In the reading room, Olivia was seated next to the woman with the magnifying glass, pointing out something on the yellowed page she was studying. The woman looked rapt and appreciative, and David had the sense that, for all her eccentricity, Olivia Levi did indeed know her stuff.
A young librarian, in a red vest that David normally associated with car valets, showed them to an alcove with a massive desk, a pair of sturdy oak chairs, and a dual-headed banker’s lamp that cast a warm glow around the interior. A faded fresco of the Muses in a garden adorned the wall beneath the window. There was even a silver cup, holding a bunch of sharpened pencils, like arrows in a quiver, along with a pad of call slips.
Olivia threw her coat over the back of a chair and broke into a grin. She looked as if she’d won the lottery.
“So, you’re some kind of big deal, huh? A private alcove? An audience with the dictator himself? Who are you, really?”
David took off his own overcoat, placed the valise on the desk, and wondered about that himself. Up until now he’d been a Renaissance scholar working in obscurity in a private library in Chicago, but over the past few days he’d begun to feel like a secret agent. And now he had to think like one. He could either dismiss this young interloper, send her off to attend to her own “theories” and hope she didn’t create another row, or he could offer some hint about what had brought him there.
Plainly, she could see his quandary.
“You do not trust me,” she said. “That’s okay. But I would remind you of one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“It was you who found me in the Piazza della Signoria, not the other way around.”
“I’m not the one who tracked me to this library.”
“Okay,” she conceded, “so I did do that. But maybe I can help you.” She glanced at the closed valise with undisguised curiosity. “Show me one thing, give me one clue, then see if I do not know what I am talking about.”
She waited, while David mulled over her offer. Then he opened the valise, took out a few of the papers, and placed them on the table.
Olivia lunged forward in her chair and bent low over the documents. Gradually, her expression became very serious, and, although none of the pages bore a signature anywhere, it was only a minute or two before she whispered, “Cellini.” Looking up, awestruck, she said, “These are from the hand of Benvenuto Cellini.”
Unless he was still being duped, she was darn good.
“Where in the world did you get them?”
“First you tell me how you knew that.”
“Please,” she said, with some disdain, “I am not an amateur in these matters. No one wrote quite like Cellini—in the Italian vernacular—and no one was so interested in these—how would you say?—dark matters.”
While it was still possible he was being gulled—that she had somehow known in advance what he was investigating—the possibility seemed increasingly remote. Could she really be such a fine actress? There was something in the expression on her face and in the tone of her voice—even in the undisguised scorn with which she had answered his last question—that persuaded him she was on the level.
And if that was true, then she could prove to be of inestimable value.
Slowly, David removed the rest of the papers from the valise—her eyes widened even more—and began to explain how they had been donated to the library by an anonymous (that much he kept to himself) patron. Olivia sat silently, riveted by each page, until she said, “But what is this?” Her fingers nimbly plucked from the stack the sketch of the Medusa’s head. “A preliminary study for his famous statue—where we met?” She gave him a quizzical smile.
“It’s possible.”
But on second thought, she shook her head, frowning. “No, that’s wrong—it’s nothing like it, really. The Medusa in the piazza is defeated—this one is defiant.” Her eye fell on the empty oblong on the same page, the reverse view, and she looked puzzled. “It was a medallion?” she hazarded. “Unfinished?”
“No, it was a mirror, simply called La Medusa,” David said. “And I have reason to believe that it was finished.”
Olivia gave it some thought, before saying, “I know a great deal about Cellini, probably more than anyone in Italy—”
Despite himself, David had to chuckle; one thing she had was the artisan’s ego, that was for sure.
“—but I’ve never heard of this thing, this mirror, called La Medusa.”
“No one has,” David replied. “But it’s my job to find it.”
She flopped back in her chair, her arms hanging down in mock defeat. “And how do you propose to do that? Find something that has been missing for five hundred years?”
“I don’t honestly know,” David said. “But since the Laurenziana holds more of Cellini’s papers than anyplace on earth, this seemed like the right place to start looking.”
She cocked her head, uncertainly.
He took a pencil from the silver cup. “Do you have a better idea?”