The Medusa Amulet Read online

  He was actually lifted off his feet before going down hard, smacking his head for good measure on the edge of a low table. He was unconscious, the blood streaming from his broken nose and split lip, when Julius popped out from behind the drapes and said, “What the hell just happened?”

  Escher was already going through his pockets, taking his wallet-he had a faculty card that identified him as Giorgio Capaldi, an assistant history professor-and his BlackBerry.

  “Is he dead?” Julius gasped, coming no closer.

  “No. But he’s going to have a very bad headache when he comes to.”

  Dragging the body into the bedroom, Escher hoisted it onto the bed, then cut the cord on the bedside phone and used it to tie his wrists.

  “Make yourself useful,” he said to Julius, who was watching slack-jawed from the doorway. “Find me a scarf, or some stockings.” He tied the remaining length of cord to the iron bedstead.

  Julius found a silk scarf, and Escher stuck it into the boyfriend’s mouth before knotting the ends behind his head. Then, almost tenderly, he lifted the man’s head and rested it on the pillow.

  “That should do it.”

  Turning, he ripped open the bedside table, spilling the contents onto the floor. On the dresser, he opened the jewel box and threw the worthless costume jewelry around the room. But just to make things seem convincing, he stuck a couple of necklaces and earrings in his pants pocket.

  Jantzen stood mute, as if transfixed, until Escher said, “Let’s go,” and pushed him back toward the front door. On the way, he swept a few things onto the floor and kicked the owl’s perch over. The bird hopped onto a stack of books, hooting and fluttering.

  At the top of the landing, he listened for any noise, then gently closed the door behind him and led Julius back down. To add insult to injury, they found a parking ticket on the Volvo.

  “I’m not paying that,” Jantzen protested, finally finding his voice again.

  “Good,” Escher said, tearing it up. “Neither am I.”

  Chapter 17

  Too long, David thought. It was all taking him too long. While his sister lay dying, he was stuck here, thousands of miles away, struggling to find an antique looking glass that might, or might not, hold the key to her salvation.

  When he’d made his regular call the night before, Sarah was actually back home, but she still sounded so weak. Dr. Ross had gotten her into the new protocol, and while it was too soon to tell if it would work, at least she had not rejected the new drug. “And they say that’s a very good sign,” Sarah said, doing her best to sound upbeat. “Tolerance has been a problem with a lot of other candidates.”

  David had done his best to sound enthusiastic, too, and so had Gary, who chimed in on the extension, but sometimes David felt that they were all just acting a part for each other. Gary had asked him if his new promotion had come through, and David had said, “If I’m lucky with my assignment here, I don’t see how it wouldn’t.”

  Sarah said she knew it would-she had always been his biggest booster-and when David hung up, he hadn’t been able to fall asleep for hours, which might explain why he was having trouble staying awake. The late-morning sun was spilling through the clerestory windows of the reading room in the Accademia di Belle Arti, and taking off his glasses, he rubbed his eyes and yawned.

  For the previous three days, he and Olivia had been holed up in their alcove at the Biblioteca Laurenziana, combing over the various drafts and versions of Cellini’s manuscripts-his treatises on sculpture and goldsmithing, in addition to the many copies, some in his own hand, of his unfinished autobiography. They were searching for any mention of La Medusa, or anything like it, which might point them in the right direction. But there had been nothing so far.

  In an attempt to hurry things along, David had left Olivia in charge of the Laurenziana research, while he had taken this ten-minute journey to the Piazza San Marco, and the Accademia library, where the Codice 101, S-yet another draft of Cellini’s life-was kept. David knew the director here, Professor Ricci, from his days in Florence as a Fulbright scholar, and though David had thought he was an old man then, Ricci was unchanged, still shuffling around the echoing halls and cloisters of the library-founded by Cosimo de’Medici himself in 1561-in his bedroom slippers, with the bottoms of his pajamas peeking out from under the cuffs of his trousers. His skin was as yellow and crinkled as very old paper.

  “So you are going to write about our Benvenuto?” Ricci said, in that proprietary way that Florentines displayed toward their legendary artists as he deposited the original manuscript on the desk in David’s carrel. “The Laurenziana, they have some fine things over there,” he said, sniffing, “and that Dr. Valetta, he will go on. But they are attached to a church, after all, not a museum.”

  David had the distinct sense that there was a cross-piazza rivalry here.

  “Superstition reigns over there,” Ricci concluded, “while reason alone prevails at the Academy.”

  David had to smile. “Actually, I’m not writing about Cellini himself,” he confessed, “but looking for evidence of something he made. A mirror with the Medusa’s face on one side.”

  Signor Ricci scratched the gray stubble on his chin, and said, “I never heard of such a thing. He made the Medusa only once, for the great statue of Perseus.” Shaking his head, he said, “No, no, you must be mistaken, my friend.”

  It was the last thing he wanted to hear. Unless it existed, and he could find it, he would never be able to hold Mrs. Van Owen to her promises. For one thing, he would not be able to lay claim to the money-she had offered no consolation prize-but more important than that, he could never insist that she fulfill her solemn oath… to save his sister’s life. It was a slim reed to cling to, but he didn’t have any other.

  As Signor Ricci wished him good luck, and meandered off, David opened the Codice 101, S, with weary hands, and read the all-too-familiar opening invocation: “All men of whatsoever quality they be, who have done anything of excellence, or which may properly resemble excellence, ought, if they are persons of truth and honesty, to describe their life with their own hand…”-but he felt little hope of finding anything new. Although the manuscripts differed by a word or two here and there, they were all close copies, and detailed the same adventures, and the same miraculous acts of creation. Studying them had been a necessary step, but where, David wondered, was he to go next?

  He carefully turned another page-the copyist had used a deep black ink that had faded to brown-and let his eye course down its length, looking for anything new, any anomaly, anything to indicate fresh passages to distinguish this copy from all the others. And after working so closely with Olivia Levi, he found it strange to have no one there to consult, or commiserate, with. Although scholarly work was generally solitary in nature, he’d quickly gotten used to having company and exchanging all kinds of ideas. Olivia was open to any suggestion or query, no matter how off-the-wall, and in nearly every case she could top it. She had a vast field of reference-there was almost nothing David could bring up that Olivia didn’t already have a firm opinion about-and she was willing to talk all night. He found himself lonely, missing her quick wit, her erudition, and-if he was completely honest with himself-the nearness of her, perched, knees up, in the next chair, her nose buried in a book. Once, she had caught him, lost in thought and simply staring at her, and she’d said, “Don’t you have work to do?”

  He’d been so flustered, he hadn’t known what to say.

  Olivia laughed and said, “It’s okay. You may be American, but you are also Italian.”

  She was bringing that out in him more and more each day.

  David was about midway through the manuscript at hand, his eyes beginning to glaze over, when he heard the sound of Signor Ricci’s slippers and looked up to see him tottering under a stack of loose pages and cracked binders. Just before he almost toppled over, the old man managed to deposit them on David’s carrel and steady himself by catching the back of a chair.


  “What are these?” David asked.

  Ricci, taking a second to catch his breath, said, “Nothing you’ll find at the Laurenziana. These are the household accounts of Cosimo de’Medici.”

  Though he didn’t want to appear ungrateful, why, David thought, would Ricci think these would be of any use? Why should he care how much wine or butter or wheat was consumed?

  “Including the art and jewelry commissions,” Ricci explained, as if reading his mind. “If Benvenuto made anything for Cosimo or his wife or his family-like a looking glass-it would be listed somewhere in here. The Medici kept careful records of everything they spent, and everything they received.”

  That they did, and for the first time in weeks, David felt a sudden surge of optimism. If nothing else, it was a fresh avenue to explore. Ricci could see that David was pleased, and his face cracked open in a nearly toothless smile. “Go to it,” he said, patting David on the shoulder and teetering off. “And be sure to tell people where you found what you needed.”

  Putting the Codice aside, David cleared a space on the carrel and began to systematically go through the ledgers, skipping quickly over the shopping lists of comestibles and the other household goods, and zeroing in on anything having to do with the purchase of art supplies-marble, brushes, paints, plaster-or metals, such as copper, bronze, silver, gold. Punctuating the lists of raw materials were finished works, separately bracketed, and David was stunned to see the purchase of world-renowned works by Leonardo and Andrea del Sarto, Botticelli and Bronzino, recorded for the first time. On one page, he found a shipment from Palestrina, describing a “stone torso of a boy” that had been unearthed by a farmer’s plow. Was this the torso that Cellini had written about in his autobiography, the one that the ignorant Bandinelli had scorned but that Cellini had later refashioned into a Ganymede?

  The dates were neatly inscribed, in a spidery but still quite legible script, at the top of each page, and David began to turn to the most promising sections, the years in which Cellini was most regularly employed by the duke. Theirs had been a volatile relationship, and when they were at loggerheads, Cellini had often taken off for Rome, or for the court of the King of France, before coming back to his native town. The Perseus statue had taken him nine long years to complete-from 1545 to 1554-and for most of that time he was begging for his pay, or for supplies, and sparring with the duke’s accountants, who were forever asking him what was taking so long.

  Part of the problem was the constant distractions he had had to deal with. The duke’s wife, Eleonora de Toledo, was often peeved with Cellini-his social graces were somewhat lacking-but she recognized his immense talent and was forever pestering him for his opinion on one thing or another; in his book, he’d written about his falling-out with her over a rope of pearls, and the time she’d try to lay claim to some of the figures designed for the pedestal of the Perseus. Still, if it was a looking glass that Cellini had made, David figured there was a good chance it had been made for her, and probably before he had ever created the remarkable Medusa now in the piazza. It was hard to imagine an artist like Cellini scaling down. Once he had made the definitive Gorgon, he would hardly be inclined to do another, and in reduced proportions besides.

  David studied the pile of ledgers and papers that the Academy director had left him, looking for the volumes from the mid-1530s, a period when Cellini had been steadily employed by the duke. Finding a couple, he put the other books on a neighboring table and concentrated on scouring the endless lists for jewelry and other items a duchess might have ordered. And though it was slow work, he did find them-lists of bracelets and earrings, adorned with pearls and precious stones, ornaments for her hair, amber combs and brushes, rings with short descriptions, such as “acanthus motif, sapphire,” or “gold band, diamond pave.” The duchess was vain, and very particular about the design of everything she commissioned… which was one reason David found the idea of a mirror in the shape of the Medusa so strange. It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a fetching image-far from it-but perhaps that was its purpose. Perhaps it was meant to be defensive. Italians were always wary of il malocchio, the evil eye, and a mirror in this grotesque cast might have been considered the perfect way to ward it off.

  He was up to June 1, 1538, and about to take a break and call Olivia for an update on her own progress, when his eye happened to fall upon a notation, in that same spidery hand, at the bottom of a page.

  But it was listed not as a commission, but simply “ dalla mano dell’artista.” From the hand of the artist.

  “ Parure,” it said, “ in argento.” Or silver. This sort of thing-a matching set of jewelry, usually including a tiara and earrings and bracelet-would surely have been right up Cellini’s alley. And though he did not yet see any mention of a mirror, it would have been a likely component. “ Con rubini ”-with rubies-was added to the general description, and though David’s sketch of La Medusa indicated no such jewels, they might have been destined for any one of the various pieces.

  But it was the last words, hastily scrawled in the margin, which made his heart thump in his chest.

  “ Egida di Zeus motivo.” Aegis of Zeus motif. According to classical mythology, the king of the gods carried a shield, or aegis, that had been a gift from Athena. And on that shield, David knew, was emblazoned the head of the Medusa. “ Un faccia a fermare il tempo ” was also appended there-a face that can stop time-the very phrase that was used in The Key to Life Eternal to describe the mirror. Not a face to kill, not a face to turn its observer to stone. A face to stop time.

  At last, he felt he had stumbled upon the trail of the thing itself, that he had found some recorded proof-outside of the papers that Mrs. Van Owen had provided-suggesting that La Medusa had indeed seen the light of day, that it was more than something Cellini had simply sketched, or claimed to manufacture.

  But if that were the case-if he had succeeded in making the Medusa -why in the world would he have given it away, much less to a duchess who was no particular favorite of his? The Key to Life Eternal claimed that the Medusa could grant the gift of immortality. Cellini would never have given such a creation away.

  Nor, however, was he one to waste materials or labor. David remembered a passage from the Key, where Cellini had written of the torment he’d endured constructing La Medusa, and of the casts he had made prior to hitting on the right one: “ Il bicchiere deve essere perfettamente smussato, il puro argento: un unico difetto, non importa quanto piccola, si annulla la magia del tutto.” The glass must be perfectly beveled, the silver welded; a single flaw, no matter how tiny, will undo the magic of the whole. David was now confronted with two possibilities-one, that Cellini had made the Medusa and, after discovering that it did not work, repurposed it as a present to a wealthy patron. Or that he had simply bestowed on the Medici an early cast, a reject, one that he had never intended to imbue with the waters from the sacred pool at all.

  And wasn’t that just like him, to muddy the trail of something valuable? The same man who had created an optical illusion in his most famous statue, or who had made strongboxes with coded locks, who kept the greatest advancements of his trade to himself, and limited the secrets of his sorcery to the unpublished Key, was not likely to leave his most ingenious achievement baldly exposed.

  Cellini was a trickster, and David had to figure out how, over the centuries, this particular trick played out.

  He quickly turned to the next page, which began with an account of some marble imported for a bathhouse. He jumped ahead several leaves, past some other mundane expenditures, until he found a later annotation, made in another hand, saying, “ Un regalo al de’Medici della Catherine, sul decimo del settembre 1572.” Or, a gift to Catherine de’Medici, the tenth of September, 1572.

  “ Lo sguardo del maggio ottentute proteggere suo da tutti I nemici .” May the gaze of the Gorgon protect her from her enemies.

  Cosimo himself had made the annotation-his initials were boldly inscribed below the note-and he
had sent the piece to his niece, who had married into the royal family of France, and become queen. No one at that time in history, David knew, was more besieged by her enemies than the Queen of France, who, facing an insurrection from the Huguenots, had ordered the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre on August 23 of that same year. In reality, the purge had lasted weeks, during which time thousands of her religious enemies were rounded up and slaughtered all over France. It was later said that the wicked Italian queen had followed the advice of her countryman, Niccolo Machiavelli, who warned that it was best to kill all your enemies in one blow.

  David fell back in his chair, trying to sort through it all. If this was indeed the one and only Medusa, then it could not have the powers Cellini had claimed or he would not have given it away… unless he’d had no choice. Could the duke have forced his hand? There were a hundred threats and forms of torture the Duke de’Medici could have employed. And perhaps the phrase, “from the hand of the artist,” did not so much mean a willing gift as a tribute pried from an artisan unable to refuse or resist.

  One way or another, though, this mirror had gone to France-where Cellini himself had spent a good deal of his life, in the employ of the French king-and it was the only one whose trail David could now follow. As a gift to the queen, it would naturally have become a part of the royal jewels. For all David knew, it was still a part of whatever remained of that once-impressive collection. Whether it had the powers it was reputed to possess, or not, it was what Mrs. Van Owen had sent him to find-and find it he would. Shaking it loose, for any amount of money, from the French patrimony, seemed an utter impossibility-even for someone of Mrs. Van Owen’s resources-but he would cross that bridge when he came to it. For the moment, he just wanted to share the news with Olivia and get cracking.

  With facsimiles of the two pages, produced by a copying machine carefully calibrated to work in low light and heat, tucked away in his valise, he raced back to the Laurenziana. He could have called Olivia on the way, but he wanted the pleasure of seeing her face when he presented his discovery from the Medici account books. In addition to the more personal feelings for her that he could no longer deny, he had also come to value her opinion-and approval-more highly than anyone else’s. She was a true eccentric, there was no denying that, quirky and volatile, but she was also one of the most widely read and original thinkers he had ever encountered. Most of her scholarly papers and monographs-and she had shared a few with David-were unfinished and unpublished, but they betrayed a wealth of knowledge on subjects ranging from the philosophy of Pico della Mirandola to the evolution of the early European banking system. It was as if her mind could not be focused on one subject long enough to see it through to its natural conclusion. Instead, she would get distracted and follow some beckoning side path-invariably finding something valuable there, too-without ever bothering to get back to her original argument.