One False Note

  "We'll explain on the way," Dan promised.

  They found an alcove that offered a measure of privacy. Amy and Dan were already so deeply chilled that changing clothes in open air was pure agony. But they felt their circulation resuming as they struggled into dry things. Next came the hard part -- locating the Church of Santa Luca on foot rather than via the canal system. They wandered for a while before finding a shuttered tourist kiosk with a city map.

  "Amazing," marveled Amy as they plotted their course through streets and over bridges. "The founders of Venice took a collection of rocks and turned it into one of the world's great cities."

  "I'll be more in the mood for town history when we've got those Nannerl pages in our hands," announced Dan.

  Navigating the narrow serpentine streets made them feel like rats in a maze. Several times they could see where they wanted to go but were unable to get there because a canal was in the way. Add to that the fact that the Venice skyline had dozens of domes and steeples, and they were searching in the dark. After more than an hour, they plodded up beside a small stone church. "This is it," said Dan. "See? There's the bridge in back."

  The night was quiet -- just the distant noise of motor-boats. Leaving Nellie and Saladin on the front steps of the church, they scampered behind the building to the canal. Amy pointed. "Look!"

  An ancient stone staircase led to the water. They rushed down and froze.

  There was the dock underneath the bridge. The Royal Saladin was nowhere to be found.

  CHAPTER 18

  Amy's vacuum-cleaner wheeze threatened to suck her brother in. "Okay," she told herself. "Don't panic -- "

  "Why not?" he asked bitterly. "If there ever was a time to panic, this is it! What happened to the boat?"

  "Aw, Dan," she moaned, "why'd you have to hide the Nannerl pages on something that can pick up and sail away?"

  Dan bristled. Anguish, disappointment, and frustration mingled in his stomach, a roiling, toxic brew. "I didn't have a lot of choice, Little Miss Perfect! I was on a motor launch with half the Janus branch chasing me! And what help was I getting from my dear sister?

  'Oh you can't drive a boat!' That's all I ever hear from you - you can't; we shouldn't; it's

  impossible! I saved our butts back there!"

  "This isn't about butts," Amy pointed out. "It's about clues, and that means the diary pages."

  "Which the Cobras would have taken off us if I hadn't stashed them on the Royal Saladin!

  " Dan shot back. "You think I'm a stupid baby who's too immature to understand what's at stake! Well, you're the one who doesn't get it! A contest; a search -- who's better at that kind of stuff, you or me?"

  She scowled at him. "We're not talking about strafing the neighborhood with bottle rockets -- "

  "You're treating me like a kid again!" he exploded. "Okay I like bottle rockets! And water balloons! And cherry bombs! I lick batteries! I experiment!

  "You're a regular Madame Curie."

  "At least I try things," he persisted. "It's better than sitting around biting your nails, wondering,

  Should I or shouldn't I?"

  His sister sighed miserably. "Fine. I'm sorry. It still doesn't answer the million-dollar question: What happens now?"

  He shrugged. He wasn't ready to accept her apology, but there was nothing to be gained by continuing the argument. "We wait. What else can we do? The boat moored here once. Maybe it'll come back."

  She spoke the words he'd been dreading -- the awful possibility that haunted him. "What if before was a one-time thing? What if we've lost those pages forever?" Dan had no answer. All at once, the breakneck pace of it caught up with him. Five hours in the Fiat, tailing the limo, Disco Volante, the Janus stronghold, the canal chase, the Cobras. And now this.

  He could have flopped down on the stone walkway and slept for a year. It was a crushing exhaustion that sucked the strength out of every single cell in his body. He felt old at eleven. Amy must have sensed this, because she put a supportive arm around his shoulders as they headed back to the church to update Nellie on the latest twist. "We could be waiting a long time," Amy told her. "Maybe you should find a hotel and get a few hours' sleep."

  "If you two think I'm leaving you alone for another minute today, then you've been drinking the canal water," the au pair said severely. "Go and wait. I'll be here."

  "Mrrp," Saladin added drowsily.

  Good old Nellie. The show of support lightened the mood slightly. The thought of someone who would look out for them -- someone older, even if only by a handful of years -- seemed almost parental.

  It was a mere pen-light in a vast void. Yet Amy and Dan Cahill had seen nothing in that darkness for a very long time.

  But as they settled in behind the church to wait, the grim reality began to press down on them. If they could not recover the papers encased in the vinyl seat cushion of the Royal Saladin,

  they were at a complete dead end.

  They had staked everything on this quest. Washing out would leave them as nothing more than fugitives from Massachusetts Social Services. Homeless orphans, with no past and no future, stranded half a world away from anyone or anything familiar.

  The minutes passed like months, as if time itself had been slowed by the black-hole gravity of their situation. They hugged themselves against the clammy dampness of night, chilled further by fear and uncertainty.

  Amy took in the lights of Venice, gleaming off the water. "Weird, huh? That so many bad things can happen in such a beautiful place."

  Dan was not on her wavelength. "Maybe we should steal another boat. Then at least we can cruise the canals. The Royal Saladin must be somewhere." He looked at her intensely. "Giving up is not an option."

  "Then how would we know the Royal Saladin won't come back a minute after we leave? Here we are and here we stay."

  For Dan, it was extra-special torture. Doing something -- even the wrong thing -- was easier to take than sitting around. The first hour was misery. The second was actual physical pain. By the third, they were numb, sunk deep in despair as the city sounds and motorboat noise diminished, leaving only lapping water and distant accordion music.

  They had always known that their quest was a long shot. But neither had expected defeat to take this form -- an unfortunate choice stashing a few vital pieces of paper in a hiding place that got up and left.

  Both sat forward on the stone path. Was the music getting louder?

  The lilting melody swelled, and a boat sailed around the bend of the canal, lit up like a Christmas tree. The open stern was packed with revelers, dancing and celebrating wildly.

  Amy and Dan felt like celebrating themselves. It was the Royal Saladin.

  Dan looked on from the shadows. "A party?"

  "Not a party," Amy managed. "A wedding!

  The bride and groom embraced by the wheelhouse, while flower girls showered them with rose petals. Laughter rang out. Champagne toasts soared. There must have been fifteen people squeezed onto the small craft, including the accordion player, who was balanced precariously on a dive platform.

  Dan was intent on the seat pad, where he knew the Nannerl pages were hidden. "Five thousand boats in Venice, and I had to pick the one from the tunnel of love! What are we going to do? This brouhaha could last all night."

  "I don't think so. See?"

  Two tuxedo-clad men were clumsily attempting to tie the Royal Saladin to the bridge dock. It took several tries, and the father of the bride very nearly tumbled over the rail into the canal. Finally, though, they got the craft moored, and the wedding party began to come ashore.

  Amy and Dan ducked behind a half wall as the guests climbed the stairs to the Church of Santa Luca. The best man brought up the rear. Before leaving the Royal Saladin, he seized the bench cushion as his "partner," dancing onto the dock to the accompaniment of the accordionist.

  Both Cahills' hearts skipped a beat. It was the pad that contained the precious diary pages.

  The others laughed an
d cheered as the best man waltzed the pad toward the steps. A thin film of sweat formed on Dan's brow.

  What's this clown doing? Is he really stupid enough to take a seat cushion to a wedding?

  At the last moment, the man tossed the pad back aboard the Royal Saladin

  and followed the rest of the guests up the stairs.

  Amy and Dan crouched in silence as the wedding party crossed the churchyard and filed into Santa Luca. Even when they heard the heavy door slam shut, they remained still and hidden. After so many reversals of fortune today, they half expected a meteorite to hurtle from the sky and vaporize them if they dared to move. Finally, Dan stood up. "Come on. Let's get those diary pages before they end up on the honeymoon cruise."

  Their Venice hotel was cheap, mainly because it had no water view. That had been the Cahills' one condition.

  "No more canals," Dan had said firmly. "I hate them."

  While Amy and Dan took long showers to warm up and wash away the none-too-clean canal water, Nellie busied herself with the diary pages. It was only three handwritten sheets. But they contained some astounding information.

  "You're not going to believe this, you guys," Nellie breathed. "No wonder somebody ripped these pages out. They're all about how worried Nannerl was. She thought Mozart was going crazy."

  "Crazy?" echoed Dan. "You mean, like, stand on your head and spit nickels kind of crazy?"

  "He was running himself into major debt," Nellie explained, following the flowery

  German script with her finger. "Spending more money than he earned. But here's the thing -- the stuff he was buying was pointless and weird. He was importing rare and expensive ingredients from overseas."

  Amy's ears perked up at the word ingredients. "Remember iron solute? That's an ingredient, too. All this must be mixed up with the thirty-nine clues somehow."

  "Mozart was in it up to his ears," Dan agreed. "Just like Ben Franklin." Nellie turned to a different page. "The diary mentions Franklin, too -- right here. Mozart was in communication with him. You know what Nannerl calls him? 'Our American cousin.' And you'll never believe who else was a Cahill - only Marie Antoinette, that's who!"

  "We're related to the queen of France!" Amy exclaimed in awe. "And the Austrian royal family, too," Nellie went on. "That was the connection. She and Mozart met when they were kids. When she married the future King Louis XVI and went to France, she became the go-between for Franklin and Mozart." Amy was so astounded by this overload of information that she almost missed the faint pencil lines in the margin next to Nannerl's heavy calligraphy. Her surprise was accompanied by a flood of emotion. "Grace wrote this," she said in a watery voice. "I'd know that handwriting anywhere."

  Dan stared. "Our grandmother ripped out part of Nannerl's diary?" "Not necessarily, but these pages were in her hands at some point. She traveled all over the world. She's mixed up in this quest fifty different ways." She squinted at the spidery script beside Marie Antoinette's name and read aloud:

  The word that cost her life, minus the music.

  Dan sighed in fond annoyance. "That's Grace, all right. Clear as mud." Nellie was exasperated. "What's the matter with you Cahills? Why does everything have to be a puzzle? Why can't you just come out and say what you mean?" "Then it wouldn't be the thirty-nine clues," Dan pointed out. "It would be the thirty-nine statements."

  Amy looked thoughtful. "The thing Marie Antoinette was most famous for was this: When someone told her the peasants were rioting because there was no bread, she said, 'Let them eat cake.'"

  Dan made a face. "You can get famous for that?"

  Amy rolled her eyes. "Don't you see? There was no cake! There was no food at all! It became a symbol for how the rich were totally out of touch with the needs of the poor. Those words helped set off the French Revolution. And that was when Marie Antoinette died by the guillotine."

  "Sweet -- the guillotine," Dan approved. "Now it's getting interesting." Nellie raised an eyebrow. "So you're saying that the word that cost her life was -- cake?"

  "Minus the music," added Amy. "What could that mean?" "Well," mused Nellie, "Marie Antoinette spoke French, so -- " "Wait a minute!" Amy exclaimed. "I know this! Grace told me about it when I was a little kid!"

  "How come you can always dredge up some weird Grace conversation from a million years ago?" Dan demanded, his emotions suddenly close to the surface.

  "She's only been gone a few weeks and I can barely remember her voice."

  "That old stuff is important," Amy insisted. "We knew her as a cool grandmother. But all those years, I think she had a hidden agenda, too. She was training us for this contest -- planting pieces of information that we were going to need. This might be one of them."

  "And what exactly is 'this'?" Nellie prompted.

  "When Marie Antoinette said, 'Let them eat cake,' she's usually quoted using the French word brioche.

  But Grace was very careful to tell me that she used the more common term for cake gateau."

  Dan's brow furrowed. "Cake is cake. Isn't it?"

  "Unless this had nothing to do with cake," Nellie suggested. "According to Nannerl, Marie Antoinette was sending secret messages between Franklin and Mozart. Maybe it's some kind of code."

  "So gateau is a message, and brioche isn't -- and they mean the same thing?" Dan put in dubiously.

  Amy shook her head. "I don't know what it means, but I'm positive it's a piece of the puzzle."

  Dan was studying the Nannerl pages over Nellie's shoulder. "There's another note -- look!"

  The pencil lines were even fainter, but there was no question it was Grace's writing. This time it was right in the center of the page.

  D>HIC 156

  Dan frowned. "Maybe she had the hiccups?"

  "Wait -- the markings are right over a name." Amy squinted at the page. "Fidelio Racco."

  "That's the guy on Uncle Alistair's paper!" Dan said excitedly. "Mozart performed at that guy's house!"

  Nellie translated from the German. "It says here he was a big-time merchant and business honcho. Mozart hired him to import some super-expensive kind of steel that was only forged in the Far East. Nannerl blames Racco for overcharging her brother and landing him in debt. And guess what she calls him." "Blood-sucking money-grubber?" Dan suggested. "She calls him 'cousin.'"

  Dan's eyes widened. "Another Cahill?"

  Amy unzipped her brother's backpack and took out his laptop computer. "Let's see what we can learn about our Italian relative."

  CHAPTER 19

  As rich Cahill superstars went, Fidelio Racco was definitely on the B-list. Maybe even the D-list. Google had heard of him, but a search for his surname placed him below Racco Auto Body in Toronto and Trattoria Racco in Florence, and only slightly ahead of the Rack O'Lamb Irish Chop House in Des Moines. The multimillionaire merchant might have been hot stuff in the eighteenth century, but the composer he had driven to the poorhouse had fared much better in the eyes of history.

  Although he was no Mozart, Racco's great wealth had founded Collezione di Racco, a private exhibit displaying the treasures and artwork Racco collected during his world travels. It was there that Amy and Dan decided to continue their search the next afternoon, leaving Nellie at the hotel with Saladin and several varieties of Italian cat food. Maybe the change of country would lead to a change of fortune in ending the hunger strike.

  The exhibit was located in Racco's eighteenth-century home, which rubbed Dan the wrong way right from the start.

  "Racco house, Mozart house," he grumbled as they marched along the cobblestone streets. "Boring house would be more like it."

  Amy was losing patience. "Why do you always have to say that? Boring this, boring that! If this house gives us the next clue, it's the most un-boring place on the planet." "Amen to that," Dan agreed. "Bring it on, the sooner the better." "We're getting close," Amy promised. "I can smell it."

  Dan wrinkled his nose. "All I smell is canal water. Man, I might never get it out of my nasal passages."

>   Venice really was a great pedestrian city, if you knew where you were going, Amy reflected. The walk to Collezione di Racco was only twenty minutes. That modest distance brought them from their shabby hotel to a large stone mansion in what was obviously a very expensive part of town.

  "I guess the ripping-off-Mozart business paid pretty well," Dan commented. "It wasn't just the money he made from Mozart," Amy explained. "The guy was a major player in international trade. He had fleets of ships all over the globe."

  Dan nodded. "Our old-time cousins were such big shots. What happened to all the loser Cahills? You know, regular Joes like us who never got rich and famous." At the front entrance, they were greeted by a statue of Fidelio Racco himself. If the likeness was life-size, the millionaire merchant had been very short -- only an inch or two taller than Dan. Most surprising of all, though, Racco was strumming a mandolin, and his open mouth seemed to imply he was singing. Dan's eyes narrowed. "Another Janus?"

  His sister nodded. "That would explain why Mozart came to him to import that special steel. He figured he'd be safe with someone from his own branch." "Bad move, Wolfgang," Dan said sagely. "Never trust a Cahill."

  They entered the mansion and paid the hefty admission fee of twenty euros. Even now, centuries after his death, Fidelio Racco was still overcharging people. They toured the exhibit's various rooms, which housed most of the riches of the eighteenth-century world -- silk, heavy brocades, and pottery from the orient; silver and gold from the Americas; diamonds, ivory, and spectacular wood carvings from Africa; and exquisitely woven carpets from Arabia and Persia. "This stuff is amazing," Amy whispered to Dan. "Only a Janus could have such incredible taste!"

  The decorative arts were dizzyingly impressive, but the information display explained

  that most of Racco's great wealth had come from less glamorous commodities -- teas, spices, and a rare Japanese steel alloyed with wolfram, which had the highest melting point of any metal.

  "For sure that's the steel Racco was selling to Mozart," Amy said positively.

  "Wolfram," Dan mused, a far-off look in his eye. "I've heard of that from somewhere."