present to a wealthy patron. Or that he had simply bestowed on the Medici an early cast, a reject, one that he had never intended to imbue with the waters from the sacred pool at all.
And wasn’t that just like him, to muddy the trail of something valuable? The same man who had created an optical illusion in his most famous statue, or who had made strongboxes with coded locks, who kept the greatest advancements of his trade to himself, and limited the secrets of his sorcery to the unpublished Key, was not likely to leave his most ingenious achievement baldly exposed.
Cellini was a trickster, and David had to figure out how, over the centuries, this particular trick played out.
He quickly turned to the next page, which began with an account of some marble imported for a bathhouse. He jumped ahead several leaves, past some other mundane expenditures, until he found a later annotation, made in another hand, saying, “ Un regalo al de’Medici della Catherine, sul decimo del settembre 1572.” Or, a gift to Catherine de’Medici, the tenth of September, 1572.
“ Lo sguardo del maggio ottentute proteggere suo da tutti I nemici .” May the gaze of the Gorgon protect her from her enemies.
Cosimo himself had made the annotation-his initials were boldly inscribed below the note-and he had sent the piece to his niece, who had married into the royal family of France, and become queen. No one at that time in history, David knew, was more besieged by her enemies than the Queen of France, who, facing an insurrection from the Huguenots, had ordered the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre on August 23 of that same year. In reality, the purge had lasted weeks, during which time thousands of her religious enemies were rounded up and slaughtered all over France. It was later said that the wicked Italian queen had followed the advice of her countryman, Niccolo Machiavelli, who warned that it was best to kill all your enemies in one blow.
David fell back in his chair, trying to sort through it all. If this was indeed the one and only Medusa, then it could not have the powers Cellini had claimed or he would not have given it away… unless he’d had no choice. Could the duke have forced his hand? There were a hundred threats and forms of torture the Duke de’Medici could have employed. And perhaps the phrase, “from the hand of the artist,” did not so much mean a willing gift as a tribute pried from an artisan unable to refuse or resist.
One way or another, though, this mirror had gone to France-where Cellini himself had spent a good deal of his life, in the employ of the French king-and it was the only one whose trail David could now follow. As a gift to the queen, it would naturally have become a part of the royal jewels. For all David knew, it was still a part of whatever remained of that once-impressive collection. Whether it had the powers it was reputed to possess, or not, it was what Mrs. Van Owen had sent him to find-and find it he would. Shaking it loose, for any amount of money, from the French patrimony, seemed an utter impossibility-even for someone of Mrs. Van Owen’s resources-but he would cross that bridge when he came to it. For the moment, he just wanted to share the news with Olivia and get cracking.
With facsimiles of the two pages, produced by a copying machine carefully calibrated to work in low light and heat, tucked away in his valise, he raced back to the Laurenziana. He could have called Olivia on the way, but he wanted the pleasure of seeing her face when he presented his discovery from the Medici account books. In addition to the more personal feelings for her that he could no longer deny, he had also come to value her opinion-and approval-more highly than anyone else’s. She was a true eccentric, there was no denying that, quirky and volatile, but she was also one of the most widely read and original thinkers he had ever encountered. Most of her scholarly papers and monographs-and she had shared a few with David-were unfinished and unpublished, but they betrayed a wealth of knowledge on subjects ranging from the philosophy of Pico della Mirandola to the evolution of the early European banking system. It was as if her mind could not be focused on one subject long enough to see it through to its natural conclusion. Instead, she would get distracted and follow some beckoning side path-invariably finding something valuable there, too-without ever bothering to get back to her original argument.
But when David burst into their alcove, Olivia wasn’t there. She might have been sleeping late that morning-David knew that she was a night owl-and it was also possible that she was off leading one of her tour groups. David was paying her a stipend out of Mrs. Van Owen’s account, but Olivia had plainly stated that she wanted to keep her other sidelines alive. “Otherwise, what do I do when you leave me to go back to Chicago?”
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.
