The Medusa Amulet (28 page)

Having tried three times to put a call through to Chicago, he snapped his phone shut and decided to wait until later. The last time he’d spoken to Gary, Sarah had been at the hospital, receiving treatment, but “so far, so good,” Gary had said. “Her counts have either improved or held steady. We’re just hoping there’s not a reaction.”

David hoped for more—much more—than that. And he was determined to make it happen.

He heard the latch of the en suite bathroom unlock, and Olivia came out in a black turtleneck and jeans, still brushing her hair back. She looked as sleek as a seal.

But everything had changed for them in the past few hours. Ever since their first embrace on the steps of her building, it was as if all the walls had come down between them. Whatever suspicions he had ever harbored about her were gone, along with whatever reservations he had entertained. In all but deed, they were lovers—and
before the night was over, even that, David suspected, might change.

“I just thought of something,” she said, pulling the brush one last time through her hair.

“What’s that?”

“I haven’t eaten since dawn.”

Now that he gave it some thought, he hadn’t had anything since morning, either.

“And maybe it would be nice to have some wine?” she added.

David needed no more persuading. Taking his valise with him, he locked the cabin and followed Olivia down the long corridor, into the next car, then the one after that, with the smell of food—good food—getting stronger all the time. A steward in a blue uniform smiled at them as they passed and said, “I recommend the trout. Just caught.”

The dining car was set with small tables on both sides of a narrow aisle, with white linen tablecloths, gleaming silverware, and little lamps that gave off a rosy glow. A waiter in a white jacket seated them and David ordered a cold bottle of Bordeaux. The last time he’d eaten on a train, it had been on an Amtrak to Detroit, and he’d had a bag of barbecue chips, a stale sandwich, and a lukewarm Coke.

There was something to be said for European transit.

After the waiter had poured the wine and taken their order for trout almondine with asparagus, a sort of awkward silence fell over them. For days, they had been working together, side by side, but now they were having an undeniably romantic dinner on the night train to Paris, and in the warm glow of the table lamp, David couldn’t help but focus on her dark and shining eyes and the sensual curve of her full lips. Glancing up at him over the rim of her glass, she caught him staring, just as she had done once before, and said with a sly smile, “What are you wondering about now?”

“Nothing,” he said, embarrassed. “It’s just been … a hell of a day.”

“Yes,” she said, nodding, “it has. But I wish there had been time, at my apartment, for me to show you something.”

“You mean your owl?” David joked. “We met.”

“No. It was something not so obvious. Library request cards.”

That wasn’t what he had been expecting. “Call slips?” No wonder Dottore Valetta had been so incensed at the sight of them.

“I keep them hidden in the stove.”

He topped off both of their glasses and said, “The stove? Don’t they catch fire?”

“Oh no, I had the gas turned off years ago. I don’t know how to cook.”

He was learning more about her every minute. “And these cards would be from the Laurenziana, I presume?”

She smiled, and her lips glistened. Was it gloss, he wondered, or simply the wine?

“You wouldn’t believe it,” she said, and before he could even ask what he wouldn’t believe, she leaned forward, her arms crossed on the table and said in a low voice, “I have them all—some of them the originals—from 1938 to 1945.”

The elderly couple just across the aisle from them called for their check. The old man winked at David, conspiratorially.

“Could this have something to do with why Dr. Valetta has banned you from the library?” David asked.

“All I wanted was to see who had asked for certain books.”

“And what did you expect to find? Adolph Hitler’s personal request to see a book about raising the dead?”

“You are mocking,” she said, slightly indignant, “but you are not so far off. What do you know about the Nazis and the occult?”

“Only what I see on the History Channel, late at night.” He hadn’t meant to upset her.

“I do not know what you mean by saying that. What is the History Channel?”

“Nothing,” he said, dismissing it. “I just meant that it’s considered kind of … speculative.”

“It is not,” she said, a spark kindling in her eyes. “People would like to think so,” she said, waving one hand with the wineglass still in
it, “but that does not mean it is untrue. Between the First and the Second World Wars, Germany and Austria—both of them—were filled with mystic lodges and secret fraternities. The Ariosophists, the Thule Society, the Vril Society. Every city, every town, from Hamburg to Vienna, had them. Hitler was even a member of some. And when he started to rise in politics, he made sure that he kept spies in every group to report back to him.”

The waiter brought their plates, and if David hoped this might change the direction of the conversation, he was wrong. Olivia dug in without missing a beat.

“Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer, he was also a great believer. He paraded his troops through the streets of Berlin dressed as Teutonic knights and the people of Germany loved it! The Nazis believed in a super race, an Aryan race, a race that had been pushed aside, or buried in the earth, or corrupted by mixing with impure blood. There were many theories, but they all agreed that this race was going to rise again. It was going to purify itself, and it was going to create a new Reich, which was supposed to last for a thousand years.”

David was listening carefully, but given his search for
La Medusa
, he felt his stores of credulity were already sorely depleted. And much as he respected Olivia’s scholarship, all of this was still sounding a little too close to those preposterous theories about Hitler possessing the Spear of Destiny, or conjuring up some Satanic power to wield control over the masses. David didn’t need any supernatural explanations for evil; as someone who had studied history all his life, he knew it sprouted up as easily as weeds, anywhere. All it ever needed was a little irrigating.

“But what’s this got to do with the library cards?” David asked, pouring the last drops of the wine into Olivia’s glass, who thanked him, then signaled the waiter to bring them each another glass.

Gulping the wine, but eager to continue her story, Olivia said, “There was one man that Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, all relied on when it came to the occult. He was a famous professor in Heidelberg, a man who had written books on pagan worship and sun signs and
what they used to call the ‘root races.’ His books were bestsellers, and his lectures were always packed.”

“Would I have heard of him?”

“Probably not. His name was Dieter Mainz. And on every one of those borrower’s cards,” she said, rapping a knuckle on the table with each succeeding word, “I found his signature.”

At last, David could begin to see the connection she was making.

“He had requested every one of those books, including the Cellini manuscripts. In certain circles,” she elaborated, “Cellini was as famous for his magic as for his art. Just think of the passages from his autobiography, where he describes going to the Colosseum at night, with a sorcerer named Strozzi, and conjuring spirits?”

David remembered it well, but in the published version, the incident had ended rather anticlimactically. After a host of demons had been summoned, Cellini asked for news of a woman he had once loved, and was told he would see her soon. And that was about it. It ended as abruptly as if it had been cut with a sword.

“And think of the journey as he describes it in the book you have shown me,
The Key to Life Eternal.
”

There, he continued the story—in an unexpurgated, and seemingly fantastical, fashion. When Olivia had first read it in the alcove at the Laurenziana, David had watched in amusement as her eyes grew progressively wider.

The waiter returned with their wine. A small man, thin and pallid, had unobtrusively taken the seat at the opposite table and was bent over a book and a bowl of vichyssoise.

“The Nazis knew that there were many drafts, many versions, of Cellini’s autobiography,” Olivia said, “and they thought the full story might be told in one of them. What they did not know about was the
Key.
”

No one had, according to Mrs. Van Owen. If she was to be believed, hers was the only copy of the book in existence, and judging from the smoky smell that still clung to it, even hers had been barely rescued from a fire.

“But they thought he might have concealed the secrets of his occult knowledge in his art. After all, no one at that time could have conceived of something so grand and so exquisitely made as the
Perseus
. Since he had achieved miracles in his art, the Germans thought he might have uncovered other great secrets, too.”

“Such as immortality?”

“Exactly,” Olivia said. “Just as he proclaims in the
Key.
”

“Immortality,” David said again, letting the word roll around his tongue. He had shared so much with Olivia. But he had yet to tell her the real reason he was so desperate to find the mirror. Was this the time?

“If there was one thing Hitler coveted,” she continued, “that was it. He didn’t just want the Reich to last a thousand years, he wanted to be there—for a thousand years and more—to rule it.”

“It must have been a great disappointment to him when the Red Army took Berlin and he had to blow out his brains in the bunker.”

Olivia sat back, with an unpersuaded expression on her face. “The body, you know, was never found.”

“Sure it was,” David said, “along with Eva Braun’s. Burned in a ditch.” That much he knew.

“Remains,”
Olivia said. “Only remains were found. By the Russians. And they
claimed
they were the Führer’s. But no one else ever had the chance to test them; no one else even had the chance to see them. The Russians said they were incinerated outside a little town called Sheck and the ashes were thrown in the Biederitz River.” She drank some more of the Bordeaux. “And we know how trustworthy the Russians are.”

The waiter appeared and asked if he could clear the table. David, trying to digest all that he had just heard, not to mention what he’d had to eat and drink, leaned back as the waiter picked up their plates. The man sitting across the aisle was smiling at him through thin lips and gray teeth and said, with what sounded like a Swiss accent, “Forgive me for intruding, but are you honeymooners?”

Olivia smiled, and David said, “No, I’m afraid not.”

“Oh,” the man said, embarrassed at his faux pas. “Please pardon my mistake.”

“No problem,” David replied, secretly pleased that they made that kind of impression.

“I had taken the liberty,” the man said, “of ordering a round of a special schnapps, made in my hometown, and traditionally used to toast a bride and groom.”

“That is very kind of you,” Olivia said, beaming at David.

“So perhaps you’ll allow me to wish you well, all the same?”

He gestured at the three small glasses, which were lined up on his table. Extending two of them, he said, “It is made from the wild cherries that grow in our valley, and we’re quite proud of it. I think you’ll see why.”

Although another drink was the last thing David needed, it would be too rude to turn it down. Olivia thanked him, too, and after a few minutes of conversation—the man introduced himself as Gunther, a salesman of medical supplies from Geneva—they shook his hand and excused themselves.

David, his valise slung under one arm, was halfway down the aisle when he realized just how much he’d had to drink, and how exhausted he really was. Olivia seemed to be feeling the same way. They were nearly staggering by the time they got back to their compartment, and he fumbled at the lock.

Any dreams David had had of their first night together would just have to wait. Olivia flopped onto the lower bunk without so much as pulling the blanket back, and David tossed the valise onto the upper berth. Stumbling into the tiny bathroom, he looked at his face in the mirror. His expression was weary, almost blank, and the taste of the cherry schnapps was still strong on his tongue.

Turning out the light and closing the flimsy door, he laid Olivia’s coat over her. Then he clambered into the upper berth, which, in his present state, felt like the best and softest bed he had ever been in. All
he wanted to do was sleep, and the gentle, constant rumble of the train was like a lullaby. One arm rested on the valise, the other dangled off the side of the bunk.

But his thoughts were restless, and he entered into that strange state where he could not be sure if he was dreaming or not. He thought of the salesman with the gray teeth, and pictured him picking cherries and putting them in a basket.

He thought of Olivia’s old boyfriend, Giorgio, his face smeared with blood, his mouth gagged, but in the dream he was trying to tell David something urgent.