The Medusa Amulet (5 page)

“Let go!” he shouted, trying desperately to kick free, even as the coins and keys from his pants and jacket rained onto the stone, and the glasses slipped off his nose. The Mont Blanc pen dropped from his breast pocket, spinning into the black void. One hand was still firmly planted on the stone, but Linz put out a foot and nudged it aside.

An instant later Palliser was falling headfirst, caroming off the edges of the narrow shaft, shredding his clothes and ripping his skin, until he plunged, screaming, into the black water at the bottom of the pit.

Linz waited a moment, listening to the gurgle of the water, then brushed his hands against his jacket and replaced the 1936 Sancerre on the shelf. He nodded at the grate, and Rigaud bent down and pushed it back into place.

On the way out, Linz flicked off the lights and went upstairs to his bedroom. Ava was in the bathroom, removing her makeup. After getting undressed, he put on his pajamas and red silk robe, and began leafing through the pages from the late Mr. Palliser’s briefcase. So far, they looked very similar to papers he’d seen before, more’s the pity. They could join all the other sketches and journal entries and
ricordanze
, carried by previous, and equally unsuccessful, emissaries. Sometimes he wondered what he would do for amusement if these detectives and so-called art experts ever stopped coming.

“Who was that bore at the dinner table?” Ava called from the bathroom.

“Nobody.”

“Will he be coming back?”

“I don’t think so,” he replied, turning another page. Linz knew that behind them all, there lurked a rich and resourceful adversary—though
nowhere near as rich and resourceful as he was—and while Rigaud had often advised him to cut the tree down at its roots, Linz resisted. A life like his held little enough to savor, and simply knowing that a nemesis existed gave him a special frisson of pleasure. He had always relished having enemies; he’d felt that their animosity directly fed his own power and invincibility.

And as for these futile attempts to recover
La Medusa
? He was the cat playing with the proverbial mouse.

Ava bounded back into the bed, nude as usual, and yanked the covers up to her neck.

“Tell me again why you won’t install central heating?”

“Tell me why you refuse to wear the nightgowns I buy you.”

“They’re not healthy—they constrict the limbs in sleep.”

It was a discussion they had had a thousand times.

“Heating ducts would destroy the integrity of the chateau walls,” Linz said. And he had always been terribly superstitious about any alterations to the Chateau Perdu.

She burrowed deeper, pulling the blanket up to her eyeballs. “You and your integrity,” she snorted.

Linz slipped the papers into the bedside drawer, right under the loaded pistol he always kept there, and turned out the lights. In the darkness, as he rolled onto his side, he fancied he could hear the cries of his dinner guest, echoing from the oubliette.

Chapter 3

For David, Sunday night had always meant dinner at his sister Sarah’s house in the suburbs. And for years, he had looked forward to it.

But those simple, happy days were gone. For the past year or more, it had been an increasingly fraught occasion.

Sarah had been battling breast cancer, just as his mother had done, and like his mother, many years ago, she was losing the war. She had been through endless rounds of radiation and chemo, and even though she was only four years older than David, she looked like she was at death’s door. Her wavy brown hair, the same chestnut color as his own, was entirely gone, replaced with a wig that never sat quite right. Her eyebrows were penciled in, and her skin had a pale translucence.

And he loved her more than anyone in the world.

Their father had gone AWOL when he was just a toddler, and after their mother succumbed to the disease, it was Sarah who had pretty much raised him. He owed her everything, and there was nothing he could do to help her now.

Nothing, it seemed, that anyone could do.

He was just stamping the slush off his boots when she opened the door. Around her head, she was wearing a new silk scarf in a wild paisley pattern. It wasn’t great, but anything was better than that wig.

“Gary gave it to me,” she said, reading his mind as always.

“It’s nice,” David said, as she smoothed the silk along one side.

“Yeah, right,” she said, welcoming him in. “I think he hates the wig even more than I do.”

His little niece, Emme, was playing tennis on her Wii in the den, and when she saw him, she said, “Uncle David! I dare you to come and play me!”

She reminded him of Sarah when she was a little girl, but he sensed that Emme didn’t like it when he said that. Was she just showing her fierce independence, or was it a sign of some subliminal—and justifiable—fear? Was she aware of the terrible ordeal her mother was going through and trying to separate herself from a similar prospect? Or was he imagining the whole thing?

Eight-year-old girls, he recognized, were beyond his field of expertise.

A few minutes later, right after David had lost his first two games, Gary came in from the garage, carrying a bunch of flyers for the open house he was holding the next day. Gary was a real-estate broker, and by all accounts a good one, but in this market nothing was selling. And even when he did get an exclusive listing, it was usually with a reduced commission.

He was also carrying a pie he’d picked up at Bakers Square.

“Is it a chocolate cream?” Emme asked, and when her dad confirmed it, she let out an ear-piercing squeal.

Over dinner, Gary said, “It’s the Internet that’s killing the real-estate business. Everybody’s convinced they can sell their houses themselves these days.”

“But are there any buyers out there?” David asked.

“Not many,” Gary said, pouring himself another glass of wine and holding the bottle out toward David, who passed. “And the ones that there are think no price is ever low enough. They want to keep making counteroffer after counteroffer until the whole deal winds up falling apart.”

“Is it time for pie yet?” Emme asked for the tenth time.

“After we’re done with the meat loaf,” Sarah said, urging David to
take another piece. There were dark circles under her eyes that the overhead light only made worse. David took another slice just to make his sister happy.

“Save room for the pie,” Emme said in a stage whisper, just in case anyone had forgotten about it in the last five seconds.

When dinner—and dessert—were over, and David was helping to clear the table, Gary disappeared into the garage again. By the time he came back in, he was dragging a six-foot-tall tree.

“Who wants to decorate a Christmas tree?” he announced.

“I do! I do!” Emme shouted, jumping up and down. “Can we do it tonight?”

“That’s why your uncle David is here,” Gary said. “To help us get the lights on. You mind?” he asked, and David said he’d be glad to help.

“Hope you’re not starting to feel like a hired hand,” Sarah said, taking a plate David had just scraped clean and putting it in the dishwasher.

“I’ve got to earn my keep somehow.”

“You do that every day,” Sarah said sincerely. “Without your help, I don’t know how any of us could have gotten this far.”

David gently rubbed her shoulder, wondering not how they’d gotten through this far but if it would ever end. She’d been through the mastectomy, and all the rest … but what happened next? He knew that when their mother had been diagnosed, things had gone downhill rapidly—she was dead within eighteen months—but that was then, and this was now. Surely the odds and the outcomes must have improved since then.

Gary hauled out a box of Christmas tree lights and ornaments, and while David held the tree straight, he positioned it in the stand, screwing in the bolts from three sides. Emme was already trying to attach some ornaments, and her dad had to tell her to wait until the lights were on. Gary had the old-fashioned kind of lights that David liked, big thick bulbs that were green and blue and red and shaped like candle flames—none of those fancy little twinkling white
lights—and the two of them wrapped the strings around the tree, handing the cord back and forth. Once they were done, Gary said, “Go for it!” to Emme, and she started sticking the ornaments on as fast as her fingers could get the hooks around the boughs.

Sarah, watching from the sofa, sipped a cup of herbal tea and offered the occasional instruction. “Spread them out, honey. You’ve got a whole tree to cover.”

David and Gary took care of the upper limbs, and when David took a silver papier-mâché star out of the box, he stopped and showed it to Sarah. It was the star she had made in grade school and that they’d always put on the very top of the tree. It was a little bent now, and he straightened it gently before putting it in place.

“I made that in Mrs. Burr’s class,” she said.

“And I had her four years later, but what happened to my ornament?”

“A mystery for the ages,” Sarah said. It was the same conversation they had every year, but it wouldn’t have been Christmas without it.

Once the ornament supply was exhausted, and the tinsel flung, Gary said, “Are we ready?” and Emme raced around the room, turning off all the lights except those on the tree. The evergreen sparkled in the dark, its boughs giving off a rich, outdoorsy scent. David sat down next to his sister, took her hand, and intertwined their fingers.

“You know how many years we’ve been recycling that star?” Sarah said.

David did a quick calculation. “Twenty-four years.”

“Next year we should celebrate its silver anniversary.”

“Yes, we should,” David replied, eager to endorse any implicit hope for the future.

“When do we put out the presents?” Emme asked eagerly.

“That’s Santa’s job,” Gary said, and Emme made a face.

“I like it better when Santa comes early,” she said, in such a way as to indicate that the Santa bit wasn’t working for her anymore.

“They get so cynical, so fast,” Sarah said, with a rueful smile. “I believed in Santa until my senior prom.”

“Remember the time you got up on Santa’s lap at Marshall Fields’ and wouldn’t get off?”

Nodding, she said, “Remember Marshall Fields’, period?”

They were both nostalgic about the pieces of Chicago history, such as its flagship department store, which had disappeared over the years. Fields had become Macy’s, and as far as David and his sister were concerned, the magic was gone.

But the magic of a lighted Christmas tree, festooned with homemade ornaments and strings of tinsel, was as powerful as ever, and Gary flopped down in his armchair with a sigh. Even Emme lay down on the wall-to-wall carpeting, with her chin in her hands, gazing at the tree. Taking off the glasses she’d just started wearing that year, she said, “Oooh, this is even prettier. All the colors get kind of blurry. Try it, Uncle David!”

He took off his wire rims, said, “Yep, it’s way better,” then cleaned them on the tail of his shirt.

“You’ll scratch them,” Sarah said.

“Only the finest Old Navy fabric,” David said.

“I gave you handkerchiefs for your birthday. What did you do with them?”

David couldn’t answer that one. Presumably, they were somewhere in his dresser, under the pajamas he never wore, or the old track jerseys he had retired. But he liked having Sarah ask, probably as much as she liked nagging.

When Sarah finally told Emme it was time for bed, David helped her up off the sofa. Sarah had always been tall and slender, like her brother, but it was like raising a wraith now. She hugged David with frail arms. “We never asked about your work,” she said. “Weren’t you giving a lecture soon?”

“Yep, and it went fine.”

“Oh, I wish I could have come,” she said.

“Next time,” he said, though the very thought of having family there made him more nervous than ever.

“What was it about?”

“We got a new copy of Dante, very old and very beautiful. I talked about that.” He never went into much detail about his work; he knew that Sarah was proud of his accomplishments, and that was enough. While he had always been the dreamer, the scholar, she had been the practical one. She hadn’t had much choice.