The King's Gold (34 page)

“The riddle says to look for a
Bath
,” Marco said when we caught up to him by the canopy.

I was busy scoping. “A baptismal font. That’s what makes sense in a church. Where do they perform baptisms in here?”

“That would be the baptistery,” Erik said.

“That’s toward the front, I think,” said Marco.

“Just hold on, just hold on,” Yolanda said. “Your technique stinks. This isn’t how you track. You people are all running around here like turkeys.”

Marco waved her off and moved back, toward the entrance, turning into a busy room off the side of the nave. We followed him into the chamber along with a rash of tourists.

“There,” I said. Among the baptistery’s splendid collection of mosaics and icons, a baptismal basin stood in the center of the room. Built out of a red porphyry cistern, its chiseled base and bronze furbelows were forged in a flowery style that is not quite of the Renaissance.

Erik, Marco, and I still made directly for it. We crawled our fingers through its carvings as we searched for some nook that might hide a gold medal. The two men bumped each other with their hips and sides as they worked.

“Move over,” said Erik.

“There’s plenty of room,” Marco replied. Then, to me: “What are we looking for?”

Erik bumped him again. “My God,
go away.”

“Why...are...you...so
hostile
?”

“Is he serious?”

“Will you two calm down?” I said.

“Here’s an idea: Why don’t you and I make a bitter little truce for the time being?” Marco waved a two-fingered peace sign in front of Erik’s face.

“A truce,” Erik said. “With a murderer?”

“I’m sorry to remind you that
you’re
more directly responsible for Blasej’s death than I am those dithering guards’. But why quibble? You must see how stupidly inefficient this treasure hunting will be if we’re trying to bash in each other’s brains.”

“But you are
dangerous.”

“I think you have seen by now that I don’t want to hurt her.”

“I don’t want you here.”

“And yet you see that I
am
.”

“Oh, he’s not going anywhere,” Yolanda said. “I’m not finished with him.”

“See?”

Erik looked at me.

“I want the families to try to come to an agreement,” I said. “A truce is a good idea.”

“Bah,” said Yolanda.

“Aren’t women wonderful?” Marco asked, diabolically.

Erik moved his mouth around his face as if a sliver of lemon had been magically pressed upon his tongue. A brief, struggling meditation. “Give me some room,” he said.

“All you need.” Marco magnanimously bowed and moved to the side.

“Actually, I think you’re done,” Yolanda said, suddenly glancing over her shoulder. “You’re starting to draw some unwanted attention.”

Behind us, tourists flocked and murmured:

“What they doing?”

“Someone call a guard.”

“Oooo, we don’t want them to do that—and I can’t find anything here, anyway,” I said. (Later, I would learn that the porphyry basin had been installed in the basilica in the seventeenth century; whatever
Bath
Antonio had referenced in his riddle was gone.)

Yolanda whistled and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “You ready to let me take a look around? Now that we’ve brokered the Geneva Convention?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. This place is a jumble sale. Knickknacks have been hurled around here since it was built. But I’ll bet there were one or two persnickety types who wanted to put all the little bits into one place, where they could keep their eye on them.”

She walked out of the baptistery, moving slowly into the basilica’s intricacy of chambers, surreptitiously touching bejeweled icons and sculptures, until she eventually found her way to a building off the side of the main basilica: the ten-room Treasury Museum.

Inside, the walls glistened with rows of glass cabinets, which held some of the most precious rarities in the papal collection. Tourists in long pants and unaccustomed floor-length dresses stooped before these displays, squinting.

With a swipe of her hand, Yolanda parted these human barricades with such authority I barely heard a mumble of protest. She led us through the treasure vault, stopping in the fourth room.

Here, she conducted a visual search of a case displaying a gold reliquary with fragments of the true cross, a gold key of St. Peter, a silver-wrapped chalice. Marco stood patiently in the midpoint of the gallery. Erik, at the doorway, kept closer watch on him than the antiquities.

But then I saw him give a jerk.

“What?”

Yolanda and I hurried over to the glass case that had caught Erik’s eye.

The case was on the west wall of the room, containing miniatures not in any way remarkable compared to the rest of Peter’s riches. A small emerald cut into the shape of a Celtic cross glittered next to a tiny bone sculpture of a lion. A tiny, miraculous pinecone made of crystal sparkled; a little Sphinx whittled from petrified wood stared out from its pretty prison.

There it was.

On the right-hand side, on a small Lucite stand, shone a round, thick, heavy, red-gold medal. It was elaborately etched, with roses, curling ferns, preternatural blossoms so Edenically lavish they nearly choked the cipher beyond recognition.

Erik, Yolanda, and I pressed ourselves against the glass pane.

“What?” Marco asked. He stood beside me. “What do you see?”

I did not say it out loud. Erik and I had found first an
L,
then a
P.
Now I stared at the third sign, which had been waiting for a prepared reader for more than five hundred years.

Marco followed my eyes. He saw it, the clue:

“What is that?” Marco gasped the question in my ear.

“U,”
Yolanda exulted.

“U,”
Marco repeated, not understanding.

“That’s it, then,” Erik said. “We’ve got it. And we’ve got to know what word the clues are spelling—don’t we?”

We were already whisking out of the basilica’s treasury, through the sacristy, then reaching its golden-phosphorescent nave.

“What was that?”
Marco demanded.

“I’ll tell you when I find out where my father’s buried,” Yolanda said.

“What if I tell you that the grave, such as it is,
is
in Venice? And that I’ll take you right to it when we get there.”

She stopped. “What do you mean, ‘such as it is’?”

“Yolanda,” I said. “I told you already—”

I shut my mouth with a snap; I could not mention the tattooed man in front of Marco.

“What did you mean by that?” she asked him again.

“I’m
not telling,
yet.” Marco kept moving forward. We were now following him out the doors, to the basilica’s front steps.

“I know why you’re doing this, Marco,” she said thinly. “And it isn’t just because of some scramble-headed idea about gold.”

He smiled. “Your sister has that theory, too. She says that I’m pursuing this because I’m good at it. At puzzle-solving. That I have promise.”

“And not because you’re pathetically lonely?”

A pause. “What?”

“You heard me. You’re lonely. I can see it—it’s pitiful. You’ve
always
been a weird puppy. And now, here you are, the son of the great Colonel Moreno, following around the de la Rosas because you’re such a guilty, friendless
headcase
.”

Marco worked to retain his style beneath the glare of the afternoon sky. “Thank you so much for the diagnosis.”

“Enough of that, Yolanda,” said Erik. “Let’s concentrate on what we’re doing.”

“It’s
true
.”

Marco’s bitten face twisted. “Right, oh, poor me. I’m just following a squad of spelling bee contestants because of a blistering Oedipal complex and psycho-babbling alienation.”

“Pretty much, yeah,” my sister concurred.

With a quick shift of tone, Marco then said, “Ah, well, perhaps you can leave off abusing me for the moment. More important matters present themselves. As you see: there he is.”

He had turned to look across the square, toward the Egyptian obelisk.

“There who is?” Yolanda asked.

“A former friend, actually. I said he’d followed me here and was waiting for you.”

Beneath the obelisk stood the mourning and gaunt-faced Domenico. His blond hair was bunged up, and he wore a crumpled suit. He carried a paper bag. From the bag he drew pellets of birdseed, scattering them for a tremendous horde of clacking, ravenous pigeons. This made him appear like an inoffensive animal lover–slash–homeless person—so much so that a tourist in a black coat and red cap came up to him and dropped a euro in his palm.

“Who
is
that?” Yolanda asked, squinting and blinking as if she didn’t see quite clearly.

“Domenico. I don’t believe you two have met. He’s lost his mind, I’m afraid,” said Marco. “It will take a couple of tricks to keep him from shooting you in the head, Erik—that’s how he does it...Once I saw him lose his temper in Gstaad. A mess.

Don’t worry, though, I made sure he didn’t get a gun—”

“You know, all of sudden, I think I’ve just
had
it with these people, Lola,” Erik broke in, the flat, dead tone I recognized from the crypt.

“Erik. Calm down.”

He pulled at the skin around his eyes. “I’m feeling pretty calm, actually. I’m pretty clear, right now. I told you we should stay in the apartment. I
knew
it. And now I see that I just have to make him
stop
all this. Make him leave us alone. Because Domenico isn’t interested in any bloody truce!”

“Just let me think.”

“Gomara,” Yolanda said. “You’re getting that funny look again, all pale and squibbly. Chill the hell out.”

“He’s threatening my family, Yolanda,” Erik stammered. “I can’t have him hurting you girls. And, Lola, I just saw you—sick—I just saw you—” His eyes welled, and a tear ran down his cheek. “It was really, really bad—”

“Just give me a second. Just give me a minute. Yolanda,
keep
him here.”

“Erik, stop shaking like that! Get yourself in control.”

He looked at his hands, which had begun to tremble. “Oh, good Christ.”

“I’m going to try something,” I insisted.

“What?”

“The guards, they’ll help.”

“No, they
won’t,”
said Marco. “They’ll just arrest us and throw us in jail. And you, Yolanda, you’ll never find out about your father.”

“
That
can’t happen,” my sister said.

“Forget it, this is over. Erik—Erik, it’s all right. I’m just going to talk to the guards. They’ll take care of him...”

I hurried down the white steps, toward two puffy-suited men standing about twenty meters left of the obelisk, making a small island in a large gray pool of pigeons. Domenico was still casting seeds to this fluttering multiplication of flying rats.

“Signores?” I asked.

The guards turned around. One was short, with large blue eyes, and the other was tall, with a giraffe neck. Both wore the Swiss Guards’ signature bloomers and vests and feathered hats.

“Si, Signorina.”

I pointed at Domenico and said in Italian: “That man is threatening us.”

They peered over at the blond thug, who was making kissing noises at the birds. “Him?”

“Yes. He’s threatened to kill my friends and me. You
have
to help us!”

“When did this happen?”

“A couple days ago.”

Giving Domenico another once over, the giraffe neck said: “Perhaps you are confused. Look at him—he is harmless. For the last two days, all he does is feed the birds. He’s like St. Francis of Assisi.”

“Actually, he’s a hired serial killer, and he’s really mad at my boyfriend for...”
Killing his friend with a poisoned emerald, in the crypt of the Medici in Florence. And then for stealing his car in Siena.
I began stuttering: “This—um—thing he did. Agh...shoot...you have to arrest him, or question him—”

“Arrest who?” They began swiveling their heads around.

“Your boyfriend?”

“No—no! No no no. Not my boyfriend. St. Francis of Assisi—this blond man.”

They stared at me, muttering, “Americans.”

“Okay, Sis, that’s quite enough, now,”
I heard Yolanda singing at my back.

The giraffe neck fluttered his yellow cap-feathers at me.

“Carlo, have I seen this girl?”

“I don’t know,” the short one replied.

“Yeah. On the wire. On that fax we got. Five two, dark hair, small-built, Indian—”

Yolanda was barreling toward me. Marco, still by the steps, was trying to persuade Erik to jam out of there.

“No, yeah, I did,” the giraffe neck said. “That drawing. Of the crazies in Siena.”

“Or wasn’t there something in the Medici crypt—”

The guards hadn’t yet noticed Erik, and I began to see that I had made an error of titanic proportions. Worst-case scenario, they would detain me, doing nothing to stop a fracas between the two men. “Let me be clear: I am filing a complaint. I am asking you for help—”

The giraffe neck pressed: “Ma’am, are you that lady on the TV?”

“You’re not listening—”

Marco had persuaded Erik to walk away from the Basilica, past the obelisk. But Erik stopped to make seething eye contact with Domenico.