“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.
Chapter 33
Alone at last, the marquis threw another log into the fireplace and stared into the rising fire.
Was it possible? Could Caterina still be alive? Could she have been alive all these centuries?
He felt at once an agony in his heart, the agony of all those lost years, and a kindling of hope, a kindling like nothing else he had felt for ages. The expression on David Franco’s face had conveyed the truth more eloquently than any words could do.
While Sant’Angelo could see now that the public accounts of his own death and burial must have persuaded her that he had indeed left this world, how could he have been so misled himself?
What foolishness, what insanity, what melancholy dolor had allowed him to believe the accounts of her demise? He could see that the sources of the story had all had their own reasons to say what they had said, to swear to what they averred. And he lambasted himself for his gullibility, his blindness, his despair. Had he believed in her death because he could not bear the thought that he had condemned her to the destiny he had endured?
And now, she wanted the mirror back. She wanted La Medusa back, at all costs. But why? To work its magic on someone else? Or, to see if, in its destruction, she could undo the curse she had brought on herself that fateful night in his studio?
He drew a chair closer to the fire-it was at that time of night that his legs always gave him the most trouble-and sat down. He must think, he must make a plan. He must rouse himself to fight for a future. Tonight he had learned that there was more than a reason to exist-there was a reason to live.
He put his head back, his eyes closed, and felt the heat from the fire wash over him.
But first he would have to confront the greatest defeat of his life, the one from which he had never fully recovered. He would have to conquer a dread that even he, the immortal Cellini, felt in the very marrow of his broken bones. Only once in his life had he confronted a foe so powerful, and in command of such dark resources, that his own abilities had paled in comparison. For decades, he had been content to observe a stalemate with this evil adversary, a stalemate that his enemy appeared content to observe, too. Sant’Angelo imagined them like two prizefighters, mauled beyond recognition, but still respectful and wary of the other’s power. Each of them knew the gift that La Medusa bestowed, along with the mighty cost it exacted, but so long as the marquis remained aware of his enemy’s whereabouts, and sure of his limitations, he was willing to bid
e his time.
Now, that time was up. If by acting at last to reclaim the mirror, he could reclaim the greatest love of his life… if he could share his sentence with the only woman in the world who would understand it… then the stalemate had to be broken. It was fate that had sent him into the Colosseum that night with Dr. Strozzi, fate that had taught him how to create La Medusa, fate that had shuttled him like a spinning top from one country to another, for hundreds of years. Now, it was fate that had sent these two young adventurers to his door, each with his or her purpose. But the main purpose they would fulfill would be his own. They would have to go into the lion’s den itself, a place where his own broken legs could not take him and where his very essence could trigger the alarms. Once there, they would have to defeat a creature more bloodthirsty than any Gorgon that had ever haunted the underworld, a creature whose reputation was still so fearsome that it was the one thing he dared not reveal.
He pulled the black tie loose from his collar and let it drop to the floor, as, in his mind’s eye, he recalled the summer of 1940… and the caravan of armored cars that had snaked up the private road leading to the Chateau Perdu. He could still hear the rumble of their engines.
He had been out hunting with his gamekeeper, old Broyard, when they heard them wending their way along the long drive that led to the castle. Quickly, he’d climbed higher on the ridge, then, trading his rifle for the pair of binoculars Broyard was holding out, swung himself up into a tree. Brushing away the leaves with one hand, he caught a glimpse of a quartet of armored cars, followed by a long black Mercedes, racing through the woods. Nazi pennants rippled over the front fenders of the limousine.
“Germans?” Broyard asked nervously.
“Who else has petrol?”
So it had come, he thought. It was inevitable. The Nazis had invaded France in early May, taking only a few weeks to breach the Maginot Line and, by the fourteenth of June, their tanks had been roaring in triumph down the Champs-Elysees. It had only been a matter of time before the marquis received just some unwelcome deputation as this.
“How many?” the gamekeeper asked, as Sant’Angelo climbed down. He said it as if he were contemplating how many rounds he’d need to shoot them all.
“Too many,” the marquis replied, clapping a hand on the man’s aged shoulder. He shared his sentiment, but knew he had to be more cautious than that.
“Come on,” he said, slinging his rifle across his shoulder.
As swiftly as the old gamekeeper’s legs allowed, they scrambled along the top of the ridge, with the dense forest on one side and the river Loire far below on the other. As they came closer to the chateau, a vast field opened up on the hillside, a sloping meadow where sheep had once grazed, but from which, the marquis feared, they might be more easily spotted by the intruders still motoring up the drive. Keeping close to the ground, he ran toward a large and circular stone pit. Built by the Norman knight who had erected the chateau in the fourteenth century, the pit had once been used to bait animals-bears, wolves, boars. A set of stone steps descended several meters into the ground, where it was joined to a barred cage. Sant’Angelo grabbed the rusty handle and pulled hard, opening the cage. It still bore a telltale animal scent. Lowering his head, he crept inside, then groped along the moss-covered wall until he found an identical iron handle in the seemingly solid stone. Pulling with all his might, he was finally able to unseal the hidden door there, and, doubling over, duck inside.
“Keep a lookout from the ridge,” Sant’Angelo said, “and don’t do anything to set them off.” Broyard nodded, before closing the stone slab behind the marquis.
The darkness was absolute, but the marquis fumbled in his pocket and found a pack of matches. Apart from a tunnel that led down to the riverbank, there was only one way to go from there. Lighting one match after another, he inched along, hearing only the squelching of his boots and the occasional squeak of a rat. The tunnel-the knight’s secret escape route-went even deeper than the moat, and its rock walls still held the rusted chains where prisoners had once been kept.
But when the marquis felt his boot stub against an iron grate, he knew that the oubliette, into which the condemned had been hurled, lay just below him. The lucky ones died from the fall, the others died a slow death from starvation.
Sant’Angelo stepped carefully around its edge before eventually coming up against the back of a towering old wine rack. He pushed it to one side on creaking hinges, and emerged, blowing out his last match, into the wine cellar.
Celeste, a pretty young housemaid, was so startled that he had to clap a hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming. She was passing dusty bottles to Ascanio.
“I was wondering where you were,” Ascanio said crossly.
The marquis removed his hand, and Celeste fell against Ascanio’s chest with relief.
“How many of them are there?” Sant’Angelo asked, brushing the dirt and cobwebs from his hunting jacket.
“Ten or fifteen. All SS.”
“More,” Celeste said, her eyes wide.
“What do they want?”
“Right now, they want wine.” Ascanio tucked another bottle under his arm. “I was trying to decide which bottles had already turned.”
The marquis smiled, and said, “Don’t do anything rash.”
“You mean like killing them?”
“I mean, anything that will bring the whole Third Reich crashing down on our heads.” Then he mounted the back stairs up to his rooms, where he changed into the houndstooth jacket and trousers of a country squire-a fashion he had adopted when he lived in England-before descending the grand escalier to the main hall… where confusion reigned.
SS soldiers, in pea green uniforms, were poking the muzzles of their machine guns everywhere, ordering the marquis’s staff to open every door, empty every drawer, and pull back every curtain.
In the center of the entry hall, overseeing it all, stood a man recognizable from every newsreel and newspaper in Europe: Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsfuhrer, Hitler’s second-in-command and head of the dreaded Gestapo. In person, he was an even more spindly creature than he appeared in the carefully contrived news footage. He was wearing a dove gray uniform, with boots that came all the way up to his knees; the fearsome Totenkopf, or death’s head, gleamed above the black visor on his cap. He was wiping his wire-rimmed spectacles clean with a handkerchief when the marquis approached.
A soldier immediately interposed himself, but Himmler waved him away with the handkerchief.
“Herr Sant’Angelo?”
“ Oui,” the marquis replied, staying sufficiently distant that any handshake could be avoided.
“You know who I am, no doubt,” he said in German, slipping his spectacles back on.
“ Ich mache.” I do.
“But I doubt you know my adviser.”
A big man with a squarish head stepped forward. He was wearing a green loden coat, far too warm for the weather, decorated with the War Merit medal and the requisite Nazi armband; he carried a bulging briefcase under his arm.
“This is Professor Dieter Mainz, of the University of Heidelberg.”
Mainz bowed his head and clicked the heels of his boots.
“He has been eager, as have we all, to make your acquaintance.”
The marquis expressed surprise. “I live a quiet life, here in the country. How could I have come to anyone’s attention?”
“I will be happy to explain,” Mainz said, in a voice that sounded as if it would be more comfortable booming out in a lecture hall. “We have reason to believe-good reason, based on my own research-that your ancestor, from whom your title descends, was a man of extraordinary talents.”
“How so?” Sant’Angelo replied, knowing full well that this ancestor stood before them at that very moment.
“My investigations,” Mainz confided, “suggest that he was well versed in many of what are commonly-and unwisely-dismissed as the occult arts.”
Sant’Angelo again feigned ignoran
ce. “I come from a long and distinguished family, but I can’t say I know much about that. Are you sure you’ve come to the right place?”
“Quite,” Mainz said. “Quite sure.”
Himmler was squinting at him closely. “Apart from your servants, do you have anyone else here at present?” he asked abruptly.
“No. I have no family.”
“No guests either?”
“No.”
“No woman?” he asked, with a tilt of his pale, anemic face. “Or man?”
Sant’Angelo took his meaning, but he didn’t deign to answer.
“Then you won’t mind,” the Reichfuhrer went on, “if we continue our inspection.” Without waiting, he barked some orders and half a dozen of the soldiers charged up the two sides of the staircase. All of them, Sant’Angelo could not help but notice, were tall, blond, and blue-eyed. He had heard that Himmler, the architect of the Nazi breeding programs, liked to handpick his recruits.
Ironically, Sant’Angelo thought, the Reichsfuhrer could never have met his own criteria.
An adjutant whispered something in Himmler’s ear, and the two of them retired to the adjoining salle d’armes, or armor hall, where Sant’Angelo could see that a command post of sorts was being hastily assembled. The medieval weaponry that lined the walls was overwhelmed by the flood of modern communications equipment-radio sets and decoding machines and rickety antennae-strewn around the room. One soldier was standing on top of the refectory table to loop a wire over the chandelier, while another had opened a casement window to affix a receiver to its frame.
“I’m dreadfully sorry about the inconvenience,” Professor Mainz leaned close to say, “but they have so much to do just now.” He said it as if he were talking about some local burghers who were preparing for a visit from the mayor. “Tonight, as you may be aware, is the summer solstice.”
True enough, the marquis thought, but what of it?
“It’s one of the ancient celebrations that we have reconsecrated,” Mainz offered. “It takes the place of all that Judeo-Christian claptrap. In fact, I’ve written a book on the subject, Arische Sonne-Rituale.” Aryan Sun Rites. “If you like, I would be happy to send you an inscribed copy for your private library.”
The Medusa Amulet Page 32
