“What?”
“I’m looking for call slips, or copies of them, from the Laurenziana.” Even Escher didn’t know why these could possibly be of importance to anyone.
But he had more general orders, too. Among other things, he was to scour the premises for anything that looked like a mirror, or a Gorgon, or a drawing of a mirror or a Gorgon. He was to keep an eye out for any book about Benvenuto Cellini, or black magic, or stregheria, the Sicilian strain of witchcraft, or for anything that struck him as occult or unexplainable—most notably, anything that connected such stuff to the Nazi high command during the Second World War. He was to photograph, or take notes on, any such material, and if it seemed particularly unique and rare, simply steal it. It was for Schillinger, whose sanity Escher had begun to doubt, and Dr. Valetta, whom he had only spoken to on the phone, to decide what was significant. Like any soldier in the trenches, he worried about the wisdom of his generals.
But Olivia’s apartment presented him with a more immediate problem. Even the most cursory review of her books and papers revealed dozens of titles—in French and German, English and Italian—on all of those topics and more. Ernst Escher was no scholar, and even though he had a degree in computer science from a technical college in Lausanne—you had to have a bachelor’s, even to be considered for the Swiss Guard—he could see that this woman had an extraordinarily wide, and bizarre, range of interests. Above her desk she had framed photographs of Mussolini hanging by his heels in 1945, a map of the lost continent of Atlantis, and finally, an official portrait of Mme. Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy. Escher hardly knew where to start.
The owl hooted and stretched its wings.
He began by combing through every desk and dresser drawer in search of the library slips. But he already knew that if they were this important to someone else, Olivia Levi might know that, too, and she would not have left them carelessly about.
Taking his camera from the pocket of his windbreaker, he spent the next hour, as Jantzen kept watch, laboriously photographing her bookshelves, being careful to disturb them as little as possible (though they were such a mess, how would she ever know?) and making sure that all the titles on the spines were legible. Then he took several shots of her desk, where he did have to rearrange several papers to be sure every word on them would be legible. The ones on top had to do with the collaborationist Vichy regime in France. Why was someone like this worrying her pretty head with ancient crap like that? She could have found a rich husband by now and be living la dolce vita, as the locals liked to call it. The older Escher got—and he had turned thirty-five on the plane trip to Florence—the less he understood people. Life was a fucked-up affair, and as far as he could tell, the point was to just get through it with the maximum amount of pleasure and a minimum of pain … even if that meant inflicting a little damage on other people along the way. If you didn’t watch out for yourself, no one else would do it for you.
“Anything happening?” he asked Jantzen as he loaded another flash card into his camera.
“Someone’s locking a bike right outside,” Julius said from the window. “A young guy.”
“Is he tall, with brown hair and glasses?”
“No, he’s got black hair, no glasses, definitely Italian.” At least it wasn’t David Franco. And he might be coming to any of the apartments in the building. Escher listened for the buzzer, but nothing rang. He noticed a box of books that he’d overlooked under the desk, and was debating whether or not to drag it out when Jantzen urgently whispered, “Someone’s coming.”
Escher heard it, too, now, the trudge of steps approaching. Jantzen ducked behind the curtains, and Escher swiftly turned out the lights, opened a closet, shoved some clothes to one side and squashed himself inside. The closet was so full the door wouldn’t close entirely, and through the crack he heard the rattle of keys, then saw a guy in jeans and a ski jacket, poking his head in.
“Olivia?” he said. “You home?”
Turning on the light, he ventured into the room, a pair of bicycle saddlebags slung over one shoulder.
“Don’t get mad—it’s just me. Giorgio. Anybody here?”
The owl hooted and ruffled its wings.
“Hey there, Glaucus, I’ve missed you. You miss me?”