The King's Gold (35 page)

“You getting everything sorted out here?” My sister now stood to my right, warning me with an irritated twitch of the lips.

I looked at her and said in Spanish, “Yes, okay,
mistake.
Get me out of this.”

Yolanda grabbed my shoulders and began steering me away.

“Hi, boys. Never mind my sister; she’s incredibly stupid.”

“May we see your passport?”

We began to move away from them, through the square, nudging past tourists. “Sorry, no time, we’re due at the place where naked gladiators used to axe each other—”

“Come on,” I called over my shoulder to Erik.

“Carlo—get her.”

“Ma’am!”

Yolanda snatched at Erik and thrust us both forward, still smiling and bubbling out, “See you later.” As the guards began to move toward us, she looked down at the swarm of pigeons, making a curious clicking noise. She jumped up and stamped her boots on the ground. “Ssssssssssshhhhhht!”

The pigeons, startled by her jungle-bird call, gave a collective squawk and flew up in a blinding, charcoal swarm, obscuring us and scratching at my hair with their hundred sharp claws.

“Let’s
book,
Lola.”

“Agh!
Ack!!
”

We ran.

I took hold of a stiff and strange-looking Erik and we hustled through the pigeon pollution and across the square. Domenico began to follow us in a swift, long-legged stride.

We dashed faster through the sideways light falling across the square, over the bricks, snaking in between islands of map-reading nuns. Hitting the square’s border, which demarcates the end of Vatican City and the beginning of Rome, I looked over my shoulder to see Domenico cutting through the throng into a muscular and incredibly fast sprint. The guards had followed us more or less toward the border at a decelerating trot, and now had their fingers in their ears as they talked and listened to a radio device affixed to their heads.

“Lola—move.”

Erik bolted, taking me with him into the depths of another crowd. I bashed into priests and sweating, squalling women.

Feet and legs tangled beneath me. I pushed against more bodies, shouting, but a high-pitched babble of voices speaking Italian, French, Norwegian, and Japanese snuffed out my cries.

We doglegged into a dead-end alleyway. My sister was yelling
no
. The sunlight soared in over the tops of the bordering redbrick buildings, landing on the narrow, cobbled space. Domenico appeared from behind the corner of the alley—white shirt, flapping blue jacket, white pants. A black object stuck into the waistband of the pants. The handle of a gun. I saw his blue eyes like two hollows in his veined, angled face. Erik stood between us. My lover’s shoulders hunched forward and the flesh around his eyes and jaw started to swell weirdly, horribly.

Marco skidded around the bend.

“Don’t be an ass!” he said to Domenico, shoving past him. “I gave you enough money so that you should be drunk in Greece.”

“Time to get out of the alley now,” Yolanda belted out. But Domenico’s huge frame blocked our exit.

“I knew what to do with that money,” Domenico said to Marco. He gestured at his weapon now hidden by his jacket. His face was so pale as to be almost silver. “What do you think I am? That I’m not a man. I have no heart. Drinking my life away with a devil like you.”

“Of course not!”

“You think you’re the only one with the right. To teach them.”

Marco hauled back and fiercely struck the blond man’s immobile chin with his fist.

Yolanda cried out, “Oh, Jesus, who is this guy?”

“Erik! Erik!” I yelled. His back was humped over. He shuddered strangely. From his throat came a rasping sound.

Domenico had not yet taken a step toward any of us; he was not even looking at us, but only rubbing his face where Marco had hit him. Erik did not wait to see what he would decide to do next with the gun he carried. I saw his knees buckle to the ground. He jolted toward Domenico, weeping, falling forward. I did not understand what I was looking at, what was happening. I thought he had been hurt, that somehow he had collapsed in a faint.

Erik reached up, under the jacket, and grabbed a hold of that black handle sticking out of Domenico’s waistband. Domenico leaned very slightly back, his mouth opening. Erik dug his hand down into the pants and grasped hold of the trigger. He pulled it.

There was a sound like a snap. Like a coin dropping on stone.

Domenico’s grief-scarred face seemed to split apart. One eye dragged downward from the concussion tearing apart the lower half of his body; his mouth bloomed and fragmented, the lips skiddering wildly onto his left cheek.

Erik shot the muffle-nosed pistol once again. A great red star of blood exploded from Domenico’s abdomen. The blond man’s head was thrown back. He fell sideways onto the sunlit ground. A hideous fizzing noise came from his lungs, or the gaps in his body, where air was escaping.

Then Yolanda and I were flying forward, our arms stretched outward. We lifted Erik bodily from the ground, dragging him out of the alley and into a white haze of people. This was made all the harder as his body had gone soft, his neck collapsing, his head over one shoulder.

“Get him out of here; get to the train station,” I heard Marco say in a hard, controlled voice as he snatched the gun, rubbed it free of prints, and stuck it in his pants. “Get the next one to Venice. I’ll meet you there.”

“JUST SHUT UP,”
I screamed.

“No, don’t say that,” he called out, his face agonized. “I’m helping you—I’m cleaning this up—”

Yolanda yelled “Go—go—go—go.”

Our hands scratched on the cobblestones as we scrambled from the brightness of the blood and the last wheezing sounds of Domenico. We pounded down another thoroughfare in grim, panting silence, making our swift way through a hot tide of a thousand believers.

I looked back at the shivering mosaic of faces. I heard a woman shrieking. There was a rustling and buckling of the crowd several feet behind us, as people began to see the body and lookyloos streamed toward the commotion.

Then I could see one navy-suited man, with a police cap and a gun at his white belt, running through the horde, looking around frantically.

“Oh, man, we have
got
to get him out of here,” Yolanda gasped, as we staggered forward.

“Did I kill him?” Erik coughed and cried out.

“Move faster!” I wept.

Yolanda barked, “Marco was right—we’ve got to get to the apartment
right now
and get our stuff, get to the train—”

“But how are we going to get away?”

As I looked behind me again, I glimpsed the back of some tall, thickset man who ran into the street, calling for the police’s help. This arm-waving Roman wore a red knit cap over his dark hair, and a long black coat.

“Help, help,” he called out. “Somebody’s hurt.”

The policeman stopped and grabbed the man, who talked excitedly while hopping up and down. The Roman pointed the policeman down the street in the opposite direction from us.

The policeman ran away, and the man with the red cap disappeared into the crowd.

“That’s our break,” I gasped.

“I think I’m in shock, honey,” Erik said. “I’m numb all over. I can’t feel my hands. I can’t feel anything—”

“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

Yolanda, looking back at the freak chance we’d been given, squinted and grimaced. She pressed her hands hard over her eyes. “Jesus, I’m going crazy. Let’s move it. Let’s haul ass, people. We’ve got to disappear.”

And that’s precisely what we did.

“Madam, where to?”

Twenty-five minutes later, Yolanda, Erik, and I stood in the ticket line of Rome’s airy Stazione Termini, the city’s main train station. Its ceiling was formed out of curving white rafters shaped with the disturbing elegance of human ribs, and these arches descended over the luminous black floor. The minimal design was punctuated by two dark green palms whose spines and sharp leaves butted up against the bony firmament.

The three of us looked like miserable ragamuffins in the soaring heights of the station. My sister had partially obscured her appearance by taking off her Stetson and ratting out her hair so it stuck out in little stiff tufts over her eyes. She took Tomas’s death certificate out of the rucksack and obsessively began to read it again. I was hiding beneath a sweatshirt hood but could see plain enough the skull lines of my face reflected in the ticket kiosk’s window. Erik had killed someone. Again. I knew that Domenico had been suffering with grief and was stupid as well as bad. And Erik knew the same. He stood between us in line, with a damaged expression in his eyes, and his mouth was as flat and pale as a scar.

Marco I could not see so as to describe. After the shooting, and our flight from the police, I lost track of him during our sweaty, flat-footed race back to the apartment. Perhaps he was gone. Maybe he wasn’t planning on “meeting us” anywhere, as he had suggested over the still warm body of his friend. But I felt so crazy that I could have sworn he even now was lingering in the purlieus, and watching our movements from somewhere in the crowd.

“Madam? Hello? Where are you traveling?”

The ticket lady’s large oval eyes observed me impatiently from behind that glass window.

Erik studied the ground as if an invisible hand had just written a message for him there on the linoleum, the way King Balthazar had seen the writing on the wall in the biblical story. I thought I had a decent idea what that message said. I, also, had my share of alarming ciphers flashing up at me from the little liquid crystal display window on my cell phone. Yolanda clutched the death certificate that obscurely told of her father’s burial site.

“You know where we’re going,” she said, flapping the paper at me.

“Erik decides,” I said. “I think we should go home. If we can get a flight—”

She pulled both of us to the side and hissed in our ears so the ticket lady wouldn’t hear: “They won’t be looking for us in Venice, anyway. They’ll ask for passports at the airport—we’ll be screwed. And we can’t take your car because you stole it, so they’ll have the license plate—”

“What if they look for us on the trains? And he’s in no shape to keep running—”

“I’m in supreme shape to get the hell out of here,” Erik said in a low, even voice, though looking so gray-skinned he didn’t even appear like the man I knew. “For the moment anyway. I think it’s adrenaline that’s keeping me glued together, and keeping me from doing a Lady
fucking
Macbeth impersonation all over the station.” He ran his fingers back and forth, back and forth, across his forehead, as if manually keeping his thoughts in check.

Just then, right over Yolanda’s shoulder, I saw a queer little flicker in the crowd. It felt as if a fox were staring at me from the bush: an inconspicuous figure in a dark shirt had just melted away among the business folks and the
bambino
-hefting moms.

Athens, we could have picked. São Tomé. Reykjavík, where internationally wanted felons disappear into the snow drifts and survive on herring. ut as if inspired by some demonic possession, we hurled ourselves onward to the fourth city of the Wolf, whose lagoons promised refuge, fathers, as well the last letter of Antonio’s unfinished, if perhaps obvious word.

L—U—P—[ ]

I spirited a packet of bright paper euros from my pocket, sliding them beneath the glass window.

“Venice,” I said.

The express swept past Rome, then through the northern countryside on the way up to Venice. Farmhouses and pastures stalked by lavish cows appeared and then evanesced in our dingy windowpanes. Erik, Yolanda, and I took our seats, Erik falling asleep immediately and atypically against the blue-and-pink upholstery, clutching my thigh with his cold hands. Yolanda spent some time fidgeting with the complimentary plastic-wrapped anise sweets and miniature espressos before abruptly losing consciousness.

I had been crying, and also vomiting in the train bathroom, until my sister shoved Sofia’s journal in my face and said, “Stop that. Distract yourself. You’re not helping
him.
” Somehow I followed her advice, and spent the next several hours anesthetizing myself with the portion of Sofia’s journal that described her life in Venice, before the sudden flashing and beeping of my cell phone diverted me from this study. While Erik and my sister were still both buried beneath train blankets, I determined it was time for me to attend to the voluminous correspondence I had been evading and vehemently exchanging in the brutal seventy-odd hours that had just passed.

There were two sets of cell-phone texts. The first set had been sent by my mother, but I had been so consumed with the latter communiqués that I had not even studied their contents.

Though these missives were as highly crypted as the Egyptian hieroglyphs, I could still, unfortunately, read them, and realize what a mistake this omission had been: