The King's Gold (5 page)

He and Blasej got out of the car. Domenico had been standing by the trunk with the luggage. Now he began walking swiftly out of the car park, muttering, “We’re already late.”

“Man,” Blasej was saying to Marco. “This is stupid. She’s a casualty.”

“Blasej, don’t be hasty. If she doesn’t come with us, we’ll visit her when we get back.”

“Unless I call the police on you now,
you idiot
!” I yelled.

Marco continued smiling at me, walking backward, as I remained sitting in the backseat.

He held the letter by his fingertips, teasing me by shaking it back and forth. I could see the delicate paper, the gorgeous puzzle of it.

“Come on, poppet,” Marco sang. “Come on, kitten. Go ahead. Call the police.”

I stayed in the backseat, refusing to move, and chattering to myself: “No, no, no. Get a grip, Sanchez. Run away. 911. There’s nothing here for you. All he’s got is a…map to Montezuma’s gold and maybe your father’s—
agh!”

He had been right about me. I couldn’t resist it. A steady diet of Alexandre Dumas novels and a flaming Electra complex had twisted my wits. He talked about pipe bombs and slapped me? He qualified for a solid dose of Thorazine and probably double life sentences in federal prison? Didn’t matter.

For another few minutes I stayed on the backseat, quietly cursing as I watched Marco flutter the letter at me. I stepped out onto the concrete. I slammed the car door shut.

“Told you,” I heard him sing out.

I followed Marco Moreno out of the parking lot, my throat so tight I could choke.

“That’s it, Lola…”

Two hours later, I was sailing over the wine-dark sea to Florence.

“Hello! Handsome boy! And you must be Lola…what was it? De la
Rosa,
wasn’t it?”

More than forty-eight hours after my abduction/psychotic break, an enthusiastic woman in vibrant midlife greeted Marco, Domenico, Blasej, and me upon our bustling into the dream scape of the Palazzo Medici Riccardi. Sandwiched between the goons, my priestess gown was bunged up, and my hair exploded all over my head as I blinked derangedly at the art sparkling all around us.

We were in Florence, Italy. This was my first time. And I was discovering that Italy is so beautiful it can arouse the senses to a deliciously painful inflammation, even when those faculties have been dulled to near catatonia by exhaustion, terror, digestive troubles, and a hypnotic focus on historical puzzles.

In other words, I loved it, insensibly and irrationally under the circumstances.

But I am a hedonist and couldn’t help myself. I loved Italy as soon we had endured two
insanely
delayed connecting flights (during which Marco’s thugs monitored my every move), and stepped off the plane at the Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome. Enthralled by art, nauseated by fear, I gawked at the tiny streets, the deathly mopeds, the streets littered with ancient monuments. As I stared at the scattered fortunes of Roman public sculpture, my “companions” dragged me to the Colosseum to barter with a baggy-panted scoundrel for two small, cloth-wrapped items, which I did not see but suspected might be pistols. Next, trips were made to camping stores, to inexplicably purchase pulleys, axes, and knives. Finally, we traveled to Tuscany. Now dazed by the sight of the Duomo’s miraculous red breast and a battalion of vendors hawking mini priapic
David
s, I bumbled around this Florentine palazzo. The fifteenth-century haven of the Medici blooms with marble nudes and trompe l’oeil paintings of satyrs and vixens. Scaffolded all around its exterior, the palace gyrated with sexy workmen built like Atlas. Below their vertiginous heights our host, this round-hipped, red-spectacled mandarin, whose hair matched her glasses, quick-footed through the foyer alongside a dark-haired North African lady of about twenty-one. This sylph wore a black dress cut with a stoical simplicity, as well as a resigned look on her pretty, very serious face.

“I am Dr. Riccardi. Most welcome, most welcome!” the older woman cried in English, grasping my shoulders with such force my head wobbled precariously. “Marco said you would be arriving with him, Lola, you lucky thing.” She peered over her glasses at his immaculate shave, his smooth hair, and his wool and cashmere clothes. “How are you doing, dear?”

“Much better now that I’m finally seeing you, again, Isabel.” He grinned.

“Ooooh, you are wicked. Looking quite as dashing as I remember, isn’t he, Adriana?”

“I—”

“This is my assistant,” Dr. Riccardi said to me, gesturing at the sylph.

“Hello—”

“And here are your two
friends
— the big, strong, silent types?”

Blasej and Domenico just stood there, huge and granite-headed, and said nothing.

“And that’s all?” she went on, counting us. “I was expecting a larger group.”

“Just us.” Marco laughed. “What, did you think I’d bring an entire team of experts? I’m not one of your Getty friends, Isabel.”

“No, but I thought—what was it—Adriana here was saying something about a phone call from a rather
voluble
young man—”

“He— I— We—” Adriana tried to explain.

“Yes, well, it must have been one of those ghastly telemarketers,” Dr. Riccardi continued. “No matter. Because here you are, in the
flesh
, dear Marco. Please do forgive the scaffolding.

Florence is constantly under repair, you see. No—but you barely notice, do you? My dear Signor Moreno. Always so focused, and still honking on about that letter—eight months you spent here, driving me wild with your questions.”

“You were very helpful in my researches, Isabel—”

“Yes,
right
— which is why you’ve now dragged this lovely little creature back here with you?” She turned back to me. “So. Lola. Sweet, isn’t she? Like Marco, you too have been bewitched by his little letter? He must have told you how it was written by Antonio Medici, and all that tosh about gold, and werewolves, and Montezuma, and I don’t know what? He had me helping him research the thing last year—I quite admire you for putting up with this man. Seduced you into working night and day, I’ll bet. He has that capacity, I’m afraid—”

I jabbered, “Actually, he kind of abducted me—”

“Hmmmm?” Dr. Riccardi goggled. “Oh, yes! Hilarious—he is a
beast
. But that’s fine, the more the merrier. The palazzo was
made
for madcapping around the archives, so let’s get you settled, come on—superb!” Dr. Riccardi walked speedily away. “Don’t worry about your luggage! My girl will be happy to bring it up to the fourth floor, which is where your room is.”

The young assistant cursed in several languages while struggling with the bags, even as Dr. Riccardi levitated out of the foyer and into the gloomy spectacle that is the palazzo. Domenico and Blasej stayed behind—Blasej to order Domenico around, Domenico to watch the girl at her labors rather than help—as Marco and I hurried into a network of gray-carpeted halls, passing inappropriately dressed German and American tourists and a series of tapestry rooms.

Dr. Riccardi flicked her hand at me as she vaulted past marble busts of severe-looking dead Italians. “I was very intrigued when Marco said he was going to whisk you down here to help him with his letter. To get a ‘second opinion’ I believe is what he said, though you don’t have any formal training in paleography, or handwriting identification, from what I understand.”

“No, I’m self-taught,” I said in either Spanish, Italian, or Urdu, for all I know, as my synapses were still maxing from jet lag and anxiety.

“Oh! How rustic. Though I like to say that our archives are available to anyone with an academic interest in them—we’re very democratic—as artifacts do belong to all of us, don’t they? They’re the property of the whole world—the future, no?”

“Honestly, Doctor, I think this letter might have been stolen.”

“Don’t mind her, Isabel,” Marco said. “She’s one of those radical political types.”

“Oh, yes. Well. One can take the argument too far, can’t one? Once I had a professor of archaeology—from Zimbabwe, of all places—try to
race
off with our collection of silver spittoons. All of it was certified as having come from the Medici coffers, without the slightest shadow of taint. Yet he was
screaming
that the silver had been melted down from the chests of King...King...Dakarai, that’s it...and that he was going to bring that patrimony back to his home country.” She was hurtling down another hallway. “He was from Oxford, too. I really did sympathize, after I recovered from the trauma. After all, there were a number of poxy thieves in the Medici family, simply pilfering the Africans.”

“What happened to him?” Marco asked. “The professor?”

“Well, he went to jail, of course!”

I tried to keep up with her pace. “You said you studied the letter then, Dr. Riccardi?”

“Yes,
exhaustively
! But I won’t influence your analysis with my opinion quite yet.”

“I know of your qualifications.” Despite a certain Patty Hearst–like flavor of this Italian boondoggle, I was still excited to meet this author. “I read your book, Antonio Medici: Destroyer and Decorator. It was very good. I liked how you mixed theory and scandal.”

She smiled with uncontained satisfaction. “Oh, I like
you
. The book wrote itself, actually! You’ll have noticed my focus on the last decades of Antonio’s life, which were so compelling, at least from a decorative arts point of view—they don’t get as much attention from his other biographers as his earlier...career.”

“I wouldn’t call genocide a career, Madam,” I said frenetically.

“Yes, as a
conquistatore
Antonio Medici was guilty of many embarrassing crimes. My real interest in him, though, begins upon his return from the Americas. That’s when he became an arts benefactor. He was a patron to the painter Pontormo, and the goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini, who made for him these splendid exploding safes. But while many of these wonderful objects survive, there are very few documents, as Antonio heartlessly burned most of his papers. I assured Marco that a personal record from the mid–fifteen hundreds would be invaluable—most of the information we have about him then is secondhand. So, when you’re ready, I will bring you to our archives, show you Antonio’s letters—the ones up until the fifteen twenties, that is, which is when our collection stops. You will be able to compare the scripts.”

“Lola’s made a study of the handwriting already, on the plane,” Marco told her.

“It’s very striking,” I said, not mentioning that said study had been interrupted by watching Blasej break my Nokia with his bare hands while he explained how he’d similarly crack my clavicle if I misbehaved. “In particular, the signature.”

Dr. Riccardi stopped before a staircase and slapped her hands around my arms. “Okay. You two are tired, maybe? We can let you sleep for a while, before we begin to work. Or, I could have Adriana bring you something up on a plate.”

Marco turned to me, touching me on the elbow with such incongruous solicitude that I had a brief and painful image of Erik, and backed away. “Are you hungry?”

I shook my head; on the plane, I’d drunk so much alcohol my blood sugar had spiked.

“No rest for the fabulous,” Marco observed to his friend.

“The sooner we get this done, the better,” I said. “I’d like to take a look at those archives now, if possible.”

“Oh, my dears,
everything
is possible in Italy.” Dr. Riccardi began hurrying up carpeted steps, then maneuvered us down a pewter-tinted corridor until we reached a large oak door. As she stood before the entrance to the collection, a mighty, mischievous librarian’s pride glowed in her face. “As you are about to see.”

And then she opened the door.

I gasped with delight at this revealed Eden. The Medici Riccardi library is frosted with gold, its shining walls studded with rare books. I had read that these were culled from the collections of Lorenzo the Magnificent, who had dispatched the librarian-hunter John Lacasis to the East, where he bought texts of Plato, Lucan, and Aristophanes that had been hand-copied in Arabic at Saladin’s behest. This first floor boasted pearl-inlaid reading tables with gold chairs occupied by a smattering of scholars. Among the professors was one noble-looking man reading a tome with the aid of a large, bronze, face-obscuring magnifying glass. His most visible feature was his shoulder-length night-black hair, signifying that Ottoman or even Peruvian blood enriched his Florentine industry. The library was silent except for the rustlings of his turned pages. A fan-shaped but inaccessible window admitted a soft light onto these studies.

Dr. Riccardi walked toward this window and stopped at a shelf stacked with clamshell boxes bound in taupe silk. She pulled down two of them.

Inside the first was a pair of items: A beautiful antique leather book, tooled with blown roses, and also a large deck of cards bearing strange hand-painted signs. The card on the top bore an insignia of a red, golden-eyed dragon.

“Wrong box,” Dr. Riccardi said, shaking her head.

“What are these?”

“The wife’s belongings. We bought them at auction three years ago, at a very good price. A journal and occult cards. She—Sofia—was something of a spiritualist.”

“Tarot cards,” I said. “Rare ones, they look like. Hand-painted. They’re fantastic—”

“Oh, ugh, not these again,” Marco mumbled.

She smiled. “Yes, very good, Lola. The tarot was inherited by Sofia from her mother, along with, probably, her rather vivid imagination, revealed here in this journal. It’s of decent interest to feminist historians—though, as you see, Marco did not think these ladies’ things sufficiently important to study. He’s a terrible sexist.” She cheerfully criticized him as she took up the other box. “
This
, on the other hand, did earn his attention.”

She lifted the cover of the second container, which held approximately eighty leaves of unfolded parchment that still bore their broken, wolf-shaped, gold wax seals.

“Antonio’s letters—the seal’s the same.” I lifted into the light a missive from Antonio to Leo X, née Giovanni de’ Medici, his second cousin and the pope. After examining it a second, I said, “Though the letter’s much earlier than Marco’s—it looks like it was written during an invasion of Africa.”