The King's Gold (9 page)

If Erik Gomara, Ph.D., pitched a jealous fit at the sight of Marco Moreno, it was the first that I could recall in our two-year relationship. Healthy-bellied, with dark chocolate eyes, large pink ears, and a tall Diego Rivera frame, Erik usually proved too busy reading, teaching, writing, eating, or rigorously seducing me to bother with the annoyances of romantic rivals. Nor could there have been any, because he was fabulous. Erik was an archaeology prof at UCLA, along with my mother, Juana, and two years back, we had gotten together while searching for her in Guatemala. He had been born in that country, before immigrating to the United States and its Ivy Leagues, then carpet-bombing UCLA’s humanities deans and female undergrads with his shaggy-dog sex appeal.

When I’d first met him, he was as famous for his sophomore-deflowerings as his medal-winning digs in Maya burial sites, but it took only a couple shakes of the Sanchez hips—and the whole near-death experience in the Guatemala jungle—for him to make me the sole beneficiary of his extreme coolness. Erik had struggled with Colonel Moreno during our adventure in the rain forest, and also watched as Lieutenant Estrada had beaten that man to a dead bloody pulp. This tragedy had both bonded us and plagued him with bad nightmares. Still, we had settled into a very happy life, dividing our time between his apartment in L.A. and my family home in L.B. Our romance, moreover, was to very shortly detonate into a wild wedding. This was to be a one-week affair that my mother and father Manuel had organized, complete with mariachi bands, live cockatiels, bowling, and a tracking demonstration by Yolanda, who had dyspeptically agreed to take the wedding party on a scavenger hunt around the Long Beach suburbs. So it’s understandable that he became agitated at the sight of Marco grabbing at me in a lavish penthouse, a mere twelve days before we were to exchange vows.

“Why is this guy in your room?” he repeated.

“Oh, they’re
staying
together,” Adriana helpfully offered, while kicking the dropped candies into a beautiful iron-wrought waste can. “Sharing a suite, you know. Most economical.”

“No, we’re not,” I objected loudly. “That was a mistake.”

“Mistake?” Erik asked.

“Why is our party being crashed by a sweaty chimpanzee, Adriana?” Marco smoothly asked.

“He said he wanted to surprise his fiancée,” she replied.

Erik’s face flushed red and white. “And who are you, bud?”

I still had the letter in my hand, and I waved it around. “Honey, let me explain. There’s this letter—”

“Lord, Adriana, just get this person out of here—”

“I can’t, Marco. I’m afraid Dr. Riccardi was more than welcoming. She thought his presence might be amusing—”

I said, “Erik, he came into the store, talking about gold and Tomas’s grave, and Col—”

“Yeah—I got that part. I told your sister and she’s
flipping out
about it. I’m surprised she’s not here herself. Everybody at home wants to know what’s going on. You’re missing your dress fittings, the shower, the caterer, the music—”

“He basically abducted me, Erik. At first, anyway.”

“Abducted you.”

“Yes, that’s what you call it when handsome men make you tart up in one of
my
red dresses and hurl you into suites that cost a thousand euros a night,” said Adriana, drily. “Sir.”

“What a wonderful way to put it,” said Marco.

I said, “Seriously—listen—”

“Actually, why
are
you wearing that?”

Everyone was talking at once.

“You can interrogate her cleavage back in California.” Marco eased a cigarette box from his tuxedo pocket, lighting up with a flick of his elegant hands. “Why don’t you find a bowl of ranch dip dressing and stick your head in it, my good boy? Go suck on a chocolate. Though you’re awfully amusing with your little cheese crackers and aroma of armpit, we are both very, very busy and can’t be bothered.”

“Will you shut up?” I hissed at him.

“I’m persuading him to
go.
Nicely, you’ll note.” Marco exhaled smoke through his nostrils before glancing over at Domenico, who still stood in the hall like a guard. “I could be ruder if you like, sweetheart.”

Erik puffed up at Marco, in a he-man sort of way, raking his fingers through his hair before patting him in a hard and whapping manner on the shoulder. “I don’t feel like we’ve been properly introduced. What’s your name?”

“Marco Moreno.” He smiled. “I can very easily ensure that you never forget it—”

“No, Jesus, don’t do that,” I said. “Okay, everyone stop acting manly right now!”

“Marco
Moreno
?” Marco’s shoulder juddered back as Erik continued to smack him. He reached up and rapped on Erik’s head with his knuckles. “Ring a bell? Moreno?”

“Stop whacking each other, sirs,” Adriana commanded. “It’s entertaining, but no one’s fought at the palazzo since, ah, 1523, I think. Too many antiques. And besides, it’s bad for the digestion. Would you like to a tour instead?”

“No, Erik has to look at
this.
” Again I tried to show him the pages in my hand, rustling them under his nose. “Here, just in case you see something that I didn’t—”

But Erik roughly brushed Marco’s lapel, so the man had to take a step back. “Hey. This is a
really
nice tuxedo. Does it wrinkle easily?”

“Honey,” I said. “Stop.”

“Gentlemen,” warned Adriana.

Marco’s face rippled with mirth. “Ha ha ha. Not at all. I’ll give you the name of my tailor—as you’ll soon need to be stitched up.”

“Look, all of you,
do shut up
,” Adriana bassooned, so that we gave a little jump and quieted down.

“Even me, darling?” Marco asked.

“Especially you. Sir.” She smiled again before pushing him down the hall, his cigarette smoke following him like the devil’s gas. She maneuvered Erik after him, before propelling me toward the staircase. “I run this house, you see. My job is to make sure the doctor is happy. When she is not happy, she screams. This, I hate. And if you kill each other before dinner—and thus are not able to sit down for appetizers—what will happen? Unhappiness. The screaming. So, please...
move
.”

This sufficiently startled Erik and me so that we automatically followed her orders. Marco floated down the stairs, and we followed him past more of the palazzo’s marble nudes, Renaissance landscapes, and a spectacularly painted chamber tucked into a side corridor.

“Here,
this
should divert you!” Adriana said. “This always works! We have a very nice chapel, with a lovely mural. Look, look, look. Pay attention. It has your friend in it; you’ll love it. No, don’t stop mumbling at
him, sir—
up here! Recognize this?”

“What?”

“What?”

“What?”

We had been dragged to a small room ablaze with a green-gold painted panorama showing nobles surrounded by slaves, dogs, brilliant hills and trees. Adriana was frisking about, drawing our attention away from our argument by pointing up to this mural of young handsome men riding muscular steeds in a kings’ processional.

“Points for who gives me the name of the mural.” Adriana waved her hands in the air. “Those of you who can’t will immediately be branded a buffoon. Come on, come on.”

“This is
absurd,”
said Marco.

“
Buf-
foon,” answered Adriana.

“It’s the Gozzoli mural,” Erik said instinctively, confusedly, his bangs waving like wheat above his ahead. “Um—Benozzo Gozzoli. This is his
Procession of the Three Magi.
The progression under the North Star. Gozzoli used Medici family members as models.”

“Yes. Excellent—especially for a big old sweaty chimp, isn’t it, sir?”

“Agh—”

“What year was it painted, sir?”

Along with a miasma of cigarette smoke, Marco puffed: “Bagh—1459—”

“Buf-foon, incomplete answer.”

“Oh—shit—the last of it was painted—”

“The latest scholarship argues 1497.” Erik nearly hollered, unable to repress himself. “The last year of—”

“Gozzoli’s life,” rapped out Marco.

“And
whose
portrait do the scholars say was painted in that year?” She raised her eyebrows, barely wrinkling her perfect skin.

“Oh,
right.
I’ve read about this.” That was me. I made my way to one particular portrait of a magus on a white horse; this was a darkly handsome, though severe-looking, person, wearing an embroidered green-and-gold coat and a gold-pointed headdress.

The artist had taken great pains to render the subject as a dashing, bronzed Moorish prince. “This is our
man
.”

“That’s Antonio Medici,” Marco gargled. “When he was a youngster—nineteen years old—here, in Florence. He posed for Gozzoli as the Babylonian magus Balthazar. He’s one of the three magi who visited the Christ child.”

“That’s it, sir,” she said, clasping her hands. “You’re back on track now. Here’s your Signor Antonio, in the late fourteen hundreds,
long
before his rehabilitation. Look at him! Murderer of inmates and asylum patients at this age, later moving on to Ottomans in Africa in the fifteen tens, then Aztecs in the Americas in the twenties. Gozzoli said that painting him was like painting the devil. Still, he did make a good model for Balthazar. Some say that Antonio had a Sicilian mother—that’s why he had such a temper. You know people will have their theories. But I’m just happy the historians are blaming him on the Sicilians and not on Algerians like me.”

Adriana smiled, and I found myself almost liking her then.

“There now!” she piped. “You aren’t ululating at each other anymore. This always works—I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had intellectuals come steaming and barking in here and wanting to assassinate each other over...what...the provenance of some rubbishy potsherd or piece of dented silver. And then I bring them in here, give them a test—and my, you really are just a bunch of apple-polishing four-eyes after all these years, aren’t you? Cool as fish now. Good for me. So! Now that I’ve gotten you all under control, it’s time for dinner. I laid an extra plate for Dr. Gomara and whisked away the steak knives. No, you don’t have to thank me. Come on, then, come on. Let’s go.”

We were commandeered back to the public areas of the palazzo, which were sparsely populated with antique-looking guards.

“Behave yourselves now—I’m warning you. Okay, super! See you in a bit.” Adriana gave us a bow before melting away.

Our tense little trio stood at the entrance of the palazzo’s opulent and gilded private dining room, where Dr. Riccardi bewilderedly attempted to engage the monosyllabic Blasej and Domenico in conversation. As I entered the room, I labored to give her a nonpanicked smile—that is, until my eyes turned up, up, up, to the salon’s paintings, its gilding, its ceiling frescoes.

And here is where the day began to take an unexpected turn once again. The moment I entered the art-littered fantasia that was once the Medici dining hall, it was as if I experienced a mental
click,
some sort of uncanny déjà vu: I knew I had seen this room before.

Or that someone had
told
me about this room before.

Gliding over the carpets, the glimmering wood, I had the strange sensation that someone—not Marco—had once whispered to me about this place. That it was full of—what?
Hints
and
mysteries
.

But what could that mean?

I grabbed Erik and hurried into the dining hall to find out.

My gaze flew above the forms of the impatiently waiting Dr. Riccardi, Domenico, and Blasej. All through the extraordinary room. The walls were striped with gilt friezes of ladies’ faces, and beyond these glimmered a ceiling fresco showing a disturbing scene of a woman being spirited away by some sort of kingly figure. High on the west wall preened a huge Vasari portrait of Cosimo I. Right next to it shone a beautifully precise map of Italy, lavish with calligraphy and gold leaf, which looked quite old.

“Where have I seen this before? Or when have I
been
here before?” I asked, while Erik continued to question me with his eyes, while attempting to smash down his travel-grunged hair in preparation for an evidently expensive dinner.

“I told you, didn’t I?” Marco replied. “The dining room.”

“Yes—but where have I seen it?”

“What’s that?” Dr. Riccardi raised her eyes from the monolithic Domenico and Blasej to the glittering ceiling.

Pointing at the pages I still held in my hand, Marco said: “You didn’t see it, you
read
about it—
he
described it, very precisely. In Antonio’s letter to Cosimo. Antonio begins recounting his life here in the palace, in the days before Cosimo threw him out of the city. He wrote about the dinners they had had here: ‘
When did we last meet, before you Exiled my wife, Sofia the Dragon, and me? It was in the 1520s, I believe, just after I returned from America, in the few months when I was still allowed to feast at our family’s palazzo. The dining hall was so lovely, I remember, full of mysteries and hints of treasure
—
’”

I said: “Yes, right—that’s it
—‘mysteries and hints of treasure.’”

“‘With its friezes of golden girls,’”
Marco went on,
“‘its secret passageways, its fresco of
The Rape of Proserpine
, and that gew-gaw I commissioned, namely Pontormo’s gorgeous map of Italy.’”