The Medusa Amulet

by Robert Masello

  “So you got it,” she said, touching La Medusa as tenderly as one would touch the crown of a baby’s head.

  “Yes,” David replied, holding her more tightly. “Now I have everything.”

  “Can we get the hell out of here?” Ascanio growled. “It’s a long way back to Paris.”

  Olivia slipped behind the wheel and, after taking another gander at the splint, handed the bag of drugs to Ascanio. “I’m sure you’ll find some painkillers in there. I’ll find the closest hospital.”

  “No!” he objected. “I told you, we’re going straight back. I’m not having some hick doctor meddle with my leg.”

  As she pulled the car back onto the trail, she glanced over at David to see what he thought, but he appeared to agree with their passenger. “Paris,” he said, resolutely. “As fast as we can get there.”

  “But I’ll still need to know something,” Ascanio said, popping open a vial of pills and hastily swallowing several of them dry. “If you traded the Maserati for this piece of shit, you will please have to tell me why.”

  Part Five

  Chapter 42

  Olivia drove the little Peugeot straight into the hospital emergency entrance, and David had hoisted Ascanio halfway out of the backseat before he protested and grabbed for the Medusa hanging under David’s shirt.

  “That belongs to Sant’Angelo!” he said, his words slurred by the Percocets he’d taken. “Give it to me!”

  But David pulled back and let the emergency workers running out of the hospital strap Ascanio to a gurney and wheel him inside. It was clear he had lost a lot of blood, and the makeshift tourniquet was all but falling off. One of the doctors was asking David a battery of questions about what had happened and who the man was, when David-pleading that he spoke no French-bolted back to the car and told Olivia to gun it.

  “Wait!” the doctor shouted, running down the drive as the Peugeot pulled away. “You can’t do this!”

  But David watched the hospital recede in the rearview mirror, as Olivia headed back into the Paris traffic. Even she looked uncertain about what to do next.

  “The airport,” he said.

  “You don’t want to call the marquis? There’s quite a lot you should tell him, no?” While Ascanio, knocked out by the drugs, had snored in the backseat, David had filled her in during the long drive from the Loire Valley, and it was a miracle that she had been able to keep control of the car the whole way. He could think of no one else in the world who would have been able to do the same.

  “Maybe the marquis could help?” she added.

  “No,” David said. “Just drive.”

  Using the BlackBerry from the doctor’s bag, he hastily dialed Gary’s number in Chicago.

  “It’s me,” he said, the second Gary picked up. “How is she?”

  “Hanging on. Where the hell are you?”

  “On the way to Orly Airport.” He had not wanted to have this discussion with Ascanio in the car-snoring or not.

  “You’re not on a plane yet?” Gary said, sounding downright angry.

  “I’ll explain later. I’m coming as fast as I can.”

  He heard Gary blow out a breath in disgust. “Maybe I didn’t make it clear enough, David. There’s not much time. Emme was here all afternoon, and for all I know, that’ll be the last time she ever gets to see her mom. Sarah’s waiting for you, David. She’s been waiting for you. But there’s only so much she can do.”

  “I know,” David said, his fingers automatically feeling for the Medusa. “I know.”

  “Christ,” Gary said, “no promotion is that important.”

  That hurt, but David knew where it was coming from. Gary didn’t understand the delay-how could he? And what could David have ever said that would have persuaded him? “Please, just tell her I’m coming. I’m coming!”

  When he hung up and the car had to stop at a traffic light, he felt Olivia’s eyes on him.

  “You don’t trust Sant’Angelo?” she asked.

  And David admitted, “No, not completely.” He turned to look at her. “He thinks the mirror is his.”

  “It is, isn’t it?”

  “But he’s not the one who sent me to find it. And he’s not the one who promised to save my sister’s life with it.”

  “What if he said he would let you?”

  “What if he said he wouldn’t?” he replied. “Can I take that chance? Now?”

  The light changed, and Olivia took off again. David set his jaw and tried to gather his thoughts. Everything had been moving so fast, and there was no letup in sight. But in his gut he knew that returning to the marquis’s town house could cause anything from a fatal delay to the loss of the Medusa altogether. No matter what he did, he would be forced to betray someone-Mrs. Van Owen or the Marquis di Sant’Angelo. He’d had to make a choice, and with Sarah’s life hanging in the balance, he’d done the only thing he could possibly do.

  Now he just prayed that the instructions in The Key to Life Eternal would work. He knew every word of the text by heart-he had read them a hundred times-but putting them into effect would be another matter altogether.

  As they neared the airport, the traffic slowed. Buses and taxis vied for space with thousands of cars, and the lanes were narrowed for random security checks.

  “Try Air France,” David said, thinking it would probably be his best bet. If not, he could always run to another terminal.

  Olivia jockeyed the car to the curb, cutting off a rental van with only inches to spare, and abruptly stopped.

  They turned to each other and she said, “You’re going to make it, David. I can feel it.”

  David wished he felt the same way. Reaching out to her, he held her close, kissed her, and said, “Stay safe. I will come back as soon as I can.”

  A cop waved his baton, urging them to move along.

  “I love you,” he said.

  She smiled, kissed him back-her warm lips lingering for just a second-before pushing him toward the door. “Tell me that in Firenze.”

  And then, with his backpack slung loosely over one shoulder, he ran into the Air France terminal. With no luggage to weigh him down, he headed straight for the first-class ticketing section and asked when the next nonstop flight to Chicago would be.

  “Flight 400 is leaving in thirty-five minutes,” the clerk said, as David slapped his passport and credit card down on the counter.

  “One ticket,” he said, “one way.”

  “But I’m afraid,” she said, consulting her computer screen, “it’s full.”

  “I’ll take anything. Coach, the cargo hold, you name it.”

  She smiled nicely, but he could tell he had already made her nervous. And why wouldn’t he? There were scratches all over his face, he was dressed entirely in black, he hadn’t shaved, he was buying a one-way ticket. For all he knew, she’d already pressed the security button hidden beneath the counter.

  “Listen,” he said, in the most reasonable tone he could muster, “my sister is very ill, and I have to get home. Can you help me?”

  “Our next flight to Chicago,” she replied, her fingers clicking over the keyboard, “doesn’t leave until this evening, but if you wanted to fly to Boston, and connect there with…”

  But by then David had already decided what to do, and taking back his passport and card, he loped down the corridor, studying the Departures list for Flight 400. It was already boarding at Gate 23. Dodging around the other travelers, he headed for the gate, but saw a long line of people already waiting to go through the security check-in.

  And behind him, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a blue-uniformed cop in a white kepi following briskly in his wake. Another one was hustling to catch up.

  He ducked into a coffee bar, then out again on the other side, and into the first men’s room he saw. He went to the last stall on the end, latched the door, and rooted around in his bag, pushing aside Auguste Linz’s journal and pulling out the silver garland. Quickly buckling the bag again, he slipped
it back onto his shoulders.

  Then, with a silent prayer, he settled the garland on his brow.

  He waited, stock-still, but felt nothing. My God, he thought, had he done something wrong? It wasn’t working. Had Sant’Angelo and Ascanio deliberately failed to tell him something? And what if he got all the way to Chicago and found out that he was missing some crucial step with La Medusa, too?

  But then, just as the panic was rising, he noticed something strange-a sensation like cool water being poured over the top of his head. He actually touched his hair, thinking it would feel wet, but it didn’t. It felt just the same. But the sensation continued, and it had descended to his face and neck, then his shoulders and chest. He kept patting himself, but his body was completely and palpably there.

  And then he saw something strange. Reflected in the back of the steel door, he saw his own murky image-only his upper body was no longer part of it. As he watched in shock, the rest of him, too, began to vanish. He slapped at his thighs, feeling a surge of terror, but his thighs felt the blow, and his hands felt the flesh. Still, staring in amazement at the back of the door, he could see that his legs were also invisible.

  And when he looked down at his feet, he watched as they, too, boots and all, disappeared. He stamped them on the floor-he felt the hard tiles, he heard the thump-but he couldn’t see anything there.

  Nothing at all was reflected now, however blurrily, in the back of the stall door.

  He could twitch every finger, curl every toe-they felt just the same as always-but he also felt weightless, the way he imagined an astronaut might feel in zero gravity. He reached out to touch the latch on the door and found it oddly difficult to do. Without being able to see his own limbs and watch where they were in space, he discovered that it was very hard to coordinate his movements. Even something as simple as unlatching the door took a concentrated effort, and he suddenly understood why Ascanio had resisted wearing the garland until the last moments of their mission. It was too easy to make a fatal blunder.

  He had just stepped out of the stall when the two cops burst into the men’s room, and he froze in place. It was a long, narrow space and they moved quickly to check for feet under the stalls. Several were occupied, and the men at the sinks, seeing that something was up, made hasty departures.

  With the end of his baton, one of the cops knocked on the closed doors and said, “ Ouvrez la porte, s’il vous plait. C’est la police.” The other, unfortunately, had moved to block the exit.

  David stood, not four feet from the cop with the baton, holding his breath, as toilets flushed and the doors, one after another, obediently opened. Looking into the wall-length mirror, he saw the cop, he saw the row of stalls, but not a sign of himself. It was positively unnerving.

  The cop glanced in each compartment, looking increasingly perturbed, before turning to his companion and saying, “ Ou est-il alle? ” He threw up his hands in confusion. As the other cop came over to see for himself, David slipped out the exit.

  Zigzagging among the crowd, who occasionally reacted to his proximity with a sudden flinch or quizzical turn, he ran straight to the security check, where the line was even longer than it had been. But between the Medusa still hanging under his shirt and the garland and flashlight still in his backpack, he doubted he would ever be able to go unnoticed through the metal detectors. He scanned the people at the front of the line, and one of them was a teenager with his ankle in a cast and aluminum crutches under each arm. David slunk in right behind him, and when, predictably, the alarms went off, David scooted around one side of him and took off down the corridor.

  Gate 23 was off on his left, but he could already see a flight attendant bundling up the tickets she’d collected, while the other was kicking loose the doorstop to the boarding ramp. He scooted past them-they both raised their heads at the errant breeze-and was halfway to the hatchway when he saw that that, too, was being closed.

  “Hold it!” he shouted without thinking, and the steward stopped, looking all around to see where that voice might have come from, but it provided just enough of a delay for David to breeze onto the plane. The hatchway was pulled shut, and David breathed his first sigh of relief.

  Looking into both cabins of the plane, however, he could see that the ticketing clerk had been right. Not a single seat was empty.

  But then, how could he have sat in one, anyway, without somehow giving his presence away? All it took was someone hearing him breathe, or tripping over his invisible legs on the way to the bathroom. He couldn’t even hide out in one of the stalls without eventually drawing attention to the Occupe sign that never went out.

  The plane taxied away from the gate, and then, to David’s anguish, lingered on the ground for what seemed an interminable time. He glanced at his watch, before remembering that he couldn’t see its face anymore. Several times, the pilot came on to apologize, and to explain that a storm front moving east had slowed down all traffic heading west. But David heard a lot of unhappy muttering among the passengers and crew before, having idled on the ground for at least an hour or two, the plane finally took off.

  Once it had settled into its cruising altitude, he found as much of a sanctuary as he could-a corner of the little space between the front and back cabins, under the porthole window of an emergency exit. If he scrunched down with his knees drawn up tight, and his back against the vibrating wall, and stayed aware of any steward who occasionally came through to retrieve something from one of the storage bins, he just might be able to make it all the way unnoticed. He’d be stiff as a board when he arrived, but he’d get there.

  The flight time, he knew, had been posted as nine hours. But he wondered, given the weather conditions, how much time it would really take.

  There was no way he could call Sarah or Gary to see where things stood… but he knew that Sarah had said she would wait for him, and they had never let each other down yet. Wait for me, he muttered under his breath, wait for me.

  Chapter 43

  When the Marquis di Sant’Angelo burst into the hospital room, trailed by a nurse pulling on his sleeve, Ascanio was just awakening from the anesthesia.

  “You are all right?” the marquis said, leaning over his bedside. He had certainly seen him looking better, but he had also seen him looking worse.

  “Monsieur,” the nurse was complaining, “these are not visiting hours, and the patient is still in recovery. You may come back when -”

  But Sant’Angelo brushed her aside and clutched his dear friend’s hand. One leg was in a formidable cast, but all in all, Ascanio looked as if he would come through the ordeal intact.

  “I’ll be fine,” Ascanio said, groggily, as he squeezed the marquis’s hand to reassure him. “But a fine pair we’ll make,” he added, gesturing at the marquis’s ebony walking stick. “A couple of gimps.”

  “Not for long,” Sant’Angelo said. “The doctors tell me they got the bullet out fine, and you’ll be walking perfectly well in a few months.”

  Ascanio nodded, and the nurse, after checking his blood pressure and offering him a sip of water through a straw, left the room, throwing one more murderous glance at the marquis.

  Opening his fur-collared coat, Sant’Angelo drew a chair to the bedside, and said, “Tell me what happened.”

  “David didn’t tell you already?”

  “Franco? He told me nothing. He called, said you were here, and hung up before I could ask him a thing. I thought he would be here, in fact.” A look crossed Ascanio’s face that worried the marquis. “What did he not want me to know?” Sant’Angelo said.

  Ascanio pointed a finger at the water, and the marquis held the straw to his lips again. And then, haltingly, Ascanio told the story of their assault on the chateau, of their final battle with Linz, and the ensuing fire and destruction. But when he was done, the marquis was still awaiting the one piece of information Ascanio had seemed to scrupulously elide. He only hoped it was an effect of the anesthesia.

  “ La Medusa,” he prompted,
his eyes actually flitting about the room. “Where is La Medusa?”

  Ascanio looked away, and Sant’Angelo pulled his chair so close to the bed it was scraping the rail.

  “Where is La Medusa?” he said, his voice taking on an edge of steel. “And where, for that matter, is David Franco?” He hardly needed a map anymore to put the two missing pieces together.

  And that was when Ascanio told him that David had made off with it. “I was in no condition to chase after him,” Ascanio pleaded. “They dropped me at the hospital, and that girl drove them off like a bat out of Hell.”

  Hell, Sant’Angelo thought, was where he’d send them, if he didn’t get back what belonged to him. Hadn’t he told this Franco everything he needed to know? Hadn’t he revealed to him secrets that he had told no other man? And this was how he was to be repaid?

  “He’s on his way home,” Ascanio said. “To save that sister of his! I’m sure of it.”

  Sant’Angelo was sure of it, too. He had foreseen something like this happening. It was why he’d had one of his minions trace the call David had made from his home, and cross-check the name of hospice patients in that immediate vicinity. David’s sister, he’d learned, was named Sarah Henderson, and she was in a place called Evanston, just outside Chicago. In spite of everything the marquis had done for him, it was clear to Sant’Angelo that David had more important priorities right now than returning his property to him. First, there was his sister. Not unexpected. And ultimately, there was his loyalty to the woman who had sent him on this mission to begin with.

  Plainly, the librarian was not as innocent as he’d seemed. That, or he had had some iron injected into him by recent events. Either way, Sant’Angelo had to grudgingly admire the man’s nerve.

  But the time had come for the marquis to put aside all subterfuge. At long last, he had done away with his nemesis at the chateau-that black stain on the soul of the world-and now it was time for him to reclaim what was due him- La Medusa, and his long-lost love in the bargain.