, he’d felt like the ground had been systematically cut away beneath his feet, but with that it was as if she had kicked him in the gut. “What does my sister have to do with this?”

“Her medical expenses have to be immense.”

“How do you know anything about that?” he persisted. “My family is none of your business.”

“It isn’t?”

“No.”

“Well, I intend to make it my business.” She leaned forward again, her long, tapered fingers spread like talons on the lab reports. “If you get me what I want, I’ll get you what you want.”

“What I want is a cure for cancer. Are you trying to tell me that you can get that?” Now he was convinced that the woman was as batty as she was rich. She must have been reading Cellini’s Key to Life Eternal , and mistaken his alchemy and magical formulae for scientific fact.

Coolly surveying him, she said, “You think I’m out of my mind,” and he remained pointedly silent. “I’d think so, too, if I were in your shoes. But believe me, I’m not. I cannot go on living without the Medusa, and, to be frank, neither can your sister. Let’s not deceive ourselves. Get it for me, and I can promise that your Sarah will live to a ripe old age… just like me.”

To David, that didn’t seem like much of a promise; despite the weird aura she gave off, the woman couldn’t be much older than his sister at all.

“Or are you prepared to just sit by and watch her die?”

With that, she got up in one fluid motion, floated up the stairs, and was gone, leaving the powerful scent of her perfume lingering in the air where David sat, with her card in one hand, stunned beyond words.

Mr. Joseph Schillinger, former U.S. ambassador to Liechtenstein, was just finishing the crossword puzzle in the Times when his driver and general factotum, Ernst Escher, said, in his thick Swiss accent, “Look who’s coming out now.”

It was the woman in black, the same woman he’d glimpsed at the Dante lecture. But there was no veil, and he had had time for Escher to run her license plate. It was indeed Randolph Van Owen’s widow. But was she the mysterious donor of the book?

“And it gets better,” Escher said, turning his shaved head and thick neck to grin at his employer.

It did indeed, because just as she got back into her waiting car, David Franco, the young man he’d come here to track, came bounding down the steps after her. He was holding out something gold-a pen, perhaps?-in his hand. Her window rolled down, she took it, and after they’d exchanged no more than a few words-and what wouldn’t Schillinger have given to know what those words were?-the car rolled off down the snowy street.

“What would you like me to do?” Escher asked, always on the lookout for action and preferably of the violent kind.

“Nothing. Just sit still.” The man was like a hand grenade with the pin pulled out.

As Schillinger kept watch from the backseat, Franco, wearing no coat against the bitterly cold wind, stood rooted to the spot. Even from this distance, across the width of Bughouse Square, he looked dazed, and Schillinger wondered what had transpired inside the library. Had he discovered yet what Schillinger had guessed the moment that the book had been revealed? That the illustrations were from the hand of the master artisan-and necromancer-Benvenuto Cellini? No one but someone steeped in the occult could have depicted the scenes so powerfully, or in such a distinctive style.

For years, ever since meeting Monsieur Linz at an auction on Lake Como, Schillinger had been a part of the man’s web, keeping his eyes and ears open for anything that might be of value to someone of such dark and rarefied tastes. And now he had it. The small favors that Linz had done him in return-parceling out word of a long-lost Vermeer drawing, or a Hobbema landscape, about to emerge onto the black market-could now be repaid in spades.

Schillinger reached for his phone and placed a call to France.

“ Oui? ” the voice on the other end snapped. “ Que voulez-vous? ”

Every time Schillinger had to speak to Emil Rigaud, he had to swallow his bile. To think that a former United States ambassador could be treated so contemptuously by a decommissioned French army captain, was infuriating, to say the least. But keeping his temper, he explained what he had just learned.

“But how much do you think he knows,” Rigaud asked, “this David Franco?”

“He’s a very intelligent young man,” Schillinger said, vaguely proud that they shared an alma mater, “but he’s just getting started. At this point, I suspect he knows only a bit less than I do.”

Rigaud sighed, as if he’d heard this veiled complaint before. “We keep it that way for your own benefit, Joseph. If you knew more than what we tell you, if you took it upon yourself to start nosing around where you are not wanted, dire consequences could ensue.”

Schillinger, insulted, went silent.

“ Comprendez-vous? ”

“ Je comprends.”

“Good,” Rigaud said. “Now call Gropius in Antwerp. Ask him about the small Corot oil that has just come to light.”

Schillinger had always coveted a Corot. How did they know that? “Thank you, Emil.” Maybe he wasn’t such a bad sort after all. “But what would you like me to do about this David Franco? I have Ernst Escher with me here, and something,” he said, in a more sinister tone of voice, “could be done.”

“Do nothing. When we have to, we will take care of things from our end.”

“And Mrs. Van Owen? We move in similar circles. Her husband recently died. Perhaps I could become her friend and learn something more that way.” He felt absurdly like a young flunky, trying to ingratiate himself with the boss.

“Monsieur Linz has the situation well in hand,” Rigaud replied, as if lecturing a schoolboy.

“I’m sure he does, but I thought-”

“Stop thinking, will you? Monsieur Linz is a Grand Master, and you are playing at tic-tac-toe. Call Gropius.” And then the line went dead.

When the ambassador looked back toward the library, Franco was trudging up the steps like a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. What did he know that Schillinger didn’t? There were times, and this was one of them, when Schillinger felt that he was playing for penny antes when great stakes were being wagered all around him. Perhaps if he pursued his own interests a bit more strenuously, he would not only gain in the material sense-and his acquisitive instincts had not lessened with age-but he might find himself in a position to command some respect from that toady Rigaud and his mysterious master.

“Well?” Escher said, eagerly, from the front seat.

“Home,” Schillinger replied, and he could see his driver’s shoulders fall with disappointment. He had so hoped for a confrontation. As Escher pulled the car back into the city traffic, blasting his horn at a slow-moving school bus, the ambassador put in the call to Antwerp.