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is, which is when our collection stops. You will be able to compare the scripts.”
    “Lola’s made a study of the handwriting already, on the plane,” Marco told her.
    “It’s very striking,” I said, not mentioning that said study had been interrupted by watching Blasej break my Nokia with his bare hands while he explained how he’d similarly crack my clavicle if I misbehaved. “In particular, the signature.”
    Dr. Riccardi stopped before a staircase and slapped her hands around my arms. “Okay. You two are tired, maybe? We can let you sleep for a while, before we begin to work. Or, I could have Adriana bring you something up on a plate.”
    Marco turned to me, touching me on the elbow with such incongruous solicitude that I had a brief and painful image of Erik, and backed away. “Are you hungry?”
    I shook my head; on the plane, I’d drunk so much alcohol my blood sugar had spiked.
    “No rest for the fabulous,” Marco observed to his friend.
    “The sooner we get this done, the better,” I said. “I’d like to take a look at those archives now, if possible.”
    “Oh, my dears, everything is possible in Italy.” Dr. Riccardi began hurrying up carpeted steps, then maneuvered us down a pewter-tinted corridor until we reached a large oak door. As she stood before the entrance to the collection, a mighty, mischievous librarian’s pride glowed in her face. “As you are about to see.”
    And then she opened the door.
    I gasped with delight at this revealed Eden. The Medici Riccardi library is frosted with gold, its shining walls studded with rare books. I had read that these were culled from the collections of Lorenzo the Magnificent, who had dispatched the librarian-hunter John Lacasis to the East, where he bought texts of Plato, Lucan, and Aristophanes that had been hand-copied in Arabic at Saladin’s behest. This first floor boasted pearl-inlaid reading tables with gold chairs occupied by a smattering of scholars. Among the professors was one noble-looking man reading a tome with the aid of a large, bronze, face-obscuring magnifying glass. His most visible feature was his shoulder-length night-black hair, signifying that Ottoman or even Peruvian blood enriched his Florentine industry. The library was silent except for the rustlings of his turned pages. A fan-shaped but inaccessible window admitted a soft light onto these studies.
    Dr. Riccardi walked toward this window and stopped at a shelf stacked with clamshell boxes bound in taupe silk. She pulled down two of them.
    Inside the first was a pair of items: A beautiful antique leather book, tooled with blown roses, and also a large deck of cards bearing strange hand-painted signs. The card on the top bore an insignia of a red, golden-eyed dragon.
    “Wrong box,” Dr. Riccardi said, shaking her head.
    “What are these?”
    “The wife’s belongings. We bought them at auction three years ago, at a very good price. A journal and occult cards. She—Sofia—was something of a spiritualist.”
    “Tarot cards,” I said. “Rare ones, they look like. Hand-painted. They’re fantastic—”
    “Oh, ugh, not these again,” Marco mumbled.
    She smiled. “Yes, very good, Lola. The tarot was inherited by Sofia from her mother, along with, probably, her rather vivid imagination, revealed here in this journal. It’s of decent interest to feminist historians—though, as you see, Marco did not think these ladies’ things sufficiently important to study. He’s a terrible sexist.” She cheerfully criticized him as she took up the other box. “ This , on the other hand, did earn his attention.”
    She lifted the cover of the second container, which held approximately eighty leaves of unfolded parchment that still bore their broken, wolf-shaped, gold wax seals.
    “Antonio’s letters—the seal’s the same.” I lifted into the light a missive from Antonio to Leo X, née Giovanni de’ Medici, his second cousin and the pope. After examining it a second, I