The Medusa Amulet (25 page)

At last, he felt he had stumbled upon the trail of the thing itself, that he had found some recorded proof—outside of the papers that Mrs. Van Owen had provided—suggesting that
La Medusa
had indeed seen the light of day, that it was more than something Cellini had simply sketched, or claimed to manufacture.

But if that were the case—if he had succeeded in making the
Medusa—
why in the world would he have given it away, much less to a duchess who was no particular favorite of his?
The Key to Life Eternal
claimed that the Medusa could grant the gift of immortality. Cellini would never have given such a creation away.

Nor, however, was he one to waste materials or labor. David remembered a passage from the
Key
, where Cellini had written of the torment he’d endured constructing
La Medusa
, and of the casts he had made prior to hitting on the right one:
“Il bicchiere deve essere perfettamente smussato, il puro argento: un unico difetto, non importa quanto piccola, si annulla la magia del tutto.”
The glass must be perfectly beveled, the silver welded; a single flaw, no matter how tiny, will undo the magic of the whole. David was now confronted with two possibilities—one, that Cellini had made the
Medusa
and, after discovering that it did not work, repurposed it as a present to a wealthy patron. Or that he had simply bestowed on the Medici an early cast, a reject, one that he had never intended to imbue with the waters from the sacred pool at all.

And wasn’t that just like him, to muddy the trail of something valuable? The same man who had created an optical illusion in his most famous statue, or who had made strongboxes with coded locks, who kept the greatest advancements of his trade to himself, and limited the secrets of his sorcery to the unpublished
Key
, was not likely to leave his most ingenious achievement baldly exposed.

Cellini was a trickster, and David had to figure out how, over the centuries, this particular trick played out.

He quickly turned to the next page, which began with an account of some marble imported for a bathhouse. He jumped ahead several leaves, past some other mundane expenditures, until he found a later annotation, made in another hand, saying,
“Un regalo al de’Medici della Catherine, sul decimo del settembre 1572.”
Or, a gift to Catherine de’Medici, the tenth of September, 1572.

“Lo sguardo del maggio ottentute proteggere suo da tutti I nemici.”
May the gaze of the Gorgon protect her from her enemies.

Cosimo himself had made the annotation—his initials were boldly inscribed below the note—and he had sent the piece to his niece, who had married into the royal family of France, and become queen. No one at that time in history, David knew, was more besieged by her enemies than the Queen of France, who, facing an insurrection from the Huguenots, had ordered the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre on August 23 of that same year. In reality, the purge had lasted weeks, during which time thousands of her religious enemies were rounded up and slaughtered all over France. It was later said that the wicked Italian queen had followed the advice of her countryman, Niccolò Machiavelli, who warned that it was best to kill all your enemies in one blow.

David fell back in his chair, trying to sort through it all. If this was indeed the one and only Medusa, then it could not have the powers Cellini had claimed or he would not have given it away … unless he’d had no choice. Could the duke have forced his hand? There were a hundred threats and forms of torture the Duke de’Medici could have employed. And perhaps the phrase, “from the hand of the artist,” did not so much mean a willing gift as a tribute pried from an artisan unable to refuse or resist.

One way or another, though, this mirror had gone to France—where Cellini himself had spent a good deal of his life, in the employ of the French king—and it was the only one whose trail David could now follow. As a gift to the queen, it would naturally have become a part of the royal jewels. For all David knew, it was still a part of whatever remained of that once-impressive collection. Whether it had the
powers it was reputed to possess, or not, it was what Mrs. Van Owen had sent him to find—and find it he would. Shaking it loose, for any amount of money, from the French patrimony, seemed an utter impossibility—even for someone of Mrs. Van Owen’s resources—but he would cross that bridge when he came to it. For the moment, he just wanted to share the news with Olivia and get cracking.

With facsimiles of the two pages, produced by a copying machine carefully calibrated to work in low light and heat, tucked away in his valise, he raced back to the Laurenziana. He could have called Olivia on the way, but he wanted the pleasure of seeing her face when he presented his discovery from the Medici account books. In addition to the more personal feelings for her that he could no longer deny, he had also come to value her opinion—and approval—more highly than anyone else’s. She was a true eccentric, there was no denying that, quirky and volatile, but she was also one of the most widely read and original thinkers he had ever encountered. Most of her scholarly papers and monographs—and she had shared a few with David—were unfinished and unpublished, but they betrayed a wealth of knowledge on subjects ranging from the philosophy of Pico della Mirandola to the evolution of the early European banking system. It was as if her mind could not be focused on one subject long enough to see it through to its natural conclusion. Instead, she would get distracted and follow some beckoning side path—invariably finding something valuable there, too—without ever bothering to get back to her original argument.

But when David burst into their alcove, Olivia wasn’t there. She might have been sleeping late that morning—David knew that she was a night owl—and it was also possible that she was off leading one of her tour groups. David was paying her a stipend out of Mrs. Van Owen’s account, but Olivia had plainly stated that she wanted to keep her other sidelines alive. “Otherwise, what do I do when you leave me to go back to Chicago?”

With each passing hour, David found such a thought more distressing … and harder to imagine.

But neatness, he would concede, was not one of her many virtues. She had left her yellow notepads, covered with long columns of dates and figures and names, scattered on the table, along with several broken pencils, some crumpled tissues, and a stack of old, leather-bound books that David hadn’t ever seen before.

None of them, he discovered, were by or about Cellini.

When David opened the first one, and did a rough translation from the Latin, he was surprised to see that it was called
A Treatise on the Most Secret Alchemical and Necromantic Arts
. Written by a Dottore A. Strozzi, it had been printed in Palermo in 1529.

The one under that—really just a pair of worm-riddled boards, with a loose collection of parchment sheets held between—had no title page at all, but after glancing through some of the text, David could see that it was a manual of
stregheria
, the ancient witchcraft that predated the Roman Empire. As late as the twelfth century, many of the Old Religionists, as the followers of the pagan gods were sometimes called, had dutifully masqueraded as Christians while secretly continuing to worship the ancient pantheon. They had simply accepted the Virgin Mary, for instance, as yet the latest incarnation of the goddess Diana.

He had just picked up the last book on the stack, a vellum-bound treatise, also in Italian, and entitled
Revelations of Egyptian Masonry, as Revealed by the Grand Copt to one Count Cagliostro—
at least this count, a famous mesmerist of his day, was familiar to David—when Dottore Valetta appeared in the alcove, a red silk pocket square blooming from his jacket. “Where is your confederate today?” he sniffed.

“I’m not sure,” David replied, scanning the table quickly to see if Olivia had left him any note from the day before. It was then that he noticed the old yellowed cards—clearly the precursors to the same library request cards he and Olivia were using—that had been hidden under the pile of books. The director saw them, too, and before
David could even say a word, he had snatched them up and quickly riffled through them, glowering.

“Her old tricks,” Valetta fumed. “Signorina Levi is up to all her old tricks.”

“What tricks are you talking about?”

“Wherever she goes, she likes to stir the pot … to make trouble. She has tried to make this particular kind of trouble before.”

David was utterly baffled. “What was she doing?” David asked. “Checking to see who had consulted these sources before we did?”

Slipping the cards into his pocket, the director looked at David as if he wasn’t sure he could trust him anymore either. “She hasn’t told you her theory? Or why we have barred her from further use of the Laurenziana?”

“No. She hasn’t.”

Now the director looked as if he regretted saying as much as he had, or giving her ideas any further airing.

But David wasn’t about to let him off the hook so easily. “So
you
have to tell me. If you don’t, I’ll make sure she does. What’s this theory of hers?”

It was clear that Valetta was choosing his words carefully when he spoke. “Signorina Levi believes that my predecessors at the library were Fascist sympathizers and collaborated with the Nazi regime.”

David was nonplussed.

“And let me hasten to add, she has never summoned any credible proof of these charges. She simply throws them around,” the director said, whisking his hand through the air, “like confetti. And without any regard for the damage such accusations could do to the reputation of this institution.”

While it was true that Olivia had never confided to him anything of this nature, David did not have much trouble imagining it. As an Italian and a Jew, whose own family had been decimated by the Fascist regime, Olivia might well have formulated such a theory. And Mussolini had indeed thrown in his country’s lot with the Third
Reich. But how this theory of hers had anything to do with the books of black magic that were also sitting on the table, David had no idea.

Nor did he have time to ask Dr. Valetta before they both heard Olivia explode from the end of the long gallery.

“What is he doing here?” she said. “Get out of there!” she shouted, and two or three researchers looked up from their seats in horror at this gross breach of decorum.

Storming into the alcove, her familiar overcoat flapping wide, her dark eyes darted around, swiftly taking in the dismantled stack of books, the loss of the borrower cards, and the look of confusion on David’s face.

“I can explain everything,” she said to David.

“I already have,” Dr. Valetta put in dryly.

“Oh, I’m sure you have.” Turning back to David, she said, “This man is just a functionary, another cipher”—she snapped her fingers to indicate what a trifle she was dealing with—“like all the others, who did the bidding of their overlords. Who knows who he really works for? God save us from the bureaucrats who clung to their desks while the Huns sacked the city!”

“All right,” Valetta said, “I’ve heard it all before, and I don’t need to hear it all again. Pack your things, Signorina, and get out of my library—”

“
My
library?” Olivia exclaimed.

“—and understand that you will never again receive permission to enter here.”

“But I am employed by Signor Franco,” she said, holding her hands out toward David.

“I don’t care if you are sent here by the Pope himself. You’re not getting in.” The director turned slightly, to block out Olivia and address solely David. “You are welcome to continue to use our facilities, so long as I believe you are confining yourself to legitimate fields of study. And as long as you are working alone.”

David was incensed himself. No one had ever suggested censoring,
or even monitoring, his work. “What are you saying? That you plan to approve, or disapprove, of my requests for material from now on?”

“Absolutely. And from that I will know whether or not you’re pursuing your own ends, or trying to assist Signorina Levi in hers.”

“That’s outrageous.”

“That’s necessity.”

“Then you won’t be seeing me here again, either,” David said, calling his bluff. In point of fact, he had already decided to follow the mirror, copy or not, to France, but it didn’t hurt to make a bold stand. “And I’ll be sure to tell Mrs. Van Owen that her donations would be better spent elsewhere.”

For a second, Dr. Valetta looked stricken. “As I have said, it is only Signorina Levi who has broken—”

“We’ll be packed and gone in five minutes,” David said, turning his back on him. Even Olivia looked surprised at this turn of events. “Gather your things,” he barked at her, and she quickly swept her pencils and pads into a pile on one side of the table.

Once that was all done, they walked in shame, like Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden, down the length of the reading room, past the astonished stares of the other occupants, down the steps, and out into the courtyard, where Olivia immediately wheeled on him, and said, “I’m sorry, David. I’m so sorry. It was only while you were at the Accademia. I just wanted to tie up some loose ends on an old project of mine.”