The Medusa Amulet

by Robert Masello

  Sant’Angelo nodded, as if in gratitude.

  “I’m a devoted bibliophile myself,” Mainz confided. “My house is so full of books, my wife says I’d fill the bathtub with them if she’d let me.”

  Ascanio and Celeste walked by, with several glasses and a wine bottle on a tray.

  “But you must have inherited quite an impressive collection yourself.”

  Sant’Angelo shrugged, to suggest he didn’t bother himself with such things.

  “Oh, don’t be so modest. Books make the house, don’t you think?”

  “I’ve heard that said.”

  “But where do you keep your library?” Mainz asked, looking around as if he might have missed it somehow.

  Ah, so this was where it had been going.

  “I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed,” Sant’Angelo replied.

  “Oh, let me be the judge of that. I may be able to share with you things about your ancestors that you never knew. In fact, I believe that when I have told you about the arcane knowledge acquired by your forebears, you will be pleased and astonished. Now,” he said, taking his host by the elbow and steering him back toward the grand escalier, “perhaps you can show me those books, yes? Upstairs? In one of the towers? I thought most of these pepperpot turrets were truncated in the sixteenth century? I wonder how these were spared.”

  Sant’Angelo deftly removed his arm.

  “Perhaps a bit of your ancestor’s hocus-pocus?”

  They were halfway up the stairs when the marquis heard the first explosion outside.

  He stopped and was about to run back down, but Mainz said, “Just a safety precaution. No serious damage will be done. Now, let’s go see that library!” It wasn’t a request but an order.

  Sant’Angelo guided the lumbering professor past several salons and corridors, lined with faded tapestries and furniture, and into the main library of the house-a cavernous space with shelves from floor to ceiling and a wooden ladder on wheels to help reach the books on top. There, the marquis kept an extensive collection, everything from Marcus Aurelius to Voltaire, all in fine bindings, their titles lettered in gold on their spines. Most of the books he had purchased while traveling the world, and as a result they were in many languages-Italian, English, German, French, Russian, Greek. The professor placed his own bulging briefcase on the center reading table and strolled about the room, whistling under his breath.

  “Fantastic,” he said. “Simply fantastic.”

  Many times he stopped and lovingly removed an ancient volume from a shelf. “The complete histories of Pliny the Elder,” he said in wonderment. Leafing through another volume, he said mournfully, “The Philippics of Tacitus. My copy was lost in a fire in Heidelberg.” Once or twice, Mainz seemed so immersed that Sant’Angelo thought he might simply be able to steal away and not be missed. Another round of dynamite exploded, and Sant’Angelo could hear huge trees toppling over.

  But after perusing a couple of dozen books, even inspecting the volumes on the higher shelves, Mainz stopped, and from his perch atop the ladder, looked down at the marquis and said, “But this is not where you do your own work.”

  “Work?” Sant’Angelo replied, assuming a touch of haughtiness. “I’m not sure I know what you’re referring to.”

  Mainz waved his hand around the room. “There’s not a book missing from a shelf. Not a paper or pen on the table. And these,” he said, gesturing at the thousands of volumes on display, “are not the kinds of books I know you own.”

  He stepped down from the ladder, and with an icy smile, said, “I want to see the private collection.”

  When Sant’Angelo didn’t reply, Mainz went on. “You can show it to me yourself, or I can have the soldiers find it, even if it means breaking down every door in the place. Come on,” he said, again in that comradely tone, “how often do you meet someone like me, who can appreciate the true worth of such stuff?” He walked on toward the door, turning only to say, “Which way do we go, marquis?”

  Sant’Angelo began to wonder if Ascanio had not been right about killing them on sight. But there was little he could do now, with Himmler himself and the SS dispersed all over the chateau and its grounds.

  He led the way back down the corridor, then up the winding staircase to his private study high in the eastern turret. It had never been wired for electricity, and with dusk falling, the marquis had to stop to light the gas lamps in sconces along the walls. The room was stuffy, too, and he threw open the French doors to the terrace and stepped outside to see what destruction had been wrought to his estate.

  There was the smell of scorched wood in the air, and when he walked to the end of the parapet and looked toward the sheep meadow, he saw that the Germans had blown up the old oaks that ran along the ridgeline and were now using their armored cars to push the splintered trunks off the cliff.

  Before he could think why they were doing it, he heard Mainz inside the study, exclaiming over something.

  “Like me, you are a Renaissance scholar!” the professor said, when Sant’Angelo stepped back inside. He was holding a copy of Cellini’s autobiography in his hand-the original printing, done by Antonio Cocchi in 1728. “But you have this book in half a dozen other languages, too! Along with his treatises on goldsmithing and sculpture. Then you must admire him as much as I do?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “Then you know, too, that he was not just a great artist. He was also a great occultist. Surely you remember his account of conjuring demons in the Colosseum?”

  “He was given to tall tales, I think.”

  But Mainz shook his head vigorously. “No, it was not a tall tale, as you call it. In fact, it was not the full tale-I am convinced of that. In the 1500s, it was simply too dangerous to tell the whole truth about such things. One day,” he said, slipping the book lovingly back into the shelf, “I will find the rest of the story.”

  Then he simply looked around the room-a pentagon, with cherrywood bookcases alternating with floor-length mirrors-and said, “I envy you this aerie.” He shrugged off his loden coat, revealing a white shirt stuck to his body with sweat, and laid it across a chair. “At home, just to get some peace and quiet, I must work in a pantry!” He wandered around the room, touching the books-their subjects ranging from stregheria to astrology, numerology to necromancy-and seemed transported. This, his expression advertised, was what he’d been looking for. His stubby fingertips trailed over the edge of the writing table, where a gilded bust of Dante, his head surmounted by a silver wreath, stood in pride of place. Sant’Angelo was careful not to let his own eyes linger on the piece.

  “I regret that my Italian is so bad,” the professor said. “The infinite charms of The Divine Comedy are sometimes lost on me.”

  “That’s a pity. He was the greatest poet the world has ever known.”

  But Mainz laughed. “You would say that, wouldn’t you? Judging by your name, you’re an Italian. And yet your family has lived in France for centuries. Why is that?”

  Sant’Angelo shrugged, and said, “Ancient history.”

  The professor paused, then went to his briefcase and unfastened the leather strap. “Ah, but ancient history is my specialty.” He began to root around inside, pulling out a stack of papers. “Only last week, we turned up some interesting information at the National Archives.” He pushed the bust of Dante to one side, nearly displacing the wreath around its brow, to make some room on the table. “I took the photographs myself. I think you’ll find them quite interesting.”

  They were meticulously done photos of handwritten and hand-drawn pages, the text in Italian.

  “The scribe who made the original drawings and notes worked for Napoleon. The words were taken down from the walls of a cell in the Castel San Leo, outside Rome. We went there, too, of course, but nothing much remained. So all we have left is these transcriptions.”

  Sant’Angelo suddenly understood why the Nazis were there.

  “I assume you can guess the occupant of the
cell,” Mainz said.

  “Count Cagliostro.” What use was there in playing dumb anymore? The words themselves, accompanied by Egyptian symbols and signs, were gibberish, but several times they made mention of Sant’Angelo and a lost castle. The Chateau Perdu. The old charlatan might have been constrained from uttering a word about what he knew, but apparently it had not kept him from writing about it. In the end, he might as well have provided the Nazis with a road map.

  “So you can see why we wanted to make this call. Reichsfuhrer Himmler has a great interest in the more arcane sources of knowledge. Wherever we go, we root it up, like truffles,” he said, snuffling like a pig.

  Sant’Angelo was well aware of the Nazis’ predilections. The swastika itself was an ancient Sanskrit symbol of peace, now turned back on its axis to suggest something else entirely.

  “Obviously, the count-the master of the Egyptian Masonic lodges-was well acquainted with your predecessor,” Mainz said, smiling coldly. “But I wouldn’t go so far as to say they were friends. Professional rivals, I would call them. Wouldn’t you?”

  The marquis stifled an impulse to retort that the powers of the count had been vastly overrated.

  “Cagliostro seemed to think that the Chateau Perdu contained some powerful secrets.”

  “That may be,” Sant’Angelo replied, “but in that case, they’re still undiscovered.” He might have said more, but he noted that the professor’s attention had been diverted; his ears had pricked up, like a hunting dog’s, and now the marquis could hear it, too-the low thrum of an airplane engine in the distance.

  “Come,” Mainz said, hurrying out onto the balcony. “He’s coming!”

  Who’s coming? Sant’Angelo thought, following him out. Dusk was falling, and from the west, he saw the red wing lights of a small plane, racing toward the chateau as if it were fleeing from the setting sun. It was going to come in low, just above the ridgeline, and he understood why the soldiers had felled the oaks; they had been clearing a runway approach. All down the sheep meadow, he saw that the armored cars had been placed in parallel lines with their headlamps on, and soldiers with flags and flashlights were positioned on the field.

  The wheels of the plane touched the grass, bounced up, and touched again as the ailerons were deployed to cut its ground speed. Even from the parapet, Sant’Angelo could see the Nazi insignia on the fuselage, along with the number 2600-the number that the Fuhrer believed held some mystical power, and that he insisted be placed on all his private aircraft.

  Hitler himself had come to his chateau?

  The soldiers waved their lights like fireflies as the plane jounced along for the entire length of the meadow. It was only as it was about to run out of room and go crashing into the dense forest that it came to a halt, so abruptly that the nose dipped and the tail end rose up like a scorpion’s stinger.

  When the engines were cut off, two SS men ran to the port-side door, just aft of the wings, and helped unfold the stairs. The others-Himmler among them-stood at attention in a single line, facing the plane.

  In the descending gloom, the marquis saw a figure appear in the door. He was wearing a mustard-colored field uniform, with breeches, boots, and a visored cap. And even from the balcony, his face, with its doleful eyes and toothbrush moustache, was unmistakable.

  Sant’Angelo suddenly realized that the professor standing beside him, like all the SS men on the field, had raised his arm in the stiff-armed Nazi salute.

  It was returned with a desultory flip, from the elbow alone, by their master, who was already strutting toward the main gate of the chateau, trailed by several officers and attaches.

  “You are being granted a great honor,” Mainz said. “The Fuhrer will be spending the night under your roof.”

  Sant’Angelo’s mind reeled.

  “So let’s have something to show him!” Like a schoolboy giddily awaiting a visit from his sweetheart, Mainz hurried back inside and began to riffle through the photos.

  “For instance,” he said, flourishing a photograph and proffering it to Sant’Angelo, “on this one Cagliostro has scrawled ‘The little palace’ and drawn this hieroglyph beside it.” It was a raven with its wings spread.

  “It looks like a raven.”

  “Of course it does,” Mainz said impatiently. “And the three short vertical lines beside it indicate a flock of them. But does it mean anything to you? Is such a motif present anywhere in this chateau, or in a family coat of arms, perhaps?”

  The little palace-no doubt he meant Le Petit Trianon, Sant’Angelo thought, though he did not share that insight with the professor.

  “And this glyph, placed below it,” Mainz said, showing another photo, one depicting a jackal, but with its head thrown back, as if its neck were broken.

  “He has written, ‘The master of the lost castle prevails.’ But prevails over what? Over Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead?”

  Sant’Angelo remembered well the psychic battle in Marie Antoinette’s hideaway. Apparently, the good count had remembered it, too, even as madness overtook him.

  Mainz laid out several more photos of the transcriptions. Even though he had not understood the meaning of what was recorded on the walls of the cell, the French scribe had made fine and accurate renderings. But the marquis sensed that the professor was expecting greater help in deciphering them.

  “And then there’s this,” he said, delicately removing a yellowed sheet of paper-this one was no photograph-done in gray charcoal and what might have once been red wine. “Although I have a great reverence for the French National Archives,” Mainz said, “I felt that this was art, and needed to be more widely seen in the original.”

  It was a powerful sketch of the Gorgon’s head, suspended as if on chains. The caption read, “ Lo specchio di Eternita, ma non ho visto! ” The glass of eternity, but I did not see! The professor pulled the damp collar of his shirt away from his thick neck. “As it turns out, the count was a fairly good draftsman. But have you ever seen anything like this, a mirror perhaps, or an amulet, with the face of the Medusa on it? I suspect it belonged to your ancestor.”

  Sant’Angelo’s mind was racing. The glass, as always, was hanging under his very shirt.

  “Cagliostro appeared to put great stock in it,” Mainz added. “For four years, he wrote on the walls of his cell with a jagged stone, or a lump of charcoal. But this picture he daubed on the only sheet of paper he had, using his own blood.”

  So it was blood, not wine… and the count had finally figured out the value of La Medusa. Judging from his inscription, however, he had not fathomed its secret until he had lost it to the marquis, and by then, of course, it was too late. Was the bitterness of that knowledge what had driven him insane?

  “Come now,” Mainz cajoled, “let’s not pretend that you are a neophyte in these matters. This library alone confirms that you are a student of the dark arts. Perhaps you are even a master. Why don’t we put our heads together? There’s probably a lot we could teach each other.”

  Oh, yes, there were any number of things that the marquis would have liked to teach him, right then and there, but the professor had turned away again, his face suddenly flushed. Voices echoed up the stairs, followed by the clomping of heavy bootheels. Mainz whirled around, and, despite the warm night, put on his green, bemedaled coat again.

  The first ones to enter the study were a pair of SS guards, the jagged sig runes that looked like thunderbolts glittering on their epaulets. They quickly moved aside to make room for Himmler, holding a wineglass in one hand, as he calmly surveyed the mirrored walls and the packed bookshelves, the gleaming table with its bust of Dante, the photographs from the French archives. He actually sniffed the air, as if to detect any potential menace-or latent powers?-lurking in the room. The marquis had the impression that he was doing a final security check before permitting his master to venture inside.

  But he barely glanced at Sant’Angelo.

  “What have we learned?” he said to the professor. />
  “We’ve really just begun,” Mainz replied. “I’ve been showing the marquis-”

  Himmler snorted at the mention of the title.

  “-some of the material we’ve recently acquired.”

  Himmler took the sketch from the professor’s hand, studied it, then held it up between pinched fingers in front of Sant’Angelo.

  “Ever seen this?”

  “The Medusa is one of the most common images from antiquity.”

  “But this one is a dead likeness of one that was done by the necromancer Cellini, as a design for a Medici duchess.” Himmler rudely shoved the bust of Dante aside so that he could sit on an edge of the desk, and in so doing, knocked the garland loose. To Sant’Angelo’s relief, no one paid any attention as it rolled out of sight under the desk chair. “And in what godforsaken spot,” Himmler asked Mainz, “was it that you found that other drawing?”

  “In the Laurenziana. Among the papers of the Medicis.”

  “Ah, yes-in Florence. I don’t understand it myself, but the Fuhrer is oddly fond of that town. He likes the old bridge.”

  The collar of his Gestapo uniform was too big for his scrawny neck, Sant’Angelo noted, and the service medal that was pinned to it only made it gape more. His gray tunic was festooned with other military ribbons and pins.

  “It’s hard to believe that such a storied object-one that Cellini made, Cagliostro captured, and Napoleon coveted-could simply have gone missing,” Himmler said, his eyes-small and pale and mean-glimmering behind his spectacles.

  It was then that Sant’Angelo decided… I could kill him. Or, better yet- I could wait for my chance and kill his master. Strike the serpent at its head. He wished he had his harpe at hand; he could have used it, like Perseus, to chop off the head of the monster. But there were other ways. He had reduced Cagliostro to a weeping, craven coward, and in the centuries since, even as his artistic powers had withered, his occult faculties had become more refined. Like a fine wine, they had matured. And despite the risk, when would he ever have a better chance than this to deploy them?