The King's Gold (16 page)

“Is this them?” the man asked in an official, if weary, voice.

“Yes, sir,” came the reply.

Erik and I wiped our faces before standing to greet the detective. He wore a navy suit, and a flat tweed cap was perched on his head. He was small, with blue eyes and short grizzled hair poking out from under the cap.

“Hello, I am Officer Gnoli,” he said in good English. “I need to ask you some questions about the unsightly dead man we found in the crypt tonight.”

“Yes, certainly.”

“So, you two, sir and young lady. Sorry if you are repeating yourselves—I think you have given this story many times already. Regardless. Tonight you saw these bad men with the gun?”

“Something terrible happened in the Medici chapel...,” I began.

“Yes, I see, so they ran away, but one of them was dead, the one we found,” the officer said after he’d pressed us for a clearer description of Marco Moreno and Domenico. “So the boys with the red and the yellow hair. They were friends of this black-haired one.”

“The black-haired one—we know him,” Erik said. “Sort of.”

“At least, my family—my father knew his father.”

As I had twice before that evening, I tried to briefly describe the civil war and my family history, though my account quickly got complicated.

Officer Gnoli stopped scribbling.
“Guatemala?”

“Well, I’m half Mexican, actually, my mother’s from Chihuahua, but my biological father—”

“Yes, yes, yes, we’ll need to interview you more. This much I can tell. But first, I must see after this dead boy in the chapel. And, there are fingerprints to take—from that Luger we discovered—”

“What’s that?”

“A weapon, it was left behind here, in the dining room. All I know is that one of the palazzo’s janitors found a professor holding a veritable cannon between his thumb and forefinger and blithering about majolica.”

“Oh,
right
.” The noble-looking scholar. “I
forgot
about him. He was— He did this magic trick thing.
Where
is he?”

“He went darting out of here as if his tail had been set on fire, apparently.” Officer Gnoli tugged at the brim of his cap. “But you—you will have to stay here in town, yes? Whatever your arrangements. So that I may send my men to you to make a report.

You in particular, Signor Gomara, as you were saying you had a
struggle
with one of the victims. You may be here days, perhaps. Weeks. It’s impossible to say.”

“We could be here weeks?” Erik asked.

“It’s impossible to say?” I added.

“Yes, you can never tell how long these things will take. Yet we are finished for now,” Officer Gnoli muttered. “I understand that you were guests at the palazzo, but no one may sleep here tonight. So if you please, you will go and find yourself a hotel. If you please also, call me at this number in the morning, not too early.” He handed a card to me. “Okay?” He popped his jaw at us.

“Yes? Or, is there a problem I should know of?”

I shook my head, just as I felt Erik sneak his warm hand into mine.

“No, not at all,” we said to Officer Gnoli, very gravely, very soberly. “Yes sir, we’ll be sure to do that.”

An hour later, we sat on a train. The midnight sky was just visible through the windows. A hard, fast rain smacked crystals upon the glass.

I rested my head on Erik’s chest. He was petting my hair and chatting breathlessly about emeralds, Renaissance burial rituals, and long-lasting
cinquecento
poisons.

I squeezed him in a hug and closed my eyes, half-listening.

It was true that I wanted to hunt after the ghost of my genetic father. And I did want to dig up the buried, bloodied treasure of my ancestral Aztecs. But I knew, too, that one of the reasons I was racing through Italy like some half-crazed heroine out of Jules Verne was that I’d fallen in love with Erik Gomara.

The train raced through the dark, under the stars, toward the medieval town of Siena.

At eleven a.m. the next morning, a considerably strung-out Erik and I stood within the splendor of Siena’s Piazza del Campo, a fan-shaped courtyard made of rust-colored brick: It extends from a turreted gray-and-red Palazzo Pubblico, or city hall, which is ringed all around by cafés, a medieval cathedral, and the nimbus of the remarkable Sienese sun. The rapturously morbid St. Catherine lived here in the fourteenth century. In 1348, the Black Death swept away three-quarters of the kingdom’s citizens, leaving behind only the phobic penitent.

Yet the city’s golden warmth drew Erik and me away from our Florentine death thoughts, as it evoked less those dour citizens than its happier mythological founders, Senius and Aschius, the Bacchus-worshiping sons of Remus.

“‘Romulus and Remus were abandoned in the forest by their father,’” I read out loud from a book,
Italy: Land of the Lycanthrop
by Sir Sigurd Nussbaum, that I had purchased from a musty little shop just that morning, “‘and were cared for by a She-Wolf, who suckled the twins as if they were part of her own litter.’” I looked up. “It’s a sort of early werewolf tale—especially when you consider the mayhem that happened afterward—”

Still wearing his navy suit from the night before, Erik sat down to sun himself on the
campo,
where purple, hood-shaped flowers bloomed between the cracks. “Right—this was when Romulus and Remus became the founders of Rome, and Romulus decided he didn’t want to share any of the glory, so he bashed poor Remus’s head in with the jawbone of an ass—or did he pour poison in his ear? I might be mixing up my mythologies—”

“You’ve got the basic point. But
before
Romulus killed Remus, Remus had just enough time to conduct a little romance, and the girl gave birth to a set of twins: Senius and Aschius. Once they got the picture that Romulus was about to chop them into bits too, they snatched an effigy of the she-wolf and raced away to Tuscany. They planted said effigy in an olive grove, founding Siena there, in order to, let’s see here...” I consulted the book again. “Ah,
‘to finish their dead father’s work.’”

Erik opened one eye when he heard my voice pitch strangely.

“You were saying that Tomas might have been hunting down this gold business when he died.”

“Marco said that, yes.”

“So, finishing off a dead father’s work? See? You’re not the only crazy one.”

“It’s very comforting to know I’m as neurotic as the ancient Romans. And Marco Moreno, come to think of it—”

“Oh, angel. On you, crazy is
very
attractive.”

“And on Marco?”

“Not so much. But let’s just hope he’s still in Florence, preferably captured and writhing under Officer Gnoli’s exquisitely painful and possibly unconstitutional thumbscrews—and that Mr. Domenico has picturesquely drowned in a vat of Super Tuscan wine, or some such—”

“While we safely look for Antonio’s she-wolf.”

“Exactly. Which brings us to the riddle—how much of the third stanza do you remember?”

“The first three lines, but not the last one.”

“Okay, then, let’s hear it again.”

I recited:

IN A SHRINE AT CITY TWO

A SHE-WOLF TELLS MORE THAN I

FOUR DRAGONS GUARD THE NEXT CUE...

“And then—that’s all we’ve got to go on,” Erik said.

I shut my eyes, concentrating. “I think the last line has a name in it. Maybe...
Matthew
—agh, I just can’t remember. But what we
do
know is that the riddle mentions a
shrine
—what does that mean, exactly? Shrine. A church, most likely—”

“Any place of worship, I’d think. But there wasn’t really anything like a separation between church and state back then. So, a shrine could be practically any building in the city.”

“So, fine, keeping it at basics. We’re looking for a she-wolf—in a shrine—”

“Which would be any kind of important structure that might have been considered holy in the sixteenth century.” Erik peered around the
campo,
softly singing the riddle.
”‘In a
shrine
at City
Two
...
A She-Wolf
tells
more than I...’”

Before us sparkled the Palazzo Pubblico’s famous fourteenth-century Gothic façade, built of pink, white, and gray bricks. Its imposing tower loomed over marble sculptures and pale friezes carved with images of a fantastical forest menagerie.

“Oh no.”
We grasped each other’s hands.

“Damn.”

“Good God.”

“They’re
everywhere
.”

It was as if they had suddenly sprung out at us from their plain-sight hiding places: The predominant beast in this zoo-adorned city hall was the she-wolf, or
lupa.
We saw her snarling in bronze at the top of a marble column; two of her sisters were carved into the white stone of the façade; two more wolf mothers peeked at us from under pointed arches; and at least one glowered down from the highest parapets.

It was here that we remembered the terrible fact: “We’re looking for a she-wolf in Siena?” I asked. “The she-wolf is Siena’s
emblem
.”

“Yes.”

“It’s like a practical joke.”

“A very good one. On us.”

“We’ve got our work cut out. This place is going to be
full
of wolves.”

We began to walk away from the
campo,
toward the shining, rose-gold city, with its chiaroscuro of cobblestone streets and ebony alleyways.

“Let’s just hope these wolves are the kind that don’t bite,” Erik muttered.

His were words that I would later remember as prophetic.

“I think I’ve counted four hundred and twenty-two separate sightings of she-wolves today,” Erik babbled seven hours later as we staggered back to a twilit Piazza del Campo
.

We approached the courtyard’s cafés, chugging on water bottles and famished from our wanderings through the city’s ambiguous forest of signs. Our investigations, though taxing, had nevertheless passed without any breath of trouble from the likes of Marco Moreno. We began to believe that the villain
might
have been subjected to Officer Gnoli’s internationally disapproved interrogation techniques, or at least that he had been sufficiently admonished by Erik’s cheek bite to keep his distance from us. So we did not have to run for our lives that afternoon, yet we faced a dilemma far subtler than our own possible murders. All that day, among Siena’s frescoed magical hydras, tapestried lambs, the bird-footed women, there were the
wolves
. We saw canines suckling, howling, heraldic, scratched into walls, and crafted from bronze.

They were sculpted into fountains and gracing the tops of pillars that occupy the centers of Siena’s little piazzas. But despite Erik’s and my Sherlockian study of them, none of these curs had yielded up anything that could be remotely taken for a clue.

Nor had our inspections of the Duomo proven any more fruitful. This, Siena’s most famous shrine, throngs with gold-leafed saints gazing piously at a ceiling sanctified with red-gold stars. Down below, on the richly decorated floor, shine round inlaid mosaics. These black, terra-cotta, and white-colored stone picture circles lead up all the way up the nave. We could not make all of these out, as several had been covered by Masonite sheets, for protection and to designate them for cleaning. Still, we did see a panel showing scenes from the terrifying
Slaughter of the Innocents
, as well as curiously pagan images of female sybils.

“Yes, yes, it was beautiful, but there wasn’t any sign of Antonio in that place—
any
place,” Erik said, as we sat outside at L’Osteria del Bigelli, on the perimeter of the quickly darkening
campo
. Several couples occupied nearby tables, and at the far edge of L’Osteria’s dining area relaxed one man who arrived after the waiter took our orders. This solitary diner was wreathed by shadows and the server brought him a large dish of whitefish, which he ate in silence. Erik and I drank Chianti and tasted linguini puttanesca by the light of our table’s large candle, which was set in a very heavy red glass votive. This light flared just brightly enough to let me read the
Diario Intimo
of Sofia Medici (pocketed the night before from the library at the Palazzo Medici Riccardi) that I yanked from a purse already distended with water bottles, matches, wallets, and other bulbous necessaries.

“But Erik, Antonio and Sofia
did
live here. In Siena. Remember what Dr. Riccardi was saying about their last day in the city? I read some of her journal on the train. They moved here after he first returned from Mexico, and she and Antonio were finally married.”

“They had a hugely long engagement, didn’t they? Something like ten years. Sofia kept on putting off the wedding, saying that she’d rather drown in the Arno than become a Medici wife—and
actually,
that reminds me of something that is maybe even as important!” Erik reached out and fiddled with my engagement ring. “
We’re
getting married in eleven days now.”

I bit my lip. “I know. We’re going to have to hurry up this Aztec gold-hunting so we can make it home in time.”

“There are still tons of things to do! Your mother was throwing these cummerbunds at me a couple nights ago and I thought I was going to crawl out the window and run away. And we still haven’t decided on the music. When you stood me up two nights ago, we were going to settle on a DJ. For the rehearsal dinner. You wanted an eighties theme; I wanted seventies.”