The King's Gold (31 page)

Il Noioso Lupo Retto,

otherwise known as

Antonio.

“Oh she’s gone insane,” I shouted when I smelled carbon.

“You’re going to burn it! You’re holding the lighter too close.”

“Don’t worry. I had Erik make two copies of the text the day before yesterday.”

“Yolanda, stop that—
that’s a very valuable piece of paper
.”

“Fine—fine—God, you
women
,” said Erik. “And she’s right about you, you pyromaniac, give it to me.”

“What’s the theory?” I asked.

“Erik showed me the journal—Sofia talks about waving a banner in front of a fire—”

“Lola, remember the Rite of Naming? What did she write...something like...‘
I stood before the flames and unfurled a parchment. This paper looked quite empty—but, as the parchment glowed before the flame, mysterious Ciphers appeared on the page.’
It doesn’t matter—just have a little patience.”

“I really don’t think that’s possible under the circumstances.”

Erik held the little flame a short distance beneath the missive; I could hear its gentle smoldering, the light sound of crackling.

“Oh, whatever you’re doing, I can’t watch,” I said, staring.

“It may not work,” said Erik. “The ink’s probably already evaporated. My only hope is that the salt preserved it.”

“What ink?”

The paper shimmered beneath our eyes. The tiny flame beneath it sent up a bloomlet of rich light, which haloed the letters with green and gold.

“Nothing’s happening,” Yolanda said.

“Wait.”

After more than a minute, a red shadow appeared on the paper. This penumbra was formed of fine, curving lines. They broadened, ramified, like molten iron poured into a sword’s mold.

“There’s a shape,” hissed Yolanda. “There’s a pattern here—some kind of insignia.”

I reached out and traced the specter on the page, which was as warm as skin.

“It’s a note written in invisible ink,” I breathed.

We leaned our three dark heads together and read the ancient message.

“CIVITAS DEI”

“It says
Civitas Dei
,” I rasped.

“Oh, oh, oh! There’s the third hint—it
worked
.” Erik began nervously dancing around the room. “I can’t believe it worked. Invisible ink—I can’t tell you the chances of our being able to read this. The words must have been spelled out in, I don’t know—vinegar, urine, lemon juice. Maybe allum—”

“How did you know to do this?” I asked, as Yolanda ran over and snatched the paper from Erik.

“Sofia played this trick for her coven in the Mithras baths. Remember the journal?”

“In the Rite of Naming—when she waved the paper in front of the fire—”

“Ciphers appeared, with their Witch-names.”

“And then they started feeling the effects of the drug.”

“Yes, but here, look at this—at the way Antonio signs the letter.

“‘So ends my letter, filled as it is with Tricks & Clues. Only if you study my words, and what lies beneath them, will you discover the Key to the mystery that waits for you in Rome.’”

“Invisible ink was a
huge
trend among sixteenth-century cryptographers. And then Antonio tells us to look for an invisible city? I thought, well, invisible
ink
—”

“‘Only if you study my words, and what lies beneath them,’”
I cheered.

“Talk about a subtext.”

“
Civitas Dei
—that means ‘City of God,’” Yolanda translated, rapid-fire. “Ugh...what’s that—Augustine.”

“St. Augustine,” I said. “Christian writer. Fifth century.”

“That’s the title of his major book,” Erik added. “Antonio uses it as a double pun—the cipher’s invisible, and the City of God’s invisible, too, because it’s in Heaven.”

“Well, not just in Heaven, right?” Yolanda shut her eyes tight.

“The invisible city? That’s the whole point of the church. To make the invisible
visible.
”

“The
church,”
I jabbered. “It’s the icon of the invisible city.”

“Best guess,” my sister said, “is that what we’re snooping around for is a cathedral, a chapel, a basilica—”

“Ohhh...but wait.” Erik stopped dancing and held up his hands. “This is exciting and everything,
but
I do think it’s time for us to take a break now. We should just take our Vicodin and sleep for another twelve—”

“Which one, though?” Yolanda asked me.

“God, which church,” I said. “In Rome. More churches here than Starbucks.”

“I’m actually not kidding about this,” said Erik.

“‘City Three’s Invisible,’”
quoted Yolanda. “‘
Within this Rock, find a Bath / Burn Love’s Apple, see the Clew / Then Fly from my Wrath’...
Okay we’re looking for a church—but what’s the
Rock
?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “But maybe the
Bath
’s a baptismal font.”

“Could be right—”

“And we already know about the
Love’s Apple
and
Wrath
business and don’t have to repeat that.”

“Okay then, you ready to go, Lola? You look strong enough. I want to get started. I’ve been going nuts sitting on my keister around here—”

“Let me just get some Advil. And did you bring some jeans I could borrow? And a shirt?”

“Yes, oops, watch out. Gomara’s having a fit.”

“Dammit!”

Both of us looked at Erik. He remained as pale as a sport sock, and anxiety clenched his features as he blustered: “I just think we should
take a minute.
I mean, sure: Would I
like
to flop around in a big mountain of Aztec gold that my genius has rescued from the sands of time? Yes. Do I
want
all of my colleagues to get asthma attacks from jealousy because I’m on the cover of
National Geographic
?
Yeah!
But if I have to get my tits burned off, Indian wrestle with contract killers, or deal with the possible death of my fiancée just one more time, I might just go totally, flamingly
whacked
, girls—seriously.”

But we did not heed this warning.

“My oh my, Erik, you are getting into a state,” my sister drawled. “Though I’ll admit you’ve got a point. I mean, finding Montezuma’s stolen gold? Psssshhht. No one’s ever done that, right? And how we supposed to do it? Using some old clues left to us by a Renaissance crackpot, we have to find one little gold medal in a church, in a city that’s busting with gold-stuffed churches? While hoping that we don’t get bumped off by some booby trap or cross paths with the Blues Brothers?”

“That’s the size of it.”

Yolanda walked quickly over to the bureau, where she’d put her Stetson, which looked big enough to sail back to Long Beach in.

Keeping her eyes on him, she put the hat on, taking care to wickedly tilt it over one eye. “Look.
Gom-a-ra
. I’ve led twenty-eight linguists through the malarial Guatemalan swamps where there was no road, no path, no
nothing
but the scent of eucalyptus to guide me, and I found them the last known living soul who still spoke fluent Xinca. And I was once hired to track a band of wild pygmies that no Spanish-speaker had ever seen, and for sixteen days I wandered through that rain forest full of giant cats and enough mosquitoes to give you epilepsy, before sitting down with the little folks to a nice cup of hashish tea. So you see, what you’re talking about here—it’s just music to my ears. So come on. Get your carcass up. Take your Ritalin, or whatever. There’s no time for you to have a conniption, man! Let’s
go
rampaging.”

And when that didn’t work, she said: “Fine. Lola, you get the arms; I’ll get the feet.”

“Okay.”

A small sumo match ensued. As the battle waged between two of de la Rosa’s daughters against my one darling, Erik did not face the fairest odds.

Eventually, and inevitably, through the use of kisses, squeezes, threats from Yolanda, and an eloquence of assurances from me, we were able to persuade Erik to help haul my dilapidated bones out the front door. Soon, out we excitedly raced, or, rather, enthusiastically staggered, into the Eternal City’s wilderness of churches—a glorious temple to God and art that I now, in cold retrospect, wish I had never heard of, stepped foot in, or seen.

The early morning sun glittered like the finest jewel in the Vatican’s collection as we hurled ourselves into a gold-tastic dream called Rome. Centuries ago, Antonio had plotted his murder of Cosimo I within these walls, laying down his breadcrumb trails, his traps. But since that time the city had shifted shape around his scheme, perhaps irrevocably burying the clue that he had hidden here.

“Thirty-eight cathedrals in the city, and most of them rehabbed by the pope’s interior decorators in the past couple hundred years. Not much of a chance of actually finding what we’re looking for,” Yolanda gleefully complained as we set out to search all of the cathedrals—aka,
Civitas Dei
. We had just exited the eastward-situated St. Peter in Chains, having found nothing there but the shocking perfection of Michelangelo’s
Moses
. From this church, we were to brave the infinite arts of the Vatican and St. Peter’s Basilica. “Though
all
of this is just a side business to finding where Pop’s buried. Because, what if Moreno
isn’t
lying? What if he’s right, and Dad’s here
—
”

“Oh, well, yes, Tomas
is
here,” I answered.

“Because, you know, it never made sense to me that we couldn’t find his body in the jungle. And I was thinking—maybe he just came over here and got into trouble, couldn’t get in touch with me. Like, once, he woke me up in the middle of the night; he was calling me from the Sahara, I didn’t even know he was gone.

I’m like,
where the
hell
are you, ya old buzzard?
He said that he’d been on the trail of this sixth-century gold diadem, ancient Libya, belonging to some Princess Badar al-Budur. He’d been buried up to his neck in a sandstorm, nearly died. Maybe something like that happened here. Except, he couldn’t get out of his fix this time.”

“No, I’m sorry, but it didn’t—”

“You’d better drop that line about Dad still being alive. Because do you even understand what you’re saying, munchkin? If he’s alive, the only reason I wouldn’t have seen him is because he abandoned me.” Though she was talking about such grim matters, she seemed cheerful enough, even slapping me on the back.

“And the old dads, well, he promised he’d never leave me high and dry.”

I hitched down the red nylon top my sister had lent me. “He is alive, Yo. I can prove it.”

“Told you to
can it—
”

“Wait. Wasn’t there something we heard about that?” Erik asked me, hiking up his backpack.

We both looked at him. “Something we heard?”

“Something we heard about Tomas—”

“We’ve been hearing a lot of things...”

“Was it about Dad dying?” Yolanda asked.

“Yes. There was some kind of—some kind of...,” he mumbled. “It’ll come to me.”

“Sounds like a belladonna flashback,” Yolanda concluded after giving Erik a close eyeballing. “Or maybe Gomara really is schizing. Whatever it is, wish I had a camcorder.”

I watched as she hacked her arm like a machete through the crowd in front of us, which is how she savagely cleared out any obstructions lying in her path in the rain forest. The breeze that she whipped up with her velocity made her hair flutter around her shoulders, and her face shone like an impatient saint’s beneath the brim of the Stetson.

“Look at you,” I said. “You’re so happy.”

“Guess you could call it that.”

“I’ve been wanting you to look like this ever since you moved home.”

“Home.”

“That’s right.”

“Long Beach, California, is the
home
of the Quik-E-Mart and the ninety-nine-cent store and the chicken fajita wrap.”

“There’s also this really nice bookstore there, I’ve heard—”

“What I’m saying is, Long Beach is for suckers. It’s got nothing but softball and Christians, and your mother sewing me up some bridesmaid’s dress that makes me look like a trannie. We should all move.”

“Where?”

“New York, São Paulo, Caracas. Here.”

“You want to move to Caracas?”

“Maybe.”

“Slow down. Jesus, you’re killing me,” sputtered Erik.

“You shouldn’t have brought your groom-to-be, L,” she said, looking at him over her shoulder. “He looks like a dug-up dead rat.”

“That would be the effect of the poison and the excruciating vomiting, Yolanda,” said Erik. “Though I appreciate the concern.”

“You know what I mean, and you’re welcome for the concern. I just want you to keep your eyes sharp.”

“One thing,” I said. “Most of the churches have gold fixtures. Watch out for gold that looks red—it’s likely to be in a church that Antonio had ties with.”

“What?”

As we pressed deeper into the city, I explained: “We think that the gold’s going to be reddish. It’s described that way in some of the colonial histories. And it’s the color of the medals.”

“
Red
-gold? All right. But what you’re really saying is the nobility fat cats got Montezuma’s wampum after all.” Yolanda’s legs and arms swung as she swatted her invisible machete once again through Rome’s crowds; tourists and locals alike fell like jungle vines as she cleared our path. “I could have told you
that.”

She was leading us to the Vatican, straight west, where the crush of people was at its most intense. Fashionable women in impossible heels floated in and out of streets made deadly by whizzing Vespas. We passed the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps (Keats, Shelley), and dove in and out of the Pantheon (with Raphael’s remains). Dark and pale faces hurled toward us, then vanished. An assembly line of tourists’ shoulders knocked at my skull; foreign hips swayed around us in perilous patterns.

Half a mile from the papal palaces, a toffee-colored woman bumbled into me before turning a hard left into another battalion of tourists. As she cleared from my view, I had a glimpse of something—someone—in the crowd.

And that sight dipped me in ice: I saw the hard-etched, blue-eyed, golden-haired, horrible face of Domenico. Massive shoulders, gorilla neck. Slitted eyes combing the crowd. He did not look back at me but at the swarm.