His fingers fumbled at the lock again, and the door was just starting to open when Escher shot him. The bullet caught him in the shoulder, but the man barely reacted. Escher had to leap at him, grab hold of his sleeve, and pull him back into the room.
“No, no, don’t shoot!” the man shouted, putting his hands together and crumpling to his knees. “Don’t shoot me!”
But Escher knew that some things, once begun, had to be finished.
He pressed the gun to the kneeling man’s forehead, fired, and let him drop to the floor like a sack of potatoes.
He heard Jantzen throwing up in the hallway.
That would be just one more thing to clean up, he thought.
Wedging the gun under his belt, he stepped away from the body. Christ, what a mess. He considered calling his boss, the fancy ex-ambassador, but he knew he had a reputation already for a certain hotheadedness. And for all he knew, it was Schillinger who was responsible for this whole fiasco. Had he sent Escher off to Italy in secret, on his own initiative? An initiative that had conflicted with someone else’s greater plan?
The pool of blood was widening, and he had to step back again.
If that was the case, then Escher was caught in the gears of a colossal case of miscommunication—a place he always hated to be.
Or was it only what it seemed? A drug robbery gone wrong? Given Julius’s clientele, that wasn’t so hard to believe, either.
Now he regretted having been quite so hasty. If one of the Turks had been kept alive, he might have been able to get some answers out of him. Next time he’d have to remind himself to be more patient.
“Julius,” he called out, rolling up his sleeves.
“What?” Jantzen replied, still doubled over and averting his gaze from the door.
“You ever going to stop puking?”
Jantzen replied with another dry heave before croaking, “What … the hell … do we do now?”
“Well,” Escher said, putting aside his deeper ruminations, “I’d say we start with a mop and a pail. You do have them, don’t you?”
Chapter 13
Cellini could tell from the slant of fading sunlight on the wall of the dungeon that it was almost time for his single meal of the day. He slumped in the corner, watching idly as a pair of tarantulas mated in the straw spilling from his mattress. He had grown used to them, along with the rats and other vermin that inhabited his tiny cell. After months of imprisonment, he might have missed them if they’d gone.
There was a shuffling tread outside, a clanging of keys, and the wooden door creaked open. While the guard stood outside with a drawn sword, the jailer, in clothes almost as soiled as the rags Cellini wore, carefully placed a pewter bowl filled with the usual cold gruel on the floor.
“Eat well,” he said, stopping to admire the rough sketches that Cellini had scrawled on the wall with cinders and chalk. The centerpiece depicted Christ among a host of angels.
While he gazed with amazement, Cellini’s own glance went to the door, and specifically its hinges. He had worked on loosening the real ones and replacing them with facsimiles made out of candle wax and rust since the day he arrived, and he was close to completing his task. When he had been taken to the Castel St. Angelo, he had declared no prison could hold him, and he hoped to prove it soon.
“Oh, and the Duke of Castro asked me to add this, since it’s a feast day today,” the jailer said, pulling a hunk of fresh bread from his pocket and dropping it beside the bowl.
“Tell Signor Luigi—the duke, I mean—that I look forward to thanking him soon, in person.”
“Benvenuto, Benvenuto,” the jailer said, shaking his head. “Why do you make things so hard on yourself? A man who can draw like that,” he said, gesturing at the sketches, “can do anything. Tell the duke what he wants to know, beg forgiveness of the Pope, and you’ll be a free man again.”
“I can’t confess to what I didn’t do. I can’t give back gold and jewels that I never stole.”
The jailer, a simple soul, shrugged his shoulders. “These things are too much for me to understand.”
He turned around and shuffled out, the door slamming closed behind him. The artificial hinges held, and despite himself, Cellini eagerly scuttled toward the food, dipping the bread in the cold slop and shoving it into his mouth with trembling fingers. A rat in the corner watched greedily.
It was only as he scraped up the last of the gruel with his tin spoon that he felt something crunch between his teeth, and he stopped chewing. Studying the bottom of the bowl, he saw an almost invisible shard glistening there, and his heart suddenly sank as the truth of what had just happened dawned on him.