“Come on,” Escher said, tossing his gloves onto the blood-soaked table. “I’ll buy you a gelato.”
Passing through the courtyard, a squirrelly young man appeared out of nowhere, wringing his hands, and said, “Dr. Jantzen? Dr. Jantzen? I need to see you, sir.”
Another one of his friend’s fine clientele, Escher thought.
“Not now, Giovanni,” Julius said.
“But I need to see you,” he pleaded, clearly strung out on some substance and plucking at Julius’s sleeve.
“He said not now,” Escher intervened, and the man, after taking one look into his hard blue eyes, fell back, silent, nearly toppling into the stagnant fountain.
Julius’s car-a Volvo, exactly as Escher might have guessed-was parked outside the tobacconist’s, and as Escher waited for him to unlock the doors, he couldn’t help but notice that there were several people inside the shop, jabbering excitedly, and a dark, beetle-browed woman, in a headscarf, with a couple of children clinging to her coat. More Turks. As Escher slung his satchel onto the floor of the front seat of the car and got in, the woman in the headscarf came to the shop window, looking fixedly at him, and then-making the bell above the door jingle- came bustling out.
“Drive,” Escher said, as Julius started the car.
The woman was shouting in bad Italian-something about her husband not coming home-but Escher’s window was up, and when she rapped her knuckles on the glass, her rings clattering, he gave her a level stare but said nothing. The children capered about in the street, as if to impede their escape, but Escher said, “Run them over, if you have to.”
“For God’s sake, Ernst…”
But Escher leaned over and blasted the horn, and the kids jumped out of the way.
The woman spat on the window, and for the rest of the ride-maybe ten minutes in slow, thick traffic-the spittle clung like glue to the glass. Escher told Julius where to go, and once they’d reached the Piazza della Repubblica and found one of the very rare parking spots, he picked his satchel up off the floor and got out.
It was a brisk, sunny morning, and Escher mounted the steps of the apartment building two at a time, with Julius lingering behind. First, he rang the buzzer, to make sure no one else was home-just because Olivia was accounted for didn’t mean she had no roommates-and when there was no answer, he rang all the others, until someone buzzed him in. When he heard a door open down the hall, he called out, “Delivery for Levi!” and swiftly climbed to the third floor, with Julius close behind.
The door itself, decorated with a postcard of some ancient sculpture, was easy work-Escher could pick any lock, and this wasn’t even a good one-and the curtains were drawn. The place was like a cave. Sweet Jesus, Escher thought, don’t any of the Florentines live in decent places? He finally located the light switch, turned it on, and found himself staring into a pair of big, blinking eyes.
An owl, with one mangled wing, was perched on a rickety stand. It was free to fly, if it could, and hooted several times at the intruders.
“This city is pazzo ”-crazy-Escher said.
The rest of the apartment was also strange. Every sofa and chair, every table and counter, was covered with books and papers. There were cinder-block shelves groaning under the weight of crumbling encyclopedias. The bedroom in back looked like no more than an annex to the library in front. Escher could barely make out the bed.
But it was all in keeping with what Dr. Valetta had reported about Olivia Levi; despite her good looks, he had warned Escher, she was not empty-headed. She was smart. Very smart. She had graduated at the top of her class from the University of Bologna, Italy’s oldest and most prestigious school, then traveled to the States to do further research in New York. She had written some provocative papers, published in academic journals that almost no one ever read, and was apparently working on some secret magnum opus while she supported herself leading tour groups around the city. Judging from the look of the place, tour guides didn’t get paid all that well.
“So, what are we doing here?” Julius asked.
“You’re standing at the window, keeping an eye out for any unexpected visitors.”
“All right,” Julius said, dutifully taking up his post where he could peek out between the drawn drapes. “But what are you doing?”
“I’m looking for library cards,” Escher said, sounding as puzzled as he felt.
“What?”
“I’m looking for call slips, or copies of them, from the Lauren-ziana.” 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.
