The Medusa Amulet

by Robert Masello

  “But now that Ahmet and his friends have disappeared,” Rigaud said, “it’s like somebody’s poked a stick in the hornet’s nest.” Waving his hands at his two helpers, he added, “You know how our Turkish associates like to stick together.”

  Julius dug his handkerchief out of his pocket and held it to his lips. To his shame, he felt a trickle of warm urine running down his leg.

  “And then there was that embarrassment on the night train. How could you two have bumbled such a simple task so badly?”

  Julius debated keeping silent, or speaking, and when Rigaud didn’t add anything, said, “I did speak to them, in the dining car. As I’m sure you know.” At this point, he was just trying to feel his way along, admitting to nothing that might get him killed but supplying whatever information seemed safe. “And I do believe I got a good idea of who they are.”

  “Yes? And who are they, exactly?”

  The radiator clanked like a string of tin cans being thrown down a chute.

  “A couple of idiots. Babes in the woods. They know nothing. The girl-Olivia-will be back leading tour groups, and Franco will be back at his library desk by this same time next week. I’m sure of it.” Then, dabbing at his lip, Julius told him about following them to the Louvre, throwing in as many details as he could think of, whether they were relevant or not, in a vain attempt to seem utterly transparent. He mentioned how long they had stayed there, the precise time they left-“That’s when Ernst went back to the Crillon, to see what he could find in their room”-their subsequent visit to the Natural History Museum, and their excursion at dusk to the town house in the Sixteenth Arrondissement.

  “They were turned away at the door,” he said, “and went off to a nearby cafe.”

  “What was it called?” Rigaud asked.

  “The cafe?”

  Rigaud waited, and Julius knew that he had come to the moment of truth-how much more could he divulge? And had he-despite his best efforts-been under surveillance when he went across the street to join them?

  “I don’t remember the name.”

  The man in the necktie went into the bathroom and turned off the faucet.

  “And then what did you do?” Rigaud asked in a measured tone.

  What could he say? If he went so far as to admit that he had joined them, he would have to come up with some plausible reason for having done so. But given his role in drugging their drinks on the train-a ruse that Rigaud would assume even these babes in the woods would have been bright enough to figure out by now-how could he say it had been an attempt to ferret out any more information? Even David and Olivia couldn’t be presented as that dumb. His mind was racing, but getting him nowhere.

  “Well?”

  On the other hand, if he suggested he was trying to feel them out-perhaps for a bribe of some kind?-he would have to explain that the offer was of course extended as a sham. The seconds were ticking away, and with each one Julius knew that he was looking more suspicious.

  “What did I do then?” Julius finally said, pretending as a last resort to be taken aback by the very question. “I left them there, eating I don’t know what-should I have gone inside to see what they’d ordered?-and I came back here.” He wiped his bloody lip again in a show of false bravado. “To this reception.”

  “Really?” Rigaud said. “So you haven’t had your dinner yet?”

  “No,” Julius said, confused. “Not yet.”

  “No chance to drop into some little cafe or restaurant?” he said, his eyes still riveted on Julius, whose wet pants were sticking to his leg.

  “It’s all right,” Julius said, “I’m not hungry. Just exhausted.”

  Rigaud, as if deliberating, ran a hand carefully over his blond hair-Julius saw blood glittering on the ring that had cracked his tooth-then nodded to the young man behind the chair. A gag suddenly dropped over Julius’s head and cut into his mouth, stifling his scream, as the Turk in the necktie went into the bathroom to turn the taps back on.

  Leaving Hamid behind to mop up and deal with Escher, Rigaud ordered Ali to drive him back to the Crillon. Although his quarry was staying there, too, that wasn’t the real reason he had checked in. The Crillon, to his mind, was simply the finest hotel in Paris. The Gestapo had thought so highly of it, in fact, that they had made it their French headquarters during the Second World War, and what better recommendation could you get than that?

  Rigaud sat in the backseat of the Land Rover, looking out at the busy streets of the city, and thinking about what he’d tell Linz, and that impossible-to-please wife of his, when he got back to the Chateau Perdu. On the bright side, he could tell them that he had eliminated any further problems from Julius Jantzen, and, shortly, Ernst Escher. They had both gone off the rails and proved to be more trouble than they were worth. He made a mental note to call Joseph Schillinger in Chicago and give him some cock-and-bull story about what had happened to his faithful hound, Escher. He’d undoubtedly see right through it, but wasn’t that half the point? To scare him back into his usual compliance? And even if he wanted to protest, who would he do it to? Auguste Linz? Christ, the man was too scared even to say his name.

  “Can I tell my cousins now?” Ali asked from the driver’s seat.

  “Tell them what?”

  Ali turned his face so that the scar on his throat was especially prominent. “That it’s done? That Ahmet and the others have been avenged?”

  “Oh, yes, go right ahead,” Rigaud said. He’d forgotten for a moment that one of the reasons for this little expedition was to quell the rebellion among the worker bees. All things considered, the Turks were a useful crew, content to ask no questions and, when paid on time, willing to do anything required. It was Linz who had first suggested enlisting them. “They’re one step up from dogs,” he had observed, “and they can be trained the same way.” Rigaud might have differed in his assessment-he thought they were at least two steps up from dogs-but he never forgot that they were punctilious about their honor and their vendettas.

  As for the librarian and his tour guide, there he was less certain of his estimation. So far, they seemed like a couple of industrious drones, who had managed, by some miracle, to hang on to their bundle of papers and whatnot. But were they a threat? Did they pose any real danger to Auguste Linz and his secrets?

  Not for one second did Rigaud think that.

  Nor did he think that their efforts would wind up revealing anything worthwhile to add to Linz’s inventory.

  That Palliser fellow, for instance, the one who’d once worked for the International Art Recovery League, he had been more of a problem. There was a mercenary streak in him that made his actions more unpredictable. That was why Rigaud had decided to nip that one in the bud. Palliser, like a couple of the other investigators before him, had been a pro… and as soon as he had shown signs of getting close to the center of the web, Rigaud, on instructions from Linz, had plucked him up, flown him by helicopter to the chateau. After a bit of casual interrogation, they had dropped him down the ever-reliable oubliette. It was all like a game of chess, and if removing Palliser was like taking the queen, dispensing with David and Olivia would be like eliminating a couple of pawns. They were less trouble alive than dead.

  At the hotel, Rigaud and Ali surveyed the lobby, just on the off chance that the two young sleuths were there, then went up to their own suite. As Ali called room service, Rigaud, getting undressed, called out to him to order his usual-a Campari and soda, with a twist of lemon. Then he stepped into the shower and turned the hot water on full blast.

  He let his head hang down under the spray, his ropy, well-muscled arms leaning on the wall, and thinking, not for the first time, what an empty game it all was. Linz already had what he wanted; his position was unassailable. But he always kept his guard up, always kept his network of spies and loyalists, experts and assassins, working for him. He lived for intrigue-what else was there?-and the possibility, however remote, that someone, somewhere, might stumble upon some dark secret or device
that he had so far overlooked. Sometimes, Rigaud suspected that he did it just to keep his mind alive and his spirits engaged.

  Linz could no more exist without an adversary than night could exist without day.

  There was a cool draft as the bathroom door opened and closed, and a moment later, the door to the shower stall opened. Ali held out a glass of Campari, with a lemon twist clinging to the rim, and then, naked, stepped into the stall to join him.

  Chapter 27

  Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, Archduchess of Austria and Lorraine, widow of Louis XVI, who had been decapitated ten months before, had just been sentenced to death herself.

  From the bedroom of his Paris town house, the Marquis di Sant’Angelo was awakened by the cries of exultation in the street. The lowly sansculottes, so named by the aristocrats because they wore pantaloons instead of the knee breeches fashionable at court, were running riot with joy. As the marquis wrapped a dressing robe around his shoulders and stepped out onto the balcony, he saw the revelers banging on the doors of the houses they passed, slapping back the shutters, waving their stocking caps in the air. A misty dawn was breaking, and it appeared that it would be a beautiful day for an execution.

  It was October 16, 1793. Or, according to the new (and more “scientific”) revolutionary calendar that had recently been implemented, the sixth of Vendemiaire.

  “She’s condemned!” a sweaty laborer shouted up at the marquis: he was wearing the tricolored cockade of the Republic on his cap. “The Austrian bitch gets the razor today!”

  The national razor was one of the many colloquial names for the guillotine. Every week there was a new one.

  The laborer remained there, grinning and waiting for Sant’Angelo to display his own revolutionary zeal, but he received no such response. The marquis knew that it was unwise to appear anything but pleased-he could be denounced and tried and executed himself-but he was not about to betray his true sentiments for even a moment. He glared down until the brute in the street, feeling a strange chill enter his bones, slunk away like a whipped dog.

  Still, Sant’Angelo could hardly believe his ears. The queen had been kept a prisoner of the National Assembly for nearly two years thus far, and for all that time, the marquis had awaited some rational resolution of her ordeal. An American patriot then in Paris, a man named Tom Paine, had suggested that she be exiled to his own country, and many others were confident that the royal house of Habsburg would never let a member of its own family perish on the scaffold. They would either send an armed force to rescue her from her terrible captivity-their troops were stationed only forty leagues from the capital of France-or would make some diplomatic arrangement involving an exchange of hostages. (They held several members of the French Assembly as potential bargaining chips.) Failing that, there was always the possibility of a hefty ransom, which was the customary means of rescuing royalty suddenly stranded in foreign and hostile territory.

  But nothing-none of it-had happened. For strategic reasons that the marquis could guess, and practical considerations that made any rescue attempt too dangerous to attempt, her allies had decided to remain idle. They were simply going to let this reign of terror that held all of France in its grasp devour the daughter of the Austrian empress, Maria Theresa. Every day, the marquis had listened in horror as the tumbrels rattled over the cobblestoned streets on their way to the Place de la Revolution, carrying the prisoners, condemned at the Palais de Justice, on their last journey. Most of the time, the marquis, whose house stood well back from the main thoroughfare, heard only the catcalls of the onlookers, shouting epithets and taunts, but there were times when he could make out the victims’ sobs and screams, their pleas for mercy or prayers for deliverance, as the open carts rumbled on.

  The procession seemed endless.

  Indeed, so much blood had been spilled beneath the guillotine that deep trenches had been dug to channel the flood away.

  And still the tumbrels kept rolling.

  But ever since Count Cagliostro had revealed to him that the queen had not only owned the Medusa but spent a very unpleasant night before abruptly giving it away, he had prepared for this grim occasion. If, as he suspected, she had looked into its depths, if the moonlight had caught her reflection in the beveled glass, then the fate that awaited her now might be unthinkably horrifying. As the creator of the mirror, it was his duty to come to her aid, at any cost.

  Throwing off his robe, he dressed quickly in the priestly black vestments he had set aside in the armoire and concealed the garland under his starched white collar; then he hung the harpe -the short sword with its distinctive notched end-beneath his robe and stuck a sack of gold coins in his pocket. Racing down the stairs with a letter and a breviary in hand, he passed Ascanio and warned him to have the carriage ready for a hasty departure to the Chateau Perdu later that day.

  “Keep the horses in harness and the curtains drawn!” he bellowed, as he raced into the streets of Paris.

  Although the queen had been interrogated for the past two days, the sentence of death had only been passed at four in the morning, and the whole city was abuzz. Everywhere, people were gathered at street corners, or in the doorways of shops and taverns, chattering away, laughing, slapping each other on the back, singing a few bars of “La Marseillaise.” It was a holiday mood, and Sant’Angelo’s heart sickened.

  What did they truly know of the woman who had been sentenced?

  He, too, had heard the vile stories that had been spread for years.

  That she had purchased a diamond necklace with two million livres stolen from the national treasury.

  That she and her loyal retainers Lamballe and Polignac had enticed the members of her Swiss Guard to join them in orgies at Le Petit Trianon.

  That she had advised the starving peasants, who had no bread, to eat cake.

  But all of the stories, he knew, were lies-lies designed to sell papers and pamphlets. Calumnies whose sole purpose was to inflame the mob and feed the fires of the Revolution-fires that needed constant stoking. For all of their talk of reform and revolution, the likes of Danton and Robespierre and Marat had plunged the country into even greater turmoil and despair, into war with neighboring countries and abject poverty at home. If these self-anointed leaders did not keep the people aroused with calls to preserve the Revolution, or to defend it from one imaginary foe after another, then the people might shake themselves awake from the trance they were in and begin to question the very men who had drenched their streets in blood and made France a pariah among the civilized nations of the world.

  Even his clerical garb, with his broad-brimmed black hat shielding his face, made Sant’Angelo an object of unwelcome attention on the streets. Much of the clergy had been purged, and only those priests who had taken the constitutional oath were permitted to perform the customary ecclesiastical functions. Marie Antoinette had never wavered from her firm Catholic faith, and the marquis knew that she would never admit to her presence-much less make her final confession to-any clergyman who had sworn such an oath.

  But he also knew that, once she saw his face beneath the black brim, she would understand that something else was afoot.

  As he approached the Conciergerie, once a Merovingian palace, but now-along with the Tour de L’Horloge and the Palais de Justice-the hub of the Revolutionary Tribunal, he could feel its silent menace poisoning the very air. A Gothic fortress, it was recognizable from afar by its three towers-the Caesar Tower, named for the Roman emperor; the Silver Tower, so-called because it reputedly held the royal treasury at one time; and the third and most awful tower of all, the Bonbec, or “good beak.” The name was inspired by the “singing” of the prisoners who were consigned to its torture chambers.

  The marquis hurried along the banks of the Seine as it caught the full morning light, and across the old stone bridge. There was a strange heavy air in the courtyard, compounded of victory, revenge, and a vague sense of unease. Even the hostlers and guards, going about their usual business,
seemed to feel the weight of what they were about to do. Killing the king had been bad enough; killing the queen, the weaker vessel, the mother of two living children and the last person who would ever sit upon a throne of France, felt, even to some of the firebrands among them, fundamentally ignoble.

  In all the commotion and confusion-horses being tethered to the tumbrels, gendarmes reading out the lists of those to be executed that morning and corralling them into the waiting carts, lawyers searching for their doomed clients-the marquis was able to make swift progress toward the queen’s own chambers in the inner courtyard. Looking up, he could see the narrow window of her cell, not only barred but partially blocked up. Two sentries stood at the door to the tower, and he brandished his letter of authorization from the Tribunal (which he had forged several weeks before, and signed in the name of Fouquier Tinville, the principal prosecutor in the case against the queen). He watched their worried faces as they debated its merits.

  “Come, come,” the marquis said impatiently, “the widow Capet is entitled to her last communion.” The words- the widow Capet -were like ashes on his tongue, but that was how the court now referred to her. The ancestors of Louis XVI had borne that ordinary surname.

  “But she already refused a priest yesterday,” one of them objected.

  “She wasn’t on her way to the guillotine then.”

  “She says that any priest who’s pledged his first allegiance to the Constitution is no priest at all.”

  “I’ll hear that from her own lips,” Sant’Angelo said, as the massive gong in the clock tower rang out. “Or would you rather explain to the prosecutor why the widow was late to her appointment on the scaffold?” He made as if to leave in a huff, when the sentries grudgingly let him pass.

  Holding up the bottom of his black robe, he ascended the winding steps three at a time, waving the letter at two more guards, who were presently occupied with wrestling a condemned husband away from his sobbing wife, then up to another barred door. Here again he showed the letter, but once he determined that the jailer could not read, he quickly produced his purse and poured a cascade of coins into the man’s weather-beaten hand.