The offer alone was enough to convince David she was telling the truth. “But are you aware,” he said, scrambling, “that the Newberry’s budget doesn’t allow for—”
“I thought I made this plain,” she interrupted, a note of exasperation in her voice. “Money is not an issue. I will pay any and all expenses, without limit. Your boss has no objection to your leaving as soon as possible. If you’re successful, the library will profit—enormously—and so will you.” She took a gold Cartier pen from her tiny clutch purse, and on the back of a card embossed with her name, wrote something down. She laid the pen on the table and flicked the card in his direction.
“That’s our private contract,” she said.
David picked it up and saw, just above her signature, “One million dollars.”
He did not know what to make of it—it was as if he were looking at an Egyptian hieroglyphic. When he looked up again, she was staring fixedly into his eyes.
“I know you need that money,” she said. “If not for you, then for your sister.”
Up until then, he’d felt like the ground had been systematically cut away beneath his feet, but with that it was as if she had kicked him in the gut. “What does my sister have to do with this?”
“Her medical expenses have to be immense.”
“How do you know anything about that?” he persisted. “My family is none of your business.”
“It isn’t?”
“No.”
“Well, I intend to make it my business.” She leaned forward again, her long, tapered fingers spread like talons on the lab reports. “If you get me what I want, I’ll get you what you want.”
“What I want is a cure for cancer. Are you trying to tell me that you can get that?” Now he was convinced that the woman was as batty as she was rich. She must have been reading Cellini’s Key to Life Eternal, and mistaken his alchemy and magical formulae for scientific fact.
Coolly surveying him, she said, “You think I’m out of my mind,” and he remained pointedly silent. “I’d think so, too, if I were in your shoes. But believe me, I’m not. I cannot go on living without the Medusa, and, to be frank, neither can your sister. Let’s not deceive ourselves. Get it for me, and I can promise that your Sarah will live to a ripe old age … just like me.”
To David, that didn’t seem like much of a promise; despite the weird aura she gave off, the woman couldn’t be much older than his sister at all.
“Or are you prepared to just sit by and watch her die?”
With that, she got up in one fluid motion, floated up the stairs, and was gone, leaving the powerful scent of her perfume lingering in the air where David sat, with her card in one hand, stunned beyond words.
Mr. Joseph Schillinger, former U.S. ambassador to Liechtenstein, was just finishing the crossword puzzle in the Times when his driver and general factotum, Ernst Escher, said, in his thick Swiss accent, “Look who’s coming out now.”
It was the woman in black, the same woman he’d glimpsed at the Dante lecture. But there was no veil, and he had had time for Escher to run her license plate. It was indeed Randolph Van Owen’s widow. But was she the mysterious donor of the book?
“And it gets better,” Escher said, turning his shaved head and thick neck to grin at his employer.
It did indeed, because just as she got back into her waiting car, David Franco, the young man he’d come here to track, came bounding down the steps after her. He was holding out something gold—a pen, perhaps?—in his hand. Her window rolled down, she took it, and after they’d exchanged no more than a few words—and what wouldn’t Schillinger have given to know what those words were?—the car rolled off down the snowy street.
“What would you like me to do?” Escher asked, always on the lookout for action and preferably of the violent kind.
“Nothing. Just sit still.” The man was like a hand grenade with the pin pulled out.
As Schillinger kept watch from the backseat, Franco, wearing no coat against the bitterly cold wind, stood rooted to the spot. Even from this distance, across the width of Bughouse Square, he looked dazed, and Schillinger wondered what had transpired inside the library. Had he discovered yet what Schillinger had guessed the moment that the book had been revealed? That the illustrations were from the hand of the master artisan—and necromancer—Benvenuto Cellini? No one but someone steeped in the occult could have depicted the scenes so powerfully, or in such a distinctive style.
For years, ever since meeting Monsieur Linz at an auction on Lake Como, Schillinger had been a part of the man’s web, keeping his eyes and ears open for anything that might be of value to someone of such dark and rarefied tastes. And now he had it. The small favors that Linz had done him in return—parceling out word of a long-lost Vermeer drawing, or a Hobbema landscape, about to emerge onto the black market—could now be repaid in spades.
Schillinger reached for his phone and placed a call to France.