“If we can get one,” she said.
They had no sooner emerged from the station than a pair of headlights approached them from down the street. David noticed that the light on the top of the cab suddenly went from Off to On, but it was only when it stopped at the curb that he saw it was a rusty old heap, the same one that had been cruising the block an hour ago. Inside, he saw a swarthy, foreign driver, with a string of wooden beads hanging from the rearview mirror, and caught the sweet scent of Turkish tobacco.
Olivia had her hand on the door when David backed off and said, “No thanks.”
Cranking the window lower, the driver said, “What’s the problem? Anywhere you want to go.”
David tapped the door politely, and said, “Changed my mind. Thanks, anyway.”
Olivia looked confused as the driver, sneering, pulled away from the curb and drove, slowly, toward the corner.
“What was wrong with that cab?” Olivia asked.
“Didn’t feel right,” David replied, and after all they had been through already, Olivia knew enough to respect a hunch.
David waited until the taxi was just out of sight, then took Olivia’s hand, saying, “Let’s take a walk,” and ducking into the park. “We’ll catch a cab on the other side.”
It was a cloudy night, with almost no moon, but the pathway was marked every fifty yards or so by old-fashioned lampposts. The gravel crunched under their feet as they walked, and the wind stirred the barren branches of the great old elms. No one else was on the walkway, the green metal benches were empty, and the few concession stands that they passed were sealed up behind accordion gates. A separate path sloped down on their left, toward a man-made lake and a ramshackle boathouse. A wooden sign on a shingle advertised rowboats for rent.
Olivia pulled her collar up around her neck and stuck her bare hands deep into her pockets. David wondered if she was questioning his decision.
With the leather valise slung over one shoulder, he kept an eye out, looking into the shadows on either side and occasionally turning to stare into the darkness behind them. Even he was starting to wonder if he hadn’t made the wrong call.
But then she surprised him, as she often did. “You know,” she said, launching into what she’d actually been brooding over, “Cagliostro was said to have initiated Napoleon into the secret mysteries of Rosicrucianism, among other things. And after the count was murdered in 1795, legend has it that the Emperor ordered his soldiers to find the count’s grave, dig up the body, and bring him the skull.”
“What for?”
“A drinking cup.”
“Sounds more like something Hitler would do.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” she said. “All dictators are madmen. But they shared something else, too. Napoleon was determined to uncover knowledge, in any form, from any source, and assimilate it into his growing empire.”
“Like the Rosetta Stone.”
“Exactly. That was why he sent scientists and scholars like Champollion off in the first place—to decipher the ancient wisdom of the East.”
David saw a movement in the trees, and relaxed only when a fat gray squirrel came the rest of the way around the trunk.
“And even though his motives were less benign, Hitler did precisely the same thing. He sent zealots like Dieter Mainz to Paris to track down any arcane knowledge that might help him to erect the Reich.”
The squirrel scampered across the pathway, which circled a classical fountain—a triton rising from the deep. While David listened to Olivia expound, he tried to gauge where they were in the park and how much farther it might be before they got to the other side.
“But I wonder what Dieter Mainz was able to make of those ravings that Cagliostro left behind? I’m no Champollion, but I’d love to show some of those hieroglyphs to one of my old professors in Bologna. Is there anyone at your library in Chicago who specializes in Egyptian texts?”
He didn’t answer her.
“David?”
His attention was firmly concentrated on a figure in the trees, up ahead. All he could make out was the hint of a black leather jacket.
“There’s someone in the trees on the right,” David said, slowing his pace but purposely not stopping. He didn’t want to let on yet that he’d seen him.
Olivia looked, too, and murmured, “Maybe this is the gay pickup spot.”
Possible, David thought, especially as he could now make out a second man, even farther into the shadows, with the collar of a peacoat turned up.
“Do you want to turn around?” Olivia said.
And David wasn’t sure—until the wind carried the faintest scent of cigarette smoke his way.
Sweet and aromatic.
“Yes,” he said, stopping in his tracks.