The Medusa Amulet Page 3

  “None, really, apart from a few papers in my case.”

  Linz had the briefcase brought to them at the table, and as the servants poured out coffee, Palliser started to enter the combination to unlock the case, when he realized that it was already unlocked. Had he been so careless?

  With some reservations, he produced copies of a sketch-in red and black ink-of the mirror, along with copies of some working papers written in Italian, and in a distinctive hand.

  Linz studied them intensely, his dark hair, speckled with gray, sweeping low across his brow. There followed a detailed discussion of Cellini’s career, and of the Italian Renaissance in general, which bowled Palliser over. A graduate of Oxford, with a doctorate in art history, he knew a genuine connoisseur when he came across one-and Linz was not only a passionate devotee of the arts, but also someone who spoke of them with the intensity of an artist himself, someone who had wrestled with the aesthetic questions on his own terms. Palliser wouldn’t have been surprised if Linz had his own studio tucked away in one of the unexplored turrets.

  Still, he felt that he had given the game away with little to show for it in return. When he finally ventured to ask his host what suggestions he might have for locating the Medusa, Linz leaned back in his chair, and after deliberating, said, “A lost cause, I should say. You admit that it hasn’t been seen for centuries. I should think it was best left alone.”

  To Palliser’s practiced ear, it sounded like he knew more than he was telling. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

  “Some things are meant to be found,” Linz said gnomically, “and others are meant to be lost. Everything has its own destiny. As an artisan,” he went on, astutely referring to Cellini in the vernacular of his day, “he was unparalleled in his various skills.” Although the term “artist” was also employed, and came into greater use over time, it was no insult, Palliser recognized, to be known as an artisan. “But in his own lifetime, even Cellini’s greatest work sometimes went unappreciated.”

  “The Perseus statue was wildly acclaimed,” Palliser protested. He did not even mention the artist’s other great triumphs.

  “But that was not his greatest work.”

  Now Palliser was puzzled. Not his greatest work? It was one of the most revered works of all Renaissance art, known throughout the world.

  As the evening progressed, Rigaud looked increasingly bored, and Ava perked up only when a torte was brought out, piled high with whipped cream and fresh strawberries. She dug in with gusto.

  Linz, too, plainly enjoyed the dessert, a moustache of cream forming on his upper lip. But Palliser had lost his appetite. Glancing at his watch-it was well past ten-he said, “And I do hate to end the evening so abruptly, but I should get back to Paris. I still have La Medusa to find.”

  “You sound undeterred,” Linz said. “I’m impressed.” Wiping his lips with his napkin, he added, “But if you would prefer to spend the night here, Lord knows we have plenty of room.”

  Little as he relished the idea of the helicopter ride back, in the dark, Palliser was even less inclined to stay the night under such a strange roof. There was something unsettling about Linz, quite apart from the fact that he had provided so little help. All through the dinner, Palliser had increasingly felt as if he was being drained of all his own information, and for nothing in return. He wasn’t used to being duped, and he didn’t like it one bit.

  “Thank you,” he said, “but I have an appointment first thing in the morning.”

  Linz acceded graciously, rising from his chair. That left arm was definitely palsied, Palliser noticed. But then, to his own great embarrassment, he found himself weaving on his own feet from the effects of the wine. Rocking in place for a second, he said, “Your wine cellar is exceptionally well stocked.”

  “It’s the best in the Loire Valley,” Linz said. “In fact, you have been such good company, I’d like to offer you a gift-a bottle of whatever you like.”

  Palliser demurred, but Linz would have none of it. “Emil,” he commanded, “tell the pilot to be ready in ten minutes.” And then, taking Palliser by the elbow, he escorted him out of the room while Ava called for a second helping of the torte.

  Palliser, holding his briefcase, was led back through the armor hall and the salons, then down a winding stair and through the kitchens and scullery. The temperature grew colder and the air grew damp. Linz circumvented an old dusty rack and flicked a switch. A long corridor, carved from the stone itself, was lined with thousands of bottles of wine, as far as the eye could see. Palliser, who had seen the vaunted storerooms of Moldova, could not even guess at the quantity housed here.

  “What do you like?” Linz asked, leading the way under a string of dim white lightbulbs. “Bordeaux? Pinot Noir?” He waved an arm at the racks, moving on. “This valley is best known for its dry white wines. Did you enjoy the Sancerre at dinner?”

  “I did,” Palliser confessed, wishing that he had enjoyed it a little less.

  “Then let me offer you one of these,” Linz said, stepping farther down the tunnel and taking a bottle from the rack. Blowing off the dust, he said, “Yes, this is a 1936-a very fine vintage.”

  As Palliser took the bottle, he became aware of a draft under his feet, and the distant sound of sloshing water. He looked down, and in the wavering light saw that he was standing atop a rusty grate.

  “This was once a dungeon,” Linz explained. “You’re standing above the oubliette.”

  The shaft, Palliser knew, where prisoners were thrown to die a slow death of thirst and starvation.

  Instinctively, he stepped back.

  “But the chateau rests on limestone, and the river is eroding the cliffs,” Linz said, stooping to pull the grate away to reveal the shaft; he appeared rather proud of his oubliette. “You see? The water has already reached the bottom of the pit.”

  Indeed, Palliser could just make out a surge of water swirling at the very bottom of the funnel, when he felt a steadying hand on his shoulder and turned to see that Rigaud had rejoined them.

  “The chopper is ready to go,” he said, Palliser’s cashmere overcoat draped over one arm.

  “Good,” Palliser replied, “thank you.”

  “Let me take those for you,” Linz said, relieving Palliser of the wine and the briefcase before he could think to object.

  Then, as Rigaud held up the coat, Palliser turned and slipped his arms into the sleeves. He felt warmer already. But as he reached down to button it, Linz patted him on the shoulder, much harder than he thought necessary, and he was thrown off-balance. Before he could quite regain his footing, Rigaud had crouched down and was lifting him by the cuffs of his trousers.

  “Stop! What the-”

  But he was already upside down, his hands scrabbling at the edges of the oubliette. He tried to brace himself, but the stone was slick and his fingers kept sliding off into space.

  “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-mache 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 ha
ve 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.