The Medusa Amulet

by Robert Masello

  “We have set aside an alcove for your exclusive use,” Dr. Valetta said, “for as long as you need it.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” David said.

  “And I have instructed the staff to be accommodating, if, say, you need more than the usual number of texts at a time.”

  “Thank you again.”

  Dr. Valetta lifted his hands and said, “Mrs. Van Owen has been very generous to us. We are only too happy to repay her in any way we can.”

  Mrs. Van Owen. Was there anywhere, David thought, her reach did not extend? Any move he made that she did not anticipate? For a moment, he wondered if Olivia wasn’t one of her plants, sent to keep tabs on his progress.

  After a few more minutes of chitchat, during which Valetta seemed to be probing into the focus of David’s research-a probing that he did his best to fend off-David stood up to excuse himself.

  “I’m on the clock,” he said, wondering if the expression would make any sense in Italian. “I’d better get started.”

  “Of course,” the director said, and ushered him out.

  In the reading room, Olivia was seated next to the woman with the magnifying glass, pointing out something on the yellowed page she was studying. The woman looked rapt and appreciative, and David had the sense that, for all her eccentricity, Olivia Levi did indeed know her stuff.

  A young librarian, in a red vest that David normally associated with car valets, showed them to an alcove with a massive desk, a pair of sturdy oak chairs, and a dual-headed banker’s lamp that cast a warm glow around the interior. A faded fresco of the Muses in a garden adorned the wall beneath the window. There was even a silver cup, holding a bunch of sharpened No. 2 pencils, like arrows in a quiver, along with a pad of call slips.

  Olivia threw her coat over the back of a chair and broke into a grin. She looked as if she’d won the lottery.

  “So, you’re some kind of big deal, huh? A private alcove? An audience with the dictator himself? Who are you, really?”

  David took off his own overcoat, placed the valise on the desk, and wondered about that himself. Up until now he’d been a Renaissance scholar working in obscurity in a private library in Chicago, but over the past few days he’d begun to feel like a secret agent. And now he had to think like one. He could either dismiss this young interloper, send her off to attend to her own “theories” and hope she didn’t create another row, or he could offer some hint about what had brought him there.

  Plainly, she could see his quandary.

  “You do not trust me,” she said. “That’s okay. But I would remind you of one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It was you who found me in the Piazza della Signoria, not the other way around.”

  “I’m not the one who tracked me to this library.”

  “Okay,” she conceded, “so I did do that. But maybe I can help you.” She glanced at the closed valise with undisguised curiosity. “Show me one thing, give me one clue, then see if I do not know what I am talking about.”

  She waited, while David mulled over her offer. Then he opened the valise, took out a few of the papers, and placed them on the table.

  Olivia lunged forward in her chair and bent low over the documents. Gradually, her expression became very serious, and, although none of the pages bore a signature anywhere, it was only a minute or two before she whispered, “Cellini.” Looking up, awestruck, she said, “These are from the hand of Benvenuto Cellini.”

  Unless he was still being duped, she was darn good.

  “Where in the world did you get them?”

  “First you tell me how you knew that.”

  “Please,” she said, with some disdain, “I am not an amateur in these matters. No one wrote quite like Cellini-in the Italian vernacular-and no one was so interested in these-how would you say?-dark matters.”

  While it was still possible he was being gulled-that she had somehow known in advance what he was investigating-the possibility seemed increasingly remote. Could she really be such a fine actress? There was something in the expression on her face and in the tone of her voice-even in the undisguised scorn with which she had answered his last question-that persuaded him she was on the level.

  And if that was true, then she could prove to be of inestimable value.

  Slowly, David removed the rest of the papers from the valise-her eyes widened even more-and began to explain how they had been donated to the library by an anonymous (that much he kept to himself) patron. Olivia sat silently, riveted by each page, until she said, “But what is this?” Her fingers nimbly plucked from the stack the sketch of the Medusa’s head. “A preliminary study for his famous statue-where we met?” She gave him a quizzical smile.

  “It’s possible.”

  But on second thought, she shook her head, frowning. “No, that’s wrong-it’s nothing like it, really. The Medusa in the piazza is defeated-this one is defiant.” Her eye fell on the empty oblong on the same page, the reverse view, and she looked puzzled. “It was a medallion?” she hazarded. “Unfinished?”

  “No, it was a mirror, simply called La Medusa,” David said. “And I have reason to believe that it was finished.”

  Olivia gave it some thought, before saying, “I know a great deal about Cellini, probably more than anyone in Italy-”

  Despite himself, David had to chuckle; one thing she had was the artisan’s ego, that was for sure.

  “-but I’ve never heard of this thing, this mirror, called La Medusa.”

  “No one has,” David replied. “But it’s my job to find it.”

  She flopped back in her chair, her arms hanging down in mock defeat. “And how do you propose to do that? Find something that has been missing for five hundred years?”

  “I don’t honestly know,” David said. “But since the Laurenziana holds more of Cellini’s papers than anyplace on earth, this seemed like the right place to start looking.”

  She cocked her head, uncertainly.

  He took a pencil from the silver cup. “Do you have a better idea?”

  Olivia studied him, then, leaning forward, said, “Does this mean you are offering me a job?”

  Was he? He felt like a diver, standing on the edge of a cliff and about to jump into unknown waters. Should he step back before it was too late, or take the plunge? “Does this mean you are available if I did?”

  “I’m not sure. I am very busy, with my tours, and my own research, and-”

  “Fine,” David said, starting to fill out the call slip and calling her bluff. “It was nice meeting you.”

  But her hand flicked out and stopped him. “Already,” she said, “you are hard to work for.” And then she laughed, and the sound of it made David laugh, too. “I want a raise!”

  There was a shushing sound from someone in the main reading room, as Olivia snatched the call slip and read what David had been writing there. “The Codice Mediceo-Palatino?” she inquired.

  “Yes,” he said, wondering if it would meet with her approval.

  “A good place to start,” she said, nodding. Raising her hand to signal one of the library attendants, she added, “You may not be so bad, after all.”

  Chapter 15

  The wind off Lake Michigan howled around the walls of the Holy Name Cathedral, rippling the tarps where the ceiling was still being mended, and sending a cold draft into the side chapel where the private ceremony was being held. A blown-up photo of Randolph Van Owen at the wheel of his yacht had been mounted on an easel, with a caption providing his dates of birth and death.

  Despite the prominence of the Van Owen name, and its long history in Chicago, Kathryn had arranged for this to be a small gathering-just Randolph’s sisters, their children, and a scattering of his friends from the yacht club. The young priest, Father Flanagan, was doing his best, but he was nervous and laboring hard to say something true and consoling about a man he’d never met. The Van Owenses had not been churchgoers, and it was clear that a lot of the priest’s eulogy ha
d come from a quick search on Google.

  Kathryn just wanted it to be over. She wished she had never had to set foot in Holy Name Cathedral again, and glancing at the confessionals on her way in, she had experienced a predictable pang. She had had to step over the very spot where the old priest, Father DiGennaro, had collapsed just a few nights before, the cell phone spilling from his hand. There was nothing to mark it now, nothing to alert anyone passing by that a man had died there. But then, she sometimes thought there was no place on earth that didn’t bear that same stain; others might not see them, but she could, everywhere. Live long enough, she thought, and the whole world starts to look like a graveyard.

  The onyx urn containing Randolph’s ashes rested on a marble pedestal, and from time to time the priest looked over at it with a show of deference, as if it contained some presence, some essence… -something other than what it did, which was purely dust and rubble. Kathryn had no illusions. For someone in her position, it would have been impossible to feel otherwise.

  When the priest intoned his last prayer and the ceremony was over, Kathryn said good-bye to the other mourners from under her black veil. Randolph’s sisters, with whom she had never gotten along, trailed out, dragging their spoiled progeny, and the boating pals shook her hand, no doubt heading off to the yacht club to get drunk in his honor.

  Father Flanagan came to her side, and after she had thanked him for his words, he said, “No, I must thank you.”

  “For what?”

  Gesturing upward, where the hats of the previous Cardinals had been reattached to the rafters and the ceiling work was again under way, he said, “I was told that you had made a very generous contribution to the church, to cover all the expenses of the roof repair.”

  That she had done. Out of guilt. If she hadn’t given the old priest such a shock, he might have one day died, peacefully, in his own bed, instead of on these cold stones. The next day, she’d written a check. Writing checks was easy.

  “May I escort you out?” he asked, but she said that wasn’t necessary. Cyril had already taken the urn in his gloved hands and walked her down the aisle to the great double doors with their Tree of Life motif.

  The moment the doors were opened, she was hit by a freezing blast and had to navigate her way down the steps carefully. The limousine was still warm inside, and she nestled down in the backseat while the wind and snow battered the windows. It was a half-hour drive, maybe longer in this weather, to the Calvary Cemetery on Clark Street, the oldest Catholic cemetery in the archdiocese, where the Van Owen family mausoleum had been erected more than a century ago. She rode in silence, accompanied only by the sounds of the tires skimming through the slush and the regular beating of the windshield wipers. Cyril knew when she wanted to be alone with her thoughts.

  And her thoughts had turned in the direction they so often went of late… to David Franco and what progress he might be making in his search for the Medusa. He had been in Italy only a matter of days, but Randolph’s death-the last in a string of so many-had reinforced in her the need to find the mirror again, and with it, she hoped, the answers to her unending dilemma. But what were the chances? Others had gone before, and they had either returned empty-handed, or, as in the case of a certain Mr. Palliser, been fished out of the river Loire with a grappling hook.

  The mission, she knew, should come with a warning, but then who would take it?

  All along the lakefront, jagged hunks of limestone and ice were piled up like a jumble of building blocks, and the lake itself was a gray, heaving slab, the wind teasing its surface into whitecaps. The late-afternoon sun was barely visible, and what light it shed was cold, dim, and diffuse. It was not a landscape Mrs. Van Owen would miss. With Randolph gone and no reason to stay, she was determined now to head for some warmer clime… and reinvent herself as she had done countless times before. She owned other homes, under other names, all over the world; she would inhabit one of them. The one thing she could never do was stay in any one place too long, lest she eventually arouse suspicion.

  And her time in Chicago, plainly, had already worn out.

  As they approached the cemetery, Cyril slowed down and turned under a Gothic archway with the Greek letters for Alpha and Omega-Christian symbols, as Kathryn was keenly aware, for God as the beginning and the end-in a triangle above the driveway. Even passing under them, Kathryn felt a sense of trespass. The limousine rolled through the deserted, windswept grounds, past rows of bleak stone monuments and crypts, beneath the barren branches of the trees that Dutch elm disease had so far spared.

  “It’s around the next bend,” Kathryn instructed Cyril, “on the left side.”

  The Van Owen mausoleum was easily the most ostentatious in the entire cemetery. Designed to resemble a Greek temple, and made of the same white limestone piled up in the breakwaters separating Sheridan Road from the lake, it sat on a slight rise, commanding an unobstructed view of the lake. Not that that did its occupants any good, Mrs. Van Owen reflected. Well over a hundred Midwestern winters had dimmed its luster, and even opened a crack in its roof, where some tenacious vines had penetrated and taken hold. When the cemetery staff had once asked Randolph if he wanted the vine removed, he had said, “Leave it be-it’s the only living thing for a square mile.”

  Kathryn felt the same way.

  Cyril stopped the car in the middle of the roadway, since both curbs were banked with snow and ice. Only one other car was even visible, a hearse, its tailpipe emitting a plume of smoke as it lumbered off into the farther reaches of the graveyard.

  Kathryn gathered her fur coat around her, and once the door was opened, stepped gingerly out onto the ice. Cyril was holding the urn in the crook of one arm, and she took hold of the other to keep her balance. Together, they stepped over the snowy curb and plowed up the hill through the blustering winds. The door to the mausoleum was nearly ten feet high, and it was made of black iron, filigreed around a thick slab of opaque glass. Kathryn dug deep in the pocket of her plush coat and removed an iron key ring that looked as if it should have opened the wards in Bedlam. She handed it to Cyril, who was unable to insert the key into the frosty, recalcitrant lock.

  But he had come prepared, and after clearing the hole with the end of a screwdriver, and then injecting some WD-40, he was able to get the key into the lock then crack the door, as ponderous as any bank vault, open.

  “Shall I come in with you?”

  “No,” Kathryn said, cradling the urn in her arms. “Why don’t you just take the car around the loop, so we’re heading in the right direction when I’m ready to go? I’ll need ten or fifteen minutes.”

  Kathryn stepped into the vault, and Cyril closed the vault behind her. A pair of casement windows, their glass as occluded as the door, allowed a pale nimbus of light to infiltrate the chamber, which was larger than it appeared from outside. The marble walls at this level were inscribed with various quotes from Scripture, and a bust of Archibald Van Owen, the bearded railroad baron who had founded the family fortune in the late 1800s, glowered over anyone entering.

  A few steps down, the chamber opened up, and on the granite slabs to either side rested perhaps a dozen caskets, their brass handles tarnished with age, their once-gleaming wood now dull and covered with a thick film of dust. And on two shelves that ran around the four walls of the crypt, there were a host of urns, in everything from porphyry to porcelain, containing the cremated remains of other family members. The air inside was cold, but not altogether still-the place in the ceiling where the vine had broken through allowed the tiniest hint of fresh air. In the uppermost corner, a spiderweb a yard wide trembled, and the marble beneath it bore a broad yellow-and-green stain from the seepage of rain and melting snow.

  A wave of repulsion swept over her, but not from the cold or the dreadful occupants of the place. It was the sight of the black spider herself, scuttling across the fine filaments, reacting no doubt to the unusual air currents in the room and thinking her web might have trapped some unlucky prey; fir
st the spider went one way, then the other, looking in vain. And Kathryn, trapped for centuries in a web from which there was no apparent escape, could not help but feel like prey herself.

  Stepping down, she went to the wall and, raising a gloved hand, cleared a space on the shelf, before placing the urn holding Randolph’s remains on it. For a few seconds, she let her hand rest atop it, as if in benediction; but in actuality she was simply waiting for some corresponding emotion, some sense of finality or even sorrow.

  But there was nothing. It was a scene she had played already, too often, and it had grown stale. Her heart was as dead as the occupants of the crypt.

  Instead, she found herself thinking of other times, now long removed. Times when she had genuinely been young and had had an appetite for the things that life had to offer. When artists had begged her to be their muse and aristocrats had showered her with gifts in the hopes that she would become their mistress. But truth be told, in all that time, there had been only one man who had touched-no, taken-her heart. Only one man whose soul she felt had touched her own. Even now, she could imagine his rough hands on her body, turning her this way and that, posing her limbs for yet another of his masterpieces. She could feel the scratchiness of his beard on her face, hear the sound of his bawdy laughter, and smile at the memory of his insolence to lords and ladies who had crossed him. She remembered the nights they slept on the hard pallet in his studio, ate their meals off borrowed silver, and strolled arm in arm along the Ponte Vecchio.

  Nor could she ever forget the fateful night she had pried open the iron casket and changed her own destiny forever. Now her only hope was to find the accursed mirror again and hope that by breaking it, she could shatter the spell and free herself from its power. If the Key was correct-and everything it had said about the powers of La Medusa had proved true so far, so why should she doubt this?-then that might be her one escape from the iron grip of immortality. Once the glass had been shattered, her life would resume again, as if she had only been frozen, and move forward, day by day, like that of any mortal woman. And end, in due course, just as naturally. In the words of the immortal Shakespeare-though when she had known him, no one had treated him as anything more than a prolific scribbler-it was “a consummation devoutly to be wished.”