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speedily away. “Don’t worry about your luggage! My girl will be happy to bring it up to the fourth floor, which is where your room is.”
    The young assistant cursed in several languages while struggling with the bags, even as Dr. Riccardi levitated out of the foyer and into the gloomy spectacle that is the palazzo. Domenico and Blasej stayed behind—Blasej to order Domenico around, Domenico to watch the girl at her labors rather than help—as Marco and I hurried into a network of gray-carpeted halls, passing inappropriately dressed German and American tourists and a series of tapestry rooms.
    Dr. Riccardi flicked her hand at me as she vaulted past marble busts of severe-looking dead Italians. “I was very intrigued when Marco said he was going to whisk you down here to help him with his letter. To get a ‘second opinion’ I believe is what he said, though you don’t have any formal training in paleography, or handwriting identification, from what I understand.”
    “No, I’m self-taught,” I said in either Spanish, Italian, or Urdu, for all I know, as my synapses were still maxing from jet lag and anxiety.
    “Oh! How rustic. Though I like to say that our archives are available to anyone with an academic interest in them—we’re very democratic—as artifacts do belong to all of us, don’t they? They’re the property of the whole world—the future, no?”
    “Honestly, Doctor, I think this letter might have been stolen.”
    “Don’t mind her, Isabel,” Marco said. “She’s one of those radical political types.”
    “Oh, yes. Well. One can take the argument too far, can’t one? Once I had a professor of archaeology—from Zimbabwe, of all places—try to race off with our collection of silver spittoons. All of it was certified as having come from the Medici coffers, without the slightest shadow of taint. Yet he was screaming that the silver had been melted down from the chests of King...King...Dakarai, that’s it...and that he was going to bring that patrimony back to his home country.” She was hurtling down another hallway. “He was from Oxford, too. I really did sympathize, after I recovered from the trauma. After all, there were a number of poxy thieves in the Medici family, simply pilfering the Africans.”
    “What happened to him?” Marco asked. “The professor?”
    “Well, he went to jail, of course!”
    I tried to keep up with her pace. “You said you studied the letter then, Dr. Riccardi?”
    “Yes, exhaustively ! But I won’t influence your analysis with my opinion quite yet.”
    “I know of your qualifications.” Despite a certain Patty Hearst–like flavor of this Italian boondoggle, I was still excited to meet this author. “I read your book, Antonio Medici: Destroyer and Decorator. It was very good. I liked how you mixed theory and scandal.”
    She smiled with uncontained satisfaction. “Oh, I like you . The book wrote itself, actually! You’ll have noticed my focus on the last decades of Antonio’s life, which were so compelling, at least from a decorative arts point of view—they don’t get as much attention from his other biographers as his earlier...career.”
    “I wouldn’t call genocide a career, Madam,” I said frenetically.
    “Yes, as a conquistatore Antonio Medici was guilty of many embarrassing crimes. My real interest in him, though, begins upon his return from the Americas. That’s when he became an arts benefactor. He was a patron to the painter Pontormo, and the goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini, who made for him these splendid exploding safes. But while many of these wonderful objects survive, there are very few documents, as Antonio heartlessly burned most of his papers. I assured Marco that a personal record from the mid–fifteen hundreds would be invaluable—most of the information we have about him then is secondhand. So, when you’re ready, I will bring you to our archives, show you Antonio’s letters—the ones up until the fifteen twenties, that