The King's Gold (30 page)

I closed my eyes again.

i think we need to talk senor relada

...

where r u

...

right now in an apt off piazza navona

...

u been alright havent heard from u

...

wel i guess i almost died

...

sory to hear that but did u find the gold dear

...

thnx for the sympathy btw i know u havent told me evrything about my dad

...

like what

...

that he was such a [expletive]

...

temper temper

....

[expletive expletive]

After two days spent alternately in psychic delirium, mute revelation, and text-message-sending frenzies, at six a.m. on June 9 I sat up and drank coffee in a small third-floor apartment off the Piazza Navona that my extremely resourceful half-sister had rented after rescuing us from the death-pit of Ostia Antica.

Yolanda de la Rosa, thirty-five years old, the legitimate heir of Tomas and a now long-dead wife named Marisa (car accident), had been well trained by her father in the art of shelter seeking. She wore a black Stetson in memory of the ten-gallon that he had affected, but that was only one of the resemblances between them, as he had whipped her into an adventurer’s shape tough enough to deserve the famous family name. At the age of twelve, he famously set her loose, and alone, in the Petén forest in Guatemala. She had tracked through the jaguar-happy swamps and defiles for thirteen days, until she discovered him waiting for her in a remote Quiche village, where he had ordered local chefs to prepare a fourteen-course feast celebrating her survival. Other equally difficult tests continued to punctuate her young life: tracking girl-eating puma in the Amazon, maniacal wildebeests in Patagonia. These Herculean labors had made her into a hard-muscled, wily, melancholic woman with deep shadows beneath her eyes, who had been living uncomfortably with us in Long Beach ever since her father’s “death.” But though her schooling had given her the equanimity necessary to face down equatorial cougars and South American vamp bats, it did
not
prevent her from presently dissecting my stupidity in a machine-gun stutter, though I was still tottering green-faced about the apartment.

“So, love apples are nothing more than belladonna, and
that
was used as a main ingredient in the ‘flying balms’ of Renaissance witches,” Yolanda boomed at me. Now hatless, wearing a scarlet poncho, as well as her ever-present blue jade necklace, she sat drinking her
macchiato
across from Erik and me as we sat at a tiny table in the kitchen. “Back in Guatemala, I’d heard about
brujas
who still use it, when they try to go into trances. They mix it in with pig lard, and then spread it all over their bodies. It gives them this, I don’t know, vertiginous feeling—but you’d be able to describe it better than I would now, wouldn’t you, fool?”

“That we would, I’m sorry to say,” Erik muttered. His eyes remained rosy from the gassing, his cheeks resembled copy paper, and he still wore the navy slacks and shirt of his now-scrofulous suit. “For God’s sake, I thought I had these big fuzzy wings and was flapping them all around like a happy pterodactyl. Until I realized that I was blind and near paralyzed and I could hear Lola choking next to me. And then—you came. And pushed me out of the Mithras bath.”

“Only reason it didn’t wind up being any worse is because I saw a little smoke coming out of those ruins, and when I ran in—when I came in I saw...what I thought was a corpse.
Why
did you burn that stuff? Didn’t you have any idea?”

“Yes,” I said. Erik and I looked at each other.

“We thought we could scamper away if things grew...tricky,” he said.

She shook her head. “They’ve got names for that kind of thinking, Gomara, and most of them are obscene.”

“I know, I know!” grunted Erik. “You don’t have to tell me! I was a moron—
ape
-stupid! If I get any dumber—”

“It was my fault,” I murmured. “It was my idea.”

“I’ll devolve into a caveman with a mono-brow as big as a freaking Frisbee—”

“Erik.”

I put my cup down. Still unsteady, I had no idea how to broach the subject on my mind. I simply flung it at him. “Erik—honey—when we were—you know—underground—did you
see
anything in there?”

“See anything?”

“Feel anything? Anything strange? Or even—”

“Besides hallucinating that I was a big bird and worrying that you were going to die? No.” His mouth dragged down his face.

I reached over to squeeze him. “Honey, it’s okay. Everything’s fine now.”

But this is when I knew I was the only one who had that mystical vision of love in the Mithras ruins.

Yolanda crossed her long legs at the ankles. “Ah, I told you she’d be all right, Gomara, you old panda. Look at her—she’s peachy. And you’ve got to buck up. You haven’t eaten anything in like two days.”

“Haven’t been hungry. Too upset.”

“Nah, that was just morphine I gave you. Say, why don’t you try to choke something down? I went shopping. You should be hungry now; I hear that belly of yours bubbling. There’s plenty of calzone in the fridge.”

“There
is
?”

“Sure.”

He kissed my head and unclasped me. “Hmmmm. Oh. Maybe...I could give food a try, I guess. I’ll be right back.”

As Erik quickly ambled off, Yolanda pulled her hair back into a ponytail and regarded me with her leaf-shaped eyes. “He was like that the whole time you were gone. A real handful. I had to dope him,
hug
him—though all that didn’t work as well as when I distracted him with that thing you were looking for—that clue, the medal—”

“Did you see the ones we found? With the letters stamped into them?”

“Sure did. And I’ll admit, that’s some interesting stuff. I got him busy writing down everything he knew about that riddle—the invisible city, Antonio il Lupo, Cosimo, this Sofia woman. And he came up with something about a hint you might have missed. The third hint in the letter, is that what he said? Something like that.”

“What hint?”

She sighed. “I don’t
know,
Lola! I’ve had some other things on my mind, too—like you croaking, and your koala in the kitchen there having a nervous flip-out, and then this business everybody’s been yelling about Marco Moreno.”

“He’s the one who got me over here, Yo,” I said.

She leaned back in her chair. “Aw, damn! So, it’s true. Marco ‘the snake’ Moreno, come to see my little sister.”

“Marco ‘the snake’?”

“Yeah, that was his nickname back at home. That kid’s a chip off the old colonel’s block, and I had the bad luck to run into him more than a few times. In the war, man, he was a serial killer. That dude’s not even human.”

“What did he do?”

“Why don’t I tell you all about that when
you’re
not half-dead? I had some hopes that he’d stay under the radar ’cause I heard he had some sort of psycho breakdown in Paris. Which was no surprise. He was always sort of freakish, you know? A real dork. No friends, reading a lot—when he wasn’t cleansing the fatherland of untouchables. But he didn’t change his stripes, judging by the company he’s keeping. Erik told me that some Eastern European friend of his got creamed, but an Italian didn’t, and this Italian boy wants to punch Erik to death.”

“More or less, yes.”

“Oh, too bad it’s true. I was hoping it was the morphine talking.”

“No.”

“Not the best news. So why’s he here? Why’s he following you around?”

“Gold. Blood vendetta—”

“The regular stuff. My question is—does he really know
where Dad died
?”

“No. He doesn’t.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

I didn’t answer, and not only because I was anxious about her reaction. Still in the midst of my spiritual convulsion that had begun in Sofia’s cave, I must have had the benign and unhinged air of a saint about me when I suddenly fell forward and threw myself into her arms. “Aw, I
love
you, Yolanda, you know that? Really, I really completely awfully do. I’m so glad you’re here.”

“Stop it—you’re getting mushy,” she grunted, but I saw tears form in her eyes as she roughly petted my hair. “And I lied. You
do
look terrible. Ya look like Jack Nicholson, kid.”

“I feel wonderful. I feel like I have been baptized.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Or, actually, I do have to tell you something. I know that Marco was wrong about our dad because...I saw Tomas.”

Her hand paused as she stroked my hair. “Did you just say you thought you saw Tomas?”

“That’s it.”

“Tomas—as in our father, Tomas. As in Tomas de la Rosa.”

“Yes.”

“As in the Tomas de la Rosa who possibly left Guatemala for some unknown reason and is now dead.”

“
Yes
—except that he’s not. I’m sure of it. He’s alive. I saw him in Siena.”

She continued to touch my hair. “Oh, Sissy, Honey-Bunny. Don’t you think I saw him for weeks and weeks after I’d heard he’d died?”

“It’s not like that. And there’s more—this fence person, Soto-Relada, this man I talked to—you’ve got to hear this whole story: He said Tomas
owned
Antonio’s letter before Marco and that he was on the trail for the gold, and then I started texting him—”

She frowned. “Blah, blah, blah, blah—I’m not listening to any of this malarkey. Because it
is
like that. I know what you’re talking about. It’s like Daddy’s a ghost, and he comes back, and you’re seeing him. But you’re
not
. I used to follow these strangers around for hours,
positive
it was him, and that all of this was just another test—like how he’d show up in the jungle after I’d been tracking alone for days? That’s what I thought would happen
all the time
. But then these strangers, they’d turn around, and I’d see, pfffft. It was just me going bananas—and on that subject, you understand I’m not doing that damned scavenger hunt—”

“Yeah, I got that. But listen—I swear I
saw
him—”

“Tomas de la Rosa is buried in the ground. And I have got to find out where that is, so I can say my good-byes, goddammit.”

“I saw him—he had a ponytail and tattoos
—
”

“Stop saying that, Lola.”

“What are you two yelling about?”

Erik had emerged from the kitchen to stand in the doorway, looking white and boneless, as he clutched a calzone in both hands.

“Um...nothing,” I said, giving him a good, long look. “You’re pale, sweets. Are you okay?”

“Well.
No
.”

“I told you,” Yolanda muttered, also calming down. “Your boy needs some fresh air or something.”

“Why are you guys fighting?”

“We’re not—we’re not. She was telling me...right—that you have a theory, baby.”

Yolanda nodded. “Yeah—okay, let’s talk about
that.
Gomara, that idea you worked out in the hospital, the third hint handed down by our Lupo. I know you came up with something good, buddy. Let us have it. Because hell, after all—you guys are on some treasure hunt, and I know I wouldn’t mind tracking down some nice Aztec gold doubloonies. Besides, if that Moreno does know anything about Tomas dying here—”

“Which he doesn’t—” I said.

“I’ll bet he’d be interested in trading on information. So let’s get with it.”

Munching the calzone, Erik glanced at my sister. “Oh, about the letter.”

“About burning the letter,” she said.

“I did come up with an amazing theory,” he said. “But I think we should probably do that later. You know, because I’m feeling a little”—he made a wobbly gesture with one hand—“schizophrenic.”

“You’re going to burn a letter?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Yolanda.

“No,” he corrected. “We’re going to
heat
it up. But just not now—”

“Actually, this could be good. I’ll go get it.” My sister banged off to the bedroom.

Erik sat back down at the table, squeezing the calzone so hard it dented. “Lola, go back to bed.”

“No, no, no. I feel fine. What did you figure out?”

“You won’t be any good if you’re sick.”

“I’m great.”

“Look in the
mirror
.”

“Here.” Yolanda raced back into the room with Antonio’s second, illuminated letter and a cigarette lighter. “How did you say you were supposed to do it? Like this?”

She removed the epistle from its red envelope, brandishing the papers before our eyes so the purple-black painted flowers glittered dimly under the apartment’s electric lights. Antonio’s script blazoned across the blond paper, telling the story of the march on Tenochtitlán, Montezuma’s curse, and the wolfman’s bloodbath under the moon.

Yolanda flicked on the lighter and held it up to the last page, which contained the passage:

And so ends my letter, filled as it is with Tricks & Clues. Only if you study my words, and what lies beneath them, will you discover the Key to the mystery that waits for you in Rome. If so, your mettle will prove cleverer, and much less yellow than I supposed.

But in my Wolf heart, by the beating of my Wyvern’s blood, I hope you die on this next Quest.

Sincerely yours