The King's Gold (27 page)

Through the woods. Past the dripping sycamores and the perfect lucid light, through the twirling curtains of orange leaves falling through the glassine air. The trees seemed to multiply in front of me, blocking my path. Branches whipped over my face, hands, and arms as I ran by the sycamores. The cool air blasted against my eyeballs. The forest was transformed into a kaleidoscope made up of a thousand broken pieces because of the impact of my feet against the ground, juddering my head on my neck, shattering my vision.

Past the trees, the incline began, out of the valley. The mud clung to my hands, peeled off the ground. I hurled myself up, the rucksack up—and right behind me, I could hear Marco panting and scratching his way up the incline. I raked my fingernails through more mud, leaves.

Up I scraped and mud slashed onto my face. Mud in my eyes. I heard a roaring, before feeling a hand gripping my calf, clawing up at my hip.

I twisted back.

Marco held me down, his breath coming so hard he looked as if he would eat me, and his eyes looked broken.

“You’re stronger than me, Marco,” I said. “Think of what you’re—”

“Don’t push me. Don’t push me.”

“Oh God!”

He glared at me with those red eyes.

“What are you going to do?”

Just the sound of breathing. But then he said: “You look just like him.”

He let me go. He leaned back, lifting his hands, palms up. I grabbed the rucksack and did not stop running.

The shining silver Fiat came into view. The key jangled up from the seat, I crammed it into the ignition, the engine slammed into life.

Just as the yellow Fiat appeared in my windshield, the greengold landscape unfurled out my window, while my wheels turned, hit the soft ground, spinning and sliding before barreling away from the valley’s cliff.

Blood-striped Erik hollered like Emiliano Zapata behind the wheel of the other car.

We sped away—we were flying from Marco, who stood stranded in the mud with his hands at his sides. Away from Domenico, who would be cursing invisibly in the forest below. The tires levitated over the humps and hunks of grass, battering down the inclines. It sounded like a cataclysm when we skidded onto unmarked pavement, me joyfully tossing out the gun I’d fetched from the stolen backpack as if it were a live bomb. The road veered up, through the hillocks, past the valley, toward anonymous fields and vineyards and cow-mooing pastures. But we knew where it was leading.

Rome.

“I think I’ve figured out the next step,” I said excitedly to Erik several hours later, around four o’clock in the afternoon.

He and I were waiting at the miniature, cluttered, espresso-and-brioche-fragrant Bar Pasquino, an establishment tucked into a corner of Rome’s Piazza Navona. Bar Pasquino is identical to perhaps five hundred thousand other caffès in the Eternal City, all resplendent with their flashes of brass, purplebelled flowers in pottery vases, and little zinc tables over which giant flat-screened TVs play blindingly violent soccer matches.

After our hectic flight from Marco and Domenico, and our rapid three-hour passage into the city, we had been instructed to patronize this particular locale during a traumatic cell phone chat with my mother. Having by now learned from Manuel about Marco Moreno’s blood ties to the genocidal colonel, Juana was in a manic frame of mind. Beyond explaining to me in an innerear-damaging staccato that I was just as bad, reckless, and nuts as my bio-dad, she’d also said this was the place just-arrived Yolanda intended to use as a message-trading center. I had tried to put the bulk of that conversation into a deep dark pit at the back of my brain, and for the past twenty minutes had been impatiently attending to the bar manager, who was about to return with the note my half-sister left only a few hours before.

While waiting, I first glanced up at the billboard-size boob tube. The machine’s high-def HDTV whatchamacallit was so godlike in its resolution that I found little psychological succor in an image of an Uruguayan knocking his bloody soccer-skull on a Sicilian’s during an international youth tournament. I then began to bruise my thumbs sending Señor Soto-Relada text questions about Tomas’s putative death, as he had claimed to know so much about the man.

After that, I happily abandoned modernity to study the materials before me. On our table, cluttered already with a small purple bouquet and a jumble of silverware, I had spread Antonio’s first letter, which I teased out from a thick bundle of other papers and Italian
Rough Guides
in Marco’s rucksack, now in my own green backpack for safekeeping. I also had out for inspection the second, illuminated dispatch we’d snatched from the fires beneath Siena’s Duomo, in addition to my increasingly thumbed copy of Sofia’s
Diario Intimo
.

I had just determined that of all these documents, the last probably contained the most auspicious signs that could help us crack the third stanza of Antonio’s riddle:

CITY THREE’S INVISIBLE

WITHIN THIS ROCK, FIND A BATH

BURN LOVE’S APPLE, SEE THE CLEW

THEN TRY TO FLY FROM MY WRATH.

Erik pulled out one of the purple blossoms from the table’s vase while I fretted over the writings. A dark-belled, black-berried flower, it was the same kind that Marco had teased me with in the Chiana Valley and that we had been spotting throughout our stay in Italy.

“What did he call you when he gave you one of these?” He shook the plant in the air.

I barely glanced up from my studies. “What did who call me when he gave me what?”

“Marco. When he handed you one of these flowers. I heard him: He said, ‘
Careful, careful, careful’
—and then he called you—”

“Erik, never mind that”—I pointed at the diary with both hands—“I’ve hit on something incredible—”

“He called you ‘
pretty lady,’
didn’t he?”

“All I remember is that there was blood all over you and that you were dancing around Domenico like a maniac. How’s the bandage I put on your arm?”

“Fine—but he
did
. He called you that. I told you—he’s getting a
crush
on you. He gets sweaty and glassy-eyed when he looks at you, like a kind of sweet, friendly sociopath, instead of a revolting, scary, guard-slagging—”

“Erik, he’s gone.”

He winked up at the televised soccer match and was briefly distracted by a failed goalie shot. “For now.”

“We don’t have to worry about him. They’re not going to find us in the city. They don’t have the diary or the second letter—they have nothing to go on.”

“Madam?”

The bar manager’s die-shaped face suddenly hovered above us. In his big breadloaf of a hand he held a scrap of paper.

“A note for you, signora.”

I unfolded it.

Hi Lola!!!!!!

You can relax now. Yeah, I’ve come. Yeah, I’m here to help you in this girl detective act that’s got you so into a twist that you just run off leaving me with Medusa Sanchez, who’s spent the last day and a half pinning some butterfly bridesmaid’s barfbag on me. By which I mean those dresses, which are beyond ugly.

So! I know you just forgot to ask me to come along to Italy, right? Huh? While Erik was slam-dancing around here right after you’d gone, I got details about you possibly fornicating with a mysterious guy and looking for Aztec gold or somesuch. And then, this morning, your ma told me on the phone that the slob you’d gone running off with is a really classy customer. Colonel Moreno’s SON, was it? Juana has been keeping me updated on all the little particulars, and boy, it has been just a pleasure to have those really relaxing conversations with her. You have got to be the all-time most troublesome pain-in-the-neck half-sister I ever heard of, and when your mother’s not yelling, I like to tell her it’s only the Mexican side of your mongrel composition that makes you such a tribulation.

I can’t wait to see, you, though.

Rome’s not too bad! I’m assuming you’ve been rolling around in libraries and found a couple things that might help us with this Aztec gold theory Manuel was filling me in on. And there was SOMETHING ELSE, if I recall, that Erik was mumbling about—Dad dying in Europe, was it? Yeah! That was interesting! What the hell is that about?! Is it true?

Okay. I’m here to find out, lucky for you. I’m sure you need my help by now, you big old pansy. So. You’ll fill me in when we meet up here later—say, at 4:30? That is, if I don’t see you before that, since you know what a good tracker I am.

How’s that chatty big-boned know-it-all Guatemalan Romeo of yours doing? Give him a sloppy kiss for me.

Love you, Y

P.S. Oh— I hope Erik told you that you can forget my heading up that scavenger hunt for the wedding party. You know how Dad used to make me do those monkey stunts when I was a kid. I am retired.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m glad she’s here to help out,” said Erik, taking a sniff of the flower.

I smoothed out the papers. “I just don’t know what I’m going to tell her about Tomas.”

“You mean the man with the ponytail—”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t talk about him. Reading this, she sounds almost
happy
—and you can see how excited she is to be here—”

“She’s getting to track her dad, and she hasn’t tracked anything since we were in the jungle. So, yes, I think she is feeling pretty excited.”

“For the last two years, all she’s been doing is stalking around Long Beach in that big black hat like one of the villains in
High Noon
and she’s waiting for the shoot-out.”

“I just wish she were already here. Because I want to get going now, after what I’ve just read here, in Sofia’s diary.”

Erik raised his eyebrows. “All right. I’m listening.”

I underlined Antonio’s riddle with my finger. “Okay, the riddle says,

CITY THREE’S INVISIBLE

WITHIN THIS ROCK, FIND A BATH

BURN LOVE’S APPLE, SEE THE CLEW

THEN TRY TO FLY FROM MY WRATH.

“Let’s just start with the first line.”

“‘
City Three’s Invisible
.’ Erik, isn’t
invisible city
what people used to call ruins? In the sixteenth century.”

He nodded. “A lot of imaginary places were called that. St.

Augustine’s City of God, Plato’s Atlantis, the Arthurian Avalon, Shambhalla—but yes, the colonial Spaniards came up with that nickname for the ancient cities they excavated—”

“Copán, Machu Picchu—”

“Even sections of Tenochtitlán.”

“Because they were buried, underground—”

“Right. You’re right—“

“They were
invisible
. That’s what we’re looking for.”

“A ruin—in Rome.”

“Just outside, actually, if I’ve figured this out. Like the riddle says, we’ll have to find an invisible city—a ruin—and a
rock,
then some sort of
bath
. And then we have to burn
these
—”

I plucked the black-purple flower that still dangled from Erik’s hand. I placed it carefully on top of the letter I’d found while getting grilled to death by naphtha fire under the Duomo.

Marco Moreno had already shown me how these flowers grow wild in Italy, when he had taken pains to draw my attention to them in the Chiana valley. I knew now that he had done so for a good, and possibly even generous reason. As I’d explained to Erik on the drive to Rome, the bloom corresponded perfectly to the floral illumination that decorated the first page of the letter, which had turned out to be, along with the anagram, the second of the three “hints” Antonio had promised were in the missive.

The rebus (a code word formed out of a picture image) it formed symbolized “love apple,” the name of this very common, wild, berry-dangling flower, which had a mysterious significance for Antonio Medici—and that Marco Moreno had showed me so pointedly in the valley of Chiana:

“‘
Burn Love’s Apple, see the Clew / Then try to Fly from my Wrath,’”
I quoted, looking at the silky dark bells.

Erik admired the trick, slapping his hand on the table. “Yes, right, I get it—these flowers are
love apples
. Which apparently we’re supposed to burn. And that’s great, but I don’t think you’re paying
quite
enough attention to that last line about the
flying from his wrath
business...” He turned his head toward the television as his sentence trailed off.

“Oh, we can worry about that later.”

He had now turned his body completely toward the TV and tilted his head, his smile fading. “Yes...maybe you’re right. Maybe we have
just
enough on our plate at the moment.”

I chattered on: “I just want to look into it
now,
you know? I wish my sister would hurry up.” I looked at my watch, which said 3:59. “It’s going to take her another half hour.”

Erik continued to blink at the TV. “I actually think we probably should go now.”

“Why?”

He gestured for me to follow his gaze. “Well, blagh, ack,
look
.”

On the screen, a well-coiffed female newscaster with scarlet lipstick and a creaseless forehead smoothly cooed that international authorities were even at this moment searching for a trio of grave-robbing and murderous bandits: