“Go!”
David turned and ran toward the anteroom door—it had been flung open and the carpet runner in the hallway was rumpled from Linz’s headlong flight. David could hear his feet tearing around a corner toward the staircase.
He took off after him, vaulting down the stairs three at a time, then through a suite of dark, cluttered rooms, where the curtains rippled from Linz’s flight and furniture had been overturned to block his pursuit.
Linz was heading, David now knew, for the grand escalier, and bloody footprints on the marble floors confirmed it.
As did his rasping cry from below—“Rigaud! For Christ’s sake, Rigaud!”
But when David ran past the hall where Rigaud had last been seen, his door was firmly shut and there was no light emanating from under it.
At the top of the staircase, David caught a glimpse of Linz’s black slippers, racing around the bottom of the stairs and off toward the armor hall. He was still trying to call out, but his voice was hoarse and barely carried.
David lunged down the stairs, nearly losing his balance on a smear of wet blood, before skidding into the entry hall and pivoting.
He couldn’t see Linz anymore, but he knew which way he’d gone, and he ran after him, the short sword still clutched in his hand, as something long and sharp suddenly grazed his shoulder and thwanged into the wooden frame of the door.
Linz was standing halfway down the hall, doubled over from throwing the spear, huffing and puffing with his hands on his knees. But his face was contorted with rage, his eyes bulging, and his thatch of brown hair, shorn close on the sides, sweeping low over his forehead. His left arm was shaking, as if from a palsy, and David had the ghastly impression that he had indeed seen this face before.
And Ascanio had said: You know who he is, don’t you?
Linz cursed and whirled around, grabbing a battle-axe and shield from the wall. His robe flapping open, and the Medusa swinging on its chain, he was done with running and advanced on David.
“Sie denken, sie k?nnen mich toten?”—You think you can kill me?—he challenged, as David deftly dodged the first swing of the axe. David backed up, and the next swing crashed into a suit of armor, knocking it off its pedestal and sending the pieces careening across the floor.
David tried to parry with the short sword, but Linz banged it aside with a shove from the shield. By the moonlight pouring in from the windows, David could see the fury in his eyes, and the manic gleam … of pleasure.
“Niemand kann mich t?ten!”—No one can kill me!—he exulted.
Linz rushed at him, the shield raised, trying to knock him off his feet, but David dodged the attack and the axe crashed into another suit of armor.
The man was breathing hard, the weapon was heavy, and David stepped back as Linz turned again, like a maddened bull, searching for his enemy.
“Ich will tausend Jahre leben!” he exploded—I will live a thousand years!—and the very marrow in David’s bones froze.
It was the voice he had heard in newsreels, scratchy and amplified and bursting with hate. It was the face, with its blazing eyes and chin raised in defiance, that had inflamed a nation and engulfed the world in war. The madman who had conjured up the fires of the Holocaust.
In that instant, David understood just what creature had managed to slink from its bunker in Berlin to claim the gift of immortality. And why, for fear that his courage might fail him, or his belief might falter, he had not been told.
But now he knew, and he felt as if an electric current had suddenly coursed through his veins, down his arm, and into the very blade he held. When the monster charged again, his hatchet raised, David nimbly stepped to one side, and before the man could turn he swung the razor-sharp edge of the sword into the back of his neck.
The monster crumpled, a geyser of blood erupting, but the chain of the Medusa had kept the sword from cutting clean through.
Finish it, David heard in his head. You have to finish it.
Pulling the sword free with one hand, and yanking the head back with his other—even now, the eyes were boiling with rage and hot spittle was flying from the lips—he chopped again. But the head still clung to the body.
Finish it.
Clutching the head by a thatch of its blood-slick hair, he hewed at the stump as if it were an unyielding branch. And though he wielded the sword, it felt as if the blade was acting on its own, hungry to complete some ancient labor. Another blow, and the body at last collapsed in a heap.