Mainz’s heavy hands were grappling at his throat, but Sant’Angelo banged a fist under the man’s chin, so hard that the back of his head smashed against the bottom of the table. While he was absorbing the shock of the blow, the marquis was able to crawl free … and settle the silver circlet around his brow.
He was crouching on the floor, framed between the open French doors, when the band took its effect. The marquis watched in the mirrored walls as his own image rippled, faded … and then disappeared. A bullet from the guard’s gun shattered the glass behind him, as Hitler’s head came up, his hooded, bleary eyes searching out his enemy. His face had the demonic glow of a furnace.
Himmler, who had spent his whole life in search of just such magic as the marquis had displayed, stood slack-jawed, while Mainz and the soldier, gun still raised, froze in place, not knowing what to do.
Before they could gather their wits, Sant’Angelo sprang to his feet and moved to one side.
“Shoot where he was!” Mainz screamed, and a second later the woodwork exploded in splinters.
“Block the door!” Himmler cried, and the remaining soldier jumped to block the stairs.
There was only one way to go, and even as Sant’Angelo realized it, so did Mainz.
The marquis ran out onto the balcony, and was about to climb over the railing and down the vines, when he felt the professor’s hands, groping wildly in the air, catch hold of his collar. Sant’Angelo squirmed out of his grip, but Mainz seemed to have a sixth sense about where he was, and snagged him again.
“I’ve got you now, you bastard!” Mainz crowed, his hair sopped in blood, his lips flecked with foam, as he pulled him back from the balustrade. “I’ve got you!” he spat at the night air.
And Sant’Angelo took hold of his loden coat and swung him around so violently that he tripped over his own feet, struggling all the while to hang on to his invisible prey.
“I’ve got you!” he rasped, as the marquis swung him around one more time, before suddenly letting him go. Mainz careened toward the balustrade, teetering there for just an instant, his arms spread wide, before the invisible marquis shoved both hands against his burly chest and sent him plummeting over the rail.
“Shoot everywhere!” Himmler shouted, and the soldier emptied his Luger in an arc, hitting nearly every spot on the balcony.
“Alive!” the Führer croaked. He had lurched up from his chair and was leaning hard against the doorframe, his left arm shaking uncontrollably. “I want him alive!”
A dozen soldiers charged up from the stairwell, rifles at the ready.
And that was when Sant’Angelo, perched like an acrobat on the balustrade, leapt into the embrace of the closest oak. Crashing down through the boughs, his legs twisting and breaking as he fell, he was finally, miraculously, suspended, as if by a celestial hand. High above the ground, in the blackness of the night, he was sheltered among the thick branches and leaves.
But the pain in his legs was nothing compared to the pain in his heart. In one fell swoop, he had lost his chance of assassinating the Führer … and he had lost La Medusa, too.
Chapter 34
When David woke up, he didn’t know which was more disorienting—finding himself in a canopied bed in the Marquis di Sant’Angelo’s house … or finding Olivia asleep in his arms.
Their clothing, dry and laundered, was neatly set out for them on a wooden rack, along with several new items—shoes and coats, most notably.
And someone was knocking, again, on the door.
David pulled the sheet up over Olivia’s shoulders, and said, “Come in.”
A maid, carrying a breakfast tray, entered and without even a glance in their direction, left it on a table by the window. Opening the curtains, she revealed a lovely view of the park … and its now-placid boating pond. “Monsieur Sant’Angelo,” she said, before closing the door on her way out, “will see you in the salon when you’re done.”
When the door closed, Olivia opened her eyes. “So this is real?”
David could hardly believe it himself. “I think so.” But Olivia’s naked body, her head nestled against his chest, was definitely real. The bed was big and soft, and their two bodies had made a deep, warm indentation in the mattress. He felt her slender fingers graze his shoulder, his arm … and much as he hated to interrupt, he knew that he had to.
“Can I take a rain check?” he said.
“What is that?”
“It means, hold that thought. I need to find a phone.”
Grabbing his robe off the back of a chair and a cup of coffee from the table, he went out into the hall—he had hardly seen anything of the upstairs the night before—and bumped into the maid again. “Is there a phone?” he asked, and she pointed him into a sitting room filled, as was much of the house, with antique statuary. David felt sure he recognized one bust as being that of Cosimo de’Medici, and another, judging from its skullcap and regalia, as a Renaissance pope.