The King's Gold (19 page)

I raised myself on all fours. Beneath my hands and knees lay a large, stone ring:

IN A SHRINE AT CITY TWO

A SHE-WOLF TELLS MORE THAN I

Within this circle snarled the intricate black, porphyry, and white mosaic of a majestic she-wolf.

The wolf’s beautiful face glimmered inches from my own. Made of a puzzle of tricolor
pietre dure,
the central image flowered into an enclosing circle of roundlets, which displayed icons of satellite kingdoms: the rabbit of Pisa, the leopard of Lucca, the lion of Florence...I transfixed on the large beast at the center of this hoop. Beneath her white belly, with its pale teats, Romulus and the doomed Remus rested and sucked. The artist had rendered her as a protective mother who furrowed her brow as she gazed down at her busy foster sons.

The six satellite icons, including the rabbit and lion, and also an elephant and a leopard, orbited in their minor circles, framed by a larger red-stone ring. This red rock was in turn bordered by a white circular band of stone, and the entire mosaic was planted within a multicolored square.

My whirlwinding father dreams reined in immediately. I homed in with a painful hypnosis on the white border ring of stone encompassing the she-wolf, running my fingers around this wheel of alabaster-colored marble. A deep ridge marked where it ended. This created a fissure, after which the multicolored square began. The circle containing the wolf seemed all of a piece, separate from the surrounding square.

“Erik.”

“And what in the
hell
do you think you could be doing racing in here like that?” the cleaning lady shouted. “We are closed; you have to leave right now.
Don’t you hear me?
Madam? Pietro, where are the damned guards?...On a break...cigarettes...They’ll be back here in just one minute...”

“Erik.”

He had half-remembered his Italian. “I’m so terribly sorry, sir. I’m glad we can lie down now; it’s just been something of a terrestrial misunderstanding...”

“Out of here...jackass...we’re closed...,”
the janitor was ordering him.

“Erik!”

His head jerked in my direction. His gaze swerved to where I pointed. “A she-wolf—”

I stretched my arms over the length and breadth of the image, so that I hugged it. “It was covered up before—I know this is it! Sofia was writing about wolves, and the Duomo, in her diary. She said, something...that Antonio gave the city pure gold, remember?” I stared up at the ceiling’s gold angels, red-gilt stars. “So that would mean some of Montezuma’s gold was—”

“Above us.” Erik raised his face to the Duomo’s heights.

“Though this
can’t
be what we’re looking for. This gold’s mixed with other metals—and Antonio couldn’t have expected Cosimo to lug away a whole cathedral ceiling—”

“Yes—but the second clue is probably
here
.
‘In a shrine at City Two / A She-Wolf tells more than I / Four Dragons guard the next Cue...’

This is a shrine; here’s the wolf. And remember, they lived somewhere around here—she describes it.” I ran over the floor to pick up my tumbled bag. I pulled out the
Diario Intimo
and frantically paged though it.

Erik turned and in three hyperactive strides stood before the mosaic.

“When they were running away from the mob, they came here for sanctuary. And the priests tried to bar them from coming in—”

“She wrote about how he performed his
trick,”
I said.

“About how he turned...turned...good lord, what was it?”

I read: “
‘My husband convinced them by performing his Trick. He used all his might, and then the Wolf turned clockwise round, and round again. And a third time. Thus my werewolf Love protected us from all harm.’
What does that mean?”

The cleaning lady and the janitor made increasingly astonishing threats about how they would assassinate us if we even scratched the mosaics, while Erik crouched down, running his fingers along the gap between the white ring and the multicolored square.

“Oh, I see,” he said, after a second. “Yes, I think I might.” He put his hands down carefully on the stone circle, the pale wheel that encompassed it.

“What?”

He braced himself against the floor, leaning his weight on his hands. He began to press. His cheeks bulged with the effort. An alarming shade of crimson spread over his forehead. Soon, sweat poured down his head, his cheeks, soaking his collar.

“I think I might understand,” he grunted.

“What are you doing?”

“Honey, help me! Push!”

I watched what he was doing for a blank moment before I understood his idea.

“All right—all right—harder.”

I bore down on the white stone round, grinding my hands against it, crushing my fingers and the heels of my hands down so that my neck pinched and my back burned. We heaved, our wet hands slipping. Thrusting and shoving away at the implacable cold rock, the strain deafened me to the battle cries of the cleaning lady.

She was trying to summon back the cigarette-smoking guards.

Nothing.

Erik and I fell back, panting.

“Again,” he said.

We bore down once more on the immobile pictures, pushing—pressing—so the skin felt as if it were being torn from my hands.

And
then the Duomo’s mosaic turned
.

The circle inched to the left, clockwise, in a good, if stiff, half rotation.

“Oh, look at these idiots, they’re destroying the mosaics!” the janitor exclaimed.

The cleaning lady’s voice dropped an octave. “No, Pietro, what
is
that they’re doing?”

“Keep going,” I yelled.

Erik and I pressed until the wolf circle turned once, a complete revolution. We stared at each other across the images of Romulus and Remus, laughing like asylum inmates.

“We’re doing it!” I said.

“This is it—this
is
it!”

Again the wolf turned. It turned once more.

With a huge last thrust, Erik and I pushed the stone circle back into position for a third time, to hear a loud, unmistakable metal
click
beneath the floor.

A great heavy creak shook the mosaic, causing dust fumes to rise all around us. The circle opened up about ten inches off the ground, jerking from its position on an invisible hinge. It was a trap door.

“Ah, incredible, look at that,” Erik breathed.

“They, they broke it, Carla,” said the janitor.

She backed away from the chasm. “No, dearest, they found something.”

Erik and I scrambled to look through the enormous hole. We gripped the thick circle at its edge and pushed it up, so it stood perpendicular to the floor. A giant green-rusted iron slide bolt, blooming whitely with spiderwebs, was affixed to its underside. The aperture gaped about five feet in diameter, exhaling stale, cool air up to our faces. Within the cleft, the air swirled blind-black, except where the light from the Duomo’s lamps poured in. This illumination revealed the top of a massive wooden ladder, which led down to imperceptible earth somewhere far below.

Erik lowered to his knees again, poking his head into the dark before crouching on his haunches, his cheeks puffing. He eased one khakied leg tentatively into the chasm. Next he stepped onto the first creaking rung of the wooden ladder.

“Let me go first,” I said. “Come on, hold up—”

“Forget it, Lola.
Agh
—okay. What have we got here? Yes, the ladder seems to be holding under my weight. That’s a plus.”

As he began to disappear down the round floor, I reached for my purse, which had been squashed at the feet of the washerwoman.

“These mosaics have been here since the fourteenth century,” she spat. “They’re the work of artists long dead now, with nothing left to show for their lives but these pictures. This is sacred ground, you fool! What do you think is going to be under there?
Madonna
—nothing good, so why don’t you get out now? The guards are going to be here any second.”

“With guns,” the janitor said to Erik.

“Fascinating—and
on
the subject of death and mutilation,” he replied, pitching his gaze my way. “Lola, something’s just occurred to me—this is obviously where Sofia and Antonio hid from the mob, but I’m worried about something. The riddle says that the she-wolf
tells more than I,
right?”

“Yes.”

He continued descending. “I think that there might be some sort of potentially
really
frightening pun going on there.”

The hole swallowed him up to his neck, so that he looked like a ruddy, voluble, disembodied head. “
Tell
—that’s not Italian.

It’s an Arabic word. Tells were artificial markers—rocks, hills, mounds. They were found in what used to be ancient Babylonia, to designate underground sepulchers, or buried ruins that were still
haunted by its genies
. People back then didn’t regard them as you and I would. You know, as more or less invitations to go scavenging under to see what we might find.” His head vanished; he was only a voice. “They regarded a tell as a
warning,
you see—a kind of antique
keep away
sign—so that you didn’t fall into the buried area and meet up with the inhabitant ghosts and demons, who would subject you to the everlasting tortures of hellfire, thumbscrews, defenestrations, other nasty—
Kahunk-agh—
”

Mid-sentence came a bad downward-tripping sound echoing up from the chasm. I heard the unmistakable bone-whacking racket of a body’s thud.

“Erik— Erik!”

I scrambled over to the edge of the abyss.

“Erik!” I put my foot on the top rung of the ladder and began hurrying down it.

“Where have you been? We’ve got nut-jobs over here!” the cleaning lady was hollering, in the sudden rush of male voices.

“Heard something about a fight in the
campo,
signora, and reports of noise—”

The cleaning lady blared: “And who’s
this
guy?”

“We’re closed, for Mary’s sake!” the janitor added. “Who are all these people!”

The frosty air of the Duomo’s basement closed in on my legs as I dropped into the black space. But in the moment before my head dipped below the cathedral’s floor, I glanced up.

In the doorway of the church I saw a trio of blue-capped police officers, one of them still smoking. As we had fled Florence less than twenty-four hours before, Officer Gnoli had not yet broadcast our names to the authorities. Yet these police officers were sufficiently freaked by our apparent destruction of one of the most important mosaics in the whole world to consider arresting or torturing us on the spot. They began to whirligig their arms around their heads so violently it almost seemed as if they were experimenting with the possibilities of human flight.

“What the hell are you doing? Why’s there a hole in the floor? Where’s that girl going?”

And in the midst of their hubbub, I saw another person peering at me.

Ponytailed, Olmec-faced, stained-glass colors running down his neck: It was the tattooed man.

“My, my look at that,” he muttered admiringly, his leather jacket rustling as he slipped between the police. “You cracked it, Lola.”

Whatever familiar signs I had seen in his face before had been erased. I could not read him, except for the excitement in his dark eyes and the red welt on his cheek from my bashing. But I was certain now it was Tomas. I’d heard all the tales about how he had donned disguises and faked disappearances to sabotage the Guatemalan army, and how as a young man he easily picked up accentless German, Nahuatl, and, yes,
Italian,
by seducing foreign ladies. And I’d heard, too, of how his eccentric, mercenary personality took its toll on my sister, Yolanda, when she was growing up. He’d pulled stunts and reappearing acts like this on her many times before.

“Why are you here?” I hissed in Spanish. “What is this all about?”

“So you know who I am?”

“Yes. You’re
dead
!”

He only smiled.

“What are you doing?”

“I heard this rumor that I had a kid who was a hell of a lot like me. I thought I’d come out of hiding to check it out.”

“Get out of the floor, Miss,” one of the policemen ordered.

“You’re damaging this monument.”

But I just blurted to Tomas’s damned amused face: “You must be crazy. Do you know what you’ve put Yolanda through? Stay away from my family!”

“Not before I give you this.” He chuckled, pulling a little silver phone from his pants pocket and tossing it to me, soft and easy.

Instinctively, spastically, I raised my hand and caught it in the air.

“Get out of there, Miss!”
the police yelled again, one of them laying hands on Tomas.

“Text me if you have any questions, sweets,” he said in this growling, happy voice. “I’ll get out of this fix easy enough. But I think you’d better slip out of here, quick.”

“Aggggghhh!”

Staring at him, and with all my strength, I pulled down on the door’s slide lock so the stone ring slammed with a deafening echoing
ring
back into the floor—now my ceiling. I rammed the bolt into an unseen hole.

Then I stumbled, yelling Erik’s name, into the darkness of the church’s secret bowels.