The King's Gold (40 page)

“Lovely work. It’s a miracle they weren’t melted down for cannons during the Crusades.”

“Yes, or the Napoleonic wars.” My mother brought out one of her typically obscure guidebooks from her purse. “Except that, actually, Napoleon would never have had them destroyed—he was such a classics nut. You know, molding himself after the great Roman emperors, even Nero.”

Yolanda tilted her Stetson back on her head to better examine the horse on the extreme left-hand side. “Where do you think? The clue’s got to be in the belly of one of these guys.”

Marco knocked on the horse’s metal ribs. “So what do you say we cut into it with a buzz saw? After hours? This place is almost closed. I could break in—”

“No—wait—” I began to say.

“You will do
no such thing
—” my mother said.

“An abomination,” Manuel said.

“But efficient,” Yolanda said.

The crowd attempting to admire the horses steadily fixed its gaze upon us.

“True,” said my mother.

“We’re talking about finding Montezuma’s gold, after all,” Marco said.

“Which apparently is spread out all over this basilica anyway,” said Yolanda. “Brought here by thieves and hijackers! Look at the reddish color—and you read as much in Sofia’s journal.”

My mother muttered, “It
would
save us all kinds of trouble...what am I saying? You two are terrible!”

“It’s just that—here, listen, hold on,” I said.

“The
riddle
—” Erik raised his eyebrows at me. “It gives you instructions for how to retrieve the clue.”

“
Right
—but also—what was that business about the horses being cursed during the Enlightenment?” I asked.

“Yolanda, cutting relics open with buzz saws? Your father
never talked like that,”
my mother said.

My sister touched her blue jade necklace. “I know, thank God he’s not around to hear it.”

“Let’s not talk about him right now,” I yapped. “Mom, what did you just say about the horses being
cursed
?”

“Oh, right.” My mother held up the book she’d brought out, which was Dorothy W. Sayer’s
Intriguing Methods of Murder in Venice.

“The horses developed a bad reputation after they were temporarily stolen again in the nineteenth century. I was talking about Napoleon? In 1797, he invaded Venice, and ordered them to be ripped from the basilica and installed in the Tuilleries. But as the
gendarmes
were carrying the statues across the square, out to their ship, something nasty happened...here, I’ll read it:

“The myth of the Horses’ supernatural malignancy was first generated when Phillipe Boudin, one of Napoleon’s more scurrilous lieutenants, heard a rattling around in the belly of the bronze figure now called ‘Horse A.’ Boudin ordered the soldiers carrying the horse across the Piazza to put it down, for further inspection, believing that the Doge had secreted treasure inside. He peered up inside the creature’s bent head, into the opened jaws. Within the aperture, he descried a curious contraption that remains a well-guarded secret of the always taciturn Venetians. What the historian does know from contemporary records is that, with his diminutive hand, Boudin reached into the bronze mouth, and was thereby struck in the throat by a miniature poisoned dart. His death was not instantaneous, it is said.”

Now all six of us were staring at the mouths of the horses.

“‘
Four holds a saint from the East / A neighing, shape-shifting wretch. / Once he was called Nero’s Beast— / Hear his Word and meet your Fetch
,’” Erik and I said simultaneously.

“The talking animal,” Marco said.

“‘
Hear his Word.’
The medal’s inside the mouth, inside the jaws,” said my mother.

“Dad, you are amazing.”

Manuel gently pinched me. “We have to keep in mind that these horses must have been restored, X-rayed, taken apart, and put back together—”

“Dozens of times, at least,” Erik elaborated.

“But any
responsible
restorer would have kept the thing exactly as it was originally—”

“All right, but stop screaming,” my mother said. “People are already staring at us like we’ve just escaped from Bellevue.”

“Which one is horse A?” Yolanda asked.

I shook my head. “No idea.”

My sister said, “It
could
be gone by now. The clue.”

“There could be a second dart in there,” said Erik.

“Or remnants of poison, or even simply something sharp, that would be bad—” offered Manuel.

While we were talking, Marco detached himself from our pack and hopped over a little glass barrier surrounding the horses.

Lightly stepping up on the marble and brick bases the sculptures stood on, he simply shoved his hand up inside the third horse’s open mouth as the rest of us let out a collective and panicked
“Agh!”

“Nothing,” Marco said, keeping his eyes on me while his fingers searched inside the dark hole. Even as we continued squirming and shouting out cautions, he moved to the last horse, rummaged in its tighter jaws, but shook his head. “Nothing.”

Behind us, the crowd had thickened even more and rigidified into a buzzing half-circle.

“What the hell is going on?...Why are they messing around with those?...I thought you weren’t allowed to touch anything here—”

“Nothing,” said Marco once more, before sidling over to the first beast in the row, a beautiful, oxidized, mournful-looking animal that had a feisty open mouth. He gingerly inserted his fingers into its bronze jaw. “Something.
Something, yes!
But I can’t get my hand in deep enough. There’s a chain. It seems to be attached to some sort of
spring
—but it feels empty. I’m pulling on it.” He laughed. “And, as you can see, I’m not dead.”

“Here, here, here.” Yolanda jumped the glass barrier and stood on a marble base.

Yolanda fit her slender fingers past the animal’s massive teeth.

She thrust them down deeper into the throat, wincing.

“I’m touching something,” she said. “Lola, it’s a chain. Going down the throat, past some kind of lever.”

“Careful!”

“Got it!”

As what I imagined to be a miniature crossbow twanged hollowly inside the long bronze throat, she tugged out a length of chain made of heavy red-gold links. From deep within the creature we heard a metallic clanking, a rattling.

She pulled and pulled. The crowd behind us grew as loud as the pigeons shrilling in St. Mark’s Square.

I saw a glitter in the black hollow. There came a sound like a coin in a well.

My sister slowly teased out a red-gold medal from the horse’s mouth.

“Look— look—”

Even as the noises from the crowd before us raised to a Greek-chorus keening, we all smashed around her to greedily read the beautiful, complex old sign on its long leash:

“Lola—the other letters, they were
U, P,
and
L,”
Yolanda roared. “And this is
O
.”

“Yes.”

“It is
lupo,”
everyone but me breathed.

As if by instinct, Marco said, “Turn it around.”

Yolanda flipped the medal, and etched on the other side we saw (translated):

To find my yellow mettle put pressure on the unlucky man in Santa Maria Assunta

“That’s a church,” my mother called out. “Santa Maria Assunta—another basilica.”

“On an island around here,” both Marco and my father said in short high bursts. “Torcello.”

“That’s what it’s called.”

“We’ll need a boat,” said Erik.

In that instant, Yolanda flinched like a sprayed cat. Her head suddenly snapped up; her face changed beneath the black brim of her hat. She paled. It appeared as if she had just been struck in the throat or the face, and I was sure from her livid cheek that she had contracted some death agent from the chain or the coin.

But then I turned around and followed her eyes over to the crowd.

A presence like a shadow among the humid horde. An identical black hat.

There stood Tomas.

Tomas de la Rosa stood six deep back in the crowd. He was dressed in his black coat, his Stetson. I saw the dark eyes beneath the hat, and the look of deeply exhausted melancholy that he fixed on his eldest daughter. Tomas had manifested from the ether looking like one of Wim Wender’s angels in
Wings of Desire
.

I felt something terrible here, something I did not understand. Perhaps I should have checked to see if his feet were backward.

He swerved his gaze over to Marco, who stared at the gold medal with a frightening severity. Tomas looked back to Yolanda, and then me. With a gesture of his left hand he gave us a grim warning
.

“Yolanda, dearest, what’s wrong?” Manuel asked.

“What’s happening? Are you sick?” Erik hissed. “Jesus,
is
there poison?”

“Sit down,” my mother ordered. “Let’s get her some water.”

“Nah, I’m peachy,” she grunted when she could. “It’s just—the excitement.”

When I looked back, de la Rosa was gone. In a snap. Marco stood awkwardly to the side, still clinging tightly to the medal on its chain. He had not seen the black-coated specter.

“But I think it’s time—to—
go
,” Yolanda said, pointing her chin back up.

Where Tomas had briefly shimmered in the crowd, a bulbous- faced security officer materialized. He was attempting to press his way through the tourists in order to have a probably unpleasant conversation with us about our methods of appreciating art.

“Yes, very, very,
very
good idea,” Erik said.

“Had enough sightseeing,” Marco acquiesced.

“Haul your cans,” said my mother. “Split up. This is no time to get deported.”

“Meet outside,” my father ordered.

Marco released his grasp of the chained clue, and we all began to thread speedily through the throng in separate directions That is, they did. I followed my sister.

“Yolanda, Yolanda.”

“Hurry up, or else the Italians will mess with us and we’ll never get out of here.”

“What did you see?”

“No one.” Her face was red and tight and she looked like she was about to burst.

“Listen, he’s been following us since Rome, and he wants to get to Marco because he thinks that he’ll hurt us.”

She shook her head but didn’t slow down. “That’s just precious—he says
Marco’s
gonna hurt us—”

“Yo, we have to talk about this—”

“About
what
?!”

“Tomas!”

She gave a bitter, angry smile as she pushed aside pilgrims.

“It’s bad luck to speak ill of the dead, L, don’t you know that?

Yeah. It is some
bad
ju-ju to call a ghost a punk-ass ’cause he up and left you in the rotting jungle with nothing but psychos bred out from the war.”

“What are you going to do?”

Tears began flying down her face. “Well, you know how I said I was done with those scavenger monkey stunt hunts? I guess it turns out I’m not! So, hell! Sign me back up for the wedding games, Lola! ’Cause I am a gooooood monkey, even when I don’t know it. But even though I am
so
dumb I should have a tail twitching on me, I know I’ve got to play out this little comedy before I can start
kicking his ass
. And
he
can tell your parents the truth to their faces, because I’m not being the messenger on this one. Neither should you—you say anything to Juana right now, what with Marco here, this powder keg will just go boom. So, what am I going to do? What I’m supposed to. And that’s to take you to see
the unlucky man
in Torcello.” She caught hold of me, and began barreling forward. “Pick up the pace.”

The unreal firmament glowed and flamed above me like another hallucination as I was roughly dragged past the jewels, gems, tourists like the living dead, converted pagans, and the alchemical gods and monsters of the basilica.

No further possibly ectoplasmic fathers appeared in the piazza, where my agitated parents, a solemn Erik, and a suddenly broodful Marco had assembled beneath the gathering dusk. I worried that Marco, in particular, would take a turn for the horrifyingly worse if the spectral Tomas appeared to him as he had us. With the waning aid of my common sense, I attempted to devise tactics for a peace treaty, a psychiatric intervention session with my rigid mouthed sister, backup plans in the events of attempted grand thefts or reciprocal assassinations or arrests, and another backup plan in the expectation that gruesome torture-traps awaited us in the island church where the last treasure of the mighty Aztecs could be found.

And all the time, the red-gold question was murmuring in my head:
L—P—U—O?

What did these ciphers spell:
Lupo
? Or some other shibboleth?

Curiosity is terrible. The promise of
pressuring the unlucky man in Santa Maria Assunta
seemed to drive us all bodily forward toward the edge of Venice and a gondola-rustling lagoon that had absorbed the blood color of the sky.

Toward nine o’clock, we were on our way to the haunted isle of Torcello.

The boat motored softly through the black and pewter water. This craft that would sail us to the Dark Age island of Torcello was not one of the fine old turquoise gondolas clacking by the quays: we were on a sleek white job nimbly negotiated from a rich sailor through the freebooter’s arts possessed by both Marco and my sister.