The King's Gold (14 page)

But Marco wrapped his arm around my waist and squeezed.

“Yes, it’s
much
better to go out like Antonio, all flashing and blazing on the Siena battlefield—using that weapon of his—what was it again? Some sort of witchcraft. It’s worth looking into; I must check up on that. Because a man’s method of dying is the best evidence of the way he lived. Don’t you agree?”

“In the colonel’s case, yes.”

“And in your father’s too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, Lola, de la Rosa died like a dog, here in Italy. It was humiliating. He went out like a filthy beggar.”

I forced myself not to react.

“It didn’t surprise me at all, though.” Marco stroked my cheek and mouth in a tender, shocking gesture. “As the colonel explained to me after my cousin was killed, only cowards plant bombs, then dash away. It’s less personal that way. Less—intimate.”

“Don’t touch her again—”

I jerked my face away to see Erik’s eyes and lips stretching out in horrible, almost deforming fury.

Marco taunted him by running his fingers through my hair before pushing me away. “Ugh. Control him. And get them to tell us what they know.”

Domenico and Blasej snagged hold of our necks to thrust our faces deep into the coffin. Our noses and lips hovered less than an inch away from the grisly remains, so we inhaled the dust floating up from the time-eaten hands of the slave. Each hand held an object, just as Antonio’s riddle hinted:
In City One Find a Tomb / Where upon a Fool worms feed / One hand holds the Toy of doom / The other grips your first Lead.
Immediately, I saw there
was
a dangerous either/or choice to be made: One of the skeleton’s tight claws, turned palm-side up, clutched a large, green jewel, a thick clog of grime nearly obscuring its delicate carvings. The other bony hand was also clenched but turned down. It held something round and metallic that I could not make out.

Erik squeezed his eyes shut, whispering in so sparse a voice I could just hear, “Don’t touch anything, don’t touch anything.”

Louder was Domenico’s breathing above me. High and quick and shallow. All at once I remembered his soft-brained reaction to the dinnertime tales of vampires and werewolves. And he’d crossed himself in panic at the sight of the corpse. He had an Achilles’ heel. Yes. He was
superstitious
.

“Look at the body, Domenico.” I squalled at him like a witch.

“Did it just move? They say vampires wake when their coffins are disturbed—do you really want to do this?”

“Shut up.”

“Look at the mask. No wonder there were stories about
nosferatu
haunting the crypt. Whoever thought this up was a monster. Do you think those rumors about bloodsuckers are true?

I heard there’s something in this place that attacks you on the neck, like a bat.”

“Blasej.” Domenico shifted his weight from side to side.

“You’re fine, man.”

“Have you heard about the man they found in here,” I shrilled, “with no blood in his veins? Attacked by some kind of ghoul.”

“Blasej, she’s giving me the creeps.”

Marco ordered: “Enough of this!”

“No problem, boss.” Blasej still had one hand on Erik’s neck, and with his free fingers, he slipped his bloody, long knife from his belt. “Domenico, relax,
odpočívej
! Don’t I always watch after you? You just keep by me, and this’ll be fast money.” He flipped the glinting knife in his hand, with an amazing agility that turned the blade into a pinwheel, a star. He carved at Erik’s neck, so blood flashed down his collar.

“AAAAAGHHH,”
I screamed.

“WAIT— I’VE GOT IT. I’VE GOT IT,” Erik blared, holding his hands up in surrender.

“What?”

“Ugh.” Erik gripped his neck, the blood seeping through his fingers. “There. Look at that. What do you see?”

“Nothing.”

“Look closer.” Erik pointed down to the slave’s powdering hand bones, the upturned claw with the green stone darkly glinting in the one-time palm.

“What’s that?” Blasej bent closer to the corpse, shining the flashlight. “Is that an emerald?”

Marco barked: “What is that thing? Don’t touch that.”

But Blasej had let go of Erik and reached down into the box.

“It is. It’s
carved
.”

Erik narrowed his eyes. “It looks valuable. And it’s just moldering away in here—”

“Don’t get jerked around by this guy, Blasej,” Domenico warned.

“I’ve almost...
got
it.” Blasej tugged at the bones to get at the emerald. He touched the jewel with both hands, twisting the skeleton, snatching it from the slave’s hand. “It feels funny.” He stepped away from the coffin, his back to me.

“Blasej.” Domenico had me by the shoulders. “What are you doing? Let’s hurry up.”

Erik stood up, facing me. He stared at Blasej, whose head I could see bent over his treasure. A look of satisfaction passed over Erik’s face.

“Blasej.
Blasej
. Let me see.” Domenico released me and went to his friend.

Erik ripped off his jacket, moving quickly and viciously over to Marco, who thrust his hand into his jacket for the gun. But Erik raised his fists and brought them down on Marco’s face, smashing his eyes and his cheeks as if he would kill him.

I was running. I was electric-brained and screaming. My hands were outstretched. Erik hauled back and hit him again as Marco tried to shield his face with his arms.

Marco sprang away. With his left hand he landed a precise crushing punch on Erik’s neck, sending him colliding to the ground.

I grappled my arms around Marco’s back and with spasmodic jerks worked to wrench his right arm around his back. I clawed my other hand around his paper-crackling chest. The letter and gun were in his jacket pocket—I scratched at him to get the weapon out, but with his left hand he easily slid out the gun and neatly swung it up toward my face in a rotating crosswise maneuver that was as lucid and unexpected as a baseball player’s pitch. The sharp metal cudgeled me hard, high on the forehead, and a spray of pure watery light blew into my eyes. I heard another metallic
clang,
and then felt a bright, cold agony as the floor rushed up to my face.

I shook my senses clear to see a flash of dark limbs. From the men’s squirming bodies came the dim
pop
of a silenced shot—mosaics on the other side of the room exploded. I heard a viscous thwack before Marco rolled away from Erik. And I saw then that something desperately wrong was happening to him, to Erik. He had been somehow
replaced
. His eyes puffed and his lips clenched back over his teeth like a snake’s.

“Erik!”

He only glared at Marco, who had a bite mark on his cheek that throbbed blood down his face, and the gun was free and pointed straight at the head of my lover.

“Blasej. Domenico! Help me out! What am I paying you for?”

Even as he brayed out those words, Marco jerked his head toward the gold-masked bones. He scuttled backward, the gun useless in his shaking hand. His eyes jutted from his skull.

From behind us, Erik and I could hear a moist and thick gurgling.

Domenico was screaming.

Blasej stood before the coffin, staring into the distance as if he had gone blind. He was choking, drowning. Tears streamed from his eyes as his mouth inflated with agony. His face twisted and paled. His cheeks sank into his head. The cut fingers that had touched the emerald were shriveled black, as a crimson line dripped from his lips. The blood ran down his chin, his chest. His body shuddered in a horrifying, elbow-flailing dance of death until his knees collapsed. He was still making the wet sounds in his throat when he fell onto his side.

With a heave and a spirt of blood, the noises ceased.

“Blasej!” Domenico blundered toward the corpse, dropping his flashlight. Blasej’s face had shrunk and his hand had withered into a blackened claw. Domenico crouched over his friend, gagging as he sobbed. Though I’d thought him the weaker-brained of the crew, he proved intelligent enough not to touch the tainted body. Nor would he linger in this booby-trapped tomb any longer. He shook his head in a rage, still crying, scowling over at Erik. But he was done for now.

“Marco.”

No reply. Marco raised his hand and nervously bit at his finger. He looked ill.

“Marco.” Domenico spat out the words. “Time to go.”

I crawled over to Erik in a daze. Half of Marco’s face shone with dark blood, giving him a hideous resemblance to a harlequin.

“Why are you doing this to us?” I demanded.

“I want— I want—”

“What?”

“My...family...
back
!”

“I can’t give that to you.”

“Let’s go!” Domenico shouted. He picked up a backpack before running from the room with fast crashing steps.

The crypt went utterly silent as Marco, Erik, and I stared at one another.

“What should I do now?” Marco murmured to himself in the hush. He still held the gun.

“You should make peace with me,” I said, shocking myself.

His eyes were on me, fixed and bloodshot. “Peace.”

“I mean it. I’m serious
.
Make peace with me, Marco. At the palazzo you said you’d give me a chance—remember? So do it. Let’s forget all this.”

He smiled or sneered or wept at me, his mouth distending.

“Forget my father? Do you know what I saw in his coffin, stitched up, ugly—
That wasn’t him!
How can I get him out of my head? Like this?” He began violently beating at his forehead with his hand. Then he hit his own temple with his gun. “Like
that
? How can I, how can I, how can I?”

“What you should
do
is get out of here,” Erik threatened. He was crouched on all fours, his eye bleeding.

Marco touched his gashed cheek, stared down blankly at the gun. He looked over again at Blasej, jerked his head away, and squeezed his eyes shut. “Yes, right,” he said after a long time, standing up. “That’s the better idea.” His teeth were bloodstained. “This is your day, isn’t it? I’ve had enough, and you’re lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky.”

And then Marco simply left us. He wrapped his arms around himself and walked backward, disappearing into the shadows. We listened as his steps broke into a run, dashing down the echoing corridors of the crypt, shouting after his lackey. They smashed their way out of the church through another window.

“You stay away!” Erik’s mouth tore open, and his face was red and wet.

But there was no one there anymore.

The flashlights scattered on the chapel floor. Dropped on the ground, their beams haloed around us. Erik and I stayed on the ground, shaking, pressing our mouths together in mad kisses.

“Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay.” Erik stopped the kissing to start hugging me convulsively tight, trying to calm himself down. “You all in one piece?”

“Yeah.”

“Am I all in one piece?”

“I think so.”

“Oh man, oh man, oh man. I was going to
kill
his ass.”

“I know. You looked—for a minute—you seemed—”

He began shaking his hands in the air, hooting, “Oh my God. Yes. I got—mad. Agh. Oh, Lord!”

“Like an
animal.
”

He ran his shaking fingers under his eyes. But he looked more like himself. “I need a drink. I need a Campari. I need an ibuprofen. I’m out of my mind.” He touched his temples. “Those guards outside are dead!”

“Yes.”

“I killed him.” He turned to peek at Blasej’s corpse, and stared. “I whacked that guy. Blasej. I totaled him. I saw it—I saw the things—The green stone. The emerald. I’d read about those other robbers—of this grave—like Dr. Riccardi and I were talking about. They’d touched jewels. And died. I was hoping—and then it did. He did.”

“Thank God!”

Erik pressed his cheeks. “I thought we were going to die. Oh, oh, oh, thank you, Princeton. Thank you, Princeton graduate seminar on the Medici.” He turned toward the door where Marco and Domenico had disappeared. “
Don’t fuck with my woman, motherfucker!
I’m dangerous! I’ve got...” he began laughing and crying. “A Ph.D. Christ!”

“Erik, Marco got away with the letter,” I finally said.

“Okay, but I’m not going to run after him and ask for it back. Because punching and biting people and...assassinating them make me feel really
hideously
gruesome.”

“And there’s something else in the coffin besides the emerald.”

He was quiet for several seconds, but then looked at me from under his lashes. “Oh, you think I didn’t see that?”

“Just pointing it out.”

The silence crystallized between us. Our eyes locked. Even as we were bleeding, wild, and in the awful presence of that dead red-haired man, we were both thinking of it.

“It’s in the skeleton’s other hand,” I whispered.

We eased apart. The room felt colder than before. The destroyed fragments of griffins and lions shivered across the gaudy walls. Slowly, we craned our heads around to look at the black stone box and the motionless figure lying next to it.

The first clue was still secreted in the coffin.

Erik and I approached the helmeted slave. Blasej had tumbled to the flag floor before us, impeding the way. One of the flashlights focused hot silver light upon his leather shoes, and the right foot’s was untied. This miniature negligence somehow made the body more human to me, more pathetic. The corpse’s head lolled from the white collar, freakishly marred by the mouth that had collapsed inside the jaw. The face looked shattered and the open eyes sunk into the skull. The hand clutching the emerald looked like twigs charred black by a fire.

Erik kneeled by the body. “It does look as if he’s lost blood.”

He shook his head. “Yes, you sure are
dead,
Monsieur. Blagh—vile. You look terrible.”

“Those stories you were telling at dinner—about demons bearing deadly gifts—”

He looked up at me and nodded. “Were a warning. This is your toy of doom. It must have poison smeared on it. Blasej’s fingers were cut—whatever it was, it got into the blood.”

We circled the remains, careful to avoid the contaminated hand. Erik picked up the flashlight and drew near the opened tomb.