aromas alone were overwhelming.
“I think so, too. Coffee?” she said, pouring a cup for David. The lapels of her robe gaped open at the throat, revealing skin as smooth as the butter she was slathering on her bread. David had to refocus his thoughts.
“I’m really sorry,” he finally said, as she unabashedly dug into a plate of eggs and bacon.
“For what?”
As slender as a gazelle, she ate with the relish of a lion.
“For getting you into this mess,” he said.
“What do you mean, for getting me into this mess? How do you know,” she said, wagging a slice of crisp bacon in the air, “that it’s not my mess?” She actually sounded a bit indignant. “It was my apartment they broke into. It was my old boyfriend they beat up. Maybe it’s me they’re after.”
Oddly, David wished he could believe that-it would at least absolve him of any guilt-but he knew it wasn’t true, and he knew that it was time he told her the truth. If she was going to assist him in his search, and be exposed to whatever dangers might lie ahead, she needed to know what she was getting into. He needed to make a clean breast of it.
“The woman who has given me this job,” he began, “is named Kathryn Van Owen,” and Olivia listened carefully as he explained what he knew of her. None of that was so hard to accept or understand. “But she believes,” he eventually concluded, “in the power of La Medusa.”
“She believes that it can actually grant immortality?” Olivia said, matter-of-factly. “I figured she did.”
Olivia had read The Key to Life Eternal. She knew how the mirror had been made, and for what purpose, but still, David had expected more of a reaction than this. “You figured that?”
“Of course,” Olivia said. “Why else would she go to all this trouble and expense?” She waved one arm around the lavish suite. “The real question is, do you believe it?”
Put on the spot like that, David hesitated.
But Olivia simply waited, and when he still didn’t answer, she understood, and said, in a gentler tone, “Why?”
“I believe in it because I have to,” he finally replied. As he told her about his sister, and his voice grew hoarse with emotion, Olivia got up from her chair, came around the table, and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. She smelled of bath soap and hot croissants.
“Do you remember what I told you in the back of the cab in Florence?” she asked.
David did not immediately know what she was getting at.
“I told you that we were alike. We do not do things for money. We do things for love. And now,” she said, “at last I know the real reason for your search.”
David felt a huge sense of relief, but at the same time he was still concerned for her safety. “If you want to return to Florence and go back to your normal-”
But she stopped him by putting a finger on his lips.
“Listen to me,” she said. “Everything that has happened-including those men on the train last night-all of that has made me feel… restored.”
“Restored?” David said. It was about the last thing he might have expected her to say. “How?”
“All my life,” she said, slipping around from the back of his chair and insinuating herself into his lap, “I have spent holed up with my books and my papers and my theories. Sometimes, I would think to myself, what do they all matter? Who cares but me? But now I know that the truth does matter. Now I know-now I remember-that there are people who will do anything to suppress it.”
“But they’ll try again.”
Olivia shrugged, and with one hand cradled his chin. “Let them,” she said. “The truth always comes out in the end.”
But when David started to protest one more time, she said, “If you are trying to get rid of me, it won’t work.” She shook his chin. “So will you stop?”
“I’ll stop,” he conceded.
“Good,” she said, grazing his lips with her own before going back to her side of the table. “Now eat something. We need to go to the Louvre. The crown jewels are waiting.”
Chapter 22
“How hard was it?” Escher said, as they approached the main courtyard of the Louvre. “You call yourself a doctor, you had one simple thing to do, and you couldn’t get even that much right.”
Julius’s face scrunched up like he’d just had to eat something sour. “But I did do it right,” he replied in a last-ditch attempt to defend himself. “If the dosage had been any higher, they’d have keeled over in the dining car.”
Escher was sick of discussing it. He wasn’t used to working with amateurs.
“Maybe it would help,” Julius ventured, “if I knew what this was all about. First you run me out of Florence-if I go back to my place, some Turk is going to try to kill me-and now I’m in Paris, chasing after God knows what. Is there a point to all this?”
“The less you know, the better off you’ll be.” Escher knew, from experience, just how annoying it was to be told that.
“Well, then I should be in very good shape, because I haven’t got a clue.”
“Keep it that way,” Escher said, “and wait here, out of sight, until I call you.” He straightened his alpine, badger-bristle hat, and took the glasses and guidebook from his pocket. Now he looked pretty much like the other provincial German tourists who had just arrived, in a busload, at the museum. He left Jantzen standing by the glass pyramid erected in the forecourt and mixed in with the crowd.
David Franco and that friend of his, Olivia Levi, were just hurrying in through the main doors.
Escher, smiling benignly at the guards and the other tourists, passed through the security check and paid for his ticket while keeping a safe distance from his quarry. David had that damned valise slung over one shoulder, and though Escher fully expected the guards to force him to check it before going through the turnstile, he could see a conversation going on, in which Olivia seemed to be pitching in. A senior guard was called over, and after glancing at the contents, and exchanging some additional words, he spoke into his walkie-talkie, waited, then nodded.
A roll of tape was produced and wrapped twice in an unbroken string around the bag, sealing it closed. Then Escher could see the guard glancing at his watch, pointing up the main staircase, and off to the left. David and Olivia were nodding appreciatively before thanking the guards and heading off toward something that Escher saw was called the Galerie d’Apollon. He quickly consulted his own guide to see why.
It had been several years since David had last been in the Louvre, but he hadn’t forgotten how vast it was. When he’d been a student, traveling on his Fulbright, it had been an easy way to spend an entire day, simply wandering from one gallery or exhibition to another. You could do it for months and still find something new to see each time.
But today, there was no time to waste. He had an appointment in twenty minutes with the Louvre’s Director of Decorative Arts-a close personal friend, thank God, of Dr. Armbruster at the Newberry. He’d put in a call to her office the night before, while it was still day in Chicago, and Dr. Armbruster had assured him she would pave the way. “If anyone knows where this Medusa might be, it will be Genevieve Solange. Go and see her, and good luck!”
In the meantime, he had an entire exhibition hall to check out.
Although the museum was thronged as usual, he and Olivia cut through the crowd like a pair of barracudas, climbing up the broad central stairs and heading for one of the most popular sites in the entire Louvre-the opulently decorated Gallery of Apollo, where the crown jewels of France were displayed.
Or what remained of them.
Over the centuries, what had once been a magnificent collection had been decimated by thefts, national fire sales, dismantlings, recuttings, and sheer disorganization, reflecting the turbulent history of France itself. Starting
