The King's Gold (42 page)

“Erik thinks he sees someone outside,” I hissed to my sister, who was grasping hold of her Stetson to keep it from flying off.

“Get in,” she barked. “God, the
weather
.”

She did not otherwise respond to me except by slamming the door back against a strengthening push of cold wind, which convulsed the moon-stained trees. The door had a huge polished metal bolt. This she hurled shut so that a metal
clang
ricocheted through the strange, glowing room.

I pulled my Maglite from my rucksack. Its beam flashed through the cathedral like a sword, and beneath it I could discern the figures of my parents and Marco, who were illuminated not only by the opal electricity but also a gold incandescence.

An intricate twelfth-century marvel shone above us: This was another artist’s vision of
The Last Judgement,
composed of thousands of squares of blushing gold. The mosaic damned suffering above us looked so nakedly pale and lonely in their cocoon of flames, and angels brandished the scales of justice before the melancholy gazes of blue-skinned demons.

So intentional, so
wicked
—I knew then with certainty that this was the place Antonio wanted to lead his nephew.

Antonio wanted Cosimo to know that
this is where you are going if you fail my final test
.

We stood before the gates of a red-gold Hell.

Yolanda’s flashlight burned onto the faces of the hellbound who writhed within their brimstone bed. Such mosaics cover the interior of Santa Maria Assunta, and they depict with horrifying clarity the specific tortures that Satan has devised for the adulterers, the murderers, the non-Catholic. On the far wall of the cathedral sparkles this version of the judgement. Its bottom rung, that closest to our gaze, boils with sinners as naked as fetuses and who bounce along the edges of flames, while above them floats Christ and his halo-clad army.

“Are one of these the
unlucky man
?” my mother asked over the sound of the wind outside. She pointed to a series of skulls, whose eye holes housed green serpents.

“How did you get in here?” Erik asked my father.

“Oh, it was easy. Relatively open window. Some storage rooms in the back. Minimum of breakage.”

“Relatively open window?”

“The old man picked a combination padlock by putting his ear to it and listening to the clicks it made when he spun the numbers around,” Marco said. “It was impressive.”

“I have very good hearing,” Manuel said. “And then of course we had to cut a quantity of very sophisticated alarm-wiring.”

Yolanda still had her flashlight trained on the mosaic, but the light began to scatter around the face of Christ.

“Are you shaking?” Marco asked.

“No,” she said. “Just a little cold.”

I unwrapped myself from my cardigan and threw it over Yolanda’s shoulders. Manuel meanwhile began to unzip that roller bag he’d been pulling around from Venice to here. “I have other supplies. Other flashlights.”

Yolanda’s illumination touched down on a collection of alpinist’s ropes, bottles of iodine, a compass, a snake-bite kit, assorted extra-strength Maglites.

“He wanted to come prepared,” my mother explained. “There are enough flashlights for everyone.”

Marco flicked on one of the Maglites so that its white triangle shone eerily below his face. “Let’s go find some gold,” he said, in a hoarse voice I didn’t like.

No one answered him. My imagination had taken a phantasmal turn, as news-pictures of the blinding skeletal Guatemalan dead seemed to flit in the air alongside the medieval doomed.

The civil war had taken many lives. And I think we all remembered the vengeance Marco had promised to visit upon our family as we moved forward slowly, fearfully, accompanied only by the shrieks of the wind.

I knew there was not much time. Antonio’s words collected in my inner ear as my fear-charged memory recalled his writings about Mexico and Timbuktu: “
In Tenochtitlán, I saw my Slave man bathed by a solitary ray of the blood-Moon, which transformed his mettle from that of a yellow-bellied Moor to a dragon-Vampyr’s
...

“You are the opposite of me, my Lord. I am a poor alchemist but you—you are my reverse. You are an animal. You are what the Italians call
il Lupo
, the Wolf...

“What is your name?”

Six fingers of light stretched out into the black hollow of the church, glistening on an angel’s wing, a particle of text in Latin.

My mother’s light scribbled brightness upon a scene at the end of the nave, which I couldn’t yet make out. Erik’s light followed after her beam. Yolanda’s torch next lined up with theirs, then did my father’s, Marco’s, mine.

All we could make out were partial pictures of men—saints, from the names written in Latin next to them—and some sort of altar, with a chair, below this parade.

White lightning suddenly flashed thick throughout the church, revealing the entire scene: We faced the cathedral’s central apse. A miniature crescent-shaped amphitheater composed of curving stone benches occupied this space, and at its center presided a bishop’s chair. At the feet of the bishop’s seat was a semi-circle of stone floor, and above this arrangement, the church ended in a mosaic-covered wall. This, the apse, was filled with images of a blue-dressed Mary, holding the Infant, and below her stood the twelve apostles. Six apostles stood on one side of the wall, and six progressed across the other.

Directly below the apostles, and above the bishop’s seat, there was a square mosaic of a bearded male wearing a pointed hat and holding a Bible. His name had been written in black letters:
Eliodorus
.

Later, I would discover that this was a mosaic of the minor St. Eliodorus, close friend of St. Jerome, one-time bishop of Altino, and the patron saint of Torcello.

That particular identity did not concern me now: six apostles on the right, six apostles on the left. This made him number thirteen.

In the thought-world of Christianity (it is said that Judas was the thirteenth guest at the Last Supper), as well as Sofia’s tarotcosmos (that card had foretold of her death) the thirteenth man has one key feature: he is cursed.

“The unlucky man,” I said.

The lightning from the windows flashed again like white horses across the wall. As my family shouted out a volley of exclamations, I gave my flashlight to Erik before slowly approaching the apse and the bishop’s seat. I climbed the bleacher steps to stand upon this brick chair. I stood nearly face-to-face with the spangled visage of St. Eliodorus.

Put pressure on the unlucky man in Santa Maria Assunta.

I put my hands, gently, on the mosaic. The puzzle work looked perfect, exquisite, and relatively new. I did not let this deter me. I pushed, nervous of breaking off the gold squares. Then I pushed harder still.

The square retreated under my hands. From behind the stone wall, I heard a great, iron grinding, a clicking, a metallic thumping.

While my family and Marco began leaping around the cathedral, I looked down, below my feet.

“Down here, down here, down here,” I howled.

Five strands of light flew down and converged on the one bright spot.

In the half-circle of stone floor beneath the bishop’s seat had opened a dead-black trap door.

The storm scraped like dragon claws over the cathedral. The wind moaned and roared as the windows flared now white, now raven dark. These pulses of thunder-light splintered the gold apostles on the wall, giving the illusion that they were voodoo poppets hexed into a mad ballet. The strobe also concussed over my father, who moved in a silent film’s jerks and starts as he tied the alpinist’s rope to the altar, lowering it into the blackness of Antonio’s trap door.

We six stood around the square opening in the floor, threading our flashlights into its maw. The flashlights sparkled in the blackness. I saw a glimmer of gold. A sparkle of silver. A scurrying, a rustling.

As if cued by a psychic Morse code, we all looked at one another over the web of light. I saw that the updraft of brightness had shaped my family’s and Marco’s faces into those of heavenly monsters, streaked with gold and jet, and with unnaturally beautiful eyes. But no one spoke until I tucked my flashlight into my belt and grabbed hold of the end of the rope that disappeared into the dead-fall.

“No, hold on.”

“I’m going to be the one going first.”

“Jesus, Lola, don’t be an ass.”

“We have to see
what’s down there before anyone
—”

I plunged in.

The drop was long, much, much, deeper than I had supposed. I felt the darkness close around my body as I grasped my way down the rope. I kept my eye not on the invisible ground but on the sightless air above me, which was crisscrossed with silver Maglite filaments and trembled with lightning. I heard, too, a squall of voices, the persistent shrieks of advice coming from my family.

I touched down. In soft, silty ground.

I clicked on the light.

A room had been carved out from the church’s foundation, and furnished from the last scraps of Antonio Medici’s collection. The airlessness of the space had allowed just the faintest remnants of his famous trove to survive.

A nibbled lace of Arabian carpets woven of indigo and gold spread out across the floor, their vivid dyes obscured by dust. To my right stood a shattered chair, once covered in velvet, and bearing the shreds of a still-rich emerald-green fabric stitched with gold snowflakes or flowers, perhaps even a remnant from the coat Antonio once wore—”
the embroidered jacket that his doppelgänger wears, in Gozzoli’s
Procession of the Three Magi
,”
Sofia had written in her Siena entry. I turned, to see at my left a fainting couch bustling with rats. In the scurrying, whisker-busy corners of the room crumbled wooden statues with distended, fierce faces, pendulous breasts. These were fertility idols of the kind I have seen from Mali and Botswana. The walls were paved with buckling mahogany, and hung with a chewed Raphael cartoon of the Madonna, and also what appeared to be a Botticelli of a darklegged woman throwing back her head while being pleasured by her lover. Large sections of these canvases had deliquesced back into a webby sponge of
prima materia,
as had the bodies of the books.
The books
. The best-prized books Antonio had managed to take with him in his flights from Florence and Siena and Rome. These were oxblood-bound, destroyed folios that might once have been the apocryphal
Prophecy of Sappho
or
Scripture of Bathsheba,
but were now mushroom-bloomed, curled, and soft as the unborn.

No treasure in this magical parlor had lasted the annihilations of time but one.

As my family and Marco one by one slipped down the rope into the abyss, I steered my flashlight onto a strange contraption that shone in the center of the room: a massive box of iron. It stood half my height and extended three feet in width. The craftsman had etched every spare inch with Islamic calligraphy, turning the ordinary metal into an object of fantastical beauty. The center face of the chest, however, contained a strange panel, composed of seven rows of buttons or dials, forged out of copper, and each inscribed with a Gothic letter.

“A combination-lock safe.” Erik approached me, shining his light up and down the designs.

“Yes,” said Marco. “One of the exploding safes. Dr. Riccardi told Lola and me about these. They were one of the signatures of the Medici, how they used to safeguard their money. Benvenuto Cellini made several of them for the family—”

“I’ve heard of those,” my mother burst out. “They were brutally dangerous. People who tried to safecrack them would be burned alive, or shot with arrows, or—”

“I recall a story about a Florentine thief being decapitated by a cunning hydraulic press when trying to break into the Medici bank,” my father said.

Marco went on: “Riccardi told me that Antonio had at least two of these commissioned when he lived in Tuscany. She had made a study of them, wrote some book. She was often nattering about them. I barely even paid attention—but there’s a code. You have to plug it in—”

“This is the alphabet here,” I said. “The Latin alphabet.”

“It’s twenty-six buttons,” my mother agreed. “Though the letters are difficult to read.”

“It’s the Gothic script,” said Yolanda.

“Just like the medals,” muttered Marco, removing the two amulets from his pants’ back pocket. “I brought them with me.”

But no one looked at the disks shining in his hand. Both my mother and Yolanda instantly pitched their faces to the ceiling’s aperture, which blazed black and white from the lightning. Above us echoed a stamping of footsteps. Next we all heard an unseen man utter a low, explosive, and hilarious profanity as he admired the detection of the trap door.

My mother’s face looked like a hawk’s in a half-patch of light.

“Who’s that?”

“He’s here,” I said mournfully.

Marco looked up, swore. “A security guard?”

Erik and my father raised their eyes, as if in slow motion.

Down he came.