The King's Gold (32 page)

I ducked my head.

Then he was sucked back into the mob.

“Ooooohhh!”
I hissed.

“What?” Erik and Yolanda both asked.

“Let’s go,
let’s go.”

I grabbed their shirts, running and dragging them with me. We had just come in sight of the gigantic Vatican and its museum.

Here there was an even denser agglutination of people. Pushing rudely into a long line, I led our too-ponderous shuffling way up to a doorway, so we could hide inside. I had seen Domenico. I
had
seen him. I was sure. But an anonymous sea of humanity crushed afore and aft, and I couldn’t spot the likes of him in the mob waiting to get into John Paul II’s house.

“Oh my God my God
my God.”

“What the hell is going on?”

“Marco.”

Erik bunched his mouth.
“Right.”

“Right?” I asked, barely paying attention
“Marco—”

“What—
Do you see him
?”

“No. Huh? Remember? What I was trying to remember about Tomas. In Siena, in the valley, Marco told us...he said something about...proof. He was talking about showing you proof that Tomas...and it must be in the stash from his rucksack, what we put in our bag. We haven’t looked through all of it yet—”

“Proof that Tomas what?” Yolanda asked.

“Oh. That. Yes,” I said, remembering Marco’s words in the Chiana valley, and how he’d shaken the rucksack at me: He’d said that in the bag was evidence that Tomas had killed himself. “Why don’t we just hold off on that right now while we—agh—try to get inside.” The line for entrance to the Vatican museums moved at a funereal pace even as I continued to press my shoulders really rudely against the people ahead of me. “Let’s go, let’s go, guys, get a move on.”

“Proof that Tomas what?”
Yolanda asked.

“Oh, ah, well.” Erik remembered the delicate nature of this ersatz “proof.” “It’s not good, Yolanda.”

I forced my way through the line, simultaneously apologizing and coughing like an escapee from a tubercular ward so as to forestall the other pilgrims’ foreseeable ravening reactions. “Agh, gag, gag, oh,
sorry— blagh
.” Erik was attempting a hesitant description of what Marco had told us about the supposed suicide, while Yolanda, now on the scent, yanked the backpack off his shoulders and began to dig through it.

“What do you
have
in here?” she sputtered, thrusting her entire arm into the bag.

“Book...papers...maps...some food—” Erik said.

“These are all folded up, and crushed up at the bottom.”

“No, no,
no—
don’t look at anything in there. Keep walking.” I pulled them through the door. After more delays, ticket purchases, and a lackadaisical weapons search the likes of which would become extinct in the coming September, we were allowed inside the white anteroom of the Vatican museums. Here, lines serpentined up and down stairs that led into and back out of the building.

Yolanda continued rattling her hands around inside the backpack.

I kept my eyes on the tourists and the guards and still did not see signs of Domenico or Marco.

“Wait,” Erik said. “What’s that?”

Yolanda had a handful of crushed and crumpled pages. She extracted one sheet from that crackling paper bush.

“Oh,” she said. She smoothed it out, held it up, and read it. In large Gothic letters, I saw the words
DEATH CERTIFICATE
. And she said again,
“Oh.”

“What does it say?” Erik said.

I yanked at her wrist. “No, don’t read it. Whatever it is—I don’t care what it says—it’s just—
lies
.”

Yolanda tensed, as if she were not so much scanning the text as bodily absorbing it; her lips formed the words on the page.

Her eyes filled with tears.

She raised the sheet of paper up to our faces. It shivered in her hand.

Upon that certificate was the hard proof that Tomas de la Rosa had killed himself in Italy.

CERTIFICATO DI MORTE

VENEZIA, ITALIA

(Translated)

This is to Certify that our records show
TOMAS DE LA ROSA
died in Venice, Italy.

Month:
MARCH
day:
23
year:
1998
hour:
NOT LISTED

Age of death:
63 YEARS
Sex:
MALE
Race:
HISPANIC

Married or single:
UNKNOWN

Primary cause of death given was:
SUICIDE BY DROWNING

Signed by
Dr. Rosate Modalas
(physician, health officer, or coroner)

Place of burial or removal:
N/A

Date of burial:
N/A

Funeral Home address
SEAL

Signed
Dr. Rosate Modalas, Health Officer

Address
Venice, Italy

Date
March 26, 1998

Record Filed:
MARCH 28, 1998

Certificate Number:
4

I gaped at the death certificate. Yolanda was oblivious to the sultry humanity pressing us up the stairs and ever forward into the Vatican’s sanctum. Erik took the document from her and read it closely.

“It looks real,” he said, sadly.

“Oh. Oh, Dad.”

I felt electrocuted. “That’s not—that’s not right.”

“What does ‘n/a’ mean?” Erik asked. “‘Place of burial: n/a. Date of Burial: n/a.’ Don’t they know? Or is just that he wasn’t buried?”

“He killed himself,” Yolanda whispered, when she could finally speak. “Oh my Jesus. Daddy
did
abandon me. He left me. The old dog
left me,
Lola. He left me all by myself. In Guatemala. Surrounded by bastards! Like Colonel Moreno—”

“Seriously, Yolanda—
we have to keep moving
.”

The crowd continued to push us past turnstiles, up the spiraling stairs. At the landing, the human wave swept us left, into the first of the extraordinary papal galleries. I feverishly looked around. No sign of Domenico or Marco within this fantasia of antiques. We began rushing about, to and fro, crying and arguing. At our feet slept mummies kidnapped from Cairo; another apartment bristled with marble Apollos. I could barely see the Gallery of Maps because of my escalating anxiety attack about our AWOL switchblade-wielding Italian.

“It’s not true,” I wheezed. We had confusedly backtracked, and floundered in the Gallery of the Candelabra, where I think I stood next to a statue of Plato. I shut my eyes. “That paper’s not authentic, Yolanda.”

Tears rolled down her cheeks and she just cried and cried.

Erik hovered next to a gray-and-white marble pillar, looking at her.

“It can’t be real.” I frantically tried to keep my eye on everything at once. “For one thing—Yolanda—Tomas wouldn’t have killed himself. He wasn’t the suicidal type. Mom never said anything about that.”

She stood with her arms hanging down loosely, and her face glistening as she mournfully hiccupped: “‘Course he was.”

“What?”

“Suicidal? Ahhhhh,
sis
. He had his rough times. Pills, drink. That’s why he was always testing me, ’cause he was so screwed up. Because he was worried neither of us would survive...this stupid
life.
But even at his worst, goddamn! He
swore
he wouldn’t do this to me!”

Now I looked at her, completely focused.

“I guess the old man just couldn’t forget the things he did in the war,” she said.

I knew these
things
included the murder of Serjei Moreno, and possibly other sins as well, but I didn’t have time to care about Tomas’s crimes, which didn’t matter nearly as much as the sight of my sister’s collapsing face. I pressed her hand to my cheek, kissed it. “Oh, honey.”

At the entrance of the gallery, a guard with startling green eyes shook his head at us.

“No, no,” he said. “Not so much noise, please.”

But Yolanda only cried harder.

Amid the splendor I lamely hugged my sister. “I saw him, I swear—and I’ve been text messaging with this guy, Soto-Relada...” But though I tried to tell her, neither she nor Erik appeared to so much as hear me. As I rocked her, Erik moved toward us. His earlier expression of wariness had disappeared.

He knew the right thing to do. He knew before me.

“Yolanda,” he said, in that voice full of wicked humor and even sexiness. “Yo-lan-da. My dear.”

She cried just a touch softer now.

He wiped her face with his shirttail. “Yolanda, my sweetie. My darling. You can cry, that’s all right. We’ll wait. There’s no rush. And when you feel better, we’ll get back to what we came here for.”

“What the hell’s he—talking about?”

“You tell me. What are we doing here?”

She didn’t answer.

“Yolanda, what are we doing here?” he repeated.

“I don’t know!”

“We’re tracking, Yolanda,” he said.

After a minute, she nodded.

“We’re looking for a clue, baby,” he told her.

Yolanda glanced at us from under her eyelashes, let out a ragged breath.

“It’s got to be around here somewhere,” I said.

“A little round medal, with a letter engraved on it,” said Erik.

“Come on, my precious porcupine, my grumpy Guatemalan.”

With great finesse, he squeezed her shoulder, nudged it. “Help us find it.”

It took a few more seconds, but then she forced herself to say, “You must be nuts.”

“You would not be the first to make that accusation.”

“It’s true,” I said.

She put her hand up to her hat, squashed it down. She wiped her face again with his shirt before glaring around at the crowd that slowly sweated among the pope’s thousand trinkets and priceless bagatelles. “Oh, I don’t know,” she moaned. “How can anybody find anything in this big ol’ hairy pawnshop?”

“That’s what you’re here for.”

We led her out of the gallery, passing back again through the map room, the apartment of St. Pius V, the Sobieksi Room. We murmured encouragements, and the riddle: “
City Three’s Invisible / Within this Rock, find a Bath / Burn Love’s Apple, see the Clew / Then Try to Fly from my Wrath.”
But she was right; inside that gilded pandemonium there seemed no way of finding the riddle’s
Bath
let alone a six-inch gold medal engraved with Antonio’s runes. She tried, puffing her wits back into shape, squinting at artifacts with her wet eyes. She inspected a multiplication of red-gold crosses, statues, altar cloths, mosaics. Still no evidence of MM or monstrous blonds. She moved past idols, thrones, gold-leafed paintings. Still nothing.

Then we arrived at the Sistine Chapel.

We stood in the middle of that glorious human pen. As the guards hollered exasperated admonishments against the use of flash photography, we stood shoulder-to-shoulder with a crush of other peripatetics to take in the beautiful horrors of
The Last Judgement,
finished by Michelangelo in 1541.

It is one of the master’s more beguiling works.

For a brief, silent, death-forgetting moment I let the fresco teach me.

At first, I saw in the
Judgement
a specific, immutable structure. This holy system is divided between high and low, with Christ at its heart. From the celestial zenith, the brawny angels of the Resurrection carry the cross-nailed Saved up to glorious Heaven. Below, the more interesting creatures, the howling damned, grimace, leering, their gorgeous round flanks distorted from the floggings they receive from surprisingly attractive demons. The damned, as we all know, include murderers, adulterers, and suicides. If everything I had learned today was true, then that would be a decent description of Tomas de la Rosa. I lifted my eyes from the writhings of these fallen, to the center of the maelstrom, or lottery. There, in the eye of this storm, floats the mother Mary, and at her side presides the great Christ.

Christ lifts his right hand, making his selections. His torso is massive, muscle-fluttering. His face turns to quarter-profile, its expression impassive.

He is surrounded not with a small rounded halo, but rather is suspended within an immense swirling zephyr made of gold light. This shining cataract shimmers and whips in the heights of the chapel. I thought that it appeared to be made of a mix of citron, white, and gold paint, just touched with a reddish hue.

I was, and remain, convinced that Michelangelo’s paintbrush had been dipped in stolen gilt melted down from an Aztec deity. I thought again of Sofia’s journal, dated 1540: “
Antonio’s Gold is to...gild the Colossus that Michelangelo will soon work upon, the tomb of St. Peter.”

Five hundred years ago, Michelangelo’s brush touched Christ’s corona, making a sacred calligraphy. Standing there, I saw the sinister magic that the master practiced appropriately enough with this filched, Mexican, red-gold paint: The central aureole causes a miraculous confusion in the
Judgement
. It creates a circular, centripetal, whirlwind force, absolutely out of keeping with the static organization of Heaven and Hell, as it threatens to whirl the angels into the abyss and the demons into the firmament. The holy fire that surrounds Christ is more like a Buddhist prayer wheel than a halo; more like an Aztec calendar signifying the eternal return than the fixed, closed circle of the Catholics.

Michelangelo knew that there was chaos, not just in history but even in Heaven.