The King's Gold (12 page)

Dr. Riccardi had her hands on Marco’s shoulders, tugging at them with surprising strength. Marco yanked himself away, but she clung to him like a barnacle, her red hair waving over her shoulders.

“Let go of her, Moreno!” Adriana yelled.

“What the hell are you doing, man?” Erik thundered at Marco.

“Domenico,” Marco spat.

The blond immediately sprinted over to the doctor, lifted her off his employer, and threw her splay-legged to the ground, as Marco said, “It really didn’t have to come to this, you yappering old bird. But if you continue shrieking like that, I might just have to break your beak. And Adriana—for hell’s sake—stop scampering around—”

Adriana did not hesitate. She sprang forward and began to expertly and brutally stab her sharp thin fingers into Domenico’s thorax in a shocking display of self-help. “Dr. Riccardi—Dr. Riccardi—”

“My girl,” the older woman cried, “get out of here!”

At my side, I heard Erik mutter, “Moreno,” just as I saw Marco step backward from the women and open his jacket to reveal a dark steel pistol stuck in his inner pocket.

Instantly, all of us grew very still and open-mouthed.

He did not point it at anyone, only saying, softly: “Seriously, stop making a fuss, girls—yes, no screaming. We don’t want those antediluvian guards to drag their walkers in here, do we? We can still all stagger out of here in relatively decent shape.”

“Shit! Fuck!” Domenico was gagging.

“Except for poor Dom, I suppose.”

Blasej ran over and smacked Adriana’s face before examining Domenico’s throat. “Moreno—man, stop blabbing and give it to her.”

Marco grimaced, gave a short laugh. I was just barely able to translate his next words, muttered in a combination of Spanish and Czech: “I don’t think you’re a very good influence on me, Blasej. You know that? I think you’re a bastard.”

“Go on—you
fucking
talker!”

Erik had gone stiff with recognition. He stood next to me with huge eyes, his face shining with sweat. “Marco Moreno.

That’s his name. Lola—he’s not related to that—no, no,—he’s not connected with that other man—”

“Yes—he’s Moreno’s son.”

“The colonel who tried to kill us—the one Estrada ripped up—in the jungle—”

“Marco,” I seethed,
“put that gun away.”

“Hello—could it be in here...?”

A stranger had just stumbled into our red-faced, arguing circle. I half-registered the noble-looking scholar who had been reading in the library, and had this minute wandered into the dining hall as if from another dimension. His dark pageboy flapped around his ears and his shiny spectacles tilted on his nose as he tiptoed in, squinting and murmuring to himself, with that large bronze magnifying glass in his hand.

With an air of supreme abstraction, the scholar blundered among us, in his houndstooth suit, his glossy shoes mincing in little steps as he skittered around the perimeter of the room. He gazed at the art on the walls through his bronze-handled glass, while chattering in Italian: “I say, I was told I could find a copy of Boccaccio in the athenaeum—but this doesn’t look right.
Is
this the athenaeum? Or did I take a left turn when I should have taken a right—or a
right
when I should have taken the left?” He observed our little party for the first time. “Oh, cheers—am I interrupting something? I must have wandered into the wrong bloody room.” He raised his magnifying glass, so his face swelled and dented and revealed his sudden attack of fright. “My, that wouldn’t be a...gun...that you’re holding, is it? Oh!”

This distraction was not wasted. Adriana pulled the doctor from the floor. The two women raced over to a section of the gilded friezes opposite the empty space that had held the map, pressing three different spots hidden between the beautiful golden ladies’ faces staring out from the panel. A small door opened in the wall; they disappeared into the dark aperture and the door shut swiftly behind them.

Marco swore violently, as Erik gripped me and rasped, “How did he find you?”

“I don’t know. He just showed up at the store.”

“Why?”

“He thinks I can help him—”

“Well, you just did!”

Blasej kicked at the wall.
“Where’d they go?”

“Bitches,” growled Marco. “I stayed here a month, and the old woman never said a word about any secret doors—”

The scholar, in his panic, had wandered directly in front of Marco, hysterically waving the magnifying glass in the air. With both hands he suddenly grasped very hard and rather insanely onto the wrist and the hand with which Marco held his gun. “Oh, my, I do seem to have stuck my foot in it—you’re not actually going to
use
that horrid thing on me, are you? I’m nothing but a poorly paid specialist in fifteenth-century majolica. I’m really just the most inconsequential person you could ever hope to meet, I assure you.” The bronze magnifying glass clacked against the gun as he manhandled Marco.

“Shut up.” Blasej yanked the scholar away from his boss, who sneered, “I thought you had a handle on the externals.”

“I’ve got it handled, just let me do him—”

“‘Do’ me?
‘Do’
me—whatever do you mean?” shrieked the scholar, who did not wait around to find out the answer to that question, as he hugged himself and ran haphazardly out the dining room’s back door.

Domenico, still grasping his throat, grunted, “I’ll get him.”

“What about these other two?” Blasej rapped out.

“Erik knows more than I do, Marco,” I keened. “He’s better at code-breaking than I am.”

“Sorry, what are you going to do,
shoot me with a magnifying glass
?” Erik barked.

Marco’s face drained pale when he looked down to see that he now clutched the bronze magnifying glass instead of the gun—a cheap magic trick of the scholar’s that I could barely comprehend with my ever-diminishing faculties. “How the hell did he do that?” He threw the glass so it shattered on the floor, then gestured at Domenico, who had turned back at the door.

“Give me your piece.”

Domenico tossed a weapon and ran out. Marco pointed the pistol at Erik’s tight-mouthed face. I fell to the ground, begging, “No, no, not him—not him.”

“Quiet down for Christ’s sake!”

“Let Lola go.”
Erik remained standing, rumpled and heavily sweating, his voice suddenly whittled down to flat syllables. “You don’t need her. I’ll help you. You don’t need two of us.” His eyes were very steady and crazily observant, in a bizarre contradiction to the rest of his body, which began to tremble loosely in his navy suit as if he were having a seizure.

Marco took a long look at him, then me.

“Too many variables—” Blasej said.

Marco raised a finger, just as Domenico reappeared, breathing hard.

“Did he come back here?”

“What?”

“That guy. I can’t find him anywhere. There’s only like two rooms back there—”

“Forget him,” Marco said. “We’re leaving. And Blasej, move him out. We’re taking him—she’ll be no use otherwise.”

Blasej spat, but said, “Fine. Where to now?”

But I already knew the answer to that question. I ran over to Erik and clutched him, shrilling, “Yes, just put that thing
away
. We’re going. Where Antonio buried his Fool, the slave. The Cappella dei Principi at the Basilica di San Lorenzo. We’re going to the crypt.”

Rough hands clapped down on us. Erik and I were forced out of the dining room, upstairs, then made to wait while our captors took a short detour to gather some bags and supplies. After that came the long and silent march beneath the storm of gold lining the halls of the palazzo, beneath the barely cognizant gaze of security guards who were either so inured to Dr. Riccardi’s dramatics or so deaf that they had not been alarmed by our stifled shouts. While we moved down the halls, back out the foyer, they mechanically nodded their greetings to us and our captors, as we were all the doctor’s esteemed visitors, and so beyond suspicion, and help.

We hurried out into the dark city streets, navigating the cobblestones of the northward-reaching Via Camillo Cavour, to the Piazza San Lorenzo with its late-hour kiosks and Pisa figurine displays. Marco and the other two backpack-laden men walked behind us, and always I had the image of that weapon pointed through Marco’s pocket at Erik’s spine. For his part, Erik strode by my side, not looking at me, his expression struggling as we moved in a large half-arc toward our destination. He was not as panicked as before. He was not shaking anymore. But he did not look good—or even much like the same sweet goofball who had come blustering into the palazzo hours before, blathering about whiskey and standby flights.

Sweat-stained, patchy-pale, his mouth moved silently. He also appeared so determined I would have sworn he had begun to plot something.

“This is it, the chapel,” he said in a scratchy voice, when we’d reached a crossroads fifteen minutes away from the palazzo.

“
Good,
Erik.” Marco gazed up. “You do know your Italian architecture, at least.”

Above us loomed a four-story church, built of thick mustard-colored stones, its rotunda capped with a little red-tiled dome.

Barred by a spiked iron gate, its left side was obscured by towering metal scaffolds much like those we’d seen at the palazzo. Unbarred arched windows glinted on the third level. Marco, Blasej, and Domenico quickly decided that these undefended windows would be the best route to the crypt, though I could not yet tell how we would reach them, even as they yanked us along. “Come on.” “Hurry up.” “Move the legs.” They waited for tourists to meander down the street before pushing Erik and me toward the gate’s left side, to look at the scaffolding that wrapped around the church: constructed of silver metal bars and wooden platforms, the scaffold had been covered on its bottom third portion by green serrated aluminum siding to keep troublemakers from climbing up the framework.

I looked up: The sky was a rich shining black, and cloudless, though not empty. Tonight it hosted a large bright moon, nearly full, and as white as fangs. In the presence of that witching
luna
and this ancient, haunted grave house, I had no trouble imagining a caped
nosferatu
in the shadows. The evening’s dinner tales hideously filled my mind with a horror film of tomb-robbers stretched out in a cold crypt, as thin as fish because they had been drained of blood.

“Jump over the gate,” Marco ordered. Domenico and Blasej scrambled over the its sharp iron staffs, then dissolved into the penumbra toward the scaffolding, so that I understood the plan.

“Now,” Marco pressed me.

Erik also remained in shadow, and he was thinking hard; I could feel it.

“How are we going to get in there?” he asked, in a queer, dead-sounding voice.

“By climbing,” said Marco.

“Climbing what?”

I removed my heels. “The scaffolding.”

Erik and I bungled the effort, heaving and grunting before finally managing to hurl ourselves over the gate.

Marco light-footed over, pushing us forward through the moon mist.

As the bottom third of the scaffolding was covered by aluminum siding, Blasej and Domenico had already begun slicing up this metal skin with shears pulled from the backpacks. Quickly, they made a little door at its base. The cut metal flaps tweaked outward, leaving just enough space for a large man to crawl beneath, as they did, vanishing inside—and minutes later, I could hear the clanking of more tools; they were performing some sort of mechanical operation on the structure.

“Snipping the wires,” Erik said. “These things are alarmed.”

“Good to go.” The unseen Blasej’s voice echoed off the metal skin that enclosed him.

“You next.” Marco showed us the gun again.

Erik ducked into the aluminum shell. I crawled beneath the metal sheet, Marco following after. Within the scaffolding, it was dark, cold, and claustrophobic. It
felt
forbidden. Above us rose a metal cage, ascending perhaps one hundred feet in the air and swaying back and forth as Blasej and Domenico capered up its ledges like acrobats.

The three of us stared up at that scaffolding in perfect fearful silence.

Then, without another word, we began to slip up the dark tower, toward the crypt that held a slave’s ancient, deadly grave.

The scaffolding’s metal cage ascended three hundred feet into the sky. In the night air, Erik appeared an unearthly, night-colored figure above me as he scrabbled up the metal bars.

I hoisted myself up one bar, then two, passing the scaffolding’s first wooden platform as the muscles in my neck and arms burned. Far above us, Blasej and Domenico spoke in low bursts, before there came the faint sound of shattering glass. I kept moving. The cage was unsteady and wobbled and creaked.

We climbed above the aluminum wrapper, scaling halfway up the scaffolding, until we overtook a second story of barred windows.

Below us was the stony street and its few pedestrians who could not see us for the dark.

“Do you think you can make it?” I whispered. We had just passed a second platform.

“It’s getting high.” Erik croaked and pulled himself up another bar.

“Don’t look down,” Marco demanded below me.

We climbed another level, then another, until we reached a death-height. My palms slid like grease on the bars. Sweat dripped down my neck.

Erik tottered just below the top window, then his feet skipped, tripped. He scrambled on the bars, as if he were running on a rolling log. From his throat came a low terrified wheeze.

“Erik!”

He slipped. He hung from his sweating fists. All I could see were his shadowed feet jerking. I clawed my way up with a hellish speed, possessed by a hallucination of his heavy body cartwheeling past the chapel’s delicate tracery, the golden stone, then smashing dead on the ground.

“Don’t touch me!”

“He’s right—all three of us could go.” Marco reached up and grasped my naked foot.

“You’re going to
fall
!”

I snatched hold of Erik’s pant leg so that he hung limp, and very still, from the high bar. Slowly, he touched his toes down, easing his feet completely onto the bar directly below him. He clung to the scaffold and ground his teeth.