“Please tell Madame Solange, when next you see her, that I would be happy to fix the problem,” Professor Vernet declared, as he flicked on the lights in the portico of the Galerie de Mineralogie et de Geologie. They were standing in a wide, high-ceilinged entryway in need of a good scrubbing, though one wall was adorned with an enormous wooden plaque, listing the Board of Governors in gilt letters. “In fact, I’ll get to it just as soon as the Louvre releases some of its own government funding to its poor cousins like us.”
David had the feeling he’d stepped into yet another territorial battle and elected to remain silent rather than risk saying the wrong thing. Miraculously, so did Olivia. Professor Vernet, wearing a white lab apron over a rumpled suit, looked as if he’d been disturbed in the middle of a rock-pounding session. A hammer stuck out of one pocket and there was dust and grit all over his sleeves. As a result, he kept his dirty fingers off the drawing as David showed it to him and explained what they were looking for.
“It’s a very impressive piece,” he conceded. “But I can also tell you that we have nothing in our collections that resembles it. With, or without, rubies.”
“But with your database down-for the moment-how can you be sure? Maybe Olivia and I could help check?” David ventured, afraid of stepping on another set of toes but having no alternative.
“I already have.”
David knew that couldn’t be true. They hadn’t been apart since arriving at the museum and just now showing him the Cellini sketch.
“It’s all right here,” the professor said, turning toward them and tapping his unconvincing copper-colored toupee. “And I can tell you we do not have such a thing.”
He moved on into the dim gallery, closed to the public today. “Anything we retain of the crown jewels is exhibited in this room,” he said, gesturing at a long and spacious hall, less opulent than the Louvre but impressive nonetheless. He nodded at a solitary watchman, who flicked on another bank of lights, and the glass cases suddenly came to sparkling life. In the center, under a separate light of its own, was a vitrine containing the incomparable Ruspoli Sapphire, a 135-carat, cube-shaped stone, bought by Louis XV. The size of a quail egg, it was the deepest blue David had ever seen.
Professor Vernet seemed gratified at David’s, and Olivia’s, appreciative gaze. “Over the years, many of the jewels were recut, to avoid identification when they were resold. But not, as you can see, this one.”
After allowing them time to absorb its beauty, the professor moved on to a longer display case, where he showed them a collection of pins and rings and bracelets adorned with precious stones. “Some of these belonged to Marie Antoinette, some to the sisters of Louis XVI.”
Studying them on their velvet place mats, brilliant and polished and refined as they were, David experienced a sinking sensation. What he was looking for in no way fit their style. A dull, silver looking glass in the shape of the Medusa’s head? Marie Antoinette would no sooner have used such a thing than a wooden toothpick. He was beginning to think he had gone in the wrong direction, after all, and come, finally, to a bleak dead end.
But Olivia, who had wandered farther down the gallery, suddenly said, “Take a look at these.”
The professor glanced in her direction and said, “Ah, the crystals. Far less valuable, of course, but marvelous specimens still.”
David walked over and saw what looked at first like a display case in a geology museum of the Southwestern United States. There were quartzite crystals, sharp and angular, and lavender geodes split like cantaloupes, their two halves twinkling in the overhead glare. David didn’t understand why Olivia had seemed so interested.
Then he saw her point at the placard on the display case.
“ Des possessions personelles de Comte Cagliostro, aussi connu comme Giuseppe Balsamo, environ 1786.” From the personal possessions of Count Cagliostro (aka Giuseppe Balsamo), circa 1786.
“You are aware of Count Cagliostro?” Professor Vernet asked.
“Yes,” David said. “We are.” He remembered well the count’s book of Egyptian Masonry that Olivia had pulled from the shelves of the Laurenziana-and now here he was again, smack in the middle of things. “But how did these wind up here?”
“The count used them in his demonstrations of hypnosis and magic. But when he had to flee Paris, some of them were left behind.”
“Why the hurry?”
“Because of the Affair of the Queen’s Necklace,” Olivia interjected, and the professor nodded.
David had only a rudimentary recollection of that episode, and the professor seemed only too happy to provide a synopsis. David had the impression that the professor, at first annoyed at the intrusion in his schedule, had warmed at the enthusiasm of the comely young Olivia and enjoyed regaling her with his stories.
“The official court jewelers, two partners named Boehmer and Bassenge, had assembled a fabulously expensive necklace, in the hopes that Mme. du Barry, and later Marie Antoinette, would buy it. But neither of them did. Instead, a confidence artist, an attractive young woman named Jeanne de Lamotte Valois, managed to perpetrate a very great swindle.”
“The greatest of its day,” Olivia added.
“She persuaded an eminent, but unscrupulous, Cardinal to pay for it. He thought he was simply buying it on behalf of the queen, who would secretly reimburse him, but the queen did not know anything about the transaction. Nor did she ever receive it. Instead, the necklace was stolen by Valois and her confederates, broken up into pieces, and sold. And despite the fact that Marie Antoinette had never owned the necklace-indeed, she had pointedly refused to buy it on several occasions-the people of France never believed her. The necklace was often cited as just one more example of her extravagance.”
“And Count Cagliostro was involved?” David asked, still feeling like the student who’d been left behind.
“Mme. Valois deliberately implicated him in the plot because she knew him to be a great favorite at court. The queen enjoyed his company, and had richly rewarded him with various tokens of her esteem. There was a trial, but after nine months in the Bastille, the count was finally acquitted. Still, he was smart enough to know that he had worn out his welcome in France and left Paris the next day.”
“And look at these, down here,” Olivia said, directing David to several amulets carved in the shape of scarabs and other foreign symbols. One was an amber gargoyle, grinning maliciously.
“Yes, those were the sorts of things the queen bestowed,” Vernet explained. “She knew he had a taste for anything of an exotic or occult nature and I think he was afraid to spirit some of them out of France.”
“Is it possible that La Medusa was one of the tokens of her esteem that he left behind?” Olivia speculated.
It certainly looked to David like the mirror might have been more to the count’s taste than hers. “And these are all of his things, in the cases here?” David asked the professor.
The professor shrugged and said, “All but some of his papers. They’re stored in the archives, next door.”
“May we see them?” Olivia asked, eagerly.
The professor, who looked as if he could refuse her nothing, brushed some dust from the front of his apron and said, “For such a lovely young visitor, I don’t see why not.”
David felt distinctly de trop, but didn’t care.
The professor led them out the other end of the gallery and down a long hall connected to an annex, talking all the way. “After leaving Paris, Cagliostro fled to Rome-unwisely, as it turns out-since the Pope found him guilty of blasphemy, burned his books, and imprisoned him in the Castel St. Angelo.”
“Cellini’s old home,” David observed.
“From there, he was moved to an even more remote prison-the Castel San Leo,” Vernet remarked, as they passed through the first of several security checkpoints, “where he survived for four years before being strangled by one of his jailers.”
The professor opened a sticky steel-plated door and led them down a metal spiral staircase. They must have gone down three or four levels before he stopped and turned on a row of overhead lights.
Endless shelves, stacked with boxes, stretched as far as David could see, but Vernet appeared to know exactly where he was going, burrowing down one row, then turning into another before stopping and pointing to a large brown box on a top shelf.
“Could I ask you to take that one down?” he said, and David gladly obliged. A film of dust rose like a cloud from its top.
