The Medusa Amulet

by Robert Masello

  “Pearls are not gemstones, my lady. They do not hold their color, as a diamond or a sapphire does. They are the bones of a fish”-this alone had always predisposed him to devalue them-“and as a result, they deteriorate. Look, these have already begun to do so.”

  Her face hardened, and she concealed the necklace in her closed fist. “If I come to the duke to ask him for the money to buy them, and he asks for your opinion-”

  Which was likely, Cellini thought.

  “-you will take a more favorable view.”

  Captain Lucasi, hovering at a discreet distance, coughed, and for once Cellini was glad of his prompting. “You will have to excuse me, Duchess,” he said, moving on, “but you know how I hate to keep the duke waiting.”

  Even before he saw Cosimo himself, he saw the crate, resting on a Persian carpet. The duke was at his desk, attending to piles of papers. In a city that boasted over seventy banks, the Medici were the premier financiers; single-handedly, they had made the gold florin the most trusted currency on the Continent. Lucasi announced their presence, and the duke, his black hair hanging down on either side of his long face like the ears on a basset hound, glanced up. “Forgive me,” he said, “I didn’t hear you come in.” He was dressed in crimson velvet, and still had his riding boots on. He raised his chin in the direction of the crate. “That just arrived from Palestrina, and I wanted you to be the first to see what’s inside.”

  Just from its provenance, Cellini could guess what the box contained. A town just south of Rome, Palestrina was a treasure trove of antiquities. Every time a farmer dug a new well, something turned up.

  “With your permission…?” Cellini said, and the duke nodded.

  Tossing the lid aside, his fingers burrowed into the straw filling the crate, until they felt the hard contours of cold marble. With infinite care, he lifted out the torso of a classically modeled boy. Its feet were missing, its arms were gone, there was no head, but the trunk had been exquisitely executed. It was not more than a couple of braccia long, the length of a horse’s head, but oh, how Cellini wished he could have seen it whole.

  “What do you think?” Cosimo asked.

  “I think its maker was a great artist,” Cellini said, cradling it in his arms like a baby. “And although restoring such antiques is not my trade, I would be honored to undertake this work.”

  The duke laughed with pleasure. “You think that highly of it?”

  “With the right piece of Greek marble, I could complete it. I could not only add the missing parts, but an eagle, too. We could make it a Ganymede,” he said, referring to the beautiful Trojan prince carried up to Heaven by Zeus’s eagle.

  “You could make what a Ganymede?” Cellini heard from the doorway, where he now saw Baccio Bandinelli, perhaps the most prosperous of the Medici court sculptors, loitering.

  After asking pardon for his intrusion, Bandinelli cast a cursory eye over the broken statue and scoffed out loud. “A perfect example, Your Excellency, of what I have often told you about the ancients. They didn’t know anything about anatomy-they hardly looked at a human body-before taking the chisel to the stone. And what you get in the end is things like this, full of faults that could easily have been corrected.”

  “That’s not what Benvenuto says. He was quite impressed.”

  Waving his fingers in the air, Bandinelli sought to dismiss his rival’s claims, and it was all Cellini could do to keep from strangling the man with his own long beard. Bandinelli, in Cellini’s view-a view shared by nearly every artist in Italy-was an overrated hack whose work disgraced every pedestal it stood on. What made matters worse was that one of his commissions-a dual statue of Hercules and Cacus, the fire-breathing giant the hero had slain-spoiled the Piazza outside the Medici door. Every time Cellini saw it-cheek by jowl with the works of the divine Donatello and Michelangelo-it made him cringe.

  “Perhaps that is why, when my own Hercules was unveiled,” Bandinelli declared, “there were those who did not understand or appreciate it.”

  Did not understand it? Did not appreciate it? Cellini was floored at the man’s conceit. As was the custom when any new statue was unveiled, hundreds of Florentines had spontaneously written sonnets about it, but they had unanimously excoriated its shoddy shape and execution. Cellini had written one himself, lamenting the fact that Pope Clement VII had originally awarded the marble to Michelangelo before inexplicably changing his mind. What a waste of fine stone!

  “Benvenuto, what have you got to say for the torso now? It’s not like you to hold your tongue.” A smile was playing around the duke’s lips. He knew about the enmity between the two men-and knew, too, that it was a struggle for Cellini to control his temper.

  “When it comes to bad workmanship, Your Excellency, I have to yield the floor to Messer Bandinelli. No one knows more about it than he does.”

  The duke laughed and clapped his hands together, while Bandinelli pasted a condescending smile on his lips. “Joke all you want,” he said. “You could never have made my Hercules.”

  “True enough,” Cellini retorted. “I’d have to be blind first.”

  “Your Eminence,” Bandinelli protested.

  “If you cut the hair off of its head,” Cellini declared, “what would you be left with? A potato. And has it got the face of a man or an ox?” It felt good to let go, and he saw no reason to stop. “The shoulders look like the pommels on a pack saddle, and the chest looks like a sack of watermelons. The arms? They hang down without any grace at all, and at one point, unless I’m mistaken, both Hercules and Cacus appear to be sharing the same calf muscle. You have to wonder-I know I do-how they manage to stand up at all.”

  Through all of this, Bandinelli fumed and writhed, while the duke listened intently, absorbed and amused. But when Bandinelli challenged him to find fault with the design of the statue, of which he was inordinately proud, and Cellini proceeded to demolish that, too, Bandinelli could take no more and he shouted, “That’s enough out of you, you dirty sodomite!”

  A hush fell over the room, and the duke scowled, perhaps expecting Cellini to launch a physical attack. And the artisan was sorely tempted.

  But he knew that if he did, he risked offending Cosimo, too. Instead, mustering all his resolve, Cellini replied, in a cold and ironic tone, “Now I know you’ve gone off your head. Although that noble custom you just mentioned is reputedly practiced by many great kings and emperors-even Jove himself was said to have indulged in it with young Ganymede-I am a humble man of natural tastes myself, and so I don’t know anything about it.”

  The duke looked relieved, and even Bandinelli, perhaps aware that he had gone too far, shrank back. Out of the corner of his eye, Cellini spotted the duchess coming, wearing the rope of pearls, and lest he get into yet another fracas, he quickly tried to extricate himself.

  “I thank Your Lordship for this opportunity to see the antique torso, but I would like to return to my studio now. There is still a good deal of work to do on the medallion.”

  As the duchess and one of her ladies entered the chamber, and Bandinelli bowed so low his beard nearly grazed the floor, Cellini made his escape. Eleonora threw him a look, as if to say I was counting on your support, but he pretended not to notice and didn’t even break his stride to study the Giotto fresco mounted above the staircase. Only when he was out in the Piazza again, standing before the Loggia dei Lanzi, with its pantheon of statuary on display, did he stop and bend over, his own hands on his knees, to breathe deeply and try to calm himself. If Bandinelli had had the nerve to fling such an accusation at him anywhere but the Duke de’Medici’s office, he’d have knocked his head off. His heart was pounding so hard that he could feel the cold metal of La Medusa, on its thick silver chain, bobbing under his shirt.

  “Benvenuto. Are you feeling all right?”

  He glanced up and saw the jeweler, Landi, no doubt heading to the Medici palace to sew up the sale of the pearl necklace.

  “Yes, yes, I’m fine,” Cellini replied.

/>   “Do you happen to know if her ladyship is receiving?”

  “She is.”

  Landi narrowed his eyes and smiled. “And is she in a buying mood?”

  “When isn’t she?”

  Landi laughed, said “God bless her for that,” and swaggered on. Cellini hoped that the duchess would keep his appraisal of the pearls to herself. He hardly needed to make another enemy in Florence.

  It was dusk already, and the monumental sculptures in the square threw long shadows on the stones. Donatello’s Judith stood, sword raised above the head of the Assyrian general, Holofernes. Michelangelo Buonarotti’s David, armed with slingshot, gazed confidently across the courtyard. And Cellini, already an acknowledged master in so many arts, longed to make his own contribution to their august company. What the piazza needed, and what he knew he could provide, was a bronze more perfectly modeled and chased and refined than any such statue ever done.

  Its subject?

  The hero Perseus… in the winged sandals given to him by Hermes, and holding the sword-forged by Hephaestus himself, to defeat the Gorgon-bestowed on him by Athena.

  What could be more fitting, more dramatic, and more likely to make Bandinelli hang himself in envy?

  With that happy thought in mind, he headed off to the Ponte Vecchio, so that he could stop at the artisans’ shops that lined both sides of the bridge and pick up some much-needed supplies. He thought it also might be nice to buy some little gift for Caterina, perhaps a bit of lace, or maybe an amber comb. She was undoubtedly attending to her hair, and he was confident that as it grew out, it would return to its lustrous black.

  But as for Caterina herself… that was another question completely. When would she realize the full import of what had happened? When would she discover the full effect of the moonlight striking the glass? A year? Five years? When would she know?

  Or when should he tell her?

  He had been a fool to have left the schematics for the iron box out on his worktable… but she was more ingenious than he’d suspected, first finding the casket and then figuring out how to open the lock. And it was that very cunning, he had to admit, which gave her such a powerful hold over him. She was not only the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, but the most clever. He had first spotted her on the arm of an aristocrat at Fontainebleau, when he had gone there to design a fountain for the King of France, and he had known from that very first moment that he had to have her… as model, as muse, as lover.

  After picking up some odds and ends-wire and wax for his armatures-he found a perfect small sapphire at a jeweler’s shop, poorly set in a pendant necklace. The foil behind it, meant to bring out its brilliance, was instead dulling it, and he thought that, with a little work, he could reset it. The jeweler, another friend of his, gave him a good price, but as he stepped out of the shop, thinking about his dinner, he caught a whiff of smoke in the air. Several other people had smelled it, too, and they were all looking toward the southern side of the Arno, from which the wind was blowing.

  Cellini’s step quickened as he crossed the rest of the bridge, and quickened even more as he entered the Borgo San Jacopo. The smell of smoke was stronger here, and it was blowing from the west, the direction of his studio. A gypsy boy was sprinting past, and Cellini snagged him by his arm. “Where’s the fire?” he asked and the boy, yanking his arm loose, said, “Santo Spirito.”

  Cellini broke into a run, the smell getting stronger all the time, and passing people who were also heading in the direction of the fire. By the time he rounded the corner, and saw the fire wagon outside his workshop, with Ascanio and a dozen other men throwing buckets of water at the blaze, he had dropped all but the necklace.

  He pushed his way through the onlookers and rushed to Ascanio’s side. “Is everyone safe? Is Caterina safe?”

  Ascanio, his face smeared with soot, shouted “Yes!” over the crackling of the flames. “We threw what we could out the windows!” Indeed, some loose books and sketches and even a few medallions still littered the street. “I’ve got the jewels in my pockets!”

  “And the rest?” Cellini said, knowing that Ascanio would take his meaning.

  “They are safe.”

  Cellini was so relieved that his most prized treasures had been saved, and Caterina spared, that the loss of everything else hardly mattered. He grabbed an empty bucket, filled it from the barrel on the wagon, and hurled the water through a burning window frame. But he could see, through the billowing smoke, that nothing would stop the fire. The residents of the neighboring houses were already emptying out their own homes, for fear the conflagration would spread, and in all the confusion, a man with a sword at his side suddenly slapped a firm hand on his shoulder and said, “Benvenuto Cellini?”

  Before he could even answer, someone else had slipped a black sack over his head and jerked a leather cord to tighten it around his neck.

  He heard Ascanio holler, and the sounds of a street brawl, and he swung the bucket at whoever was holding him. It hit something brittle, he heard a groan, then the cord was yanked tighter. He couldn’t breathe, and he was knocked off his feet by what might have been the hilt of a sword. Still kicking, he was dragged into an alleyway, then manhandled into a waiting carriage. He heard the crack of a whip and felt the wheels begin to roll. As he struggled to get up again, a knee was pressed to his chest, and a voice close to his ear hissed, “Call on your demons now.”

  Chapter 7

  David was poring over the lab reports when he suddenly became aware that he was being watched.

  The moment the analyses had arrived by special courier, he had raced into the Newberry’s book silo-a large research space containing the Newberry’s precious collections of codices, maps, and manuscripts-to comb through them. Microscopic samples of the ink and paper had been sent off to Arlington, Virginia, where the FBI submitted its own materials, and from what he had ascertained so far, everything about the documents given to him by Mrs. Van Owen checked out. In terms of age and provenance, they were completely authentic. And he’d have been delighted to bring her that news himself if she had not already been standing on the steel catwalk above him, studying him like a bug in a jar.

  He had not heard her come in, nor did he know how long she had been silently observing, but the hairs on the back of his neck prickled nonetheless.

  “What are you reading?” she asked, her voice muffled and absorbed by the thousands of volumes stored in the cylindrical shelves that rose all around them.

  “Ink and paper analyses from the sketch of La Medusa,” he said, waving one hand over the cluttered desktop.

  “I told you there was no need to waste time on that.”

  With one gloved hand on the railing, she descended the stairs. She was dressed all in black, as appeared to be her custom, and as she left the gloom of the stacks and entered the pool of light in which David was working, several pieces of diamond jewelry sparkled at her throat and ears. The heady scent of her perfume filled the air as she drew out a chair and sat down, crossing her legs, enhanced by a pair of sheer black stockings and sharply pointed heels.

  David doubted that the book silo had ever seen anyone quite like her.

  “So tell me what you’ve learned.”

  For a moment, David could think of almost nothing other than her dark, but oddly forbidding, beauty.

  With languid fingers, she turned a page around, glanced at the heading, and said, “Iron-gall extracts?”

  “It’s a good way of dating ancient inks,” David said, still trying to recover. “The Egyptians started using ink on papyrus around 2500 B. C, and the Romans used sepia-the black pigment secreted by the cuttlefish.” He was babbling, he knew, but decided to go with it until he’d fully regained his composure. “But by the time of the Renaissance, iron-gall extracts, which were made by mixing bark and tree galls with other ingredients, had pretty much replaced them.” He expounded further on the tests that had been done on the ink and the paper, while Mrs. Van Owen appeared to be listeni
ng with half an ear. “There’s an unusually high degree of logwood extract in these tannins, and that will help us to track down other documents Cellini might have written, or sketches he might have made, from the same period. And those, in turn, may provide some clues as to the present-day whereabouts of the Medusa.”

  What he didn’t say was that he thought it all was highly unlikely; he still wasn’t convinced that the thing had ever even existed. Cellini was famous for his plans that never came to pass and his designs that never reached fruition. It wasn’t for want of trying, but the man led an eventful life, in a turbulent time, and when he wasn’t running from a pope, he was dodging a king. His commissions were major undertakings-fountains for the gardens at Fontainebleau, or twelve life-sized silver figurines of the gods-but he seldom lived in one place, under one prince’s patronage, long enough to see things through. (Of the twelve figurines, only one-Jupiter-was ever made, and it, like so much of Cellini’s work, had been lost, destroyed, or melted down over the centuries.) It was a miracle that his bronze statue of Perseus slaying the Medusa, which had taken shape over a period of nine years, had ever been completed at all, much less survived to become one of the greatest masterpieces of Western art.

  “And where are these other documents you would need to consult?” she asked, though he felt, from her tone of voice, that she was simply leading him along.

  “Most of them?” he said. “They’re housed in the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence.”

  “So?”

  He paused, unsure what she was getting at. She leaned back in her chair, falling out of the penumbra of light, but her eyes glowing all the same. “So why are you here,” she elaborated, “and not in Italy?”

  The question took him off guard on several scores, chief among them the implication that he was working exclusively for her.

  “I have a job, right here,” he fumbled.

  “You are officially on sabbatical now.”

  David almost laughed. “I’m afraid that only Dr. Armbruster can make that decision.”