The King's Gold (18 page)

“I’m glad I don’t believe in fiends or ogres or devils,” I said, my voice wavering.

“Lola.”

“I’m glad I know all those
thousands
of stories I’ve read about man-eating werewolves were just the projections of dipsomaniacs and sexually repressed schizophrenics—”

“You’re starting to make the hairs stand up on my arms.”

“It’s not me—it’s the
place
. With all these wolves, the stories, the moon—”

Erik’s wonderful face glowed coral from the candlelight.

“Why don’t we talk instead about how
I’m
the only wolf you have to worry about, and how when we get a hotel room, I’ll show you my big ears, and my big teeth, and my
huge
though muscular belly—”

I grabbed his hand. “Yes, yes, that’s a much better plan.”

“Good. So, look—we’ll leave off on the hunt until tomorrow. I’ll go inside, use the facilities. Then I’ll get you a pensione and...massage your feet.”

“Excellent.”

Erik kissed me on the lips before disappearing into the trattoria.

I picked up my book, turning a few pages. Still, I remained uneasy. I closed the
Diario
to tuck it back into my purse. I began observing again the scene around me.

The city seemed too shrouded, too secret. Most of the laughing couples had departed. A very few others entwined and cooed in far-off corners. The waiter had just collected the fish dish from our neighbor, and was nowhere to be seen.

But all at once I could swear that the man seated close to our table focused his eyes upon me. I could not see his face for the darkness, though the sputtering candle before him illumined his cheek, then a shaded eye.

He sat in three-quarters profile, touching the rim of his wineglass. His voice drifted toward me like smoke.

“You are right to believe in monsters, Lola,” he said.

The candlelight continued to burn up from the heavy red glass holder. It loosened a faint light that escaped onto my hands and the oilcloth before me. It slipped across the shadow-cloaked man two tables away. I stared at the figure, though I could not see his face.

The man had spoken to me in a cowboy-toned Italian. The accent was pure Tuscan, which branded him as a native. Also, I discerned no Marco-variety of mischief in his voice. I must have misheard his saying my name, or he heard Erik saying it.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“You were talking about the brigand Antonio Medici?”

“Yes.”

“I overheard. Sorry to disturb you.”

I hesitated. “Oh, no problem.”

“He
was
a monster, you know. At least according to the old wives. Seems to me that you and your friend haven’t heard the whole story.”

I peered closer but still saw only the man’s rose mouth, gold cheek, that shadowed eye.

“The story that he was...a killer?”

“That he was a werewolf,” came the soft low voice toward me in the dark.

The man remained seated at his table, tasting his wine, smoking a cigarette. “The legend of the
loupgarou
is an ancient one, little girl. Even Queen Cleopatra knew about the men bitten by beasts, who became half-human, half-hellhound. Pliny thumbed his nose at the myths, since he was a reasonable man. Cornelius Agrippa, on the other hand, did not. These days, most folks with enough IQ to spell their own names will have themselves a good belly laugh at the stories of thinking animals. But on a night like tonight, with a full moon like this, and when the church bells ring through the square, even the most godless heathen of a skeptic crosses himself.”

As he spoke, my skin began to sparkle with dread—and curiosity.

“It’s said that old Antonio Medici was one such foul fiend,” he continued. “That he capered off to America in the form of Dr. Frankenstein, but then came back as his miserable creature, if you understand my meaning. The man returned to Italy a shape-shifter, a skin-changer—it was a jungle sickness he’d brought home along with a heap of gold stored in an explosive safe. But no gold, no matter how well guarded, could cure him of his disease.” The man paused. “I can tell that I have your attention. You’ve gone quiet as a mackerel! So I’ll tell you just a little bit more: There’re unofficial histories,
highly
discounted, which claim that he contracted the Condition one night, in the year 1526, when Cortés’s men had themselves a brawl over the gold. The angry Aztec gods saw their chance during the melee, and sprang upon the soldiers unawares, so that Antonio was somehow...contaminated.”

“How did it happen?” I murmured.

“Oh, no one really knows. Or no one likes to
say
. There are only whispers of rumors, an echo of an echo of a tale...of Montezuma’s curse...unholy acts...of Antonio drowning in his own blood only to be raised again in a grisly spectacle...Later, the story descends into your Hans Christian Andersen–type of werewolf bedtime story. Tattle of slaughtered women, infants snatched from their beds, et cetera. Though Antonio’s biography does pick up toward the end of his life. They say the last time Antonio got himself moonstruck was on a battlefield. He killed squadrons of men with some sort of witch fire, before being struck down himself. The catastrophe occurred here, actually. In Siena.”

The man stopped talking. He finished his cigarette, turning his large, shadow-puppet head to blow white fumes over his shoulder. I still hoped for more of this story as my hands nervously gripped the glass votive, so the candlelight glowed through my fingers.

But a moment passed, then another. It seemed very silent in the square.

All at once, I had the distinct feeling that I had not met this man by accident.

“Are you a visitor to Siena?” I asked.

“I’ve only recently arrived, Miss.”

“You seem to know a great deal about Antonio Medici.”

“I’ve been researching this angle of Italian history for...friends of mine.”

“Are you an academic?”

“Once, a goodly long while ago, when I was just a tadpole like yourself.”

“And now?”

“And now... who can say? I don’t think they have names for what I am today. Not respectable ones, anyway.”

Grasping the votive, I could feel my heart beating faster.

“Who are you?”

The dark figure shifted, leisurely. “Nobody.”

I leaned forward. “Sir, what is your name?”

“Not one that you want to know,” the man said, standing up.

This is when the light hit his face. And it was almost as if he changed shape before my eyes.

From his accent I had believed him to be a country Italian. I had been so convinced of this that when his features first emerged in the light, his face appeared to me as a kind of shock. It seemed to shift from the round, Roman visage of my imaginings—for the man caught by the candle was not Mediterranean. I read his face:

He had the telltale sharp cheekbones, the tilted eyes, the rough, bronze skin. A long ponytail trailed down his back. Gold earrings shone in his ears. Blue and red tattoos of snakes and Maya hieroglyphs serpentined down his neck. He was not young. But he was Guatemalan and so with Marco Moreno.
I’ve been researching this angle of Italian history for...friends of mine.

He loomed over me, close enough so that I could hear his breath.

In the next second, he reached out and touched my cheek, my mouth, with a horrible and frightening tenderness.

I stumbled from my chair shouting for Erik with a dreamlike laryngitis, and took hold of the heavy, red glass votive while having instant, nearly psychedelic flashbacks to those guards’ bloody bodies in the Florentine crypt. The man floated a few steps away from me, telling me to wise up, in sudden streetwise Spanish. With antic spasms of my legs, I knocked over chairs, scuttling over them. How had Adriana stabbed Domenico’s thorax with her fingers? I could not remember—I held up the votive and thrashed it back and forth in an ungainly threat. “Go away, go away!” The man reached for me in the shadows. I swung again, more savagely. His large hand lightly grasped the arm that was not carrying the votive. In a delicate maneuver like a magician’s, he painlessly folded it back on my spine.

“That should hold you until you cool your hot head down,” he said.

I am not a natural fighter. But I am able to learn, and I took my lesson here from the tutorial I had already received from Marco Moreno in the crypt.

With a feverish whirling baseball pitch I swung myself out of the arm pin, crushing that red glass mace into his jaw with all my strength.

He dropped like a boulder, still gripping my arm, and I went down with him.

“Help, help!”

I twisted away, shuddering. There was a bursting in my head.

Pain blazed in my hip. I heaved up, aimed at the man again. I stared at him. He sat upright in a wash of blue moonlight, stared back, grimacing. His teeth flashed white in the smoke-dark face.

But here I saw something I did not expect.

A glance, a flinch, an image. In the black eyes. The wide wolf mouth. What was it? An expression. It struck me, then disappeared.

I collapsed backward. Just for that second I lost all control. I thought I heard a wailing sound. It was from my own throat.

Then the man I suddenly knew to be Tomas de la Rosa unwound himself from the tangle of my attack and ran away.

“Lola!” Erik cupped his hands on both sides of my face.

“What happened?”

“Something—something—”

“Are you hurt?”

“I don’t know!”

“Who was that?”

He had come racing up to me, pulled me to my feet. The space outside L’Osteria was a disaster area of splintered crockery and flung furniture. The waiter came running up, a figure in a red apron waving a receipt, and exclaiming, “Madam! Are you all right? I’m calling the police!”

“No! Don’t —thank—
ugh
—I’m fine.”

I snatched up my bag and glared out into Siena’s starscape until I detected the faintest black lineaments of a tall figure retreating into the shadows.

I pursued him.

I tore over the brick square. My purse flew behind me like a kite. The specter vanished, reappeared. He hovered before my eyes like a mirage or a phantom within the depthless recesses of the city. I dashed through Siena’s market halls, now far past the
campo,
the baptistery. Behind me, Erik gasped, “Where...are...we...going?”

“After...him.”

I had to find him. I had to
be sure
. Barreling over cobblestones and street trash, my flying feet darted over the snake-thin sidewalks. Then an alleyway. This lean, cold channel, capped by the black sky, was backlit by an unseen streetlamp’s phosphorus-green mist.

At its end stood the man. I saw the mammoth shoulders, the long stream of hair flicking down his back. He glanced back in my direction before melting around an ebony corner.

Careening around this bend, I found myself in a perplexity of nameless streets, which opened out into the Piazza Jacopo della Quercia. We lurched to a halt several hundred feet from the arched, Gothic, gilded Duomo, which we had come in sight of again.

Erik and I bent down, breathless.

“Where’d he go, Erik?”

“Who are we chasing?”

“Tomas de la Rosa.”

A pause. “Tomas de la Rosa.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Tomas de la Rosa, the archaeologist and your dead biological father.”

“It’s him—I’m
positive
.”

“That’s—
cracked
. He’s not alive.”

Even I could see the logic was wanting, but I still said: “Yes he is!”

“Lola—”

“I swear it—”

“I thought you’d never even really seen his face, except for crappy photographs—”

“Doesn’t matter—”

“If that man’s your father, then why is he running away from you?”

“I hit him with a very heavy object, as hard as I could.”

“That would be a good reason.”

“It is very important that you believe me right now, Erik.”

He looked as if he’d just been hurled through a wind tunnel.

“Just...give me a second.”

“It’s him—it was his
face
—as soon as I looked at him, I saw—”

“What?”

“I don’t know—
him
.”

I could nearly see Erik’s thoughts battering against his forehead. “Okay.” He spread out all his fingers in a gesture of benevolent half-comprehension. “I get it—you saw him.”

“I did.”

“I believe that
you
believe it. Even if the idea is pretty much clinically nuts.”

“That’s good enough for me—because
there he is.
”

From the darkest periphery of my eye, I’d just caught a glimpse of the shadowed figure above the Duomo’s stairs. He dematerialized in the penumbras of the shrine as if he were seeking sanctuary from me.

We rushed toward the Duomo. Erik and I threw ourselves against its immense wooden doors, too hard, so they flew open.

We tumbled inside the cathedral at such a calamitous pace that we would have sprinted over the steel security turnstile if only its various protuberances hadn’t murderously goaded our ribs and nether regions. Our bursting entrance also came to the heartstopping shock of the two workers within: a woman and a man who had been disinfecting the church’s Midas-golden cherubs and other assorted spiritual furniture.

My purse was thrown as I bashed down onto the mosaicglittering floor. Erik skidded crazily on the slick stone. The man and the woman jumped up and yelled incredibly violent threats at me. Then they began hitting Erik.

“No, no, good man, kind lady, please stop doing that,” I heard Erik saying in Spanish. “
Alto, alto
—
terminare
—
arrete
—
Aufenhalt
—Christ, I’m forgetting my Italian.”

I gaped up at the vastness of the cathedral. But there was no sign of the man from the
campo
here.

“Where—are—you?”

This is when I looked down at the mosaic below me and understood that the tattooed stranger had somehow
led
me here.

Earlier in the day, when Erik and I entered the Duomo, our gaze traveled up, up, up, to the Duomo’s heavenly ceiling and its gold seraphim and rose window. The ancient circular mosaics ran across its floor—the roundlet showing the
Slaughter of the Innocents
, others of saints and sybils. Custodians covered these with Masonite panels to protect the tiles from the wear of foot traffic. But tonight the church had been closed to tourists so that these workers could clean the church’s art. Thus the floors were, at this hour, naked.