Boehmer and Bassenge had gone to bed, but he remained in the mirrored salon, sometimes stepping out on its balcony, where the cold wind rippled the sleeves of his shirt and whipped his black hair into a frenzy. The barren branches of the old oaks creaked like hinges, and a pack of wolves, hunting along the banks of the Loire, howled at the moon. The sky was clear, and the stars twinkled as white and bright as the diamonds in the necklace he had been shown a few hours before.
But it wasn’t the necklace that occupied his thoughts. The queen knew it had been made for her nemesis, du Barry, and for that reason alone, even if it were the most beautiful necklace in all the world, she would never buy it.
No, what occupied his thoughts was La Medusa …apparently adorning the greatest charlatan in France—a man who claimed to be three thousand years old. A patent sham, professing to know the wisdom of ancient Egypt.
How in the name of Heaven had he come by it?
And did he know—or had he discovered—its secret?
For over two hundred years, the Marquis di Sant’Angelo—as he had titled himself on the very night he left Florence—had searched for the glass. But ever since the day it had been torn from his neck by the Duke of Castro and handed over to the Pope, it had vanished without a trace. His spies at the Vatican had never been able to discover it, and the marquis had eventually assumed that, like so much of the papal treasure, and so many of his other great works, it had been melted down or dismantled … destroyed by someone who could never have guessed its latent power.
Caterina—his model, his muse, his love—had known. She had discovered it by chance … and to her great misfortune. But as a papal retainer had confided to him years ago—at the tip of Cellini’s dagger—she had died in a shipwreck, fleeing the Duke of Castro’s inquisitors. As proof, the man had shown him the ship’s manifest and passenger lists, left in Cherbourg. She had changed her name, but Cellini recognized well her peculiar and barely legible handwriting. Reports of the ship’s destruction had been widely circulated at the time.
Perhaps the sea had conferred a blessing upon her.
There were times when he wondered if he might not have been better off himself, inhabiting that tomb in the Basilica della Santissima Annunziata. Sleeping there, in silence, until the Second Coming.
But what reason was there to believe that Christ was going to return at all? What reason was there to believe in anything?
A hawk, with a rodent clutched in its talons, settled onto a swaying branch and proceeded to devour its screeching prey.
That was the way of the world, he thought. Every living creature was ultimately a banquet for some other. And no one had ever seen more of the grisly and unending spectacle than he had.
Over the centuries, he had uncovered secrets no other man had. He had delved more deeply into arcane matters than anyone else had ever done, even the learned Dr. Strozzi. And he had escaped death, a hundred times. But at what cost?
Life, he had discovered, knew its own limits. When the thread had been meant to be cut, it was cut … and all the time thereafter was only a hollow enactment of things never intended to occur.
Oh, he had lived on, but once he had reached his mortal span—seventy seventy-five, whatever God had intended—his life had become as great a lie as Cagliostro’s.
Was that, he wondered, why he had always harbored such hatred for the man?
He lifted his hands, still gnarled from his days as the great and applauded artisan, and wondered where, precisely, their genius had gone. On the night the old beggar had been buried in his tomb, it was as if his gifts had been buried then, too. He could sculpt, he could mold, but only as well as some rough, untutored apprentice in his shop might have done—as anyone with ten fingers and two eyes could do. He could not create works worthy of the artist he had once been, and so, over time, he had ceased to try. It was too painful, too degrading, to produce pieces of anything less than transcendent beauty.
The waters of eternity, he thought, the light of the ancient moon … united in the Medusa, they had granted him the gift he sought. But the gift they bestowed was an empty vessel. It was a life without purpose, and a destiny with no fitting end. He might have laughed if he were not the one who had been tricked.
Chapter 21
As the TGV pulled into the Gare de Lyon in Paris, David helped Olivia up from her bunk—“My head feels as if it’s been hit with a hammer,” she complained—and then wrestled their bags toward the door. When it whooshed open, he helped her out onto the platform while keeping an eye out in all directions.
The bald man and his accomplice, the one who had undoubtedly drugged their drinks, had to be somewhere in the mob disembarking from the train, and for all he knew they were still on the job.