spotting the chain, lifted it over his head.
“You see?” Himmler said to Mainz. “Direct action is always best.”
The guard placed La Medusa in Himmler’s hand, where he let it dangle from his fingers. “It doesn’t feel especially powerful,” Himmler said, weighing it up and down. “Is it?”
Sant’Angelo prayed that he could retrieve it before the Nazis ever had the chance to gauge its full potential. But the Luger was still grazing his skull, and he hardly dared to breathe.
“You can put that down now,” Himmler said, and the guard immediately obliged, stepping back a few feet, but with the gun still in his hand. “We don’t want anyone’s head exploding while there’s still something worthwhile in it.” A wintry smile creased his lips. “Now,” he said to Sant’Angelo, “answer the question.”
“It’s simply a good-luck charm that has been in my family for many years.”
“Has it worked?” Himmler asked in a doubtful tone.
Before Sant’Angelo could summon a reply, there was a sharp cry-“Heil, Hitler!”-from the bottom of the steps, and he could see a long shadow playing on the wall of the stairwell… and rising up into the turret.
Himmler quickly got off the desk and the guards went rigid at attention. Mainz mopped the sweat from his forehead and wiped it on his sleeve.
The shadow grew larger, nearer, and the mirrored walls of the study suddenly seemed as if they were closing in. Even the marquis felt the imminence of something powerful… and evil.
“Who can breathe in here?” he heard the Fuhrer complain as he entered the room. “Open those doors all the way.”
The oafish guard leapt to the French doors and threw them back.
The Fuhrer’s eyes darted around the room, taking in everything without turning his head more than a few degrees. His field uniform was more modest than Himmler’s, decorated with only the red armband and, on his left breast pocket, an old-fashioned Iron Cross, the one engraved with the year 1914 and given out to veterans of the First World War. Surveying the many mirrors, he said, “Vanity is a weakness. A weak man worked in here.”
No one contradicted him.
“And why, even this high up, is there still no breeze?”
Sant’Angelo had the impression that they were all being blamed for the lack of air.
Taking off his hat, adorned with the gold Imperial Eagle, he placed it on the desk upside down, then smoothed the back of his head with a trembling left hand. His eyes were an icy blue, and his brown hair was shorn oddly close along the sides. In the front, it fell in a heavy sweep from a parting on the right. Only his bristly moustache was tinged with gray. Noting the Medusa in Himmler’s hand, he said, “You hold that bauble as if it were significant.”
“It is, Mein Fuhrer.”
“Given the trouble you’ve put me to, it had better be.”
Hitler took it in his right hand-Sant’Angelo noticed that he had placed the left one behind his back-and took an interested, but skeptical, look. First he studied the glaring face of the Gorgon, then he turned it over and grunted when he saw its black silk backing. With a thumb, he removed it, uncovering the mirror.
Sant’Angelo prayed that he would stay clear of the moonlight just beginning to show on the terrace outside.
“So it’s a lady’s looking glass,” he said, looking away from the mirror. “And not a particularly good one. The glass seems flawed.”
Sant’Angelo hoped he would put it aside; but instead, he distractedly wound the chain in and round his fingers, the Medusa herself cupped firmly in his palm.
“We believe there is more to it than meets the eye,” Himmler said, though with great deference.
“Yes, yes indeed,” Professor Mainz blurted out. “I believe that a manuscript exists, perhaps in this very chateau, which will explain how it was made-and the powers that it can bestow.”
Hitler flicked his eyes toward Sant’Angelo. “Well? Can you speak?”
“I can.”
“Then do so. I haven’t got all night.”
“You have already taken the measure of the thing quite accurately,” Sant’Angelo replied, in a deliberately timid tone. “It’s simply a little mirror, poorly made, without a single precious stone to distinguish it.”
“Ah, but that’s exactly it!” Mainz said, unable to restrain himself. “The things that have the greatest power always disguise themselves!” As he went off on a fevered disquisition of the occult and its physical phenomena, the marquis gently folded his hands together, in an innocent gesture, and lowered his eyes. He knew that he had been dismissed-judged and found wanting in Hitler’s eyes-and that was just what he hoped for.
He focused his thoughts entirely on the Fuhrer… focused them, as he once had done years ago, on a sham Italian count. If he was going to break this monster’s mind, he first had to find a way inside it.
The discussion went on all around him, Mainz rambling on about a Spear of Destiny, Himmler babbling about an ancient king named Heinrich the Fowler, but Sant’Angelo tuned them out, as if adjusting a wireless set, and concentrated on a single signal… the one coming from the Fuhrer himself.
But no sooner had he found it, loud and clear, than he felt as if a wintry wind had just blown through his very bones. Even in that stifling room, he felt a glacial chill. Rather than being able to marshal his own thoughts, he found them scattering in all directions, like dead leaves drifting across a field of rubble.
Concentrate, he told himself. Concentrate.
But it was like loitering on a battlefield, after the slaughter.
He gathered himself together, trying to erase the desolate scene, and tried again. With every ounce of energy that he could muster, he burrowed into the Fuhrer’s brain.
And this time-this time-he saw Hitler’s head snap backwards. The palsied left hand-was the man diseased?-brushed the back of his hair again, in what was plainly a nervous tic.
He had found his point of entry, and now the marquis bored in deeper, harder. His own temples throbbed with the effort. The Fuhrer’s shoulders seemed to droop, his knees to bend.
“Of course we haven’t even begun a proper interrogation,” Himmler was saying, as if Sant’Angelo weren’t there to hear it. “This so-called marquis cannot be as ignorant as he claims.”
Sant’Angelo was careful not to move a muscle, or call any undue attention to himself, as he continued about his work.
“But in my estimation, the entire chateau is a source of power,” the professor added. “I felt it the moment we passed the gatehouse. We must look under every stone.”
The blood drained from the Fuhrer’s face, and he wavered on his feet. His hand shook more violently, and Himmler suddenly took note.
“Mein Fuhrer,” he said, “are you all right?” He motioned for the desk chair-an ornately carved throne-and one of the soldiers carted it around the table as if it were made of toothpicks and slapped it down behind him. Himmler guided their shaken leader onto its velvet seat.
“Go get the doctor!” Mainz cried, and the soldier standing by the door bolted down the stairs.
Beads of sweat dotted Hitler’s brow.
The marquis concentrated even more. Like a mole, he was tunneling into the deepest recesses of the monster’s brain, and there, once he was at the very core, he would brew a storm so great that the Fuhrer’s eyes would go blind, his ears go deaf, and his blood would boil beneath his skin. To the Nazis in the room it would look like a stroke-a fatal stroke-the kind that might suddenly afflict anyone… even the master of the almighty Third Reich. And no one would be the wiser.
But then the jolt came. The counterattack.
Sant’Angelo had never felt such a powerful blast. It dwarfed Cagliostro’s powers.
The Fuhrer, whose chin was nearly resting on his chest now, whose whole left arm was quivering, showed no emotion, but the shock wave came again, rocking the marquis so hard he nearly lost his balance. He was amazed that no one else had felt it.
Recovering himself, he leaned forward, his hands on the desk to brace himself, but now he saw Mainz, kneeling by the chair, glance up at him suspiciously.
“What are you doing?”
Sant’Angelo couldn’t reply-he needed to focus all his attention. Hitler slumped in his chair, as Himmler stood helpless by his side.
