Gary was confused.
“Because there’s no way I’m going anywhere without seeing him one more time.” She set her fragile jaw like a linebacker. “I don’t care how long it takes. I’ll wait.”
Gary believed her.
“I’ll wait,” she repeated, before slowly drifting off into a drug-induced sleep.
Chapter 32
The papers from his valise were pretty much ruined. The only good news David could think of was that the originals were still safe and sound at the Newberry.
Still, the marquis had laid the documents out on his desk in the center of his salon with all the care and respect one would accord a newly discovered codex by Leonardo. They lay atop a layer of soft, absorbent linen, and even now he was dabbing at their edges with a dry sponge.
The pages of the manuscript, La Chiave Alla Vita Eterna, might as well have been glued together; they would have to be dried out slowly over the next few days, their leaves delicately separated by scalpels and tweezers.
But it was the sketch of La Medusa that had immediately drawn Sant’Angelo’s full attention. Professor Vernet at the Mineralogical Museum had said the marquis was an expert in these matters, and the fact that he had instantly focused on this remarkable sketch only confirmed it. He was smoothing out its wrinkles as tenderly as a father would handle his infant child.
The man himself was like no one David had ever met. He wore an imperious expression and, beneath a prominently hooked nose, a luxuriant dark moustache. To David, he looked like a throwback to some earlier era. And despite his pronounced limp, he bore a powerful physical presence. Still wearing his formal clothes, the black tie dangling loose around his neck, he brooded over the papers. His pleated white shirt was fastened, David could not help but notice, with glittering sapphire studs and matching cuff links.
“In future,” he said, “you should really keep things like this out of the water.”
“In future,” David replied, “I hope to avoid being shot at.”
David had filled him in quickly on how they had come to show up at his door, soaking wet and out of breath, but when Sant’Angelo had asked who would be chasing him so intently, and why, David had been unable to supply the answer.
“They wanted that,” Olivia had jumped in, gesturing at the drawing.
“This?” Sant’Angelo said. “It’s just a sketch—and a copy at that.”
“They want the actual object, the looking glass,” she said, glancing at David to make sure he was okay with her being so forthcoming.
David nodded his acquiescence. Like Olivia, he was sitting in silk pajamas and a velvet robe supplied from the marquis’s own wardrobe. They had changed in a sumptuous bedroom suite upstairs and come down to steaming cups of hot chocolate.
“A little mirror, made out of what?” Sant’Angelo said skeptically. “Silver?”
“But by a great master’s hand,” David replied.
The marquis nodded. “Ah, so you do know. Cellini’s hand is always unmistakable, is it not?”
David shouldn’t have been surprised. He had the sense that this man knew far more than he was letting on.
“I have a client, and she has commissioned me to find it,” David said. “At any cost.” As a dealer in these things, the marquis would surely be intrigued by that mention of a commission.
“She has, has she? May I ask her name?”
“I’m not at liberty to divulge that,” David said, feeling that it was best to keep at least one or two cards close to his vest, especially with someone as cagey as Sant’Angelo.
The marquis nodded, no doubt accustomed to people keeping the names of their employers to themselves. But he wasn’t nearly done with his questions—and David wasn’t done with him, either. It was all a matter, David knew, of who divulged what and in what order.
“But what brought you to me in the first place?” Sant’Angelo said, leaning back in his chair, his fingers steepled in front of him.
David saw no harm in answering this one directly, telling him about some of their discoveries at the Mineralogical Museum. “Cagliostro seemed obsessed with someone by the name of Sant’Angelo, then, there it was—your name, in gold leaf, on the plaque listing the Board of Governors.”
The marquis acknowledged as much.
“So I have to ask,” David said. “Your family has apparently been in Paris for many generations, and working in this trade. Did one of your ancestors come into possession of La Medusa?”
Sant’Angelo didn’t even hesitate. “Yes.”
Olivia nearly leapt out of her chair, and David felt like the wind had been knocked out of him. Here was the most concrete proof yet that the thing had existed, not to mention some indication of where it had been. He was almost afraid to speak again.
“You don’t, by any chance, have it in your possession now?”
“No.”
“But you know where it is?” Olivia said, perched on the front of her chair.