With each passing hour, David found such a thought more distressing … and harder to imagine.
But neatness, he would concede, was not one of her many virtues. She had left her yellow notepads, covered with long columns of dates and figures and names, scattered on the table, along with several broken pencils, some crumpled tissues, and a stack of old, leather-bound books that David hadn’t ever seen before.
None of them, he discovered, were by or about Cellini.
When David opened the first one, and did a rough translation from the Latin, he was surprised to see that it was called A Treatise on the Most Secret Alchemical and Necromantic Arts. Written by a Dottore A. Strozzi, it had been printed in Palermo in 1529.
The one under that—really just a pair of worm-riddled boards, with a loose collection of parchment sheets held between—had no title page at all, but after glancing through some of the text, David could see that it was a manual of stregheria, the ancient witchcraft that predated the Roman Empire. As late as the twelfth century, many of the Old Religionists, as the followers of the pagan gods were sometimes called, had dutifully masqueraded as Christians while secretly continuing to worship the ancient pantheon. They had simply accepted the Virgin Mary, for instance, as yet the latest incarnation of the goddess Diana.
He had just picked up the last book on the stack, a vellum-bound treatise, also in Italian, and entitled Revelations of Egyptian Masonry, as Revealed by the Grand Copt to one Count Cagliostro—at least this count, a famous mesmerist of his day, was familiar to David—when Dottore Valetta appeared in the alcove, a red silk pocket square blooming from his jacket. “Where is your confederate today?” he sniffed.
“I’m not sure,” David replied, scanning the table quickly to see if Olivia had left him any note from the day before. It was then that he noticed the old yellowed cards—clearly the precursors to the same library request cards he and Olivia were using—that had been hidden under the pile of books. The director saw them, too, and before David could even say a word, he had snatched them up and quickly riffled through them, glowering.
“Her old tricks,” Valetta fumed. “Signorina Levi is up to all her old tricks.”
“What tricks are you talking about?”
“Wherever she goes, she likes to stir the pot … to make trouble. She has tried to make this particular kind of trouble before.”
David was utterly baffled. “What was she doing?” David asked. “Checking to see who had consulted these sources before we did?”
Slipping the cards into his pocket, the director looked at David as if he wasn’t sure he could trust him anymore either. “She hasn’t told you her theory? Or why we have barred her from further use of the Laurenziana?”
“No. She hasn’t.”
Now the director looked as if he regretted saying as much as he had, or giving her ideas any further airing.
But David wasn’t about to let him off the hook so easily. “So you have to tell me. If you don’t, I’ll make sure she does. What’s this theory of hers?”
It was clear that Valetta was choosing his words carefully when he spoke. “Signorina Levi believes that my predecessors at the library were Fascist sympathizers and collaborated with the Nazi regime.”
David was nonplussed.
“And let me hasten to add, she has never summoned any credible proof of these charges. She simply throws them around,” the director said, whisking his hand through the air, “like confetti. And without any regard for the damage such accusations could do to the reputation of this institution.”
While it was true that Olivia had never confided to him anything of this nature, David did not have much trouble imagining it. As an Italian and a Jew, whose own family had been decimated by the Fascist regime, Olivia might well have formulated such a theory. And Mussolini had indeed thrown in his country’s lot with the Third Reich. But how this theory of hers had anything to do with the books of black magic that were also sitting on the table, David had no idea.
Nor did he have time to ask Dr. Valetta before they both heard Olivia explode from the end of the long gallery.
“What is he doing here?” she said. “Get out of there!” she shouted, and two or three researchers looked up from their seats in horror at this gross breach of decorum.
Storming into the alcove, her familiar overcoat flapping wide, her dark eyes darted around, swiftly taking in the dismantled stack of books, the loss of the borrower cards, and the look of confusion on David’s face.
“I can explain everything,” she said to David.
“I already have,” Dr. Valetta put in dryly.