The Medusa Amulet (31 page)

Caterina—his model, his muse, his love—had known. She had discovered it by chance … and to her great misfortune. But as a papal retainer had confided to him years ago—at the tip of Cellini’s dagger—she had died in a shipwreck, fleeing the Duke of Castro’s inquisitors. As proof, the man had shown him the ship’s manifest and passenger lists, left in Cherbourg. She had changed her name, but Cellini recognized well her peculiar and barely legible handwriting. Reports of the ship’s destruction had been widely circulated at the time.

Perhaps the sea had conferred a blessing upon her.

There were times when he wondered if he might not have been better off himself, inhabiting that tomb in the Basilica della Santissima Annunziata. Sleeping there, in silence, until the Second Coming.

But what reason was there to believe that Christ was going to return at all? What reason was there to believe in anything?

A hawk, with a rodent clutched in its talons, settled onto a swaying branch and proceeded to devour its screeching prey.

That was the way of the world, he thought. Every living creature was ultimately a banquet for some other. And no one had ever seen more of the grisly and unending spectacle than he had.

Over the centuries, he had uncovered secrets no other man had. He had delved more deeply into arcane matters than anyone else had ever done, even the learned Dr. Strozzi. And he had escaped death, a hundred times. But at what cost?

Life, he had discovered, knew its own limits. When the thread had been meant to be cut, it was cut … and all the time thereafter was only a hollow enactment of things never intended to occur.

Oh, he had lived on, but once he had reached his mortal span—seventy seventy-five, whatever God had intended—his life had become as great a lie as Cagliostro’s.

Was that, he wondered, why he had always harbored such hatred for the man?

He lifted his hands, still gnarled from his days as the great and applauded artisan, and wondered where, precisely, their genius had gone. On the night the old beggar had been buried in his tomb, it was as if his gifts had been buried then, too. He could sculpt, he could mold, but only as well as some rough, untutored apprentice in his shop might have done—as anyone with ten fingers and two eyes could do. He could not create works worthy of the artist he had once been, and so, over time, he had ceased to try. It was too painful, too degrading, to produce pieces of anything less than transcendent beauty.

The waters of eternity, he thought, the light of the ancient moon … united in the
Medusa
, they had granted him the gift he sought. But the gift they bestowed was an empty vessel. It was a life without purpose, and a destiny with no fitting end. He might have laughed if he were not the one who had been tricked.

Chapter 21

As the TGV pulled into the Gare de Lyon in Paris, David helped Olivia up from her bunk—“My head feels as if it’s been hit with a hammer,” she complained—and then wrestled their bags toward the door. When it whooshed open, he helped her out onto the platform while keeping an eye out in all directions.

The bald man and his accomplice, the one who had undoubtedly drugged their drinks, had to be somewhere in the mob disembarking from the train, and for all he knew they were still on the job.

David had slung the shoulder strap of the valise over his neck, and with one arm around her waist, shepherded Olivia to the cab stand, where he barged to the head of the line, pleading that his wife needed to get to a hospital. Once in the taxi, he directed him to the Crillon, where Mrs. Van Owen’s very efficient travel agent had already arranged for their accommodations.

At the hotel, Olivia was sufficiently recovered to navigate through the lobby, and down the hushed corridor to the lavish two-bedroom suite with a bird’s-eye view of the Place de la Concorde. Formerly known as the Place de la Révolution, its stones had once been awash in the blood from the guillotine; Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, had been decapitated, like thousands of others, just a few hundred yards away.

“I need a hot shower,” Olivia said, “and room service.”

“What do you want?”

“Start with a dozen eggs, bacon, croissants, cheese, coffee—very black and very strong—and a gun.”

“I don’t think guns are on the menu.”

“Just so long as I have something to kill them with, if I ever see those two again.”

David placed the order, then quickly tried Gary again on his cell phone. This time the call went through, and even though it was the middle of the night in Chicago, Gary sounded wide-awake.

“I was planning to just leave you a message,” David said.

“That’s okay. I’m up.”

“Where are you?”

“Right now, the den. I’m watching some old movie on TCM.”

“How’s she doing?”

Gary paused, before saying, “Okay, I guess. She goes in daily for treatments, but at least she’s not living in the hospital. She doesn’t have a nurse waking her up every two hours to take another blood sample.”

“How’s Emme holding up?”

“She’s just happy to have her mom at home. For that matter, so am I.”

“I wish I could be there to help out.”

“Listen, you do what you have to do. Get that promotion. I’ll keep you posted. But Sarah likes knowing you’re out there, going to all those glamorous places. Which one are you in now?”

“Paris.”

“Paris,” Gary said, and David could picture him nodding in approbation. “I’ll have to tell Sarah as soon as she wakes up.”

“I’ll send her a postcard,” David said, “though I hope to be home before it gets there.”

“That’d be great,” Gary replied. “Emme’s been practicing up on the Wii, and I think she wants to whip her uncle David at a game of tennis or Ping-Pong or something.”

“Tell her I’m up for the rematch anytime.”

Hanging up, David stared out the window, feeling the enormous distance between himself and his sister, and feeling, like a magnet, drawn back toward home. But what good would that do her? What good would that do anyone? Anything he could accomplish had to be done right here.

The bedroom door opened, and Olivia emerged in a plush bathrobe, ruffling a towel through her hair, just as the room-service cart arrived. Throwing down a cup of hot coffee before even touching the food, she asked, “So, I’ve been thinking about it. Do you think these two are the same guys who beat up Giorgio in my apartment?”

David had been considering that, too. “Even if they’re not, I’d bet they’re all good friends.”

Olivia began to lift the silver salvers and inspect what was on the plates and in the bread basket. The aromas alone were overwhelming.

“I think so, too. Coffee?” she said, pouring a cup for David. The lapels of her robe gaped open at the throat, revealing skin as smooth as the butter she was slathering on her bread. David had to refocus his thoughts.

“I’m really sorry,” he finally said, as she unabashedly dug into a plate of eggs and bacon.

“For what?”

As slender as a gazelle, she ate with the relish of a lion.

“For getting you into this mess,” he said.

“What do you mean, for getting me into this mess? How do you know,” she said, wagging a slice of crisp bacon in the air, “that it’s not my mess?” She actually sounded a bit indignant. “It was my apartment they broke into. It was my old boyfriend they beat up. Maybe it’s me they’re after.”

Oddly, David wished he could believe that—it would at least absolve him of any guilt—but he knew it wasn’t true, and he knew that it was time he told her the truth. If she was going to assist him in his search, and be exposed to whatever dangers might lie ahead, she needed to know what she was getting into. He needed to make a clean breast of it.

“The woman who has given me this job,” he began, “is named Kathryn Van Owen,” and Olivia listened carefully as he explained what he knew of her. None of that was so hard to accept or understand. “But she believes,” he eventually concluded, “in the power of
La Medusa.
”

“She believes that it can actually grant immortality?” Olivia said, matter-of-factly. “I figured she did.”

Olivia had read
The Key to Life Eternal
. She knew how the mirror had been made, and for what purpose, but still, David had expected more of a reaction than this. “You figured that?”

“Of course,” Olivia said. “Why else would she go to all this trouble and expense?” She waved one arm around the lavish suite. “The real question is, do
you
believe it?”

Put on the spot like that, David hesitated.

But Olivia simply waited, and when he still didn’t answer, she understood, and said, in a gentler tone, “Why?”

“I believe in it because I have to,” he finally replied. As he told her about his sister, and his voice grew hoarse with emotion, Olivia got up from her chair, came around the table, and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. She smelled of bath soap and hot croissants.

“Do you remember what I told you in the back of the cab in Florence?” she asked.

David did not immediately know what she was getting at.

“I told you that we were alike. We do not do things for money. We do things for love. And now,” she said, “at last I know the real reason for your search.”

David felt a huge sense of relief, but at the same time he was still concerned for her safety. “If you want to return to Florence and go back to your normal—”

But she stopped him by putting a finger on his lips.

“Listen to me,” she said. “Everything that has happened—including those men on the train last night—all of that has made me feel … restored.”

“Restored?” David said. It was about the last thing he might have expected her to say. “How?”

“All my life,” she said, slipping around from the back of his chair and insinuating herself into his lap, “I have spent holed up with my books and my papers and my theories. Sometimes, I would think to myself, what do they all matter? Who cares but me? But now I know that the truth does matter. Now I know—now I remember—that there are people who will do anything to suppress it.”

“But they’ll try again.”

Olivia shrugged, and with one hand cradled his chin. “Let them,” she said. “The truth always comes out in the end.”

But when David started to protest one more time, she said, “If you are trying to get rid of me, it won’t work.” She shook his chin. “So will you stop?”

“I’ll stop,” he conceded.

“Good,” she said, grazing his lips with her own before going back to her side of the table. “Now eat something. We need to go to the Louvre. The crown jewels are waiting.”

Chapter 22

“How hard was it?” Escher said, as they approached the main courtyard of the Louvre. “You call yourself a doctor, you had one simple thing to do, and you couldn’t get even that much right.”

Julius’s face scrunched up like he’d just had to eat something sour. “But I did do it right,” he replied in a last-ditch attempt to defend himself. “If the dosage had been any higher, they’d have keeled over in the dining car.”

Escher was sick of discussing it. He wasn’t used to working with amateurs.

“Maybe it would help,” Julius ventured, “if I knew what this was all about. First you run me out of Florence—if I go back to my place, some Turk is going to try to kill me—and now I’m in Paris, chasing after God knows what. Is there a point to all this?”

“The less you know, the better off you’ll be.” Escher knew, from experience, just how annoying it was to be told that.

“Well, then I should be in very good shape, because I haven’t got a clue.”

“Keep it that way,” Escher said, “and wait here, out of sight, until I call you.” He straightened his alpine, badger-bristle hat, and took the glasses and guidebook from his pocket. Now he looked pretty much like the other provincial German tourists who had just arrived, in a busload, at the museum. He left Jantzen standing by the
glass pyramid erected in the forecourt and mixed in with the crowd.

David Franco and that friend of his, Olivia Levi, were just hurrying in through the main doors.

Escher, smiling benignly at the guards and the other tourists, passed through the security check and paid for his ticket while keeping a safe distance from his quarry. David had that damned valise slung over one shoulder, and though Escher fully expected the guards to force him to check it before going through the turnstile, he could see a conversation going on, in which Olivia seemed to be pitching in. A senior guard was called over, and after glancing at the contents, and exchanging some additional words, he spoke into his walkie-talkie, waited, then nodded.