The Medusa Amulet

by Robert Masello

  “I know what that’s like,” one student joshed, and a couple of them snickered.

  “And so he said to Perseus, ‘I want you to make me a special marriage present,’ and Perseus, who was very brave but also foolhardy, said, ‘I will give you anything you ask.’ And the king said, ‘Then you will get me the thing I want most-and that is the head of the Medusa.’”

  This turn of events seemed to interest the students even more.

  “But no one could kill the Medusa,” the guide went on, her voice rising, as if she wanted to make sure that even David could hear. “If you looked into the eyes of the Medusa, you would turn to stone.” The Notre Dame kid turned around and gave David a curious look. “The Gorgons were immortal, and the waters from their secret pool, if you could collect it without being killed, offered eternal life.”

  David suddenly felt as if this woman with the iris in her lapel-a woman he had never even seen before-knew why he’d come to Florence and what he was looking for. He’d been in the city no more than a few hours, but he felt as if he’d already been exposed.

  “I guess he did the job,” the Notre Damer said, “or this statue wouldn’t be here.”

  “Yes, but how?” the guide said. “Do you know how he killed the Medusa without even looking at her?”

  When there was no reply, she said, “He called upon his friends, the gods.”

  “That would help,” another student said.

  “Yes, it did. Do you know who is Hermes?”

  “The guy on the FTD commercials,” Notre Dame said, but the reference seemed to baffle the guide.

  “The messenger of the gods,” a girl put in. “He could fly, I think.”

  “ Si, si,” the guide said, clapping her hands encouragingly, “and he gave a magic sword to Perseus, a sword that could cut off the head of the Gorgon. Another friend to Perseus was called Athena-”

  “The goddess of wisdom,” the same girl volunteered, and the guide beamed at her.

  “Yes, Athena, she gave him a shield, a very…” she searched for the word, then said, “ reflecting shield, like a mirror, so he would not have to look at her. Also, he had a hat, a helmet, that made him… invisible.”

  And so, according to the myth, the heroic Perseus had journeyed to the distant isle where the three Gorgons lived and, using these strange gifts, had slain the one named Medusa. And, for allegorical reasons that art historians still liked to debate, the Duke de’Medici had commissioned this monument, this retelling of the ancient story, to be erected in the central square of Florence. Originally planned to stand only a couple of braccia high, Cellini had increased its proportions in the process of composition, and raised it on a tall marble base adorned with four niches, holding beautifully modeled figures of Zeus, Athena, Hermes, and the young Perseus with his mother. These figures were so stunning, in fact, that when Eleonora de Toledo, the duke’s wife, first saw them as freestanding sculptures, she insisted that they were too exquisitely wrought to be wasted on a pedestal, and announced that they would be better suited to her own apartments in the palace. Cellini, though grateful for the praise, was not about to shortchange his masterwork, so before she had time to claim them, he raced back and soldered them into their assigned niches, where they stood between the sculpture above and the four bronze plaques below, illustrating scenes from Perseus’s later adventures.

  It was just such maneuvers, David reflected, that had made Cellini, in his own life, one of the most infuriating men in Europe. In the service of his art-and his ego-he was forever crossing swords with princes, popes, and noblemen. And when he wasn’t being celebrated for his achievements, he was being hauled into court, or hauled off to jail, on charges of everything from murder (he confessed to several, though claiming self-defense every time), to sodomy (not so uncommon a practice in those days), to failing to pay child support. (The Florentine courts were very progressive for their time.) Perhaps it was this selfsame transgressive nature-the willingness to act boldly, even in plain defiance of secular law and holy authority-that had first endeared him to David. As someone who lived his own life strictly by the rules-working hard, avoiding trouble, winning every academic prize within reach-David had been irresistibly drawn to this figure who took life by the reins and rode it anywhere he chose. Whose art, and writings (he had also authored treatises on goldsmithing and sculpture), revealed a mind that was always in quest of new knowledge, new techniques, new frontiers.

  Judging from the Key to Life Eternal, he had even searched for a way to cross the line between life and death… and claimed to have found it. That was one aspect of his career which the Van Owen papers had revealed in a way that neither David, nor any other scholar, had ever known.

  “And who can see the miracolo in the back?” the guide was now saying, crooking one finger at the students to draw them around to the rear of the statue. David, tagging along, knew what she was going to point out.

  Nodding at David as if to give him permission to join the group, she was calling attention to the fantastically ornate helmet on Perseus’s head. Wings sprouted from either side of the visor, along with a crouching gargoyle on the top, but it was in back that Cellini had created his optical illusion. Hidden among the folds and curlicues of the helmet was a stern human face, with a long Roman nose, a lush moustache, and piercing eyes under arching brows. You could look at the back of the helmet and never see it there, but once it had been pointed out, you could never again miss it.

  “There’s a face, looking out,” the girl with the twirling pen announced.

  The guide clapped her hands together again. “That’s good. Very good. This, I think, is the face of Cellini himself.”

  And David agreed. Not only was it just like Cellini to bring off such a stunt, the visage also bore a resemblance to the only known depiction of the artist, rendered by Vasari in later life. It was one further proof of his ingenuity, or, in the academic lingo that David had so come to detest, his “reverse iconography and intratextual complexity.”

  Several of the students dutifully scribbled in their notebooks, and the guide, checking her watch, said, “Come, we must now look at the Palazzo Vecchio,” waving her hand at the massive and forbidding wall of the Medici palace that brooded over the square. With the students trudging after her, the guide, whose own enthusiasm never seemed to flag, cast a look back at David, who smiled and raised a hand in farewell. David mouthed the words, “ Grazie mille,” and the guide tilted her pretty head and said, “ Prego.”

  An hour later, after completing his own tour of the piazza, David was sitting inside a nearby cafe, nursing a cup of cappuccino to stave off the jet lag and making some notes for the next day. The Biblioteca Laurenziana would open its doors at ten, and he planned to be the first one through them. There was a lot of work he wished to do in their archives, and he was drawing up a list of his priorities when, out of nowhere, a cyclone hit his table.

  The opposite chair was yanked back, a body dropped into it, and a voice called out to a passing waiter, “ Due ova fritte, il pane tostato, ed un espresso. Pronto! ”

  Glancing up, David saw the tour guide unbuttoning her overcoat and scanning the tabletop as if on the lookout for anything she could eat while waiting for her eggs and toast to get there.

  “ Buon giorno,” David said, surprised but amused.

  “ Buon giorno,” the guide replied. “ Lei parla l’Italiano? ”

  “ Si,” David said, glad to start giving his rusty Italian a tryout. “ Ma sono fuori di pratica.” But I’m out of practice.

  The guide nodded quickly three times, and said, “ Cio e buono.” That’s okay.

  The waiter put a cup of espresso in front of her, and the guide downed half of it in one gulp, snapping her fingers before the waiter could get away and saying, “ Un altro.”

  While the waiter went to get another, David introduced himself. “ Mi chiamo David Franco.”

  “Olivia Levi,” the guide replied, taking the band from her ponytail and shaking her hair l
oose. Olivia-it was the perfect name for her, David thought. Eyes as black as olives, and skin the color of the espresso foam. “And, if you do not mind, we will speak English.”

  David felt vaguely insulted. Was his Italian so bad that she’d given up already?

  “It is for me,” Olivia said. “I must use it so that the studenti don’t have any reason to laugh when I talk.”

  “I thought you did an exceptional job.”

  Olivia blew a sigh of disgust. “That is all it is-a job. I must do it for the money. Everything,” she said, lifting her hands from the table in resignation, “I must do for the money.”

  She had all the theatricality of the Italians, too, David thought. “Leading tour groups must keep you pretty busy. Especially in a place like Florence.”

  “But it keeps me from my work. My serious work. I am not a guide; I am a writer.”

  “Really?” David said intrigued. “What do you write about?”

  “What do I write about?” she said, gesturing at the wonders of Florence surrounding them. “The greatest collection of art ever produced in one place, at one time. What other city can claim Michelangelo and Botticelli, Verrocchio and Masaccio, Leonardo and Ghiberti, Brunelleschi and Cellini? They were all here. Their work, it is still here. And I do not even mention yet Petrarch and Boccaccio and the immortal Dante!”

  “But you Florentines gave Dante a pretty rough time,” David said with a smile. “Exiling him forever in 1302, as I recall.”

  Olivia stopped dead and gave David a more appraising look, as if to acknowledge that this was someone who might know a little something, after all.

  “Not my people. My people never had a say in anything. They lived on the Via Guidici.”

  In other words, she was telling him that they lived in the Jewish quarter.

  “Even Cosimo, who was supposed to be our friend, he closed the Jewish banks in 1570 and forced everyone, whether they liked it or not, to live in that damned ghetto.”

  The waiter set a plate and another espresso down in front of Olivia, who lowered her head-the ringlets of her jet-black hair artfully framing her narrow face-and dug in unashamedly.

  What amused David about the Florentines-and it was certainly true of Olivia just now-was the way that they spoke of their history almost in the present tense. Olivia dropped the name of Cosimo de’Medici, dead for five hundred years, like he was a personal acquaintance, and as if the removal of the Jews from much of Florence was something that happened just yesterday. In fact, David knew, the Florentine Jews had gradually regained many of their rights, and by 1800 had once again been allowed to live anywhere in the city that they chose. There was even a city ordinance on the books that prohibited malicious references to Jewry from the public stage. The ghetto was gradually eradicated-there was no trace of it remaining-though the undercurrent of anti-Semitism that ran through so much of Europe lingered long after.

  An undercurrent that Hitler, in his own time, had brought roiling to the surface.

  “Your family survived the war then?” David said hopefully.

  Mopping up some yolk with the bread, Olivia said, “A few. Not so many. Many of them, I am told, were sent to Mauthausen.”

  A concentration camp where thousands of Italian Jews were gassed.

  “I’m sorry,” David said, and she shrugged her shoulders wearily.

  “After all this time, what can you say? Many of the Italians, they hid the Jews in convents and cloisters. But the Pope? He did nothing. And the Fascists? They liked their brown shirts and their boots, and they liked killing shopkeepers and clerks; it was easy. But once that was done, so were they. They were cowards at heart.” She scraped the plate for the last of the eggs, as David pictured in his mind’s eye Mussolini hanging by his heels from a meat hook.

  “Where do you live now?” David asked.

  “You know the Giubbe Rosse, in the Piazza della Repubblica?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  She shrugged again and said, “It’s the best cafe in Firenze. I have an apartment next door to it.” Having cleaned every crumb from her plate, she leaned back in the chair and fumbled in her pocket for a pack of cigarettes. She held them out to David, who declined, then lighted one herself.

  “But what are you?” Olivia asked. “You are American. But a tourist?”

  David wasn’t sure if this was just polite conversation, or if he was being sized up as a potential customer.

  “I’m actually here on some business.”

  “You do not look like a businessman.”

  David decided he’d take that as a compliment. “I’m researching something. I work in Chicago, at a library.”

  “I have been to Chicago,” Olivia said triumphantly. “It was very cold. And I also lived in New York, for five years.” She spread her fingers to emphasize the point. “I was writing a dissertation, at Columbia.” She said it like Col om bia the country. “Now I work here.”

  “On a book?” David asked.

  A furtive look crossed the tour guide’s face. “A very big book,” she said. “A history-I cannot tell you more. I have been working on it for seven years.”

  “So you must be nearly done?” David said encouragingly.

  But Olivia shook her head and exhaled a cloud of smoke over one shoulder. “No. I have met with much resistance. And it will cause a lot of arguments.” Glancing at her watch, she said, “And now I must go. I have a private client for a tour. Where are you staying?”

  “The Grand.”

  “The Grand?” David could see another reappraisal going on in Olivia’s eyes. “And who is it you work for? What library is this?”

  “The Newberry. It’s a private institution.”

  “And are you going to work at the university here?”

  “No, at the Biblioteca Laurenziana.”

  It was as if David could actually hear the wheels spinning in her head, like a slot machine that was coming up all cherries. He expected another volley of questions, and was beginning to wonder if he should have been quite so forthcoming. Was it really just by chance that she had followed him to the cafe and joined him? Or was he being paranoid? Ever since that guy had tried to run him down in the street, he’d been uncharacteristically suspicious.

  Olivia stood up, taking one last drag on her cigarette. “I will be late,” she said, dropping the butt in her empty espresso cup. “But I thank you for the meal.”

  “You’re welcome,” David said.

  “You may join another of my tours, anytime. Also for free.”

  “Careful,” David replied, “I might take you up on that.”

  She smiled and said, “It is possible I could teach you a thing or two.”

  And then, as he pondered the full import of that, she hurried off across the square, the tails of her old coat flapping around her. He was still looking when she turned her head unexpectedly and caught him. Her laugh rang out across the piazza.

  Chapter 12

  Damn, damn, damn. What should he do now, Escher wondered, from his vantage point across from the cafe. The girl was leaving, and David was staying, but he couldn’t very well tail both of them.

  Who was she? An accomplice of some kind? Or just a tour guide who’d taken a fancy to the guy who’d joined her group?

  On Ambassador Schillinger’s orders, Escher had followed David all the way from Chicago, never more than a few hundred yards behind. While David flew in the first-class compartment, Escher had squeezed into the last available seat-back by the bathrooms-in coach.

  And while David traveled into the city in a private car, Escher had followed in an unlicensed cab.

  And as David had checked into the Grand Hotel, Escher had lurked in the lobby. He was still carrying his overnight bag slung over one sturdy shoulder.

  On a hunch, he followed the girl. She was good-looking, though with less meat on her bones than he liked. Maybe in her late twenties, she walked with the brisk pace of someone who was intent on getting a lot done. As she passed a trash b
in, she pulled the iris out of her lapel and dropped it in. Escher snorted in approval, thinking she must have worn the flower solely for the benefit of the tourists.

  A few blocks from the piazza, she ducked into a used-books store and came out half an hour later with a fat volume tucked under one arm. With her other hand, she was fishing in her coat pocket, and when he realized that she was looking for her car keys, he hailed the first passing cab, jumped in, then had the driver wait until she stopped beside a beat-up little Fiat and got in. The thing was more dents than car.

  “Follow it,” he told the cabbie, tossing some bills onto the front seat.

  She drove like she did everything else-fast and direct, cutting through the traffic like a knife, honking her horn, whipping around the traffic circles, taking corners so sharply that pedestrians had to jump back to keep their feet from being run over.

  “This woman’s crazy!” the cabbie said, doing his best to keep up.

  “Just don’t lose her,” Escher said, tossing another bill.

  At the Piazza della Repubblica, she went up and down the local streets a couple of times, apparently looking for a parking spot-in Florence, it was never easy-before someone in front of a busy cafe pulled out. Another car made a beeline for the spot, but the little Fiat, clattering like a tin can, cut it off at the pass and dove in headfirst, one tire bumping over the curb, the back end sticking out into the street.

  Escher could hear a brief shouting match, but the girl grabbed her book, locked the car-who would ever steal that hunk of junk, he wondered?-and marched up the steps of a small, dilapidated apartment building without so much as a glance back.

  Once she was inside, Escher got out of his cab and watched the windows. She appeared on the third floor, yanking open some curtains, and when he consulted the apartment roster, he was able to deduce that her name was Levi, first initial O.