young and had had an appetite for the things that life had to offer. When artists had begged her to be their muse and aristocrats had showered her with gifts in the hopes that she would become their mistress. But truth be told, in all that time, there had been only one man who had touched-no, taken-her heart. Only one man whose soul she felt had touched her own. Even now, she could imagine his rough hands on her body, turning her this way and that, posing her limbs for yet another of his masterpieces. She could feel the scratchiness of his beard on her face, hear the sound of his bawdy laughter, and smile at the memory of his insolence to lords and ladies who had crossed him. She remembered the nights they slept on the hard pallet in his studio, ate their meals off borrowed silver, and strolled arm in arm along the Ponte Vecchio.
Nor could she ever forget the fateful night she had pried open the iron casket and changed her own destiny forever. Now her only hope was to find the accursed mirror again and hope that by breaking it, she could shatter the spell and free herself from its power. If the Key was correct-and everything it had said about the powers of La Medusa had proved true so far, so why should she doubt this?-then that might be her one escape from the iron grip of immortality. Once the glass had been shattered, her life would resume again, as if she had only been frozen, and move forward, day by day, like that of any mortal woman. And end, in due course, just as naturally. In the words of the immortal Shakespeare-though when she had known him, no one had treated him as anything more than a prolific scribbler-it was “a consummation devoutly to be wished.”
Without her even having noticed at first, hot tears had begun coursing down her cheeks, and she could taste their saltiness on her lips.
She had fled Florence, then the European continent altogether, with the Duke of Castro’s men hot on her heels. Her ship had foundered and sunk two days out of Cherbourg, but she had been rescued after several days of clinging to the wreckage, and eventually found shelter under another name, among the gentry of England. It was there, years later, that she had heard news of Benvenuto’s death, and his burial beneath the stones of the Basilica della Santissima Annunziata. Had he found a way, she wondered, to cheat the blessing, or the curse, of the looking glass? Or was she the only one on whom the magic had been performed? Could he have made the thing and not employed it himself? It seemed unlike him, but at the same time, perversity was in his very nature. At the news, she had found herself overwhelmed by a wave of loneliness more profound than anything she had ever experienced before.
But she had grown accustomed to it over the years. She was a lone wayfarer, carried along on a cold, inescapable, and unending current.
The cobweb vibrated again, and she saw the fat black spider scuttling across its strands. Hoarse sobs were coming from her throat, and she had to retire to a stone bench beside the caskets. She took a scented handkerchief from the pocket of her coat and dabbed at her tears. A breeze encircled her as Cyril cracked the door open.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
But all she could do was nod. Like anyone else, he would think it was just the release of all those emotions that had been building up since the death of her husband. Let him.
“The car’s right outside,” he said.
And this time she said, “I’ll be there in a minute.”
The door groaned shut again, and she took a few moments to compose herself. Her eyes, inadvertently, went back to the spider, biding its time in the corner of its web. And the sight of it was enough to send a shudder down her spine and bring her back to her feet. When she closed the door of the mausoleum behind her, she knew it was the last time she would ever see this place.
Chapter 16
A butcher shop. As far as Ernst Escher was concerned, that was what the place looked like. And not for the first time, he wondered if he was being paid enough for this job.
Julius Jantzen, in a surgical mask and blood-spattered apron, was just depositing one of the last severed feet into the acid bath. Disposing of three bodies, from the hair on the head to the last toenail, wasn’t easy, and Escher and Jantzen had been hard at it for almost two days. Julius had wanted to smuggle the bodies out of the apartment and dump them into the Arno, or even somewhere in the surrounding countryside; but Escher knew from experience that bodies had a way of turning up. Rivers were dredged, fields were tilled, even asphalt parking lots were sometimes broken up for a new development. No, as he had patiently explained to Julius while mopping up the blood in his foyer, it was always best to get rid of the evidence, right then and there.
And who could ask for a better place to do it than Julius’s private lab?
Escher had gone out and picked up a hatchet, a bone saw, a steel mallet, gallon jugs of chemical supplies, and everything else necessary for the destruction, decomposition, and disposal of human remains. On the way back from his last trip, he had stopped to pick up several packs of good, German beer-Lowenbrau-so that he wouldn’t have to drink any more of that Italian swill. It would be thirsty work, of that he had no doubt.
Even though Jantzen was the doctor, Escher quickly discovered he had no stomach for the dirty work. It was Escher who’d had to lift each of the three Turks onto the examining table and start chopping with the axe and the saw. The human body was neatly divisible into six pieces-the arms, the legs, the head, and the torso-but after smashing the jaw, for instance, the delicate work was extracting every last tooth and making sure it was properly pulverized.
While Escher took care of the butchery, he left the acid immersions, incinerations, and flushing of the remains to Jantzen, who several times stopped to throw up into his surgical sink.
“Good God,” Escher asked him at one point, “how did you ever get through medical school?”
“I hadn’t murdered the cadavers.”
“And you didn’t murder these. I did. Or would you rather I’d have let them kill us?”
“Ahmet wouldn’t have killed anyone; he was just hopped up and looking for a quick score.”
“And that’s what you think?” Escher said.
“Why? What else could it have been?”
“I think he was here to see me,” Escher said, smashing the skull on the table with the mallet, “and got a bit distracted.” Softened by the sulfuric acid, the head squashed like a pumpkin. “Never send a junkie to do a job. That’s what I always say.”
Every few hours, Escher went out for a meal-the place run by the Spaniards at the corner really was as good as Julius had claimed-but usually he went alone. A couple of times, he brought something home for Jantzen, and though he’d never planned on staying the night, much less two, in such a dump, there was so much work to do he hadn’t bothered to find a hotel. He’d simply commandeered the bed.
As for keeping tabs on David Franco, he knew what he was up to-nosing around the Laurenziana library. The moment he’d disappeared inside, Escher had put in a call to Schillinger-the man did know everyone-and within minutes, the library’s director, a Dr. Valetta, had gotten in touch and promised to keep him posted on David’s doings. Fortunately, no one, to Escher’s knowledge, knew anything about this little Turkish incident, and he certainly had no intention of mentioning it to anyone.
He wished he could be so sure of Jantzen.
His cell phone rang in his breast pocket, and he had to snap off his latex gloves to answer it. It was Valetta himself, true to his word.
“He’s gone, but she’s here,” he whispered, as if afraid of being overheard in his own office.
“Where has he gone?”
“How should I know? But Olivia Levi is working alone, in the main reading room. Right now. You said you wanted to know when she was accounted for.”
“All right, all right,” he said, “thanks for the word.”
Turning to look over his shoulder, he saw Jantzen holding the hand hose and washing some ashes and bone dust down the sink. Every few hours, just for safety’s sake, they poured in some drain cleaner, too.
“You feel like an outing?” he called out.
Jantzen turned to look at him, a numb expression in his eyes. His whole body, haggard enough to begin with, looked stooped and defeated. Why, Escher wondered, didn’t he just prescribe himself some uppers?
