“Open his shirt,” the Reichsführer told the other guard.
The second one, a towering blond oaf, yanked the marquis’s shirt open, sending the button flying, and then, spotting the chain, lifted it over his head.
“You see?” Himmler said to Mainz. “Direct action is always best.”
The guard placed La Medusa in Himmler’s hand, where he let it dangle from his fingers. “It doesn’t feel especially powerful,” Himmler said, weighing it up and down. “Is it?”
Sant’Angelo prayed that he could retrieve it before the Nazis ever had the chance to gauge its full potential. But the Luger was still grazing his skull, and he hardly dared to breathe.
“You can put that down now,” Himmler said, and the guard immediately obliged, stepping back a few feet, but with the gun still in his hand. “We don’t want anyone’s head exploding while there’s still something worthwhile in it.” A wintry smile creased his lips. “Now,” he said to Sant’Angelo, “answer the question.”
“It’s simply a good-luck charm that has been in my family for many years.”
“Has it worked?” Himmler asked in a doubtful tone.
Before Sant’Angelo could summon a reply, there was a sharp cry—“Heil, Hitler!”—from the bottom of the steps, and he could see a long shadow playing on the wall of the stairwell … and rising up into the turret.
Himmler quickly got off the desk and the guards went rigid at attention. Mainz mopped the sweat from his forehead and wiped it on his sleeve.
The shadow grew larger, nearer, and the mirrored walls of the study suddenly seemed as if they were closing in. Even the marquis felt the imminence of something powerful … and evil.
“Who can breathe in here?” he heard the Führer complain as he entered the room. “Open those doors all the way.”
The oafish guard leapt to the French doors and threw them back.
The Führer’s eyes darted around the room, taking in everything without turning his head more than a few degrees. His field uniform was more modest than Himmler’s, decorated with only the red armband and, on his left breast pocket, an old-fashioned Iron Cross, the one engraved with the year 1914 and given out to veterans of the First World War. Surveying the many mirrors, he said, “Vanity is a weakness. A weak man worked in here.”
No one contradicted him.
“And why, even this high up, is there still no breeze?”
Sant’Angelo had the impression that they were all being blamed for the lack of air.
Taking off his hat, adorned with the gold Imperial Eagle, he placed it on the desk upside down, then smoothed the back of his head with a trembling left hand. His eyes were an icy blue, and his brown hair was shorn oddly close along the sides. In the front, it fell in a heavy sweep from a parting on the right. Only his bristly moustache was tinged with gray. Noting the Medusa in Himmler’s hand, he said, “You hold that bauble as if it were significant.”
“It is, Mein Führer.”
“Given the trouble you’ve put me to, it had better be.”
Hitler took it in his right hand—Sant’Angelo noticed that he had placed the left one behind his back—and took an interested, but skeptical, look. First he studied the glaring face of the Gorgon, then he turned it over and grunted when he saw its black silk backing. With a thumb, he removed it, uncovering the mirror.
Sant’Angelo prayed that he would stay clear of the moonlight just beginning to show on the terrace outside.
“So it’s a lady’s looking glass,” he said, looking away from the mirror. “And not a particularly good one. The glass seems flawed.”
Sant’Angelo hoped he would put it aside; but instead, he distractedly wound the chain in and round his fingers, the Medusa herself cupped firmly in his palm.
“We believe there is more to it than meets the eye,” Himmler said, though with great deference.
“Yes, yes indeed,” Professor Mainz blurted out. “I believe that a manuscript exists, perhaps in this very chateau, which will explain how it was made—and the powers that it can bestow.”
Hitler flicked his eyes toward Sant’Angelo. “Well? Can you speak?”
“I can.”
“Then do so. I haven’t got all night.”
“You have already taken the measure of the thing quite accurately,” Sant’Angelo replied, in a deliberately timid tone. “It’s simply a little mirror, poorly made, without a single precious stone to distinguish it.”
“Ah, but that’s exactly it!” Mainz said, unable to restrain himself. “The things that have the greatest power always disguise themselves!” As he went off on a fevered disquisition of the occult and its physical phenomena, the marquis gently folded his hands together, in an innocent gesture, and lowered his eyes. He knew that he had been dismissed—judged and found wanting in Hitler’s eyes—and that was just what he hoped for.