The Medusa Amulet

by Robert Masello

  “ Aequora of infinitio,

  Beatus per radiant luna,

  Una subsisto estus of vicis,

  Quod tribuo immortalis beneficium.”

  And then, for good measure, he recited his own translation, in the vernacular tongue he preferred.

  “The waters of eternity,

  Blessed by the radiant moon,

  Together stop the tide of time

  And grant the immortal boon.”

  With the talisman made, only one step remained-to see if it would work. If it did, then anyone catching the moonlight in its glass, along with his own reflection, would find himself frozen in time forever, as unchanging as the image trapped in the glass.

  Had anyone, Cellini wondered, ever accomplished so much as he? Could any artisan, in his own age or the ages to come, boast of such achievements?

  He had sat back on his workbench, the lantern light reflected in the glass of La Medusa and felt… what? Exultation? Yes, but mixed with the bitter rue that came from knowing he could never trumpet it to the skies.

  What he had done, no man could ever know.

  If the Holy Roman Church were to learn of it, he would be burned at the stake. If kings and princes knew, he would be captured, imprisoned, and the fruits of his labor stolen. A race of immortal men, no doubt as corrupt and venal as their mortal counterparts, would spring up to overtake the world. No, the only sensible course was to keep La Medusa close and secret, its powers bestowed only on its creator, and on whatever worthy soul that creator chose to favor.

  The lantern had sputtered, its last drops of oil consumed, and gone out. The workshop had been bathed in the light of the winter moon, full and white and cold as a glacier.

  Cellini had slipped the chain onto the amulet, then looped it around his neck. Tiptoeing past Ascanio and the other apprentices, fast asleep downstairs, he stepped into the silent courtyard behind his house. Walls of stone rose on all sides. But high above, like a gleaming coin, the moon hung in a starry sky. His nervous breath fogged in the air.

  Was he prepared to put his work to the ultimate test? Was he ready to accept any outcome, whether it be everlasting life… or sudden death? No grimoire guaranteed its results.

  A shiver rippled down his spine, inspired by the chilly air, or the anticipation. With numbed fingers, he lifted La Medusa, the snarling face glaring into his own… and deliberately turned it over. The curvature of the glass twinkled in the moonlight.

  His own face-with its prominent, hooked nose, coal-dark eyes, and luxuriant moustache-appeared in the mirror, but there was something strange going on, something that it took him a second to realize. It didn’t feel like his reflection he was seeing… it felt as if he were already inside the mirror, and helplessly staring out.

  The amulet itself seemed to come alive, as if the liquid inside had been brought to a sudden boil.

  A dog howled from the alleyway and ran for the street.

  Cellini could not tear his eyes away. He felt as if he were being drawn down into a whirlpool, around and around, down and down. His scalp prickled, and his skin erupted in a welter of goose bumps. La Medusa seemed to twist in his hand like a frightened bird, and before he could even think to let it go, he had felt his mind grow dim and his knees buckle beneath him. The cobblestones of the courtyard rose up like an engulfing wave.

  “Are you done with your bowl?” the jailer asked through the iron grate in the door.

  Cellini, still mourning over the poison he had just ingested, looked up from the floor, then nodded.

  “Then pass it to me,” the jailer said, and Cellini picked it up and carried it to the door.

  “Tell me,” he asked, “did Signor Luigi-forgive me, the Duke of Castro-himself prepare my food tonight?”

  “Are you crazy? Of course not.”

  “Then who did? Anyone unusual?”

  The jailer smiled. “Nothing gets by you, Benvenuto. It was prepared by a friend of the duke’s.”

  Cellini waited.

  “A man named Landi. He wore one of those loupes around his neck.”

  Of course, Cellini thought. Landi was the jeweler who’d tried to foist off the bad pearls on Eleonora in Florence; he had subsequently moved here, to Rome. How pleased he must have been to receive this deadly commission from the duke.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “You will know soon enough,” Cellini replied, taking one last look into the bottom of the bowl, and noticing yet another minute splinter. He wet the tip of his finger, removed the shard, then passed the bowl sideways through the bars.

  When the jailer had gone, he went to the window and placed the tiny fragment on the sill. How strange to be looking at something so small and yet so lethal. How many, he wondered, had he consumed?

  But then, in the last light of the summer sun, he noticed something that made his heart spring up in his chest.

  The shard had the tiniest hint of a greenish cast… as if it might be beryl, or some other semiprecious stone.

  He examined it more closely. The sun had almost set over the Roman hills, but there was just enough light to catch that cast again. His mouth suddenly so dry he could barely breathe, he grabbed his spoon and pressed it down on the shard. There was a pleasing crunch, and when he lifted the spoon, a spot of harmless dust lay on the windowsill.

  Cellini crumpled to the floor, knowing that he had been delivered

  … and by the hand of the unscrupulous jeweler. Landi had, no doubt, been given a diamond to complete the task, but had pocketed it instead, thinking a less-valuable gem would do the job just as well.

  In that, he was mistaken.

  But if Benvenuto had needed any further impetus to escape, this was it. His usefulness was at an end, and so long as it could be made to appear a natural death, his enemies were prepared to kill him now. He dug under his sodden mattress and removed the long ribbon of cloth strips, laboriously tied together, that he planned to use to lower himself over the walls. He had hoped to make it longer, just as he had hoped to wait for a night with no moon, but now that he knew his chances of a papal reprieve were null, it was time to put his scheme into action. When the midnight bell had tolled, he used his spoon to remove the artificial hinges he had placed in the door, crept past the jailer’s room, where he was snoring soundly, and out onto the parapet of the Castel St. Angelo.

  All of Rome spread out below him, swaddled in night, and with the strength still left in his emaciated frame, he lowered the rope-still too short to reach the ground-and began his slow and perilous descent.

  Chapter 14

  Monday dawned cold and gray, but after a hot breakfast delivered to his room, David packed up his leather valise and set out on foot for the Biblioteca Laurenziana, still determined to be the first one through its doors.

  Florence could be a forbidding city under the best of circumstances, with its ancient buildings glowering over its crowded streets and squares, but that morning, with a blustery wind keeping everyone’s heads down and dust and dirt flying up from the cobblestones, it was especially sinister. On the Via Proconsul, he passed by the Bargello, once the headquarters of the chief city magistrate. For centuries, criminals had been publicly hanged from its tower windows, and if they were foreigners, their bodies had been donated to medical students and “anatomists” such as Leonardo da Vinci for dissection and study.

  A few shifty-looking men huddled in the Bargello’s doorway, throwing dice, and David instinctively hugged the valise more tightly to his side. Italy boasted some of the greatest artists and inventors of all time, but it was also the home to some of the world’s most skillful pickpockets and thieves.

  The streets were congested with morning traffic, cars rumbling by and motor scooters whizzing past like hornets. Jumping out of the way of one, David thought he caught sight of a figure in a slouched hat, with a rolled-up newspaper under one arm, dodging into an alcove. But a break in the traffic opened up, and without looking back he darted across the street.

  Ahead, Il
Duomo, the mighty rose-colored cupola of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, rose above the surrounding rooftops. Ever since its construction in the 1420s, city law had dictated that no building should ever exceed it in height. Built by Brunelleschi, it was a miracle of both artistry and engineering, soaring over three hundred feet into the air and so all-encompassing that it was, in the words of the Renaissance architect Alberti, “large enough to shelter all the people of Tuscany in its shadow.” Mark Twain had said it looked like “a captive balloon,” floating over the town.

  A bunch of tourists, climbing off their bus and hoisting their videocams, snagged him in their midst, and before he could extricate himself, he thought he glimpsed that same figure, hat pulled low, mingling with the mob; but he could have been mistaken.

  He wondered if his near miss with that driver back at the skating rink in Evanston had left him a bit paranoid.

  Heading across the piazza, he could see the smaller, but no less captivating, dome of the ancient Church of San Lorenzo; like every major construction project in Florence, the contract had called for the cathedral to be “ piu bello che si puo,” or in English “as beautiful as can be.” It was a stipulation the city fathers had insisted upon throughout the Renaissance, and it had yielded an unparalleled crop of striking architecture. Over the centuries, San Lorenzo-which claimed to be the oldest church in Florence, its original cornerstone having been laid in 393-had been rebuilt and expanded until, gradually, it had become a sort of monastic complex, housing an old sacristy by Brunelleschi, a new sacristy by Michelangelo, the Medici burial chapels, and, in an adjoining cloister, David’s destination… the world-renowned Laurenziana library.

  From the outside, the buildings presented a fairly austere appearance, their walls layered in the dark stone, or pietra serena, of their native Tuscany. And although in warmer weather its cloistered courtyard was filled with green leaves and banks of multicolored irises, today it was barren and sere.

  David’s footsteps echoed across the empty square, a flock of dirty gray pigeons scooting out of his way.

  But under the sound of their fluttering wings, he became aware of sneakers squeaking in one of the shadowy arcades. When he stopped, pretending to tie his shoe, the squeaking stopped, and when he stood up and went on, he could hear it again, not far behind. He turned quickly, but saw only one old matron, in hard black shoes, persistently scrubbing a window frame. He waited for another second, peering into the arcade, with its rounded arches and deep recesses, but no one appeared.

  Was he being followed? Was it just a pickpocket, and not a particularly good one at that? Was it someone who knew what he carried in the fancy valise?

  Or had he just seen too many movies?

  He shook his head and climbed the stairs to the second floor of the cloister, where the library and its world-famous collection of books and codices was housed.

  But he was no sooner at the top than he heard that squeaking sound again. Was Mrs. Van Owen-rich and eccentric as she was-having him tailed, for God’s sake?

  For all he knew, that maniac in the BMW had followed him all the way from the States.

  He no longer knew what to believe.

  But he did know how to waylay his pursuer and find out once and for all.

  The vestibule of the library had been purposely designed by Michelangelo to be dim-the windows had been bricked up, in fact-so that the visitors to the library would feel themselves ascending from its gloom into the sudden illumination-in every sense-of the library at the top of the stairs. David pressed himself into a niche that housed a marble bust of Petrarch, and with the valise clutched under one arm, held his breath.

  The steps came closer, and paused just outside the vestibule.

  Had the tracker decided to abandon his quarry?

  And then, squeaking softly, the steps continued. David saw the back of a hat and raincoat, with a newspaper sticking out from under one arm.

  Stepping out of the niche, David said in Italian, “What can I do for you?”

  The figure whirled around, a copy of La Stampa flying out from under one arm, one palm dramatically pressed to her chest.

  To his astonishment David saw that it was the tour guide, Olivia Levi, from the day before.

  “ Maron! ” she cried. “You nearly killed me! Why did you do that!”

  “Not until you tell me why you’ve been following me!” At least his suspicions had been proven correct-he had been followed.

  Olivia bent to pick up the scattered pages of the newspaper, just as a heavyset female guard, in a gray uniform and cap, showed up at the top of the steps to see what the sudden commotion was all about.

  “Oh no,” she shouted, glaring at Olivia, “not you again! You’re barred from the library-you know that-so get going!” She slapped her hands together, up and down, to emphasize her dismissal.

  “But I’m not done with my research!”

  “That’s too bad. The director is done with you.”

  There was a pleading look on Olivia’s face and, without missing a beat, she added, “But I am working today! I am this man’s assistant. He has hired me to help him with his work here.”

  She quickly glanced at David, waiting for confirmation, and David didn’t know what to do. His normal impulse was to help out a fellow scholar, but there was too much about this woman that he simply didn’t know, or trust.

  “Is that true?” the guard asked suspiciously. “She works for you?”

  But it wasn’t going to be that easy. “Why are you barred?” David whispered in English.

  “What does it matter?” Olivia whispered back. “It was nothing!”

  “Last chance-why are you barred?”

  “I had an argument with the director,” she said, shrugging. “The man is a Nazi.”

  From the way she said it, coupled with that weary shrug, David almost laughed. But it still took him several seconds before he decided to take a chance. Looking up at the guard, he said, in Italian again, “Yes, I’ve hired her.”

  “And who are you?”

  David took his own letter of introduction from his pocket and advanced with it in hand. “Dottore Valetta is expecting me.”

  The guard studied the paper, glared one more time at Olivia, then turned around and waddled into the library, a nightstick straining in the belt at her side.

  “ Grazie mille,” Olivia mumbled to David, who mumbled back, “But we’re not done-you’ll still have to tell me why you were following me.”

  “Because you told me you would be working here,” she said. “I needed a way back in.”

  “Why didn’t you just ask me?”

  “Because you didn’t know me.”

  “And I do now?”

  “We are getting there,” she said, with a half smile that, despite himself, he found beguiling.

  Following the guard, they entered the long and elegant hall that was the library’s main reading room. Bay windows, framed by marble pilasters, lined one wall, throwing a bright but diffused light onto the red and white terra-cotta tiles-demonstrating the fundamental principles of geometry-embedded in the floor. Wooden desks lined both sides of the room under a high, beamed ceiling. An old woman, studying some ancient text with a magnifying glass, glanced up as they passed, then quickly buried herself again in her work.

  At the end of the hall, the guard turned into a side corridor and rapped her knuckles on a frosted-glass panel. She opened the door, announced them, and before David could even see Dr. Valetta, he heard the director say, “No, that woman is not allowed on the premises!”

  “She’s working for Signor Franco,” the guard tried to explain.

  David neatly stepped around her, where he saw the director, in a crisp tan suit with a pocket square, standing behind a desk. When David extended his hand, Dr. Valetta accepted it, all the while keeping a close eye on Olivia, who loitered near the door.

  “Greetings, Mr. Franco. We’ve been expecting you. But how is it that you know Signorina Levi?”


  “She’s volunteered to help me with my research,” David improvised. “She tells me she’s quite familiar with the Laurenziana’s collections.”

  Dr. Valetta snorted. “That much is true. But I wouldn’t believe anything else she tells you. The signorina has her own ‘theories,’ and no amount of fact can ever dissuade her.”

  “What?” Olivia broke in, unable to contain herself. “I have plenty of facts, and I’d have more if people like you weren’t forever standing in my way!”

  David turned to her and said, “ Basta.” What had he gotten himself into?

  Subsiding, she said, “I will wait for you in the reading room,” and stalked out.

  “Sorry about that,” David said to the director.

  Valetta looked like he was still wondering what to do, then said, “You will have to be responsible for her, you know?”

  “I will.”

  Determinedly regaining his composure and pinching the crease of his trousers before resuming his own seat, Dr. Valetta invited him to sit down.

  David took the chair opposite the desk, resting his valise against his leg. The walls of the office were lined with shelves of books, all perfectly arranged and aligned. More, David thought, for show than for use.

  “And you are comfortable if we continue to speak in Italian?”

  David nodded and said he preferred it.

  “Good. I believe that you have done some research in our collections before?”

  “I have. But it was some years ago.”

  “Then permit me to remind you of our procedures.”

  David listened attentively, in part to make up for Olivia’s transgressions, as the director explained that any manuscript or text that was requested had to be brought to the borrower’s assigned desk by a library attendant, and no more than three at any time. Any manuscript being returned also had to be given back to one of the attendants. Any portfolio or briefcase leaving the library had to be inspected by a security guard-assisted by a librarian-at the checkout station. No photographs were allowed, except by special permission. And, to avoid any ink spillage, no pens-only pencils-were allowed for note-taking.