The King's Gold (10 page)

“Lola,” Erik said. “I’m in the dark here—”

“Antonio made a clue of the room in the letter—it’s subtle, but it’s there,” Marco pressed. “The question is, why?”

“Oh, you’re not still chattering about
that
?” Dr. Riccardi said.

“Ale! Ale! Marco,
you
talk to your friends. I’m finding it too difficult.”

“I brought them only for you to look at, Isabel.” Marco moved over to her and his hoodlums, who looked big and muscled and completely out of place in the delicate salon. “I thought you would find them invigorating.”

“You
beast
.”

“Who are
those
guys?” Erik touched his belly. “God, everybody works out a lot around here—”

“Honey—”

“And what were you talking about, being ‘abducted’? A band of rabid Chippendales dancers busted into a used book store and kidnapped its owner to take you...to dinner?”

“Erik, there’s a lot I have to tell you. About him, who he is.”

“Marco Moreno.”

“
Let’s have some wine,”
Marco was at this moment suggesting to the doctor.

“But before I do—and you freak out”—I pressed Antonio’s missive into Erik’s hands—“please, just take a look at this letter. I’m hoping you can help me with it.”

He took hold of the onionskin pages, inflating his cheeks.

“Because I’m such a flexible guy, I’ll put this whole Rico Suave–red dress–unexplained flight to Italy thing on the back burner.”

“Just for a minute.”

“Hmmm, all right. What have we got here. It looks...old.” Erik glared down at the writing, then raised his eyebrows.

“What—what
is
this?”

“It’s a letter written by Antonio Medici—”

“Who you were just talking about—the psychotic one? The killer? The one who went with Cortés—”

“Yes.”

“Oh—the
gold
. What you were texting me about—”

“There’s a riddle, and Antonio says that he has a map to the treasure.”

“To Aztec gold—
Montezuma’s
gold,” he rapped out.

“That’s right.”

He lightly ruffled the papers. “I don’t see a map in here.”

“Read it, read it, read it.”

“Sit down, please,” Dr. Riccardi was saying in Spanish as she stood by the huge walnut dining table, which was set with silks and silver. She puckishly managed to navigate me into a chair between Erik and Marco, with Domenico and Blasej opposite us.

Taking her place at the head of the table, she breathed: “What’s all this about you being Miss de la Rosa’s fiancé, Dr. Gomara? Is it
true
? Am I in the midst of a scandal? Do tell.”

“Of course not,” Erik said in a big overly confident voice as he looked up from the letter.

“But you
did
fly out here the
instant
you heard that the lovely Ms. de la Rosa had arrived in Italy with another man?” she exclaimed.

“Basically.”

Dr. Riccardi shrugged her shoulders and opened her mouth with delight at the idea. “Have you always been such a knight?”

“Actually,
no
.”

“How intriguing! Ooo. You don’t even have to
say.
It’s written all over you. You were quite the Don Juan, weren’t you? Before your fiancée
tamed
you?”

“I actually sort of chased her down like a crazy wildebeest.”

“Excellent!”

“Let’s just say that love changes you for the better,” Erik suggested, rolling his brown eyes over at me.

Dr. Riccardi waggled her fingers at him. “Oh, Lord, who told you that? What a lot of twaddle. And on that note—” She raised her nose toward the door.
“Adriana! Adriana!”

Now Erik began to study the epistle.

“Adriana!”
she blared again. “Dr. Gomara, do they have you twiddling with that fake old letter too?”

“I guess they do. Beautiful paper.”

She focused her red spectacles on Marco. “You
have
to give that thing up, dearest. It’s contaminating people—look,
two
new converts to your conspiracy theory in just under a day.”

“I didn’t tell you to give him the letter,” Marco said in a thin voice.

I ignored him. “But Dr. Riccardi, I recognize this room. Antonio—or whoever authored Marco’s letter—wrote about it. When he described the dinners they had here, before he was forced from the city...”

In about seven minutes, Erik had rapidly absorbed the contents of the letter with his typical Evelyn Wood speed, agreeing that “Antonio” had taken pains to write about the room’s decor.

“My Italian’s not great, but I think I just saw what you’re talking about; it’s here:

When did we last meet, before you Exiled my wife, Sofia the Dragon, and me? It was in the 1520s, I believe, just after I returned from America, in the few months when I was still allowed to feast at our family’s palazzo. The dining hall was so lovely, I remember, full of mysteries and hints of treasure—with its friezes of golden girls, its secret passageways, its fresco of the
Rape of Proserpine
, and that gew-gaw I commissioned, namely Pontormo’s gorgeous map of Italy.

Looking up from the letter, he compared the text to the room itself. “So, he talks about a ‘
dining hall with its friezes of golden girls, its secret passageways.’
And on the walls there are these very pretty gilt friezes. Check.’ He raised his face to the painted ceiling. “And check, the fresco. Then:
‘And that gew-gaw I commissioned, namely Pontormo’s gorgeous map of Italy.’”
He turned to the west wall, admiring the gold-leaf adorned map. “Check. It’s all here.”

Dr. Riccardi waved us off. “Let’s at least have a
drink
if we’re going to belabor the forgery again. Hello there—
Adriana
?”

Dr. Riccardi’s protégé entered, carrying a jeroboam of red wine and a plate of tidbits.

“Have you been squalling for me, Doctor? I can’t hear you through the heavy doors.”

“Don’t blame good Renaissance architecture for your bad behavior.
Amuse bouche?
”

“But certainly.”

“Not those nasty livers.”

“You will
love
them.”

Adriana filled all our glasses before sailing through the back door. Dr. Riccardi pursed her mouth before turning her attention back to us.

“Cheers, then,” she said. “To—to—Antonio.”

“To Antonio,” Marco agreed, clinking glasses with the doctor.

“Per Antonio,”
Domenico said hesitantly. He glanced at Blasej, who shrugged and drank.

Erik’s glass remained untouched as he read the letter one more time. “Okay, I have the basic idea here. Antonio claims that when he was in Mexico with Cortés, he stole Montezuma’s gold. Very nice! And it’s also clear that he hated Cosimo, duke of Florence, because he exiled Antonio for—something. Being a ‘Versipellis.’ What’s that, skin changer? Um—‘werewolf’?”

“Exactly,” I said.

“But he’s having his revenge, as he’s
hidden
the gold here in Italy, with all of these hints as to its location. And he also made up a map.”

Erik leaned back in his chair and laughed, loudly, his belly shaking. “So—
wow.”
His big shiny face had a slightly electrocuted but happy expression. “This could be—this might be—incredibly—”

“I know!”

“But there’s no map here.”

“Not that we can find, no.”

Erik and I swiveled our heads around, studying the room. The gilt frescoes of the ladies’ faces stared into the distance, and my eyes strayed over the well-fed face of Cosimo. I looked over to the splendid framed map of Italy. This was book-size, exquisite. The cartographer had drawn the long boot of the country with billowing pen strokes. Mountain ranges and lakes were illuminated with scarlet lacquers, a reddish leaf-gold, and woad blue. Masterful Carolingian calligraphy designated the ancient cities of Romagna, Pons Aufidia, Scylazo, Malfi...

Dr. Riccardi said, “As I have explained to Marco a million times, that letter does
not
bear the writing of my Antonio
il Lupo
.”

“Antonio the Wolf,” Erik said, sipping his Chianti. “
Lupo
means ‘wolf,’ right? People called him that because they thought he was a werewolf—the Versipellis business.”

Dr. Riccardi poured him more wine. “Yes, Antonio had some sort of revolting medical problem—
the Condition
—and in his early Florentine career, that, combined with his habit of murdering people, inspired a local myth that he’d been
hexed
. The story transformed into an absolute
epic
after the expedition with Cortés, when people began to claim that Antonio and an African slave man of his were cursed by Montezuma in Mexico!”

“The slave we read about in the letter to Pope Leo X?” I asked.

“We think so. Montezuma purportedly transformed Antonio into a werewolf, and the slave into a vampire. But what
really
happened is that Antonio was just a literal monster. After his return from the Americas, he famously tortured his slave in a Venetian dungeon, using a golden mask that covered the mouth and nose, leaving only little tiny pits for the eyes. They called it the Tantalus mask—you know, Tantalus was punished by the gods, who wouldn’t allow him to drink or eat but paraded food before his eyes. In prison, the mask performed the same function: the slave could see the meals displayed before him but never taste them.”

Erik shook his head. “Poor bastard!”

“Poor Fool,”
Dr. Riccardi corrected. “That’s what Antonio called him, the slave. ‘The Poor Fool!’ Or, just ‘the Fool.’”

Marco stiffened at this. “Poor Fool? I don’t remember that nickname. And I’ve been studying this letter for over a year. How could I have missed it?”

“No? Oh, I thought I told you—it’s all in Sofia’s journals.
Anyway,
the rumor is that Antonio had the Fool slave clapped in jail because he tried to steal from him. Tried to snatch his gold, precisely—that’s the story that our forgers here are capitalizing upon. Legend has it that Antonio secreted scads of the stuff out of the jungle, which he wanted to use to fund a revolution in Tuscany, to develop some sort of class of, what did he call them—”

“Warrior-aristocrats.” Marco pronounced these words so acutely I was reminded again of his father’s dreams of military dictatorship, and shivered. “Antonio performed those human experiments in Florence, and fought the Moors for their alchemical secrets because he wanted to lift his people to a higher plane—a
stronger and more select society
. Isn’t that what he planned for?”

“Yes, well, happily, he gave up his beastly little utopia. After the slave’s death, Antonio turned over the proverbial leaf. He quite peaceably returned to Florence, and even seems to have paid penance by burying the slave in a tomb just off the Medici crypt, behind a stone marked with a crescent moon—which is the sign of Islam
and
of the vampire and werewolf in folklore, of course. A marvelously grand chapel was much later built right around it—the Cappella dei Principi at the Basilica di San Lorenzo. People say it has been stalked by an African vampire ever since. And there
have
been one or two squeamish incidents at the chapel.” Dr. Riccardi now spoke in a mock-spooky sotto voce: “Involving grave robbers, who died hideously after trying to break into the slave’s coffin. It was as if their blood had been
sucked
out of their bodies.”

Erik had been looking at me, then at handsome Marco, before drinking extremely deeply from his wineglass. “I’ve read those stories. There’s an old wives’ tale about a vampire who flaps around that chapel in the terrible form of Antonio’s slave. He’s seeking revenge for his murder. But now he’s supposed to be white-eyed, teeth dripping with blood, and offering his victims jewels, precious objects. If you accept them, you won’t only die, but also be doomed to leave a corpse that looks something like a fruit roll-up.”

“Bad luck to talk about that,” Domenico murmured, shifting in his seat and muttering a prayer or complaint against this distasteful subject.

Blasej gently gestured at him to relax. “It’s okay, Dom. Eat your dinner.”

“My, your fiancé does seem to know a lot about this history,” Dr. Riccardi enthused over their voices. “Miss de la Rosa—or will it soon be Mrs. Gomara?”

“Nomen atque omen,”
Marco recited, evilly.

I peered intently at him, suddenly struck by that quote.

Erik leaned across me, toward him. “Who
are
you, anyway?”

Marco precisely adjusted his cuff links. “Still haven’t made the connection? My name, my name? Haven’t you heard it before—say, two years back?”

“Last year?”

“He’s the colonel’s son, Erik, that’s what I had to tell you...” I would have finished this sentence, but my words trailed off as my breath came out quick and shallow. “What did you say?”

“I was talking to your friend about my name—”

“No, Marco,
the Latin.
” I felt a sparkling sensation in my mind.

“Say it again.”

Marco lit another cigarette and shot his goons a look. “
Nomen atque omen,
it’s one of Antonio’s favorite sayings—”

“Erik, read that part of the letter to me again. Where he writes that Latin bit.”