The King's Gold (41 page)

Yolanda steered its nose through the farther reaches of the lagoon, her stiff cowboy silhouette fading as the darkness spilled down into the air. I did not know what horrors or rationalizations darted through her mind; she had not yet spoken six words during the entire journey.

The rest of us stood on the deck. I hovered in the far back of the boat. The others arrowed toward the prow, their shadowed figures illuminated by a cloud-shrouded moon.

I approached Marco and Erik, who stood a few feet from each other and could not see me in the penumbra.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I heard Erik say softly.

“About the money?” Marco asked.

“About Lola.”

“Yes, that too.”

“You’d better give it up. You’re no different than in Florence.”

“
You’ d
better hope that’s not true.”

Erik did not answer.

“The truth is I don’t know what I’m going to do anymore. Gold—well, that’s always useful, isn’t it?” Marco went on. “But, maybe I can just wish the colonel a cheery R.I.P. and be done with it—hell, I have no idea. You see, I might even
like
you, Gomara. You nervous wreck. I do have to tell you, friend, you’re not looking very well ever since...
you know
.”

“What I did was a mistake,” Erik said in a barely audible voice. “I wish I had—I could have—I don’t know if he would have—”

“Nonsense. Domenico
would
have whacked you. And her. I didn’t like it much, but certainly you did the right thing. And besides, you’ll find, with time, that you can always come up with a
thousand
good reasons for your crimes, and make yourself feel much better. You see in me the most marvelous proof of that theory!

What are you doing, anyway, nursing a little depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, agoraphobia? You’re losing ground, boy! Are you thinking about doing something incredibly stupid?”

“Crazy’s
your
racket.”

“I’ll just tell you, it wouldn’t be worth it.” Marco sighed. “Listen to me: Forget about all that. Domenico. Right
now’s
the shocker. It’s wonderful. Anything could happen.”

“Marco,” I said, so they looked quickly down.

“Give me a stroke—didn’t even hear you creep up—”

“I want to ask you something.”

“Listening—”

“What would you do if Tomas were alive?”

“Lola,” said Erik. “Come on,
no
. No, no, no. Enough with that.”

“Alive?” I could hear Marco’s distaste at the idea. “Well, he’s
not
.”

“I want to know.”

As Marco considered my question, I felt Erik’s warm body right by my shoulder, my chest. Marco was wrong about Erik losing ground; he was solid as the earth. I swore to myself that first thing tomorrow morning, I’d hire him a battalion of lawyers, get the hell out of here, get married, and do whatever it took to get him safe and feeling fine.

“What would I do if de la Rosa were alive?” Marco finally responded. “Something disgusting, probably. The good thing is, we never have to find out. That rose got pruned, and isn’t going to grow back, if you know what I mean. And I am
considering
taking a breather from the gardening business to dabble in...what you were chattering about...my flair for scholarship or somesuch! Because everyone involved in the old war’s dead and gone. Aren’t they? Even
him
? You must know this by now, don’t you? That Tomas died
here,
Lola. Somewhere in the lagoon.”

“I read the papers in your rucksack.”

“Yes—I figured you would. Well, you had to find out. Tomas filled his pockets with stones and sank under. The loser. I found out when I was in Siena. And I was sent—you’ve seen it—the proof. They couldn’t dredge up the body and that’s why there’s no marked grave. But he’s not missing. There’s no mystery. He”—Marco gestured at the lagoon, with a grim face—“drowned, here. So, I’m sorry for you. Not sorry for me. That’s how it is.”

“Who did you get that death certificate from?”

“The fence—Soto-Relada—the one who got me Antonio’s letter in the first place.”

“Creature, darling, what did he say?” My mother’s disembodied voice thrust at us in the blackness.

“Mom—”

“We’re there,” Yolanda suddenly said in a high, strained tone.

“We’re what?”

“We’re there. At the island. Look.”

My sister pointed to the sky. Barely visible through sea-haze like pounded chalk, we saw salt flats and low hills. No houses were visible beyond the dock, only the pitch and lonely slope of the deserted-looking isle that shrugged itself from the stillness of the lagoon. Deeper within its pale would be the old church.

Marco sank back into himself as he regarded the de la Rosa–drowning waters with satisfaction. But though the dismal sight deterred further conversation, my mind was ticking double-time.

Query:
Two men want to kill each other—How to prevent them?

Answer:
Give them a third enemy.

And who was that? Antonio Beatro Cagliostro Medici. More specifically: his
puzzle.

I had to figure its answer out before Tomas and Marco did.

I knew Manuel had been right when he warned against making too hasty a judgment about the cipher Antonio had left us. I was sure there was
something
we had all been missing, beyond even the yet obscure question of the identity of the
unlucky man in Santa Maria Assunta
. Somehow, we were supposed to use the word spelled out by the four medals to discover the gold on Torcello. We thought that this word was now obvious. But would Antonio have gone through so much trouble to hand over such a ham-fisted code as
lupo,
his famous name? It’s like the dolts who use
password
for their password. And Antonio was no dolt.

I’d have to tease out the last and probably disastrous trick that I
was sure
remained for us. And then I would use my detective arts against Tomas and Marco to somehow double-cross them into peaceable submission.

The ultimate clue was locked in the four letters we had retrieved:

“U—O—L—P,”
I whispered to myself.
“L—U—P—O. O—P—U—L. U—L—P—O. L—O—P—U. ‘Nomen atque Omen.’”

Yolanda tied the boat to the quay and rifled through Manuel’s supplies-packed roller bag for a Maglite. We disembarked in the webbed darkness, up the shore that had been climbed by Roman legionnaires and monks of the Middle Ages. Marco stumbled behind, my parents ahead. I could not see my path for the black magic mist and the ferocity of my intrigues.

“Hang on, sweetie,” Erik murmured to me.

We moved up a lengthy path bordered by flowers that scented the air with rose or bergamot. A charcoal-rubbing of fog drifted ahead. At length, a holy dome appeared from the tangles and ivied fingers of briar bush: the church of Santa Maria Assunta.

Antonio’s treasure chest of a cathedral loomed before us, its bricked arches filled with midnight vapors so that they were white, like blind eyes staring out at us in the dark.

We walked toward the cathedral on a path of sand, where pale shoots of grass curled around our feet with such tugging insistence I thought of the long white fingers of the dead. The domed building before us was all hulk and shadow but for those pallid-eyed windows. The moon just now clearing above the crucifix shuddered its blue light down upon us; Renaissance astrologers knew this as the dangerous midsummer moon, what the pagans called the Mead Moon, or the goddess Ishtar’s moon, which should be honored with offerings of skullcap blooms to ward off the monsters that it calls.

I looked madly at my feet, but the sandy earth stretched below me blameless of any witch herbs that might keep away the dark man who surely followed close by.

My family was silent and silver-colored. They moved forward as if tractor-beamed toward the church by Yolanda’s swirling flashlight, which did not reveal any guards prowling about this nearly vacant island village. This omission made much more sense to us when she illuminated Santa Maria Assunta’s formidably barricaded entrance.

“Let me look,” Marco said.

He crouched in front of the church’s massive and shadowed front double doors, running his fingers down their carvings. A coat of arms, and little else, graced this entrance.

Yolanda hunched down next to him.

“There’s no lock to be picked,” he said to her.

“This isn’t the way in,” she murmured back. “Damn. I don’t want to just be lingering out here, where any idiot can come along and give us trouble.”

“Maybe we’re not even supposed to be on the inside,” I said.

Yolanda agreed. “Maybe Antonio’s
unlucky man
was a person who was alive in the sixteenth century. What did the clue say? ‘
To find my yellow mettle put pressure on the unlucky man in Santa Maria Assunta.’
Maybe he’s someone that Cosimo had to interrogate—to put pressure on him—and they were supposed to meet outside, on the salt flats, and duke it out—”

“No, there’s something waiting for us in there,” Erik said.

My mother peered up at him. “How do you know?”

“I just know how
he
thinks, now. How he thought. He wanted the killing to be intimate—an assassination of this kind has to be.

Antonio wouldn’t have hired a mercenary to do his own work.

He
was
crazy. But the kind of crazy that people become when they—they—begin to see the world in a different light.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Marco said with some relish: “He means that Antonio went
cracked
after he buried Sofia. You know, when he figured out the truth? That there’s no hope! That human beings are nothing but animals in high heels,
and
we’re all one day going to die,
and
events spin out of one’s control and nothing ever stays put, except for one’s own miserable self.”

“Not even that,” said Erik.

“Yes, right, that is bad,” my father answered. “But that’s why the universe invented daughters and impossible women like Juana, to console one against the inevitable despair of living—”

“Metaphysics later,” my mother said abruptly. “I think you’re right, Erik. I’ll bet there’s something in the church. We just have to get inside. Manuel! Remember Beijing?”

“Beijing...”

“When we smuggled the Olmec totems?”

“Oh, right—yes—out of the Forbidden City. Oh, kids, Juana here had the most
outlandish
theory about Pangea, and the genetic relations between the Chinese and the pre-Columbians—and there was that
palace
—”

“Forbidden City?” Yolanda grunted.

“He decoded seventy-two locks, all with passwords from the Qing dynasty—I learned that day that Manuel is a
terrific
fortress breaker,” my mother was saying, over the others’ insistent voices, though not my own, as I was focusing again with a nearly catatonic sharpness on the last and crucial piece of the puzzle I believed Antonio had hidden from view. “No, come on—enough talk, let’s go. No, not
you
two. Monster, you and Erik stand guard.”

Their torch’s light evaporated into the indigo air as they all slipped behind the church. Erik and I were left to stand sentry against whatever fiends might come hurlting at us from the shores of the black lagoon. After a few moments, he and I silently reached out to hold hands. We did not think to extract our own flashlight from our rucksack, and together we watched the dank, star-struck air swirl into uncanny shapes amid the surrounding brush.

A good patch of time passed here. My mind continued to perform an obsessive quilt work with Antonio’s various writings, despite the occasional and alarming bursts of sound that I could hear my parents making at the back of the cathedral:

In Marco’s letter, Antonio had written,
“Cosimo, I do own a vast, bloodstained, and secret treasure, which I bartered for my soul in Tenochtitlán, and have kept hidden from the world all these years. I leave it to you. I bequeath my Yellow Mettle with a condition, however...

“...
I am made of the strongest mettle when I am in your company,”
Sofia had promised her husband on the eve of their escape from Rome. And I recalled a mishmash of text fragments:

“...Yellow is the color of my courage...You idiotically mispronounced my Secret Name...Some call you il Lupo, but I see you for what you really are. Darken not my door again,
Versipellis.”

“What is your name?”
Antonio had asked the slave, after killing his father in Timbuktu.

Another ripple of sound from within the cathedral interrupted my thoughts. There came a blunt crashing noise; a violent suppression of voices.

“They’re in,” Erik said.

I closed my eyes, opened them again. I was sorting Antonio’s secret out. An idea began to grow out of my memory of Antonio’s epistles and Sofia’s journals.

But then I perceived something else. In the air coursing with increasing force above the onyx bristles of the lagoon pines, I detected a thickness in the oxygen, an astral coldness. I observed also some sort of movement, of an arm, or a strangely shaped head, as if one of the silvered trees had come alive through a sudden enchantment.

“Do you think shadows are like a Rorschach test?” Erik asked in a woeful voice.

My hair had begun to swirl around my ears because of the wind. “Rorschach test?”

“The things that you can see in the dark—tricks of the imagination, making you see monsters or ghosts. In the Middle Ages, you know, the night and the full moon were considered the devil’s playground. It was said that if a guilty soul saw a dark man approaching him through the shadows, it was the spirit of the murdered or maybe even Beelzebub himself come to snatch you down to Hell. And tonight—”

“Listen to me! You didn’t murder Domencio. You had to do it—he had a gun—he was insane—”

“All I can say is, tonight, that doesn’t seem so much like a fairy tale—”

“Erik, do you see something out there?”

“
Yes.
Because I’m going crazy!”

I pounded on the door. “Let us in, let us in.”

“Hold on!” came Yolanda’s muffled bark.

She swung the door open just as the fledgling storm gathered power. A white dazzle of light made both Erik and me cringe as the wind battered our bodies.