The King's Gold (37 page)

I did not answer.

“Sure you would. Because, Lola, you
do
remind me of your grandfather. With your books. How you went off loping into the jungle two years past. Anyway, Jose Diego de la Rosa, that was his name, your grandpa. He used to ramble around Argentina looking for this sword he swore belonged to ol’ King Arthur, which was inherited and buried by a girl pal of Che Guevara. He’d go banging around Patagonia with a backpack full of sextants and thermometers, and a bunch of history books, looking for the thing. ‘I think that sword’s at the bottom of Laguna Negra, my boy, thrown there in disgust by the revolutionaries,’ he’d say to me, sticking one of his books under my nose. He was a genius, swear to Christ,
and
right about a blade being at the bottom of the Black Lake, no surprise. But before he could study the thing, he was killed by a Peronist with six bullets. And then—girl, you look like you’re going to faint, you okay?—there’s one of your great-grandmothers, Ixzaluoh. Bow-legged as a circus freak, but a great warrior for Honduran independence in the 1800s. She wanted to learn the best way to a kill a man—she was fighting the Spaniards—and so she spied on the hidalgos at the encampments, hiding in the trees while they made their gunpowder down there on the ground. She memorized every secret ingredient they used, brought the recipe back home, and wound up killing eighty colonials with that brimstone before she got dead in an explosion she set off herself—”

“Stop it,” I said, though even at this moment he’d hooked me. I instantly, wrongly, wanted what he was offering. An enchanted lost family taken from the pages of my favorite books. An epic pops who would explain me to myself. But I knew I couldn’t take these things because that would be a betrayal of Manuel. “Stop it.”

He leaned back lazily. “That’s all right, Lola, I’ll just tell you when you’re ready.” Then he said, with less languor: “It’s time for us to end this conversation, anyhow.”

“Why?”

“‘Cause I need you to do something. About Marco. That’s why I called you out here. I’ve been keeping my eye on him. He’s been crying and so on, playing with that gun he lifted off the stiff you guys left in Rome. He thinks you don’t like him anymore, Lo-lee-ta. And he thinks you’re the only girl in the whole, wide, bad world who understands him, how smart he is, how much he misses his precious daddy. But if I let him brood too long, he’ll take a bad turn. I saw it happen with his father in the war—ugly sight. And I don’t want to have to have a chat with him until we’re away from all these businessmen and babies. So you should go and calm him down, which apparently you’re not too bad at, according to his blithering. Tell him what he wants to hear. About how he’ll get his hands on enough gold to make him into a baby Hitler, and how you think he’s just a peachy and misunderstood son-of-a-bitch. But you’d better do it before he has himself a fit and I have to do something unkind to him in front of a toddler.”

“I don’t want you to do anything to him,” I said. “And he
can’t
see you.”

“Like you’re already aware, I know how to make myself hard to spot when I want.”

I pressed my fingers to my temples. “And Yolanda—”

“Don’t you worry about her. I’ll take care of Y; she is my love-girl. Just like I’ll take care of you, L, and your mother too—”

My teeth clashed when he said that.

“You’ll take care of Mom and me?”

There was a threat to Manuel in his promise. It made me want to shake Tomas by the collar, or cry
and
abuse him, or somehow ensure I’d never see him again.

Except then, I could not do any of these things: In Siena, I had read his face like a book; though I had never seen him before, I had recognized it immediately. As I glared down at the man’s ugly-handsome face, I suddenly knew why. It was because I had inherited that same face, the same bones, with feminine touches. I had recognized myself in him. I looked more like that prevaricating, honey-tongued destroyer than Yolanda did; I looked more like that story-telling daughter-escaper than my mother.

Then I didn’t want to know any more. I walked away from Tomas de la Rosa without another word, down the empty seats, past the businessmen.

“Careful, sweets,” I heard him say.

When I turned around, he was already slipping down the aisle, the ponytail snaking down his back. He disappeared out the opposite door.

He had certainly done his job with me, offering me my weirdness dressed up as brilliance. And he had more than reminded me that Marco had wanted to erase the evidence and fruit of my family’s secret history.

I steadied my breath as I entered car five.

But there was no monster waiting for me in the next car.

Tomas had his facts wrong; that war of his was old.

I opened the communicating doors upon a hollow-cheeked man meditating like a desert hermit in one of the blue upholstered seats.

Marco Moreno glanced up with his astonishing eyes and did not seem surprised when he saw me come in.

“I threw away the gun a few miles back,” he said, softly. “I wiped it down. Nobody will track it to him.” A pause. “I meant it when I said I’d help you.”

I sat down on the seat opposite his and just looked at him, not saying anything for a long time. While I saw how his feelings had maimed his face, I thought again of how he let Blasej kill those guards, and of the hideous hint that Yolanda had given me about what he’d done to farmers back in Guatemala. I had not forgotten these details; on the contrary. And yet, I knew that here was a person in a crisis of villainy, just as Erik, six cars back, was in the throes of some kind of crisis of goodness. Marco was learning the painful lesson that he could be different.

He blinked at me, nodding, before gazing out the window at the blue radiance flying past. Not many words were required between us at this point.

“What am I going to do with you?” I finally asked.

“I don’t know.”

Marco reached out and patted my hand. He held it until I gently extracted myself from his grasp. He looked out the window again.

“But I know you’ll love it, Lola.”

“What?”

He smiled as if he was in love with me, and pointed at the view.

“Welcome to Venice,” he said.

We were there: At the edge of the window frame was water, the color of cobalt mixed with sapphire and glazed with melted topaz. Farther still, as if floating above that lagoon, presided a casbah built of gold domes and white spires. Dark flying creatures—La Serenissima’s famous pigeons—circled the panorama of St. Mark’s Square, the pale obelisks topped by the golden winged lions that guarded this place we had run to for sanctuary.

My heart gave a painful, hopeful leap when I saw the Fourth City.

I looked back from the approaching fairy city to Marco Moreno’s lean, wrecked face. De la Rosa had told me he wanted to meet with Marco in a place empty of toddlers and businessmen; he sought privacy for his retribution against the Morenos. I would not let him have it. There would be no more deaths.

“Venezia. Venezia.”
I heard over the speakers.

I pressed into my cell phone pad the message:

Then I said: “Come on.”

“Where?” Marco asked. “Just you and me?”

“No.”

I took Marco’s hand and half-dragged him through the compartments, the doors sucking open and closed as we passed through. I did not see Tomas in the slender space of the train, though I expected that he saw us. The blue view through the long rectangle of windows revealed that we had nearly reached the end of the line.

“Ultima fermata, Venezia.”

Another door opened, shut.

Erik and my sister peeped sleepily up at us as we stood above them, while the other passengers rose from their seats to draw down the packs and bags stored overhead.

Erik looked at Marco through heavy-lidded and unsurprised eyes.

“He’s traveling with us.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m glad I’m getting this news when I’m a complete zombie,” he observed to Marco. “This numbness is really wonderful;

I hope it lasts.”

“Look at you,” Marco said. “You have it bad.”

“I would have killed you in Florence.” Erik turned his face away. “But I don’t feel like doing that anymore.”

“No, you’re not built for it.”

“Where’s my father?” Yolanda demanded. “Where’s my dad buried?”

I kept an eye on the door breathing open and shut behind us while gathering as much luggage as I could. Outside the window, the metal-green lagoon convulsed with speed boats, and the taffy-colored mansions thrust up from the water like mirages.

The train shivered, halted.

“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” I said.

St. Mark’s Square was filled with diamond and peach light, opal-colored birds and variegated people. The Basilica di San Marco is a pointed, gold-crested citadel crested by four massive gilt-bronze horses that appear to madly gallop above the basilica’s jeweled doors.

I ran into the pigeon-dusted square, ahead of Erik, Yolanda, and Marco Moreno. The piazza tossed with thousands of crane-necked strangers glaring at the Byzantine splendors, so they resembled Michelangelo’s damned who stare confusedly up at the angelic heavens in
The Last Judgement
.

I nearly cried when I saw two smallish, dark-haired Latins in the midst of this bedlam. They had forced the crowd to relinquish a large circle of space to them through the effective and aggressive thrustings of roller bags.

“Monster!”

“Mom! Dad!”

And then my mother and father were running toward me, salty hair flying, bald head shining, and it was a catastrophe of weeping accusations and nearly hysterical declarations of love as we embraced.

On the east side of the square is Caffè Florian, a eighteenth-century institution, and once I scoped out the crowd to ensure any raised-from-the-dead dads weren’t lying in wait, I joined my family around one of its little wicker tables.

“And Marco...you are who, again, just so as to confirm?” my mother interrogated him after ordering pomegranate-red Kir Royales and zabaglione for the table. Her silver hair was swept up in a cylonic twist, and her coffee-colored eyes blinked rapidly in her wrinkled, triangular face. She wore sturdy khakis, a tweed jacket, and talked with her long-fingered hands. “Manuel was telling me something...disturbing...about your being some sort of lunatic with whose family we’ve had
dealings
. And that you kidnapped or brainwashed our daughter, then whisked her here to Italy, now, what—seven days before her wedding? I know that I should probably find some sledgehammer and bash you, but it somehow seems less appropriate now that we’ve met. You look like a pitiful skid row person.”