The King's Gold (43 page)

At first he was like a large dark bird against the brightness of the stormed sky, but when we lifted our flashlights to catch him in that klieg, I saw that the wings on his shoulders were made by the ballooning of the plastic tent he’d strapped to his rucksack.

Tomas de la Rosa descended the rope, those ebony-colored wings flaring behind his shoulders and his black Stetson like a diabolical halo around his head. Tomas flew swinging down on that rope just like Apollo, god of light, the
deus ex machina
who once flew onto the stage in the tragic
Orestes
to miraculously resolve all pains and all sufferings. But de la Rosa was not any angel of order.

“I’ve had it with watching you people prank around with Marco, here,” Tomas growled beneath the brim of his Stetson as he managed his big body down. The brim lifted to reveal that brick-colored, bullet-nosed, unredeemable, and black-eyed face. “How am I supposed to keep hid with you cozying up to a
Moreno—
what are you all, suicides? And
you,
Y, what the hell did I teach you? This boy’s a torturer and a killer. Got a
talent
for it. Gutted twenty tied-up farmers with a bowie knife when he was only a nineteen-year-old army private.”

A paralytic silence filled the room. Yolanda maintained the dead heart she had developed since seeing him in the basilica. My mother’s head wavered backward from the shock. My father’s chest caved in as if it had instantly been burgled of its contents.

Marco sat down hard, before the safe, his face turned up in disbelief. The medals rolled onto the dusty ground.

“You recognize me, Marco?” Tomas asked, in a voice that was not his own, but spoken in the birdy tones of Señor Sam SotoRelada.

Marco did not answer.

Now the voice was Tomas’s. “I see you do. Ah, boy, you’re an obedient cuss, aren’t you? All I’ve got to do is dress up like a usedcar salesman and hand you a puzzle, and the next thing I know both your bodyguards are dead, and you are wide open.”

“Yes, you’re very clever,” Marco breathed.

“So. What do you think I’m going to do with you?”

“I think that we’re both about to fulfill our obligations, Tomas,” Marco replied dangerously, after a long, long pause.

I looked wildly at the ground, at the medals there. They had landed in this order:

I almost saw it then. The answer I had been looking for. The ghost-word trembled in the spaces between the two letters, nearly complete. It was a word I’d read only once, a name I had nearly forgotten.

I turned from the name half-written in the dust, to the velvet shattered chair, upon which was folded that green, inimitably gold-embroidered scrap of fabric. I had seen that embroidery before. I saw
him
wearing that jacket. This had once been a precious textile worn by a noble Medici. I saw the sixteenth-century face with a shock of remembrance.

This image tapped more whisper-fragments from the texts I had been reading, and I heard Cosimo’s voice, the Slave’s, Sofia’s.

The Fool is the sign either of Dead Ends or Fresh Starts.

The swarty Magicians burned like straw men...save for the ash-pale son of the Wizard...

You are the opposite of me, my Lord. You are my reverse. You are a wolf.

...I was impressed by the trickery of his language...

...the jacket his doppelganger wears.

What is your name?

Opul of Timbuktu.

The answer came to me.

“I know what the code is,” I said in a clear high voice.

No one looked at me but Tomas.

“It’s not
lupo
,” I said. “
Lupo
’s a trick. I’ve figured it out. It’s the only way to get inside that safe, the word
I
know. But I won’t tell you unless you promise—no violence! You two swear it!”

Tomas shook his head and spit. “If that isn’t the
damnable
de la Rosa bull-headedness already rearing up in you, L, and I haven’t been in your company more than a few minutes.”

I felt my arms maniacally flap at my sides in fear and triumph. I had performed my detection. Detection is a form of reading and we all know that reading is a brand of art, and art is the force that can save the world.

Except, in the next minutes, I found out the hideous lesson that art is not as powerful as I had supposed.

Marco gave me one look, and I could not tell if it was full of love or hate.

“Marco.”

He turned around and punched a code into the alphabet panel on the safe.

It exploded.

Erik grabbed hold of me and threw me to the ground. My parents fell to the floor under a burst of white smoke. Yolanda nimbly descended to all fours like a spider landing from a web, as did Tomas. Both remained unfathomably calm and steady in their crouching positions amid the aurora borealis of gunpowder and whirling flashlights.

I did not understand what had happened until I saw blood and a litter of red-spattered lead arrows on the ground, and realized that the gore was dripping from the air.

“Marco, Marco.”

From beneath Erik’s chest, I looked up in shock. Marco swung and bled above us as he somehow wrangled himself up the rope. His arms had not been hit by the safe’s deadly sharp arrows, but he had large wet gashes on both thighs and his left hip was soaked with blood. The strength that he had revealed in the Florentine crypt allowed him to fling himself higher toward the ceiling. He scratched his way up the aperture, wailing and shrieking with pain. He disappeared out the top of the trap door. I heard him trying to run through the cathedral.

“You—you—” my mother began screaming to Tomas. “I went looking for you in the
jungle
—I nearly
died—
you broke my heart, you bastard, you hateful—”

“It’s still just us,” Manuel stormed. “Juana. It’s still you, me, and Lola. He has
nothing
to do with the three of us! And I’ve loved you for thirty years, woman!
He
doesn’t matter.”

Tomas still watched me. “Show us what you found out, Lola.”

Erik had rolled off me and put his face in his hands. Yolanda’s face was white as salt beneath the brim of her hat.

“Marco—”

“I’ll talk to that boy later. You show us what there is to see now,” Tomas repeated.

I felt myself floating to my feet. I do not know what my parents were saying. I do not know who was where. Soon I would find blood on my arms, which wasn’t mine. I would arise in horror over the disappeared Marco, and search for him. I would see the blood spread like a calamity across the altar and the nave, and how it led to the possible scrawl of Marco’s footprints on Torcello’s storm-thrashed shore. But now, in the midst of my concussion, my colossal weirdness, my miscreant curiosity, I hovered across the room toward the safe. I pressed the four letters, which spelled the unknown name of a Renaissance eccentric and genius:
OPUL.

The great iron door creaked open. Within the safe were two objects: a pair of slave’s chains, marked on the cuffs with the Medici crests, and a leaf of foolscap paper.

I picked up the thick and brutal iron chains, and showed them to my family. I lifted the short letter and read it.

Cosimo

That you have found this means that you have remembered, at least, my real name, and know of my shame—of my mettle turned so soft and yellow from living as one of the vicious Medici all these years. Consider that your prize, along with your beautifully buried Uncle Antonio Medici.

The gold is all gone. I burned it in my laboratory. Yet my alchemical experiments are a failure. My wife is dead. I have found there is no cure for the Human Condition.

Do not tell the Priest of the manner of my death, or of the other crimes of cowardice that I performed in my life, so that I might be buried in hallowed ground, next to my Sofia.

Opul of Timubktu

“Our Antonio was the Slave,” I said, shaking even harder than Yolanda as I clutched the chains. “A slave named Opul—Opul—the African alchemist—don’t you see—it’s so awful. The name.

What is your name?
That’s what Antonio asked the Moor in Africa, after he’d killed his father in the alchemy lab.
Opul of Timbuktu
. It’s like a palindrome:
Lupo
going one way,
Opul
in the opposite direction.
You are my reverse. You are a wolf.
Then in Mexico, the slave really did reverse places with Antonio Medici, when there was a riot over the gold. He probably took advantage of the confusion, stole a ship, imprisoned his master. The letter
was
a forgery. The real Antonio was dark-skinned, which is why he could pose as the Moor Balthazar, and was called il Lupo Tetro. And Opul was light—that’s also why he was able to pull off the impersonation for so long, along with his use of the gold mask covering up Antonio’s face, and the myth about the werewolf—what
we
thought was the Condition.
And
playing with the Italians’ color prejudice—”

“Versipellis,”
Erik muttered. “Cosimo called him
skin-shifter
because he shifted from black to white. We couldn’t see past it ourselves—our reading of Sofia’s journal.”

“Yes. But the Aztecs, the gold, the druidical books, all that’s gone. The
yellow mettle
that he promised Cosimo was just this—his confession. Of his passing as Italian, living off the money stolen from the Aztecs and handed down from slave-traders. That he was a coward. At least until his death, when he killed all the Florentines, with, what—naphtha—because he blamed them for his father’s death, the alchemist. And that’s why his
mettle
is yellow. His character. Not the gold. The poor, poor man. What he didn’t spend on protection, he burned to find the Universal Medicine—so he could stay with Sofia, who loved
him
. So he could cure the
Condition
—agh—” The image of Marco’s face pressed itself with chilling insistence against my mind. “We have to go find him out there. Marco. We have to go. There’s nothing here for us. No treasure, except for what’s in the two medals. The rest of it’s been—” I didn’t know how to put it. Later I would find the word:
alchemized.

“No treasure?” Tomas asked, his voice low and steady.

“The original gold? No. There’s nothing here of value to us.”

“I can’t say I agree with that,” he said. “Because, hell, if I didn’t make a mistake keeping so far away from you, Lola.” De la Rosa stared straight down at me with that ugly-handsome face, as if he were the most incredible of superheroes, gifted with X-ray eyes or psychic powers. “I thought maybe you weren’t really mine, that Juana would have hammered out everything in you that she knew was from me. But now I see that wouldn’t be possible. Because you are mine. You are just like me. You are root and branch, my little girl, the crazy daughter of the Indian who blew up the Spaniards, the grandbaby of the man who went searching for Excalibur in the Pampas, at the end of the damn world. You are precious to me. You are a sight. You are a
sight
. Lola de la Rosa. You are a sight for these weary old eyes.”

“
Ah—”
I cried.

And here everything broke loose.

Yolanda slowly raised her hand to her head and slipped off the Stetson. She crushed it between her hands.

“What did you do?” she shrieked. “What did you do? What did you do to me?”

“Hel-lo Y,” Tomas answered, imperturbable. “My tough-nut kid, my number one love-baby.”

Over this my mother was yelling something, too, which was gargantuan in its anger and its profound obscenity.

But then Erik said, “Lola—your
face
.”

Something had just happened to me, understand, and just that second. Something that I did not expect and that was, in its way, terrible.

Maybe I’d been preparing for this moment all my life by reading those books of mine. Maybe the Red Lion’s lovingly collected anti-heroes had screwed up my psychology. But while I had been looking into the dark and strange eyes of Tomas and hearing him tell me that I was his very own, his girl, the root-andbranch grandbaby of a lost-and-found epic family, I had changed. I had
shifted
. And they could all see it.

The worst of it was when I looked up and saw the face of Manuel, and took in his expression.