The Medusa Amulet (42 page)

The marquis would not get a better opportunity. Moving up swiftly behind the printer Jerome, he whispered in his ear, “Wouldn’t you like to wash that ink off your hands?”

The man whirled around and saw only the slick cobblestones
shining in the moonlight. But he shouted, “Who’s there?” and Hébert and Octave, who was still sporting the bloodstained feather in his cap, turned around.

“What are you shouting about? Can’t you see that these people need their rest?” Hébert said with a laugh.

An elderly prisoner called out to him, “Citizen Hébert—a word, I beg you—just one word!”

“There was someone right here,” the printer insisted. “He just spoke to me.”

“And what did he say?” Octave asked, smirking.

“He asked … if I wanted to wash the ink off.”

And then, before Hébert or Octave could make some rejoinder, the marquis grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and dragged him, his boots scuffing wildly at the stones, to the stone parapet above the riverfront.

“Help me!” the printer screamed. “Help me!”

With a mighty shove, Sant’Angelo sent him toppling over the wall. There was a loud splash as he plunged into the Seine.

Octave and Hébert ran to the parapet, staring down into the swiftly flowing stream, but there was no sign of him. Octave drew a pistol from his belt, and Hébert pulled his rapier from its scabbard.

But they could see nothing, and no one, to fight.

The marquis slipped behind Octave. The sound of his boots was swallowed by the cries of the prisoners, many more of whom were now pressed against the bars, their hands clutching the grate, their eyes bulging with wonder. Whatever strange miracle was occurring outside their bars, they wholeheartedly approved.

“So, you like your souvenirs?” Sant’Angelo murmured as he ripped the bloody feather from Octave’s cap.

He made the feather bob and dance in the empty air, until Octave took a wild shot at it. The marquis felt the heat of the bullet as it passed below his arm. Then he raised his sword and, in one fell swoop, sliced the man’s hand off altogether.

Still clutching the pistol, the hand fell, and Octave didn’t seem to
understand what had just happened. He stood stock-still, looking down at his own spurting wrist, before suddenly howling in pain, wedging the stump under his armpit and fleeing down the concourse.

The prisoners, delighted with the show so far, banged on the bars with tin spoons and closed fists.

The chief backed away, his sword probing the darkness in every direction.

“Where are you?” Hébert cried out. “Who are you?”

But for this last act, the marquis did not want to be invisible. He wanted Hébert to know who was about to kill him. Taking off the garland, he slowly came into view, like an image coalescing from the moonbeams themselves.

“The priest?” Hébert said.

The black cassock whipped around Sant’Angelo’s legs, blown by the wind from the river. The bloody sword glittered at his side.

“Guards!” Hébert shouted at the top of his lungs. “Guards!”

Wordlessly, the marquis moved closer.

Hébert swung wildly with his rapier, all the while retreating, but when a blow came close enough, Sant’Angelo parried it with the edge of his own sword. The clang of the steel rang out through the night air.

The prisoners shouted, “Kill him, Father! Kill him!”

Hébert’s tricornered hat fell from his head and blew along the stones. His face was white with terror, and suddenly he found himself so close to the bars that the frenzied hands of the inmates were clutching at his sleeves and collar. He whipped around, slashing at the arms extended through the grate, then turned again to confront the marquis.

There was the clatter of hooves, as mounted gendarmes, aroused by the commotion, appeared at the end of the concourse.

“Who’s down there?” the captain cried. “What’s going on?”

“Shoot him!” Hébert called out to them. “I order you! Shoot the priest!”

Sant’Angelo saw a musket lowered, and a puff of smoke. The bullet whizzed over his head and clanged off the iron bars.

With a sweep of his blade, he knocked the sword from Hébert’s hand, but a fusillade of shots suddenly ricocheted around him; the gendarmes were galloping down the concourse. Putting a hand on Hébert’s chest, he thrust him up against the seething wall of fingers and hands, hundreds of them, all intent on tearing him to pieces. Like a pack of harpies, they grabbed hold of him, rending his clothes and ripping out his hair, scratching at his flesh, digging in their nails like claws. An old man gnawed ferociously at one arm. A hollow-eyed girl inserted a knitting needle into the back of his neck as delicately as if she were making lace.

Slipping the garland back onto his brow, and holding his arms out as if in surrender to the coming soldiers, the marquis left the prisoners to their deadly work. In seconds, he had melted back into the night.

And as the horses whinnied around him, and the gendarmes swung their muskets this way and that—“Where’s the priest?” their captain cried, waving his sword, “Where did he go?”—Sant’Angelo turned toward home. The streets now were dark and silent, and most of the day’s celebrants were asleep, or lying drunk in the gutter. For the moment, their bloodlust had been sated.

Chapter 30

As he had watched their mysterious stranger descend into the Metro station across the street, David’s first impulse had been to run after him and force him to explain himself, to tell them something concrete about their adversaries. Otherwise, what use were these cryptic warnings?

But he sensed that the doctor—if that’s what he really was—had already taken as much of a chance as he was willing to.

“So what’s next?” Olivia asked. “We could camp out on the marquis’s doorstep, which might get cold, or go back to the hotel.”

Truth be told, neither of those was what David wanted to do; what he wanted to do was climb the wall around the town house, break in through the first window he could find, and scour Sant’Angelo’s collection himself, from top to bottom.

Taking out his cell phone, he checked for messages, but there were none of any consequence. He tried Sarah, got her voice mail, then tried Gary and got his voice mail, too. Every time he called, or spoke to them, his heart was in his mouth, afraid that Sarah might have taken a turn for the worse. Although he hoped for the best, he was always—secretly, and to his own dismay—expecting the worst.

“The hotel,” David conceded, as he pulled his coat off the back of his chair. “You can fill in some of the blanks on Cagliostro on the way.”

Outside, the street was nearly deserted, but on the train platform he felt oddly exposed. There were a couple of men loitering near the tracks, reading papers, or studying their BlackBerries, and though there was nothing overtly menacing about them, David got a strange vibe. He was starting to wonder if the good doctor had given him the willies, or worse yet, dropped something into his drink again. But glancing at Olivia, he could tell she was feeling edgy, too.

“Maybe we should splurge on a taxi?”

“If we can get one,” she said.

They had no sooner emerged from the station than a pair of headlights approached them from down the street. David noticed that the light on the top of the cab suddenly went from Off to On, but it was only when it stopped at the curb that he saw it was a rusty old heap, the same one that had been cruising the block an hour ago. Inside, he saw a swarthy, foreign driver, with a string of wooden beads hanging from the rearview mirror, and caught the sweet scent of Turkish tobacco.

Olivia had her hand on the door when David backed off and said, “No thanks.”

Cranking the window lower, the driver said, “What’s the problem? Anywhere you want to go.”

David tapped the door politely, and said, “Changed my mind. Thanks, anyway.”

Olivia looked confused as the driver, sneering, pulled away from the curb and drove, slowly, toward the corner.

“What was wrong with that cab?” Olivia asked.

“Didn’t feel right,” David replied, and after all they had been through already, Olivia knew enough to respect a hunch.

David waited until the taxi was just out of sight, then took Olivia’s hand, saying, “Let’s take a walk,” and ducking into the park. “We’ll catch a cab on the other side.”

It was a cloudy night, with almost no moon, but the pathway was marked every fifty yards or so by old-fashioned lampposts. The gravel crunched under their feet as they walked, and the wind stirred the
barren branches of the great old elms. No one else was on the walkway, the green metal benches were empty, and the few concession stands that they passed were sealed up behind accordion gates. A separate path sloped down on their left, toward a man-made lake and a ramshackle boathouse. A wooden sign on a shingle advertised rowboats for rent.

Olivia pulled her collar up around her neck and stuck her bare hands deep into her pockets. David wondered if she was questioning his decision.

With the leather valise slung over one shoulder, he kept an eye out, looking into the shadows on either side and occasionally turning to stare into the darkness behind them. Even he was starting to wonder if he hadn’t made the wrong call.

But then she surprised him, as she often did. “You know,” she said, launching into what she’d actually been brooding over, “Cagliostro was said to have initiated Napoleon into the secret mysteries of Rosicrucianism, among other things. And after the count was murdered in 1795, legend has it that the Emperor ordered his soldiers to find the count’s grave, dig up the body, and bring him the skull.”

“What for?”

“A drinking cup.”

“Sounds more like something Hitler would do.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” she said. “All dictators are madmen. But they shared something else, too. Napoleon was determined to uncover knowledge, in any form, from any source, and assimilate it into his growing empire.”

“Like the Rosetta Stone.”

“Exactly. That was why he sent scientists and scholars like Champollion off in the first place—to decipher the ancient wisdom of the East.”

David saw a movement in the trees, and relaxed only when a fat gray squirrel came the rest of the way around the trunk.

“And even though his motives were less benign, Hitler did precisely the same thing. He sent zealots like Dieter Mainz to Paris to
track down any arcane knowledge that might help him to erect the Reich.”

The squirrel scampered across the pathway, which circled a classical fountain—a triton rising from the deep. While David listened to Olivia expound, he tried to gauge where they were in the park and how much farther it might be before they got to the other side.

“But I wonder what Dieter Mainz was able to make of those ravings that Cagliostro left behind? I’m no Champollion, but I’d love to show some of those hieroglyphs to one of my old professors in Bologna. Is there anyone at your library in Chicago who specializes in Egyptian texts?”

He didn’t answer her.

“David?”

His attention was firmly concentrated on a figure in the trees, up ahead. All he could make out was the hint of a black leather jacket.

“There’s someone in the trees on the right,” David said, slowing his pace but purposely not stopping. He didn’t want to let on yet that he’d seen him.

Olivia looked, too, and murmured, “Maybe this is the gay pickup spot.”

Possible, David thought, especially as he could now make out a second man, even farther into the shadows, with the collar of a peacoat turned up.

“Do you want to turn around?” Olivia said.

And David wasn’t sure—until the wind carried the faintest scent of cigarette smoke his way.

Sweet and aromatic.

“Yes,” he said, stopping in his tracks.

The two men were moving closer together—for a hookup?—as David slipped his arm through Olivia’s and steered them back toward the triton fountain. He resisted turning around for several seconds, leaning in like a lover, but when he listened hard, he could hear the sound of footsteps on gravel.

And when he did turn, he could see the two men casually sauntering after them. It was no time to take a chance.

“Run,” he said, releasing Olivia’s hand. “Run!”

They both took off, racing around the fountain and down the darkened path.

When David glanced back, he couldn’t see the pursuers anymore. But he could hear the sound of twigs snapping, leaves crumbling, and footsteps pounding on the cold, hard soil near the trail.

Olivia, in her sneakers, was running at a good clip, and David made sure to stay close by her side.

But he had the feeling that the guys chasing them were loping along on either side, hidden by the trees and brush, and intent only on blocking their exit from the park.

“Where to?” Olivia panted.

And that was when David spotted the separate trail leading down to the boathouse and pointed at it.

Olivia abruptly veered off, down the sloping path to the lake, her arms spread out to maintain her balance, and David followed her. He didn’t see anyone behind them, but he was sure that they would figure out what had happened in a few seconds—if they hadn’t already.

A string of forlorn white lights dangled around the eaves of the boathouse, but the door was shut and the shutters drawn. A little wooden gate blocked the pier; Olivia vaulted it easily, with David hot on her heels. Three or four old rowboats bobbed in the black water.