The King's Gold (8 page)

“Yes, he bought it from me fourteen years ago! Old Tom spent a good amount of time trying to solve the thing, and was close to doing so—but then, you know, he went crackers and died. And so I...liberated the letter, if you will, from his estate, and sold it—again—to our friend, Moreno. I have a rather unorthodox business model, gets me into a lot of trouble—at the moment, in fact, I’m currently trying to avoid a date with...what do you
Yanquis
call it? The ‘fuzz’?”

I was so galled I just clung to the phone with my mouth open.

“But why dwell on that nasty detail? On the other, much less self-incriminating subject, Tomas was like that—the crackers part—you must have heard. Something of a melancholic. Given to
moods.
Like the daughter. Yolanda. And his war—his experiences in it—did not help his sulks much. So it didn’t surprise me much at all to hear that he might have died in Italy—it was just like him to race off and not say anything about it to anyone...wait, did you just hear something? A siren—something like that?”

“What? No.”

“Are you sure? Someone hyperventilating on a megaphone?”

“You’re saying he
did
die here, in Italy. How?”

“Oh—blagh—so you’re saying you don’t know. Well, I won’t tell you. Look, I’m very sorry that your family has had things
so
hard, but you really should thank me, as you would be floundering around with the fishes if I hadn’t recommended your talents to Sir Marco. And as to the letter—well, I’m sure it’s not a forgery. Your father would not have been interested in it if it were.

And,
if you are a de la Rosa, then...well, you’ll
figure it out.
The de la Rosas always do. That’s what will keep you healthy with Mr. Marco. Figuring it out. What I’d do if I were you is spin out this treasure hunting business with your Latin phrases and witty perambulations and he’s sure to remain your friend. Then, after you find the stuff, that is, the
gold,
find some clever way to slip him some particularly painful poison. And make sure to remember I get my percentage.”

“Señor Soto-Relada—”

“Yes, excellent—very well then—look, I have to go. See, I
do
hear it. Oh, damn. Oh, my God, that’s a siren—I see these flashing...red lights—must dash—good-bye, Lola—”

“Señor—”

“Mucho gusto!”

And with that, he clicked off the phone.

I scrambled out of the tub, redialing to no avail, and trying to piece together that baffling conversation while drying myself off with a towel. I had dabbed at my thighs and belly button when I recalled that I had nothing but that wadded up Kleenex-looking priestess gown to cover up my confusion. Adriana, however, had earlier mentioned something about providing me with dinner wear. I moved over to the suite’s wardrobe, a delicately carved sixteenth-century affair, and opened it. Inside shimmered a selection of silk gowns adorned with tiny explosions of spiderwebby embroidery, crystal beading, ruches, Venetian laces.

“Oh my God!” I yelped, because I’m not made of wood. I had half slid into a bias-cut silk firecracker with a Marlene Dietrich décolletage when I heard brief knocking, then a rattling at the front door’s lock.

Marco Moreno sauntered back into the room, dressed in a magnificent tuxedo. He coughed embarrassedly and turned away when he saw my frantic flashes of skin.

“Oh—you take a long time to get ready. Sorry.”

“How did you get in here?” I hurriedly slipped the thing on.

He held up a key. “As you were shrieking before, it’s my room too. Well, well! You were looking very road kill before, but you’re
much
better now. Been enjoying yourself?”

I wasn’t going to tell him about my conversation with Soto-Relada, and so only asked, “What do you think?”

“A little, actually, yes.”

“Wrong.” I turned my head, briefly. Out in the hall, I could just now hear the sound of a door opening, and also footsteps. A woman’s low laughter. Adriana.

“But you’ve been looking at the letter again, haven’t you?”

Marco observed the pages scattered on the bedspread. “Any more thoughts?”

“Many.”

“I’ll just bet.” He picked up the onionskin papers, brandishing them at me. “So, I’ll give you another one, then: You diagnosed this letter as being a forgery. But have you considered the fact that sometimes people’s writing just
changes
? You compared this letter to one that Dr. Riccardi showed you—the one Antonio wrote to Pope Leo X, right? That was written—what?—in the early fifteen hundreds, when Antonio had just sailed from Florence to Timbuktu. He was a young lunatic then, torturing Muslims, enslaving them, but that was all over by the time he married, left Florence, and then wrote
my
letter—”

“Tomas’s letter,” I corrected him.

Marco smirked. “In a manner of speaking, it
was
written by a different person! Antonio was over forty years older, a sick, tired, melancholy old man when he penned this letter that I’m holding. I once read that Shakespeare’s signature would look different, just a little, mind you, but discernibly, every time he wrote it. Handwriting differences would be even greater in this case!
And
you forget that Antonio suffered an illness—”

I grudgingly nodded. “That letter was written when he was dying from the Condition.”

“Exactly. He suffered from the Condition. No one knows exactly what the illness was, but couldn’t it have been some sort of nerve damage, some sort of palsy, or even an injury to the hand, which would have altered the letter heights, the threads, the pen pressure?”

I considered this for a moment before conceding that what he suggested was possible. “You know more about this than I thought.”

“It’s become a consuming interest of mine.”

“Why?”

“It seems as if I have found my calling.”

“What—history?”

He hesitated, staring down at the letter. “Politics. It’s something of an inheritance.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It doesn’t matter.” He moved closer to me. “What matters is
this
right now. And I have seen your brain at work. You practically
ate
this letter when I first showed it to you. I thought I was going to have to give you a tranquilizer you became so excited. And in the Long Beach Airport—despite all your whingeing about calling the police, you chased me through the terminal like a little demented bloodhound. But I completely understand. I feel the same way. There’s a
promise
in this writing, don’t you think? Of something wonderful.” He moved toward me again, and I took a step back, so that we were walking in a circle, the way wrestlers do before a fight. Soon my back was toward the front door, and he smiled at me with his white teeth. “Pretty Lola, I know you want to find out the truth. There are secrets here—I can
smell
them, can’t you? There’s something downstairs—in the dining room, as I said before. I can’t put my finger on it. Something in this palace that’s been bothering me for a year—”

“What?”

He was now very near, and shining-eyed. I remembered the old biblical tales of Lucifer and his beauty, his hissing seduction of Eve. Marco was an extraordinary shape-shifter to move so quickly between threatening thug and honey-tongued tempter.

His hand rested on my hand, gently, grazing my engagement ring with his fingertips.

“Don’t touch me like that,” I said, rattled.

Outside, I could again hear the sound of that laughter—actually, more like a shrieking—that punctuated the halls of the palazzo.

Marco smoothed out my fingers so that my palm opened, then laid the opal-colored pages in my grasp.

My fingers folded over the letter.

“Come on, look at it,” he half-sang to me. “Really
study
it. After all, don’t you want to show how you’re better than him? Tomas, I mean? Soto-Relada told me he spent years trying to figure out this puzzle. It must pique your interest—Tomas’s failure. And the idea that you might have the chops to break a code he couldn’t.”

I didn’t answer that. “In Long Beach, you
hit
me, Marco. You threatened my family. Now you’ve put a gorilla outside my door.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t work that well when I think that people are going to hurt me if I displease them.”

He kept his eyes intently on mine. “Actually, I’m becoming more and more convinced that you will please me, Lola.”

“If you intended that to make me feel better—guess what? It
doesn’t.”

“Well,” he said smoothly, “it’s true. I’ll confess that I wasn’t quite sure what I would do with you once I got you over here. Drag you by the hair about Italy and make you figure this puzzle out for me, I suppose. Not very efficient. And not likely to end well. But, it appears you just might be smart enough to truly work with me on this letter, and not because I bully you. Which would require, of course, that I would be
stupid
enough to forget who you are.” He brought his hand to his lips, briefly, and he seemed suddenly less bulletproof, less brittle, before he spread out his arms and laughed bitterly. “But it is possible that I could forget. After all, I am a man in grief, terrible, terrible grief, and am not seeing clearly.”

He stared at me for a long time then. Or I, at him. At this moment he did not seem dangerous. He was weirdly, almost intimately sad, even seductive—in a Stockholm syndrome sort of way.

“Yes, after all—why not? Why fight? You could prove yourself to me now, if you wanted,” he murmured, and I could feel his warm breath on my cheeks. He took my face in his palms, pushing back my hair. “Little beauty. Little nutter. We’re not so very different, are we? But I want you to
work with me.
I know you’re capable of more than that amateur show you put on in the library! I
dare
you. Show me that not all of the de la Rosas are trash. It would mean a great deal to your family. Maybe I’ll give you a chance.”

“Oh—you—
grrrrr
!” Holding the letter tightly, I furiously jerked my face out of his grasp. Marco kept hold of my arm as I blundered out of the suite’s front door and faced the source of the laughter outside.

“Or, maybe
not,”
Marco said, over the din.

In the Persian-carpeted hallway, the formerly blasé Adriana was flushing crimson and spasming with hilarity. Opposite her stood a tall, stocky man in a crumpled, navy suit with stuffed pockets, and with wayward black and silver hair.

“You’re really going to have to educate these Italians, Adriana, because the customs guy says to me, ‘You’re what—Latino? That’s what? As in...Indian? As in Chief Running Bear or something? As in eagle feathers and nude dancing? I thought you were Chinese, boy, because of your, well, your
eyes.
’ And I said, ‘No, I’m Indian—Maya Indian—and my ancestors did wear feathers, in fact, particularly when they were performing these incredibly painful human sacrifices, especially on large-bottomed male Italian colonials, because their effeminacy pleased the harvest gods—Italians, to tell you the truth, a
lot
like you’—but he didn’t think it was very funny, because he said he was going to put me in the airport prison—”

“I know, I know, they are blockheads,” gasped Adriana, reaching out to dust off some lint from his lapel, before spotting me and composing herself.

“Who’s that?” Marco asked from behind me.

Adriana patted down her hair. “Oh—yes. This lovely man says he is your...
fiancé
?” She rolled her eyes meaningfully. “Signorina de la Rosa?”

The guest turned around. The man’s dark, exhausted glance first veered up to Marco and shot out little poisoned darts when he saw his hand on my arm. Then he looked at me, with his funny, handsome-haggard face.

“Hi...,” he said, bobbing his airplane-seat-mashed head back and forth and opening his arms. “Surprise, sweetie! What the hell are you doing here? Love you! Guess you didn’t expect me to really come when you invited me on that text message thingie. Well, ha! Um—here I am!”

I rushed to Erik and nearly crushed him to pieces in my embrace.

“When did you get here?” I almost brutally squeezed Erik around his big waist; his hands were very cold as they moved through my hair.

“Rome, about two hours ago. After you texted me about this ‘client’ person, and Aztecs, and Tomas, I couldn’t get a hold of you on your cell. So I called up your parents and Yolanda, but no one knew what was going on. Then I phoned
this
place—the palazzo—you gibbered about it in your text. Adriana told me that you had a room reserved here! So then I ran to the airport! And then I just staggered around! I was trying to figure out what in holy hell was going on—your flight had just left! You were gone! We had dinner reservations! We were going to have lobster and pick the rehearsal dinner DJ! And then I was sort of
upset
and then I kind of felt myself
floating
over to the ticket counter and babbling out
my fiancée’s in Italy
—and they put me on standby and—well—bam
bam!
” He waggled his hands around his ears. “I just did it! Flew here like a maniac! All very spontaneous, you know, and I was hoping it would be romantic and not stalking—”

I started laughing. “Are you drunk?”

His thick black bangs stuck up all around his head, and his beard-bristles sprang out from his thick jaw. “No, not very. Anymore. But you know, coach is
such
hell and they’ve got this duty-free whiskey and I sipped like half a bottle while nibbling on...these—” From the depths of his bulging jacket pockets he began pulling out the treats he’d purchased en route: Tiny cans of gourmet nuts, Baci balls, little Parmesan cheese twists, a squeaky-new paperback novel, and a miniature bottle of L’Air du Temps for me.

Even while a few stray Baci balls tumbled to the ground, however, his gaze moved up to Marco, who still stood behind me in the hall. “But I still didn’t get drunk enough to survive the freaking Christian Slater movie they kept on playing over, and over, and blah, blah, and yadda, yadda, yadda, and what I’d actually really like to know is,
What the hell is this guy doing in your room?
”