The Medusa Amulet

by Robert Masello

  “ Das Schwarze Korps was the official newspaper of the SS, Heinrich Himmler’s personal mouthpiece,” Olivia explained. “It was the place where all the racial theories, and occult underpinnings, of the Nazi regime were broadcast. According to the dates of entry in this file, the Nazis received permission from the Vichy government to access these files on June 15, 1940. That’s exactly one day after they took Paris. You have to give them credit for one thing-they didn’t let the grass grow under their feet.”

  “But if these photos were taken in Italy by the Nazis, how’d they wind up here, in the French files?” David asked.

  “I would say that the investigator was compiling the complete dossier here. Why not? After all, he expected the Reich to be around and running the place for another thousand years.”

  “Who did? Himmler?”

  “No, he was a little busy just then. But it appears he sent his right-hand man.”

  She showed him a letter from a French bureaucrat, summarily dismissing the previous administrator of the archives-Monsieur Maurice Weinberg-and cosigned, in a crabbed, precise hand, by the Reichsfuhrer himself. The letter appointed in his place an emeritus professor of philosophy and theology at the University of Heidelberg. A man named Professor Dieter Mainz.

  Dieter Mainz, whose name had appeared on all of those library request cards at the Laurenziana, too.

  Olivia looked like she had struck gold. “I knew it!” she said. “They were tracking count Cagliostro all along.”

  But were they tracking him in search of La Medusa? David thought with horror. And what if they had found it? What if it had been but one tiny item in their massive plunder of Europe? So much of the treasure looted by the Nazis had been destroyed in the war, or lost. And plenty more was still stashed away in secret vaults, under aliases and forgotten code numbers, from Brussels to Buenos Aires.

  “But do you want to know the best news yet?” Olivia said.

  “What?” He could use some good news.

  She held up her hand, covered with dust from the box and papers. “Nobody else has come this way in a long time.”

  It was a good point, and he was glad she had made it. This was a trail no one else had blazed, though whether it led anywhere was still an open question.

  When they had completed their review of everything else in the box, which included several pamphlets printed in France and extolling the power of the magic Cagliostro had uncovered in ancient Egypt, they closed up the carton, replaced it, and threaded their way back to the museum director’s office. It looked as if it had once been a large recital hall, and had a desk at one end and a long table covered with rocks and chisels and tools at the other. Professor Vernet was turning the handle on a vise, to crush a stubborn specimen, when Olivia said, “Thank you for your help.”

  The professor looked over his shoulder, turned the crank one more time, and said, “Happy to be of assistance, mademoiselle.”

  His eyes, David noted, never left Olivia.

  Brushing the rock residue from his hands and removing his apron, he offered to escort her-them-to the doors of the museum. All the way, he engaged Olivia in a discussion of her work, where she had studied, how she liked Paris, while David followed along. In the portico, Vernet took her hand, and while assuring her again that he was available for consultation at any time-“Did I mention that I live quite close by?”-David idly surveyed the Board of Governors plaque. Several dozen names were listed, in no particular order, and while most of them meant nothing to him, some were famous from the worlds of French politics and finance.

  And one, in gilded letters near the bottom of the last column, nearly bowled him over.

  “Excuse me,” he said, brashly interrupting an inquiry into Olivia’s plans for dinner, “but it appears you have a Monsieur di Sant’Angelo on your board?”

  “Yes, what of it?” Vernet replied, miffed at having his pitch cut short. “He has the best eye for gems in all the world. We often consult with him when something especially rare comes to our attention.”

  “He lives here?”

  “Oh yes-in a grand old house in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, on the rue de Longchamp. Number 10. He has a business there, by appointment only.”

  Was it possible? David thought, his mind racing. When Cagliostro had written that the Gorgon belonged to Sant’Angelo, did he mean a person by that name, and not a place? Was he referring to an ancestor of this very man-perhaps a jeweler in his own day? Had the count left La Medusa in his keeping when he fled Paris one step ahead of the mob?

  “Has the family lived there long?” David asked.

  “Oh, as far back as anyone can remember. Long before the Revolution, that much is certain.”

  “And have they always been jewelers?”

  “In a manner of speaking. Collectors as much as purveyors. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason, just curious,” David said, intervening to free Olivia’s captive hand from Vernet’s grasp. “I can’t thank you enough for all your help, but we do have to go.”

  Olivia looked relieved to regain her freedom and allowed David to steer her toward the doors.

  “Wait-if you are interested in Cagliostro and his practices,” the professor said, in a last-ditch effort to lure them back again, “you might also like to see Franz Mesmer’s iron rods. We have them in storage!”

  “Next time!” David called out, as Olivia waved farewell, and they hurried down the steps of the museum and into the chilly dusk.

  Chapter 24

  Somewhere in the Sologne Forest, the Marquis di Sant’Angelo grew so impatient with the rate of progress they were making that he stopped the coach and exchanged places with the driver. The coachman was now reclining inside the carriage, while the marquis himself, wrapped in a hooded coat stitched from the fur of the wolves he had hunted on his estate, sat on top, cracking the whip over the heads of his four black horses.

  He was determined to arrive at the palace of Versailles in time to see the queen at the evening meal and secure an audience with Count Cagliostro. The accompanying coach, carrying the royal jewelers and their priceless diamond necklace, had long since been left behind.

  As the light began to fade from the winter sky, the carriage clattered into the village, which had sprung up solely to accommodate the needs of the ever-expanding royal court. Peasants were scurrying about in the cold, loading wagons with barrels of wine and wheels of cheese. They leapt out of the way as the marquis turned the coach into the broad avenue leading to the palace itself, rolling past the snow-covered parterres and terraces, past the empty orange groves and over the ornamental bridge above the Grand Canal. The palace itself loomed ahead, behind an immense forecourt, like a great white wedding cake of columns and colonnades. Lanterns and candles had already been lighted in several hundred of its windows in preparation for the night’s festivities.

  But then there were festivities every night.

  Once, years before, the marquis had spent a good deal of time at court, keeping company with the previous king and his notorious mistress, Madame du Barry. Louis XV had been known for his debaucheries, but the marquis had found him frank and entertaining-and vastly preferable to the present king and his court of sycophants and dandies. The only reason he had spent time at Versailles in recent years was to visit with the queen. Marie Antoinette had touched his heart upon his first sight of her there in 1770.

  The dauphine, as she was then known, had just arrived, like a gift-wrapped package from the royal house of Austria-a girl of fourteen with roses in her smooth white cheeks and a fall of fair blond hair. She was as skittish as a fawn, with wide blue eyes and a long, slender neck, and the marquis felt for her plight… a shy child who was comfortable speaking only German, deposited among a throng of jabbering Frenchmen-all of them vying for position and favor with the future Queen of France. Her fifteen-year-old husband-to-be, the dauphin, was a surly, fat sluggard the marquis wouldn’t have trusted to clean his boots.

  And now she was the most fam
ous-and in some quarters vilified-woman in all of Europe.

  When the marquis pulled in on the reins and brought the horses, foaming at their bits, to a stop, several liveried stable hands raced to open the carriage doors and the coachman stumbled out, pointing to the marquis and trying to straighten out the confusion. Sant’Angelo laughed, stepping down and leaving it to the servants to sort things out. Striding up the wide staircase, he entered the palace itself, which was buzzing like a hive with valets de chambres and ladies’ maids scuttling to and fro, and headed straight for the chambers of the Baron de Breteuil, Minister of the Royal Household.

  “I need to see the innkeeper!” the marquis exclaimed, bursting into the room, still in his wolf furs, where the baron was conferring with some elaborately coiffeured men. “I must have my usual quarters!”

  The baron immediately broke away and, shaking Sant’Angelo’s hand, said, “Of course, of course, Monsieur le Marquis, but we weren’t expecting you!” In a lowered voice, he said, “I was under the impression that Messieurs Boehmer and Bassenge had gone to see you at the Chateau Perdu… about a certain matter.”

  Breteuil knew everything that everyone was doing, at any given moment.

  “And so they have. In fact, they should be here soon.”

  “Then you’ve seen the necklace?”

  Sant’Angelo shook his head dismissively. “A gaudy piece that the queen would never wear-especially since she knows it was originally made with du Barry in mind.”

  Breteuil frowned and nodded, as if this confirmed his own suspicions. “But the jewelers are so persistent,” the baron said.

  “In their shoes, I would be, too. They’ve got a fortune tied up in that piece. If they make it back to Versailles tonight, don’t put them up anywhere near me.”

  “I understand,” he said. “And I’ll have your own rooms made ready immediately.”

  “Good,” the marquis said, clapping him on the back, in part because he genuinely liked the baron, who also had the queen’s best interests at heart, and in part because he knew such conduct was a gross breach of the elaborate court etiquette. At times like this, he missed the last king.

  For Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, life at Versailles was a life lived in public. From the moment they awoke in the morning to the moment they retired for the night, they were accompanied, assisted, advised, pampered, coddled, served, and observed. The marquis could not imagine living life as such a spectacle and he did not imagine that the teenage Antoinette had expected it either. Life at the royal Austrian palace of Schonbrunn had been, by comparison, restrained and secluded.

  On one of her first duties after her marriage at Versailles-a wildly extravagant affair that drew six thousand of France’s richest and most prominent citizens-she had been ushered into her private chambers (still shadowed by a substantial coterie of her retainers, including the Princesse de Lamballe, who was to become her close confidante), and shown the royal jewels. The marquis, in his informal role as arbiter of all things elegant and artistic, had been admitted to the august group, and he had watched as this slip of a girl, dwarfed in a dress of white brocade with enormous hoops on either side, was maneuvered into a chair for the ceremony.

  At Versailles, if Antoinette so much as plucked an eyelash, it was a ceremony.

  Two kneeling servants presented a red velvet box, six feet long and half again as high, with several dozen different drawers and compartments, all lined in pale blue silk. The bounty within was unparalleled, and the marquis could not help tallying it all up in his head as the dauphine removed and admired each of the many treasures. There were emerald earrings and pearl collars that had once belonged to Anne of Austria, the Habsburg princess who had married Louis XIII in 1615, a diamond parure, tiaras, brooches, diadems, and a pair of newly made gold bracelets with the initials MA engraved on clasps of blue enamel. The marquis even spotted in the inventory one or two pieces that he remembered from Florence, long ago, when they had adorned Catherine de’Medici before she had decamped to become the Queen of France.

  But when the dauphine withdrew a folded fan, studded with diamonds, and tried to flutter it open, the leaves remained stubbornly closed.

  The Princesse de Lamballe tried to lend a hand, shaking the fan herself, but her luck was no better.

  Sant’Angelo knew why; the Parisian jeweler had consulted him on its design, and the marquis himself had suggested a hidden clasp, perfectly concealed in a circle of white diamonds.

  “ Erlauben Sie mich,” the marquis said, leaning close. Allow me. The dauphine had flushed at his sudden proximity-and several of the courtiers reared back in shock-but when he took up the fan, undid the clasp, then, like a coquette at L’Opera, cocked his elbow and fanned himself with its silk leaves, the Dauphine spontaneously laughed-which gave the others permission to laugh, too. Continuing the joke, he said in a raised voice, “ Es ist unertraglich heib hier drinnen, denken Sie nicht?”-It is insufferably hot in here, don’t you think?-and Antoinette had beamed at him, grateful not only for the levity but for the taste of her native tongue. The marquis had spent many a year in Prussia, and the language was still at his command.

  “May I know your name?” she inquired in German. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”

  “This, madame, is the Marquis di Sant’Angelo,” the Baron de Breteuil hastily inserted himself to answer. “An Italian friend of the court.”

  “And a friend, I hope, to you, too,” the marquis replied. Although many of those present could probably follow the gist of the conversation, the fact that it was conducted in German formed a special bond between the two of them. Glancing around at the deeply rouged ladies in attendance, Sant’Angelo had leaned in even closer than before and whispered, “Have you ever seen so many appled cheeks? It looks like an orchard in here.”

  Antoinette covered her lips and tried not to laugh. It was the custom at the French court to plaster rouge on the face like primer on a wall, and he guessed that the young girl would not yet have accustomed herself to the gaudy sight of the ripe red cheeks everywhere. Even the market women tried to copy the effect using grape skins.

  “But it’s the powder,” she replied, sotto voce, her eyes straying to one of the more monumentally dusted wigs, “that makes me want to sneeze.”

  “That’s what the fan is for,” he said, fluttering it again, before showing her where the clasp was hidden and handing it back. He had had a daughter, Maddalena, in a far-off time and place, and on the last occasion he had seen her she was about this same age…

  But that was another life, and, as he had learned to do over the years, he quickly shut the door on it.

  Other gifts were presented, too, and some of these were intended for her attendants, such as a set of porcelain Sevres for Prince Starhemberg. When the ceremony was over, the dauphine extended her hand again, and reverting to German a final time, said to the marquis, “I hope that we shall be great friends.”

  “I am sure of it, Your Highness.”

  “And I believe that I shall be in need of them here.”

  She was young, but perhaps not so naive as he’d thought.

  Over the next fifteen years she had learned fast, adapting to the rites and rituals, the pomp and circumstance, of the most refined court in Europe. He had watched her grow from an awkward girl to a confident, even imperious, woman. And tonight, when he saw her at the grand couvert -where the king and queen dined in solitary splendor, while dozens of spectators looked on-the queen raised her eyes above the gold-and-enamel saltcellar and nodded a greeting. If only she knew, he thought, that the saltcellar, commissioned by King Francis at Fontainebleau in 1543, was from his own hand.

  Waving the Princesse de Lamballe to her side, she whispered in her ear, and moments later the princesse herself drew the marquis aside and said, “The queen invites you to join her at the Petit Trianon tonight. Count Cagliostro will be there, and she thinks you might like to meet him.”

  “Indeed I would,” he said.

 
The Petit Trianon was the queen’s private refuge-a separate, small palace on the grounds of Versailles, where no one was admitted unless by order of the queen herself. Consequently, invitations to her salons there were terribly coveted, and hard to come by; the marquis had once heard that even the king, despite the fact that he had given it to her, had to ask permission to enter its gates.

  At ten o’clock, Sant’Angelo approached the neoclassical palace, so much less ornate and extravagant than its Rococo counterparts, mounted the steps, and passed through several rooms painted a distinctively muted blue-gray. From the main salon des compagnie, he could hear the strains of a harp and a harpsichord, playing a song written by the queen’s favorite composer, Christoph Willibald Gluck. He assumed that it was the queen herself, an accomplished musician, who was sitting at the keyboard.

  And, as he entered, he saw that he was correct. Antoinette was playing the harpsichord, the Princesse de Lamballe the harp, while perhaps a dozen other members of the nobility were sprawled about on upholstered divans and gilded chairs, sipping cognac, playing cards, amusing themselves with one of the many Persian cats or small dogs that had the run of the place. The marquis, who had seen more than his share of imperial courts, had never known one to include quite so many pets. A parrot perched on the mantelpiece now, safely out of harm’s way, while a white monkey, on a long leather leash, explored the underside of a marble-topped console.

  The marquis waited at the threshold to be acknowledged by the queen, but she was concentrating so hard on the score that she did not see him. He recognized the Countess de Noailles, Mistress of the Household, sitting with her dreary husband at a faro table; the high-spirited Duchesse de Polignac, reclining beside a portly man in an open frock coat (frock coats, which were considered too casual for court, were encouraged at the Trianon), and a dashing young officer in a Swedish Cavalry uniform festooned with gold braid. This was the Count Axel von Fersen, emissary to the French court, and from all accounts the queen’s lover.