She had sent others—treasure hunters, mystics, once even an Interpol detective—but all had either given up in frustration … or vanished off the face of the earth. Palliser was only the last in a long line. Although she had no way of knowing for sure, she felt that she, too, was caught up in some vast malignant web, and that there was a great evil spider brooding at its edge, sensing any vibration upon the strands.
How long would it be before the spider sensed a new intruder?
The storm outside was picking up, and by the time the limo was approaching her lakefront building, the streetlights were bobbing in the wind, and the snow was swirling in the air.
But pacing back and forth in front of the steps, as if oblivious to the storm raging around him, she saw a young man, his hood drawn, his hands stuffed down in his coat pockets, and she immediately knew who it was.
“Cyril, let me out in front,” she said over the car intercom.
“Are you sure? I’m almost at the garage entrance. Whatever you—”
“Let me out!”
Without another word, he pulled the car up at the curb, and Mrs. Van Owen jumped out, gathering her fur coat around her.
David turned around and threw his hood back. With the wind whipping his thick brown hair into a frenzy, the snow sticking to his cheeks and eyelashes, and an absolutely tormented look in his eye, he stared into her face. She had the impression he wanted to grab her by the fur collar of her coat and shake her like a kitten.
“Did you mean what you said?” he demanded.
“You mean about the money?”
“Yes,” he said, but waving it away as if it were only a secondary consideration. “I mean the rest of it.”
Ah, the promise to save his sister. “I did.”
“Every word?”
“Every word.”
He was studying her face, as if he were trying to reconcile it with some other image or impression. She could see him wrestling with himself right before her eyes, trying to believe in something that could never, in any rational terms, make sense. She was afraid to say anything more lest she accidentally deter him. The swaying sodium light overhead threw his features into a sickly light, then into deep shadow, and back again.
But the haunted expression never left his eyes.
“I’ll hold you to it,” he said, as if issuing a threat.
“I’d expect you to.”
There was something more he wanted to say—she could see the words almost forming on his lips—but then he must have thought better of it. She suspected she knew what it was—he wanted to demand some further proof, some ironclad guarantee, some assurance that he was not being duped.
But what stopped him was the overwhelming need—and desire—to believe. It’s what stopped anyone from questioning his or her faith beyond a certain point. Who wants to burn down the only house they can bear to live in?
“I will leave tomorrow,” he said, and Kathryn nodded.
“I’ll have all the arrangements made immediately,” she said.
And then, raising his hood back over his head, David turned and marched away, leaving a trail of wet footprints on the snowy sidewalk. Pulling her fur collar up around her face, she watched him go, wondering all the while if this was to be her savior … or only more bait for the spider?
Chapter 11
The moment the plane taxied up to the gate at Galileo Galilei Airport, David was out of his first-class seat and waiting in the aisle. Over his shoulder, he had the black leather valise in which he carried perfect copies of the Cellini papers and the all-important drawing of La Medusa. Too irreplaceable to travel with, the originals had been secreted, for safekeeping, in the upper regions of the Newberry book silo.
True to her word, Mrs. Van Owen—or her travel consultant—had made all the necessary arrangements virtually overnight. And while most people were still digesting their Christmas dinners, David was clearing Customs. A uniformed driver was waiting for him, and they drove straight to the Grand—an eighteenth-century palazzo that had been converted into one of Florence’s most luxurious hotels. An opulently furnished suite had been reserved in his name, the bedroom walls decorated with faded frescoes of a courtier and his lady wandering through a cypress grove filled with songbirds. The birds, and the grisaille tint with which they were rendered, were plainly a tribute to another of the city’s Renaissance masters, Paolo Uccello—whose last name, literally translated, meant “birds”—and it reminded David that he was back in his spiritual home, the cradle of Western art and culture.
Only now it was more than a vast, open-air museum. It was a vault that might hold the key to his sister’s very life.