The King's Gold (24 page)

In short order, he nimbly scrambled the letters until he came up with this:

Il Noioso Lupo Retto = Io Sono il Lupo Tetro

The resolved anagram, translated literally, is

Or

I am a Sad & Dark Wolf

I slapped my hand on the bed. “That’s it! That’s it, Erik!”

“Tetro.”
Erik rested his head on a cushion. “That means ‘sad and dark, or gloomy, melancholy,’ like we were talking about before.”

“Yes.”

I read it again, and again, until something disgruntingly obvious occurred to me.

“But we already
knew
that. Antonio was a depressive. I don’t see how this is supposed to be any kind of clue.”

Erik’s eyes had just closed. His head sank down farther into the comforter.

“Erik.”

His eyes half-opened. “Yes.”

“Let’s figure this out.”

He crawled under the covers with lumbering lunges. “You just come here, snuggle up—you talk, and I’ll meditate on it.”

In the next minute, his mouth opened and he had splayed dramatically all over the bed.

I, on the other hand, continued to obsess over the letter.

Il Noioso Lupo Retto:

The Righteous and Tiresome Wolf

Io Sono il Lupo Tetro:

I am the Dark and Sad Wolf

For the next few hours, until just before dawn began to break, I alternately napped alongside Erik and leafed through the epistle in search of the “
Three Hints”
that Antonio promised were secreted in the letter. His story about the gold did seem to contain occluded meanings, but there were not any I could interpret; I also could not begin to fathom a treasure clue from the unscrambled lament concerning his dark sadness.

I glared out the still-black window of our room while I pondered the Wolf’s strange life and death. The letter that Marco Moreno had dragged me to Italy to study had been written by Antonio on the eve of the Florentine’s 1554 battle against the Sienese. History told that the fight had gone well for the Florentines but not for Antonio. As I had explained to Marco days before in the Red Lion—and as the tattooed man/father/freakshow had briefly recounted for me before our scuffle at the caffè—Antonio had become fatally confused during the skirmish against the Sienese. No book on the Medici history is complete without this colorful story of his demise: Antonio had been in the possession of some extraordinarily powerful weapon (which many attributed to his alchemical experiments, and others to Sofia the Dragon’s magic), but somehow his horse had turned the wrong way on the battlefield, and before he had been cut down, he had killed many men in a catastrophic sixteenth-century version of “friendly fire.”

A man’s method of dying is the best evidence of the way he lived—

Marco Moreno’s voice echoed in my mind. Those were the words he said to me in the Medici tomb, moments before he described Tomas de la Rosa’s supposed ignominious death.

It’s much better to go out like Antonio, don’t you think? 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 rubbed my eyes. Perhaps we were missing some key that could be found only in Antonio’s last days. The melancholy Wolf had fought and been executed on the Tuscan battleground of...I couldn’t remember.

Slipping off the bed, I made for the stack of books I had purchased that morning in Siena’s shops. Though I hadn’t found any in-depth studies of Renaissance Tuscan mayhem, I did stumble on a little capitalist self-help gem called
How to Crush the Competition Like a Medici: Learn from the First Cosa Nostra’s Battles to Achieve Global Corporate Domination.
Paging through this brutal little guidebook’s many maps, I found the spot where Antonio fell in the ’54 war.

There it was, in the south of Tuscany:

Marciano-Scannagallo.
How to Crush the Competition
’s atlas indicated that the battleground was not so very far away from where we were. But what exactly had happened in the theater—at that hour? And why had Antonio become confused and killed the wrong men before being cut down himself?

I checked my wristwatch: four in the morning. A perfect time to wake up.

Erik lay in an immobile heap on the bed. I began to jostle his arm until I saw that his eyes were already open, and his skin was pale and moist.

“Erik— Erik, honey.”

“Ye-es.”

“Why are you awake?”

“Because sleeping’s so overrated.”

“What are you thinking about? What happened in the crypt?”

“Nonsense.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”

“Why?”

“Because I
am
thinking about how those poor old guys died, and Blasej...and I’d rather forget the whole business as soon as is humanly possible.”

“Well. If you’re sure you
don’t
want to talk.”

“Very.”

“Then, sorry.” I began tossing him around again. “You have to get up—”

“Um—
no
. I want a drink. Or you could just crush up a bottle of Ambien and sprinkle it over some gelato for me.”

“No, no, no. Come on, lovey—come on, sexy—”

“I’m really not joking—”

“On your feet. I’m going to talk to the manager—see if we can rent his car. We’re going to make a little trip.”

“Oh, right, a trip—
where
?”

“Marciano.”

“What? Why?”

“To find out how Antonio died.”

“Dad—are you there?” I was fumbling with the cell phone that the tattooed man had tossed me in the Duomo.

“Can you hear me now?”

“Monster? Where
are you
? Why haven’t you called us?”

“Ah—Pops—how’s the world’s greatest father, and most macho Mexican—”

“Lola, what’s going on? You—you—you ran away!”

“Er, um, yeah, I’m in Italy.”

“Good Lord! A few nights ago Erik calls us gibbering about Aztecs, the Medici, some Lothario whisking you off to Europe, and—gag—I can barely
say
it—something about de la Rosa’s grave. The next thing we knew, he’d sped off to Rome. And then your
sister...”

“Yolanda—what do you mean?”

“Darling, you know I love you. You are my angel and I adore you from the tips of your toes to that little zany brain of yours, and I would slay dragons to protect you—even though you suddenly appear to have gone as witless as the seven hundred pounds of poultry your wedding caterer is even now transforming into tacos for your wedding reception!”

“Dad—”

“Lo-la. I understand you went to Italy because you might find Tomas there? I
do
know that your miserable excuse for a biological father cut quite the dashing figure—after all, I nearly lost your mother to his gassy charisma decades ago, which I cannot completely regret, obviously, since it gave me
you...
but let’s get past all that, can’t we? He is
dead now
! And I thought that might mean that I could
finally
get some peace of mind—but no! First your mother gallops off to the jungle to find his tomb and nearly gets squashed to bits in the jungle—and then you! Racing off without a single whit of notice, and practically on the eve of your wedding.” Manuel Alvarez took a big breath and blew it out.

“Though I must say that I
am
so glad to hear from you, Creature. I do adore you so much that I can’t really be very upset (though your mother has been a raving
animal
) even if it means that I have to share your affection with of course the eternally damned ghost of that scoundrel de la Rosa...”

While Manuel gasped into my ear, Erik and I drove in our manager’s rented car, a silver Fiat. It smelled like cigarettes and guzzled gas, but we’d stocked it with books and provisions Erik thought we’d need to barrel over the thirty southeast miles extending from Siena to Marciano della Chiana. We headed to the bucolic countryside that once was the battlefield where Antonio had died. It was not quite dawn. The region’s groves and twisted, dark trees diffused the early lavender light. The scene’s Zen-like beauty, however, stood in harsh contrast to the jangling voice of Manuel Alvarez, Ph.D.—my adopted father, the long-unmarried lover of Juana, and the Guatemalan curator whose secret stores of bravery helped us face down Colonel Moreno two years ago and to locate my mother in the jungle.

“Okay, Pops, listen. First off, I’m definitely not here looking for de la Rosa—de la Rosa’s
grave,”
I assured him with this very incomplete truth.

“You’re not?” he asked in his high, scratchy voice. “No? Oh. Well! Then why in the world was everyone howling that Tomas died in Italy?”

“That’s just a rumor; it’s not true. And I need you to focus on something else now.”

“First Tomas is dead in Guatemala. Then he’s dead in Italy. Then he’s nowhere. And
still
he is able to drive us all absolutely bats—”

“Dad, listen to me.”

“Um...okay! All ears, darling.”

“Right now, we’re in Siena—actually, almost at Marciano della Chiana.”

“We’re practically there,” yawned Erik. He was simultaneously driving and blinking at the map. “Just looks like vineyards. Grapes. Farmhouses. Good. Nothing that could kill you.” He squinted at my silver cell. “Where’d you get that phone, by the way?”

“Ssss—
him,”
I mouthed.

“Oh, right, the Ghost of Christmas Past—”

“Was that Erik?” my father asked.

“Yes, he’s here.”

“So he found you? Before he left, he said you scampered off with some sort of
man
.”

“I did—I’m here because someone showed up at the Lion with this document, Dad. His name’s Marco Moreno. We sort of... know him. Remember Colonel Moreno? Victor Moreno?”

“Marco Moreno? Mmmm, no bells. Wait—did you say Colonel
Moreno
? From the jungle? The
dead
one? The one who tried to shoot us and was smashed to pieces?”

“Marco is his son.”

“Is that her?!”
I heard my mother exclaim in the background.

“The
son,”
my father said. “That’s not good, is it?”

“Well, he’s gone, now. He went off, after Erik...talked to him and his friends.”

“Yeah, that’s what happened,” Erik muttered next to me. “We just hugged it out, and then they all teleported away.”

My voice pitched: “But this letter he brought me—it was written by Antonio Medici.”

“I’d rather talk about this Marco fellow—”

“
Dad,
Antonio Medici? Do you know about him? The conquistatore?”

“Agh, yes, yes. I attended a panel on him in Morocco, where we all
foamed
about these beastly colonials. Antonio Medici, alchemist, werewolf, soldier of Cortés, mass murderer—”

“In his letter, we found a map, kind of. It’s amazing—it could lead us to Aztec treasure.”

“Well, there
was
that old rumor, of Antonio having stolen some sort of Mexican stash. Never been substantiated. So, I see. You are trying to find old Montezuma’s gold?
That’s
interesting—but, wait— Honey—
Juana
—calm down, gagh—
I’m talking to her—
”

My mother is a silver-haired, Mexican-born world expert on Mayan iconography, who began booming out in the loud, dangerous voice that terrified her underlings at UCLA, where she headed the archaeology department: “So? What’d she say? Is she shacked up with some guy?”

“It doesn’t sound like that, dear.”

“Then what’s she doing? I’m playing Wanda the wedding planner over here, and I’ve got a dozen bridesmaids coming over any minute to slap a tiara on her head and get her wasted—”

I blurted: “
Dad—
we’re looking for this place where Antonio died. Go with me on this.”

“I know where Antonio was killed, Lola. Used to be called Scannagallo, a valley—”

“We’re driving to it now.” I explained to Manuel that I needed whatever details he could muster about the Florentines’ conflict with the Sienese, and Antonio’s last battle.

“Fine. All right. Let me try to collect my thoughts—though I’m starting to feel very queasy about this Moreno person...ah, let’s see...Siena was a pawn in Franco-Italian tensions in the sixteenth century. In the so-called Italian wars. The city wanted independence from Spain—Charles V had Spanish garrisons there—and the Medici also wanted it for themselves.”

“Good, good, what else?”

“Cosimo aligned himself with Charles to fight against the French, who were protecting the Sienese rebels. A soldier named Pietro Strozzi, an enemy of Cosimo’s, defended the Sienese. In, what, 1554, his infantry went rampaging around the countryside, pillaging and whatnot, also very cheerfully disemboweling Imperial supporters. But the decisive battle happened during the summer. That’s when the Medici forces arrived.”

Erik pressed harder on the gas. “The map says we’re going to pull up around it soon.”

I looked up as he drove the car off the main road, bumping over dirt roads until he pulled up directly west to a valley. The lifting light revealed a long dip in the countryside, filled with wild-looking sycamores, and from this vantage I could just detect a man on the other side of the valley. He wore a shirt that looked dark gray in the predawn. This would be a farmer or a vintner.